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Passing along something Carl Steiniger posted on the HRWA group on Facebook. I'm completely confused about what's going on at Pier 40 now, there was an RFP, there was Cirque du Soleil, there was a local group, I don't know where everything landed - I guess I'll go find out tonight. I'm not quite as obsessive about what's going on in the Hudson River Park as I was when I kept my boats there, but I still have a ton of friends in the park so I care about what happens there. Will be there for silent moral support if nothing else.
Just a reminder that Community Board 2 (Manhattan) will be hosting a Pier 40 Forum this Thursday, February 28th, at the Saatchi & Saatchi Building, located at 375 Hudson Street (between West Houston and King Streets). The Forum will begin at 6:30 p.m.There will be presentations regarding a number of income-generating proposals for Pier 40 and comments by many of our elected officials. If time allows, there will be a limited question and answer period. We hope you can attend.
Or just another brick in the wall? Poor Baydog, just when I'm making my first excursion into eating innards at Tasty hand-pulled noodles Inc., he's having some sort of rough patch in his love affair with food - the sushi's not cutting it and the groundhog er Philly cheese steak, which seems about as close to the polar opposite of sushi as you can get, also isn't quite it. Maybe some nice dim sum?
This was actually part of my February hundred-mile victory feast, and it was as good as it looks. If you read my Tuesday night post, you know that I went for walk that would have been great if I'd started, oh, an hour or so earlier; however, that did get me within easy striking distance of another 100-mile month, and when I looked at the map and discovered that a return to crooked little Doyers Street would be about a mile and a quarter, I instantly decided that I was going to go have dinner at Nom Wah,, a classic-looking old place that I'd noticed 2 doors past the noodle shop (and therefore one very hearty bowl of hand-pulled-noodle soup too late to try).
It was the perfect foil to Monday night. It was a little on the dreary side, but it was short enough that it didn't matter, and I knew exactly where I was going, exactly how long it was going to take, and in fact, exactly what I was going to order when I got there - what could be better for a solo diner than an 8-piece dim sum sampler? That's what's shown above - I chickened out of taking a picture myself, because I was out in the middle of the room by myself and had the real camera along (one of the good bits of Monday's walk was the full moon rising next to WTC 1 and over the Winter Garden; the Winter Garden currently has an art installation of colorful lighted disks that appeared almost moon-sized, I brought the Lumix with thought that if it was clear on Tuesday night I might be able to get a picture -- it wasn't and I didn't) and it just seemed awfully conspicuous.
Thing is, it turns out I didn't need to -- what they brought me looked EXACTLY like the picture above, which I took from their website! No food stylists with the primping and the makeup - that's genuine natural beauty there! Only concession for the website was the checkered tablecloth. This would have been a fine light supper in itself; I got self-indulgent and added a roast pork bun (which if I were in Hawaii I would describe as "onolicious" or maybe even "brok' da mouth!", pretty close to my favorite manapua, and that's a good thing!) and the fried sesame balls with lotus paste. Wonderful. I'll be back. May skip dessert next time, you order everything at one go and my eyes turned out to be bigger than my stomach, and then I ate all three of the sesame balls anyways and there I was, on past perfectly comfortable to a little more stuffed than necessary. Next time, maybe just an almond cookie for the road. I did get a jar of their chile oil on the way out as a present for TQ, he loves spicy stuff and Nom Wah's looks like it might pack a good punch!
As for Baydog - well, if all else fails, maybe a good dose of salt. Salt air and salt water. Not too long 'til Spring, right?
Nobody Shakes It Like The Polar Bears Shake It!!!
The rest of you Harlem Shakers, just lay down the funny hats, watch this, and bow to your betters! Let's hear it for the crazy and amazing Polar Bears of Coney Island and The Bronx. Faaaaabulous! Note on the 27th - Oh, and how appropriate that I've got dancing polar bears up on International Polar Bear Day. I'm changing the date of this post from yesterday to today. Happy Polar Bear Day to all!
Lifted from this morning's Facebook status update - sort of explains the whole "NONgoal" thing I was cackling about back in January.
99 miles in February, one to go!
Although last night's 11 and 3/4 mile walk was a good example of why I'm talking about "nongoals" with the walking. Having done 100 in January, naturally I had that in my head as a target for February, even though I'd promised myself that I wouldn't do that to myself - February is a shorter month, and we are beginning to get into the spring crunch at work and the last thing I need to do is inflict extra pressure on myself.
Last night was a lovely night, though, and I'd been thinking that it might be a good night to wrap up another 100 mile month.
I did another new walk, and a nice one (over to the Hudson from work, down around the Battery and then up along the East River to 57th street, then to 57th street and 7th ave to meet the Q train) but I started a little later than I should, I was tired enough that I got very aggravated by running into unannounced barriers on the East River Promenade and having to backtrack (I may actually be at 100 miles but the turnbacks aren't easy to spot on Google Maps) and then the Q train was doing the horribly annoying 2-section thing (see note at end) by the time I was riding home. This is why I don't want to start setting goals of 100 miles a month - the whole point is that I'm trying to up my activity level by doing things I enjoy, not ruin things I enjoy by obsessing over upping my activity.
Note- Horribly annoying 2-section Q-train thing goes like this: Up until around midnight or so, I could have gotten on a Q train at 57th street and that train would have taken me straight home, fairly quickly. After midnight, the Q gets broken into 2 sections, one from 57th street to Atlantic Avenue (2nd stop in Brooklyn as you're coming from Manhattan and a very large station where a lot of subway lines converge and you can also switch to the Long Island Railroad) and another from a different platform at Atlantic Avenue on out to Coney Island. Pretty much automatically makes the time it takes to get home at least half again as long. They do it for track work, it's not like the MTA is actually trying to make late-night commuters unhappy, but it still makes late-night commuters unhappy.
Parrotfish (uhu) with Christmas wrasse - two of my favorites. It's very very cold in NYC, the weekend's forecast is totally unsuitable for recreational boating so I'm looking forward to my first pool session in 2 years (!!!). It's going to be nice to work on my rolls in warm, clear, blue water ("yoga in a boat", I like to call it), but of course thoughts of warm, clear, blue water on cold winter days gets me thinking about the very best warm blues - the ones along the shores of O'ahu! Wish I could take a holiday there - especially now that I know that changes are coming to Haleiwa. At first I was afraid that that meant that I had missed my last chance to get shave ice at Aoki's when I decided to go hike among the honu (Hawaiian green sea turtles) instead of taking a shorter walk and then going back for my treat - thank goodness, it doesn't sound like this will be the end of Aoki's, but I will miss getting my shave ice at their classic old shop.
Mahalo nui loa to dear Pua for sharing the news, and for talking me through the initial shock. It's funny, I half expect one or another my favorite places in Aiea to be gone every time I visit - but Aoki's? I'd have thought that whole little stretch of Haleiwa town would be in some sort of historic preservation district, safe from the wrecker's ball.
It was really cold out, but I still talked myself into a bit of a post-work walk by promising to reward myself with a stop at Wonton Garden, a noodle shop on Mott Street that's open late and sees a fair amount of me during budget season. I'd actually been crushed last year when I was all set for a bowl of their good wonton soup with thin Cantonese noodles on night after work and made my way there only to discover they were apparently closed for good, but as it turned out, they were closed for a very long renovation (yay!). I hadn't been since I discovered they'd reopened and I though I'd go tonight. I didn't make it. On crooked little Doyers Street, a little over 2 miles into what ended up being a nice little 3-mile walk, I was brutally waylaid by Tasty hand-pulled noodles Inc.
Dont'cha hate it when that happens?
I had the house special, which is hand-pulled noodle soup with beef, oxtail, tendon, tripe, and a fried egg. I was a little scared of the tripe but I figured I could pull it out if I didn't like it, and it turned out to be pretty good. I figure this is Consolation Prize #2 for the noodle soup with soy-glazed pork belly I missed out on. I certainly felt consoled after this meal. Big-time comfort food, oh my yes. Very tasty indeed.
I'll make it back to Wonton Garden before too long - budget season and royalty review time are both coming up fast and there will be plenty of late nights to go visit my old favorite hole-in-the-wall -- although I don't know if I can call them a hole-in-the-wall anymore, they are looking kinda spiffy since the reno!
Deep in the heart of BROOKLYN!
Note: If you don't have time to read, scroll down, there are more pictures are at the end!
So yesterday's chowderhound pictures were taken during one of my best rambles yet. I do still mean to do a post about how all of this "urban hiking" I've been doing is part of a Non-New-Year's Ir-resolution (short version: because the only New Year's resolution I ever kept was the one about never making another New Year's resolution again!) and why I made such a big deal about 100 miles being a NON-goal - but tonight I just want to share some pictures of yesterday's walk. This one was a little more planned out than most have been - I had a 3-day weekend to play with, with a 1:00 pm sea kayak committee meeting pretty much wiping out Sunday (good timing, with temperatures below freezing and winds that sounded like they were going to rip the roof off the club that was the one day of the weekend I really didn't want to be outside, I've toughened myself up because I think I'd go nuts if I stayed inside ALL winter but you know, there are LIMITS for this transplant from the tropics, and Sunday was way beyond those) and TQ unfortunately working on Saturday and Monday. Of those 2 days, Saturday was clearly the one to scratch the kayak itch, which I did (yay); Monday was looking like another excellent day for a long, long walk with Bella as long as I layered up for wind and cold. The interesting thing about walking with Bella as opposed to walking solo is that I lose the option to stop in a coffeeshop or jump on a bus if I get too cold, so I really did gear up pretty much exactly as though I were heading off for a hike in the woods - hiking boots, windbreaker over fleece and windpants over jeans, water for both of us, plus a good breakfast for me (kinda Hawaiian-style - ramen noodles with spam and an egg! :D) and a small extra helping of food for her (she gets breakfast early, before TQ leaves for work, I figured she'd need something to walk on too).
We set out from Midwood a little after 10:30 and the great part was that we didn't have any particular time we needed to be back.
Graffiti only a grinch could hate at the Midwood High Athletic Field. OK, probably principal-sanctioned, but it's nice, right?
Marina near the north end of Plum Beach Channel We stopped here for our first water break. It's funny, this is an arm of Gerritsen Creek; I've paddled past this a dozen times or more but somehow never thought of turning in to explore. Of course in the summertime it's full of jetskis and motorboats, but so is the rest of the area.
One less-pretty picture - Gerritsen Beach got absolutely hammered by Hurricane Sandy. Mostly the residents have done an amazing job of cleaning up but there's still evidence here and there.
Lovely little bungalow court in Sheepshead Bay. Glad to see it looking ok after Sandy. I love these little courts - I think some of them have gone done to be replace by big glitzy condos with Miami-esque wave-styled rooflines and such, but if I had enough money to have a little place on the water and not have to worry about a storm taking it, I think I'd rather take someplace like this.
Donna G, one of the Sheepshead Bay fishing fleet. I always find myself thinking it would be fun to go fishing on one of these boats when I walk through this area - haven't gotten around to it yet but there are a couple that are known as family-friendly (which I would hope to mean "women won't be made to feel like they're spoiling a boys' day out") and maybe one of these days I will get around to it. That, and paddling the Gowanus Canal with the Dredgers...good to have things to look forward to!
Sheepshead Bay. The bay is named after a kind of fish, but if they ever wanted to rebrand it to appeal to the gentry they could call it Duckhead Bay. Or Swanhaven. But I'd be sad if they did.
Back home in Midwood, just before sunset.
Rough estimate of the day's route. A fine urban hike!
More pictures from the day over on Flickr.
2. Eat up all the chowder by yourself.
3. Let the dog lick the empty container. The dog will be thrilled.
Note: For sharing chowder with humans or cats, you might want to look elsewhere for hints. These instructions might not work as well with species who have a less liberal definition of "share".
Alas, No Noodles. Made it a Paddle-My-Buns-Off Paddle instead!
Oh, so sad! No more late night noodles and dumplings at Purple Yam - they said they tried for 3 weeks and it just wasn't flying :( . I have the worst timing - I went in when they first posted that deliriously delicious-looking shoyu-glazed pork-belly noodle soup, which was a week or two too early, then I waited until a week too late to try again. Still had a fine meal (tried the tamarind shrimp with rice cake, which was very good), and then as a consolation prize I got an order of Purple Yam's fabulous cua pao (steamed pork buns) to go. I had one for a late-night snack, and through some admirable self-restraint, there are 2 left for breakfast.
Purple Yam's cua pao is a huge favorite of mine because it's about the closest thing to manapua I've found in this town, with the exception of the char siu bao at a Chinese bakery that shut down a month after a co-worker who also hailed from the islands introduced me to it, and one other little hole-in-the-wall bakery in Chinatown whose address I idiotically failed to note (I'd stumbled across it during one of my rambles). Funny thing is, almost every Chinese restaurant and bakery in the city serves steamed roast pork buns that resemble manapua - but there's something about the seasoning of the meat that's not right. I think they cook the char siu sweeter in Hawai'i or something (or maybe everything just tastes sweeter to me when I'm there), but whatever the case, Purple Yam's cua pao comes pretty close.
The usual! I took this in Fairmount Park, somewhere near Philadelphia, on a great trip a couple of years ago to go see some Pirate Burlesque on the barkentine Gazela with Will and Elizabeth - what a great trip that was, and this has become my standard Valentine's Day picture 'cause I love it & it's perfect for my outdoorsy/watery theme.
Yeah, working in children's publishing does have its good points sometimes! Thank you to Brian at A Movable Bridge for taking the picture - the first nice lunchtime surprise was running into him up in the cafeteria, and then as I was talking to him, Clifford came sneaking up behind me. Clifford's celebrating his 50th birthday this year - we kicked off the festivities last Fall, because it was in 1962 that Norman Bridwell first sent a set of his drawings to an editor who really took a shine to one of a little girl and a big red dog and suggested that that pair might make an interesting basis for a book of their own. Clifford the Big Red Dog came out in February 1963 and the big dog just got bigger and bigger from that point on. We've had balloons all week and today Clifford was up in the cafeteria handing out hugs and cupcakes!
There's a lovely interview with Norman Bridwell in School Library Journal (I actually laughed out loud reading the story about his editor warning him "You know, we're not running a Norman Bridwell book club...") - and as long as I am going on and on about Clifford I will just add that my favorite thing so far from the celebration was when Mr. and Mrs. Bridwell and their daughter, Emily Elizabeth (yes, THE Emily Elizabeth!) came to visit last year. Norman gave a very nice talk for the staff here, and at the reception afterwards we all got signed copies of The Clifford Collection. I just LOVED that because as a fortysomething, dyed-in-the-wool bookworm, one of the first books I remember was the original Clifford.
I suppose that I'm pretty good proof that one of the best ways to teach a kid to love to read is to read to that kid. I remember getting read bedtime stories every night (or poems, and with poems I always wanted one more, and my dad would always close with, "I'll tell you the story of Jack and Ory, and now my story's begun; I'll tell you another about his brother, and now my story is done!", which drove me nuts because I never found out what EITHER of those stories were). In doing so, my folks actually taught me how to read without realizing that they were doing so; I don't recall it myself but the story they've told me was that they figured out that I was reading along when one night one of them mis-read something, and I corrected them. At first they thought maybe I'd just memorized the story, but then they tried me on something I was less familiar with and I read that too. I don't know if Clifford was one of the titles I learned on but I do remember Clifford, and another Bridwell classic, The Witch Next Door, as being early, early favorites.
Funny thing about working here is that of course we're surrounded by Clifford all the time, but it's mostly the TV version and the Clifford I remember from "small-kid-time" was a much doggier sort of dog - like he didn't talk, and I was pretty sure I recalled him actually snarling at one point, and he was just generally a little less tidy in a way that I liked. I'd been thinking it would be fun to get my hands on a copy of the first one just to see whether I was remembering it right, but somehow never got around to it, so it was tons of fun to get this signed copy of the first 6 stories - turned out I was recalling correctly, and on top of that there's a great little intro section that includes the original drawing that started it all. Lots of fun. Happy Birthday Clifford!
With the remnants of last weekend's blizzard still in evidence, there's certainly no mistaking the fact that it's still winter, but the days ARE getting longer (I do love it when I start seeing a bit of blue still left in the sky when I leave work at my usual hour of 6, and we are there!), and the various Sebago committees are beginning to gather to plot out the season's fun (SailComm was last night, kayak & canoe committees this weekend), and before too much longer, our local ospreys will be starting their long flight back from their wintering grounds to the South. One of the ospreys that nests in the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge (over in Broad Channel) has actually been tagged with a GPS tracker, and I'm really looking forward to following along on Osprey's Journey.
Thanks to John at Control Geek for passing the word word word, word on the bird!
Cross-posting at the Sebago Canoe Club blog.
Why, yes. Yes, I do.
The storm for me: Ohhh, I better leave work early. Ohhh, I better make some elk chili. Oh, la, how lovely is my neighborhood with an aesthetically pleasing 8 inches of pretty fluffy snow.
PS - The TillerShovelman meme so far -- 'cause like the Maidenform woman, you never know where he'll turn up next!
Oh Docker started it with one of his trademarked ode-ious posts. Next, Baydog chipped in with a little fashion critique (funny with the lift tickets - during the brief period in high school that I was doing a little skiing, the fashion among my friends was to leave the lift tickets on so everyone could tell at a glance how much you'd been skiing that winter). Next, the Shovelman shows up rescuing the Expedition to the End of the World and today the esteemed blogger's memeitude continues for at least another 15 minutes!
What's that at 12:00, right on my nose? Why, I do believe that is a Seal of Approval for Steve the Paddling Chef!
The weather during the end of the week last week was very shifty, leading to my decision to ditch my Tuesday night music last week in favor of wrapping up the 100 miles I'd realized I was pretty close to logging in January. As it turned out, I probably could have gotten in some miles on either or both Wednesday (when the rain that was supposed to start bucketing down around 6 held off until much later) or Thursday, which was cold but not as cold, I think, as the forecast had threatened, and again I think the wind came screaming in again later than expected, leaving another decent window for a walk right after work. Still, you know how it works - if I'd decided to gamble on the 30th or 31st offering decent walking conditions, they wouldn't have. It did pour on Wednesday, and the wind on Thursday ended up howling so loudly late late at night that I had a nightmare about my very solidly-built circa-1940's low-rise brick apartment was swaying and on the verge of collapse. I was SO glad to wake up - and when I did and heard the commotion outside, I knew why I'd dreamed that!
Tricky conditions for trip planning, but fortunately Steve had thought to start looking at the weekend and decided that Sunday might be worth another shot at a Jones Beach seal paddle & sent out the word among the winter paddlers that he was thinking that way. By Thursday, although the original forecasted temperature of 40 had dropped some, it was still looking like it would be above freezing - and the windspeeds were looking more and more cooperative for our purposes, so he made the call - it was a go!
The plan was to meet at Jones Beach at 10, launching sometime around 11. We'd started out with 8 people coming but the predicted temperature did keep dropping. Saturday was bitterly cold (great day for the Outsider Art Fair I went to with a friend) by Saturday evening, we were down to the 5 of us who ended up going.
Sunday morning was definitely on the nippy side, but it was nice and quiet and seemed like it was going to be a good day. This was the first time we'd used the roof rack and saddles since Sandy, when they were submerged in salt water during the flood - TQ had been too busy with his job out in Rockaway to have time for those, but I'd gone to the club for the big post-Sandy cleanup day and I took care of those and although TQ said the locks on the bars are a little sticky and need a shot of silicone lubricant, everything else was fine (hooray).
We were a bit late to Jones Beach because it took us some extra time to set up the racks. We launched down near the Coast Guard station at the west end, near where we finished the club hike 2 weeks ago; I don't know about everybody else but I think I might vote for this launch for all future club trips - we usually launch at Field 10, which nobody can ever find without driving past it at least once. I was laughing this time, I swear this was the first time I have ever gone to Jones Beach, with TQ or anyone else, that we didn't end up doing an accidental trip the roundabout at the base of the Jones Beach tower. This one, you can actually see from the road. Here's the gang launching, minus only me and TQ of course - we were next on the water, we got there late but we're pretty efficient about getting on the water quickly. I probably would have tried to take some pictures of the birdwatchers that were there - it was chilly but there were a whole bunch of them there looking at a flock of little birds that I probably would have taken for sparrows if not for the bundled-up birders training their high-powered scopes at them. Turned out that they were snow buntings and horned larks and one single lark sparrow, which the birders were having a wonderful time trying to pick out from the rest. I was a little worried that we were going to scare the flock away, but one of the birders said we didn't have to worry, they would fly but they would circle back and land again the minute we were by. Would've loved to watch a bit more but our friends were waiting (plus it was awfully cold standing around)!
Turned out Steve had never actually been out of the inlet, so that was what we did first. Quite the contrast to the heavy chop here last time!
And then the wind died completely and the water went to flat calm, and the seals were everywhere. Practically perfect seal-watching conditions - a choppy day, those little heads are so hard to spot, a day like this, it's the easiest thing in the world. Wish we'd had this weather the weekend of the club's seal paddle!
We pretty much stopped paddling and just looked at the seals looking at us until we started to get chilled enough that we decided to move on.
Plenty of birds, too - none of the dovekies birder friend Mary told me to watch for (cute little birds, I would've loved to see them, and when I mentioned that to one of the birders who were watching the buntings and larks in the morning, she got very excited - "There are dovekies?" - I did explain that that was just what somebody had said we should watch for!) but we saw more loons, and I think a couple of long-tailed ducks, and mergansers kept surprising up when they'd suddenly pop into view right next to our boats. Lovely!
Moving along now to warm up after we'd all gotten chilled during the drift, Steve suggested that we head just a little way into the marsh, just up to the little summer house in the picture above. He's taken to calling that "Bonnie's place", not because it is, but because boy, I do wish. You can keep your Cancun, you can keep your Cote D'Azur..it may not be Hawai'i but for someone who's settled here in NY, I just think that having a little place like this to go in the summertime would be heaven.
Looks like they made it through Sandy OK. Nice to see.
Stymied once again by the neoprene gloves, and on top of that my hands were officially freezing at this point - I actually thought the camera was having problems but when I looked closer back at the dock, I realized that I had just zoomed it all the way up to max (Optio W80 has a 5x optical zoom but then it goes on up to 30x plus digitally) and this was the sky! Oh well, I still enjoyed this last encounter.
Waved goodbye to the seal and started paddling fast to warm up again. Next stop Bigelow's! I'd foregone this after the hike because there were a couple of people who were interested in being back at the club by a certain time, so us going back early let the carpool be more efficient, and I just didn't feel like I'd worked up enough of an appetite to do justice to a plate of Bigelow's lovely clam bellies. No such reservations this time!
End of another fine day. Thanks again to Steve the Paddling Chef for pulling this together despite a very unsettled forecast - turned out great!
I'm A New York City kayaking & sailing enthusiast. Finance analyst (or trying to be) by day - and somewhat by accident. Did someone say "river rat"? Why thank you, how sweet!
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Blogroll. Partial and preliminary. To be continued. | 2019-04-22T08:02:14Z | http://frogma.blogspot.com/2013/02/ |
A couple years ago, I had a few hours to kill on a layover in Chicago. I wandered the terminal, looking for something interesting. I mostly found fashion brand stores and restaurants, but then I found a store filled with a variety of tech gadgets, the unifying theme being “things that guys probably will think are cool.” I entered the store and came across some Star Wars memorabilia, including an eighteen-inch-tall replica of Yoda, complete with white hair, green wrinkles, and tattered Jedi robes. It’s ironic to say that a replica of a puppet appeared lifelike, but this one did.
When I approached for a closer look, its head turned slightly to face me, its eyes blinked, and it said in perfect Yoda syntax, “Teach you to use the Force, I will.” I was impressed, and that was just the beginning.
Yoda instructed me, “Extend your hand before me.” So I did, hesitantly, not sure what would happen. The motion sensors at Yoda’s feet combined with animatronic motors in his body combined to fling Yoda backward more than a foot, as though pushed by the Force emanating from my outstretched hand.
My first thought was, “This is so cool!” My second thought quickly followed, “I have to have it!” Fortunately my third thought countered, “Danny, this serves no purpose whatsoever. And it’s a big box to lug through a terminal and continued business trip. And your wife will kill you.” I just smiled and filed away the experience to share one day. In all likelihood, my memory has embellished the story a bit, but the next part is clear: A few moments later I stepped into the men’s room, and after using the facilities, I joined a row of guys standing in front of sinks, waving their hands wildly to find the exact angle and position for the motion-sensing faucet to sense their presence and turn on the water. The contrast was striking: The Yoda replica’s sensors were so sophisticated that they made me feel like a Jedi for a moment, and a few paces away the faucet sensors were so lousy that it took ten minutes to wash my hands.
The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.
This juxtaposition was a striking illustration of the story of progress. Digital Yoda was “amazing,” and a few paces away stood a row of men muttering, “Are you freaking kidding me?!” The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed. The same is true of education and learning. That raises an important challenge for all of us: Even as we work to build a better tomorrow, how do we make the most of what is available to us today?
A similar Circle of Life exists in the world of education, with the three actors being learners, teachers, and businesses. Learners are instructed by teachers, who take cues from businesses as to what is needed and valuable in the work force. Those businesses then hire the learners.
What follows is advice to help each of these actors make the most of the opportunities available to us.
As a young student or at the start of your career, your imperative is to make an investment in education that yields a worthwhile return in the form of acquired skills and increased employability. To that end, consider carefully whether the signal of a university degree—especially if it’s not from a top school—is worth not only the cost, but also the opportunity cost. Remember that your time has value, and the opportunity cost of whatever else you could be doing if you weren’t at school is estimated at $54,000. As a thought exercise, consider that if at the age of twenty-two, you invest $54,000220 at a modest seven percent interest rate (which is the low end of the S&P 500 long-term average), by the time you’re sixty-five, it will have grown to more than $800,000. Set that against the cost and debt that you might incur, and you’d better be confident that it’s the right move for you.
Rather than a traditional college education, consider less expensive and more focused alternatives.
Rather than a traditional college education, consider less expensive and more focused alternatives, for example, a hybrid program like the one offered by Minerva Schools at KGI; a “last mile” training offered by MissionU; find an apprenticeship, either structured through a program like Praxis (whose slogan is “The degree is dead. You need experience.”), or independently, through a service like GetApprenticeship.com; or a coding boot camp such as Turing, Lambda, or General Assembly. They’re all likely to serve you in much better stead than a generic college degree. Most of them cost substantially less, and some tie your investment directly to your future employability by charging little or nothing upfront, but being paid a percentage of the job wage you land when you graduate. The total amount is still much less than college.
Order your hardcover copy of Leveraged Learning today!
If you’re not sure what you want to do with your life yet, which is reasonable when you’re in your late teens or early twenties, consider taking a gap year, either on your own or through a structured program like UnCollege. Take the time to expose yourself to new ideas and fields of interest, which can be done easily and inexpensively through online courses or with books ordered from Amazon or borrowed from your local library.
Another option is to do free work to gain experience or look for internships and apprenticeships. You don’t need college to do this, and often the best positions must be found independently. To learn how to do this, look at Charlie Hoehn’s Recession-Proof Graduate. His suggestions work just as well in good economic times and for people who never went to college. The decision to skip college or drop out can be walked back easily if you decide to do that later; most colleges offer generous, flexible sabbatical and leave options, in which you can take at least a year or two off with no strings or consequences. Harvard, for example, allows you to come back anytime. Although much is made of famous dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, the truth is that they knew they could return. If it makes you more comfortable, rather than drawing a hard “I’m out” line in the sand, consider a “soft dropout” of a year or two to explore better options.
Make it a habit and a practice to keep learning, and stay engaged.
Godin’s altMBA course, my company Mirasee’s Business Ignition Bootcamp (which is free; details at LeveragedLearning.co/bib), and Byron Katie’s training on The Work.
All of this will hold you in good stead and keep you both competitive and engaged. That said, the options available to students are only as good as can be created by dedicated and hard-working teachers.
As a teacher and expert, your imperative is to stay current in your field, empower your students, and be well rewarded in the process. This begins by staying as active and involved in your field of expertise as possible. Read the news and the journals, follow the thought leaders, and do the occasional project or two. Without ongoing exposure, it’s just a matter of time until you get left behind.
With your expertise secured, lean into your role as a teacher. Think deeply and be creative about what is most important for your students to learn, what scaffolding they need to wrap their heads around whatever you’re seeking to share, and how to support them to encode that knowledge in a way that can be retrieved when they need it.
If some of these suggestions feel impractical because of the environment in which you work and teach, find or create an environment that gives you freedom to innovate, whether that means teaching elsewhere or putting out your own shingle as an educator entrepreneur. If you choose the latter, a good place to start is one of the Course Building Bootcamps offered by my company Mirasee (details at LeveragedLearning.co/cbb).
Finally, since we’re still in the Wild West days of online courses and continuing education, do everything you can to lean into legitimacy. Work extra hard to ensure student success and capture those case studies. Align yourself with whatever bodies govern or lend credibility in your industry, and when you’re ready, seek their stamp of approval. Most important, build connections with the stakeholders in your students’ success. They include your students, but often they are businesses.
Most important, cultivate the things that matter by developing a culture of learning and growth. Great books abound on this topic, ranging from Dan Coyle’s The Culture Code, to Ron Friedman’s The Best Place to Work, to Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules!, and to Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage. Some of these authors can be brought to speak to your organization, and Patrick Lencioni’s Table Group offers consulting and facilitation. Training also can be found from other providers, such as Mind Gym, The Center for Work Ethic Development, and my company Mirasee (focused on developing the strategic thinking skills of your employees and creating your own internal training; details at LeveragedLearning.co/business).
Most important, remember that talent comes in all shapes and sizes, and that the value of the degree you might have earned decades ago is very different from the value of degrees issued by institutions of higher learning today. As a business leader, it is your job to take the actions that lead your organization into the future, and this is how to do it.
Then we close our laptops, take out our earbuds, and return to our lives, in which millions of people face debilitating stress and anxiety, far too many struggle with disabilities, and business news is about more scandal than success. Looking at the world around us, we can’t help but think wistfully of the hope offered in the TED videos, and wonder where it went.
The gap between the world that we live in and the world that we wish for is bridged by education.
The gap between the world that we live in and the world that we wish for is bridged by education. It’s not by degrees, not by debt, and not by signals that aren’t backed by substance. We need real education, which makes its beneficiaries more knowledgeable, more insightful, and possessed of the fortitude to see their way through challenges to reach innovation and success. That education is the real “golden ticket” for those who claim it, and with enough of these tickets in circulation, the ultimate winner is the whole of our global society.
As I wrote at the start of our journey together, every chapter in this book could have been an entire book, or several, of its own. Many of the ideas I’ve shared could be further expanded, and there’s a lot of work to be done. That work is for all of us to do. Seizing this sort of education in its current early state takes ingenuity from learners, dedication from experts and teachers, and vision from business leaders. Most important, it takes courage from all three. I recognize that some of these changes are uncomfortable, and some are downright scary, just as it is for trapeze artists to let go of one bar in order to reach the next. But it’s the best way for us as individuals to see the success that we want and need, and the only way for us collectively to build a better tomorrow.
When I taught my first college course in 2003—a seminar on “Race and Gender in Mass Media” at a top-ranked university—it looked very much like the courses I’d taken as an undergraduate a decade prior.
I’d stand at the front of the classroom each week and ask probing questions, hoping to engage my 20 charges. I’d lecture from, and periodically glance at, my printed-out notes. I certainly wouldn’t screen a YouTube video (that hadn’t been invented yet) or invite them to engage on social media (ditto). All assignments were handed in on paper, and graded by hand.
Fifteen years later, the landscape has changed almost beyond recognition, both for college students and for the adult learners I now work with.
I still teach traditional classroom-based executive education programs, primarily for Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. But I’ve also taught executive programs exclusively online, as well as in “blended learning” formats that mix webinars with an in-person component.
I’ve developed more than a dozen courses for LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com), and have also created online courses that I sell directly to readers of my work, on everything from becoming a recognized expert to creating high-quality content more rapidly.
In short, I’ve experimented with almost every modern configuration of advanced learning, and have seen firsthand what works and what doesn’t.
That’s why I’ve found Danny Iny’s work, and the concept of Leveraged Learning, to be so valuable. For years, Danny has been a good friend and one of the smartest thinkers I know on the future of education.
I profiled him in my book Entrepreneurial You (Harvard Business Review Press, 2017), and followed his advice scrupulously when I was developing my own online courses, which have now generated multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars and impacted the lives of hundreds of talented professionals.
I’ve long agreed with Danny that our current system of education is broken. Back in 2013, I penned a Harvard Business Review article, “Grad School May Not Be the Best Way to Spend $100,000.” Danny is spot-on that while historically prominent Ivy League schools will continue to prosper, and low-priced community colleges will continue to fill a targeted niche, there will be a massive shift in the middle coming very soon.
That means the “education-industrial complex” we’ve come to know for the past 70-odd years (since the end of WWII) is about to implode. The challenge before us is how to navigate these uncharted waters— as professionals, lifelong learners, and (perhaps) as teachers, professors, and maybe even as course creators ourselves.
Danny’s solution, which you’ve read in this book, is both wise and humane. For too long, many institutions (and individual instructors) took the easy path. They kept doing what had worked before, milking a profit and focusing more on their own needs or interests than what their students—their customers—wanted or needed.
If we want to create a thoughtful, educated citizenry—and if we want, at a very basic level, for our own work to be effective and meaningful—then we have to get serious about understanding human behavior.
How can students, especially busy professionals who are now called upon to keep their own skills sharp over a lifetime, learn best? How can we create a learning environment that’s engaging, empowering, and effective? And how can we, as learners, create the time and mental space necessary to continually refresh our knowledge and abilities?
Having read Leveraged Learning, I know you’re better prepared to grapple with the critical questions we’re all facing about the future of learning in the twenty-first century. As a professional, you understand the irreplaceable value of lifetime learning—the necessary ingredient to stay not just relevant but ahead-of-the-curve in the marketplace.
If you’re also an expert and educator, you understand the critical importance of student engagement. It’s insufficient—and in some circumstances, even exploitative—to create materials and then let students flounder them through on their own. We have to create robust learn- ing communities, whether virtual or in person, that support student knowledge and growth.
And if you’re a business leader, you understand that these issues simply can’t wait. As the impact of technology and globalization deepens every day, we risk having a stagnant workforce ill-equipped to meet today’s most pressing business needs. We can’t rely on ‘the system’ to generate the high-skilled talent we need. We have to roll up our sleeves, get involved, and encourage and incentivize our employees to embrace transformative lifelong learning.
The shifts Danny has documented are disruptive, but carry within them the potential to reshape education dramatically for the better. It’s a responsibility we all bear, and an opportunity we must seize. | 2019-04-20T22:59:23Z | https://leveragedlearningbook.com/chapters/chapter-11/ |
In a way what follows echoes the post about concerts in churches. HERE What is appropriate in a church and what is not?
A Mary Poppins mannequin hung from the ceiling at St. Cecilia Cathedral [?!? No, really. There’s a photo.] for its 31st annual flower festival, but a custodian used bolt cutters to send it crashing to the floor on the first morning of the event. The custodian said he hopes the incident sparks “conversation” about what types of displays are appropriate in a church.
On the first morning of the 31st annual Cathedral Flower Festival, with its theme of “A Night at the Movies,” an agitated church custodian made a bold move.
Mark Kenney, 59, who grew up in the parish, had worked at St. Cecilia Cathedral for three years. Around 8 a.m. on Jan. 29, he went to a work shed, picked up a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters and ascended to a catwalk high above the mostly empty nave, or main sanctuary.
He looked through a peephole, he said, to make sure he wouldn’t hurt any people. And then he cut a steel cable, which sent a suspended, umbrella-carrying, hat-wearing Mary Poppins figure crashing to the floor.
Someone alerted the pastor, the Rev. Michael Gutgsell, who ran from the rectory next door to the church and saw Kenney.
Gutgsell had known that his custodian had misgivings about secular displays in the church but says he was dumbfounded and didn’t understand why Kenney would take such drastic action. [It was indeed dramatic, if not drastic.] In a brief meeting that week, the pastor said, he had asked for Kenney’s promise not to be disruptive.
Kenney — who has served three terms of up to six months in federal prisons for crossing security lines at military bases in protest of nuclear weapons — then knelt at the communion rail and prayed until officers arrived and handcuffed him.
He spent a night in jail before he was bailed out and pleaded no contest. He said he is scheduled for sentencing “on Holy Thursday,” March 24.
Gutgsell, a former chancellor of the Omaha Archdiocese and a Catholic University-licensed “canon lawyer,” an expert in church laws and rules, disagrees.
Eileen Burke-Sullivan, a theologian and vice provost for mission and ministry at Creighton University, said she sees no problem. The cathedral and the archdiocese, she said, have supported the arts in Omaha for many years.
Remember, read the whole article and think before posting.
I do no not like to comment online, but need to pass on some information.
Rev. Gutgsell at St. Cecilia’s Cathedral is actually a very devout conservative who regularly celebrates the TLM.
The Cathedral has one of the best choirs in the US and often chants in Latin.
This entry was posted in Hard-Identity Catholicism, Our Catholic Identity and tagged Archd. Omaha, Concerts in Churches, idolatry, sacrilege. Bookmark the permalink.
The custodian is a hero, obviously driven to a point where he could no longer tolerate what was going on. Reminiscent of Our Lord evicting the money changers from the temple?
However I suspect he will now be charged with criminal damage (or whatever your equivalent offence is in the US), lose his church job and who knows what else.
What an upside down world we live in.
I think the wrong person was “arrested” (or stopped). And somewhere from up the hierarchical ladder, punishment should be handed down for desecration of God’s house.
I am gob-smacked and literally breathless. The pastor not only allowed the displays but allowed his heroic custodian to be handcuffed, jailed, and charged. And now he is going to be sentenced! I am faxing the Archbishop of Omaha, who should take Mr. Kenney to dinner and knock some sense into the learned head of the pastor. That is Archbishop George Lucas and his fax number is 402.558.3026. You can send him a message on the archdiocesan website, but I like to send a fax because it creates a piece of paper and a bureaucracy has to do something with a piece of paper.
Good for him. Somebody has to stand up for God. He should be proud to suffer with Christ. He should have fashioned a whip first.
What a brave man! I can quite understand his anger and his actions. I do hope publicity about him spreads and makes some of the clergy think again before installing similar secular items in their churches and cathedrals. The thought of Mary Poppins crashing to the ground makes me laugh and I think I would have cheered under my breath had I been there. ‘This isn’t culture – it’s Disney crap’ how right he is!
Regarding playing non-sacred music on a pipe organ in a sacred place – I was surprised some years ago when I attended an organ recital in one of Paris famous churches and among the works played were some which were based on Norse sagas. I thought it an odd choice at the time but I understand that this is the norm in organ recitals even those taking place in cathedrals and churches. Looking back I am sure that when my father gave organ recitals in churches or cathedrals he only played sacred music. Perhaps organists today think that today’s audiences need the variety.
1) I’m the proud owner of a first (US) edition of Mary Poppins, which I bought for the princely sum of 10 cents at a garage sale in Hyde Park, MA, in the late 1990s.
2) I’ve had a serious crush on Julie Andrews since I first saw her in The Sound of Music when I was in high school.
A Fax for George Lucas? Useless. Disney already bought Lucasfilms.
Let us pray that each one of us would have the zeal and fortitude to rid the temple of all that degrades the consecrated House of God.
Having spent — compulsively, I fear — a fair amount of time over at “Fishwrap” the past few days taking note of the comments surrounding the Kung letter to Pope Francis I must admit that the state of decay and decomposition with our Church is ever so much worse than I knew or imagined. This infantile display is small change compared to what is flaunted over there. It is however symptomatic of the loss of the Transcendent eating away at the heart of the hierarchy, the clergy, religious and laity. The faith is regard as nothing more than superstition and magic without shame — boldly.
It all need be thrown to Gehenna.
I also find it incredulous that the spokesman for the Archbishop said ‘he saw nothing in the broad language of the catechism that would preclude such displays as Mary Poppins being suspended from the cathedral ceiling.’ There’s nothing in the catechism about hanging Mickey Mouse in a church but common sense and a sense of the sacred should tell anyone that it is completely inappropriate.
What qualifies as appropriate for the organ? Only music explicitly based on Gregorian chant? Only “classical” music? Only classical music written before 1900? Only classical music written before 1900 that I like? The whole question seems to lay bare in short order the painfully arbitrary lines we often draw in matters of artistic appropriateness.
I am with Mr. Kenney 100%. I too have serious reservations about concerts being given in churches. I always ask if the Blessed Sacrament has been removed before the concert. Churches are houses of prayer not concert halls. I have some sympathy with concerts of the like as Bach’s ” St. Matthew’s Passion”. I also understand that there are many churches which have fine organs and hence the desire to give organ recitals using such instruments.
And to top it off — the scandal is magnified by clerical indifference to the man being arrested. All manner of crime is masked but this … ?
I am on the verge of regarding all as lost.
As I read this it reminded me of Mattathias in 1 Maccabees 2:19-51. Maybe the pastor should be thankful only Mary Poppins abd Buddha were slain.
Mr. Kenney deserves the gratitude of every Catholic. I believe, and before nonsense permeated the church, everyone believed, that the Church’s mission was to change the culture. Now we are trying to be inclusive to the point of desecration. We are in dire need of a clear thinking clergy, whose paramount thoughts are for the preservation of our souls.
Do I detect a hint of sarcasm in the comment by rcruz regarding appropriate organ music to be played in a church? I would have thought the kind of music would be obvious – and it would not include ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside’ or ‘Alexander’s ragtime band’ or indeed Norse mythical sagas.
The line, actually the deep chasm between what is beautiful and what is not, is not arbitrary. The half life of radioactive elements makes a good simile for comparison’s sake. Some things decay at faster rates than others. Rachmaninoff’s All Night Vespers probably has a half life of seven or eight hundred years. Take Me Out to the Ballgame has a trans-uranium element’s half life, measured in milliseconds.
I see nothing in the broad language of the catechism that would preclude displays such as XXXXX being suspended from the cathedral ceiling.
Nice cleansing of the temple there: “you cannot serve both God and mammon.” The church is for…the Church–is it not?
Of course they are just hawking CDs and PBS memberships.
A spoonful of sugar doesn’t help the sacrilege go down.
Ok. Isn’t it about time now for the resident communists to start chiming in lamenting this man’s lack of respect for private property rights and how he had no right to destroy something that doesn’t belong to him?
When someone asks “What would Jesus do?” remind them that overturning tables and beating people with a whip is on the list of possibilities.
This is the heart of the matter. Catholic schools and universities teach ersatz Catholicism and millions are leaving the Church for churches which offer praise and worship services because they have no understanding of the Mass as the source and summit of our Faith. Will this end any time soon? I don’t think so at least not in my lifetime.
Nancy, your daughter is asking an important question.
If this man needs money for legal fees can a link be supplied for donations please.
Well, St. John Chrysostom said heretics need to be smitten across the face. All this guy did was take out the trash. The parish ought to eat the financial loss from the property damage and pay the guy’s fines and court costs as a penance.
I think the leaders there were totally wrong to do such secular things with the church. I understand perfectly how the custodian felt and I believe his reaction was justified.
God bless him. But I’m sure some politically correct careerist will take him to task for being so insensitive. We are sensitive for everything but Jesus today.
I would be every bit as appalled as the custodian if Mary Poppins was suspended from the nave ceiling at my church. Was it there during any Masses? I would be severely tempted to do the same thing he did. It is the kind of thing where you pray about whether doing something dramatic and accepting the consequences willingly may be the right and charitable thing to do. Why the absolutely incredible indifference to the sensibilities of Catholics from the rector and diocesan officials? This definitely exposes something really wrong in that diocese.
Is there a kickstarter campaign for his legal defense?
1.) I fantasize about becoming Mary Poppins someday when I am done homeschooling my kiddos, yet even I thought her demise here was quite comical!
2.) While most people probably don’t “hope” their child will become a custodian, I often tell my kids that I will be happy with whatever careers they choose providing they are obedient to God’s will for their lives and that they always work with integrity and diligence at their craft. This is one time I would be quite proud to be the mother of a custodian.
It is a sad day when so many moreI always tell my kids that I will he happy with whatever they become as long as it’s God’s will for their lives & they do their best at said “job.” I would be very proud to be the mother of such a custodian as highlighted in this article!
It is quite sad that so many more “highly educated” people cannot separate the secular from the sacred, or Disney from art!
I went to St. Cecilia’s in grade school and again in college.
It’s horrifying to see the church desecrated so.
The sculptor Albin Polasek made the beautiful St. Cecilia crucifix and the stations of the cross.
It’s a shame to see it sharing space with a cartoon character.
Instead of pressing charges against the custodian, they should be sacking the Cathedral rector. Statues of Buddha have no place in a consecrated church. At the very least, the statue of Poppins was in poor taste and ill conceived.
Wasn’t this Bishop Elden Curtis’ diocese?
I think of the Bishops at the Council of Nicea, who had been tortured and maimed, witnessing with their bodies, missing hands and eyes rather than deny the faith.
I think of Card. Francis Xavier Nguyen van Thuan spending years in Solitary confinement by the communists, using his hand as a chalice for 3 drops of smuggled wine in order to say Holy Mass. Bishops in Islamic countries, who die for their people.
This leaves me cold ! Very Cold !!
Let us all offer reparations for this.
To clarify for some connecting that this took place during Lent, the article indicates it took place in January. Not Lent, but still tacky and ill advised.
“And his disciples remembered that it was written, ‘The zeal for thy house has consumed me'” John 2:17.
“He said he is scheduled for sentencing “on Holy Thursday,” March 24,” showing that there is more than one way to enter into the paschal mystery.
Lord, if only you would set your seal of approval on this man and this just deed. If only you would distinguish him with abundant blessings, at least a job that pays twice as much, that you will bring someone forward to pay his debts and in general leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that you are superabundantly pleased with him and his ethics and aesthetics. We have been suffering at the hands of the experts for so long, maybe you will see fit to deliver us through the custodians.
While I’m not arguing in anyway for a completely subjective approach, I am advocation caution in being quick to decide if something is “appropriate”…a discussion that goes far beyond the focus of the original post. For instance, if one were to do MacMillan’s Mass at just about anywhere other than Westminster Cathedral you’d probably be run out for being “inappropriate.” But it’s a deeply Catholic work by a deeply Catholic composer. But people wouldn’t bat an eyelash if the organist plays the Toccata from Widor 5, which is a self-defined secular work.
His charge is spot on, and sadly may apply to many churches.
I still can’t imagine it. Do they have a sale right in the nave of the church? Don’t they have rental tents in Nebraska?
Mr. Kenny’s good sense and gumption are to be commended. LORD, grant that these manly virtues be visited upon your holy people, especially the clergy.
Mr. Kenney’s defense should be – it’s an artistic display, and his actions were an act of performance art. Does the Church hate art?
Seriously – if the dude has a defense fund, I’d be happy to contribute.
I’ve wanted to shout that a thousand times.
The custodian is my hero.
For those interested here are photos of the other displays. I can’t imagine this kind of display inside a church.
@ Fr. Reader: LOL. Very good.
Oh that such zeal for God’s house would consume us all!
Too bad he wasn’t at the Vatican when they projected animals on it! Papa Francesco, give this man a job!!!
What this courageous man did reminds me of St. Boniface cutting down Thor’s Oak.
God bless you, Mark Kenny!
If there’s a “GoFund Me” account for this man, I’d gladly contribute.
The sensus fidelium has spoken!
I read this with great enjoyment and a laugh. Thank you Mr. Kenney! It’s great to see someone strike a blow against sacrilege, long overdue. Honestly, I’m nowhere near Omaha, and I feel proud. It’s a thing of beauty to contemplate, Mary Poppins crashing to the floor, and I love Mary Poppins too! But she doesn’t belong in a cathedral, and I don’t know what people in charge are thinking! This type of thing is astounding!
I love what he said, and the fact he said call the police and knelt at the rail and prayed.
Oh I agree, someone set him up for a GoFundMe or something. I will also be faxing a request for charges to be dropped. Thanks Grateful to be Catholic. I hope many people contact them with the same request.
Mr. Kenney served time. This may not be an insignificant charge for him. I hope it being the Jubilee of Mercy that the Archbishop extends some toward Mr. Kenney, and not only drop the charge but allow him to keep his position.
A blow was struck for the common outraged man (and woman). Hooray!
Seriously, there is no other place in Omaha that can host the show or concerts?
Perhaps something from Archbishop Lucas would be helpful. He is the “Pastor” of the Cathedral Church. His “Cathedra” is there. Let us pray Archbishop Lucas has the strong Governing character of Cardinals Burke and Sarah and Archbishop Sample. The faithful are watching and waiting your Excellency.
According to the article, the man gave his word not to be disruptive. Without in any way endorsing the mid-air display of a Mary Poppins statue in the nave at St Cecilia, I, for one, do not find the man’s actions heroic, especially given his broken word to a priest.
Raise your holy hell at the appropriate time. When you give your word not to be disruptive, keep it. Go up the “chain of command” if you must…..go all the way to the Lord, in prayer.
Ultimately, this is on the Archbishop…..it’s his cathedral.
What would St. Joseph do?
Well, Poppins is a Christian allegory, but throwing out an idol of Buddha is purely Catholic.
I am admirable of this brave Christian.
If you do this kind of rebellion, you have to make meticulously sure that you don’t put yourself in the wrong.
I’m inclined to understand him as far as Buddha is concerned – he’s the founder of a non-Christian and, if I may say so, particularly wrong religion and frequently idolized by the adherents of the same.
Mary Poppins? That is certainly a different matter. “Disney” and “secular” are rather different things from evil and sinful.
Don’t get me wrong, of course the thing does have a rather strong touch of the unadvisable and unfitting. But while it may be allowed or even obligatory to stand up in thunder and ignoring legitimate authority and chain-of-command matter against the Sinful, the merely Unadvisable is on a totally different level. He’s spoiling what might have been a legitimate and courageous protest against Buddha in church, by making of it something everyone understands, even chiefly, as a protest against Mary Poppins in Church.
Out of what might have been a protest against religious syncretism, he makes a protest against the mere adaption of popular culture. Was that advisable on his part? No.
Subterfuge surgically employed in a just cause is not a mortal sin. Would not one expect the tactic to be employed in the defense of a life? The life of the Church is daily endangered from those within and without by mindless naiveté and aggressive underhanded manipulation.
It was a foolish mannequin, not Julie Andrews!
As for the faithful good priest who allowed this, and any others who were complicit. We need to start using some judgement fifty years into the debasement of our faith. Often in the current cultural chaos we can get disorientated, but let us keep our thinking caps on.
I appreciated the commenter appealing to the memory of the Maccabees. As a lector I often have difficulty holding back tears when proclaiming the word from those books of Holy Scripture. They are an admonition to us who live in these days, who worship in these bare ruined choirs.
Even a good priest can have a blindspot…This serves as a warning that God often will use His creation to send a clear, unambiguous message about desecrating His Church.
while I happen to know merely one song from Mary Poppins (guess which), a movie like the Jungle Book *is* art. You may well make differences between higher and lower forms of art, which is probably what you meant, but (if I may be forgiven to say impersonally and without intending personal offense): the one who doesn’t understand what art is is rather he who doesn’t thinks Disney and art are mutual exclusive concepts.
And I can’t help imagining if one wanted large, architecturally-interesting spaces, there’s somewhere in Omaha were one could be found and something worked out.
I’m afraid my first thought on seeing Mary Poppins was of possible sly mockery of the Assumption, or Ascension, come to that. It would be easy enough to avoid the danger of such a mistaken suggestion,… via another venue.
Sorry, friend, but we have a obligation to God first. The hogtying of faithful Catholics to accept such bull&hit is precisely what perpetuates it. I applaud this man for understanding where his duty really dwells. Honoring the Lord, not being an accessory to sacrilege.
For all of Father’s supposed orthodoxy, what we have, in my view, is a demonstration of the danger of associating being Orthodox with merely having a taste for the Smells and Bells. Like the only value of Tradition is in some cultural appreciation that would have a priest install a Buddha, under any pretext, and a Mary Poppins Mannequin inside God’s House.
The shock expressed by this priest is similarly disturbing as, to me, it demonstrates the sad reality that many who are snorking down the Happy Meal Options are losing their taste for and even their ability to recognize real food and substance. But as I used to tell my kids, you can tell the food isn’t what it should be in that “meal” because they have to bribe you with a toy to eat it. And yet the Pavlov ingrained lesson remains. Sap and pap good. Real nutrition not fun like Mary Poppins fantasies.
How long oh, Lord. How long?!
With the perpetuation of stupid, that is the manufacture of invincible ignorance within the Church, “long” is likely to be exactly that.
Islam is cutting off real heads for it’s beliefs, and we are deliberating about whether or not it is right or wrong to cut down a plastic fictional character for ours, and some say that is too much.
To cause someone to be distracted (from giving all one’s attention and Worship) during Mass: I thought this is worthy of confession (meaning to repair an insult or break in one’s relationship with God). Being distracted: is it not an offense against the First Commandment which is given to us by God, Himself? If there is a flying statue of a fictional character in the same space as that which is used to offer a ‘fitting and worthy sacrifice’ unto God…is this not a distraction? If there were a ‘flying’ statue of a Saint perhaps one’s mind Could be drawn to God. But a fictional character? How does that help anyone point their mind to and give worship to the One True God and offer a fitting and worthy sacrifice? May the name of Mark Kenney be ever remembered where Zeal for the House of the Lord is remembered as with Phineas of the Old Testament. May Mark Kenney serve as a model for the Love or our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. May Mark Kenney receive every blessing for is Zeal for Our Lord and for loving our Lord more than he loves the esteem of humans. Where can financial donations be sent to aid Mr. Kenney’s defense or court costs?
Sigh……to everyone who really finds heroic Mr. Kenney’s actions (not his motivations, but his *actions*), to everyone who would hold up this man as a model of behavior to your children, I invite you to watch the movie “Joseph of Nazareth”, which poignantly contrasts the saint with those of his day who chose violence.
Again, what would St Joseph do?
One cannot but wonder, as the agenda to devolve the hierarchy, just how many more dioceses will turn to such creative secularize symbolism to replace the marvelous traditional source of spiritual inspiration used for centuries to attune oneself to God. Isn’t detachment from the world–not celebration of the world–the desired outcome for souls?
That update is interesting and curious. Regardless, the ongoing trend to turn sacred spaces into “cultural” spaces must be resisted more effectively. A Mark Kenney Defense Fund would be welcomed.
“Cathedrals,” he said, “are kind of the epicenter for culture presentation and development.” Yes, when the presentation and development (art) is directed to God.
I thought Cathedrals were jewel boxes as mentioned in the Old Testament and a place to worship.
I would have to disagree that this beautiful cathedral was built for ‘cultural presentation’. No, it was built as a house of God where He is to be worshipped and adored. It is not the multi-use cultural center or civic center or anything like that. Father was wrong. But the custodian was wrong to scream at the pastor.
Pardon the double post, but it just occurred to me: what if Mary Poppins or Buddha had been sitting in the bishop’s cathedra? Would that have made a difference?
As for “Rev. Gutgsell at St. Cecilia’s Cathedral is actually a very devout conservative who regularly celebrates the TLM.” perhaps that is so. But I know a priest who celebrates the TLM and fiddles around with the words of absolution (in the traditional form – he adds “omnibus”). The appearance of orthodoxy is not a guarantee or it, and neither for good judgement.
While this case is an extreme example, using Cathedrals as museums rather than houses of prayer is nothing new. We really need to change that attitude.
In St. Joseph’s day people were stoned to death for sacrilege especially in the Temple. The book of Deuteronomy, and really man places in the Old Testament makes that pretty darn clear. So that argument is a nonstarter. As others have already stated, our Lord picked up a rope and drove the sacrileges bums out of HIS FATHER’S House. So I’d say this man’s actions have precedence.
Far as I’m concerned he’s earned his stripes in the Church Militant, if not a pair of Captains Bars. This is how a man behaves. When reason fails clear and decisive action is necessary. We’re so used to talking stuff to death that when a man acts like a man were all shocked. I’m frankly sick of the Catholics who want to paint Our Lord and every male Saint a pansy pacifist. Go read the Maccabees, the lives of the Cristero’s and countless others. If your Catholic then your a soldier in the Church Militant. You have a duty to protect and defend the House of GOD. Come what may. And before some poor misguided bleeding heart liberal starts a-hollering “how’s that different from what the muslims do?!?” I’ll tell ya, keep it in context toots. This guy didn’t kill anyone. Much like our Lord, and with a great deal less violence, this man threw the garbage out the door. Good job!
Psalms 68:10 For the zeal of thy house hath eaten me up: and the reproaches of them that reproached thee are fallen upon me.
I teach my son that while we’re manning our place on the wall we must pray unceasingly for the grace to, as the Marine Corps puts it “stand and die.” Whether that be the death of a job, a career or our very selves. There is no greater honor, anywhere, then to sacrifice oneself for GOD. So yea, I’m definitely going to hold this man up as a good example to my son. And may his number increase!
St. Vincent of Lerins has some great advice for us.
The Professor- seeing those photos really drives home how inappropriate this is. Flowers is one thing; this is not just flowers.
I would be astonished and horrified to see this done to my church, but many of them (including the pastor) evidently don’t experience that because they are so accustomed to the process.
If they didn’t do it for a year or two, replaced it with 40 hours, it would be still special, but appropriate.
The link provided by The Professor is well worth following, and the post linked has a further link at its foot also worth following.
Clear photos of the Buddha head, the Yul Brynner-like mannequin, the other monstrous mythological figure: apparently in a chapel – not the veiling behind the King of Siam of… who and what, exactly?
And read the rationale under “About Us” at the Cathedral Arts Project link.
Note the Archbishop’s dual responsibility: as Archbishop and, to whatever extent, as ex officio member of the Board of Directors (together with Fr. Michael).
I suppose we should be grateful that the police were so promptly called. Maybe we should see this as an improvement on some previous ecclesial policy. Of course, if this is what happens with such trivial cases, can we expect SWAT teams for more serious offenses such as child abuse which previously, as we know, didn’t even merit a call to the police?
I am sorry that I do not really have time to read through the entire article at the moment but will as soon as possible — I wanted merely to say here that as to cultural events hosted in sacred places, I have a memory that may shed light on this discussion.
Some years back as a very contented and peaceful member of the parish of Our Saviour’s, Manhattan under the always encouraging pastoral guidance of Fr. Rutler, I attended an evening concert and performance of sacred music in the church. In his remarks welcoming all to Our Saviour’s just prior to the music, Fr. Rutler requested that we not applaud the performers as one might usually do automatically for a performance in another place such as a concert hall, because, and my paraphrasing will never do justice to his words, essentially, we needed to not interrupt our constant mindfulness that in that church the Blessed Sacrament was present in the sanctuary, and that He was the One only worthy for praise or “applause” when we were assembled therein.
It was one of the finest musical performances, of sung prayers, I have ever heard. The silence was profound and not without appreciation for what that group of talented voices had prepared for our edification and reflection. Some musical performances are enjoyed and forgotten. Others live well beyond that one evening.
While I agree with Mr. Kenney that the display is inappropriate for a church sanctuary or nave, my main issues with his actions are 1) his damage to property that wasn’t his (the Mary Poppins figure) and 2) his breaking his promise to the pastor. The fact that he was even asked to make such a promise would seem to indicate that the pastor knew Mr. Kenny might do something like this. I suppose his agreement to make restitution mitigates whatever wrong he did in damaging property, but I dunno that it excuses it completely.
What I find striking about this case is that Mr. Kenney would appear to be rather leftist or liberal in his politics–his previous arrests were for protesting nuclear weapons, a typically leftist cause. Yet he seems to have far more respect for tradition than his TLM loving pastor does! In this respect he reminds me so what of Dorothy Day, who though often regarded as a leftist saint, was quite traditional in her piety and can’t be pigeonholed into either side of the political spectrum.
Thank you Mr. Kenney for your service.
I don’t quite know what to make of the Cathedral’s use for this decidedly secular purpose. I can understand circumstances in which a concert including secular music could occur there. I have more difficulty accepting as appropriate what appear to be extensive displays of secular visual artworks (costumes and set pieces can constitute works of the ephemeral art of theater). If it doesn’t have one already, the Cathedral should seriously consider building a hall that can serve the parish community and also accommodate the Flower Festival.
Finally, the report that the Parish Priest is described as conservative (I take that to mean theologically conservative) and a supporter of the Extraordinary Form adds to my puzzlement.
benedetta: Interesting anecdote about Fr. Rutler, sacred spaces, and the persistence of cultural memory. This brings to mind Fr. Rutler’s WWII book “Principalities and Powers: Spiritual Combat 1942-1943.” The spiritual and the cultural are often overlooked by military historians. You probably know about this book, just thought I’d mention it.
@bookworm……It’s a comfort to find at least one like-minded soul commenting here.
– repent and go to confession when he has missed the mark.
Better to do that reflection beforehand.
It occurs to me to compare the Buddha head and other (Thai) mythological being as details of a narrative tableau rather than idols presented or even promoted in their own right, with details of sculpture, painting, and stained glass in churches down the ages – for example, the demons in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel.
But it seems worth addressing precisely the presence of these images in relation to this tableau in this place (a chapel?) in the Cathedral.
We are not given details as to the scope (and fine points, if any) of Mr. Kenney’s “promise not to be disruptive”. What would, or would not, have fallen under the description “disruptive”? Passing out protest leaflets? Inviting people to sign a protest petition? Addressing people in the attempt to dissuade them from visiting the Flower Festival? Perhaps “founder and director, Brother William Woeger,” would consider merely “walking around negatively in the middle of what’s going on” as “disruptive”.
or, earlier, the Jesuits of Georgetown, when Mr. Obama appeared there – by dropping something down the cable (burhka-like?) over Mary Poppins, and secluding in one way or another the Buddha, mythological being, and mannequins – with or without planned or spontaneous invited volunteer assistance.
That would certainly have been “disruptive” by probably any promised definition, but less destructive of property.
Would it have been any the less deplored?
Let’s quote the man in context and entirely.
For example the one he did on the book of Revelation has a romance developing between two spies. I’m not an expert on the Book of Revelation but I know that’s not in there.
If I may, there is an excellent book on the life of Saint Joseph, written in the 1700, with a full imprimatur etc. by Mother Maria Cecilia Baij OSB, Benedictine Abbess of the Convent of St. Peter in Montefiascone, Italy. Clearly the writings of a 16th century Abbess with full Church approval have more credibility than a director whose more interested in entertainment than accuracy.
I’m always amazed by the folks that are so concerned about the rights of their fellow creatures even to the contempt of GOD. Have we lost all sensitivity to the rights of Almighty GOD?
That Cathedral is the House of Almighty GOD. HIS property. Really everything is HIS but HIS House is a House of prayer, HE Said so. Where is the long list of how HE’S been wronged in this matter.
– not profane the house of God with idols.
– repent, go to confession when he has missed the mark and fallen prey to human respect.
It’s all about GOD. Not the flowers, not the pastor, not the people who paid for the flowers to see mary poppins swinging from the rafters. It’s about the devil using selfish men to mock GOD in HIS own house. And Catholics, who claim to love GOD letting the slimy snake get away with it.
– You and I and Mr. Kenney will surely agree that the nave of a Catholic cathedral is not where we want to see a mid-air display of Mary Poppins.
– To be clear, I wasn’t quoting Mr. Kenney, per se, but rather a paragraph from the newspaper article, a paragraph which I quoted in its entirety.
– Thank you for the book recommendation.
Sorry, but as much as I may agree that this display was inappropriate, it does not justify the actions taken by the custodian. Cutting down the Mary Poppins figure from such a height could have caused great damage to the floor of the cathedral, not to mention the potential harm to any people who might have been underneath (yes I know he looked in advance but you can’t be too careful). He should have protested through the proper channels, and not resorted to vandalism to make his point.
Regarding the Update: The fact that the rector regularly celebrates the TLM and the state of the choir are not the issues here. Sadly, one can display all the outer attributes of faithfulness and still be capable of hideous acts of disrespect toward God.
Where is the Archbishop in all this? How could he or any on his staff have possibly approved of this in the first place? Perhaps if the Flower Show people wished to create beautiful arrangements of flowers at each altar, and if the public were allowed to respectfully visit the cathedral to view these arrangements it might be imagined to be acceptable.
But after visiting the link provided by one of the commenters to a secular newspaper which reviewed the event with photographs, it was nothing like that. One particularly painful photo was of characters from “War and Peace” in a sled in front of a beautiful statue of Our Lady and Jesus, which was obscured by all the Hollywood hoopla.
The people who put on the show obviously wanted a grand, beautiful building to showcase what seems to be an otherwise fine flower show. In any other venue, it would have been a wholesome and lovely event.
I understand why the custodian was placed in prison. He could have killed someone by his acts, or at the very least, physically damaged the cathedral. But a cathedral is built and consecrated for greater use. What a dreadfully disrespectful and misguided decision on the part of the Rector and the Archbishop.
….indeed. But a thorough and “honest examination” of that disconnect would be in order. The fruits of confusion that have a priest declaring that he sees nothing wrong with this secular display inside God’s house has its roots. The additional charge of slander against the festival that the priest leveled at the custodian (to be found on Blog for Dallas Area Catholics) in the letter dismissing him is similarly indicative of a confused understanding.
So, no, this is not the “only” issue in which there is not “full communion.” That latter portion being a made up term to cover the absurdity of decrying separation for those who choose clarity in doctrine.
Chiara makes a number of interesting points. “Perhaps if the Flower Show people wished to create beautiful arrangements of flowers at each altar, and if the public were allowed to respectfully visit the cathedral to view these arrangements it might be imagined to be acceptable.” There would be a lot of scope for reverent imagination in that: one wonders if that is how it started in 1985 (or if there was a background of such reverent floral display). It would be interesting to know more of the preceding 30 years’ Festivals. And about the formulation of the rationale for the Project: has that changed over the years? Mr. Kelly’s article reports, ” ‘I learned three years ago that he [Mr. Kenney] didn’t approve of the flower festival,’ Woeger said.” Might Mr. Kenney’s disapproval have existed (and been repeatedly expressed through various proper channels) even earlier, before it came to Br. Woeger’s attention? Might its source be the specific content of each one of the last several Festivals?
Mr. Kelly notes, ” Kenney said in an interview this week that he will make restitution.” Does anyone know where this interview might be found?
Chiara found the “Dr. Zhivago” display “in front of a beautiful statue of Our Lady and Jesus, which was obscured by all the Hollywood hoopla” particularly painful. It has been a long time since I saw the 1965 movie (and I’ve never seen another), but I was wondering if this leaving of the statue unveiled was deliberately paying attention to a dimension (or possible dimension) of the story, though it was a statue rather than an ikon. If so, it might make more sense than most of the scenes, though whether that justifies it to any extent remains the question.
I was a parishioner at the Cathedral, sent my son to school there for a few years, and even volunteered at the flower festival, once. The real problem here is the clash between those who wish to make the Cathedral a museum and those who wish to have it be a thriving parish and sacred space.
Father Gutgsell is a good and faithful priest. If anger is directed, or fault assigned, it does not belong to him. In my experience with him, he has always counseled toward the holy and sacred, but in the face of years of unrelenting attacks, has made decisions to accommodate, so that the way to conversion is kept open. That is why he will have a TLM, and a 5:30 quicky Mass on the same evening, both said by him. He is not in control of the flower show, that belongs to Brother William Woeger.
Every year, parishioners who are accustomed to being shocked and scandalized by the displays flee to other parishes for the weekend. They leave the parish to Brother William and his non-Catholic board. Some, like us, find another parish home, and never return.
When we left St. Cecilia, we spent months discussing our decision making process with Fr. Gutgsell. We went back and forth between parishes. I have a deep love for Fr. Gutgsell. He is a truly holy priest in a very difficult situation.
Brother William is the real culprit here. He needs to go.
I an sure I am not alone in being grateful for this additional information on background and context!
Suzanne – I am fully sympathetic with your experience in confronting the clergy when defending the dignity of the Faith in your parish. I had a similar experience, but in my case, I felt that God wanted me to stay. It has not been easy or pleasant, but I know it is heartbreaking to leave one’s beloved parish. I hope you find peace and joy in your new parish.
I think in this case the ultimate responsibility lies with the Archbishop. The religious brother you mentioned may have been doing the dirty work, but he is there at the pleasure of the Archbishop. I do not understand how the Archbishop could have countenanced this whole scenario – how did it ever get approved in the first place? He is the one who gave a free hand to whoever made an exhibition hall of God’s holy cathedral. And he is the one who should accept the shame for the indignity and scandal he gave to his people.
It is all a grievous, scandalous situation. It distresses me to know that any clergyman, especially an Archbishop, can allow God’s cathedral to be used as a backdrop for a secular exhibition. This is dreadful.
This is Poppycock. It was the reason we first complained.
My quick impression, starting in 2001 with about the first half of the photos is that there are already oddities, that, as Chiara suggested in one example from this year, there is often an effect of obscuring sacred images with parts of the floral displays, and, that there is such abundant ostentation, that, even if most reverently intended, it does not certainly show good judgement or taste.
Lots to complain about in 2006 (the huge, realistic painting woman in the peach-colored negligee, where the full nakedness of some parts of the anatomy is provocatively cut off by the lay-out, for one notable example!).
The first nine years documented under one Archbishop, the next seven under his successor. Presumably, sixteen occasions of some sort of ‘dual approval’, as Archbishop and as ex-officio Board member. Mind-boggling (if my first four Festivals sampled are at all characteristic).
I’m not sure how much exploring I want to do in the photo archive, but it is good to know of it, however deeply disheartening the effect.
steve51b31 asked if this was not Archbishop Elden Curtiss’ diocese: Wikipedia tells us it was, and allows us to work out that he presumably presided over 16 Flower Festivals, the last nine of which are documented at the site noted by Suzanne Carl. | 2019-04-25T18:19:47Z | http://wdtprs.com/blog/2016/03/archd-omaha-custodian-destroys-mary-poppins-mannequin-buddha-on-display-in-cathedral/ |
From the far reaches of their empire, the Romans brought back all sorts of beasts for their menageries and gladiator spectacles—lions from Africa, bears from northern Europe, and ibexes from the deserts of the Middle East. If the empire had reached Australia, the Romans surely would have imported kangaroos, koalas, and other marsupials found nowhere else on Earth.
Scientists have long pondered why different species are distributed in various places—a field called biogeography. The line of inquiry stretches from Aristotle, through Carolus Linnaeus, the 18th-century father of taxonomy, to Charles Darwin up to E.O. Wilson, who coined the modern term “biodiversity.” Until the 1970s, however, biogeography was a strictly terrestrial pursuit.
In 1977, scientists diving on the Galápagos Rift in Alvin made a discovery that shook the foundations of biology. They found oases of animals thriving in the sunless depths around hydrothermal vents. Instead of photosynthetic plants, chemosynthetic microbes comprise the base of the food chain at vents. They obtain energy from chemical-rich fluids generated by volcanic processes on mid-ocean ridges, the 50,000-mile (80,000-kilometer) undersea mountain chain that encircles the globe and marks the edges of Earth’s tectonic plates.
Since the discovery of vents, scientists have explored hundreds of volcanically active vents in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. And we have found that on the seafloor, as on land, distinct animal populations have evolved in different regions.
In the eastern Pacific, tubeworms dominate vent sites, but they are notably absent at vents in the Atlantic. Instead, billions of shrimp swarm at vents along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which bisects the Atlantic Ocean floor. Both Pacific and Atlantic vents have mussels, but not the same species.
Scientists today recognize six major seafloor regions—called biogeographic provinces—with distinct assemblages of animal species. Beyond the tubeworm-dominated eastern Pacific, there are two provinces in the North Atlantic, where different species of shrimp and mussels predominate at deep vent sites and at shallower ones to the north.
The fourth province is in the northeast Pacific, off the U.S. Northwest coast, which shares similar species (clams, limpets, and tubeworms) with the eastern Pacific, but different species of each. Across the ocean in the western Pacific, vents are populated by barnacles, mussels, and snails that are not seen in either the eastern Pacific or the Atlantic.
Scientists got their first chance to search for vents in the Central Indian Ocean in 2001 and found the sixth province. These vents are dominated by Atlantic-type shrimp, but also had snails and barnacles resembling those in the western Pacific.
All these regions contain the same basic ingredients to support life—chemical nutrients generated by geothermal processes at hydrothermal vent sites. So why do vent fauna differ in the Atlantic and Pacific, or in the eastern and western Pacific? How do we assemble these puzzle pieces to explain the diversity and evolution of vent species throughout the world’s oceans?
Which combinations of these variables limited or encouraged the dispersal of animal populations along the widely scattered, ephemeral patchwork of active vents on mid-ocean ridges? Which sent some populations down divergent evolutionary pathways, led others to extinction, and created fertile niches for yet others?
Breakthroughs in biotechnology that allow rapid gene sequencing now give scientists powerful new abilities to compare genomes of different species to see how closely related they are and to examine how far back in time they may have diverged on the evolutionary tree. Determining evolutionary relationships among seafloor species and communities, and their distribution and biodiversity, will help unravel the evolution of life on Earth. And it will guide our search for life on other planetary bodies, where chemosynthesis may reign.
Ecosystems on land and the seafloor differ substantially, but terrestrial evolutionary lessons may still apply to the deep sea. For example, as Australia separated from the ancient supercontinent of Pangaea and became an island, its animal population became divorced from other populations (including predators) and began to evolve separately. Did something similar happen on the ocean floor?
About 40 million years ago, a continuous mid-ocean ridge system existed in the east Pacific, extending from below the equator to the coast of what is now the Northwest United States. In the continuing reorganization of tectonic plates on Earth’s surface, however, the North American Plate pushed westward. It began to override the Pacific Plate, forcing a portion of it underneath the North American Plate. (The San Andreas Fault in California is actually a fault between two mid-ocean ridges—a continuation of the East Pacific ridge system now on land.) Plate tectonics effectively disconnected northeast Pacific ridges from the rest of the Pacific ridge system.
As a result, northeast Pacific vent communities diverged from their equatorial Pacific cousins. Both regions’ vents share clams, limpets, and tubeworms, but not the same species. Northeastern tubeworms (Ridgea piscesae) have skinny tubes, while eastern tubeworms (Riftia pachyptila) have fatter tubes.
The geological evolution of mid-ocean ridges and ocean basins influences biological evolution in other ways.
Hydrothermal vents are typically found in rift valleys at the crests of mid-ocean ridges, but there are striking differences in ridges. On the fast-spreading East Pacific Rise, rift valleys are typically 200 meters wide and 10 meters deep. But on the slower-spreading Mid-Atlantic Ridge, rift valleys are often 1 kilometer wide and 2 kilometers deep. Such deep valleys may have become evolutionary dead-ends for vent animals inside, whose larvae could not surmount the rift crests to disperse and colonize new vent sites. The deep valleys might also have blocked entry for competing vent animal larvae from outside the valleys, giving the inside animals a foothold to survive.
Pacific and Atlantic ridges differ in other ways, too. Mid-ocean ridges are broken into segments by mammoth faults, called fracture zones, which intersect the ridges at roughly perpendicular angles. Ridge segments move apart along fracture zones, breaking the otherwise straight line of the ridge and creating a zigzag pattern of alternating ridges and fracture zones.
In the Pacific, two ridge segments may be separated by 10-kilometer-long fracture zones. In the Atlantic, fracture zones typically span hundreds of kilometers—perhaps an unbridgeable gap for vent larvae dispersing into or out of the area.
Topographical factors may also explain the unique biological communities found at seamounts—submerged volcanoes that typically are isolated from mid-ocean ridges. Vent communities at Loihi Seamount, an active subsea volcano near Hawaii, and at Edison Seamount, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, each have their own set of endemic species.
Are vent larvae from these isolated seamount communities too far away to reach mid-ocean ridges or other hydrothermal vent locations? Or do seamounts, towering miles above the seafloor, cause deep-ocean currents to swirl around them—creating impenetrable vortices that dispersing larvae cannot breach?
Despite their isolation, seamounts may play a vital role in the evolutionary history of seafloor life. Standing high above catastrophic seafloor events, such as mass extinctions, they might have offered critical refuges for vent fauna. Or they may have provided fortuitous evolutionary stepping-stones between mid-ocean ridge vent sites.
Into this complex equation, scientists have added new variables by discovering other deep-sea habitats that foster chemosynthetic life.
In shallower seafloor regions on continental margins, for example, naturally created methane and hydrogen sulfide seep from the seafloor. These so-called “cold seeps” support chemosynthetic ecosystems (including tubeworms, mussels, and shrimp) that are different but analogous to vents.
Genetic studies have shown that tubeworms at seeps and vents are not the same specie, but the two habitats do share 13 species. Over evolutionary history, did species migrate back and forth between seeps and vents?
Fossil records show that ancestors of vent tubeworms, barnacles, and limpets are as old as the dinosaurs. Several mass extinctions, like the one that annihilated the dinosaurs, have occurred in the deep sea. Could seeps or vents act as deep-sea refuges, where colonies of animals survived catastrophes and subsequently reseeded populations?
In 1987, Craig Smith of the University of Hawaii and colleagues found a thriving, diverse animal community on a whale carcass that had fallen to the ocean bottom. Microbes decomposing the whale’s soft tissue and bone lipids produced hydrogen sulfide nutrients similar to those that sustain vent communities. To date, more than 20 whale-fall ecosystems have been found. They share 10 species with vents and 19 with seeps.
Similarly, wood—from trees discharged into the coastal ocean by rivers and mudslides, or from shipwrecks in more far-flung areas—also provides chemical nutrients from decaying organic matter to support chemosynthetic animals.
Like seamounts and cold seeps, whale and wood falls likely play important evolutionary roles. Whale falls along migratory routes, and trees deposited near river mouths, may serve as stepping-stones to help disperse seafloor fauna. Shipwrecks may have introduced less natural, more recent seafloor stepping-stones.
Recent evidence indicates that wooden shipwrecks began earlier than suspected in history, were not confined to coastal areas, and occurred more frequently than previously believed. Between 1971 and 1990 alone, an estimated 3,000 wooden ships were wrecked.
To this expansive list of possibilities, we can also add biological factors into the evolutionary process. For starters, the proliferation of certain animals in certain locations is probably encouraged or discouraged by subtle differences in seafloor rocks, the chemistry of vent fluids, or other unknown factors.
Tubeworms may have an advantage over shrimp at fast-spreading Pacific mid-ocean ridges where eruptions occur more frequently than they do in the Atlantic. Eruptions destroy vent populations. Animals stand a far greater chance of avoiding extinction caused by frequent eruptions if they have evolved with the abilities to colonize sites, mature, and reproduce quickly. On the other hand, as these sites mature or become more stable, other animals may seize the advantage and overwhelm the original colonists.
According to one theory, the newly forming Atlantic Ocean—small, shallow and more susceptible to evaporation—was more saline. Shrimp may be more salt-tolerant and may have settled first at nascent Atlantic vent sites. Once they took hold, species such as tubeworms could never attain a foothold. Shrimp assiduously scrape the surfaces of vent chimneys to harvest bacteria and, the theory continues, they would have consumed any tubeworm larvae that happened to settle long before the worms could mature.
Plate tectonics may have played an evolutionary role in another way—by opening and closing passages between oceans. As Pangaea began to break up 200 million years ago, and North America and Europe separated from Africa, the ancient Tethys Ocean formed between them. It was the precursor of the Mediterranean Sea, and it allowed a free flow of waters from the proto-Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean.
Perhaps this bygone oceanic route links Atlantic and Indian Ocean shrimp populations, which are diminished at shallow Atlantic vents (800-1,700 meters/2,625-5,577 feet), more abundant at deeper Indian vents (2,400 meters/7,874 feet), and swarming by the hundreds of thousands at even deeper Atlantic vents (2,500-3,650 meters/8,202-11,975 feet). The shrimp’s predilection for greater depths may have allowed their larvae to disperse via deep currents from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean—an avenue unavailable to other species—rather than via a route along the mid-ocean ridge, through the South Atlantic and around the Horn of Africa.
Perhaps the explanation for distinct North Atlantic fauna—with its swarming shrimp and no tubeworms—involves other ocean gateways. The North Atlantic Ocean basin began to form about 180 million years ago, but South America and Africa remained connected until about 110 million years ago. That means that North Atlantic populations were isolated from the South Atlantic for some 70 million years. Further, the Drake Passage between Antarctica and the tip of South America, a crucial oceanic gateway connecting the Pacific and Atlantic, did not open until about 21 million years ago.
Genetic comparisons of shrimp populations throughout these oceans will allow us to reconstruct the pathways of shrimp migration over evolutionary history and answer these questions.
A similar combination of geological and oceanographic factors may also explain the Logatchev vent site. Discovered in 1994, it is the only Atlantic vent site where clams are known to exist. Logatchev, the southernmost known vent site in the Atlantic, is located just east of the Caribbean Sea.
Did clams originally migrate from the Pacific via an ancient seaway that connected the Pacific and Atlantic—before the Isthmus of Panama rose about 5 million years ago to block it? Or did clam populations from western Pacific vents migrate around South America until they were impeded south of Logatchev by ocean currents or seafloor topography? Or perhaps clams thrive in other Atlantic vents that we haven’t discovered yet.
Complex processes create the patterns of vent populations we have seen. But we can’t truly begin to assemble this evolutionary puzzle without having all the pieces. Major regions of the seafloor remain unexplored.
We have not yet located vent sites in the South Atlantic, for example. The puzzle pieces we do have indicate a disconnection between fauna in the North Atlantic and on other mid-ocean ridges.
The most intriguing explanation may involve the Romanche and Chain Fracture Zones located near the equator, which are particularly huge—thousands of kilometers wide and tens of kilometers deep. A strong, deep current flows along and through these fracture zones, almost straight across the South Atlantic—at 1 million cubic meters per second. We think that the combination of these currents and fracture zones may act as physical barriers blocking the transport of vent fauna between the North and South Atlantic—a subsea equivalent of a Berlin Wall.
To assess the critical factors that redirected evolutionary pathways, the first step is to actually locate and sample what’s living in key places for making evolutionary comparisons. Is South Atlantic vent fauna similar to that in the North Atlantic or Pacific? We will find out during an expedition in 2005, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Ocean Exploration program, to search for vents in the South Atlantic.
Proposed expeditions aim to add more missing pieces in the largely unexplored Southern Hemisphere. In 2006, we hope to explore the seafloor off New Zealand, which offers a natural laboratory to explore relationships among the full spectrum of habitats supporting seafloor life (vents, seeps, whale falls, and shipwrecks) that exist in close proximity there.
Expeditions proposed for 2006 to the Chile Rise offer a similar opportunity to examine—all in one region—a diversity of chemosynthetic communities, along with a wide range of plate tectonic processes, from mid-ocean ridge spreading to an oceanic plate being subducted back into the mantle. It also includes a triple juncture of mid-ocean ridges, where vent populations may converge or diverge.
In 2006, NOAA’s Ocean Exploration program will fund expeditions to search for vents near Antarctica, on the East Scotia Rise and in the Bransfield Strait, which is strategically located at a narrow, but critical juncture linking the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The powerful Antarctic Circumpolar Current, rushing easterly through the Drake Passage, may prove to be a magic carpet dispersing Pacific vent larvae to the Atlantic, a wall of water preventing the westward flow of Atlantic larvae, or a bottleneck choking flow in both directions.
The region also has a large whale population, giving us opportunities to explore whale falls. And the tempestuous Drake Passage and Southern Ocean ice have populated the seafloor with wood falls from shipwrecks that we will search for—including Sir Ernest Shackleton’s famous ship Endurance.
There is another icy, unexplored ocean that we are eager to explore—the Arctic Ocean. In 2001, the spectacularly successful maiden voyage of the U.S. icebreaker Healy found evidence from water samples and seafloor rocks of far more volcanism and hydrothermal venting than was predicted on the ultra-slow-spreading Gakkel Ridge in the Arctic Ocean.
Are Arctic vent species similar to those in the Atlantic, the Pacific, or to neither? Our current knowledge suggests that the Arctic Ocean has never maintained deep-water connections with neighboring oceans. We theorize that Arctic fauna has evolved in isolation—producing fundamentally different kinds of species. Perhaps species dwelling on the remote Gakkel Ridge are “living fossils”—relicts of ancient species that continue to thrive today just as they have for tens of millions of years.
In 2007, we will return to the Gakkel Ridge on an expedition funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets (ASTEP) program. To explore beneath the ice, we will employ new autonomous underwater vehicles built at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, including SeaBED, PUMA, and JAGUAR.
WHOI is also designing and building a cutting-edge Hybrid Remotely Operated Vehicle (HROV) called Nereus, which will be able to operate at depths up to 11,000 meters (36,000 feet) in two modes: as an autonomous, or free-swimming, vehicle for wide area surveys, and as a tethered, or cabled, vehicle for close-up sampling and other tasks.
When Nereus is ready, we plan to take it on a cruise funded by the National Science Foundation to the Challenger Deep, a trench off the Marianas Islands in the western Pacific that is 10,923 meters (35,838 feet) deep—deeper than Mount Everest is tall. In a place where the pressure reaches 16,000 pounds per square inch, we will find out if these extreme conditions have spawned uniquely adapted life forms on the seafloor.
An Antarctic cruise in 2006 will search for the wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated ship Endurance and test the theory that wooden wrecks play an important role in sustaining and dispersing seafloor populations.
Exploring the deep The oceans average two miles in depth and in some places plunge almost seven miles - deeper than Mount Everest is high. Researchers at WHOI are developing a new underwater robot to explore these depths. Until now, these places have been beyond the reach of conventional technology. | 2019-04-20T03:21:21Z | https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/the-evolutionary-puzzle-of-seafloor-life/?id=2505 |
The bathroom is one of the most used rooms in the home, and one of the most important. You can do without a bedroom or a living room, for example, but you can’t do without a bathroom. Houses generally have one or two bathrooms built already, depending on how big it is, but when you want to add one more, it can be expensive, especially if there are no preexisting pipes in the room. The need to purchase pipes and install them can skyrocket the cost of building a bathroom, something which you may not want to spend on.
If you need another bathroom in your house, but there are no existing pipes in the room where you want the bathroom to be, consider macerating toilets (also known as Upflush toilets). Macerating toilets grind or blend human waste into a slurry, and then move it into a stack by pumping.
Although these type of toilets have been around for a while, they are still relatively unknown. This kind of toilet is used when you want your bathroom in an unusual location (one without pipes, for example) or where a conventional toilet won’t work. They are also suitable for basements and other places below the sewer line.
If you are looking for such a toilet, we came up with a review of the 5 best macerating toilets in the market today. Hopefully, this can help you decide which upflush toilet you can get for your bathroom.
The Liberty Pumps ASCENT II-ESW Macerating toilet is a toilet that gives your bathroom a stylish and modern look. This toilet only uses 1.28 GPF (gallons of water per flush) and is certified by EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) WaterSense, making it an excellent water-saving option.
The included lightweight, elongated seat makes using the toilet comfortable. The installation process is quite easy too, as you do not have to break the floor to install any pipe. The toilet boasts a RazorCut technology that grinds the waste into bits in no time at all. This toilet uses 1.9-volt batteries to function and the batteries last about 4 hours.
One major drawback of using this toilet is the fact that it makes a lot of noise when in use, which some users have found disturbing. Apart from this, the toilet does well in most upflush toilet reviews.
The toilet is water efficient.
The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act)-compliant seat height makes it very comfortable to use.
It uses a RazorCut technology that makes it an efficient upflush toilet.
The toilet is pretty straightforward to install.
The toilet can be noisy when in use.
Some users have complained about the electrical probes misbehaving.
The Liberty Pumps ASCENT II-ESW Macerating toilet features a service panel that can be easily removed, so you can access the cutter area without removing the plumbing. This helps to make repairs easy to do. It uses an advanced RazorCut technology that breaks down the waste quickly and efficiently. This is what makes the toilet feature in most macerating toilet reviews.
Saniflo is one of the top brands in the toilet market, and the Saniflo SaniPLUS Macerating toilet is one of their most popular products. The toilet has a modern design that gives your bathroom a classy look.
Using this toilet offers you an opportunity to save water as it only uses 1.6 GPF. One of the advantages of using the toilet is that it is packaged with the bowl, tank, and pump, so you do not have to get the different components separately.
This water-saving toilet has stainless steel macerating blades that efficiently break down solid waste. Its toilet is pretty quiet, too, which is a significant advantage when you consider that most upflush toilets are noisy.
It is a bit on the pricey side, though, and the standard bowl means it takes more space than an elongated bowl would. If you can look past this, you would learn that the Saniflo SaniPLUS Macerating toilet is indeed one of the best in the market.
The sleek design adds to the aesthetics of your bathroom.
This toilet helps save water, as it uses only 1.6 GPF.
The stainless steel macerating blades efficiently break down waste.
The toilet is very quiet.
The toilet weighs 99.7 lbs, making it lighter than most other toilets.
The toilet is a bit on the pricey side.
The toilet takes a reasonable amount of space because of its standard bowl.
The Saniflo SaniPLUS Macerating toilet uses a 10-PSI pump that can pump the waste vertically to about 12 feet and horizontally to about 150 feet. Therefore, you can use the toilet 150 feet away from the soil stack. It is very quiet, so you do not have to worry about the toilet disturbing other people when you use it at night.
If you are looking for a macerating toilet that you can use anywhere and install without breaking a sweat, consider the Thetford Bathroom Anywhere Macerating Toilet. The toilet is sold as a complete kit, so the components are already included in the package. The elongated seat comes at a comfortable ADA-compliant height, making it one of the most comfortable upflush toilets in the market today.
This toilet also comes with a slow close seat, so you do not have to worry about the seat slamming shut after use. Apart from saving water, the toilet also helps save cost, as you do not have to buy batteries for the toilet to function. The macerator can pump vertically to a height of 18 feet and horizontally to about 150 feet. You can then make use of the toilet at a distance of 150 feet from the soil stack.
The toilet has a straightforward installation process.
The seat height is ADA-compliant, which means it is suitable and comfortable for most adults.
The slow close seat puts an end to seat slamming experience.
Batteries are not needed for the toilet to function.
The toilet comes with some safety features like circuit and overheats protection.
Some users have issues with the complete evacuation of the bowl.
Some users have complained of the stainless straps used for installation being too small.
The Thetford Bathroom Anywhere toilet takes safety very seriously, as it has a built-in circuit and overheats protection. These features make it popular among users and have earned it glowing ratings on macerating toilet reviews. The anti-siphon backflow protection feature of this toilet prevents water from flowing in the opposite direction.
If you do not have access to high-pressure water, another Saniflo product, the Saniflo SaniBEST Macerating toilet would be good for you. It has an elongated bowl that makes using it very comfortable. The toilet uses 1.6 GPF, making it an efficient water saver. One of the most significant selling points of this toilet is the ease of installation. With just four simple connections, the installation process is complete.
The Saniflo SaniBEST Macerating toilet refills the tank and flushes quietly, making it a favorite among users. The package includes a pump, a tank, and a bowl, so you do not have to get any of the components separately. The toilet can be used in small bathrooms, as the elongated bowl does not take a lot of space. The toilet is a bit pricey, but if you can afford it, you will see it’s worth the price.
The porcelain material makes the toilet remain hygienic and clean for a longer time.
The toilet flushes and refills quietly.
The 1.6 GPF makes it an impressive water-saving toilet choice.
The installation process is straightforward.
It has an elongated bowl, making it a comfortable toilet.
It comes packaged with the bowl, tank, and pump, so you do not have to spend extra time and money getting the individual components.
The toilet is a bit pricey.
Some users have complained about the toilet clogging.
After installation, the toilet is not easy to take apart, making repairs a little tedious.
The Saniflo SaniBEST Upflush Toilet has a quiet flushing and refilling system, so you do not have to worry about it disturbing other people’s sleep when you use it at night. It has macerator blades that rotate at about 3600 RPM (revolutions per minute). This helps reduce the waste to a slurry quickly and efficiently.
Another quality product from a well-known manufacturer, the Saniflo Saniaccess 2 toilet is another impressive upflush toilet that deserves to be mentioned in the macerating toilets. It comes with a pump that helps pull the water up easily, which makes it suitable for bathrooms with low-pressure water supply. The toilet has a round-shaped bowl, making it suitable for small spaces.
If you want to save on your water bills, the Saniflo Saniaccess 2 Upflush Macerating Toilet is a decent choice as it uses only 1.28 GPF.
The installation process is pretty straightforward, as you do not have to break the floor to install the toilet. Although it is small, the toilet does not compromise on seating space and comfort. One of its major selling points is its cost. This toilet is one of the most affordable upflush toilets in the market.
This toilet is easy to install and use.
The round bowl makes it suitable for use in small bathrooms.
It is a comfortable toilet to use.
This toilet comes at a pretty affordable price.
The toilet is an impressive water-saving choice, using only 1.28 GPF.
Being a toilet, it is an impressive choice for bathrooms with low water pressure.
Some users have complained about waste sometimes sticking to the bowl.
Some users have issues with connecting the toilet with the vent pipe during installation.
The Saniflo Saniaccess 2 Upflush Macerating Toilet has a round-shaped bowl. This means that the toilet can be used in any bathroom and is especially suitable for those with small spaces. It does not use batteries to perform its functions, which cuts down on your expenses.
There are many types of toilets on the market today, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. These toilets are not as popular as the conventional, gravity-fed toilets, so most people do not know what they are and what they offer. You are probably wondering what this toilet is and how it works, so let’s answer the question that usually comes to mind first.
What is a macerating toilet?
Macerating toilets or upflush toilets are quite different from conventional toilets because they flush waste upward. (Yes, upward!) This fact attracts a lot of interest from potential users because it contradicts what most people are used to. After you pass out waste, the waste is ground and pumped through a PVC pipe, which is connected to the sewer line.
Traditional toilets take advantage of the force of gravity to flush waste. Since they stand above the sewer line, gravity takes the waist down. This does not apply to upflush toilets because they are mostly used in places below the sewer line, so gravity cannot help in flushing the waste.
The grinding and pumping process occurs each time you flush the toilet, so you do not have to worry about waste sitting in the pump unit or macerator. Therefore, the toilet stays clean and does not require frequent cleaning.
Just like any other big decision, especially one that concerns your long-term comfort, you need to ensure that you get the best product possible when choosing a macerating toilet. There are things you have to take into consideration before making your choice so that you get the perfect fit for your bathroom. Here are some factors to keep in mind.
The macerating pump is one of the most critical components of an upflush toilet, so it is crucial that you get one that is both durable and effective. Choosing a good macerating pump involves you studying the specifications of the toilet.
Ensure that you check the horsepower, amperage, voltage, and any other relevant spec before committing to a toilet. These features are good indications of how reliable a pump is, so they are essential. Also, take note that stainless steel macerator blades are more durable and efficient than other kinds of blades.
You have probably seen this one on other toilet reviews, and it is easy to understand why. The amount of water used by a toilet will have an impact on the cost of your yearly water bill. It makes sense to go for an option that will help you save a reasonable amount of money (as well as help save water), to ensure that the toilet you choose is a water-saving one.
Most toilets use GPF (gallons per flush) to indicate the volume of water used, so all you have to do is check the GPF for the toilet you want to buy. Obviously, the lower the number, the better. Another smart way to get a water saving toilet is to check if the toilet is EPA WaterSense certified. Toilets with this certification are generally better water saving options than those that do not have this certification.
The shape of the toilet bowl affects the amount of space the toilet would occupy. Therefore, if you need a macerating toilet for a small bathroom, go for one with a round bowl. Toilets with round bowls generally occupy less space than those with standard bowls. On the flip side, elongated bowls have more space for seating, so they are more comfortable to use than the round bowls. The important thing is to get the right balance between saving space and comfort.
The height of the bowl also affects the comfort you experience from using the toilet. Make sure then that you get a toilet with a standard seat height, to guarantee a long-term comfortable bathroom visit.
The macerator pumps usually house a motor that drives the blades. The motor is essential because, without it, the toilet will not function. For the motor to operate smoothly, it is imperative that it be sealed entirely in oil. This helps you prolong the lifespan of the motor, so you do not have to spend unnecessarily on replacing it.
Macerating toilets can be used below the sewer line, which is why they have the property of flushing upwards. It is vital that you know the maximum depth below the sewer line you can use the toilet. This knowledge will help you during installation because if you install the toilet lower than the specified depth, it will not function correctly.
It is natural for macerating toilets to attract many questions, especially when you consider the fact that they are uncommon. Some of the questions that come up in discussions among users and potential users include the following.
Q: What are the advantages of using upflush toilets?
You can install a macerating toilet anywhere. This flexibility is probably their most significant advantage, as you can use them in both standard bathrooms where traditional toilets can be installed, as well as in places where conventional toilets cannot be used.
They are reasonably cheaper than standard toilets, so using this toilet saves you money without sacrificing the functionality and comfort you expect from a good toilet.
These toilets are generally easier to install than traditional toilets. You do not have to call a plumber to help with the installation, so you can save money on that aspect as well.
Using a upflush toilet is not very different from using a traditional toilet. The size, design, water usage, and comfort are similar to what you get with conventional toilets, so you will not notice the difference.
Q: How do I install a macerating toilet?
Connect the spigot of the discharge toilet, which is located horizontally to the macerator or pump.
Connect the tank of the upflush toilet to the water supply.
Connect the small discharge pipes.
Finally, connect the macerator to the power supply.
The above steps are indications of how easy it is to install this toilet. The ease of installing the upflush toilet is, in fact, one of its major selling points.
Q: How do I clean my upflush toilet?
Before you start, ensure that the power is off. The macerator usually contains a switch that can be used to shut it off.
Mix about 2 to 3 cups of toilet bowl cleaner and pour it down the toilet. Make sure that the cleaner is nonacidic. Leave this for about 2 to 3 hours before rinsing it off with water.
Switch the macerator back on. The bowl cleaner and unwanted particles then drain through the plumbing. This way, the toilet bowl cleaner will also clean the plumbing.
Macerating toilets are gaining popularity among homeowners because of their affordability, ease of installation, and flexibility. The most significant advantage of using these toilets is the fact that you can use them anywhere in the house including places without proper pipes for traditional toilets.
Unlike what some people think, you do not have to sacrifice comfort when using this toilet as they also come in different shapes and sizes that offer different comfort levels. All you have to do is get the right macerating toilet for you.
Buying a macerating toilet is similar to buying a traditional toilet. You have to consider the water saving ability, ease of installation, and comfort. The only difference is the macerator that should also be on your list of considerations.
All the upflush toilets reviewed here have their strengths and weaknesses, so it is up to you to decide which one is best for your needs. Take note that the upflush toilets we have mentioned are some of the best macerating toilets in the market right now, so you can’t go wrong no matter which one you pick. | 2019-04-22T13:18:25Z | https://twimbow.com/macerating-toilet-reviews/ |
These themes were explored in four papers presented on a Friday afternoon. Here Katrien Pype presented a recent chapter on ”Smartness from Below” calling for a closer attention to local vernaculars about technology and ”being smart” - and their relation to fantasies of development and ”smart cities”- in Kinshasa.
These considerations neatly set the stage for the other papers in the panel; on repair and maintenance of electricity meters in Maputo, by Idalina Baptista, urban finances and mobile money in Eastern African cities, by Daivi Rodima-Taylor and William Grimes, and the politics and contestation of sanitation infrastructure in South African former townships by Steven Robins and Peter Redfield.
In a panel on women’s roles in negotiating health and healing in Africa, Nanna Schneidermann presented a paper on ”technologies of motherhood” based on recent fieldwork in Cape Town.
Overall the papers engendered discussions about the need for more “use-centric” studies and approaches to technology in Africa cities, and how these in turn might refine the concept of technology itself, as it is placed both in histories and in specific contexts of use.
On May 9 2017, Katrien Pype presented preliminary analysis of her research on CB radio communications in Kinshasa. The presentation was part of the seminar series of the (Belgian) Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences.
Mobile phone technology constitutes only one, and a fairly recent, platform for connectivity with “elsewheres”. I focus here on radio phonie communication, a technology commonly known as citizen broad band radio, that has ensured long-distance dyadic communication in DR Congo since colonial times, and doubles as a money transfer agency. Recently, this outmoded communication platform has known an upsurge in Kinshasa in order to enable connectivity with regions in the former Bandundu and Equatorial Provinces, areas without cellular coverage. First, I examine phonie connectivity, and especially the affective dimensions of this long-distance interaction and link this tot the position of Kinois as “city-dwellers” trying to cope on the one hand with the socio-economic predicaments of life in an African metropole, and with claims –interpellations- made by relatives or intimate Others residing in the hinterland. Second, I highlight a material dimension to Kinois’ connectedness in order to acknowledge the role of technology in the shaping of modern sociality. Finally, I argue that the publicness of phonie talk – usually acted out in front of other phonie clients and the phonie operator, who contribute to the conversations – offers techniques for living with the interference from the urban into the rural and vice versa. By exploring “interference” as a technical and a social experience that people – not just in Kinshasa, but anywhere, where long-distance connectivity is lived – actively manage, the paper highlights the affective dissonances associated with the reduction of spatial distance through modern communication technologies, and thus brings nuance to the narratives of hope and anticipation, especially expectations for economic and material betterment, accompanying innovation in communication and the trope of global connectedness.
The material thus offers an interesting perspective on the co-habitation of so-called "old" and "new media"; while also bringing to the fore the longue duree of electronically mediated translocal connectivities.
Katrien is currently transforming the presentation into an academic article to be submitted to the journal of the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences.
The chapter is an attempt to call for more attention to the cohabitation of techne experts in African societies. In this way, I propose an alternative interpretation of "the smart city". There is considerable attention to the continuation of the social positioning of healers, blacksmiths, media practitioners and engineer students.
In addition, I explore the linguistic closeness of various forms of knowledge in the urban sphere and the handling of tools.
The endeavor of the whole book is to propose an Africa-centered understanding of technological innovation, going beyond the familiar tropes of appropriation and creativity. The book is the outcome of a workshop at MIT held in October 2014.
Pype, K. 2017. "Smartness from Below. Variations on Technology and Creativity in Contemporary Kinshasa." In: Mavhunga, C.C. (ed.), What do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? Cambridge: MIT Press. Chapter 5: 97-115.
Shari Thanjan holds a BA Hons in anthropology from UCT and is a specialist in maternal and child health interventions. For the past six months she has been working as a field assistant with the MediAfrica project.
A cellphone always becomes some sort of a fictional companion in your life. It’s so easy to grow attached to material things, holding you to all your networks and traits of your personality. Your phone becomes a friend in times of need. This piece is about a heartbreaking journey between me, my phone and I. And it leads me to reflect on the research we have been doing on mobile phones and motherhood in Cape Town.
The whole debacle started when I took it to a music festival a few months back. Music festivals are always a risk for all your belongings. You can always lose your most important valuable items, which usually include a bankcard, your favourite items of clothing and of course, your cellphone. On event pages on Facebook, there are always posts of people looking for missing items after the party. Being a “joller” (in South African terms a person who goes out dancing a lot), I have mastered the art of not losing my most important belongings despite partying hard. So, off I go to a music festival with my “I’m a responsible joller who doesn’t lose her things attitude”. Putting my phone in a safe place, keeping my bags closed tightly and always on my back to avoid losing my phone. Coming home on the Friday night, I was extremely chuffed with myself for not losing anything. The next morning I went for a breakfast with my friend, happy as a hummingbird. This happiness was cut short, as my phone suddenly fell on the ground whilst getting out of the car to come home. In shock I quickly picked it up to check if the screen cracked. A sigh of relief, not one crack! Then, as I turned it on, the screen remained blank, black, dead. I immediately started thinking of things I could do to fix it, thinking maybe I could put it on the charger and then it will come back to life. My mind started racing with all sorts of silly ideas. I felt so stupid, as all my “responsible” actions, the night before, putting my phone in a safe place, keeping my bags closed tightly and always on my back to avoid losing my phone, were apparently for nothing. So, there I was in an ironic situation, annoyed with myself and the universe.
Firstly, and most importantly,the phone held the ties to my boyfriends. My one boyfriend, who is sort of an ex but still a friend ( its complicated) asked me to behave while I was at the music festival and report to him, where I was and how I was doing, as he needed to know(apparently) that I was safe. Then, a boy I had been crushing on for years, was at the festival and I had drunk-texted him at three am confessing my dear feelings and was still awaiting his response that Saturday morning, but alas, my dear phone broke .Until today, I don’t know what his reply was! I always wonder if a potential and blossoming romance was cut short, by my broken phone. Obviously, it was not meant to be, but a girl can dream sometimes.
Secondly, my broken relationship with my phone affected my friendships. Of course at a festival in a city where you have many friends, you want to meet with them for pre-festival fun. Now I could not contact any of my buddies, getting some disappointed moans from friends when I saw them later that evening.
Further, without my phone I worried about my safety, potentially getting lost, and not having the ability to contact my people, or uber home. So my whole social circle and interactions, which are particularly important in the light of a music festival weekend, was all lost within that moment of my phone breaking.
Part of going for a good party these days is capturing all of the music, videos, pictures, the venue and gorgeous selfies on your cellphone. Just for keeps or to share on Instagram, WhatsApp or Facebook, to show the world what a marvellous time you had . I worked hard on the Friday night taking as many cute selfies and beautiful pictures as I could, only to have it all lost. It tried to borrow my friends phone, which is difficult as their cameras work differently and sometimes their memory gets full and stuff. Eee, I guess one should just live in the moment, right? Well, now I didn’t have a choice!
Without my phone my personal life seemed to be in shambles. But worse, my job as a research assistant was set back. All of my research participants contact details were saved on my phone as well, and now I wondered how to even get in touch with them. Believe me, some of them were hard to come by. And what about doing interviews? All my recordings of interviews were done on my phone. We had also collected something we called media diaries from participants, which is a documentary of their everyday lives recorded on their phones. Though we had wisely made backups, I could not view this material on my phone any longer. How could I do my work with no phone?
It was so heart breaking. I was so upset and there and then, with my broken phone. A material object I owned had the ability to break my heart. There wasn’t much sentiment attached to my phone as an artefact, but more emotion attached to the services it could provide me with- ranging from the camera to the social ties and work - it was all gone.
Yet, in the midst of all this agony there was a light. Through doing many interviews in poverty stricken areas in Cape Town, I soon came to realize that my agony was shallow, and honestly quite silly and I should not have been so upset. Many of the mothers we spoke to did not have smartphones, or even phones. Their reason for this was its unaffordability as the prices of data in South Africa are unaffordable to most, but also more disconcerting was: Some were afraid to be robbed, if they had a (nice) phone, and some did not have a phone because it had already been stolen. While I fret and worry about Facebook posts, many people had access to Facebook as part of a data saving network plan, whereby one couldn’t see pictures and videos, only writing. Many of our research participants hardly went on social networks. Some avoided it purposefully, to avoid all the social drama attached to networks.
The moms we worked with who did have a phone often bought a WhatsApp bundle for R12.50, which lasted them the whole month, and did not include downloading of pictures and videos. Many survived with just this as their main form of communication with partners, family and friends. While sitting in the clinics, trying to get moms to register on MomConnect, many of the moms were not even interested in their phones, or had any idea how to use it. This happened with moms of all ages. I had to assist most people I met with the whole procedure.
My time in the field and comparison with my own phone really made me realize, that even though statistic screams that South Africa has 100% mobile penetration, it is not even so. South Africa is a majority poor country. Yet, although there are many mobile interventions deriving from policy, pushed into South African programmes, it seems that end user was not considered, basically, the people of South Africa. In almost every interview I did, or people I met throughout fieldwork could not afford the phones imagined for the mobile interventions.
Going back to my drama, my fieldwork really showed me that a phone is not everything, and one can actually live a happy content life without it. The participants in the research showed me this, and helped me, well, get over my self and my phone.
I think leaving the field is one of the worst parts of being an anthropologist for a living. Life as I have come to know it in the field collides with life as I used to know it at home. It is one of the big steps of data processing; transforming the lived life, shared concerns and thoughts, experiences, aesthetics and skills learned during the fieldwork from “stuff that is going on in my life” into “data”; the object of analysis and writing academic texts and the like. Suddenly everything, both “here” and “there,” is strange and awkward.
The boundaries between the field and home are in anthropology increasingly permeable, but maybe that just intensifies the movements as different modes of engagement with the world.
Me and the awesome assistant Shari felt this in full a few weeks ago, as we finished up and said goodbye to friends at Hanover Park MOU and at the courts we had been hanging out at, and then drove straight to University of Cape Town for me to present at the research seminar of the Department for Anthropology. We were late, and I was nervous and had bad stage fright.
Luckily the theme was Permeable Boundaries, and I was presenting with my buddy Rogers Tabe Egbe Orock from Wits University. We talked about the concept of “BIGNESS” and power in our fieldworks in Cameroon and Uganda, and in African anthropology more generally. But we also talked about our shared background as PhD students in Århus and the pathways of being a young(ish) scholar. The questions from students and colleagues led to important discussion about stereotypes in African politics and the materiality of fame and power.
Letting the calmness and openness of hanging out at Hanover Park seep into the seminar room for me brought a gentleness and humor to a genre, the staff seminar, that us usually either dreary or scary.
The seminar also marked the end of my time at UCT as a visiting fellow, and I left Cape Town grateful for the wisdom, tough questions, and generous help and friendship from colleagues at Anthropology and the First Thousand Days research group.
In development policy and public discourse mHealth is at times seen as the Promised Land. Something that potentially can cut at least 25% off health expenditure and improve health systems and the delivery of services to citizens. So what does the Promised Land look like from the point of view of those bringing it about?
This South African summer and fall I’m spending some time broadening my horizons and experimenting with interdisciplinarity.
On December the 14th 2016, from 6 PM Morten Jerven, Economist and Professor in Development Studies at NMBU (Norway) and Grieve Chelwa, Economist and Post Doctor at Center for African Studies, Harvard University will meet to discuss economists (mis)understanding of Africa's economic development and what is acutally happening on the continent.
The seminar is open and hosted by Norwegian Concil for Africa and takes place in Kulturhuset, Youngstorget 3, 0181 Oslo.
I’m back in Kampala. I have been away for five years, and return now, to see people who have been my family and friends. I am of course worried; will they remember me? I better not impinge on their lives, just politely pass by. The city, however, has other plans.
The Center for African Studies Workshop, taking place in Robinson Hall on campus and headed by Jean and John Comaroff, is a weekly event in which various scholars present work that in some way is related to Africa. This is an initiative that the Comaroffs brought with them from the University of Chicago to Harvard. It has become a hub of the Africanist melieu at Harvard, gathering both students, staff at the univerity as well as interested outsiders and visitors. In addition, the seminar is incorporated into undergraduate and graduate teaching at Department of African and African American Studies ands the papers are thoroughly discussed in classes beforehand.
On the 26th of September 2016 Jo Helle-Valle gave a presentation, based on fieldwork over a quarter of a century in Botswana, titled "Seduced by Seduction - being a man in Botswana". (Read the abstract here.) The full paper was disseminated a week before to all members of the workshop. The workshop opened with the author presenting the paper's main argument and situating it within a wider academic landscape. Then dr. Lorena Rozzi, from Department of History at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and a visiting scholar to Harvard, served as discussant before the floor was open for all.
Valuable comments will be incorporated into the reworking of the manuscript.
Digital technology is transforming the way in which elections are held globally, including on the African continent. With young voters comprising a substantial part of the electorate, political campaigning is increasingly shifting online. As LSE’s Wendy Willems argues in the second article of a series about the role of digital technology and social media in Zambia’s recent elections, political parties tapped into digital youth culture in a number of interesting ways.
ICA Africa 2016: Communication, Theory, Africa.
Two of the researchers in the MediAfrica project presented at the recent ICA Africa conference in Nairobi.
Do mobile phones set citizens free?
In postcolonial Kinshasa, citizens use mobile phones (and smartphones) are as tools to deceive the state but also to expose fraud. The Congolese government is also strongly aware of the revolutionary capacities of new media. In 2011, text messages were blocked; and in January 2015, the government shut the Internet for a few weeks, gradually opening up Internet while blocking social media platforms such as Whatsapp, Facebook, Viber and Skype.
It is clear that political change on the continent is not only documented by citizens filming and photographing protest and abuse, but these also feed into the ways in which citizens and the state interact. One should however always be careful to situate these mass-mediated interactions within complex postcolonial histories of governance and political communication.
Kinshasa's elderly people dance in TV music shows to counter the negative stereotypes of "African elders"
Fieldwork on media participation among Kinshasa's elderly people has shown that they are not that invisible in the city's popular culture. Rather, TV dance shows in which elderly Kinois (inhabitants of Kinshasa) perform cha cha cha, bolero and rumba (among others) and in which they speak about the earliest days of Kinshasa's nightlife scene are important platforms through which the elderly communicate with the city at large, and especially with the youth's popular culture.
The study shows that elderly people are not necessarily passive consumers of media content, but actually contribute to TV and radio shows as well.
In this series of three articles, LSE’s Wendy Willems examines the role of digital technology and social media in Zambia’s recent elections. She situates this within the broader context of the African continent where both governments and mobile phone operators face a growing number of economic and political dilemmas in relation to the rise of social media.
The PI of the project, Prof. Jo Helle-Valle, has recently moved to Harvard University as a Visiting Scholar. The affilation will last until August 2017. Apart from working on data analysis of fieldwork material from Botswana, and manuscripts of various kinds, he will also be able to benefit from the exciting and vibrant academic mileu of Department of African and African American Studies at the African Studies Center.
Jean Comaroff, Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies, is affiliated to mediafrica. Her extraordinary competence on Southern Africa, and South Africa in particular, is an invaluable asset for the project.
Arrival at a new field site is for the ethnographer often characterized by an overwhelming amount of practical activities towards answering questions like these: Where am I? Do I live here? How do I protect my body and my equipment (and in the long term my mind) from the weather/wild animals/destruction by ritual sacrifice/theft? Can I sleep safely? Do I need to get around? How do I get around? Who do I talk to? How do I address them? How do I respond without facing sanctions? What is dangerous? What is safe? What is good? | 2019-04-23T06:25:36Z | https://www.mediafrica.no/blog/?offset=1499339915251 |
Picão preto has a long history of use among the indigenous people of the Amazon, and virtually all parts of the plant are used. Generally the whole plant is uprooted and prepared in decoctions or infusions for internal use, and/or crushed into a paste or poultice for external use. In the Peruvian Amazon picão preto is used for aftosa (foot-and-mouth disease), angina, diabetes, menstrual disorders, hepatitis, laryngitis, intestinal worms and for internal and external inflammations. In Piura region of Peru, a decoction of the roots is used for alcoholic hepatitis and worms. The Cuna tribe mixes the crushed leaves with water to treat headaches. Near Pucallpa, Peru, the leaf is balled up and applied to a toothache; the leaves also are used for headaches. In other parts of the Amazon, a decoction of the plant is mixed with lemon juice and used to treat angina, hepatitis, sore throat, and water retention. The Exuma tribe grinds the sun-dried leaves with olive oil to make poultices for sores and lacerations and, in Tonga, an infusion of the flowers is used to treat upset stomach in food poisoning.
In Peruvian herbal medicine picão preto is employed to reduce inflammation, increase urination, and to support and protect the liver. It is commonly used there for hepatitis, conjunctivitis, abscesses, fungal infections, urinary infections, as a weight loss aid, and to stimulate childbirth. In Brazilian herbal medicine it is used for fevers, malaria, hepatitis, diabetes, sore throat, tonsillitis, obstructions in the liver and other liver disorders, urinary infections, and vaginal discharge and infections. An infusion or decoction of the entire plant is often gargled for tonsilitis and pharyngitis. Externally it is used for wounds, fungal infections, ulcers, diaper rash, insect bites, and hemorrhoids. Brazilian herbalists also report using picão preto to normalize insulin and bilirubin levels in the pancreas, liver, and blood. In Mexico the entire plant or leaf is used to treat diabetes, stomach disorders, hemorrhoids, hepatitis, nervous problems, and fever. It is used as a gargle for mouth blisters, and the juice of the plant is used in an external poultice for kidney and liver inflammation.
Picão preto is rich in flavonoids, terpenes, phenylpropanoids, lipids, and benzenoids. Even as early as 1979 and 1980, scientists demonstrated that specific chemicals found in the herb were toxic to bacteria and fungi. Many of the flavonoids in picão preto have been documented with antimalarial activity. In 1991, Swiss scientists isolated several known phytochemicals with antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory properties, which led them to infer that the presence of these compounds "may rationalize the use of this plant in traditional medicine in the treatment of wounds, against inflammation and against bacterial infection of the gastrointestinal tract." New bioactive phytochemicals, discovered in 1996, showed activity against transformed human cell lines.
The plant chemicals in picão preto include: aesculetin, behenic acid, beta-sitosterol, borneol, butanedioic acid, butoxylinoleates, cadinols, caffeine, caffeoylic acids, capric acid, daucosterol, elaidic acid, erythronic acids, friedelans, friedelins, germacrene D, glucopyranoses, glucopyranosides, inositol, isoquercitrin, lauric acid, limonene, linoleic acids, lupeol, luteolin, muurolol, myristic acid, okanin-glucosides, palmitic acid, palmitoleic acid, paracoumaric acids, phenylheptatriynes, phytenoic acid, phytol, pilosola A, polyacetylenes, precocene I, pyranoses, quercetin, sandaracopimaradiols, squalene, stigmasterols, tannic acid, tetrahydroxyaurones, tocopherolquinones, tridecapentaynenes, tridecatetrayndienes, and vanillic acid.
Picão preto has been the subject of recent clinical research that has supported many of its uses in herbal medicine. A research group in Taiwan reported that a picão preto extract was capable of protecting the liver of rats from various introduced toxins known to cause liver injury. This research group had previously demonstrated picão preto's anti-inflammatory actions in animals a year earlier (in 1995). In 1999, a Brazilian research group confirmed the anti-inflammatory activities in mice and attributed them to an immune modulation effect (noting the extract reduced the amount of pro-inflammatory immune cells in human blood in a previous study). In addition, other research demonstrated that a picão preto extract inhibited prostaglandin-synthesis and cyclooxygenase (COX) activities. Both are chemical processes in the body which are linked to inflammatory diseases (and provide the focus for newer "COX-inhibitor" classes of anti-inflammatory and arthritis pharmaceutical drugs).
Other areas of research have validated picão preto's traditional use for ulcers and diabetes. Extracts of the leaf (as well as the entire plant) have clinically shown to protect rats against chemical- and bacteria-induced gastric lesions and ulcers and, also, to reduce gastric acid secretion. The activity noted in these studies was higher than that shown by two prescription anti-ulcer drugs. Other in vivo studies with rats and mice have demonstrated that picão preto has hypoglycemic activity and is able to improve insulin sensitivity which validates its long history in herbal medicine for diabetes. Researchers (in 2000) attributed the plant's hypoglycemic properties to a group of glucoside chemicals found in the aerial parts of the plant. Picão preto was also documented to prevent hypertension in rats fed a high-fructose diet, and to lower the resulting (elevated) blood pressure and triglyceride levels. In hypertensive rats (including high dietary salt-induced hypertension), extracts of the plant significantly lowered blood pressure - without having an effect on heart rate and urine volume.19 A leaf extract was also shown to have smooth-muscle relaxant activity on the heart.
Picão preto has long been used in traditional medicine systems for infections of all kinds: from such upper respiratory tract infections as colds and flu to urinary tract infections and venereal diseases-and even infected wounds on the skin. Research has begun to confirm these uses in several in vitro microbial studies. In 1991, scientists in Egypt first documented picão preto's antimicrobial activity against various pathogens. Other in vitro studies have demonstrated its antibacterial activity against a wide range of bacteria including Klebsiella pneumonia, Bacillus, Neisseria gonorrhea, Pseudomonas, Staphylococcus, and Salmonella. Extracts of the leaf also have been documented to have antimycobacterial activity towards Mycobacterium tuberculosis and M. smegmatis. A water extract of the leaf has shown significant anti-yeast activity towards Candida albicans. Much of picão preto's antimicrobial actions have been attributed to a group of chemicals called polyacetylenes, which includes a chemical called phenylheptatriyne. Phenylheptatriyne has shown strong in vitro activity against numerous human and animal viruses, bacteria, fungi, and molds in very small amounts.
In the tropics, picão preto is also used for snakebite and malaria; research has confirmed these uses as well. Several studies have confirmed the plant's antimalarial activity; it reduced malaria in animals by 43-66 percent, and in vitro by 90%. With regard to its status as a traditional snakebite remedy, one research group confirmed that a picão preto extract could protect mice from lethal injections of neurotoxic snake venom.
The last area of research has focused on picão preto's anticancerous possibilities. Early research, in various in vitro assay systems designed to predict antitumor activity, indicated positive results in the early 1990s. Picão preto first was reported to have antileukemic actions in 1995. Then researchers from Taiwan reported (in 2001) that a simple hot-water extract of picão preto could inhibit the growth of five strains of human and mouse leukemia at less than 200 mcg per ml in vitro. They summarized their research by saying that picão preto ". . . may prove to be a useful medicinal plant for treating leukemia."
Picão preto, one of South America's well-known medicinal plants, is widely used for numerous conditions. Many of its indigenous uses for inflammation, hypertension, ulcers, diabetes and infections of all kinds are being validated and verified by modern research. Unfortunately, little is known of it in herbal medicine practices in the U.S. - and it is not widely available here. In South America, it is considered a safe plant to use; in the various animals studies performed to date, no toxic effects have been reported. Specific toxicology studies have shown no toxicity when dosages of (up to) 1 g per kg of body weight were injected into mice.
Traditional Preparation: In the tropics, generally one cup of a standard decoction 1-3 times daily depending on the condition that is being treated. Two to three ml of a 4:1 tincture twice daily or 2-3 g of powdered herb in tablets, capsules, or stirred into water (or juice) twice daily can be substituted, if desired. See Traditional Herbal Remedies Preparation Methods page if necessary for definitions.
1. Picão preto has evidenced weak uterine stimulant activity in guinea pigs. As such, it should not be used during pregnancy.
2. This plant contains several coumarin derivatives. Coumarins are a group of chemicals that thin the blood. Those on blood thinning medications such as Warfarin® should use picão preto with caution and monitor these possible effects.
3. Picão preto contains a small amount of naturally-occurring caffeine; it should not be used by those who are allergic or sensitive to caffeine.
4. The plant has been documented to lower blood sugar levels in several animal studies. Those with hypoglycemia or diabetes should only use picão preto under the supervision of a qualified health care professional and monitor their blood sugar levels accordingly.
5. Picão preto has been documented with hypotensive activity in several animal studies. People with heart conditions and those taking antihypertensive drugs should consult their doctors prior to using this plant to monitor these possible effects (as medications may need adjustment).
Drug Interactions: None clinically documented in humans; however, the use of this plant may potentiate antidiabetic, anticoagulant, and antihypertensive drugs (based on animal studies).
"Spanish needles (Bidens pilosa). This is a plant that belongs to the same botanical family as feverfew. It is a popular folk medicine in Taiwan for all sorts of illnessnes, from influenza to hepatitis. In one study with laboratory animals, Taiwanese scientists showed that this herb has significant anti-edemic and antiinflammatory activity. More research is needed here, but I'm intrigued, and I'm on the lookout for further reports of its effectiveness.
Decoction mixed with lemon juice for angina, sore throat, water retention, hepatitis, dropsy. In Piura, the root decoction is used for alcoholic hepatitis and worms (FEO). Around Pucallpa, the leaf is balled up and applied to toothache. Leaves also used for headache (VDF). In Brazil it is used as a diuretic and to treat jaundice. Used for aftosa, angina, diabetes, dysentery, dysmenorrhea, edema, hepatitis, jaundice, laryngitis, worms (RAR).
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If you missed Part 1 of this trip report covering my first two days at the Top Forks Hut in Mt. Aspiring National Park in New Zealand, go back and read that first!
Despite the lack of a fire the night before the hut stayed warmer and after a marvelous, slept-like-a-dead-man 8 hours of slumber I awoke to a mixture of cloud and thicker cloud. I hemmed and hawed about getting out to shoot the sunrise when the weather made up my mind for me by sending down sheets of rain. Sunrise hopes dashed I went back to sleep for another 2 hours thanks to the sonorous ambience of raindrops falling on a roof over my head. Around 9:30 am the sound of rotor beats pulled me from my dreams and I got out of bed in time to watch a helicopter disappear up valley the way I had hiked the day before. That was followed shortly by a fixed wing plane and then just a few minutes later by yet another chopper. This one circled a bit before settling down and discharging three Kiwi hunters who planned to set up residence in the hut for the next week during a quest to bag a deer or Chamois. Alas, no longer alone in the hut I decided the best thing to do was be alone somewhere else. So I threw some clothes, food, and camera gear into my pack and bounced out of the hut and onto the track to Rabbit Pass.
The first 100 meters of trail on the way to Rabbit Pass.
Rabbit Pass is a challenging route that connects the south Wilkin River to the east fork of the Matukituki, which means you could have a fun, multi-day trip starting in Top Forks and ending in Wanaka. Trampers familiar with New Zealand will see the appeal. However, I had no such plans since I hadn’t laid out the logistics for such a trip. And arguably more importantly: the DOC staff, the helicopter pilot, the track brochures, the posters on the wall of the hut, and even the little bunnies I saw I said something along this lines of “if it’s raining, we really really strongly suggest and could not recommend more that you do not go over Rabbit Pass because part of the route is sketchy enough when it’s dry; when it’s wet you are tempting death.” And since I’m pretty happy when dying doesn’t enter my daily plans I decided that I would go as far as the sketchy part (known as the Waterfall Face) but no farther.
The trail started out with a moderate climb on a decently-formed track through the gorgeous beech forest. A quick 10-minute jaunt brought me to a break in the forest with wonderful views of the northern fork of the Wilkin. Rain and cloud obscured the tops of the peaks but the grandeur was still obvious.
Low cloud in the north Wilkin River Valley.
From there the track reentered the forest, narrowed down, and climbed up over wet and slippery roots for the next 45 minutes. This is where the track entered the alpine scrub zone and became more fun (or less fun, depending on your point of view). At many points the trail entered stream channels and climbed vertically up them (after all, why waste taxpayer money on building a track if the stream has already done it for you!). When the trail wasn’t coinciding with a creek it was sidling through the bushes, barely wider than a deer path. Just like the day before I had to carefully watch every footfall in order to prevent a slip and slide into the bushes below me. The narrowness of the trail also meant that I was constantly plowing through sodden shrubs and despite wearing my rain gear I was soaked from the knees down.
Appropriate attire for trekking through wet alpine shrubberies.
I may not be as fast a hiker as I was 10 years ago but I am good at maintaining a steady pace, even while climbing steeply. I had the wonderful beats of Lake Street Dive pumping through my headphones and I marched up through the brush for an hour until, suddenly and without much fanfare, the track become horizontal and I entered the Waterfall Flats area. This is a spot where inexplicably the river flows horizontally for a few km before crashing down the narrow ravine I had just climbed up. As a consequence there is a gigantic, flat-bottomed cirque there surrounded by enormous walls and waterfalls.
Waterfall Flats looking north to the outlet of the cirque.
From just past the entrance to the flats I could see the head of the valley about 2 km in the distance. It was a somewhat tedious, yet straightforward, 45-minute bush bash and river crash through the tussock and river to reach the valley terminus. The rain had slackened considerably and I sat down to eat lunch with the sounds of two massive waterfalls (one over 1300 feet high) serenading me. As soon as my bag was off my back though the rain and wind picked up again and I could feel hints of snow in the air. I retreated to the semi-protected shelter of a nearby rock bivvy to down my salami sandwich and pretzel sticks. I also found a strange, worm-like creature in my water bottle so had a bit of extra protein as well.
Lunching, tramping-style. The potentially deadly Waterfall Face route can be seen directly above the left edge of the rock biv in this photo.
With dying not on the menu for the day there was little else to do at this point but head back down to the hut. After the 45-minute pound across the flats I was treated to what was becoming a very rare treat on this excursion: sunlight! The clouds broke open for about 5 minutes and beautiful, warm, golden light streamed through, illuminating the distant peaks and allowing me to pretend it wasn’t as cold out as it was.
A rare moment of blue sky in the Waterfall Flats.
As quickly as the sunlight appeared it vanished, replaced once again by brooding clouds. With little reason to stick around the area I descended the trail with single-minded purposefulness, passing the next 2 hours 30 minutes by having a series of nonsense conversations with myself like what I would do if I had bought a bunch of bitcoin back in 2010. Answer: spend most of the earnings on scenic flights in New Zealand, probably.
I arrived back at the hut with a few hours of daylight left so I thought I’d play around with some underwater photography. I did wade into the river and rattled off a few shots but condensation on the inside of my dome port left the images cloudy and uninteresting. So I disassembled everything back at the hut and left it out to dry completely.
Ever wondered what a glacial river looks like beneath the surface? Wonder no more.
Shortly thereafter the Kiwi hunters returned and with the wood I had laid out to dry they got a good serving of coal ignited and the little stove cranked up the temperature in the hut to comfortable t-shirt levels. We sat around and bullshitted while the hunters attempted to deep fry steaks in a makeshift fryer, and I enjoyed a freeze-dried something or other before crawling into bed and zonking out for the night.
Day 4 kicked off once again with the hopeful goal of photographing at sunrise. When my alarm went off about 45 minutes before sunrise I peeked out through the window of the hut and saw that the sky looked promising. I slipped back into my sleeping bag to squeeze a tiny bit of that sweet early morning snoozing out of life and within five minutes there was a thunderous downpour outside. Sunrise goals crushed I fell back asleep for another hour.
When I woke up for the second time the rain had well and truly stopped and there was, too my great delight, ACTUAL SUNSHINE coming out of the sky and hitting the mountains.
What is that bright stuff on the mountains?
Thanks to the fire the night before my camera and underwater housing had completely dried out. The temperature outside the hut was already somewhat warm, which helped prevent condensation as well when I brought my kit outside and assembled it. I then slipped into my soaking wet shoes (one night in front of the fire was unfortunately not enough to dry them out) and squelched off down to the river.
In my previous attempts at split under/over photography I had been frustrated by depth of field issues: focusing on a subject under the water meant the background was often out of focus, even at f/16 or f/22. But at those apertures either shutter speed or ISO has to skyrocket in order to provide a good exposure, but both come with their own set of technical issues I don’t want to get into here. Instead I had an idea that I could shoot at f/5.6 and simply shoot two exposures, one focusing on the background, and one focusing underneath the water. I reasoned that as long as the compositions roughly lined up (I was shooting handheld so no perfect alignment here thanks to a tripod) I could easily blend the shots later in Photoshop to get the best of both worlds. That morning’s shoot was a conceptual test of that idea and I didn’t hold out much hope for a good photo; I simply wanted the proof of concept.
Thankfully the beautiful light on the mountains and the electric blue of the water meant that I had good raw material to work with. And after a little trial and error a few days later in Photoshop I was able to create my vision of a split shot of the Wilkin River near the Top Forks Hut.
Mount Betsy Jane and the Wilkin River. Composite of two photos taken from the same spot, both at f/5.6. One shot focusing on the background, one on the foreground. Photos combined later in Photoshop.
After shooting till my toes started to go numb, as well as killing the requisite number of sandflies (42), I tromped off back to the hut and was greeted by the mouth-watering smell of frying bacon and eggs. The Kiwis were up and cooking. I contented myself with the much less delicious but arguably morally superior breakfast of bland oatmeal.
Then it was time for me to pack up. My pickup the next day was by jet boat, approximately 10 miles down the trail. Which meant I needed to mosey off to the Kerin Forks Hut, which sits at the confluence of the Wilkin and the Siberia Stream. Two of the hunters, Doug and Damian, were heading off in that same direction to find a suitable spot to spend the day hunting (read: looking through the scope and drinking beer). So the three of us spent an amiable 45 minutes tramping downstream talking about things like the NZ army and the NZ dairy industry until the guys peeled off to wander up to a clearing on the hillside.
NZ is a land of waterfalls.
Hiking solo again I tried to follow the marked track but after finding it to be nothing more than annoying bush bashing I hopped down into the river and followed the gravel banks, crossing the river as necessary. It was already flowing fast and deep; I couldn’t imagine what it would be like all the way down at the confluence with the Siberia Stream. Not long after the river became too deep to continue along on foot and I spent an ugly hour slopping through wet tussock and falling in the occasional pit before gaining drier and better track as it entered the beech forest.
Looking back toward Top Forks.
20 minutes later I stopped to pee, and feeling utterly isolated I stood just on the side of the track and peed right there. Imagine my surprise then when I zipped up and turned around and saw five people walking up the track toward me. Thankfully they had been too busy looking at their feet to notice me whizzing 20 feet ahead and seemed as surprised as I was when I said hello. We chit-chatted about trail conditions and tramping plans then I was off again, enjoying the good track through the forest and stopping to marvel at the outrageous mushrooms growing out of the rich soil.
Why did the mushroom go to the party? Because he was a fungi.
Soon the trail came out of the forest, over a stream, and emerged in a gigantic clearing. I had arrived at Jumboland. A beautiful, grassy plain sitting at the confluence of the Wilkin River and Wonderland Stream, Jumboland was named after a famous horse who roamed the area with some of the early explorers. It was so lovely and pleasant there I stopped for a quick lounge in the sun. But after dozens of sandflies found me and began swarming around I was quickly on my feet and walking again.
Somehow I had forgotten my baseball cap on this trip, and with the amount of rain I’d seen so far it hadn’t been a problem. But the skies over Jumboland were mixed rain and sun and I could feel my scalp cooking in the clear moments. I tied my bandana into a makeshift head covering and was surely an odd sight, dressed in bandana, plaid shirt, and full bib rain pants. 20 minutes later as I hiked back into the forest the rain had all but stopped, the sun was beating down, and taking those rain pants off urgently became the most important task I could imagine in life.
Legs freed and a quick lunch downed I shouldered my pack and spent the next few hours cruising through the marvelous beech forest. The track became better maintained with every step and I was flying along despite trying to not walk very fast. Tunes, thoughts, and river crossings all blurred together over the next three hours in a wonderful, dreamlike hiking melange and I found myself reluctantly arriving at the Kerin Forks Hut at 5 pm. I walked inside to find the most spotlessly clean hut I’ve ever seen (thanks to the diligent efforts of those five trekkers I passed early) and thought, “I can remedy that!” and promptly threw my belongings all over every conceivable surface.
With trail like this you don’t want the hike to end.
I popped back outside to spend a few minutes surveying the area near the hut but I saw more sandflies and got more bites in those few minutes than during the rest of the trip in total. During my lookabout I spied a giant pile of cordwood in the woodshed and despite the fact that it was fairly warm out I decided to start a fire in the hut so I could dry my shoes out. With stacks of wood and kindling I got the fire going licketysplit and stuffed the woodstove full of tinder. Soon it was so hot inside the hut I was sweating just sitting there in a t-shirt and shorts. Oops. But damn if my shoes weren’t drying out in record time.
After a few hours I made a spicy curry for dinner and was sweating even more from internal heat. That may have been a mistake but saving my largest ration of chocolate for the last night certainly wasn’t. No one else ever arrived at the hut so I spent the evening lounging, reading tales from other travelers in the hut log, and journaling the day’s experiences.
My last day of the trip started with the Mystery of the Phantom Mouse. In the wee hours I was awakened by a scritch-scratching in the walls of the hut. Then without warning something plopped onto my pillow (pillow is a loose term I am using to describe anything you can rest your head on; in actuality it was my down jacket jammed inside a stuff sack). I sat bolt upright and grabbing my headlamp I sprayed a beam of light across my bed and the floor of the hut. Nothing. Absolutely nothing moved or made a sound. The phantom mouse had come and went. So I rolled over and nodded off.
When I woke up for good around 8:30 am it was to more rain. Sitting warm and comfy inside the hut I reflected gratefully on the moments of nice weather I had experienced. A few coals lingered in the stove so I stoked the fire back up and leisurely packed up my things, reorganized and stacked the wood, and cleaned the hut.
Around 1:15 I heard the roar of a jet boat coming up the river so I grabbed my pack and walked down 10 minutes to the river’s edge to meet my ride. I hopped in the boat alongside a few other trekkers that had come down from the Siberia Valley and we had an exhilarating 25 minute ride back to the town of Makarora, along the way picking up a man and his dog who were happy to get out of the river and into the boat.
Back in town I jumped in my car, cranked up some music, and drove back to Wanaka. Another great trip in the books!
Thanks for sharing your journal. Interesting and inspiring as always! There is something strangely appealing about walking through the beech forests in New Zealand during rain. When the mountain scenery is obscured by clouds, the things that attract me the most are the various fungi, lichens and mosses that cover everything. I’m glad you paid some attention to them too.
You said it! The New Zealand beech forest is one of the most magical, fairy-tale environments I’ve ever walked through.
Combining a mountain and a river in a photo, seen it a million times. But combining a river shot half under the surface and in focus, and the mountains as background, thats a first for me. Well done sir.
Much appreciated! I am excited about the possibilities shooting like this opens up. Because like you I am getting a bit tired of shooting the same old kinds of shots!
Great, great tet. I enjoued every word of it. It was like I was with you along this fantastic trip! Thanks Josh!
I truly love your travelogs. As was said above by Miroslav….I felt as though I was there. Your photos truly bring NZ to me.
Thank you so much, Michelle! I’m happy you enjoy reading them, as I enjoy writing them.
Enjoyed reading parts 1&2 of your trip, along with seeing your images of the beautiful landscape New Zealand has.
Thank you, Barb! Lots more trip reports coming soon. | 2019-04-24T10:54:41Z | https://www.joshuacripps.com/2018/04/top-forks-hut-mt-aspiring-trip-report-part-2/ |
This will take awhile, so be patient with us!
Shall we start with the Catcher?
The following are the past players who have won the Gold Glove at Catcher who are eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame and have been enshrined.
1.4 dWAR. Johnny Bench would get out of the gate quickly winning not only the Gold Glove but also the Rookie of the Year Award. Bench would lead National League Catchers in Assists and Putouts this year. Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989.
1.5 dWAR. Bench would improve all facets of his game and avoid the sophomore slump. This year the Cincinnati Red would lead in Runners Caught Stealing. Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989.
1.8 dWAR. This year, Bench would explode offensively leading the NL in Home Runs and RBIs. He would also win the National League MVP Award. With his glove, he would lead the Catchers in Total Zone Runs. Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989.
1.7 dWAR. This was a down year for Bench, but still a good one. He would make his fourth straight All Star Game. Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989.
1.0 dWAR. This was Fisk’s first year in the Majors and he would win the American League Rookie of the Year. He would not win the Gold Glove again. While he would lead the AL Catchers in Putouts and Assists, he would have much better defensive seasons later on in his career. Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2000.
1.7 dWAR. Bench would again win the National League MVP, again winning the Home Run RBI Title. He led the Catchers in the NL in Runners Caught Stealing Percentage and Total Zone Runs. This season he would also lead the National League in Defensive bWAR. Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989.
1.6 dWAR. This would be the third and final time that Bench would lead in Caught Stealing Percentage. He would also again take the NL Catcher Total Zone Run Title. Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989.
2.1 dWAR. Finishing 4th in NL MVP voting, Bench would lead the National League Catchers in Double Plays Turned and Total Zone Runs. Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989.
1.8 dWAR. What mattered most to Johnny Bench this year was that this was his first World Series win. He would again lead in Total Zone Runs. Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989.
2.0 dWAR. This season saw Bench win the World Series MVP and take Cincinnati to back-to-back World Series Titles. This would be the final season he led in Total Zone Runs, but the first and only where he led Catchers in Fielding Percentage. He would also lead NL Catchers in Putouts and he finished third overall in the National League in Defensive bWAR. Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989.
1.0 dWAR. With his tenth straight Gold Glove, Johnny Bench also went to his tenth straight All Star Game. Realistically, he probably should not have won it this year. Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989.
2.5 dWAR. This was the year that Gary Carter and the Montreal Expos really arrived. “The Kid” finished second overall in Defensive bWAR while taking the lead in Putouts, Assists, Total Zone Runs and Fielding Percentage as a Catcher. He was third in Defensive bWAR the season before. Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2003.
2.2 dWAR. This was the first season that Gary Carter won a Silver Slugger and the first season the Expos made the playoffs. In this strike shortened season, he would lead everyone in Defensive bWAR. Again he would lead the NL in Putouts in Total Zone Runs as a Catcher. Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2003.
2.7 dWAR. Carter finished second overall in the National League in Defensive bWAR. Incidentally, he would finish a whopping 4.0 next season…where he DID NOT win the Gold Glove. This season he would lead the NL Catchers in Putouts, Assists, Runners Caught Stealing and Total Zone Runs. Overall, this was a player whose defense was stellar! Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2003.
1.2 dWAR. Sherm Lollar is not just the answer to ‘Who is the first Gold Glove Winner” but also the answer to ‘Who is the only Catcher to win the God Glove for all of the Majors’. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was not on the ballot despite being eligible for the Hall of Fame in 1969.
0.6 dWAR. Lollar went to his fifth All Star Game and had another good season at the plate with 20 Home Runs and .273 Batting Average. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was not on the ballot despite being eligible for the Hall of Fame in 1969.
1.9 dWAR. This was Crandall’s fifth All Star Game appearance. Crandall would lead the National League Catchers in Putouts, Assists Runners Caught Stealing and Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. He was on the ballot for four years finishing as high as 3.9% in 1976.
1.2 dWAR. This would be Lollar’s sixth and final All Star Game. With his bat, he would post career bests with 136 Hits and 22 Home Runs. For whatever reason, this six time All Star never made the ballot. Can anyone explain that one? Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was not on the ballot despite being eligible for the Hall of Fame in 1969.
2.2 dWAR. Crandall was again an All Star and led the Catchers in the NL in Assists, Double Plays Turned, Runners Caught Stealing and Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. He was on the ballot for four years finishing as high as 3.9% in 1976.
1.5 dWAR. Battey would become a full time starter this year and he finished 8th in MVP voting. He would lead AL Catchers in Assists, Caught Stealing Percentage and Range Factor per Game. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was not on the ballot despite being eligible for the Hall of Fame in 1973.
1.0 dWAR. This one was on reputation as Crandall did not have an exceptional year defensively, but he did again go to the All Star Game. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. He was on the ballot for four years finishing as high as 3.9% in 1976.
0.5 dWAR. Battey would again lead the AL Catchers in Assists and Range Factor per Game. This year he would also lead the American League in Double Plays by a Catcher. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was not on the ballot despite being eligible for the Hall of Fame in 1973.
0.4 dWAR. Jonesboro was an All Star this year, and led the NL Catchers in Range Factor and Putouts. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was not on the ballot despite being eligible for the Hall of Fame in 1976.
0.9 dWAR. This season, Earl would earn his first of four trips to the All Star Game. Battey again led all American League Catchers in Assists and Range Factor. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was not on the ballot despite being eligible for the Hall of Fame in 1973.
1.7 dWAR. This was the eight and final All Star Game appearance for Crandall. He would lead the Catchers (NL) in Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. He was on the ballot for four years finishing as high as 3.9% in 1976.
1.2 dWAR. This was the best year of Howard’s career, as he would win the AL MVP Award. Howard by this point had already won four World Series Titles and went to the All Star Game seven times. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for fifteen years, finishing as high as 20.7 % in 1981.
1.4 dWAR. Edwards made his first All Star Game this year. He would lead NL Catchers in Putouts, Double Plays Turned, Runners Caught Stealing, Range Factor per Game and Fielding Percentage. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year in1980 but did not receive any votes.
1.9 dWAR. Howard would not win the American League MVP this year but would finish third. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for fifteen years, finishing as high as 20.7 % in 1981.
0.7 dWAR. Edwards was again named to the All Star team, his second of three appearances. This season he would lead National League Catchers in Putouts, Double Plays Turned and Range Factor per Game. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year in1980 but did not receive any votes.
0.8 dWAR. Freehan made his second All Star Game. He would lead the AL for Catchers in Putouts and Range Factor. Ranked #50 on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year, receiving 0.5% in 1982.
0.9 dWAR. An All Star again, Freehan would take the Putouts, Range Factor and Fielding Percentage lead for AL Catchers. Ranked #50 on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year, receiving 0.5% in 1982.
1.1 dWAR. Jonesboro led all NL Catchers in Putouts and Range Factor per Game. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was not on the ballot despite being eligible for the Hall of Fame in 1976.
0.6 dWAR. Freehan would again go to the All Stat Game. Freehan led the American League in Putouts by a Catcher. Ranked #50 on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year, receiving 0.5% in 1982.
1.6 dWAR. Hundley would have a good career defensively, though would not have any metric that mattered here. Was on the ballot for one year, receiving no votes in 1983.
1.3 dWAR. Freehan would be apart of Detroit’s World Series Championship. This year, the Catcher would hit 25 Home Runs, the most of his career. Ranked #50 on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year, receiving 0.5% in 1982.
0.5 dWAR. Freehan would become an All Star again and would be one eleven times. Ranked #50 on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year, receiving 0.5% in 1982.
1.4 dWAR. This was the first All Star Game appearance for Fosse, and yes the legendary one where he was run over by Pete Rose. Offensively he had his best year with 138 Hits and a .307 Batting Average. He would lead the AL in Caught Stealing, Putouts and Range Factor. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was never on the ballot despite being eligible in 1985.
0.3 dWAR. Fosse would have another good year offensively, but he probably should not have won the Gold Glove this year. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was never on the ballot despite being eligible in 1985.
2.1 dWAR. Munson would lead all AL Catchers in Assists and Double Plays Turned. Ranked #91 on Notinhalloffame.com. On the Ballot for fifteen years, finished as high as 15.5% in 1981.
0.5 dWAR. Munson likely should not have won the award this year, but he did lead the AL Catchers in Assists. Ranked #91 on Notinhalloffame.com. On the Ballot for fifteen years, finished as high as 15.5% in 1981.
1.6 dWAR. This year, Munson would lead the AL Catchers in Range Factor per Game. The following season he would win the American League MVP. Ranked #91 on Notinhalloffame.com. On the Ballot for fifteen years, finished as high as 15.5% in 1981.
2.6 dWAR. Defensively, this was an incredible year for Sundberg, leading the AL Catchers in Putouts, Assists, Double Plays Turned, Runners Caught Stealing and Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year in 1995, receiving 0.2% of the ballot.
2.4 dWAR. Sundberg had another excellent defensive campaign leading the American League Catchers in Putouts, Assists, Double Plays Turned and Total Zone Runs. He would make his first All Star Game and finished 15th in MVP voting. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year in 1995, receiving 0.2% of the ballot.
2.9 dWAR. Sundberg would again finish 15th in MVP voting. He would also again lead Catchers (AL) in Putouts, Assists, Double Plays Turned, Runners Caught Stealing and Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year in 1995, receiving 0.2% of the ballot.
1.6 dWAR. Boone went to his second All Star Game this season and he would have the highest Fielding Percentage of all National League Catchers. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for five years finishing as high as 7.7% in 1996.
2.0 dWAR. The Rangers Catcher had would again lead AL Catchers in Putouts. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year in 1995, receiving 0.2% of the ballot.
1.9 dWAR. An All Star for the third time, Boone finished 6th overall in Defensive bWAR. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for five years finishing as high as 7.7% in 1996.
0.8 dWAR. Sundberg had a down year and likely won this on reputation. This year he actually allowed the most Stolen Bases, though he was second in Runners Caught Stealing. He would also lead in Range Factor. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year in 1995, receiving 0.2% of the ballot.
1.5 dWAR. The Texas Ranger returned to defensive form leading in Total Zone Runs and Runners Caught Stealing. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year in 1995, receiving 0.2% of the ballot.
3.0 dWAR. In terms of Defensive bWAR, this was the best season of Bob Boone’s career. Boone led everyone in Defensive bWAR this year. He would also lead AL Catchers in Putouts, Assists, Runners Caught Stealins, Caught Stealing Percentage and Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for five years finishing as high as 7.7% in 1996.
2.0 dWAR. Parrish would also win the Silver Slugger and he would finish ninth in MVP voting. He would also finish fourth in Defensive bWAR. He would lead the AL Catchers in Runners Caught Stealing, Caught Stealing Percentage, Total Zone Runs and Range Factor per Game. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year finishing with 1.7% in 2001.
1.3 dWAR. Pena would finish 12th in MVP voting, the highest of his career. He would have 163 Hits, the most of his career. He would lead the National League Catchers in Putouts this year. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year in 2003, receiving 0.4% of the ballot.
1.1 dWAR. This was the magic year for the Detroit Tigers as they won the World Series this season. Parrish would lead the Catchers in Double Plays Turned. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year finishing with 1.7% in 2001.
2.5 dWAR. This year, Tony Pena would make his second All Star Game. He would also lead everyone in the National League in Defensive bWAR. Pena would take the NL Catchers crown in Assists, Putouts, Double Plays Turned, Runners Caught Stealing and Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year in 2003, receiving 0.4% of the ballot.
1.0 dWAR. Sorry Lance. Bob Boone should have won this one. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year finishing with 1.7% in 2001.
2.5 dWAR. Pena finished 4th in Defensive bWAR this year. He would lead the National League Catchers in Assists, Runners Caught Stealing and Total Zone Runs. He would lead everyone in the National League in Defensive bWAR this season. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year in 2003, receiving 0.4% of the ballot.
2.6 dWAR. Boone would actually lead everyone in the American League Defensive bWAR the year before and finished third this year. He would have the most Assists, Double Plays Turned and Total Zone Runs as an American League Catcher. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for five years finishing as high as 7.7% in 1996.
3.3 dWAR. Davis would only win one Gold Glove but this was his second (and final) All Star Game appearance. He would lead everyone in the National League in Defensive bWAR. He also led all NL Catchers in Double Plays Turned, Runners Caught Stealing, Caught Stealing Percentage and Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Davis was never on the ballot despite being eligible in 1996.
1.7 dWAR. Boone finished seventh overall in the AL in Defensive bWAR. He led in Caught Stealing Percentage in Total Zone Runs for AL Catchers. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for five years finishing as high as 7.7% in 1996.
2.2 dWAR. This would be the only individual award that Mike “Spanky” LaValliere would win and offensively, the only one where he had over 100 Hits. LaValliere led NL Catchers in Caught Stealing Percentage and Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. LaValliere was never on the ballot despite being eligible in 2001.
1.5 dWAR. Boone led the American League Catchers in Assists and Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for five years finishing as high as 7.7% in 1996.
2.6 dWAR. Santiago was one year removed from winning the Rookie of the Year. He would finish 2nd in Defensive bWAR this year and led NL Catchers in Assists, Double Plays Turned and Caught Stealing Percentage. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Santiago was on the ballot for one year in 2011, receiving 0.2% of the ballot.
1.9 dWAR. Not too shabby at age 41. Boone led the American League Catchers in Putouts and Caught Stealing Percentage. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for five years finishing as high as 7.7% in 1996.
1.7 dWAR. Santiago went to his first All Star Game this year and finished 9th in Defensive bWAR. He would lead all NL Catchers in Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Santiago was on the ballot for one year in 2011, receiving 0.2% of the ballot.
0.4 dWAR. Sandy Alomar went to a lot of All Star Games he should not have. He also won this Gold Glove…and shouldn’t’ have. The only stat he led in this year was Errors for a Catcher. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year finishing with 2.8% in 1996.
1.2 dWAR. Easily the weakest of Santaigo’s Gold Glove wins, Santiago would again go to the All Star Game. He went to the mid-season classic five times. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Santiago was on the ballot for one year in 2011, receiving 0.2% of the ballot.
1.2 dWAR. Pena would win his fourth and final Gold Glove this year, and the only one in the American League. The Red Sox Catcher would lead American Leaguers at his position in Putouts, Runners Caught Stealing and Range Factor per Game. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Was on the ballot for one year in 2003, receiving 0.4% of the ballot.
3.0 dWAR. Tony Pagnozzi would lead everyone in the National League in Defensive bWAR this year. He would also lead all NL Catchers in Runners Caught Stealing and Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Pagnozzi was never on the ballot despite being eligible in 2004.
1.7 dWAR. Ivan Rodriguez went to his first of many All Star Games. He would lead the American League Catchers in Runners Caught Stealing, Caught Stealing Percentage, Total Zone Runs and Range Factor per Game. Ranked #9 on Notinhalloffame.com. Entering his first year of eligibility.
0.9 dWAR. While this was a much weaker season defensively than the previous one, Pagnozzi would make his first and only All Star Game this year. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Pagnozzi was never on the ballot despite being eligible in 2004.
1.2 dWAR. I-Rod went to his second straight All Star Game this year. Ranked #9 on Notinhalloffame.com. Entering his first year of eligibility.
2.4 dWAR. This would be the only individual award that Manwaring would collect in MLB but it was well earned. Realistically, he probably should have won the Gold Glove last year too, as he had a Defensive bWAR of 2.5 and finished second overall in the NL. This year he finished first. He also led in Caught Stealing Percentage, Total Zone Runs and Fielding Percentage. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Manwaring was never on the ballot despite being eligible in 2005.
1.0 dWAR. Rodriguez have decent season defensively, but a Gold Glove one? He would win his first Silver Slugger this year. Ranked #9 on Notinhalloffame.com. Entering his first year of eligibility.
1.1 dWAR. In this strike shortened season, Pagnozzi finished 10th in the National League in Defensive bWAR and in Caught Stealing Percentage. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Pagnozzi was never on the ballot despite being eligible in 2004.
1.7 dWAR. I-Rod would go to his fourth straight All Star Game and win his second consecutive Silver Slugger. He would lead the AL Catchers in Assists and Total Zone Runs. Ranked #9 on Notinhalloffame.com. Entering his first year of eligibility.
1.8 dWAR. This would be the first individual accolade for Charles Johnson who would finish seventh in Rookie of the Year voting. Johnson led the NL Catchers in Assists. He finished second overall in Defensive bWAR. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Johnson was on the ballot for one year in 2011 but did not receive any votes.
3.2 dWAR. Ivan Rodriguez would finish second overall in Defensive bWAR in the American League. He would also lead the AL Catchers in Putouts, Assists, Double Plays Turned, Runners Caught Stealing, Caught Stealing Percentage and Total Zone Runs. Ranked #9 on Notinhalloffame.com. Entering his first year of eligibility.
2.0 dWAR. Johnson would lead the National League Catchers in Double Plays Turned, Runners Caught Stealing and Fielding Percentage. He finished third in the National League in Defensive bWAR. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Johnson was on the ballot for one year in 2011 but did not receive any votes.
2.9 dWAR. This year, Rodriguez would lead everyone in the American League in Defensive bWAR. He would also lead the Catchers in the AL In Assists, Caught Stealing Percentage and Total Zone Runs. Ranked #9 on Notinhalloffame.com. Entering his first year of eligibility.
2.6 dWAR. This was easily the best year of Charles Johnson’s career. He would have one of his better offensive seasons and finished eleventh in MVP Voting, while going to his first All Star Game. This was also the season where the Florida Marlins won their first World Series. Johnson would also finish first in Defensive bWAR. He also led in Runners Caught Stealing, Total Zone Runs and Fielding Percentage. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Johnson was on the ballot for one year in 2011 but did not receive any votes.
2.6 dWAR. I-Rod took second place in Defensive bWAR in the American League. The Catcher would lead all in the AL in Putouts, Assists, Runners Caught Stealing, Caught Stealing Percentage and Total Zone Runs. Ranked #9 on Notinhalloffame.com. Entering his first year of eligibility.
1.4 dWAR. While this was the lowest Defensive bWAR he would post while winning a Gold Glove, it was still enough for eighth overall in the National League. He would lead the NL Catchers in Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Johnson was on the ballot for one year in 2011 but did not receive any votes.
2.7 dWAR. Another Gold Glove, Another appearance in the All Star game, Another Silver Slugger. This time however, for the first and only time, Ivan Rodriguez would be named the American League Most Valuable Player. Again he led the AL Catchers in Caught Stealing Percentage and Total Zone Runs. He would also finish third in Defensive bWAR in the American League. Ranked #9 on Notinhalloffame.com. Entering his first year of eligibility.
0.7 dWAR. A bit of a curious choice, Mike Lieberthal actually went to his first All Star Game and did have one of his best offensive seasons. Defensively he did leas the Catchers in Assists and Fielding Percentage though also led in Passed Balls. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Lieberthal was not on the ballot despite being eligible in 2013.
1.0 dWAR. Was this one on reputation? Rodriguez had an OK season defensively but still led the AL in Caught Stealing Percentage. Ranked #9 on Notinhalloffame.com. Entering his first year of eligibility.
2.4 dWAR. Mike Matheny finished second overall in the National League in Defensive bWAR and would lead the Catchers in Runners Caught Stealing and Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Matheny was not on the ballot despite being eligible in 2012.
1.8 dWAR. This year would end his dominance in Texas but not in Baseball. Rodriguez would again lead Catchers in Caught Stealing Percentage and Total Zone Runs. Ranked #9 on Notinhalloffame.com. Entering his first year of eligibility.
1.9 dWAR. Ausmus would finish seventh overall in Defensive bWAR in the National League. He would lead the National League Catchers is Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Ausmus was on the ballot for one year in 2016 but did not receive any votes.
1.7 dWAR. Molina would help the Angels win their first World Series this year. In the regular season he would lead the American League Catchers in Caught Stealing Percentage and Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Molina was not on the ballot despite being eligible on 2016.
1.2 dWAR. While Ausmus would have a good season defensively he did not lead in any defensive metric. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Ausmus was on the ballot for one year in 2016 but did not receive any votes.
0.9 dWAR. Molina would again lead Catchers in the AL in Caught Stealing Percentage and Total Zone Runs. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Molina was not on the ballot despite being eligible on 2016.
0.4 dWAR. Matheny led the NL Catchers in Fielding Percentage. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Matheny was not on the ballot despite being eligible in 2012.
0.1 dWAR. By this time, Ivan Rodriguez had won the World Series in Florida, but a Gold Glove with a 0.1 Defensive bWAR?. This was not earned at all. Ranked #9 on Notinhalloffame.com. Entering his first year of eligibility.
0.4 dWAR. Like the year before, Matheny only led in Fielding Percentage. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Matheny was not on the ballot despite being eligible in 2012.
0.4 dWAR. Matheny may have had the same Defensive bWAR but he did lead the Catchers in the NL in Assists and Runners Caught Stealing. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Matheny was not on the ballot despite being eligible in 2012.
1.0 dWAR. I-Rod had a better year, leading the AL Catchers in Total Zone Runs. Ranked #9 on Notinhalloffame.com. Entering his first year of eligibility.
1.0 dWAR. Ausmus remained a consistent defensive gem for the Astros and would lead in Fielding Percentage. Unranked on Notinhalloffame.com. Ausmus was on the ballot for one year in 2016 but did not receive any votes.
0.7 dWAR. Another gifted Award? Likely, but not the first time this occurred with a Gold Glove. Regardless this man should be a Hall of Famer. Ranked #9 on Notinhalloffame.com. Entering his first year of eligibility.
The following are the players who have won the Gold Glove at Catcher who are still active.
2.6 dWAR. Russell Martin would win his only Silver Slugger this year and also went to his first All Star Game. Martin finished second in Defensive bWAR in the National League and would lead the Catchers in Putouts, Assists, Double Plays Turned, Runners Caught Stealing and Range Factor per Game. 33 Years Old, Playing for the Toronto Blue Jays.
0.2 dWAR. Joe Mauer would win the Silver Slugger and the American League Batting Title. He did lead in Total Zone Runs and Fielding Percentage, however his overall defensive performance was not Gold Glove worthy. 33 Years Old, Playing for the Minnesota Twins.
1.0 dWAR. Molina was already a World Series Champion by the time he won his first individual award. He had already eclipsed 2.0 in Defensive bWAR in the two years previous. 33 Years Old, Playing for the St. Louis Cardinals.
0.7 dWAR. Mauer won the MVP Award and won the Batting Title, OBP and Slugging Titles along the way. He did not lead in any defensive category. 33 Years Old, Playing for the Minnesota Twins.
1.9 dWAR. Yadier Molina finished sixth in Defensive bWAR this year and this was also his first All Star Game appearance. He would lead the Catchers in Total Zone Runs. 33 Years Old, Playing for the St. Louis Cardinals.
0.9 dWAR. Mauer would again finish in the top ten in AL MVP voting (eighth). Mauer would win again, but again with a Defensive bWAR under 1.0. He would however lead the American League Catchers in Fielding Percentage. 33 Years Old, Playing for the Minnesota Twins.
2.9 dWAR. Molina finished third in Defensive bWAR this year, and his 2.9 is his highest to date. He would lead the National League Catchers in Assists, Caught Stealing Percentage and Total Zone Runs. 33 Years Old, Playing for the St. Louis Cardinals.
2.7 dWAR. This was Weiters first season as an All Star and with a 20 Home Run season. He would finish third overall in the American League in Defensive bWAR and would lead the AL Catchers in Double Plays Turned. 30 Years Old, Playing for the Baltimore Orioles.
0.4 dWAR. This was a down year defensively for Molina, though he was an All Star Game again, though he would still won the Platinum Glove. Odds are, that Molina was only focused on the fact that his Cardinals won the World Series, the second time for Molina. 33 Years Old, Playing for the St. Louis Cardinals.
1.3 dWAR. Weiters would again go to the All Star Game and would lead the AL Catchers in Putouts and Total Zone Runs. 30 Years Old, Playing for the Baltimore Orioles.
2.6 dWAR. Molina would bounce back and finished third in the National League in Defensive bWAR. Molina would also lead the NL Catchers in Double Plays Turned. Molina would also win the Platinum Glove and the Wilson Defensive Player of the Year. 33 Years Old, Playing for the St. Louis Cardinals.
2.2 dWAR. Salvador Perez would not just become the starting Kansas City Royal Catcher, but would emerge as an All Star. Perez would also lead the AL Catchers in Assists and Runners Caught Stealing. This year, Perez finished 4th in Defensive bWAR 26 Years Old, Playing for the Kansas City Royals.
2.1 dWAR. The Cardinals Catcher finished eighth in Defensive bWAR and led in Total Zone Runs in the National League. Molina would win the Wilson Defensive Player of the Year. 33 Years Old, Playing for the St. Louis Cardinals.
2.1 dWAR. Perez returned to the All Star Game and finished 8th overall in the American League in Defensive bWAR. Perez would lead all of the AL Catchers in Total Zone Runs. 26 Years Old, Playing for the Kansas City Royals.
1.5 dWAR. The Cardinals Catcher finished eighth in Defensive bWAR and led in Total Zone Runs in the National League and would again win the Platinum Glove. 33 Years Old, Playing for the St. Louis Cardinals.
1.5 dWAR. An All Star again, Perez would lead the American League Catchers in Assists. His highlight however was winning the World Series as well as the MVP of the Fall Classic. 26 Years Old, Playing for the Kansas City Royals.
1.5 dWAR. Once again wining the Platinum Glove and going to the All Star Game (his eighth appearance). He would lead the NL Catchers in Putouts. 33 Years Old, Playing for the St. Louis Cardinals.
2.0 dWAR. Once again an All Star, Salvador Perez would be tops in the AL Catchers in Putouts, Assists, Runners Caught Stealing, Caught Stealing Percentage, Total Zone Runs and Fielding Percentage. Perez would finish 7th in Defensive bWAR. 26 Years Old, Playing for the Kansas City Royals.
2.0 dWAR. By this point, Posey had already won the Rookie of the Year, an MVP Award, three Silver Sluggers and three World Series Rings. Posey earned his first Gold Glove by Leading all NL Catchers in Double Plays Turned, Total Zone Runs and by finishing 4th in Defensive bWAR. 29 Years Old, Playing for the San Francisco Giants.
Well, the Catcher position did not yield as many faux pas winners, as other of the positions we will talk about certainly did. Still, it also hasn’t seen a plethora of winners go to the Hall of Fame.
We will continue around the diamond and tackle First Base next. | 2019-04-26T03:38:45Z | http://www.notinhalloffame.com/blogs/from-the-desk-of-the-chairman/7913-awards-hof-part-twenty-three-gold-glove-catcher |
COLOR THEORIES____The Good, the Bad and the UselessAlthough the use of color is not without pitfalls, unlikedrawing or pictorial composition, it is the most flexible andtolerant of individual taste of all the aspects of painting. Whilemany of us a seem to born with the ability to draw, few of us areborn colorists simply because good color can be achieved onlythrough an intelligent approach born of proper study.No other element of Art has more mystery surrounding it thanthe study of color. From that mystery have arisen countless colortheories. Some theories have strong foundations built on provenand observable fact. Other of these theories are, well---frankly,they are bizarre. In the beginning of this chapter we'll discuss abit of the history surrounding a few of the more bizarre and,unfortunately, influential theories which continue to bring newterrors to students of color. My opinions may fly in the face ofwhat you've learnt at university, but please give them a hearing.
In the chaos following the First World War, the ashes ofGermany became the breeding ground for a new social order.Socialism took firm root in the fertile ground of post-wardiscontent. Socialist thought crept into everything, even unlikelyareas like the arts, and it gave birth to the artisticmanifesto.With their many manifestos, the new men of the NewSociety shouted down figurative painting as merely "illustratingthe myths of the intellectual bourgeois." These new anti-intellectuals set about to create art forms which would becomeillustrations of their social and political manifestos.Out of that curious period came this call to arms of theNovembergruppe; "Painters, Architects, Sculptors, you whom thebourgeoisie pays with high rewards for your work---out of vanity,snobbery, and boredom---Hear! To this money clings the sweat andblood and nervous energy of thousands of poor hounded humanbeings---Hear! It is unclean profit . . . we must be truesocialists--- we must kindle the highest socialist virtue: thebrotherhood of man."Walter Gropius, apart from founding the Bauhaus, was alsochairman of the Novembergruppe's Arbeitsrat fur Kunst (WorkingCouncil for Art). He sought to join all of the arts together"under the wing of a great architecture." Appointing himself GreatArchitect and sounding much like the jackbooted men who would soonfollow, he wrote "the intellectual bourgeois has proved himselfunfit to be the bearer of a German culture." He predicted aBauhaus/Socialist New World Order arising from unsuspectedquarters when he wrote, "New, intellectually undeveloped levelsof our people are rising from the depths. They are our chiefhope." Unfortunately, he got his wish . . . and the world got Hitler.A common thread joined those art forms spawned by the newanti-intellectualism. Artistic movements like Futurism, Vorticism,Orphism, Purism and Surrealism, were distinguished not so much asaesthetic movements but as esoteric codes designed to baffle thehated bourgeoisie (never mind that later Socialists would rejectthese incomprehensibly coded aesthetic messages to seek comfort inthe most puerile and saccharine of bourgeois art, and never mindthat the artists themselves became the prototypes of thesuccessful capitalist). It was only natural that, in those giddyearly years, The Movement would produce its own peculiar theoriesconcerning politically correct ways of seeing. Rising out of thisyeasty mix of aesthetics and politics and armed with correct newcolor theories and a reformer's zeal, sprung Josef Albers andJohannes Itten.Albers and Itten's color theories had little to do with thepractical problems encountered by the figurative artist. To their way ofthinking, that was all to the better. But when World Socialism finallyrejected their ideas as counter- revolutionary, they, along with Gropius, beat ahasty retreat to those places still cordial to arcane and unprovabletheories...the universities. The sheltered hot house atmosphere of theuniversity provided a congenial rallying place where countless studentsjourneyed forth to kneel at the feet of their idols. The trouble was, thosestudents never got up off their knees--- they went on to teach thoseunworkable coded theories to the next generation of easily gulled students.Itten's book, The Art of Color, attempted to validate histheories through a clever technique well known in advertisingagencies. By juxtaposing his color charts next to the work ofgreat painters he hoped to add credence to his theories.Strangely, Itten chose painters who died well before the advent ofthe modern pigments and colors shown in his charts. Those greatmaster's pictures have as little bearing on his color theories asare the trim young models in beer commercials a result of drinkingthe advertiser's product.To appear original, Itten abandoned the ten-colorwheel of the Munsell System in order to create his idiosyncraticTwelve Color Star and a seven value Color Sphere. The dilemma was;how was the artist to apply rigidly circumscribed charts, blocks,stars and spheres of color to painting the delicate passagesinherent in figurative painting? Those uncompromising Bauhausprecepts have proved to be coarse, clumsy tools ill suited toproducing that grace and finesse we associate with figurativepainting. Thus far, the only application of Alber's and Itten'stheories have been in short-lived art fads like Color Fieldpainting and Op Art.I don't want to leave you with the impression that all formal colortheories are useless to the illustrator and painter. Quite the contrary.Unlike Albers and Itten (both of whose theories are never mentioned inserious writings on color), a few well grounded color theorists like FaberBirren, concentrated on practical color effects of use to the artist andcraftsman. Birren's book, Creative Color should be required reading for anyillustrator or painter. The color effects shown in Creative Color are asextraordinary as they are useful. Birren was not the only one to developpractical color theories with the artist in mind. Far ahead of its time wasthe fundamental work from which much practical color theory grows--- M.E.Chevreul's 1839 book, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast ofColor. It was from within this book that the color theories of theImpressionists took root. Although approaching color from a more scientificstandpoint Ogden Rood, Albert Munsell, Wilhelm Ostwald and Denman Ross allproduced work of lasting value to the artist.The Munsell Color System:A decade before the Novembergruppe issued its first artisticmanifesto in the city of Weimar, Albert H. Munsell had developedan elegant system of color notation in the city of Boston. Thatsystem has become the universal standard by which colors arejudged. It should be the standard by which color theories arejudged. Professor Munsell sought to bring color description awayfrom whimsical and confusing names like 'Firecracker Red' and'Chinese Red' into a standardized language by which color could beaccurately specified. He succeeded in doing much more than that.
Munsell separated color into three fundamental components.The first dimension was HUE, "The quality by which we distinguishone color from another, as a red from a yellow, a green, a blue ora purple." He divided the hues into ten equal steps on a band. Theband was bent around to form a hoop---the Color Wheel. In namingthe Hues, he did not use names like Orange. What is commonlycalled orange, for example, he called yellow-red because it is amixture of those two primary hues.The second dimension of color is the easiest one tounderstand. VALUE is "The quality by which we distinguish a lightcolor from a dark one." The scale used to depict value is avertical pole divided into nine increments of neutral grey. A pureblack was added at the bottom and pure white added to the top.CHROMA describes the brilliancy or strength of a specific Hueat any given Value. By extending a scale horizontally from theneutral pole of the Value scale, an easily understood graphicrepresentation of Chroma Strength can be made. Red is at its mostbrilliant (has its highest Chroma Strength) at Value 5 on theneutral pole, it extends on the horizontal scale to its maximumChroma Strength of 10. As the horizontal scale approaches thepole, the colors become more and more grey until, at a ChromaStrength of 1, at become almost a pure grey. Shorthand notationsare used which first list an abbreviation of the Hue followed bythe Value and the Chroma Strength separated by a slash and statednumerically.The scientific principles upon which this system is basedare beyond question. Since the inception of the Munsell Color System,hundreds of new colors and pigments have been introduced. Without exception,all of them conform to the system's principles. That is; no color can behigher in Value than white or below the Value of black. Every new color has aHue name which can be precisely located on the Color Wheel. The variablescale of Chroma Strength can be logically extended to accommodate morebrilliant pigments as they become available. As an example, when ProfessorMunsell designed his system, the Red Hue at Value 5 attained its highestChroma Strength of 10 (the Munsell notation is R 5/10). How can the Munsellsystem accommodate the fluorescent pigments which were undreamt of in thebeginning of the century? Quite easily. The complete collection of HolbeinDesigner Gouache has a fluorescent color called 'Opera." Its Hue is describedas a 7RP, meaning a Red with a cool overtone. The Value is described as 5.5.Because of Opera's fluorescent pigment, its Chroma Strength is a whopping18.5, almost twice that of the original Value 5 Red. Opera's Munsell notationis the rather longish 7RP 5.5/18.5.Earlier, I stated that Professor Munsell achieved a greatdeal more than creating a neat system for cataloguing colors.Residing within his system is a well conceived plan for achievingcolor balance. In comparing the Chroma Strength of Value 5 Redwith the Chroma Strength of its visual complement, Value 5 BlueGreen, we can see that although the Chroma paths touch at theneutral pole, the Chroma Strength of Red extends to twice that ofBlue Green. If we mixed equal parts of Red with Blue Green wewon't get a perfectly neutral grey, but one in which the Redpredominates very decidedly. It would be like a tug-of-war withten men on one side, each representing a step of Chroma, and onlyfive on the other side.
Visualize a bar representing the five stepsof Chroma for Blue Green and the ten steps of Chroma for Red. If thebar rests upon a fulcrum at the neutral point it obviously willnot balance. But if we cut off steps 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 from theRed side of the bar, it will balance upon the fulcrum, or neutral grey. It isthis simplicity which is characteristic of the Munsell Systemthroughout.Of course, as artists, we don't want to be limited to usinghalf-strength reds in order to balance its complement. We musthave other means at our disposal for attaining balance. If ourpurpose was merely to make a neutral grey, we would use a greateramount of the weaker color. If we wish to produce a balanced andharmonious color design, we can employ a larger area of the weakercolor. If we do this in the correct proportions, relative to theChroma Strength of each color, we will attain balance. It's asthough we used ten blocks of the weaker Blue Green (BG 5/5) tobalance five blocks of Red (R 5/10).For the artist, all of these color theories have a majorshortcoming---they do not deal with artist's paints, especiallyopaque paints. Chevreul's admirable work was created primarily asan aid to the weavers at the Gobelin tapestry works. By layingsmall dots of color next to each other, like stitches of coloredthread, the Pointillists were able to make full use of histheories. On the other hand, mixing pigments on a palette does notproduce the same results. Thus, not all of Chevreul's theorieswere applicable to the pictorial painter.While it lies at the foundation of modern color theory,Munsell's color system does not easily accomodate itself to makingaccurate mixtures with artist's colors. Early in the 20th century,attempts were made to locate the complements of various artist'spigments. The Dudeen Color Triangle was one of those earlyattempts. The Dudeen Color Triangle was not widely acceptedbecause it was, to be frank...poorly designed. The Modular ColorSystem was another system designed to be used by artists. It wasan elegant and useful system designed by Nathaniel Jacobson andintroduced in 1975 by Liquitex. It consisted of a set of acrylicsformulated to have the highest Chroma Strength according to theirparticular Value. A set of Reds would range through the Valuescale from pale pink down to deep maroon. Aside from Red, theModular System included various values of Neutral Grey, Yellow,Green, Purple and Blue, all arranged according to their positionon the Value scale. It was very easy to use. Sadly, it was notgreeted with the success it deserved. Perhaps we artists needpoetic sounding color names, like Cadmium Red Light and LightPortrait Pink rather than R5 and R8.Color mixing was made much more understandable in 1989 withthe publication of Stephen Quiller's Color Choices. Quiller is anaccomplished landscape painter whose work is distinguished by hisexcellent use of color. He mixes color with his brains---and acolor wheel of his own invention. The Quiller Wheel is createdfrom actual artist's paints, not printer's inks. Thus, CadmiumOrange lies opposite Ultramarine Violet rather than the Munsellnotations of a 4 Yellow Red across from a 9 Purple Blue. Althoughthere are variations between manufactures, the true complements ofartist's paints are located on the opposite side of the wheel---nomore color shifts resulting in 'mystery mud'. Quiller's colorwheel is the foundation for an easy-to-understand color course.Landscape painting offers great latitude for demonstratinga variety of spectacular color effects. Landscape offers far greater latitude thanthat is allowed by the subject matter of most illustrations---people and products. Still, Quiller's sensible approach to colormixing makes this book one of the most useful books the painter orillustrator can own.During Hans Holbein's day, color theory was a moot point. Youjust couldn't build much of a theory around a palette with onlyhalf-a-dozen colors. As more colors became available and the useof color became more than merely tinting monochrome pictures,color became the subject of serious study. But that study wasalways done by the practitioners---the artists. Rubens certainlydidn't need a theorist to tell him that blue was calming, red wasenervating and yellow could be cheerful.Over the centuries new colors were slowly added to thepalette. But with the discovery of aniline dyes in the 1850's arainbow of brilliant colors exploded onto the market---colorswhich found their first use in women's fashions. What followed wasa demand for portraits of women wearing those brightly hueddresses. That in turn, created a demand for paint manufacturers toproduce the brighter pigments needed to adequately depict thosenew fashions. It was this bright palette of colors that theImpressionists and the Pre-Raphaelites inherited.Fortunately, techniques for the practical employment of colorin pictorial (not abstract) paintings has been passed on to us bynumerous illustrators and painters. Howard Pyle, Harvey Dunn,Norman Rockwell, Andrew Loomis and Frank Reilly are a few of theworking artists who wrote extensively concerning the effective useof color in painting. Their approach to pictorial painting wasbased on the observations we all make when observing nature. Theybelieved that, if in looking out a window you saw an area of greensituated below a large expanse of blue, you'd be right in assumingthe green represented grass and the blue was that of the sky. Ifyou looked out the same window and saw blue on the bottom andgreen on top, you might suspect that someone had turned your houseupside-down. Despite newer theories, we still hold those truths to be self-evident.
The use of color in pictorial paintings derives from equallysimple observations of nature. The information resulting fromthose observations is known to everyone, not only artists. If youdrew a picture of a person with one too many fingers, the mistakewould be obvious to anyone. Like the odd products of Bauhaus colortheories, drawings of six-fingered people just won't convince mosthumans. Of course there will always be a self-proclaimed elite whocan persuade themselves into seeing The Emperor's New Clothes, butthe rest of us still remain unconvinced and, like Queen Victoria, not amused.I won't try to persuade you that learning to use color iseasy. It's not---but following these suggestions will help keepyour paint clean and bright.First: always keep your brushes clean. Use copious amounts ofwater or solvent to clean your brushes. Dirty brushes (and dirty water or solvent)will turn the brightest color mousy and dull.Second: do not allow the colors on your palette to run intoeach other. Be especially careful that you do not dip into acolor with a brush which contains another color.
Third: Keep your eye on the white paint on your palette. Ifyour brush is contaminated, it will show up here first.Fourth: use your grey card to compare the values of yourcolor mixtures. The grey card helps you to get it right thefirst time, thus avoiding an overworked picture. Properlychosen values are the key to convincing color.Fifth: get a color wheel. It will make order out of thechaos. Grumbacher's Color Computer is handy because it helpsyou to find direct, split and triadic complementaryharmonies. It also shows tints (colors mixed with white),tones (colors mixed with grey), and shades (colors mixed withblack). Far and away the artist's most useful color wheel isthe Quiller Wheel, of which we spoke earlier.Sixth: your palette is one of your most important tools. 90%of an artist's work is done on the palette; tones and colorsare tried out, as well as the thickness or thinness of thepaint. The palette must be kept clean and organized becauseit is where you do your thinking. Your painting can be nobetter than your palette.
PAINTING WITH COLOR: The Short CourseRather than approach color as though it was some sort ofspecial science, let's approach it with the knowledge we'vealready developed as artists.* We know that, to be successful, all pictorial paintingsmust be based upon the structural truths of tone, light andshadow.* Color is not only subject to the same pictorial approachgoverning tone, light and shadow; but also to the effects ofatmosphere and reflected light.Colors and their Characteristics:In order to use color in a pictorial painting we must be ableto carry any color from its lightest value down to completedarkness. Although nature contains far darker darks andlighter lights, Black and White represents the extreme valuerange of opaque paints. Although any color can be lightenedor darkened with white or black, that method seldom producesthe most brilliant (highest Chroma Strength) color for anygiven value.YELLOW:Although you can get a wonderful richness by using Black tolower the value of Purple, using the same Black to lower thevalue of Yellow will produce, not a darker yellow but anOlive Green. However, lowering Yellow's value is easy onceyou understand that many of the earth colors like YellowOchre, Raw Sienna and Burnt Umber are just duller, darkeryellows. Because it is located near the top of the Value scale,the value of Yellow can only be raised with White.PURPLE:The various shades of Purple, or Violet are very important increating the shadow areas of its complement---Yellow. Don'tforget, Alizarin Crimson is a violet, not a red. AlizarinCrimson mixed with Pthalocyanine Blue produces a dark purple.Alizarin Crimson can also be mixed with a small amount ofPthalocyanine Green to produce a cool violet. AlizarinCrimson mixed with a Neutral Grey produces a wide range ofvery useful violet tones.RED:Red can be very difficult to paint with because so many redpigments have cool overtones which aren't apparent until youtry to mix them with other colors. Cadmium Red Medium andCadmium Red Deep turn almost violet when mixed with White.Until you're really familiar with your colors, use CadmiumRed Light for your bright red. When raising the value ofCadmium Red Light, mix a tiny touch of Orange into your whiteto keep it from getting cool. You can also use a premixed "Flesh" insteadof White to lighten your reds. In order to maintain thecharacter of Cadmium Red Light while lowering its value, mixit with Alizarin Crimson tempered with a bit of Burnt Umber.ORANGE:Cadmium Orange is the most useful orange pigment. It can bedarkened with Burnt Sienna and lightened with Flesh or NaplesYellow mixed with White.GREEN:Straight from the tube, Permanent Green Light is the highestchroma green. It's also difficult to use in pictorialpainting. Pthalocyanine Green is very dark but staysbrilliant when brought up in value with White.BLUE:Pthalocyanine Blue has extraordinary tinting strength. It'svery dark as it comes from the tube, but if you needadditional depth to your blue shadows, add Burnt Umber.Pthalocyanine Blue (Winsor & Newton calls theirs Winsor Blue)can be lightened with White. Be careful when mixing it withother colors because a little bit of Pthalocyanine Blue goesa long way.WHITE:Before we go any further, let's discuss the different typesof white paint and their proper uses. Titanium, or PermanentWhite should not be mixed with colors unless you want pale,chalky pastels. Titanium White is useful for creating opaquewhite passages against dark backgrounds. To lighten a colorto a clear and bright tint, it must be mixed with Zinc White.The virtual unavailability of Zinc White in acrylics accountsfor much of the chalkiness seen in pictorial acrylicpaintings when compared to oil and gouache paintings.Although gouache dries to a matte finish, gouache colorstinted with Zinc White show far greater brilliancy and depththan similar tints made with acrylics mixed with Titaniumwhite.BLACK:Just as some white pigments are better mixers, the same canbe said for blacks. Ivory Black is the most transparent ofthe blacks. It darkens colors without overwhelming them.
* Pictures which are built on a few basic values---a light,one or two middle tones, and a dark---seldom go dead.* Large amounts of pure, bright colors won't producebrilliant pictures. A patchwork of colors and values placedagainst each other, compete for attention and the brilliancyof the whole picture becomes reduced.* One primary plus its neighbors, opposed by itscomplementary will never go dead. These colors, supported byneutral and semi-neutral colors, plus black and white, willalways be brilliant...always.* Mix your colors from as few colors as possible. Every coloradded to a mixture reduces its brilliancy.* Large areas of color should be toned down with a complementor grey, in order to give other colors a chance. Remember theaxiom, "The larger the area, the softer the color needs tobe."
The size of a pictureeffects our perception of its color harmony. Bright colorscan be quite pleasant when used in a small color sketch, butwhen we use the same colors in the enlarged version, thecolors appear coarse. The reason lies in the limited numberof color cones in our retina. Because we have only so manycolor cones to register the different color vibrations, oureye tires quickly when scanning large areas of color. Theillustrator whose pictures are photographically reduced forreproduction should understand and exploit this phenomenon.A common cause of dead pictures is too much raw unrelatedcolor rather than not enough. Here are some ways to bring yourpicture back from the dead.* Trying greying all but two colors.* Tie your palette together by mixing a single color into allbut one or two of the other colors.* Create your pictures with simple tone plans consisting of alight tone, one or two middle tones, and a dark tone. Keep itsimple.* Reduce your palette to three or four basic colors fromwhich you'll mix all the rest. This is a lot easier and moreeffective than it sounds.* Don't put bright colors into your shadows.* Put your brightest colors into areas of light, especiallytransitional areas where light meets shadow.* Never use all three primaries in their pure state, in thesame picture. If they are there, that's your source oftrouble. Tone two of the primaries with the third one. Onlyone primary should dominate.* Introducing black, white or grey can help restore thebrilliancy of a picture which is too full of color. You haveto sacrifice color in one place to gain brilliancy elsewhere.* If the picture doesn't respond to any of the above, itmeans that the values are wrong. The overall relationship oflight to shadow has gone wrong. A color cannot be right untilits value is right.I know that much of this goes against what you think comprises goodcolor, but these aren't my rules...these are nature's rules. Stick yourhead out of the window. What do you see? If your studio is in the city,you'll likely see a lot of greys and dull browns. But if your studio isin the country, you'll still be looking at lots of greys and browns. Mostof the permanent things in the landscape; earth, tree trunks and rocksare greyed down colors. Except on golf greens, most grassy areas aregreyed or brownish greens. The bright colors are reserved for rare andfleeting effects; flowers, sunsets, fruits, feathers and the spectacularcolors of autumn. Those bright colors always appear to be at theirmaximum brilliance because they are surrounded and buffered byneutralized tonalities of themselves. Perhaps there's an important lessonawaiting on your next walk through the fields.
Light and Shadow:Outdoor light comes from the sun, not the sky. That's whysunlit highlights are warm, especially as we approach sunset. Theblue of the sky reflects into the shadows causing shadows toappear cooler than the lights.In a studio with a north facing window, the opposite is true.Because there is never any direct warm light from the sun, theblue of the sky reflects its cool light through the window.Because of optical contrast, the shadows appear warm. Your pictures will become livelyand lifelike if you remember to create a warm/cool interplaybetween, and within, your shadows and your lights.Shadows are affected by more than just the warm or coolreflections of the light source, thus we have the axiom, color isrelative to all surrounding influences. What this means is, theareas of a warm yellow cube illuminated by a warm light sourcewill get warmer and more intense, while the color on the coolshadow side will become neutralized. If we place the cube on ablue ground, that color will be reflected up into the shadow. Someof the blue would mix with the yellow causing the shadow to lookgreener than the above example. We call the actual color of anobject its "local" color. Yellow is the local color of the cubesused in our example. This brings us to yet another axiom, localcolor should never completely lose its identity in the shadow.All colors are modified by the conditions surrounding them.Warm light shining on a warm color will give it greater brilliancy. Thesame warm light shining on a cool color will subtract brilliancy.* When struck by light, all colors become a source ofreflected light and will reflect themselves into adjacentshadow areas.* All colors in shadow take on the reflected colors of theadjacent light struck area.* Any two colors become harmonious when one (or both) aremixed with some of the other.* No color can be more intense in shadow than it is in light.* Colors at their greatest intensity should be relegated tothe lights and halftones. In shadow, these colors should begreyed or neutralized---or changed by the influence of theadjacent colors.* The most brilliant colors are usually found in thehalftones.Although the painter's axiom of, greys make the picture hasmuch to recommend it, too many neutral greys can deaden a picture.Overly neutralized greys can be fixed by "spiking" them with thecolor they lean toward. Although this technique is particularlyeffective in the halftones, shadow colors can also be intensifiedto good effect. However, to avoid a gaudy and unconvincingpicture, greater delicacy and taste must be used when spikingshadows.Pre-mixed greys can be very useful to tone down colors without alteringtheir value. If we hold a color, let's say Flame Red, next to ourgrey card we see that it's between a Value 3 and a Value 4---mytube of Flame Red is a Value 3.5. By mixing increasing amounts ofgrey with the color, we can lower its intensity without changingits value. If you paint a square with the toned down mixture andplace a square of the pure color in the middle, the color willappear to be much more brilliant than if just painted on white.Experiment with varying proportions of grey and red. See how easyit is to create the effect of a glowing red area. If you squintyour eyes the differences between the pure color and grey willdisappear. Remember, if you photograph this with black and whitefilm, it will look like the entire square has been painted in aValue 3.5 grey.Colors which are direct complements, meaning they appeardirectly opposite each other on the color wheel, will usuallyneutralize each other if mixed together. The neutral and semi-neutral tones made by mixing direct complements are called visualgreys. One of the best known combinations is Alizarin Crimson andViridian. The chart shows three values of a neutral mix at thetop. The three values in the middle are semi-neutrals favoringAlizarin Crimson. The three values at the bottom are semi-neutralsfavoring Viridian. The same system applies to the other examples.Learning to mix and use visual greys is one of the mostuseful skills a colorist can develop. I spent more than a yearpainting with nothing other than mixtures of Ultramarine and RawSienna. I never exhausted the possibilities offered by those twocolors. Painting with such a limited palette gave me a greaterappreciation of color. Again, this is something which must beexperienced firsthand. Pick two complementary colors and execute apainting. Although you may use a full range of values, you'llprobably not use the full range of color. This execise is a realeye-opener. I recommend it.Like many of the techniques in this chapter, the followingtechnique was first shown to me by Andrew Loomis in his classicbook Creative Illustration. Although the illustrations in Loomis'book may appear dated, his solid advice is timeless. In order togive you the flavor of Loomis' approach, I'll quote him directly."Here is one of the best ways in the world to obtainbrilliancy of color: Keep your color most intense on the edges ofthe lighted areas, where it merges into shadow. This seems to castan aura of additional color over the whole area. Just taking alocal color of the light and rubbing it into a darker color of theshadow (which most of us do, most of the time) produces nobrilliancy. It is apt to be just color in the light, then mud,then reduced color in the shadow. This is one of the least knownand least practiced truths." It also is one of the best and mostuseful pieces of advice I've ever received.That wraps up the our abbreviated introduction to colortheory and basic color principles. I hope that the information inthe beginning of this chapter saves you from wasting time withdead-end color theories that just don't work. Don't expect toabsorb everything after reading it just one time. Let it sink infor a while. Experiment by applying these principles to littlecolor sketches. If you run into any trouble, come back to consultthe "bullet points" in this chapter or Stephen Quiller's ColorChoices and Andrew Loomis' Creative Illustration. If I werelimited to owning just two books about color, these would be the two. | 2019-04-20T03:20:34Z | http://flatfigureart.blogspot.com/2007/06/color-theories.html |
Maybe it just seems that it has to be a simple process because the definition is simple. Or maybe people really just don’t care about the particulars despite having formed an evidence-based opinion. Either way, few layfolk actually understand the process and it’s not that difficult to understand. And when you fully understand it, it’s very easy to use to your advantage.
As with everything these days, there’s a firm dichotomy on what you should believe about detox. You either absolutely need to do it once a month or you’ll be sorry, or paying attention to it’s a complete waste of time. And there are opinions on both sides of the aisle that are flat wrong.
There’s a vast amount of evidence in the scientific literature on this topic, and for good reason. Pharmaceutical companies have spent bazillions of dollars researching it because pharmaceutical drugs are processed in the exact same way that toxic substances are. Even steroid hormones your own body makes are processed this way.
There is tremendous utility in understand the detoxification process if you are experiencing an unexplained set of symptoms or a chronic illness. There are numerous components of processed as well as unprocessed whole foods that can change the way your body interacts with “toxins” as well as pharmaceutical drugs.
Both drugs and toxins are referred to as xenobiotics, molecules that are not native to your own body. Typically these xenobiotics are processed and sent packing by the 3 phases of detoxification, but many seemingly innocuous foods can alter these processes.
A great example is grapefruit, which is known to inhibit an enzyme that carries out the “detoxification” of many toxins and pharmaceutical drugs. As a result, many drugs carry a warning against the consumption of grapefruit because it can causes a dangerous accumulation of the drug in your blood.
Another great one is polysorbate 80, a common emulsifier used in processed foods. Polysorbate 80 inhibits a highly used transporter responsible for removing toxins from cells(1). Polysorbate 80 has also been shown to induce colitis in mice(2).
In my opinion, some food intolerances may not be due to an intolerance specifically to that food. Instead, certain components of food may interact with the detoxification process causing an accumulation of xenobiotics that may cause a bad reaction. Understanding detoxification and how your diet interacts with it may answer some questions you’re having problems answering.
Despite the piles of evidence on how the detoxification process works, people still hold incorrect opinions on how it can help them. For those who believe it’s worthless, the only harm is their ignorance on the subject. But to others trying to get rid of an unexplained illness, it can bring greater symptom flares and false hope.
So rather than wax poetic on the topic, let’s dig in. We’ll start with how toxins enter the body.
Every day we’re exposed to a boatload of toxins. Many believe this is a product of the modern world, but our ancestors were exposed to a boatload of toxins as well. The toxins they were exposed to were different, but they were toxic nonetheless. While yesteryear’s toxins were typically bacterial, plant, or animal in origin, today’s toxins tend to be from plastics, pesticides/herbicides, and household and beauty products.
Whether you’re being exposed to toxic chemicals from a flame retardant mattress or a toxin secreted by some bacterium that’s overgrowing in your gut, the process of detoxification is the same. Actually, if we want to be technical, what’s happening isn’t actually detoxification it’s biotransformation, but you probably don’t care about that.
Ultimately toxins are removed from the body in the feces, urine, and sweat. These substances are all water-based, so water-soluble toxins are sent packing efficiently by each of those methods.
Another “bonus” of water-soluble toxins is that you don’t tend to absorb them very well. The lungs, gut, and skin are all water-tight barriers composed of cells with a fatty cell membrane. This means that anything water-soluble remains out of the blood unless the cells making up these barriers have transporters or channels that bring them in to cells.
For example, many water-soluble vitamins have transporters that carry them in to cells. Sodium and glucose have transporters that carry them in to cells. Almost anything physiologically important to you that’s water-based has a specific transporter that carries it in to or across the cell. This doesn’t mean that water-soluble toxins can’t get in, but if they do they’re easy to get rid of anyway because they’re already water soluble.
But what about fat-soluble toxins, what’s the deal with them? Fat-soluble toxins that are small enough can freely enter cells because they can diffuse through the fat-based cell membrane. This isn’t an ideal situation.
When a fat-soluble toxins enters a cell it can damage them or even kill it. They can also traverse through a cell and into the blood if not caught in time. Fortunately we have a pretty solid means of dealing with them, both at the organ and cellular level.
For simplicity sake, let’s pick a typical route of toxin exposure, the gut. Let’s say you have some form of bacterial overgrowth in your gut and this bacteria is secreting a fat-soluble toxin. If it were water-soluble it would come in to contact with the epithelial cells that form your gut wall and get turned away. But since it’s fat-soluble, it just diffuses through the membrane and enters the cell.
The epithelial cells that make up the gut wall are pretty excellent at what they do. They, along with cells of the liver, are the best equipped to deal with fat soluble toxins because the cellular machinery is there in spades.
If everything goes peachy-keen, the gut cell converts the fat soluble toxin in to a water-soluble molecule and pumps it back in to the gut to be removed in the feces. Since it’s now water-soluble, it can no longer enter cells of your gut. Bacteria can muck up the process by deconjugating the toxin so that it’s fat-soluble again, but we’ll cover that in a later blog.
This process is great, but not 100% efficient. Some fat-soluble toxins manage to slip through the gut cell and enter the blood. Luckily, the vein they happen to enter just so happens to go directly to the liver, the portal vein.
Once in the liver, the fat-soluble toxin enters cells there and gets converted into a water-soluble molecule. From there it either enters the gallbladder and gets secreted back in to the gut via the bile or enters the circulation and leaves in the urine.
Again, not an infallible system but a great system nonetheless. The problem is you can absolutely exceed this systems ability to process fat soluble toxins many ways. First, a leaky gut not only removes the barrier, but it also removes the first line of cells that would process the fat-soluble toxin.
Second, inflammation in the gut inhibits the detoxification process. We know this happens because people with inflammatory bowel disease have defective detoxification pathways and have altered metabolism of pharmaceutical drugs.
Third, certain food components can inhibit different phases of detoxification. For example, grapefruit can inhibit phase 1 detoxification as well as phase 3. Turmeric can inhibit phase 1 detoxification as well, which we’ll cover a little later.
Finally, certain nutrients power all of these processes and they’re not infinitely available. Relying on specific pathways too much can deplete your ability to use that pathway. There are 3 phases of detoxification and each phase has multiple pathways to deal with a specific toxin.
For example, the second phase involves adding something to the toxin to make it water soluble. If you’re chronically exposed to something that relies on a specific pathway, and some other toxin exclusively uses the same pathway as well, that toxin can accumulate. And even though your trainer told you that the accumulation of toxins doesn’t happen, we inarguably know that it does. Let’s take a look at how.
In general, many toxins accumulate basically everywhere. I don’t mean everywhere in the human body, I mean everywhere in the world. These toxins accumulate in the soil, food chain, and even in the fat tissue of animals. Since they don’t biodegrade, they are often referred to as persistent organic pollutants(POPs).
Since these toxins don’t biodegrade, they accumulate in the soil. Since plants get their nutrition from the soil, many of these make their way in to the plant and some simply get consumed when an animals consumes the soil surrounding a plant. A great example of this is polychlorinated biphenyls, which were banned in 1979 but are still found in the soil and food chain.
These POPs are fat soluble, so they tend to accumulate in the fat of animals. So when you eat that hamburger that was once a cow that grazed on land containing PCBs, you absorb the PCB metabolites that cow had stored in its fat tissue. And when you kick the bucket and bacteria degrade you, the PCB makes its way back in to the soil.
So you are exposed to a significant number of toxins through the food chain. Once these fat soluble toxins enter your gut, they need to be processed or shunted away in fat before they pile up in the blood and overload the liver. But where’s the evidence that this happens?
Multiple lines of evidence point to the accumulation of toxins in fat tissue. First, studies that have sampled human fat tissue find the presence of pesticide residue metabolites(3, 4) and plastics(5, 6). If the gut and liver were completely capable of processing these toxins, we wouldn’t find them stored away in fat tissue.
But that’s not all. Over time, these toxins are slowly released in to the bloodstream from fat tissue, at levels tolerable to us, for further processing. The ultimate goal is to cnvert them in to water-soluble metabolites and send them packing. Unfortunately, if you’re trying to lose weight, the metabolism of fat tissue that happens with fat loss can cause these toxins to get released more rapidly(7, 8).
Even if you thought these studies were fraught with tainted samples, there’s a common example of how this happens. When you take a drug test for a job, the test relies on this process to determine if you’ve used marijuana recently.
THC, the active component of marijuana, is fat-soluble. Since it’s fat-soluble, it shows up in your urine for days to months after you last used it. That’s because it gets stored away in your fat cells and released over time, as mentioned above. Once released, it goes to the liver, gets converted to something that’s water soluble, re-released into the blood or lymph, and dumped in the urine.
So the test isn’t only measuring whether you’ve smoked marijuana, it’s also measuring how effectively you use that particular set of detoxification pathways. You pee in a cup and pass or fail depending on the efficacy of the 3 phase detoxification process. Factors that determine this are how much fat you carry, how often you smoke marijuana, how long it’s been since you last smoked, and how well these pathways are running.
This system is fantastic in its simplicity and is no different whether you’re dealing with pot, pesticides, or plastics. So let’s further examine the 3 phase process of detoxification.
Going back to our example of a bacterial overgrowth secreting a toxin, let’s look at the precise ways that this toxin gets dealt with. The first step in understanding begins once the fat-soluble toxin diffuses through the cell membrane and into the cell.
In this illustration, ligand refers to something that binds to a receptor. For our purposes, ligand refers specifically to a fat-soluble toxin. Other potential ligands include pharmaceutical drugs, hormones, metabolites from commensal bacteria, and certain components found in food.
Pregnane X receptor(PXR)-Ligands include many pharmaceutical drugs and pesticides, endogenous steroid hormones, bile acids, and antibiotics.
Constitutive androstane receptor(CAR)-Ligands include certain pharmaceutical drugs and pesticides, DHEA, bilirubin, bile acids, and phenobabrital.
Aryl hydrocarbon receptor(AHR)-Ligands include components of plastics and bilirubin.
All 3 receptors also have ligands that bind polyphenols in food and metabolites from commensal bacteria. These receptors are held in the cytoplasm until a ligand binds to them. Upon binding, the receptors carry the ligand to the nucleus and initiate some combination of the 3 phases of detoxification.
Once the receptor chaperones the ligand to the nucleus, gene expression is altered in a way that promotes the conversion of the fat-soluble ligand in to a water-soluble molecule and removes it from the cell. This is done by upregulating genes that perform the 3 phases of detoxification.
Phase 1 detoxification(Oxidation, reduction and hydrolysis)-Phase 1 detoxification is mostly carried out by cytochrome p450(CYP450) enzymes, of which humans have 43 different types. Each CYP450 metabolizes a specific set of xenobiotics. Ligands can activate and/or deactivate a number of CYP450 enzymes when carried to the nucleus. The purpose of phase 1 detoxification is to make the ligand more water-soluble or to make it compatible with phase 2 detoxification. Sometimes, the products of phase 1 detoxification are actually more toxic than the original ligand, but they are either more water-soluble or compatible with phase 2.
Phase 2 detoxification(Conjugation)-Phase 2 detoxification involves conjugation of the ligand with a charged substrate. The 6 processes that are involved in phase 2 detoxification are methylation, sulphation, acetylation, glucuronidation, glutathione conjugation, and glycine conjugation. Depending on the ligand bound to the receptor, the appropriate phase 2 enzyme is induced to turn the ligand fully water-soluble and non-toxic. The particular enzyme that gets induced depends on the shape of the molecule being compatible with the particular enzyme. Ligands can either directly enter phase 2 if they have the proper conformation or must enter phase 1 first to make them compatible.
Phase 3 detoxification(Transport)-After phase 2 detoxification, the product molecule is fully water-soluble and can be released from the cell. During phase 3 detoxification, the molecule binds to a transport receptor that kicks the molecule out of the cell and either in to the bloodstream or back in to the gut. P-glycoprotein, one of the primary phase 3 transporters, is responsible for pumping toxins back in to the gut for elimination in feces. It also sends toxins from the liver in to the gallbladder for excretion in bile.
So, as you can see, the basics of detoxification at the cellular level are actually quite simple. First, a fat-soluble xenobiotic diffuses across the cell membrane of a cell and enters the cytoplasm. Once there, it floats around until it comes in to contact with a receptor that binds it. Once bound to the receptor, the xenobiotic is chaperoned to the nucleus where some combination of the 3 phases of detoxification turn it water-soluble and spit it out.
If everything worked out perfectly, cells would literally spit out toxins as they encounter them. Unfortunately that’s almost never the case. Some toxins can accumulate in the blood or tissues, which is in agreement with findings showing metabolites of toxins in fat tissue.
Sometimes toxins get through the gut and liver, or enter through the skin or lungs. Fortunately many cell types express a high level of xenobiotic receptors to help prevent major problems. The lungs, liver, gut, and kidneys are all highly capable of transforming fat-soluble toxins in to water-soluble metabolites and kicking them out of the body.
A toxin may begin transformation in the gut, make it to the liver, and enter the general circulation only to be kicked out in the urine via the kidneys. A toxin may somehow bypass all security systems and make it in to cells of the blood brain barrier where it binds PXR and gets kicked out by P-glycoprotein. Some toxins, particularly ones absorbed through the skin like bisphenol A(BPA), may get partially metabolized, stored away in fat, and released when you sweat(9).
You encounter many toxins every day and each is dealt with in a specific manner. In general, I don’t think this is something you need to go crazy over. However, if you have a reason to believe you have symptoms that are caused by an accumulation of toxins, the standard cleanse/detox approach is probably not the best option.
It would be great if optimizing detoxification were as simple as throwing a bunch of turmeric at it, but it’s nowhere near that simple. In fact, I consider turmeric/curcumin a perfect example of why the general shotgun approach is probably not the best for most people.
Curcuminoids, the active constituents of turmeric, activate the pregnane X receptor and induce phase 2 detoxification. This is great, but at the same time they block phase 1 detoxification. In this situation, turmeric will speed up the processing of toxins that can go right in to phase 2 detoxification, but impede the detoxification of toxins that must go through phase 1 detoxification first.
Another problem with turmeric is that it’ s typically taken with piperine to enhance absorption from the gut. On their own, curcuminoids are quickly “detoxified” in epithelial cells and spit back in to the gut by P-glycoprotein. Piperine works by blocking P-glycoprotein, which is probably not something you want to do if you’re trying to prevent the absorption of toxins from the gut. It’s great for improving the absorption of turmeric from the gut, though.
Overall, you have a pretty good capacity to detoxify the many xenobiotic compounds you come in to contact with. Despite this fact, toxins can become problematic and accumulate in the blood and fat. During periods of fasting and weight loss, these toxins can be slowly released in to the blood and affect physiology. This is particularly concerning for endocrine disruptors such as BPA and PCBs which mimic hormones.
This by no means gives credence to the popular cleanses/detoxes that precede many diet programs. Throwing a bunch of random nutrients that all induce and inhibit different detoxification enzymes probably won’t do much, and even if it does it’s probably as likely to create a problem than to solve it.
Did this blog scratch an itch? Are you looking for something a little more…usable for you? Well, I’m thinking of generating a pre-tox checklist, basically a to-do list to get started on using the science of detoxification to your advantage.
Buuuut…I need a little motivation. You see, it takes a loooooooooong time to write these blogs and I want my readership up. So, I just need you to do 2 things to motivate me. First, like my facebook page here. Second, share this article from there so others can read it.
I have a number of “likes” and “shares” in my head that I want to reach. If I hit that number, I’ll make this pre-tox checklist public. If not, I feel like I gotta pay you somehow…So I’ll send it to anyone who likes the page and shares the article. I’ll give it 2 weeks, so please, like and share.
Hey Karen, I never really saw any interest so I never moved forward with the pre-tox checklist. What is it you are looking to do and maybe I can point you in the right direction if I have any blogs to help? At this point I’ve moved most of my private blogs public that would contain that info so everyone has access. Thanks for reading and sharing!
Thank you for this very insightful article and great website too. You’ve really done a great job and research for this topic about detoxification. Good job. | 2019-04-19T17:23:29Z | https://hackyourgut.com/2017/03/21/the-ultimate-guide-to-understanding-detoxification/ |
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Give your car the performance appearance and edge you have been looking for with the CorkSport Lowering Springs for the 2004-2009 and 2010-2013 Mazda 3. By reducing ride height approximately 2.25" in the front and 1.75" in the rear, adding the CorkSport Lowering Springs to your Mazda 3 will result in a quicker turning response, crisper road feel, a more aggressive appearance, and a firmer spring rate, all while maintaining excellent ride quality.
I really love the lowering range these springs gives to my 2012 Mazda3 2.5 sedan. My front and rears are equally lowered. If I drive through a bump, or hole too fast my shocks will bottom out. Lastly, I hear clunking noises on the front when I turn my wheel even sitting still. My mechanic wants to charge me to install some rubber silencers to place on top and bottom of the front springs.
***CorkSport Reply: Joel give us a call, the sound is not normal and should be pretty easy to fix without the rubber silencers.
I've had my lowering springs on my 2013 mazda 3 for about a year now. In the beginning they were great, rode smooth, a nice functional drop. Only issue I'm having now is they're all making noises. Had my car up on a lift and the rear passenger spring is 'loose' feeling, can squeeze it easily. Not too sure what could be wrong, any ideas??
***CorkSport Reply: Heather give us a call, the sound is not normal and should be pretty easy to fix.
I have a 2010 Mazda 3 sport GS 2.5l, and Iam running a 17x8.5 rim with 45 offset and a 255 40r17 Good Year Eagle Sport tire. I had to roll the fenders in the back and the tire easily tucks under heavy load so I have no issues with the back. My question is for the front, my tire is almost to the outside edge of the fender but since there is not much suspension travel/ room into the wheel well on the front right now it's fine. will this spring cut down on suspension travel? and do the front tires on other cars with this spring tend to tuck in past the top the fender opening? Also I noticed the mazdaspeed lowering springs don't lower as much, would that spring work on a Mazda 3?
I have a 2011 Mazda 3 with 18x8 wheels with a 40mm offset and 215/40/18 tires. Will these fit on my car?
I have a 2010 Mazda 3 2.5l with rally armor mud flaps and stock everything else, will these fit and have any sort of rubbing on the fender or when I turn will the tire rub on the struts or the new springs?
These springs are great and easy to install. It took about 2 hours and the car was back on the ground and ready to go. When I read how much these springs dropped the car I was excited, but I was totally blown away when the car was put back on the ground. The springs completely closed the wheel cap to credit card fitment in the front, and I'm not running a crazy big wheel in the front. (18 x 9 with a 235/45 18) wasn't expecting that much of a drop. The rears on the other hand were disappointing after seeing how much they dropped the front. There is still a two finger gap in the rear. Wish corksport had the option to upload pictures, because I'd have some up for you guys.
I'm looking into purchasing 17x7.5 with a 35 offset for my 2012 3 hatchback with about 33,000 miles. Will I need to roll any fenders? And should I look into purchasing new shocks/structs? They are currently stock.
Will these springs lower my 2007 Mazda 3 to much where I cant get over speed bumps or scrape everywhere?
Fast shipping. I've never installed springs before but I'm mechanically inclined. All I needed was a spring compressor I rented from auto zone and with the very detailed instructions and pictures this was a very easy installation took me about 4-5 hours and the car sits and rides nicely. Very happy with the purchase. Also recommend getting the skid plate for the Mazda 3. The $280 it costs is cheaper the mashing out your oil pan or other crucial under body parts lol.
Would the stock wheels fit or would i have to get aftermarket wheels with the springs?
Do you need to install a camber kit with the lowering springs? It won't effect the tires if i don't install the kit right?
Would this fit Megan's street series coils?
This is the ride height it should of had from the factory. I was given a stern reminder of why I call the spring compressor tool I have the kiss of death. Only almost died once when the tool gave way, and the spring went flying past my head. Can't use the front central jack point anymore, too low for my floor jack, found that out when I took it off jack stands. As for pounding off the steering knuckle to free the front struts - don't, I don't even do that at the dealership when customers need new shocks/springs. I take the lower control arm off instead, and remove the knuckle/strut as one piece, then use a shop press to remove the strut from the knuckle. I did this for looks only, shouldn't comment on performance gain, because I can't tell a difference from stock springs vs. these. I already had stiffer shocks, stiffer sway bars. It's a perfect drop, passes the shoe test with flying colors.
Dropped my '10 gt. Rears seemed to be high on the sedan at first but now that everything's settled the wheel gap is gone and looks sweet. Camber in rear was just at acceptable limits for alignments so no need to buy toe or camber arms! Besides being nice and low taking off-ramps at 50 and keeping flat is fun too.
Recently installed these springs on a 2012 skyactiv.
I didn't want to slam it and also didn't want a bone jarring set up with every bump in the road and this has met both expectations.
The drop is very ascetically pleasing and leaves enough ground clearance for street use without worry of scraping etc. Also the increased spring rate is just enough to get excess roll out in the corners without being unreasonably stiff for long rides.
In summary. If the ground clearance leaves a bit to be desired, you want to tweet your set up for a little less roll without a harsh setup then I'd highly recommend these springs.
Replacement of the springs alone is a very economical choice.
Will it fit on a 2011 mazda 3, 2.5?
Installed back in January, and love the way my 2010 hatch sits now. I'm going to be going lower soon though.
Rides awesome! I have a 2009 sedan and the front dropped really well, however I parked next to a stock height 3 and saw no difference in the back... I'm assuming this is because one, the back is a lot lighter than the front and two, the rear springs weren't very different from the height of my stock rear springs. All in all it looks decent, rides really well though!
CorkSport Reply:Give it a little more time on the rears to settle and lower.
if i put this on my 2011 sedan is the drop going to look like the pic?
I have a 2004 sedan with 225/40 r18 wheels,, I was wondering if install the Corksport lowering springs will I need a wheel alignment?
CorkSport Reply:Check out our FAQ tab for this product listing for an answer to this question.
I have an 05 sedan, I also have continental DWS tires. Not the thinnest profile. I measured out 2.25" and it goes a little over the tire. Should I camber to be safe?
CorkSport Reply:Check out our FAQ for the answer to this.
What makes corksport lowering springs a better choice than eibach sportline springs aside from the drop height?
would these fit fine on a 2012 mazda 3 skyactiv? would i need any other purchases besides the springs?
Does it settles in more?
If I put these springs on my Mazda 3 2012, will I have to line up my wheels after?
If we buy these springs will it wear out the shocks quicker? I heard lowering springs can possibly damage the shocks..
Do they fit the skyactiv mazda3?
Will these fit a 2014 Mazda 3 sedan?
do you ship to Canada? ?
will i need to buy the chamber kit with these springs.
would these fit or would there be rubbing?
Do I have to buy sport struts to go along with the lowering spring?
Hey there, i'm considering these VS pro kit/Road Magnets for my 12' SkyActiv Sadan, are these linear or progressive?
I have a 2006 Mazda 3 sedan with Mazdaspeed 3 (first gen) wheels. Would the regular Mazda 3 lowering springs work or should I get the ones for the speed 3 instead?
I have a 2007 Mazda 3i with fresh oem shocks and struts all over. Do you know if these springs will ruin the factory shocks with this amount of drop? What shocks does corksport suggest to use with these springs? Also will i be able to align my car or do i need to buy any other parts?
Hey guys. Will I need to get new camber arms if I use these springs on my 2013 skyactiv sedan with 12,000 miles?
I want to order these springs but is there any additional mods I need to do if I have 18x8 +42 rims with 225/40 tires?
Just put a set of tenzo wheels on my '12 Skyactiv. They're 18x8 +40 just wondering if I'd have any issues with the drop theses springs give combined with my wheel dimensions? Thanks in advance!
What size are those RPF1's on the image?
would i require the camber plate to properly align my vehicle after the purchase of the CorkSport Strut and Spring setup?
I see that you don't need anything else besides the springs, but are anti-roll bars recommended with these? And how is the ride compared to stock?
I own a 2011 mazda 3 2.0 and my question was if I put these springs on my car will it be too low for the winter snow as I live in Canada. Also will it fit for my summer tires : 225/40/18 with 50mm offset.
Own 2012 mazda 3 sky active with 20 inch rims... will springs make tires rub??
Would these fit 235/45R17 tires?
Will these fit if my wheels are 18x8.75?
I am running 215/60/r16. Will these rub?
Good idea for my 2012 mazda 3 sky activ with 15,000 miles?
Will these fit 2011 Mazda 3 sport hatch?
What are the spring rates for these springs?
i own a 2013 mazda 3 2.0 liter and has 10000 miles on it. Do you think it would fit to my car?
Will i need to buy a set of adjustable camber arms along with the springs to make the ride alignment better? Or will i be fine with just the springs?
Considering buying these for my 2010 3s 2.5L. What wheel and tire size would you recommend for best fitment and reliability?
CorkSport Reply: Give us a call, 360-260-2675.
CorkSport Reply:No they will not.
Installed these springs on M3 2012 1.6L 4DR with 215/45/17 tyre.
Have the wheel aligned & balanced.
10-20mph drive I felt vibration/shaking during acceleration on the front.
Any idea what caused the vibration/shaking?
Hey, just out of curiosity...do you think that these springs will be ok for track use every once in a while? Also, is there a reason why the front looks lower than the rear?
CorkSport Reply:They would be fine for a track day if you have some upgraded dampers to use.
Set of 2 or 4?
CorkSport Reply:It is a set of 4 springs, 2 front and 2 rear.
Are these springs compatible with a 2004 3 sedan?
Will i need a camber kit to go along with these springs since the drop is so low? i drive a 2013 SA Mazda 3 with 1k miles..
CorkSport Reply:They should work great.
CorkSport Reply:They would fit but the spring rate would be a little out of whack, the Mazdaspeed 3 is heavier. Check out our Mazdaspeed 3 specific springs for the correct fitment.
Will i need to purchase anything else besides the springs for a 2013 3 hatchback SA with 16 inch rims?
CorkSport Reply:No. Last we checked Mazda 3s in California are the same as the rest of the US so you should be good.
Will it still be at a functional height? can I still get up curbs/speed bumps alright?
Will these also work on 09 models and with koni struts?
I'm here in Australia and the legal lowest height is about 110mm, installing these will the height still be within limits?
CorkSport Reply:with the stock body yes you should be fine. If you fit an aftermarket body kit you are on your own.
Hi! I just received my order, it arrived 2 days earlier than expected. and the springs seems in very good condition, really excited to see them installed on my car. I'll post a picture of it for everyones reference. I really hope it'll work fine.
CorkSport Reply: Yes it will.
Is the image shown in this item's description is how the car will be lowered after installing this springs?
how will it be relatively to the image shown?
CorkSport Reply:The car shown has the CorkSport Springs installed on it so your results should be similar.
Any suggestions to add to these? 2011 Mazda 3 2.0L sedan. ~19,000 miles. I'll need the recon sticker, but should anything else be changed? Everything is stock. If nothing needs to be changed, when should I look for signs of wear and tear?
CorkSport Reply:Give us a call for details.
I just ordered a set, Hope it'll fit exactly with no problem, and will lower my car close to how it is described here. Thanks.
CorkSport Reply: With 81,000 miles the stock struts are probably worn out and need to be changed regardless of new springs or not.
I am planning on purchasing these as well as 215/45 r17 wheels. Will it rub or anything? I have a mazda 3 2013 itouring skyactiv.
CorkSport Reply:If the offset is not to aggressive they should be fine.
CorkSport Reply:The springs will fit the 2013 Mazda 3. With 59k on your Mazda 3 I would look at replacing the struts/shocks as well at the same time. We do ship to Dubai.
Will i need to roll my fenders?
CorkSport Reply:With stock wheels no. If you get some crazy offset aftermarket wheels possibly.
If I purchase ur springs for my 2013 mazda 3 I skyactive is there anything else I would need to purchase to avoid problems?
CorkSport Reply:You should be good.
I have an xxr 552 with 18x8.5 and tires 225/40/18. would this set up fit?
CorkSport Reply:It depends on the wheel offset. You may need to roll the rear fenders if the offset is too aggressive.
I just installed the springs on stock struts on my 2013 3i with 800 miles, typically how long can you expect to see out of these on oem struts before having to replace them? Roads are pretty flat here.
CorkSport Reply: I would check them out at 30k to see how they are doing.
What are the specs of the Rpf1's in the display picture?
CorkSport Reply: We do not have the specs, it is a customer submitted picture.
Will these fit a 2013 mazda 3 itouring skyactiv with a set 18x8 with 40 offset rims and will i need anything else?
CorkSport Reply:If you choose the correct tire they should work. You may need to run a rear set of camber arms if the factory alignment has too much positive camber to get some extra clearance.
1-Do you springs control bounce better than my OEM's?
2-Do i need bumper stops for bottoming?
3-Using the stock 17" alloy, what is the max width size I can go in tire size without rubbing wheelwell?
would there be negative camber ? or need a camber kit for these springs ?
- how much of a wheel gap will be left for the front and rear on a 2012 mazda 3 hatch skyactiv stock wheels.? and there is no rubbing right?
CorkSport Reply:There is no rubbing unless you are running an aftermarket wheel with a crazy offset.
CorkSport Reply:It depends on road conditions where you live on how long the factory shocks will last.
2012 mazda 3 skyA, 16,000 miles on it do i need to buy anything regarding struts, dampers before i install the springs?
CorkSport Reply: You should be ok. Road conditions do play a factor on how long your factory struts last.
i have a 2012 mazda 3 skyAct, and i was wondering if i would need to roll my fender or purchase a camber kit due to the lowering height of 2.25 and 1.75? plus when lowered will the front and back be at an even height?
I have a 2013 m3 skyactive thats not even a month old. My concern is that will I have to do any type of alinement Ex: camber to the car once the springs are installed or is just and install and go type of situation.
CorkSport Reply: You will need to get an alignment after installation to correct the toe in the front suspension.
hi i have mazda 3 2012 skyactiv this springs are going to fit on my car? i need to buy something else or just the springs?
CorkSport Reply:Yes they fit great.
This is an excellent product. I love these springs. An amazing noticeable drop! Thanks corksport!
Hi, I have 2012 skyactiv sedan, and I have fitted 20"x8.5 with offset of 35 and car has 20k miles. I was wondering if I would encounter any problems such as rubbing, bad camber, or need replace struts. I just want to make sure nothing goes wrong once installed.
I'm coming up on 35k miles on my 2011 Mazda 3 2.5, do I need to replace any other parts or can I just install these springs?
CorkSport Reply:Depending on road conditions you may or may not need to replace the struts and shocks based on the milage you have. If you want to be safe change the struts with you install the springs.
I have 2012 mazda 3 1.6 4dr, are these springs will work? or any recommendation.
CorkSport Reply:The springs will fit the 1.6 models but we are unsure of the amount they will lower compared to the North American models.
I read that you can drive with this drop of about 2 inches (average) with stock shocks/struts with low mileage vehicles; how does 20k miles sound?
CorkSport Reply:It depends on how the roads are in your area.
Are these springs going to fit my 2013 3i?
CorkSport Reply:There is no correct answer for your question, it comes down to what you want for function and style.
Are these springs a complete set of 4?
CorkSport Reply:We recommend an alignment with the installation of the springs. The toe at a minimum needs to be adjusted.
i have a 2010 mazda 3 hatchback with 48000 mil, can i just put these springs on right away or do i need something else?
CorkSport Reply: With 48,000 miles we would recommend installing the springs with new dampers.
Will this fit my 2013 Skyactiv and how low will it drop it?
CorkSport Reply:Yes they will fit the Skyactiv models and they will lower the car 2.25 front and 1.75 rear.
Im currently running the tein s techs on my 2004 sedan, will these drop it lower?
CorkSport Reply:The drop between the two springs should be similar.
I've got a 2008 Mazda 3 sport would these springs go straight on with no other parts got 27000 on the clock?
CorkSport Reply: If you stock struts are in good shape still then yes. If you are in doubt on them change out the struts too.
What size wheel and tire combo are you using on the vehicle in the picture? I was looking a 18" Motegi MR120 with 45mm offset and want to make sure they fit with this lowering kit. Thanks.
Would I have to replace any shocks or struts while installing these? Also would the springs wear them down quicker? I have a 2013 mazda 3 2.0 skyactiv with 3850 miles on it.
CorkSport Reply: We have found on low mileage vehicles you can install the springs on the stock struts for street driving.
Just had them installed, took 2 and a half hours, the front suspension was way harder than the rear but in the end it was worth it. Love the drop in the front and rear. Making my the car look real mean!
CorkSport Reply: The springs should work on your Mazda 3.
CorkSport Reply:It depends on the mileage of your Mazda 3. On higher mileage vehicles we recommend changing the struts when installing the springs.
CorkSport Reply: They will fit your Mazda 3.
Getting these before EECMM but I'm slightly concerned by practicality, by safe springs do you mean that they don't rub or scrape the road? Thanks for continuing to put out great products.
CorkSport Reply: No rubbing or scraping with the installation of our springs. They should be good for daily driving as well.
will these fit on the 2013 skyactiv?
CorkSport Reply: Yes they will.
these will fit the gen2 speed 3 correct?
CorkSport Reply: They should work great.
The springs look good but I was wondering if I get 18x9.5 +15 set of wheels what will have to do besides fender rolling ? Or is my best bet is to go with 17s?
CorkSport Reply: 8.5 width are tight so you would need to do some fender rolling and pick the perfect offset.
will these fit a 2012 mazda 3 hatch?
and would these springs slam the car? causing it to scrape the floor ?
Ordered them Sunday but have not received them yet and decided I want to get coilovers instead. What are the chances I'd be able to cancel order or return?
is this a set already or do i need to buy 2 items?
CorkSport Reply: You only need to order 1 set, 4 springs are included.
Are these a 2" drop or a 1" drop?
CorkSport Reply: The drop is 2.25 in the front and 1.75 in the rear.
Im saving up to get these. Ive been looking at quick struts, eibach and a few others. But i think im going with Cork because of the focus on the brand. I'll update once i install and give a good test drive.
They fit 2010 mazda 3 hatchback 2.0L?
>>CorkSport Reply. Yes they will.
With this drop height, will there be any problems clearing speed bumps?
I am very interested in buying these springs as I have heard great reviews thus far. However, just to make sure, after installing these springs without any other adjustments (camber, fender rolling), I will not have any issues like rubbing?
>>CorkSport Reply: You will not need to roll your fenders unless you have a wider than 8 inch wheel and a offset which pushes the wheels past the lip of the fender. There should be no rubbing.
do these fit the 2011 mazda 3 4 door sedan ?
>>CorkSport Reply: Yes they fit just fine.
Just put them on last week and i love them. Awesome drop, god handling.
Wished you guys had these before I got my Eibach springs which I do like but I would of loved being able to support Corksport some more.
Where oh where does one get that awesome front splitter shown in the pic? I've been looking for one of those for a long time.
>>CorkSport Reply:The bumper is made by AutoExe.
really looking into purchasing but the drop height concerns me a little. what are the chances that i will need to roll the fenders after putting these on?
>>CorkSport Reply: You will not need to roll your fenders unless you have a wider than 8 inch wheel and a offset which pushes the wheels past the lip of the fender.
do these fit a 2006 mazda3 4 doors?
>>CorkSport Reply: They work great on the 2006 4 door models.
Will these fit on a 2006 mazda 3 sedan?
I'm considering getting these for my 2.0, would these decrease the life expectancy of my shocks/struts?
>>CorkSport Reply: Life if your shocks really depends on the roads in your area and how you drive. The springs still keep the shocks in their intended operating range.
What are the spring rates?
Do you have any pictures of a Mazda 3 on your springs or just the Mazdaspeed?
do these require new cambers as well. or are they just suggested?
>>CorkSport Reply: They are just suggested.
can these be used with stock shocks?
>>CorkSport Reply: Yes you can.
Do these fit 2012 mazda 3 skyactiv touring i sedan?
>>CorkSport Reply: Yes the do fit.
>>CorkSport Reply: Yes they will.
>>CorkSport Reply:The camber arms are a good idea but not required.
What about the skyactive model with these springs?
>>CorkSport Reply: They will fit the Skyactiv models.
Hey there! I was wondering if these fits on a mazda 3 2012 H/B ?
>>CorkSport Reply: Yes they do!
I have a 2012 Mazda 3 skyactive. I was wondering will these springs work okay with having a 225/45R18 set up with a 38mm offset. Will I need to roll the fenders, or will it cause issues to the tires from going over bumps?
You should be okay running a wheel of that size with that high of an offset.
ive upgraded my wheels from a 205/55/16 to a 225/30/20. can i still use these springs to lower my car?
If im in a 2007 2.3 with speed3 18, 225/40/18 will these still fit alright? And what the warrenty?
If you have close to a stock wheel offset you should be fine.
Hi, I got a Mazda 3 2011 hatch and was planning to buy some springs. But after asking 2 or 3 question. I heard that the back look to much higher compare to the front. I that real? Is there anything i can do to get them at the same level?
The rear has a larger drop than the front.
I want to compare these to other springs in regards to stiffness. What is the spring rate on these? Is it the same throughout or variable?
You are going to see around 7% increase in spring rate.
I've got a 2006 3 but I have rx8 wheels and ½inch spacers so my tires stick out, will these still work with my car? Or will I have to roll my fenders?
You may have to do a slight fender roll.
That wheel setup should be fine with the correct tire size. As of this answer we have both the shocks and springs in stock.
Do I have to do any modifications to my shocks, structs, etc??? Can I just install the springs just like that?
It depends on the milage you have on your Mazda 3. If you are under 30k you are most likely ok. If you are over 30k installing new struts at the same time as the springs would be a good idea.
Normal speed bumps should be fine with the springs.
In previous post you mention adding rear camber plates. Where can I buy those?
Stock wheels will work just fine, most aftermarket wheels if sized properly will as well.
You will need to align the car to correct the toe on the suspension. You do not need the camber arms but they are a good idea for making the rear camber even between both sides of your Mazda 3.
Do I need a camber kit after installing these as well?
You do not need them but they are a good idea for making the rear camber even between both sides of your Mazda 3.
Does this mean that without the camber control arms one side will have more camber vs. the other?
Possibly yes. We have seen it on our shop car and several others in the past.
how many springs come with the 2013 mazda 3 springs?
4 springs total, 2 front and 2 rear.
Make sure the rear springs are locked into place against the lower control arm. If they are not spun against it you can get noise from the suspension over bumps.
These springs just replace the old factory springs right? Or do I need to by any other additional items to lower my 2012 Mazda 3?
I would look at getting rear camber arms to install at the same time. The factory settings are pretty liberal in range and having the car set the same helps with tire wear.
Swaybars do a good job of limiting body roll so they would work well with or without lowering springs. To get the most out of the springs they would help.
Yes they will as long as you are not running a crazy offset.
Will these work with koni orange strut/shocks?
Do the springs fit the 2010 mazda 3, 1.6 petrol??
We have not tried them on a 1.6L model but they should fit the same. The amount of drop might be different due to weight differences.
If I want to lower the back more than the front can I just switch it and use the 2.25 drop on the back 2 tires?
The front springs will not work on the rear.
Will these work on a 2008 Mazda 3 Sedan?
Will my car be fine if i put 5ppl in it with this aftermarket springs?
Average size 5 people should be fine. The car would be pretty low though.
Will a camber kit be required along with purchasing the lowering springs? Or can I just do an alignment once they are installed?
The lowering springs can be installed and a factory alignment can still be maintained with the stock camber adjustment.
Will it fit on a mazda 3 2004 sedan ?
Will I have to get aftermarket shocks if I want to put these on my mazda 3?
The can be used with OEM or aftermarket shocks.
They will fit the 2007 Hatchback. The drop might be slightly different but should be in the 1.75-2.5" range.
Can these be used on a 2008 mazda 3 hatchback?
They will work on a 2008 Mazda 3 Hatchback.
So these just swap original ones with these and that's it?
Correct, they can replace an otherwise stock suspension system and that is all that is necessary.
This part is lowering springs not a coilover. The springs we offer can be used with adjustable struts. | 2019-04-24T10:25:45Z | https://corksport.com/corksport-mazda-3-lowering-spring-set.html?selected_section=discussion&page=10 |
July 25 (AM) A senior official of the Muthurajawela oil storage facility told that the oil storage has completely depleted and that the petrol and diesel outputs have been halted. The reason for the depletion was an explosion of a buoy that was carrying oil inland from the host tanker. Trade unions claim that CPC is paying millions as demurrages daily due to oil tankers which are anchored near the main port. more..
July 25 (Island) The govt will enhance foreign remittances by raising the minimum monthly wage of Sri Lankan migrant workers from September 1 this year. Minister Dilan Perera said that the minimum monthly wage for Sri Lankan foreign workers would be increased to USD 350 from the current USD 300. There was no change in minimum monthly salary of migrant Lankan workers till 2010. In 2010 it was around Rs. 20,000. more..
July 25 (Island) Nobody could challenge the country�s state owned premier scientific research institution, the Industrial Technology Institute (ITI) on its methodology in detecting Dicyandiamide (DCD) in ice cream distributed at dansalas on Poson Day, Minister Champika Ranawaka said. The powerful multinationals might be able to buy people at any level but on issues like this it was the responsibility of everyone to more..
July 25 (Island) Owners of the land where the Achchuveli Army Camp was situated showed their interest to hand over it to the govt after accepting compensation, but now they were refusing to do so due to a politically motivated campaign, Brig. Ruwan Wanigasuriya said. Nine persons owned the blocks of land where part of the army camp was located, he said, noting that they were not living in welfare camps contrary to claims more..
July 25 (Reuters) Australia will transfer 157 Tamil asylum seekers it has been holding at sea for nearly a month to a mainland detention center, the immigration minister said on Friday, in an apparent setback for the government's policies. Australia has provided little information about the asylum seekers, detained by customs after setting sail from India. Their case was due to be heard by the High Court next month. more..
July 25 (CT) We wish to bring a notorious torturer to your attention. And, we wish to do so by highlighting two cases, which have incidentally received some public attention, via the media and other sources. The two cases involve acts of torture committed on Mr. Sanjeewa Edirisinghe, resident of No. 164, Heen Agara, Panirendawa, Chilaw, Puttalam District and Mr. Wathuthantreelage Presly Fernando, who is also from Chilaw. Torture committed on Mr. Sanjeewa Edirisinghe by a team led by more..
July 25 (CT) Dharmadeepa has plunged into infamy. If the accusation that an officer of the law had urinated into the mouth of a suspect in police custody, as a method of interrogation, is true, then there is no gainsaying that Sri Lanka's cultural and social degeneration has reached a level beyond resuscitation. Torture in whatever form, whether inflicting physical pain or unmitigated humiliation, as part of routine grilling or as a means to obtain guilty confessions, is illegal under more..
July 25 (LBO) Shares closed 0.03% higher Friday amid net foreign buying, brokers said. All Share Price Index closed 2.24 points higher at 6,783.64, up 0.03%. The S&P SL20 closed 2.30 points lower at 3,764.90, down 0.06%. Turnover was 1.23 billion rupees, up from 950.21 million rupees a day earlier with 92 stocks closed positive against 89 negative. Chevron Lubricants Lanka closed 70 cents higher at 310.00 rupees with two off-market transactions of 93.00 million rupees more..
July 25 (Island) Following a private television channel reporting two police constables performing labourer�s work at the Borella police station, one of the police constable has been interdicted forthwith. Police have questioned the concerned police constable whether he had contacted the media organisation. SSP Ajith Rohana, asked why one of the police constables, had been interdicted when there were two constables telecast sweeping the garden of the said police station whilst more..
July 25 (CI) Flattest track in the world, eh? Ask the South Africa batsmen. They started to bat at the SSC midway through the second session of the second day, and during the 52 overs till stumps the run-rate never crossed two. Sri Lanka's trio of spinners teased and probed, Suranga Lakmal extracted some reverse swing, and the bad balls were virtually non-existent. Rangana Herath needed five balls to get his first wicket. more..
July 25 (DN) The Public Grievance Redress Mechanism introduced by the Public Management Reforms Ministry aiming at resolving the problems faced by citizens in obtaining public services had received over 150 public complaints within the first 24 hours of its introduction, Public Management Reforms Minister Naveen Dissanayake said. Of the complaints, 37 had already been sorted out while 47 were being looked into. he was addressing a media briefing at the ministry premises yesterday. more..
July 25 (GDI) Central Bank of Sri Lanka hosted the 28th SAARC FINANCE Group Meeting and SAARC FINANCE Governors� Symposium at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka on 24 July 2014. The 28th SAARC FINANCE Group Meeting was attended by Governors and Finance Secretaries and other delegates from the Central Banks and Ministries of Finance in the SAARC region. Following the SAARC FINANCE Group Meeting, the SAARC FINANCE Governors� symposium was held, more..
July 25 (Island) Military Spokesman Brig. Ruwan Wanigasuriya said that 21 houses damaged during the recent violence between two groups at Alutgama had been renovated by the army and handed over to their owners. He said that the Army had begun the restoration of violence damaged houses and shops just after lifting of the curfew in the area on June 18. According to estimates there were 71 houses which could be repaired more..
July 25 (MoD) A new motor racing track built by the Sri Lanka Navy has been introduced to motor sports enthusiasts during a press briefing held on Wednesday. The 'Navy Racing Track- Colombo', built at Navy's sprawling Welisara naval facility is the closest motor racing/riding track in Colombo. With a motorcar track of 1.2 km and a 1.8 km riding track the NRTC has fulfilled a felt need of the Navy which in recent years has made its presence felt in a variety of sporting disciplines. more..
Faeces in Central Province water!
July 25 (Island) The Central Province Health and Indigenous Medicine Minister Bandula Yalegama said that human excreta had been mixed with water resources in the area. The health authorities had been informed of the situation and urged to take remedial measures as it could lead to the spread of contagious diseases, Yalegama. Public Health Inspectors have been advised to chlorinate the water. The Minister said that most community water projects had been started in plantation areas more..
July 25 (DM) President Rajapaksa directed the Vice Chancellor of the Rajarata University to pardon the university students and to reopen the university immediately, during the District coordinating Committee Meeting held in Anuradhapura today. The president had inquired the Vice Chancellor Professor Ranjith Wijewardane about the situation of the university. Upon the inquiry Vice Chancellor explained current situation more..
July 25 (GDI) The 9th session of the Sri Lanka Youth second Parliament will be held on 26 and 27 at the Maharagama Sri Lanka youth main hall. It has been jointly organized by the Sri Lanka Youth and the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Skills development. Educational Reforms, un-employments, entrepreneurship development, Disaster Management and relief services, environment protection, Health, Empowering women, Child rights and protection, foreign employment, more..
July 25 (Island) Minister W.D.J. Seneviratne told Parliament that paying pension arrears through the Divisional Secretariats had been stopped after receiving information that a huge fraud amounting to over Rs. 38.2 million had taken place in several Divisional Secretariats. The Minister, responding to several questions raised by JVP Leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake on Wednesday, said that payment of pension arrears through divisional secretariats had been stopped by more..
July 25 (IANS) Navy and Coast Guard ships are deployed continuously in Palk Bay off TN to protect Indian fisherman from attacks on the sea, Defence Minister Arun Jaitley said. The vessels also seek to check illegal activities in the sea, the minister told the Lok Sabha in a written reply. Jaitley said the Indian govt had repeatedly told Sri Lanka to ensure that its navy "acts with restraint and our fishermen found in SL waters more..
July 25 (AD) A 46-year old person has self-immolated in Wellawatta a short while ago, over a dispute with her wife, according to the police. The deceased has been identified as a resident of Pintu-Place in Wellawatta. The police Media Unit told Ada Derana that the person has set himself on fire after pouring a bottle of kerosene oil. The remains of the body is currently kept at the Colombo National Hospital for the post-mortem examination.
July 25 (DM) The special commodity levy on imported grains has been reduced from July 26 because of the insufficient supply of local grain to the market, the Finance and Planning Ministry said. It said the prevailing drought was the reason for the low grain supply. A kilo of Mysore dhal has been reduced by Rs.3; cowpea by Rs.30; watana dhal by Rs.7; green gram by Rs.32, chickpeas by Rs.5 and Kurakkan by Rs.30.
July 25 (AD) The JVP today accused that the govt supporting the spread of racism in the country in a bid to uphold the political power. Central Committee Member of the JVP Bimal Ratnayake expressed the observations while commenting to media at an event in Colombo organized to sign a petition to eliminate racism from Sri Lanka. �This state of affairs prior emerged in countries such as Ukraine, Palestine, Iran, and Afghanistan. more..
July 25 (MoD) Secretary Defence and Urban Development Mr. Gotabaya Rajapaksa attended a traditional 'Ifthar' ceremony at the Hotel Taj Samudra in Colombo this evening (23). The 'Iftar' was hosted by the Ministry of Defence and Urban Development. 'Ifthar' is the breaking of fast of Muslims during the month of Ramadan, the 9th month of the Islamic calendar. Muslims around the world undertake a month long fast during this holy month. It is the third of the five obligations of Islam. more..
July 25 (AM) While dismissing an appeal filed by Associated News Papers of Ceylon Ltd (Lake House) against a Colombo District Court judgment, the Court of Appeal yesterday affirmed and upheld the original District Court judgment ordering the Associated News Papers Ceylon Ltd and then Sunday Observer chief editor Ajith Samaranayake to pay a compensation of two million rupees to retired army Brigadier L.D.S. Wijisekara over publishing a defamatory statement on April 3, 1994. more..
July 25 (E24|7) The baby elephant that was kept illegally at Dewram Vehera Pannipitiya in Sri Lanka was taken to the Uda Walawe Transit Home after a Court Order on July 18, 2014. The baby elephant was later released from the temple. According to Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWLC) officers, despite resistance by temple officials the baby elephant was taken and had arrived at the Uda Walawe Transit home. more..
July 25 (Island) A section of lawyers styled as the Forum of Independent Lawyers of Sri Lanka has accused the BASL leadership of misusing funds to gain personal and political mileage at the expense of the interests of the association. The following is the full text of statement issued by Anoma Goonatilleke, President of Forum ILSL and its Secretary, Saman Galappaththi: "As members of the legal profession, proud of its traditions and committed to its wellbeing, we are appalled by the recent activities of more..
July 25 (LT) Rajapaksa administration, targeting the presidential election to be held next year, is making plans to transfer or forcefully retire state officials and senior officers of security services who are not amenable states a very reliable source. The first victim of this plan is to be the IGP N.K. Illangakone reveal these sources. It is reported that the govt is taking steps to get Mr. Illangakone retired. According to sources the reason for pressurizing Mr. Illangakone to retire is the unbiased action more..
July 25 (E24|7) An Afghan woman has been sitting at the security entrance to the front office of the UNHCR for several days asking the UNHCR office to grant refugee status for her Afghan husband. She has been listed as a refugee for the past two years but not her husband; she claims they have been living in SL all of that time. �Our situation has become critical now. Our lives are in danger, we need to be settled somewhere safe," more..
July 25 (AM) Minister Champika Ranawaka has opened a new Facebook account and a fan page after his former account and fan page were deactivated. Minister received a reply to his complaint from the Facebook administration saying that the identification number of his parliamentary ID and his older accounts verification ID number did not match. Minister said that he started a new fan page attached to the new account, but the new page was only able to get around 1500 likes. more..
July 25 (SM) An unidentified group has ordered a ban on a special screening of a film at �Raja� cinema, one of the oldest cinema halls in Jaffna. Directed by Sri Lankan born Tamil S.K. Ramanatas who presently lives in Switzerland, the film �Maaru Thadam� has a cast consisting of youths living in Jaffna. The two-and-a-half-hour film has been approved for screening by the State Film Corporation, and Jaffna Municipal Council permission too, has been obtained. more..
July 25 (DM) The Italian supplier of the �Under Buoy Hose� -- damaged when pumping crude oil from the tanker to the storage terminal -- has refused to replace it despite being covered by the 3-year warranty, Minister Anura Priyadarshana Yapa said. Imported crude and refined oil is discharged from ships to the storage terminals using buoys. Buoy used for discharging crude oil is placed at sea some 9 km from the Colombo Port more..
July 26 (CT) �When Gandhi was studying law at the University College of London, there was a professor, whose last name was Peters, who felt animosity for Gandhi, and because Gandhi never lowered his head towards him, their �arguments� were very common. One day, Mr. Peters was having lunch at the dining room of the University and Gandhi came along with his tray and sat next to the professor. The professor, in his arrogance, said, �Mr. Gandhi: you do not understand� a pig and a bird do more..
July 26 (CT) The local lacoreens or sepoys, as we have every right to call them, are paid to do a job and they are paid handsomely too. Remove the monetary aspect and would these so-called NGO heads deliver the same speeches with the same gusto? To this brigade of paid mouthpieces the Bar Association has plugged itself and the dollar disbursements reveal the source to their sudden anti-Lankan stand as well. Is there any credibility when these civil society leaders are simply more..
July 26 (CT) Kaema Sutra, a collaboration between Dharshan Munidasa and Jacqueline Fernandez at Arcade Independence Square, is a restaurant that features contemporary Sri Lankan food. The concept of serving authentic Sri Lankan cuisine with a contemporary twist in the preparation methods is the highlight of Kaema Sutra. "For many years, no one used the great ingredientsof Sri Lanka to improve Sri Lankan cuisine. more..
Naveen lets Karu's cat out of the bag!
July 26 (CT) The UNP is not a political Party of any clan or progeny by inheritance. Though it was founded by D.S. Senanayake and his son Dudley later dominated the scene, even when Dudley was alive, it opened the doors for others like Sir John Kotalawala and Wijayananda Dahanayake to become Prime Ministers of this country at certain intervals. That was how leaders like J.R. Jayewardene, Ranasinghe Premadasa and D.B. Wijetunga were born out of the UNP. more..
July 26 (CT) The vote in the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva last week to institute an International Commission of Inquiry into Israel�s latest assault on Gaza is instructive for the Sri Lankan public in several senses. It reveals the utter hypocrisy of those who moved a resolution against Sri Lanka and voted for it while voting against the resolution on Gaza or abstaining. At least those who voted against Israel and Sri Lanka show the virtue of consistency if not logic. more..
July 26 (FT) It�s been a long wait for fans of award-winning Sri Lankan writer Afdhel Aziz, who just released his debut novel �Strange Fruit,� out this weekend. Following are excerpts of a wide-ranging interview on the novel, how and why he writes and his interests, to inspirations and future plans. Q: Your debut novel Strange Fruit was just released. What can readers expect? A: Strange Fruit is now out in all bookstores in Sri Lanka. more..
July 26 (FT) When leaders are forced to take decisions related to racial sentiments or sentiments where the nation is divided very sharply, then it is a hard task. Farsighted leaders who lead from the front take strong decisions in such times and take the nation forward during the difficult period. Those who apply the fox theory of Machiavelli and those who have nothing but self-interest act indecisively in such situations. We have ample examples internationally and locally. more..
July 26 (Island) The focus of this article will be on the external dimension of the Sri Lankan Muslim ethnic problem. Way back in the seventeenth century the great English poet John Donne declared in one of his sermons, "No man is an island". It has had much vogue as a quotation over several decades for more than one reason. It figures in the epigraph to Hemingway�s best-selling novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was followed by an enduringly popular film starring Gary Cooper more.. | 2019-04-24T08:38:13Z | http://www.infolanka.com/news/2014/july/index47.html |
General Synod Chatham 2004 of the Canadian Reformed Churches existed for two weeks (Feb.10 – 21, 2004). The delegates had been chosen by regional Synods East and West, but most certainly felt themselves appointed by God to deliberate and decide on all the issues put before them. Surely each individual member felt themselves inadequate to deal with such weighty matters but yet the Lord gave them collectively the strength and wisdom to observe, consider, and make recommendations for adoption concerning many matters of interest and concern to the whole federation of churches in Canada and the United States.
Based on the interim Acts that were provided on the internet we want to provide our readers with a general overview of the decisions taken at this synod and provide some editorial comment at the same time.
To start off with we want to deal with the modis operandi (the method of operation) of synods in general and thus also the most recent one. As already mentioned above, Canadian Reformed synods operate by observing incoming material, considering the material and by making recommendations about the material. After this process has been completed a vote is held and the recommendations are either adopted or defeated. By using this method it is not always clear on what basis a decision has been made.
It is of particular importance that decisions taken at a major assembly should be based on solid grounds, on God’s holy Word. Often it is also helpful to use the Confessions and the Church Order and/or even the Forms adopted by the Churches, to provide grounds for decisions. In that way the Churches and their members can be informed and even educated about the matter(s) being dealt with.
In a time when much emphasis is placed on Ecclesiastical Fellowship and its benefits, the Canadian Reformed churches could do well to learn from two federations with which it has had the longest relationships (the Dutch and Australian Churches) where the modis operandi is specifically used to provide grounds for all decisions.
One of the first decisions made by Synod Chatham was to reverse a decision of the previous synod, Synod Neerlandia. The matter at hand was the relatively minor matter concerning the number of delegates that should make up a General Synod. In the past the rule has been that each regional synod would delegate four ministers and four elders to synod, thus producing a general synod of sixteen (16) delegates. At Synod Neerlandia the overture of Regional Synod – East to increase the number of delegates to six ministers and six elders from each regional synod was defeated. As a result the church at Guelph appealed this decision to Synod Chatham.
It is interesting to note how Synod Chatham dealt with this appeal in its considerations. Having first ‘observed’ the content of the appeal from Guelph it ‘considered’ five aspects.
3 The third ‘consideration’ reads, “The argument of Synod Neerlandia ‘that General Synods are not representative assemblies …but that Reformed Church Polity works with the principle of delegation does not exclude the possible increase in numbers of delegates.” 4 At the same time Synod ‘considered’ that the Church at Guelph did not prove that a major shift in direction can be avoided by increasing the number of delegates to such an assembly. 5 Finally it was ‘considered’ that Guelph was correct in observing that it is unlikely that more regional synods will be added to the two thatpresently exist. Thus, the number of delegates to synods will not increase in that manner. After these five Considerations, Synod made two recommendations. The first was to rescind the decision of Neerlandia to leave the number of delegates as they were and the second was to increase the number of delegates to six ministers and six elders from each regional synod. We have very little argument with the end result of this decision as it is a minor matter in our view, but the point of this detailed review is to point out the failure of the modis operandi. For who can say why the number of delegates waschanged? Was it because it is unlikely that there will be more regional synods in the foreseeable future? Was it because there is an ‘indirect’ proportional representation when delegates are chosen regionally? But that consideration was contrasted by the following one. In fact, if one reads through the considerations the opposite con-clusion from what was finally de-cided could easily be expected. If someone wanted to appeal this decision what would they appeal? They cannot really appeal the recommendation as it is merely a statement, a decision without reasons. An appeal could be launched against one of the considerations, but how is one to know that it was the basis for the decision. Perhaps a following synod might agree with an appeal against a consideration but not overturn the recommendation or the decision to adopt the recommendation because there is no proof that the decision was based on any one or all of the considerations.
It would be far better and much more edifying if the decision was based on certain grounds. Perhaps the real reason the decision was made to increase the number of delegates is that at least half of the federation was in favor of doing so. Perhaps delegates felt that since the federation has grown in membership that the request to increase the delegates to synod was reasonable and acceptable. It is certainly not clear from the Considerations why the decision was made to increase the number of delegates.
We hope that the regulations for synods will soon be changed to fall in line with those of the churches in Australia and the Netherlands so that the Biblical/Church Orderly grounds are provided along with the decisions.
Due to the illness of Dr. J. de Jong Synod needed to appoint a professor to the Theological College. Although technically it is correct to say that Synod, upon the advice of the Board of Governors, who propose a name on the advice of the Senate of the Theological College, appoint a minister to the position of professor at the Theological College, the process for these appointments leaves much to be desired. We hope to elaborate more about this at another time.
At Synod Chatham, Dr. A. J. de Visser was appointed to and accepted the position of Professor of Diaconiology and Ecclesiology. Together with all the churches we pray that the Lord will bless this brother as he takes up this new position with weighty responsibility in the midst of the Church of our Lord, Jesus Christ.
Five churches and an individual member sent in appeals against the decision of Synod Neerlandia to the establish Ecclesiastical Fellowship with the OPC. [The appeal of the individual member was denied based on the rule that a member should address his/her consistory about an appeal about a synod’s decision.] The focus of this review does not allow for a detailed review of the appeals and the considerations pertaining to them. Suffice to report that Synod Chatham decided that Synod Neerlandia 2001 did not err when it took the decision to establish Ecclesiastical Fellowship with the OPC.
One church appealed two components of Phase Two [adopted by Synod Neerlandia] of the unity efforts with the URCNA. The two components under appeal were the requirement to accept one another’s attestations and the openness of the pulpit to ministers from one another’s federations. This church also noted the confusion between the terms Ecclesiastical Fellowship, ‘sister churches’ and Phase Two. For some these terms are synonymous and for others they are not.
Synod ‘considered’ that if Synod Neerlandia would have used the term Ecclesiastical Fellowship in place of Phase Two, the appealing church would not have had any dif- ficulties. Therefore it decided to declare that Phase Two is the equivalent of Ecclesiastical Fellowship as it is maintained under the adopted rules (Acts of Synod Lincoln 1992, Art. 50, IV.B.1-7). At the same time, Phase Two clearly includes the purpose that the churches involved move forward from Phase Two (Ecclesiastical Fellowship) to Phase Three (federative union). Hence the appeal was denied.
We empathize with the appealing church with regard to the confusion in terminology. Some time ago an article has appeared in Reformed Polemics (Vol.8, No.5) that deals with the terms Ecclesiastical Fel lowship and sister churches.
In essence this appeal deals with the contention that “some formulations in the Westminster Standards are not in agreement with the Three Forms of Unity, ‘and therefore should be reckoned as divergencies that must be resolved outside the bounds of Ecclesiastical Fellowship.’” The example of the Scriptural understanding of the covenant was given as an example. It was felt that Ecclesiastical Fellowship opens the door to false preaching on this topic.
Synod decided that this was more correctly an appeal against a decision made by synod Lincoln and pointed out that both synod Abbotsford and synod Fergus denied appeals concerning the same matter.
The appealing church provided a history of correspondence that indicates that they properly took the Church Orderly way in dealing with the fact that the Church at Surrey maintained the status of Rev. Boersema while he became a member of the OPC. This event took place prior to the churches having established Ecclesiastical Fellowship with the OPC.
Synod decided that the appealing church is technically correct but that the Church at Surrey was justified in providing an exception in Rev. Boersema’s case.
A large portion of Synod’s time was taken up with correspondence, appeals, speeches and reports regarding federations with which the Canadian Reformed churches have Ecclesiastical Fellowship. At this time we will not go into detail about any of the specific federations with which Ecclesiastical Fellowship has been established but merely give a quick overview of the decisions made with regard to each.
In every case Synod Chatham expressed appreciation for the fact that the federations with which the Canadian Reformed Churches have Ecclesiastical Fellowship continue to uphold Scripture and that Ecclesiastical Fellowship ought to be maintained.
Thankfulness was expressed regarding the positive developments within our contact with the RCUS. At the same time the churches were encouraged to pursue actively our Ecclesiastical Fellowship with the RCUS via pulpit exchanges, visiting RCUS churches, and via invitations to youth camps and conferences held in the various church communities.
Contact with this federation has been ongoing for some years. From time to time an overture has been sent by one or other church to establish Ecclesiastical Fellowship with this federation. At this synod there was also a letter from a church with such a recommendation. Synod, however decided not to do so, but rather to continue the mandate provided by Synod Neerlandia. In short, that mandate is to work towards the establishment of Ecclesiastical Fellowship by discussing the differences between the Three Forms of Unity and the Westminster Standards as found in the “Evaluation of Divergences” received by Synod 1986.
The ERQ is a very small federation and thus has limited human resources for this kind of work. For this reason both Neerlandia and now Chatham prioritized the mandate by indicating that pulpit supervision, fencing of the Lord’s table and confessional accountability should receive the highest priority.
Seeing that the Canadian Reformed Churches already have contact with the Korean Presbyterian Churches (Kosin) in Korea, Synod Neerlandia considered it logical and wise to agree with an overture to seek contact with that same federation in Canada and the United States. The Committee for Contact with Churches in the Americas (CCCA) had difficulty establishing contact with representatives of this church federation and recommended that their mandate be discontinued. Synod, however, was of a different mind and adopted the recommendation that it decide to mandate the CCCA to contact the North American Kosin federation with the help of the churches in Korea.
Synod declared that at this time there is no reason to pursue actively an ecclesiastical relationship with the IPCM as the committee was unable to establish meaningful contact.
As Synod Neerlandia had mandated the CCCA to send (at their own discretion) an observer to future meetings of NAPARC to investigate its usefulness and possible membership in it, the committee provided a report. It presented history, membership, basis, purpose and function of NAPARC. The Committee suggested to Synod that membership might be useful to provide support to the OPC and the RCUS who are already members of NAPARC. At the same time it would also help to express greater unity with the ERQ.
Synod, however, agreed with one of the churches who sent a letter with regard to the Committee’s report. They considered their submission to be correct when it questioned the need for another organization beside the ICRC as there is significant duplication in the purposes, function and membership of both groups.
In addition to continuing the relationship of Ecclesiastical Fellowship with this federation Synod recommended these churches as worthy of financial assistance to aid them with their extensive mission work and in their labors among the concerned in other church federations.
The Board of Governors of the Theological College in Hamilton was also invited to seek ways to offer assistance for theological training. The Committee on Relations with Churches Abroad (CRCA) was also mandated to request the reasons why the FRCSA have revoked their relationship with the Korean Presbyterian Churches (Kosin).
The CRCA recommended to Synod that contact with the Free Church Continuing be discontinued and that the mandate to discuss divergences with the Scottish churches should be rescinded. However Synod adopted its own recommendation to decide that due to the lack of clarity about the division between the Free Church and the Free Church Continuing the CRCA ought to be mandated to continue to monitor the situation in the hope of gaining greater clarity. Synod also mandated the committee to continue the discussion on the existing differences in confession and church polity.
As part of the considerations about the recommendations of the CRCA the following was noted: “The CRCA is correct that Synod Neerlandia brought something new into the contact with the FCS. Synod Neerlandia did consider, however, that previous synods have consistently declared that the differences between the Westminster Confessions and the Three Forms of Unity need to be discussed within the bounds of Ecclesiastical Fellowship.
The suggestion that the proportion of Psalms and hymns in the Gereformeerd Kerkboek should reflect the importance – and even the priority – of the Psalms.
The consideration that the decisions of Leusden and Zuidhorn about the fourth commandment are based on unconvincing argumentation.
An address to the next Synod of the Dutch churches to the effect that their recent decisions pertaining to the Marriage Form weakens the Scriptural teaching about marriage.
Synod agreed with the CRCA about concerns regarding the proportion of Psalms and Hymns and mandated the committee to convey these concerns to the Dutch churches. The CRCA was also mandated to study the results of the deputyship “Fourth Commandment and the Sunday” and report to the churches.
In addition, the discussion with the Dutch churches regarding the new Marriage Form is to continue. In its considerations, Synod Chatham did leave open the possibility that some change in wording does not necessarily have to mean a diminishing of the Scriptural teaching. At the same time it warned about the wording used to describe the propagating of children.
The committee was also urged to seek clarity into the legitimacy of the recent “Vrijmaking” and to monitor further developments. At the same time the committee is to inform the Dutch churches as well as those who have liberated themselves that they have our prayerful support. The Canadian Reformed churches were also urged to remember both groups in their public prayers.
It was decided to maintain membership in the ICRC and to send delegates to the next conference scheduled for 2005 in South Africa.
In addition the CRCA is to inform the Secretary of the ICRC that the Constitution Art. IV.1.a. should be left unchanged since there are no new grounds.
As not much new has developed in the contact with this federation Synod included in the mandate of the Committee for Promotion of Ecclesiastical Unity (CPEU) to specifically address with the OCRC whether it shares a mutual desire for federative unity with the CanRC.
A sub-committee of the CPEU was established at the previous synod to pursue theological training for the ministry in a proposed united federation with the URCNA. This subcommittee was called the Theological Education Committee. The committee and its mandate were extended, but with the reminder that at least one federational theological school at which the board of governors, the professors and teaching staff are appointed by synod should be maintained.
A second sub-committee of the CPEU was established at the previous synod to deal with a proposed revised Church Order of a united federation. Synod continued its mandate for another three years and made specific mention of the need to continue in the evaluation of the differences between the current church orders of the federations in light of the Scriptural and Confessional principles and patterns of church government of the Church Order of Dort; to propose a common church order in the line of the Church Order of Dort; to formulate a draft proposal of regulations for General Synod; and, to provide the CPEU with a report in sufficient time for them to produce the comprehensive report for Synod in a timely fashion.
A third committee involved with the CPEU in contact toward federative unity is the Common Songbook committee. Our Committee for the Book of Praise serves in this capacity. Synod received a progress report of the work of this committee. In one of its ‘considerations’ synod encouraged the churches to address this committee directly with suggestions, etc. In the renewed mandate for this committee Synod made particular note of the need to continue to produce a songbook that contains the complete Anglo-Genevan Psalter and other suitable metrical versions of the Psalms, including hymns that also meet the standard of faithfulness to the Scripture and the Reformed Confessions.
Synod mandated the CPEU to work closely with its sub-committees and to present a single comprehensive report that has been prepared jointly with the CERCU of the URNCA to the next Synod. They are to include a recommendation for a definite time frame for federative unity.
A discussion on the ‘Framework Hypothesis’ and the support that this theory has within the URCNA have been added to the mandate for the CPEU.
The mandate for the CPEU with regard to this federation is to continue meeting with them with a view to pursuing Ecclesiastical Fellowship, while at the same time promoting and maintaining the desire for federative unity, discussing whatever obstacles there may be on this path. A suggestion was made to make use of a document entitled “Foundational Principles of Reformed Church Government”. This is the same document that is being used as a working document in the unity discussions with the URCNA.
In addition to the report of the CCCA, Synod also received letters from seven churches in the federation. In summary, the report of the committee indicated that they had met only one time since the last Synod. Further the committee expressed the opinion that many of the issues it was mandated to discuss with the OPC had already been dealt with.
The churches that sent in letters, on the other hand, felt that they had not received much about the issues being discussed. At most they recall the Acts of Synod Burlington 1986.
They are also disappointed about the lack of meetings between our committee and the one from the OPC. They ask that the committee receive a more specific mandate regarding goals and items for discussion.
Synod decided to be more specific in its mandate to the CCCA when it decided to refer to its ‘considerations’ in its decision. Specifically it referred to the consideration that the goal of the discussions should be to determine whether the unity of the faith regarding the church, the covenant and the sacraments is adequately and faithfully expressed in our confessional standards. The focus of the discussions should be two-fold: on the one hand, the scriptural faithfulness in the confessions and, on the other hand, the actual application in the reality of church-life, i.e. how the principles are put into practice, or should be put into practice.
With respect to the Greja-Greja Reformasi di Indonesia and the Greja-Greja Reformasi Calninis in East Nusa Tengarra, synod decided to mandate the CRCA to continue correspondence to make more information available to the churches and to report to the next synod in the hope that Ecclesiastical Fellowship can be established. Synod also decided not to enter into Ecclesiastical Fellowship with the New Zealand Reformed Churches at this time.
The committee is encouraged to continue in its various mandates including a printing of the Book of Praise in 2006. Synod also decided, upon the request of minor assemblies and a number of churches, to mandate the committee to present a proposal with the inclusion of the Apostle’s Creed in the baptismal forms to the next General Synod. The committee was also mandated to submit a final proposal for a Form of Subscription, one for the local congregation and one for Classis, to the next General Synod.
The mandate of synod Fergus to the committee to prepare the prose section of the Book of Praise with the NIV Bible references but not to proceed with the requested changes to the Psalm and hymn section at this time was extended by this synod.
Synod instructed the committee to deal with submissions regarding the hymn section by maintaining the current structure of hymn section; propose changes, additions or improvements where deficiencies and/or weaknesses are found; select suitable hymns using the Guide lines and Principles agreed upon by the committee and the representatives of the URCNA.; limit the number of hymns to 100; and, publish a revised hymn section for testing by the churches.
Finally, the Committee was recommended to proceed with the Overleaf Musical Notation Edition. | 2019-04-22T20:45:55Z | https://www.reformedfellowship.net/pete-deboer-a-review-of-the-2004-canadian-reformed-churches-synod-chatham |
There are 50 pet friendly assisted living facilities in LANCASTER, California. Call (877) 311-8349. These senior living facilities in LANCASTER allow various pets, such as dogs, cats and others. Costs and pet policies vary in each of the 50 facilities.
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When looking for an assisted living facility in Lancaster, California that allows pets, consider Guma 2 Residential Care For The Elderly. This pet friendly assisted living facility is an excellent luxurious senior care option. It has a total of 6 assisted living apartments and includes services such as pet care, walking trails and staff available 24/7. Its license number is 197607093. Guma 2 Residential Care For The Elderly provides senior living not only to Lancaster older adults, but also to all Los Angeles county pet owners as well.
If you have a cat or a dog and also need help with daily living, Almundo's Home Care can help you or your loved one to find the assistance and personal care you need in Lancaster, California. Almundo's Home Care has a maximum capacity of 4 older adults who want to live with their pets and includes amenities such as on-site café, transportation services and apartment cleaning. Older adults with dogs or cats can enjoy the companionship of their pet at Almundo's Home Care. There are pet related rules that senior pet owners are expected to follow when staying at Almundo's Home Care.
Manor House Of Antelope Valley can accommodate 6 senior citizens who have a pet and offers services such as monthly doctor visits, regular health checkups and an on-site nurse. This pet-friendly personal care facility is located at 45550 11th St. , W. , and it is fully equipped to provide assisted living to Lancaster, CA older dog owners. Manor House Of Antelope Valley has certain pet related rules and restrictions in place.
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Retirees looking for senior living communities in Lancaster, California that accept pets will find Dj's Care Home 2, located at 3278 Ashton Place inside 93536 zip code as a wonderful choice for all of their personal and pet care needs. Dj's Care Home 2 is pet friendly, so Los Angeles county seniors can continue to enjoy the companionship of their pets while getting all the senior care services they need, such as round-the-clock caregiving, help with moving around and more. Dj's Care Home 2 is able to care for up to 6 older adults and allows seniors to stay with cats or dogs under certain pet-related rules. California records indicate 197608219 license number for Dj's Care Home 2.
Located at 44035 22nd Street West in Los Angeles county, J. r. Retirement Home For Elderly enables pet owners in Lancaster, CA as well as those who live in surrounding areas to receive assisted living care. This pet friendly senior living facility includes amenities such as medication set-up and reminders, a wellness center and emergency pendants. Living with a pet at J. r. Retirement Home For Elderly is possible for up to 6 Lancaster older adults. J. r. Retirement Home For Elderly has an official license to provide senior living accommodations for Los Angeles, CA seniors who are dog and cat owners, with license # 197608294.
55+ adults with pets who require assisted living in Lancaster, California can take advantage of Castle Home, situated at 3244 Ashton Place. Castle Home provides amenities such as on-site hair salons and grooming, daily fitness activities and gourmet dining. Seniors with cats, dogs and other pets are welcome at this facility. Certain pet related rules mentioned in the pet policy apply. Castle Home is capable of caring for up to 6 senior citizen pet owners from 93536 zip code in Los Angeles county and nearby areas. Castle Home has an active license to offer assisted living in Lancaster, California License number: 197608917.
Brookdale Antelope Valley provides pet friendly assisted living care in Lancaster, California. The senior living facility can provide accommodation to a maximum of 115 pet owners at a time. With a location at 43051 15th Street West, in the 93534 area code inside Los Angeles county, Brookdale Antelope Valley provides assistance and support not only to older adults, but to their pets as well. Brookdale Antelope Valley includes assisted living services such as help with taking a bath, getting dressed and individual care plans. This senior care facility allows Medicare and Medicaid.
Angelic Home Care specializes in providing pet friendly assisted living in Los Angeles county, California. Up to 6 seniors can take advantage of its services and choose from multiple assisted apartment layouts. Angelic Home Care recognizes the importance of pets in seniors’ lives. Although cats, dogs and other pets are welcome, there are some pet related rules and restrictions. Angelic Home Care can provide aid with bathing, dressing and incontinence care to any pet owner senior citizen in Lancaster, CA and surrounding areas. Angelic Home Care is located at 44334 Lively Avenue, 93536 and supports older adults who need memory care.
When looking for an assisted living facility in Lancaster, California that allows pets, consider Arayata Elderly Care. This pet friendly assisted living facility is an excellent luxurious senior care option. It has a total of 6 assisted living apartments and includes services such as pet care, walking trails and staff available 24/7. Its license number is 197606626. Arayata Elderly Care provides senior living not only to Lancaster older adults, but also to all Los Angeles county pet owners as well.
If you have a cat or a dog and also need help with daily living, Lancaster Senior Homecare can help you or your loved one to find the assistance and personal care you need in Lancaster, California. Lancaster Senior Homecare has a maximum capacity of 6 older adults who want to live with their pets and includes amenities such as on-site café, transportation services and apartment cleaning. Elderly with pets can enjoy the companionship of their pet at Lancaster Senior Homecare. There are pet related rules that senior pet owners are expected to follow when staying at Lancaster Senior Homecare.
Oasis Home can accommodate 6 seniors who have a pet and offers services such as monthly doctor visits, regular health checkups and an on-site nurse. This pet-friendly personal care facility is located at 1003 West Ave. H-4, and it is fully equipped to provide assisted living to Lancaster, CA older dog owners. Oasis Home has certain pet related rules and restrictions in place.
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Located at 2049 Kalliope Avenue in Los Angeles county, Treasure Heritage enables pet owners in Lancaster, CA as well as those who live in surrounding areas to receive assisted living care. This pet friendly senior living facility includes amenities such as medication set-up and reminders, a wellness center and emergency pendants. Living with a pet at Treasure Heritage is possible for up to 6 Lancaster older adults. Treasure Heritage has an official license to provide senior living accommodations for Los Angeles, CA seniors who are dog and cat owners, with license # 197609060.
Seniors with cats who require assisted living in Lancaster, California can take advantage of Watkins Rcfe, situated at 42849 Sachs Drive. Watkins Rcfe provides amenities such as on-site hair salons and grooming, daily fitness activities and gourmet dining. Seniors with cats, dogs and other pets are welcome at this facility. Certain pet related rules mentioned in the pet policy apply. Watkins Rcfe is capable of caring for up to 5 senior citizen pet owners from 93536 zip code in Los Angeles county and nearby areas. Watkins Rcfe has an active license to offer assisted living in Lancaster, California License number: 197605954.
Ana Residential Care provides pet friendly assisted living care in Lancaster, California. The senior living facility can provide accommodation to a maximum of 6 pet owners at a time. With a location at 1046 East Lancaster Boulvard, in the 93535 area code inside Los Angeles county, Ana Residential Care provides assistance and support not only to older adults, but to their pets as well. Ana Residential Care includes assisted living services such as help with taking a bath, getting dressed and individual care plans. This senior care facility allows both Medicaid and Medicare.
Caring Hearts Senior Care Home specializes in providing pet friendly assisted living in Los Angeles county, California. Up to 6 seniors can take advantage of its services and choose from multiple assisted apartment layouts. Caring Hearts Senior Care Home recognizes the importance of pets in seniors’ lives. Although cats, dogs and other pets are welcome, there are some pet related rules and restrictions. Caring Hearts Senior Care Home can provide aid with bathing, dressing and incontinence care to any pet owner senior citizen in Lancaster, CA and surrounding areas. Caring Hearts Senior Care Home is located at 4144 Vahan Court, 93536 and supports seniors with dementia.
When looking for an assisted living facility in Lancaster, California that allows pets, consider Annabelle's Cottage Ii. This pet friendly assisted living facility is an excellent luxurious senior care option. It has a total of 6 assisted living apartments and includes services such as pet care, walking trails and staff available 24/7. Its license number is 197607362. Annabelle's Cottage Ii provides senior living not only to Lancaster older adults, but also to all Los Angeles county pet owners as well.
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Evergreen Elderly Care Living can accommodate 6 seniors who have a pet and offers services such as monthly doctor visits, regular health checkups and an on-site nurse. This pet-friendly personal care facility is located at 45237 Sancroft Avenue, and it is fully equipped to provide assisted living to Lancaster, CA older pet owners. Evergreen Elderly Care Living has certain pet related rules and restrictions in place.
Located at 43252 Darby Street, Lancaster, California, 93535, Admirable Home Care can help any Los Angeles county pet owner who requires senior living assistance and includes services such as Internet, help with laundry, communal kitchen and more. Admirable Home Care can provide pet friendly assisted living to no more than 5 Lancaster residents at once. Admirable Home Care recognizes the positive effect of pets on lives of senior citizens and welcomes pets. Certain pet related rules and restrictions apply. It is licensed by California with license number 197606542.
Older adults looking for senior living communities in Lancaster, California that accept pets will find Elc Home Care Services, located at 540 W. Avenue J-10 inside 93534 zip code as a wonderful choice for all of their personal and pet care needs. Elc Home Care Services is pet friendly, so Los Angeles county seniors can continue to enjoy the companionship of their pets while getting all the senior care services they need, such as round-the-clock caregiving, help with moving around and more. Elc Home Care Services is able to care for up to 6 older adults and allows seniors to stay with cats or dogs under certain pet-related rules. California records indicate 197607004 license number for Elc Home Care Services.
Located at 44328 Lively Avenue in Los Angeles county, Lively Home enables pet owners in Lancaster, CA as well as those who live in surrounding areas to receive assisted living care. This pet friendly senior living facility includes amenities such as medication set-up and reminders, a wellness center and emergency pendants. Living with a pet at Lively Home is possible for up to 6 Lancaster older adults. Lively Home has an official license to provide senior living accommodations for Los Angeles, CA seniors who are dog and cat owners, with license # 197608136.
Older people with pets who require assisted living in Lancaster, California can take advantage of Jmj Guest Home, situated at 43905 Elm Avenue. Jmj Guest Home provides amenities such as on-site hair salons and grooming, daily fitness activities and gourmet dining. Seniors with cats, dogs and other pets are welcome at this facility. Certain pet related rules mentioned in the pet policy apply. Jmj Guest Home is capable of caring for up to 6 senior citizen pet owners from 93534 zip code in Los Angeles county and nearby areas. Jmj Guest Home has an active license to offer assisted living in Lancaster, California License number: 197605266.
Compassionate Elderly Care Management Systems specializes in providing pet friendly assisted living in Los Angeles county, California. Up to 6 seniors can take advantage of its services and choose from multiple assisted apartment layouts. Compassionate Elderly Care Management Systems recognizes the importance of pets in seniors’ lives. Although cats, dogs and other pets are welcome, there are some pet related rules and restrictions. Compassionate Elderly Care Management Systems can provide aid with bathing, dressing and incontinence care to any pet owner senior citizen in Lancaster, CA and surrounding areas. Compassionate Elderly Care Management Systems is located at 44161 11th St. W, 93534 and provides care to seniors with dementia.
When looking for an assisted living facility in Lancaster, California that allows pets, consider A Plus Elderly Care. This pet friendly assisted living facility is an excellent luxurious senior care option. It has a total of 6 assisted living units and includes services such as pet care, walking trails and staff available 24/7. Its license number is 197606875. A Plus Elderly Care provides senior living not only to Lancaster older adults, but also to all Los Angeles county pet owners as well.
If you have a cat or a dog and also need help with daily living, Joe-sephine Residential Care Fac. For The Elderly can help you or your loved one to find the assistance and personal care you need in Lancaster, California. Joe-sephine Residential Care Fac. For The Elderly has a maximum capacity of 4 older adults who want to live with their pets and includes amenities such as on-site café, transportation services and apartment cleaning. Senior cat owners can enjoy the companionship of their pet at Joe-sephine Residential Care Fac. For The Elderly. There are pet related rules that senior pet owners are expected to follow when staying at Joe-sephine Residential Care Fac. For The Elderly.
Aquamarine Retirement Home can accommodate 6 baby boomers who have a pet and offers services such as monthly doctor visits, regular health checkups and an on-site nurse. This pet-friendly personal care facility is located at 6523 W. Avenue L-7, and it is fully equipped to provide assisted living to Lancaster, CA older pet owners. Aquamarine Retirement Home has certain pet related rules and restrictions in place.
Situated at 44148 12th St. W. , inside 93534 zip code area in Los Angeles county, Excellent Home Care provides pet friendly assisted senior living to Lancaster, CA cat and dog owners and includes services such as group outings, scheduled picnics with residents and families and numerous entertainment options. Excellent Home Care can house up to 6 older adult pet owners at a time and provides multiple pet amenities and services to Lancaster residents.
Located at 2044 W. Avenue H6, Lancaster, California, 93536, Westside Villa can help any Los Angeles county pet owner who requires senior living assistance and includes services such as Internet, help with laundry, communal kitchen and more. Westside Villa can provide pet friendly assisted living to no more than 4 Lancaster residents at once. Westside Villa recognizes the positive effect of pets on lives of senior citizens and welcomes pets. Certain pet related rules and restrictions apply. It is licensed by California with license number 197606435.
Older adults looking for senior living communities in Lancaster, California that accept pets will find Strawberry Fields, located at 434 E Lancaster Blvd inside 93535 zip code as a wonderful choice for all of their personal and pet care needs. Strawberry Fields is pet friendly, so Los Angeles county seniors can continue to enjoy the companionship of their pets while getting all the senior care services they need, such as round-the-clock caregiving, help with moving around and more. Strawberry Fields is able to care for up to 6 older adults and allows seniors to stay with cats or dogs under certain pet-related rules. California records indicate 197603946 license number for Strawberry Fields.
Located at 43454 30th Street West in Los Angeles county, Prestige Assisted Living At Lancaster enables pet owners in Lancaster, CA as well as those who live in surrounding areas to receive assisted living care. This pet friendly senior living facility includes amenities such as medication set-up and reminders, a wellness center and emergency pendants. Living with a pet at Prestige Assisted Living At Lancaster is possible for up to 68 Lancaster older adults. Prestige Assisted Living At Lancaster has an official license to provide senior living accommodations for Los Angeles, CA seniors who are dog and cat owners, with license # 197602540.
Seniors with dogs who require assisted living in Lancaster, California can take advantage of Lancaster Haven Rcfe, situated at 1755 West Lancaster Blvd. . Lancaster Haven Rcfe provides amenities such as on-site hair salons and grooming, daily fitness activities and gourmet dining. Seniors with cats, dogs and other pets are welcome at this facility. Certain pet related rules mentioned in the pet policy apply. Lancaster Haven Rcfe is capable of caring for up to 6 senior citizen pet owners from 93534 zip code in Los Angeles county and nearby areas. Lancaster Haven Rcfe has an active license to offer assisted living in Lancaster, California License number: 197608302.
Good Samaritan Special Care Home provides pet friendly assisted living care in Lancaster, California. The senior living facility can provide accommodation to a maximum of 5 pet owners at a time. With a location at 42612 35th St. West, in the 93536 area code inside Los Angeles county, Good Samaritan Special Care Home provides assistance and support not only to older adults, but to their pets as well. Good Samaritan Special Care Home includes assisted living services such as help with taking a bath, getting dressed and individual care plans. This senior care facility accepts Medicare and Medicaid.
William J. Pete Knight Veterans Home-lancaster specializes in providing pet friendly assisted living in Los Angeles county, California. Up to 60 seniors can take advantage of its services and choose from multiple assisted apartment layouts. William J. Pete Knight Veterans Home-lancaster recognizes the importance of pets in seniors’ lives. Although cats, dogs and other pets are welcome, there are some pet related rules and restrictions. William J. Pete Knight Veterans Home-lancaster can provide aid with bathing, dressing and incontinence care to any pet owner senior citizen in Lancaster, CA and surrounding areas. William J. Pete Knight Veterans Home-lancaster is located at 45221 30th Street West, 93536 and supports older adults who need memory care.
When looking for an assisted living facility in Lancaster, California that allows pets, consider St. Therese Residential Care. This pet friendly assisted living facility is an excellent luxurious senior care option. It has a total of 6 assisted living units and includes services such as pet care, walking trails and staff available 24/7. Its license number is 197603942. St. Therese Residential Care provides senior living not only to Lancaster older adults, but also to all Los Angeles county pet owners as well.
If you have a cat or a dog and also need help with daily living, Oasis Community & Senior Living can help you or your loved one to find the assistance and personal care you need in Lancaster, California. Oasis Community & Senior Living has a maximum capacity of 6 older adults who want to live with their pets and includes amenities such as on-site café, transportation services and apartment cleaning. Seniors who own pets can enjoy the companionship of their pet at Oasis Community & Senior Living. There are pet related rules that senior pet owners are expected to follow when staying at Oasis Community & Senior Living.
We Care Residential Home For The Elderly can accommodate 6 baby boomers who have a pet and offers services such as monthly doctor visits, regular health checkups and an on-site nurse. This pet-friendly personal care facility is located at 4707 West Avenue K-8, and it is fully equipped to provide assisted living to Lancaster, CA older dog owners. We Care Residential Home For The Elderly has certain pet related rules and restrictions in place.
Situated at 421 Corona Court, inside 93535 zip code area in Los Angeles county, Dependable Home Care provides pet friendly assisted senior living to Lancaster, CA cat and dog owners and includes services such as group outings, scheduled picnics with residents and families and numerous entertainment options. Dependable Home Care can house up to 6 older adult pet owners at a time and provides multiple pet amenities and services to Lancaster residents.
Located at 44856 33rd Street West, Lancaster, California, 93536, Superior Care Home can help any Los Angeles county pet owner who requires senior living assistance and includes services such as Internet, help with laundry, communal kitchen and more. Superior Care Home can provide pet friendly assisted living to no more than 6 Lancaster residents at once. Superior Care Home recognizes the positive effect of pets on lives of senior citizens and welcomes pets. Certain pet related rules and restrictions apply. It is licensed by California with license number 197608449.
Seniors looking for senior living communities in Lancaster, California that accept pets will find Mgm Elderly Care, located at 4215 Conestoga Drive inside 93536 zip code as a wonderful choice for all of their personal and pet care needs. Mgm Elderly Care is pet friendly, so Los Angeles county seniors can continue to enjoy the companionship of their pets while getting all the senior care services they need, such as round-the-clock caregiving, help with moving around and more. Mgm Elderly Care is able to care for up to 6 older adults and allows seniors to stay with cats or dogs under certain pet-related rules. California records indicate 197608455 license number for Mgm Elderly Care.
55+ adults with pets who require assisted living in Lancaster, California can take advantage of Diana's Marian Res. Care Facility 1, situated at 44047 Rodin Avenue. Diana's Marian Res. Care Facility 1 provides amenities such as on-site hair salons and grooming, daily fitness activities and gourmet dining. Seniors with cats, dogs and other pets are welcome at this facility. Certain pet related rules mentioned in the pet policy apply. Diana's Marian Res. Care Facility 1 is capable of caring for up to 6 senior citizen pet owners from 93535 zip code in Los Angeles county and nearby areas. Diana's Marian Res. Care Facility 1 has an active license to offer assisted living in Lancaster, California License number: 197607859.
50 Pet Friendly Assisted Living Facilities in LANCASTER, CA. List of 50 best pet friendly senior living options in LANCASTER for 2019 that allow dogs, cats and other pets. | 2019-04-21T18:41:23Z | https://www.petfriendlyseniorliving.com/assisted-living/california/lancaster.html |
WASHINGTON, DC - Two stalwart members of the Texas family of medicine were honored at the AMA House of Delegates meeting.
Dr. Mattox was recognized for his service in Houston’s medical response to several natural disasters, including Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 and Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. As part of the Katrina Joint Unified Command, Dr. Mattox helped form an “evacuation city” to house, treat, cloth, and feed 27,000 evacuees from New Orleans in only 18 hours.
WASHINGTON, DC - Congratulations to a pair of medical students who won election as new Region 3 representatives to the American Medical Association Medical Student Section today. Raghuveer Puttagunta from the Baylor College of Medicine is a new Region 3 delegate, and Ben Karfunkle from the University of Texas-Houston Medical School is an alternate delegate.
Texas Medical Association Council on Health Care Quality chair Frank Villamaria, MD, and member Lisa Ehrlich, MD, answer questions from TMA communications vice president Steve Levine, about the new "Choosing Wisely" initiative. They explain why Choosing Wisely is good medicine and a wise course for physicians and their patients.
The Affordable Care Act requires most people to carry health insurance beginning in 2014. While some states received federal financing to set up a state-run health insurance marketplace, Texas chose to participate in the federal marketplace, which offers dozens of health plans and sliding-scale tax credits to help poor individuals and families in Texas purchase coverage. Since the marketplace launched on Oct. 1, technical glitches have plagued the federal website and made it difficult for consumers to create accounts and compare health plans.
The Texas Medical Association, Texas Hospital Association and Texas Academy of Family Physicians said many physicians and hospitals have also been unable to determinewhich health plans offered in the marketplace include them in their provider networks.
Many insurance companies participating in the marketplace have created health plans with provider networks based on existing contracts with physicians and hospitals, and did not contact those providers to sign new contracts or ask if they were willing to participate in the new health plans, according to the associations. As a result, many providers do not know which of the health plans offered in the marketplace will pay them for services.
Spangler explained that many physicians sign contracts that allow insurance companies to include the physician in the provider network for any of their health plans. Often, the insurer is not required to notify the physician which of the health plan networks include the physician.
Physicians may not be able to offer alternatives that would be less costly for the patient, if they are unfamiliar with the patient's health plan network, said Spangler. Furthermore, health plans from the marketplace could present financial obstacles for physicians, because those health plans are required to have a 90-day grace period for policyholders that do not pay their monthly premiums on time. While other health plans would cut off coverage if a patient did not pay their bill on time, the health plans offered in the marketplace would still indicate the patient was covered during that grace period, and retroactively revoke payments to the physician for treatment provided during that time. In those situations, the doctor would be forced to seek payment from the patient for services already provided.
Lance Lunsford, a spokesman for the Texas Hospital Association, said the association has also received inquiries, mostly from small and rural hospitals, on why some hospitals haven’t been contacted to participate in the health plans offered in the federal marketplace and how those hospitals can determine whether they’re already participating through their existing contracts with insurers. The hospitals have the same concerns as doctors, said Lunsford, adding that the hospitals want to be included in the plans.
Texas Oncology, one of the largest cancer treatment groups in the state, has chosen not to participate in any health plans offered in the marketplace because “there are many unknowns related to how the Health Insurance Market Place will cover cancer treatment,” according to a statement by the organization. “These details will impact our ability to provide patients with the latest and most effective treatments, so it is imperative that we are fully informed before a decision is made,” the organization further stated, while also indicating that it would re-evaluate its decision not to participate once more information was available.
Not all of the health plans in the marketplace are based on existing contracts between providers and insurers. For example, some insurance companies participating in the federal marketplace have signed new contracts with specific providers to create HMOs with "skinny networks." Those plans have fewer participating providers but lower monthly premium costs.
All of the health plans in the marketplace are required to maintain provider networks that have sufficient numbers and types of providers to ensure all health services are available in a reasonable time period, according to federal officials at the Health and Human Services Department.
The uncertainty of the provider networks also creates a hardship for consumers, many of whom consider whether their current doctor is covered before purchasing a health plan. On average, Texans have 54 health plans in the marketplace to choose from, all of which have varying monthly premiums, deductibles and provider networks.
Before a consumer can view specific information on the provider networks of health plans offered in the federal marketplace, consumers must create an account on healthcare.gov and apply for coverage. The website does not have a tool to search for specific providers to determine which health plans they’re participating in. Federal officials said that consumers could click a link associated with each health plan to review the provider network, but the Tribune was unable to access that feature because of glitches on the federal website that made it difficult to create an account.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://www.texastribune.org/2013/10/18/uncertainty-federal-marketplace-creates-hardships/.
Six Republican senators voiced "significant concerns" with the government's implementation of the HITECH Act and meaningful use program in a letter to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. The letter says their concerns include "the lack of data to support the Administration's assertions that this taxpayer investment is being appropriately spent and actually achieving the goal of interoperable health IT."
Read more about "REBOOT: Re-examining the Strategies Needed to Successfully Adopt Health IT," which the senators sent to Secretary Sebelius.
“Like a rundown house in need of repair, you’ve got to pick up a hammer and start somewhere. Increasing Medicaid payment rates to Medicare parity is the nail that needs to be hit first.” That was the take-home line of a letter TMA President Michael Speer, MD, sent to the five state senators and five representatives who are hammering out the details of the 2014-15 state budget.
“Over the past several months, there has been considerable attention paid to Texas’ ‘broken’ Medicaid system, with particular interest in the plummeting physician Medicaid participation rate and the impact that exodus is having on patients’ ability to obtain timely, medically necessary care,” Dr. Speer wrote. He pointed out that “grossly inadequate payment” is the single largest reason our members gave to TMA’s Physicians Medicaid Congress for not participating in the program.
"Payments to doctors, other providers at center of debate over Medicaid expansion," Fort Worth Star-Telegram, April 27, 2013.
"Medicaid called 'broken.' Legislators cite declining physician participation," San Antonio Express-News, April 28, 2013.
"Texas Medicaid debate pits rival visions of health care law," Dallas Morning News, April 28, 2013.
Technical issues have delayed plans by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to begin denying claims for services ordered or referred by a physician who is not enrolled in Medicare. The denials were scheduled for May 1. CMS did not elaborate on the technical issues, or set a new deadline.
Once CMS solves its technical issues, physicians who receive claim denials will need to contact the ordering or referring physician to verify that he or she has enrolled in Medicare to prevent future denials. See TMA's free tool to check your Medicare ordering and referring status.
VIDEO: What’s the Main Difference Between ICD-9 and ICD-10?
There’s been much buzz about the new ICD-10 medical coding system — and you’ll be hearing a lot more about it between now and the Oct. 1, 2014, implementation date.
So what are the real differences between it and ICD-9? In an interview with TMA’s Associate Vice President for Practice Management Services Peggy Pringle, Denny Flint, president of Complete Practice Resources, explains that structurally the two codes sets are not all that different. ICD-9 codes have three to five numeric digits, while ICD-10 has three to seven alphanumeric digits. The switch last year to HIPAA 5010 transaction standards for electronic claims paved the way for practices and payers to be able to accommodate the extra digits.
See how TMA can help you prepare for the transition. You better begin now.
Reprinted with permission from Texas Family Doc - "Don’t Get Mad, Get Even: Political Advocacy"
Last December, after months of “planning to,” I finally got around to calling to my state senator to set up a meeting before the legislature convened.
When I met with the legislative aide several weeks later, we had a productive conversation. She had worked on health affairs for another state senator before. I pitched our bill to restore funding to family medicine graduate medical education and the physician loan repayment program to help place doctors in underserved areas. We had been instructed to ask our senators to support the bill and cosponsor it if possible. I thought, ‘What the heck, nothing to lose by asking.’ I was told that the Senator was interested in health care issues and she would get back to me with the senator’s answer. I also forwarded a map of the senate district with all the medically underserved areas and primary care physician to population ratios labeled.
A few weeks later, she emailed me to say that the Senator had decided to support the bill. Ok, I thought, she’ll vote for it when it is heard in committee. A few days later I saw that she was listed as a cosponsor! With 2 of the committee members listed as cosponsors, our chances of getting the bill out of committee looked much better.
Politics can be frustrating, but persistence pays off. And you have nothing to lose by asking.
The Texas Medical Association today asked the House Committee on Public Health to send House Bill 3183 back to the bus barn.
The bill would allow a chiropractor to conduct the required mental and physical examination of a school bus driver, but such examination is beyond the scope of practice of chiropractic in Texas.
The Texas Legislature must protect Texas schoolchildren by ensuring that the men and women behind the wheel of their bus have the mental and physical ability to drive them safely. The heart, lungs, vision, reflexes, hearing, and mental health should all be evaluated for a prospective school bus driver. Chiropractors have neither the statutory scope of practice nor the training to analyze, examine, or evaluate such important components of one’s health.
Mental health is not part of the “biomechanical condition of the spine and musculoskeletal system.” Thus it is not something that can be analyzed, examined, or evaluated by a chiropractor.
Likewise, many components of a physical examination exceed the biomechanical condition of the spine and musculoskeletal system. For example, cardiac, neurological, and pulmonary health are all important components to determine whether one is healthy enough to transport our youngest and most vulnerable citizens. The heart, lungs, and central nervous system are not part of the “biomechanical condition of the spine and musculoskeletal system.” Thus they cannot be analyzed, examined, or evaluated by a chiropractor.
Vote "No" on HB 3183.
Do you understand the difference between the antikickback statute and the Stark law? The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has begun ratcheting up enforcement in regard to billing and financial relationships.
Here’s a quick comparison between these two laws that aim to prevent fraud and abuse.
The Texas Medical Association is proud to host a live simulcast, April 17, of the TEDMED lectures direct from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.
What’s TEDMED? It’s an annual meeting of the minds where multi-disciplinary innovators discuss hot topics and new developments in health and medicine. Past TEDMED speakers include Temple Grandin, President Bill Clinton, and TMA’s 2013 General Session speaker, Abraham Verghese, MD, to name a few. This year’s speaker line-up includes 50+ global leaders from medicine, science, research, technology, academia, business, government, and the arts. Don’t miss out!
Though much of the focus of the event is on stage, it is important to remember that TEDMED is a fast-paced, all-encompassing and immersive event that provides stimulation and exciting discourse from start to finish…onstage and off.
Come prepared to think; come prepared to interact -- but most of all, come prepared to have fun! You're sure to find TEDMED an unforgettable experience.
ATTENDANCE IS FREE FOR TMA MEMBERS! Register now.
FREE parking is available in the TMA Building.
Beverages and light refreshments will be available courtesy of the Texas Medical Association.
Event is limited to 100 guests. Register now. You may register for 2 tickets per session.
Mobile access to all four days and all speakers!
Go beyond passively watching. Use the TEDMEDConnect mobile app to connect “live” to the TEDMED stage and participate in live polls and activities, ask and answer questions, and share comments with the speakers. Be part of the conversation about the future of health and medicine!
Allow all of our 1,200+ Kennedy Center Delegates and tens of thousands of TEDMEDLive participants to connect "live" to the speakers on the TEDMED stage and ask them questions or transmit comments.
Contain the up-to-the-minute TEDMED schedule, including a handy "What's On Now" feature.
Provide users the ability to view photos from TEDMED and upload photos from TEDMEDLive viewing locations.
Allow users to participate in live polls and games.
Give users the opportunity to request a follow-up "Science-Kit" from speakers.
Allow users to download the conference program.
Connect users to Facebook and Twitter.
When prompted by the app, input the TEXAS MEDICAL ASSOCIATION location ID and your personal email address so each user can identified and communicate with the Kennedy Center stage or speakers.
You can read about TEDMED 2013 here.
If you have any questions about the event, please contact TMA's Knowledge Center at (800) 880-7955.
PQRS is switching from the carrot to the stick.
Learn how TMA can help you keep from getting hit.
TMA, partnering with the TMA Foundation, is among 21 state and specialty medical societies and regional health collaboratives that won grants from the ABIM Foundation to advance the Choosing Wisely campaign. Support for the grant program comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Learn more about Choosing Wisely.
Starting May 1, Medicare will deny claims for services ordered or referred by a physician who is not enrolled in Medicare. Physicians who receive claim denials will need to contact the ordering or referring physician to verify that he or she has enrolled in Medicare to prevent future denials.
Use TMA's exclusive free tool to check your Medicare ordering and referring status.
TMA's "Calendar of Doom" is now "Deadlines for Doctors: Do This Now."
It is still loaded with the key dates you need to know to stay abreast of all the upcoming state and federal regulations and key health policy issues that impact you and your practice. It is still filled with the outstanding TMA information resources, tools, and educational programs you need stay in compliance. It is still a great way for you to plan ahead for those insurance company demands and health information technology carrots and sticks.
Check out the new "Deadlines for Doctors."
TMA has learned that if you were in residency or fellowship training between Jan. 1, 1995, and March 31, 2005, you may qualify for a refund of Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) taxes collected on your stipend during that time.
Find out how you can get your money back.
Medicare payments to physicians will drop 2 percent on April 1 because of the federal budget sequester. TMA's Payment Advocacy Department analyzed the impact of the fee reduction and compiled a list of answers to questions you may have.
The Senate Health and Human Services Committee is taking up two bills on end of life today.
One measure is an agreed-to bill supported by TMA, the Texas Hospital Association, the Texas Catholic Conference, and the Texas Alliance for Life. Senate Bill 303 by Sen. Bob Deuell, MD (R-Greenville), amends the Texas Advance Directives Act (TADA) to allow patients to make their care preferences known before they need care and to protect patients from discomfort, pain, and suffering due to excessive medical intervention in the dying process. This bill would maintain protection against forcing physicians to violate their religious beliefs, moral conscience, and professional ethics. Rep. Susan King (R-Abilene) is carrying the bill in the Texas House (House Bill 1444).
The other bill, Senate Bill 675 by Sen. Kelly Hancock (R-North Richland Hills), significantly changes TADA and interferes in the physician’s ability to exercise his or her medical judgment. It could subject terminally ill patients to unneeded pain and suffering, and expose physicians and caregivers to a very vague new cause of legal action. TMA opposes this bill.
"I have come to realize that this is an issue that requires the wisdome of Solomon and the patience of Job," Senator Deuell said at the outset of the hearing. "Lacking that, we must simply do our best to do right by patients and their families."
Houston emergency medicine physician Arlo Weltge, MD, is at the Texas Capitol today to testify for SB 303 and against SB 675 on behalf of TMA.
Thanks to the advancements of medicine and science, Texans are living longer. However, these blessings bring the challenges of care and treatment decisions in life’s final stages. Advance directives allow patients to make their end-of-life treatment decisions known in the event they become incapable of communication or incompetent. Without advance directives, some of life’s most difficult decisions are being thrust upon unprepared adult children, parents, or other loved ones.
At each step, human beings are involved in both deciding on and providing treatment. We must respect the value of life and the moral conscience of those involved.
Texas physicians abide by the principle, “First, do no harm.” For this reason, TMA supports the Texas Advance Directives Act (TADA). Its aim is to allow patients to make their care preferences known before they need care, and to protect patients from discomfort, pain, and suffering due to excessive medical intervention in the dying process. The time may come when all that can be done for a patient is to alleviate pain and suffering, and preserve the patient’s dignity. For physicians, this is about medical ethics and providing medically appropriate care.
Then-Gov. George W. Bush signed TADA into law in 1997. It had unanimous support from physicians, nurses, hospitals, nursing homes, hospice care facilities, and pro-life organizations. The law provides a balanced approach to addressing one of life’s most difficult decisions.
TADA allows a patient to issue an out-of-hospital do-not-resuscitate (DNR) order, a medical power of attorney, or a directive for physicians and family members regarding the person’s wishes to administer or withhold life-sustaining treatment in the event the person is in a terminal or irreversible condition and unable to make his or her wishes known. Additionally, when an attending physician morally disagrees with a health care or treatment decision made by or on behalf of a patient, the act provides for a process whereby an ethics or medical committee reviews the physician’s refusal. The patient is given life-sustaining treatment during the process. If the ethics committee decides that discontinuing lifesaving treatment is in the best interest of the patient, and the family disagrees with that decision, the hospital must continue treatment for 10 days to allow the family some time to find a different facility for the dying patient.
Legislation has been introduced in the past two legislative sessions that would instead require indefinite treatment.
TMA has opposed the proposed legislation because it would prolong unnecessary — and often painful — care. It would require physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals to provide medically inappropriate care, even if that care violates medical ethics or the standard of care. It also sets a dangerous precedent for the legislature to mandate the provision of physician services and treatments that may be medically inappropriate, outside the standard of care, or unethical.
Incentives paid under the Medicare electronic health record incentive program are taxable, the Internal Revenue Service ruled in February.
Find out why and what you need to know to stay out of IRS hot water.
The top problem uncovered by the Medicare Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) for Texas’ Region C involves showing medical necessity for cardiovascular procedures, according the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
That doesn't mean they're not medically necessary -- just that the documentation wasn't right.
Learn how to protect your practice and patients by preventing fraud through identity theft at a two-hour seminar in Dallas April 17. TMA, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Senior Medicare Patrol are sponsoring the seminar.
The Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) restored the Medicare Part B deductible payment on Jan. 25 for patients eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid, also known as "dual eligibles."
Learn how it works -- and what about all of January's claims?
Time is running out to decide if you will participate in Medicare this year. Feb.15 is the deadline to make a decision. TMA will help you decide with a new webinar discussing your three options.
Read on to learn about your three options and how to exercise them.
Q. I need to provide an insurance company a deidentified sampling of medical records from my practice for initial credentialing. What, precisely, defines a “deidentified” record?
A. Physicians may need to use deidentified records for various purposes, such as research, demographic and public health studies, or operational purposes like credentialing. Deidentified health information as defined by HIPAA is not protected health information (PHI) and thus is not covered by the HIPAA Privacy Rule.
Read the list and more tips.
The new year brings new and revised CPT codes. TMA’s Payment Advocacy staff highlighted the changes most likely to affect the most practices in 2013.
Eighty-two evaluation and management (E&M) codes were revised to include “other qualified health care professionals.” This phrase also was added to several non-E&M services in various sections of the guidelines.
Find out what that means and check out the other CPT coding changes we've flagged.
Although ICD-10 implementation doesn't kick in until Oct. 1, 2014, you can take steps now to help minimize your stress level in the months leading up to it. Time is on your side, but you must begin preparations to transition your practice soon.
In a recent video interview, TMA Practice Management Consultant Heather Bettridge sat down with Steve Arter, the chief executive officer of Complete Practice Resources (CPR), and CPR President Denny Flint to get their take on the necessary steps physicians should be taking now.
While his proposal for a new law to ban the sale of assault weapons is grabbing the early headlines, a number of pieces of President Obama's plan to reduce gun violence involve physicians and the health care system.
Already drawing controversy, for example, is the president's announcement that he will "clarify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes."
In an article entitled "Obama: Doctors Should Ask About Guns in Homes," the conservative NewsMax publication says that provision "sounds like George Orwell’s 1984." From the other side, The Atlantic reported that "the order actually just preserves a legal expectation for doctors to report on their patients that has existed for 37 years."
The Secretary of Health and Human Services (Secretary), through the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other scientific agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services, shall conduct or sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it. The Secretary shall begin by identifying the most pressing research questions with the greatest potential public health impact, and by assessing existing public health interventions being implemented across the Nation to prevent gun violence.
"And while year after year, those who oppose even modest gun safety measures have threatened to defund scientific or medical research into the causes of gun violence," the president said at his news conference, "I will direct the Centers for Disease Control to go ahead and study the best ways to reduce it -- and Congress should fund research into the effects that violent video games have on young minds. We don't benefit from ignorance. We don't benefit from not knowing the science of this epidemic of violence."
The first item, according to the White House press briefing, is aimed at training teachers, school counselors, social workers, and others who routinely work with students and young adults. We'll be curious to see more details on the second item. | 2019-04-25T13:02:56Z | http://bloggedarteries.texmed.org/2013/ |
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Episode 11: What makes a good accountant?
Your accountant should be one of the most reliable, supportive people in your network when it comes to building and running your small business. So what exactly makes a good accountant? And does such a thing exist?
In this episode of Xero In, Brett Kelly, senior client director at Kelly + Partners, drops by to chat to Rob Stone and Jeanne-Vida Douglas about how to know when, and why, you need an accountant. Brett also shares insights into the accounting needs of growing small businesses and what you should expect from your accountant beyond the expected norm.
RS: Welcome back to Xero In. I’m your host, Rob Stone, along with JV Douglas and we are delighted to have Brett Kelly join us today.
JVD: Yeah, this is a really exciting interview. He’s such an inspiring person.
JVD: The thing I find really interesting about – about Brett is that he started out in accounting really, really early on and he’s – he’s just got so much confidence that when he was 18 he – he turned around and went, okay, here I am working for one of the most prestigious companies in Australia but I don’t actually want to do this, I want to do things differently. And he went and he pursued that. And that – that – it’s that kind of presence of mind that I find really inspirational.
JVD: Yeah, absolutely and his core talent seems to be identifying first for himself how to succeed and how to move forward and then codifying that and sharing that with essentially his customers.
RS: Yeah, and you get the results.
JVD: And it’s not just financial success which is what we tend to focus in on so much. He – he actually talks about being a successful person which means creating an opportunity to have a happy family, to creating an opportunity to do exercise, to be engaged with the community, to actually take some time off and I mean I – one of the things I found really interesting is that he forces his clients to take a break.
JVD: Let’s switch over to Brett now.
JVD: So we're here with Brett Kelly and we're going to find out a little bit not only about his own experience but also about how other small businesses, should maybe think about going about selecting partners and selecting the people that they work with.
RS: Yeah, in particular accountants so maybe why don't we kick off there and so, you know, Brett if you were out there as a small business owner and you want to find a good accountant first off what in your opinion do you think is a good accountant and, you know, what - what type of things should small businesses look for?
BK: It's a great question. We've built our whole business off the back off one question. I would meet everybody that I met and ask them "do you have a great accountant" and at the time I'd ask that question with a smirk. I still do.
A pretty simple question, do you have a great accountant? They'd look at me and sort of laugh and go "what's a great accountant?"
I would simply say to them, you know, "what a great accountant is is somebody who can help you get to where you want to get to, who can ask you the questions that don't occur to you. That's where they can add value. Who at heart has your best interests because if they don't want the best for you and they don't want to help you you've got a big problem. But it has to be more than that."
You see intentions are nice, you know, I love you, I want to make you better off. I hear this all the time. I have a really great relationship with my accountant. But when we do our review process we find that that accountant is costing these people 20, 30, 50, $500,000 a year. There's no point having a mate as your accountant. You want somebody that's your mate, that - that cares about you and you - you know, your family and your business's future. But you also want somebody that can show you that they have the expertise to help you get from where you are to where you want to be.
The four principles that we're running from is that we want to help people get organised. We want them to have a clear plan which they have in their head. We just want to reduce to a couple of pages.
That we want them to take action against that plan and be able to measure that plan against what we call financial scorecards. Now if you help somebody do that for the first time in many, many years they can breathe. They sit back and they go I feel organised. I feel on top of what we call their financial universe. They know where they are, where they've been and they know the steps to take to get somewhere. It's not very complicated. You know, we're not talking about curing cancer, putting a man on the moon or anything really complicated.
But what we're finding is when I say to somebody, you know, "do you have a great accountant" and they're not - you know, a little bit unsure. "Okay Brett oh that sounds great" I say "well let me ask it to you this way. When you look at this person as a person and as a business owner are they the type of person you want to be when you grow up? Are they getting the type of results that you want" and if they're not I say "well why don't you find somebody who is?" You know, many people in our industry are jaded, grey faced, overweight, three times divorced and miserable. They kind of hate themselves. They hate what they're doing. It's going to be difficult for them to, you know, put forward with any credibility that they have a passion for you and your business.
RS: You're growing with them.
BK: We literally will say that this is really personal training for your finances. This is taking a personal interest in who this person is. Private businesses are funded from personal balance sheets and the banks. And saying to them, you know, if you don't get the person right you'll never get the business right. So you have to get the person right first.
So if we can get the person right, get their head straight and harness that passion it's great to be all passion and no meat right? That's not a great sandwich. But if we can get that passion and - and understand where they're trying to get to and help them structure the simple steps that they need to take in a focused way, we can really harness the energy because you do meet early stage businesses and they're full of passion. They're really excited. You know, well that's great but, you know, they're not quite sure of what are the concrete steps that they need to take.
So we will take them through a process. We have two proprietary processes. One's called a flight plan so it's a personal flight plan, who you are and where you want to get to. And the other one's called a plan to win.
Now we don't know people that win that don't have a plan and when you say what's your plan they typically can't show you so we give them a one page plan with simple steps and we start taking them through this process. It causes them to think principally about as a person who do they want to be when they grow up. As a business, what do they want to look like when they grow up? You know, what is success actually look like?
RS: So going back 10 years did you go through this process with yourself?
BK: That's exactly what I did Rob. I said you know what I don't want to have a business - I was sick of accountants. So I started working at Price Waterhouse at 18. I looked at them and I thought, you know, if I grow up and become like you I'll hate myself. So… I need to do something about this. And I had spent in my youth and sort of parallel career trying to understand, you know, what life was all about.
BK: Dale Carnegie. So I have an undergrad degree, a Masters degree, a CA qualification, I'm a tax agent, JP, I've got all sorts of stuff and none of those courses deal with how to deal well with people and Think and Grow Rich is really, you know, how do you achieve your goals? You know, what are your goals and how do you achieve them? What I took out of those two books was, you know, you need to be excellent at dealing with people. You can't achieve anything without people so you need to be great at working with them.
And then out of Think and Grow Rich they basically said if you want to be successful find people that have been successful and just ask them what they did and so I wrote to 80 prominent Australians. I interviewed 34 of them. I turned it into a book called Collective Wisdom which I self-published and became a number one national bestseller in Australia and off the back of that did many hundreds of professional speaking engagements before I got back into chartered accounting. But when I came back into chartered accounting I believe I came back into it for the right reasons.
JVD: Well most of the time they'll say just don't have the time to do it anyway.
JVD: Small business people are invariably run ragged already or feel that they are.
JVD: It's that classic of working in their business constantly rather than on themselves or on their business. How do you get people to stop and take the time to actually reflect?
BK: Good tools. What we've done, we've got more than 800 proprietary tools in the business that I've written right from the beginning to say okay I want to start a business that can be my best business card. So that I could say to you "look if your business was like mine would you be happy?" So we've grown on average at 42 per cent over the decade. I've had 16 weeks' holidays every year for the last four years. I have an eight year old, a 10 year old and a three year old and I make a lot more money than any other accountant in the country. So if you can put that forward and say hey, you know, it is possible and people are open-minded you can show them that by getting organised you can make a massive difference in your life.
I'll give you a story. When I was, you know, 22 years old I go to interview Bob Hawke at his office and I said to his PA, I said "what are all those diaries behind you" and she said "oh they're Mr Hawke's diaries" and I thought to myself what does he collect diaries?
BK: And this is '97. This is pre-iPhones and things. So you had to keep diaries five years ahead. You know, the Olympics are four years' time, you've been invited, you've got to do this, that and the other. So when you're a young person if you can change your paradigm I thought jeez. I thought I was busy.
Now I've met somebody who actually is busy. So when I meet a private business owner I say "oh so you're busy. You know, busy is like most bodily functions, sort of everyone does them but let's not talk about it."
You know, everyone's busy right? Unless you're dead you're going to be busy. So the question is busy doing what? And so if you can sit someone down and say "what time do you wake up, what time do you go to bed and how do you account for the time that's between those things."
Do you have any real clarity around what your actual goals are and have you put any time in your - in your actual diary if you actually have one to actually work on those actual goals?
And the answer mostly is I'm busy but I still watch the football. I'm busy but I still watch The Bachelor. I'm busy but I'm up to date with all the things that don't matter. And I don't have the time to do things that do matter. Instead of making a little bit of sacrifice upfront in your business, to really get organised, systemise what you're doing so that later you get a time - what I call a time dividend. You know, you get no financial dividend out of your business and you sure as hell don't get a time one.
And so in setting up Kelly Partners I said what I want to show small business owners is they could work with an accountant who actually knows how to run a business, and has built tools that prove that we know how to run a business. So instead of me saying "I'm an expert, listen to me" I go look don't listen to me, have a look at this, this and this, I can show you things that - you're a smart person, you know we're going to help you. So when they see our tools they go sugar yeah that would make a difference. My guy, he doesn't have anything like that and I go "well why is that? You know why that is? Because most accountants are small business owners and they're busy."
JVD: They're doing the same things.
BK: They're doing the same thing and then they go out and say hey I'm a business owner, I can make you better off and the number one thing we find that a small business owner wants. They don't want more money. Many of them have got enough money.
They want more control and they want more time. So we start upfront and say "hey let's just get you organised and give - give you control. Let's get real clarity about what you say this plan is."
Do you want 50 million bucks or five million, one million or five? What do you want, you know? Oh yeah, yeah, I want this. Okay. You can't get what you don't know you're trying to get. And then say "right let's" - for example one of the things we do in our flight plan process is I ask our clients to book their holidays a year in advance.
It's very personal and it's very simple. When are the school holidays? You have children. Would you like to occasionally see them? Yes. Let's book the holidays. What do you mean by book? I don't mean scratch in your diary that you might go if something else doesn't come up. I mean physically book, pay for the tickets, pay for the accommodation, tell your wife you're going, give her the stuff, and commit to your children, yourself and others that you are going away. You have to take holidays right? You have to.
And you have to commit to learning. So one of the other things that we - we plan out a year in advance is well what learning are you going to do this year? You know, we don't know any leaders that aren't readers. We don't know - we do know that learning leads to earning. They've been saying it forever. It's as obvious as anything. I've never seen a growing business that isn't led by a growing person.
RS: On that note how do you carve out and prioritise your time for your own learning? I mean you're incredibly busy.
BK: I'm not busy. I'm relaxed.
BK: With taxes as a bonus.
BK: So if you work out in your small business - now we do another exercise with clients. We say okay your revenue's $100 so that's good fun. Then your cost of sales is $40, so you've got $60 gross profit. You've got $20 overhead. You've got $40 over. You've got $20 of profits. Excellent. So if you convert that into days on, say 45 work weeks, 48 days. You'll pay 30 per cent of that to the Tax Office. Thirty days, 32 days. Right. So you're working the whole year for 32 days.
RS: That's a real paradigm shift, looking at it that way.
BK: So how do you want to spend your days? Because you don't have that many and I also don't work on the basis that I'm going to live to 400 because I'm not. We have so many clients with more than 7000 businesses in New South Wales and the great news about that is that we're very in touch with the human experience. We know people get married. We know people die when they're not planning. We know that they get divorced when they weren't thinking about it and that they'll - you know, lots of good things happen too. There are births, deaths, marriages and there's just all the things that happen in life. But because of the broad human experience we're seeing I certainly don't take time or life for granted and so I want to get out of bed because I am excited by what I'm doing. I want to stay up late because I want to make a difference in the lives of the people around me and my own life.
And so, you know, we talk about well how are the people we work with? They're the people that want to get out of bed. They get up early. They stay up late. Business is their primary hobby if you like. They don't view it as work. They enjoy what they're doing. And to your question before JV about, you know, how do you pause and work out that why, it's pretty simple. If you were in business for any other reason than to serve other people, go and get into another business.
So work out that you want to help people. And then work out the unique skills and opportunities that you have to help people and then get busy helping people and if you get a clear financial model and you're helping a lot of people you'll make a lot of money.
RS: I love it. I'm pumped up.
JVD: So much inspiration. Thanks for coming on Brett.
RS: Wow, I got so much from that chat with Brett.
JVD: I feel all exhausted and inspired at once.
JVD: You know we’ve got so much good stuff out of our – our conversation with Brett that we’ve actually – divided it into two episodes.
RS: What a great idea.
JV: But you’ve got to stay tuned for the next instalment.
RS: Great, can’t wait to hear it.
JVD: Looking forward to it, thanks Rob. | 2019-04-21T12:52:09Z | https://www.xero.com/id/resources/podcasts/xero-in/2015/find-good-accountant/ |
There are huge amounts of reasons concerning why you ought to consider utilizing hemp oil, all which realize positive effects on your wellbeing. In the US, marijuana is accessible legitimately in constrained amounts in excess of twelve of states. Through this, you’re ready to consume hemp as an answer for a portion of the wellbeing conditions that you may have. Not at all like unsynthesized marijuana, hemp is equipped for diminishing torment without making you sense that you’re consuming a medication.
Hemp oil is known to be low in soaked fats. Through this, you’re certain that when consuming hemp oil, you won’t be making any negative impacts on your body, however, you’ll be strengthening your body and health. However, before you make any purchase of hemp oil, its ideal getting to know of some places which you can attain the oils, thus getting to ensure that its of the best quality.
More so, you’ll find that besides pain reduction, hemp has other impacts on the skin, all which are positive. When mixed with fatty acids and Omega 3, hemp oil is capable of making your skin better, smoother and remove acne. Its an ideal skin care product that you can get to use to ensure that your skin is always amazing.
Likewise, you’ll find that hemp oil gets to assist your body with hormonal balance. Traditionally, hemp oil was essential in treating menstrual pain in women, meaning that nowadays, its still a valid option.
On the off chance that you have joint inflammation or have any unending torment, hemp oil can help. Research and studies have proved that the utilization of unsaturated fats can help with agony, and since hemp oil is an incredible wellspring of Omega 3 unsaturated fats, you should see a distinction in your condition in a month at the most extreme. Obviously, the impacts can appear to be changed to various individuals, yet most patients have claimed extraordinary things.
At last, it’s optimal getting the opportunity of learning how to utilize hemp oil cautiously, since there’s loads of terrible press around it, utilizing balance is a perfect way to guaranteeing results. When obtaining hemp oil, dependably consider a respectable organization. Get to take your time to comprehend as to the companies available and ensure that you know the one with the best hemp products. Through this, you’re ready to spare some time and cash and guarantee that you get quality products. All the more along these lines, you’ll see that conducting exploration will help you in learning as to all that that’ll work best.
You may need to get the services of a plumbing company. The maintenance of the drainage system highly dependent on the professionalism of the plumbing contractor. A perfect kept drainage system will make sure that water and sewerage services are well taken care of. This will make sure that people get the services they need in good condition. This is also very healthy to the users of the water. The plumbing company is therefore needed to offer its services. It may take a lot of time trying to identify a good plumbing contractor. So many aspects have to be put in place when settling on a plumbing company. You can read below to know the aspects that are needed to hire the services of a plumbing contractor.
The first factor that should be considered when choosing a plumbing company is the experience of the plumbing contractor. Most of the customers need the experience to make choices. A very experienced plumbing contractor will be able to offer the best services to the customers. The experienced company will know what is wrong with a drainage system very easily. They know this from the long time they have been doing the same job. The solutions to such problems are also readily available from the experienced firms.
The second factor that should be considered when choosing a professional plumbing contractor is licensing and insurance of the company. The license should also not have an outdated one. A good license is one which is provided by the government agencies. The company should also be insured. The insurance should cover the equipment of the company. The insurance should also cover the employees. The damages that can be experienced by the third parties should also be covered against. With an insurance cover, the customers will never have to pay for the damages.
The employees of the company should also be well qualified. The company should employ well-trained workers. The employees should have the best skills that are needed in maintaining the drainage system. You do not need to give a contract to a company with a semi-skilled workforce. To get the best services you will require the services of a company with a skilled workforce.
A good company to carry out plumbing activities to the customers should be one that has been recommended. Searching for online reviews about the company is essential. This entails asking around for the views about the company. The good and bad of the company are also shown to the customers. The company that has the best reviews should be considered.
You can keep your pets like rabbits at home and ensure that the are happy and very comfortable. You can keep them safe by doing some things for them for example cleaning them but there is a lot you can still do for them so that they can feel more appreciated and accepted at home. Finding homemade hay for your rabbit will do it good because of the several advantages it is known for. By reading this article, you will get to understand why you should find some homemade hay for your rabbit.
As a way of keeping your rabbits entertained and active all day long, you ought to feed them with the homemade hay. The rabbits tend to concentrate on chewing the homemade hay all the time and making fun with the homemade hay chewed balls in their mouth and by this they will remain active. You as a pet owner, you will enjoy watching your rabbit do this from time to time. Your rabbits can acquire fiber by eating the homemade fiber. Fiber is a very essential component for any balanced diet of an animal. For this reason, you ought to find homemade hay for your rabbits and feed them that which is of the same size as their body.
Rabbits at home can use homemade hay as their toothbrush. Rabbits ought to chew this homemade hay on a daily basis as it will help them sharpen their ever growing teeth as well as keeping them strong. As the rabbits chew the homemade hay as a way of keeping them busy, they will finally swallow it and as a result they get to improve their digestion habits and they will be very healthy generally. By doing this on a daily basis, you will not have to spend time and resources visiting the vet frequently.
You can use these homemade hay as bedding for your rabbit. It is meant to have a pleasant smell which the rabbits will feel so happy about and end up sleeping peacefully. Homemade hay has no dangerous effects like causing respiratory problems to your rabbits as they are usually free from dust. It has a very soft texture and so, you rabbits will not feel any challenges while sleeping on the homemade hay. You can keep your home clean by the use of this type of hay since it is easy to remove in an event where the rabbits have scattered it during play. It is very safe to use homemade hay even in a situation where you are living with people who are allergic to dust as it has no dust itself.
The need for vacation is highly recommended after spending a long time at work. When planning a vacation, you will be required to make several choices. The most difficult being choosing the right destination for the vacation. The only way that you will enjoy the vacation is if you choose the right company and destination. The other reason why you should go on vacation is to de-stress. Therefore, you should be equipped with excellent vacation ideas so that you can realize the value. Several vacation ideas exist for girls that you can choose from. Here are some of the places that you should consider going on vacation with your girls.
Austin should be one of the places that you should give priority when choosing a vacation destination. The reason why you should consider Austin is because of the beauty. One of the things that contribute to the beauty of the city is the nightlife scenes. The other reason to choose Austin as your vacation destination is the bars and clubs. The next destination that is recommended for girls is Cancun. The reason why you should choose to go to Cancun is to enjoy the resort life. You should plan a vacation to visit Cancun so that you can have an excellent experience of the beach resort. The most important item that you should have for this vacation is the sunhat.
New Orleans is the other suitable vacation destination for the ladies. If you choose to go to New Orleans, you will be sure of the best vacation experience. Hence, you should convince your girls to choose the city for vacation. The city is highly recommended as it is the best place to party. You should ensure that your vacation schedule coincides with events such as Halloween and Mardis Gras. The most suitable vacation destination should be Paris because of the reputation. The Paris Guy provide you with more information about why Paris is an excellent vacation idea for the ladies.
You should also include Las Vegas in the list. Las Vegas is recommended for the girls who are brave. Booking a cruise is also recommended as a suitable vacation idea for the ladies. Therefore, if you are on a flexible budget, you should give it a priority.
The other vacation idea that you should think of is meandering through the California Wine Valley. It is recommended for those who prefer casual experience. You will also have the chance to enjoy several varieties of wines. The other places that you should include in the destination list include Big Apple and Nashville. Therefore, you should ensure that you visit these places with your girls so that you can be sure of an exciting vacation experience.
Important Tips to Assist You in Picking the Perfect Marriage Counselor.
In marriage, counseling is one of an essential that that is required. Through the counseling session, your marriage will be always in the right track. If you need to marriage counseling services, you, therefore, need to look got a marriage counselor to handle the task. During your search you are likely to come across many marriage counselors, therefore, picking a right one is an overwhelming task. You should select the right marriage counselor to enable you to get professional services. With the help of the tips below, you are able to determine the right professional to pick for marriage counseling services.
You should begin by looking at the credential of the marriage counselor. You need to confirm the credential of the marriage counselor since there are some that will just have the title without being trained. Thus, ensure that you check on the certification to ensure that the counselor has been trained. Ensure that the marriage counselor has obtained a copy of the license. The licensed marriage counselor shows that the professional has the right qualification to provide the counseling services.
You need to consider checking at the pricing of the session. You can have a certain amount of money that you and your partner are willing to spend on the services. Therefore, you will be looking for the professional who will offer you with the services within your price range. You need to look at the rates from different professionals’ offering to marriage counseling services. Ensure that you select the marriage counselor that admits you to use your insurance to pay for the session. This will help you save a lot of money for the services. The right marriage counselor should have the right qualities and ask for a reasonable fee.
When looking for the right marriage counselor, you need to consider the level of expertise. The highly experienced marriage counselor will provide you with the right services. The counselor will have acquired the right skills and knowledge for handling the session through being in the business for a long period. For that reason, consider checking with your potential marriage counselor from the period that he has offered the services. Consider asking the marriage counselor to provide you with references. Take your time and get in touch with the past clients of the marriage counselor you are considering. You need to find out on how the marriage counselor operates. From the marriage counselors website, check at the testimonials left by other couples who have experienced the services of the counselor. Looking for the reviews and references will assist you in your selection of the professional to work with for the marriage counseling session.
Why Hire a Good Roofing and Siding Company?
Those who have noticed that something is wrong with their roofing might be very worried about it. Homeowners certainly know that roofing is very important to their homes, and if they do not work on the damage right away, it can grow and spread, and even involve other parts of the home. One will be relieved to know that he or she does not have to get up on the roof and try to solve the problem alone, as he or she can hrie an excellent, experienced roofing and siding company out there. Those who find the best roofing and siding company, then, can be sure that through it, they will be able to enjoy so many benefits.
The first thing that homeowners can benefit when they hire the best roofing and siding company in their area is that of knowing that the problem will be fixed very quickly. When it comes to roofing problems, fast work has to be done, as these problems tend to spread and grow very quickly. It is certainly a relief to know that professionals who work for a reputable roofing and siding company can do very fast work on repairs, easing their minds considerably.
Finding a reputable company like this one is also great, as when you do so, you can be sure that you will get to enjoy a lot of different kinds of services that will turn out to be so useful to your home. Not only will you be able to have roofing work done, but you will also be able to get repairs on your siding, your deck and porch, your gutters, and also your doors and windows. Of course, this will give one so much convenience to enjoy, as it will no longer be necessary to hire a different company for each one of his or her home repairs.
One who finds the best roofing company like this will also be glad to know that when he or she does so, it will be possible to trust in the quality of the work that is done. This is because professionals who work for a service like this will be well-trained and experienced, with the skill to avoid mistakes and do things beautifully and flawlessly.
If you have noticed that your roofing is damaged and leaking, then, or if something else is wrong with your home, then you should immediately find the best roofing services like these, as when you do so, you can be sure that the problem will be fixed fast, and in the proper way according to the best standards.
Are you interested to know how you can improve your savings account or achieve financial freedom? One of the ways you can save money is through investing in the stock market. It is really fun to save and earn money through this method. If you want to make sure that you are getting more wins with this, the might as well hire someone who can help you with it. If you want to be a good investor, there are some things you need to learn. This is because investing in the stock market needs careful analysis and decision making process. For example, there are some information you need to master and study way ahead of time. This involves getting yourself familiar with the pattern of stocks and a lot more. If you want to succeed in this kind of business venture, you must have intelligent decisions all the time.e The information you will be needing would be helpful if you want to succeed in this type of business venture.
By mastering the patterns of stocks, you can be sure that you will get higher returns from your investment. For example, you can invest in gold, commodity, and currency. More than that, you need to also be familiar with derivatives. Since you will also be dealing with contacts, it is important that you know when this ends. If that is too confusing for you, visit this site and read all the information you need to know. The other thing you can do is to look for stock broking companies that can help you with this. The other reason why you need them is for your stock exchanges to be done easily and smoothly. The good news is that these companies can be found in the internet already.
More than that, these stock broking companies can guide you when it comes to the decision making process. For some people the world of stocks is a difficult world to understand, so ask help from these professionals when things get rough and tough for you. Today, you can find different kinds of investors. This is because there is a different type of investor when it comes to risky chances. Every investor you find out there has its own way of investing in the stock market, and you could be different from the usual type. Always remember that it is always better if you have someone, a professional from a reliable stock broking company, who will teach you every single thing you need to learn. If you want to make sure that you have everything you got, click here for more info.
A lot of sectors and operations have been greatly boosted over the last few decades because of the high growth of technology globally. The major reason behind the rapid growth of many organisations across the world are the various technological advancements that have employed by the business owners for the running of their business operations. The implementation of the CRM software programs in many real estate businesses has seen them grow and achieve a lot of success within a short duration of time. There are so many ways through which the CRM system can help you grow your real estate business. Here are some of the few reasons it is important for a real estate business person to implement the usage of the CRM software system in his or her business organisation so look out for more info .
The CRM software helps to improve efficiency in many real estate businesses and thus minimizing the costs incurred and time wastages. CRM helps the real estate business owner to easily track the leads generated from the customers therefore making their management very easy. Through putting all the relevant information in one place, it becomes very easy for the business owner to find the needed information about the clients and thus saving a lot of time in the organisation. Lastly, the CRM software systems helps to secure the businesses’ data.
There are some key CRM systems that can help your real estate business thrive and hence important to be aware of them. When running a real estate business, always take into account the following best customer relationship management software system that can help boost the growth of your business. The first CRM system for your business is the salesforce CRM for the real estate agents.
The other CRM software system is the wise agent that enables the real estate agents easily track leads and pipeline management tools. The real estate agents are also helped to track their leads by the help of the CRM tools known as the HubSpot CRM. Through the HubSpot CRM, it is also easy for the real estate business to streamline the sales process and increase its returns. The Freshsales CRM is also very important not only to tracking the customer leads but also for engaging the property buyers in a more efficient way. The Pipedrive CRM tools are also greatly recommended to the real estate agents that are too busy.
Going to Zumba classes can help you enjoy a lot of advantages. A major benefit of Zumba classes is that they help you burn more calories. Aerobic exercise and resistance training is usually included when it comes to Zumba classes. You will have to do high-intensity cardiovascular exercises and controlled and quick movements. This helps in ensuring that your metabolism is kept in high gear for at least an hour. In that hour, you will have burnt a lot of calories. You should go to Zumba classes if you’re going to lose weight quickly.
Another advantage of Zumba classes is that they boost endurance. Maintaining continuous movement while working out can be very tough. Zumba is a long-duration workout that will help you build more endurance. Utilizing all energy and doing endless exercises in Zumba helps in ensuring that your body will get used. This helps in ensuring that work out is more comfortable and more enjoyable.
Another advantage of Zumba classes is that it helps in improving posture. The movements involved in Zumba classes are not the ones involved in most workouts. When it comes to Zumba, all samba, salsa, and mambo moves are incorporated. Specific muscle groups are focused on when it comes to Zumba. You will also be working on your joints to enhance more movement and stretches. You can improve the posture and flexibility of your body when there is no tension. Another benefit of Zumba classes is that they help you reduce stress.A lot of people prefer going to work out in the gym. However, the gym can be intimidating and frustrating for most people. If you feel like that, you should going to Zumba classes. These classes are social, and this helps your body release endorphins and neurotransmitters. You will be able to reduce all the stress in your body, and you will also be able to improve your mood.
Boosting your confidence is another reason why you should go to Zumba classes. This is because the social aspect of Zumba cannot be compared to other workouts. There will be a fun way for you to improve your dance moves and your physical health. The setting of Zumba classes is usually informal, and this ensures that you will always feel comfortable. This helps in ensuring that you improve your self-confidence. Another reason, why you should consider going to Zumba classes, is that you will have a chance of improving coordination. Coordination becomes a problem especially as you age. In Zumba classes. There are a lot of functions and dance motions you will be able to undertake. In this case, your coordination will still be better as you age.
It will be a great idea to ensure that you have used the very best technique so that you can deliver flowers to any one you like with no troubles. In order for you to deliver flowers to somebody you care with no snags, make certain that you have well thought about all those useful things in a serious manner.
In order for you to be able to deliver the types of flowers you want with no hitches, certify that you have fused hands with the correct specialist. You should also ensure that you have dealt with a florist flowers deliver service when delivering flowers so that you can be able to satisfy all of your wants and the needs of the recipient.
It is a very challenging to deliver the flowers by yourself and that is one of the reason why you should use flower delivery services because they offer services that will help you attain all of your needs with no problems. Your flowers will not be impaired before they reach to the sender if you make certain that you have worked hand in hand with a florist flower delivery service that is sited in your area.
You will not in any case damage your vehicle with dirt or water if you work close with a flower delivery firm that is to be found in your town. Keep in mind that there are a lot of florist flower delivery businesses and it will be up to you to selected the one that will help you satisfy all of your needs with no bothering issues.
You should ensure that you have shadowed all guidelines that you have been provided with so that you can easily be able to find a trustworthy flowers delivery business to deal with. Conducting an online survey is one of the many ways that you should consider when looking for the finest flowers delivery business.
It will be a decent notion to make sure that you have combined hands with a professional and an authorized flowers delivery business so that you can attain your objectives easily. You will be able to surprise your loved one who you are sending flower to perfectly if you ensure that you have considered working jointly with an illustrious florist flowers delivery service.
You will enhance all of your goals with easily if you make certain that you have dealt with an insured flowers delivery establishment that is to be found in your zone. Cost of the flowers delivery company’s services is another aspect that you should ponder on seriously when looking for a good flowers delivery business. | 2019-04-18T11:13:56Z | http://translateportuguesetoenglish.us/category/web-resources/ |
Stockholms universitet, Naturvetenskapliga fakulteten, Institutionen för miljövetenskap och analytisk kemi. Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, Norway; Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway.
12. Aben, Ralf C. H.
Stockholms universitet, Naturvetenskapliga fakulteten, Institutionen för miljövetenskap och analytisk kemi.
Experiments with a climate model (NorESM1) were performed to isolate the effects of aerosol particles and greenhouse gases on surface temperature and precipitation in simulations of future climate. The simulations show that by 2025-2049, a reduction of aerosol emissions from fossil fuels following a maximum technically feasible reduction (MFR) scenario could lead to a global and Arctic warming of 0.26 K and 0.84 K, respectively; as compared with a simulation with fixed aerosol emissions at the level of 2005. If fossil fuel emissions of aerosols follow a current legislation emissions (CLE) scenario, the NorESM1 model simulations yield a non-significant change in global and Arctic average surface temperature as compared with aerosol emissions fixed at year 2005. The corresponding greenhouse gas effect following the RCP4.5 emission scenario leads to a global and Arctic warming of 0.35 K and 0.94 K, respectively.
The model yields a marked annual average northward shift in the inter-tropical convergence zone with decreasing aerosol emissions and subsequent warming of the northern hemisphere. The shift is most pronounced in the MFR scenario but also visible in the CLE scenario. The modeled temperature response to a change in greenhouse gas concentrations is relatively symmetric between the hemispheres and there is no marked shift in the annual average position of the inter-tropical convergence zone. The strong reduction in aerosol emissions in MFR also leads to a net southward cross-hemispheric energy transport anomaly both in the atmosphere and ocean, and enhanced monsoon circulation in Southeast and East Asia causing an increase in precipitation over a large part of this region.
Particulate matter suspended in air (i.e. aerosol particles) exerts a substantial influence on the climate of our planet and is responsible for causing severe public health problems in many regions across the globe. Human activities have altered the natural and anthropogenic emissions of aerosol particles through direct emissions or indirectly by modifying natural sources. The climate effects of the latter have been largely overlooked. Humans have dramatically altered the land surface of the planet causing changes in natural aerosol emissions from vegetated areas. Regulation on anthropogenic and natural aerosol emissions have the potential to affect the climate on regional to global scales. Furthermore, the regional climate effects of aerosol particles could potentially be very different than the ones caused by other climate forcers (e.g. well mixed greenhouse gases). The main objective of this work was to investigate the climatic effects of land use and air pollution via aerosol changes.
Using numerical model simulations it was found that land use changes in the past millennium have likely caused a positive radiative forcing via aerosol climate interactions. The forcing is an order of magnitude smaller and has an opposite sign than the radiative forcing caused by direct aerosol emissions changes from other human activities. The results also indicate that future reductions of fossil fuel aerosols via air quality regulations may lead to an additional warming of the planet by mid-21st century and could also cause an important Arctic amplification of the warming. In addition, the mean position of the intertropical convergence zone and the Asian monsoon appear to be sensitive to aerosol emission reductions from air quality regulations. For these reasons, climate mitigation policies should take into consideration aerosol air pollution, which has not received sufficient attention in the past.
Human activities have lead to changes in the energy balance of the Earth and the global climate. Changes in atmospheric aerosols are the second largest contributor to climate change after greenhouse gases since 1750 A.D. Land-use practices and other environmental drivers have caused changes in the emission of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) and secondary organic aerosol (SOA) well before 1750 A.D, possibly causing climate effects through aerosol-radiation and aerosol-cloud interactions. Two numerical emission models LPJ-GUESS and MEGAN were used to quantify the changes in aerosol forming BVOC emissions in the past millennium. A chemical transport model of the atmosphere (GEOS-Chem-TOMAS) was driven with those BVOC emissions to quantify the effects on radiation caused by millennial changes in SOA.
The specific objectives of this licentiate thesis are: 1) to understand what drove the changes in aerosol-forming BVOC emissions (i.e. isoprene, monoterpenes and sesquiterpenes) and to quantify these changes; 2) to calculate for the first time the combined historical aerosol direct and aerosol-cloud albedo effects on radiation from changing BVOC emissions through SOA formation; 3) to investigate how important the biological climate feedback associated to BVOC emissions and SOA formation is from a global climate perspective.
We find that global isoprene emissions decreased after 1800 A.D. by about 12% - 15%. This decrease was dominated by losses of natural vegetation, whereas monoterpene and sesquiterpene emissions increased by about 2% - 10%, driven mostly by rising surface air temperatures. From 1000 A.D. to 1800 A.D, isoprene, monoterpene and sesquiterpene emissions decline by 3% - 8% driven by both, natural vegetation losses, and the moderate global cooling between the medieval climate anomaly and the little ice age. The millennial reduction in BVOC emissions lead to a 0.5% to 2% reduction in climatically relevant aerosol particles (> 80 nm) and cause a direct radiative forcing between +0.02 W/m² and +0.07 W/m², and an indirect radiative forcing between -0.02 W/m² and +0.02 W/m². The suggested biological climate feedback seems to be too small to have observable consequences on the global climate in the recent past.
Stockholms universitet, Naturvetenskapliga fakulteten, Institutionen för miljövetenskap och analytisk kemi. Linköping University, Sweden.
The Arctic region is warming considerably faster than the rest of the globe(1), with important consequences for the ecosystems(2) and human exploration of the region(3). However, the reasons behind this Arctic amplification are not entirely clear(4). As a result of measures to enhance air quality, anthropogenic emissions of particulate matter and its precursors have drastically decreased in parts of the Northern Hemisphere over the past three decades(5). Here we present simulations with an Earth system model with comprehensive aerosol physics and chemistry that show that the sulfate aerosol reductions in Europe since 1980 can potentially explain a significant fraction of Arctic warming over that period. Specifically, the Arctic region receives an additional 0.3Wm(-2) of energy, and warms by 0.5 degrees C on annual average in simulations with declining European sulfur emissions in line with historical observations, compared with a model simulation with fixed European emissions at 1980 levels. Arctic warming is amplified mainly in fall and winter, but the warming is initiated in summer by an increase in incoming solar radiation as well as an enhanced poleward oceanic and atmospheric heat transport. The simulated summertime energy surplus reduces sea-ice cover, which leads to a transfer of heat from the Arctic Ocean to the atmosphere. We conclude that air quality regulations in the Northern Hemisphere, the ocean and atmospheric circulation, and Arctic climate are inherently linked.
Sediments from the paleoequatorial Pacific record the paleomagnetic field with high-fidelity and contain cyclic variations in chemical and physical properties that can be astronomically tuned, as has been shown from past Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) and Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) cruises, e.g., Legs 85, 138, 198, and 199. In an effort to fill gaps from past coring and to construct complete stratigraphic sections spanning the Cenozoic, Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expeditions 320 and 321 cored sediments along a Pacific Equatorial Age Transect (PEAT) earlier this year. A total of 23 holes at 8 Sites (Sites U1331 through U1338) were cored, recovering 6,141 m of sediment (Preliminary Reports are available at http://iodp.tamu.edu/publications/PR.html). Initial paleomagnetic results from Expedition 320 include measurements at 56,222 intervals along ~2000 split-core sections, as well as detailed progressive alternating field (AF) and thermal demagnetization of over 400 discrete samples (7 cm3 cubes). The cleaned paleomagnetic data were characterized by shallow inclinations, consistent with the sites being near the paleoequator, and by 180° alternations in declination downhole, reflecting magnetic polarity zones. The resulting magnetostratigraphies, which are used to develop initial age models for the drill sites, yield 803 dates ranging from 51.743 Ma (the base of Chron 23n.2n at Site 1331) to the present (Chron C1n; 0 to 0.783 Ma at Site U1335). In addition, 83 short polarity intervals were observed that might correspond to cryptochrons or geomagnetic excursions. We will discuss initial efforts to further resolve the PEAT magnetostratigraphies and to integrate them with bio-, chemo-, and cyclo- stratigraphies from the equatorial Pacific and elsewhere in order to improve and extend astronomical calibration of the geologic timescale.
Sediment core HLY0503-8JPC raised by the HOTRAX'05 expedition from the Mendeleev Ridge was analyzed for multiple lithological, paleontological. and stable-isotopic proxies to reconstruct paleoceanographic conditions in the western Arctic Ocean during the Late Quaternary. The core, extensively sampled in the upper 5 m, reveals pronounced changes in sedimentary environments during the ca. 250 kyr interval encompassing Marine Isotopic Stages (MIS) 1 to 7. An estimated average resolution of 500 yr/sample, at least for the last glacial cycle including the last interglacial, provides more detail than seen in other sedimentary records from the western Arctic Ocean. The age control is provided by C-14 and amino acid racemization measurements on planktonic foraminifers and correlations with the stratigraphy developed for the central Lomonosov Ridge and with glacial events at the Eurasian Arctic margin. Cyclic variations in lithology combined with foraminiferal abundance and stable-isotopic composition indicate profound changes in hydrographic and depositional environments between interglacial-type and glacial-type periods apparently reflecting a combination of 100-kyr and precessional time scales. This periodicity is complicated by abrupt iceberg- and/or meltwater-discharge events with variable (Laurentide vs. Eurasian) provenance. The proxy record from the interval identified as the last interglacial (MIS 5e), which may aid in understanding the future state of the Arctic Ocean, indicates low ice conditions and possibly enhanced stratification of the water column.
Southeast Asia is characterized by a monsoonal climate, with distinct wet and dry seasons. This has great impact on societies, agriculture and infrastructures. Despite the critical importance to understand the mechanisms that influence the variability of the Asian Monsoon, there is scarcity of both historical and paleoclimate proxy data from Southeast Asia. For this reason, two lakes from Thailand, Lake Pa Kho (LPK) and Lake Nong Thale Pron (NTP), which are located in the northeastern and southern part of Thailand, respectively, were cored. The region also offers the opportunity to study the potential influence of climate on the Angkor civilization. Overall, this project seeks to improve our understanding of the mechanisms that contribute to Asian monsoon variability and how the variability influenced Angkor Civilization. Here I present results on a 2000-years sediment record from LPK. The most important part of the work presented here consists of compound-specific hydrogen isotope ratios (δD), which are used to infer past changes in the hydrological cycle of Southeast Asia. This approach is based on the premise that δD of lipid biomarkers from plants, algae and microorganisms deposited in sediments reflects the δD of their source water, which in turn is influenced by local hydrology. A rapid increase in precipitation is inferred from ca. 700 to ca. 850 AD, after a long dry phase. The inferred shift to wet conditions likely contributed to the rise of the Angkor Civilization, by boosting agriculture. However, gradual drying occurred at around 900 AD until the 19th century. This long-term decline in precipitation, favoring ever more frequent occurrences of severe droughts, likely also contributed to the demise and fall of the Angkor, around 1400 AD. Comparison with other hydroclimate proxy records revealed that wet conditions in tropical SE Asia corresponded to a dry Western Pacific, wet conditions in the East Pacific, and vice versa - a pattern that can be explained by opposing centers of convection and subsidence. Moreover, our tropical record also appears to be anti-correlated with the subtropical East Asian Monsoon, possibly caused by rainout effects along moisture trajectories. These long-term rainfall shifts closely match patterns observed during periods of strong El Niño, and suggests a central role for Pacific Walker circulation as a driver of centennial-scale hydroclimatic change. Besides these results from LPK oriented towards reconstructing hydroclimate, I also present some initial results concerning the evolution of the plant community of LPK, based on compound specific 13C analysis, as well as first biomarker results from NTP.
Stockholms universitet, Nordiska institutet för teoretisk fysik (Nordita). Yale University, USA; University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
The Swedish environmental and classification system for pharmaceuticals is a voluntary, industry-owned system with the purpose to provide environmental information about active pharmaceutical ingredients in the Swedish market. In this paper we report the results from a detailed evaluation of the accuracy and consistency of the risk assessments conducted within this system. The evaluation focused on the following three aspects: 1) comparison of the companies' risk assessments with the classification system's own guidance document, 2) how the risk assessments are affected if additional effect data is used, and 3) the consistency of different risk assessments for the same pharmaceutical substance. The analyses show that the system's guidance gives no criteria for when to consider a study "long-term" or "short-term", and that this confusion affected the outcome of the risk assessments in some cases. Furthermore, when the system's guidance document is followed and the risk assessment was supplemented with effect data from the open scientific literature, then the risk classification for a substantial number of the evaluated substances was altered. Our analyses also revealed that in some cases risk assessors disagree on the outcome of the assessment for the same active pharmaceutical ingredient. Finally we list some recommendations to improve the classification system. The recommendations include clarifying concepts and instructions in the guidance document, introduction of a standardized way of reporting data to the website, and promotion of use of non-standard test data when considered the most relevant.
Calcareous nannofossils have provided a powerful biostratigraphic tool since the 1950's and 1960's, when several milestone papers began to highlight their potential use in dating Cenozoic sediments and rocks. Here, we present a new calcareous nannofossil biozonation for the Paleogene Period, which is based on biostratigraphic data collected during the past 30 years. Semi-quantitative counting methods applied on DSDP/ODP drill sites and marine on-land sections have been used to demonstrate the details of the abundance patterns of each biostratigraphically useful calcareous nannofossil taxon. This new biozonation still partly relies on older biozonations and thus represents an integration between those classical biohorizons that proved reliable and new biohorizons proposed as substitutes for bioevents considered problematic. Thirty-eight new Paleogene biozones are proposed using a new code system: 11 Paleocene biozones (CNP1-CNP11), 21 Eocene biozones (CNE1-CNE21) and 6 Oligocene biozones (CNO1-CNO6). The new scheme uses a limited number of biohorizons, one for each biozone boundary, which guarantees more stability although with a coarser resolution. A series of additional biohorizons are included in almost every biozone. This new Paleogene biozonation has an average duration of 1.1 Myr per biozone, ranging from 0.9 Myr in the Paleocene, to 1.0 Myr in the Eocene, and 1.8 Myr in the Oligocene. Age estimates provided for calcareous nannofossil biohorizons are calculated using both magnetostratigraphic and astronomically tuned cyclostratigraphic data. | 2019-04-23T13:07:50Z | http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/resultList.jsf?af=%5B%5D&aq=%5B%5B%7B%22categoryId%22%3A%2211537%22%7D%5D%5D&aqe=%5B%5D&aq2=%5B%5B%5D%5D&language=sv&query= |
1 After the death of Moses the servant of the Lord, the Lord spoke to Joshua son of Nun, Moses' assistant, saying, 2 "My servant Moses is dead. Now proceed to cross the Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the Israelites. 3 Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you, as I promised to Moses. 4 From the wilderness and the Lebanon as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, to the Great Sea in the west shall be your territory. 5 No one shall be able to stand against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will not fail you or forsake you. 6 Be strong and courageous; for you shall put this people in possession of the land that I swore to their ancestors to give them. 7 Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to act in accordance with all the law that my servant Moses commanded you; do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, so that you may be successful wherever you go. 8 This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth; you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to act in accordance with all that is written in it. For then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall be successful. 9 I hereby command you: Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go."
10 Then Joshua commanded the officers of the people, 11 "Pass through the camp, and command the people: 'Prepare your provisions; for in three days you are to cross over the Jordan, to go in to take possession of the land that the Lord your God gives you to possess.'"
12 To the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh Joshua said, 13 "Remember the word that Moses the servant of the Lord commanded you, saying, 'The Lord your God is providing you a place of rest, and will give you this land.' 14 Your wives, your little ones, and your livestock shall remain in the land that Moses gave you beyond the Jordan. But all the warriors among you shall cross over armed before your kindred and shall help them, 15 until the Lord gives rest to your kindred as well as to you, and they too take possession of the land that the Lord your God is giving them. Then you shall return to your own land and take possession of it, the land that Moses the servant of the Lord gave you beyond the Jordan to the east."
16 They answered Joshua: "All that you have commanded us we will do, and wherever you send us we will go. 17 Just as we obeyed Moses in all things, so we will obey you. Only may the Lord your God be with you, as he was with Moses! 18 Whoever rebels against your orders and disobeys your words, whatever you command, shall be put to death. Only be strong and courageous."
1 Then Joshua son of Nun sent two men secretly from Shittim as spies, saying, "Go, view the land, especially Jericho." So they went, and entered the house of a prostitute whose name was Rahab, and spent the night there. 2 The king of Jericho was told, "Some Israelites have come here tonight to search out the land." 3 Then the king of Jericho sent orders to Rahab, "Bring out the men who have come to you, who entered your house, for they have come only to search out the whole land." 4 But the woman took the two men and hid them. Then she said, "True, the men came to me, but I did not know where they came from. 5 And when it was time to close the gate at dark, the men went out. Where the men went I do not know. Pursue them quickly, for you can overtake them." 6 She had, however, brought them up to the roof and hidden them with the stalks of flax that she had laid out on the roof. 7 So the men pursued them on the way to the Jordan as far as the fords. As soon as the pursuers had gone out, the gate was shut.
8 Before they went to sleep, she came up to them on the roof 9 and said to the men: "I know that the Lord has given you the land, and that dread of you has fallen on us, and that all the inhabitants of the land melt in fear before you. 10 For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites that were beyond the Jordan, to Sihon and Og, whom you utterly destroyed. 11 As soon as we heard it, our hearts melted, and there was no courage left in any of us because of you. The Lord your God is indeed God in heaven above and on earth below. 12 Now then, since I have dealt kindly with you, swear to me by the Lord that you in turn will deal kindly with my family. Give me a sign of good faith 13 that you will spare my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to them, and deliver our lives from death." 14 The men said to her, "Our life for yours! If you do nt tell this business of ours, then we will deal kindly and faithfully with you when the Lord gives us the land."
15 Then she let them down by a rope through the window, for her house was on the outer side of the city wall and she resided within the wall itself. 16 She said to them, "Go toward the hill country, so that the pursuers may not come upon you. Hide yourselves there three days, until the pursuers have returned; then afterward you may go your way." 17 The men said to her, "We will be released from this oath that you have made us swear to you 18 if we invade the land and you do not tie this crimson cord in the window through which you let us down, and you do not gather into your house your father and mother, your brothers, and all your family. 19 If any of you go out of the doors of your house into the street, they shall be responsible for their own death, and we shall be innocent; but if a hand is laid upon any who are with you in the house, we shall bear the responsibility for their death. 20 But if you tell this business of ours, then we shall be released from this oath that you made us swear to you." 21 She said, "According to your words, so be it." She sent them away and they departed. Then she tied the crimson cord in the window.
22 They departed and went into the hill country and stayed there three days, until the pursuers returned. The pursuers had searched all along the way and found nothing. 23 Then the two men came down again from the hill country. They crossed over, came to Joshua son of Nun, and told him all that had happened to them. 24 They said to Joshua, "Truly the Lord has given all the land into our hands; moreover all the inhabitants of the land melt in fear before us."
1 Early in the morning Joshua rose and set out from Shittim with all the Israelites, and they came to the Jordan. They camped there before crossing over. 2 At the end of three days the officers went through the camp 3 and commanded the people, "When you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God being carried by the levitical priests, then you shall set out from your place. Follow it, 4 so that you may know the way you should go, for you have not passed this way before. Yet there shall be a space between you and it, a distance of about two thousand cubits; do not come any nearer to it." 5 Then Joshua said to the people, "Sanctify yourselves; for tomorrow the Lord will do wonders among you." 6 To the priests Joshua said, "Take up the ark of the covenant, and pass on in front of the people." So they took up the ark of the covenant and went in front of the people.
7 The Lord said to Joshua, "This day I will begin to exalt you in the sight of all Israel, so that they may know that I will be with you as I was with Moses. 8 You are the one who shall command the priests who bear the ark of the covenant, 'When you come to the edge of the waters of the Jordan, you shall stand still in the Jordan.'" 9 Joshua then said to the Israelites, "Draw near and hear the words of the Lord your God." 10 Joshua said, "By this you shall know that among you is the living God who without fail will drive out from before you the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites, and Jebusites: 11 the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth is going to pass before you into the Jordan. 12 So now select twelve men from the tribes of Israel, one from each tribe. 13 When the soles of the feet of the priests who bear the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, rest in the waters of the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan flowing from above shall be cut off; they shall stand in a single heap."
14 When the people set out from their tents to cross over the Jordan, the priests bearing the ark of the covenant were in front of the people. 15 Now the Jordan overflows all its banks throughout the time of harvest. So when those who bore the ark had come to the Jordan, and the feet of the priests bearing the ark were dipped in the edge of the water, 16 the waters flowing from above stood still, rising up in a single heap far off at Adam, the city that is beside Zarethan, while those flowing toward the sea of the Arabah, the Dead Sea, were wholly cut off. Then the people crossed over opposite Jericho. 17 While all Israel were crossing over on dry ground, the priests who bore the ark of the covenant of the Lord stood on dry ground in the middle of the Jordan, until the entire nation finished crossing over the Jordan.
1 When the entire nation had finished crossing over the Jordan, the Lord said to Joshua: 2 "Select twelve men from the people, one from each tribe, 3 and command them, 'Take twelve stones from here out of the middle of the Jordan, from the place where the priests' feet stood, carry them over with you, and lay them down in the place where you camp tonight.'" 4 Then Joshua summoned the twelve men from the Israelites, whom he had appointed, one from each tribe. 5 Joshua said to them, "Pass on before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan, and each of you take up a stone on his shoulder, one for each of the tribes of the Israelites, 6 so that this may be a sign among you. When your children ask in time to come, 'What do those stones mean to you?' 7 then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off in front of the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed over the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. So these stones shall be to the Israelites a memorial forever."
14 On that day the Lord exalted Joshua in the sight of all Israel; and they stood in awe of him, as they had stood in awe of Moses, all the days of his life.
15 The Lord said to Joshua, 16 "Command the priests who bear the ark of the covenant, to come up out of the Jordan." 17 Joshua therefore commanded the priests, "Come up out of the Jordan." 18 When the priests bearing the ark of the covenant of the Lord came up from the middle of the Jordan, and the soles of the priests' feet touched dry ground, the waters of the Jordan returned to their place and overflowed all its banks, as before.
19 The people came up out of the Jordan on the tenth day of the first month, and they camped in Gilgal on the east border of Jericho. 20 Those twelve stones, which they had taken out of the Jordan, Joshua set up in Gilgal, 21 saying to the Israelites, "When your children ask their parents in time to come, 'What do these stones mean?' 22 then you shall let your children know, 'Israel crossed over the Jordan here on dry ground.' 23 For the Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan for you until you crossed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red Sea, which he dried up for us until we crossed over, 24 so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty, and so that you may fear the Lord your God forever."
1 When all the kings of the Amorites beyond the Jordan to the west, and all the kings of the Canaanites by the sea, heard that the Lord had dried up the waters of the Jordan for the Israelites until they had crossed over, their hearts melted, and there was no longer any spirit in them, because of the Israelites.
2 At that time the Lord said to Joshua, "Make flint knives and circumcise the Israelites a second time." 3 So Joshua made flint knives, and circumcised the Israelites at Gibeath-haaraloth. 4 This is the reason why Joshua circumcised them: all the males of the people who came out of Egypt, all the warriors, had died during the journey through the wilderness after they had come out of Egypt. 5 Although all the people who came out had been circumcised, yet all the people born on the journey through the wilderness after they had come out of Egypt had not been circumcised. 6 For the Israelites traveled forty years in the wilderness, until all the nation, the warriors who came out of Egypt, perished, not having listened to the voice of the Lord. To them the Lord swore that he would not let them see the land that he had sworn to their ancestors to give us, a land flowing with milk and honey. 7 So it was their children, whom he raised up in their place, that Joshua circumcised; for they were uncircumcised, because they had not been circumcised on the way.
8 When the circumcising of all the nation was done, they remained in their places in the camp until they were healed. 9 The Lord said to Joshua, "Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt." And so that place is called Gilgal to this day.
13 Once when Joshua was by Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing before him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went to him and said to him, "Are you one of us, or one of our adversaries?" 14 He replied, "Neither; but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come." And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped, and he said to him, "What do you command your servant, my lord?" 15 The commander of the army of the Lord said to Joshua, "Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy." And Joshua did so.
1 Now Jericho was shut up inside and out because of the Israelites; no one came out and no one went in. 2 The Lord said to Joshua, "See, I have handed Jericho over to you, along with its king and soldiers. 3 You shall march around the city, all the warriors circling the city once. Thus you shall do for six days, 4 with seven priests bearing seven trumpets of rams' horns before the ark. On the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, the priests blowing the trumpets. 5 When they make a long blast with the ram's horn, as soon as you hear the sound of the trumpet, then all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city will fall down flat, and all the people shall charge straight ahead." 6 So Joshua son of Nun summoned the priests and said to them, "Take up the ark of the covenant, and have seven priests carry seven trumpets of rams' horns in front of the ark of the Lord." 7 To the people he said, "Go forward and march around the city; have the armed me pass on before the ark of the Lord."
8 As Joshua had commanded the people, the seven priests carrying the seven trumpets of rams' horns before the Lord went forward, blowing the trumpets, with the ark of the covenant of the Lord following them. 9 And the armed men went before the priests who blew the trumpets; the rear guard came after the ark, while the trumpets blew continually. 10 To the people Joshua gave this command: "You shall not shout or let your voice be heard, nor shall you utter a word, until the day I tell you to shout. Then you shall shout." 11 So the ark of the Lord went around the city, circling it once; and they came into the camp, and spent the night in the camp.
12 Then Joshua rose early in the morning, and the priests took up the ark of the Lord. 13 The seven priests carrying the seven trumpets of rams' horns before the ark of the Lord passed on, blowing the trumpets continually. The armed men went before them, and the rear guard came after the ark of the Lord, while the trumpets blew continually. 14 On the second day they marched around the city once and then returned to the camp. They did this for six days.
15 On the seventh day they rose early, at dawn, and marched around the city in the same manner seven times. It was only on that day that they marched around the city seven times. 16 And at the seventh time, when the priests had blown the trumpets, Joshua said to the people, "Shout! For the Lord has given you the city. 17 The city and all that is in it shall be devoted to the Lord for destruction. Only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall live because she hid the messengers we sent. 18 As for you, keep away from the things devoted to destruction, so as not to covet and take any of the devoted things and make the camp of Israel an object for destruction, bringing trouble upon it. 19 But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the Lord; they shall go into the treasury of the Lord." 20 So the people shouted, and the trumpets were blown. As soon as the people heard the sound of the trumpets, they raised a great shout, and the wall fell down flat; so the people charged straight ahead into the city and captured it. 21 Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.
22 Joshua said to the two men who had spied out the land, "Go into the prostitute's house, and bring the woman out of it and all who belong to her, as you swore to her." 23 So the young men who had been spies went in and brought Rahab out, along with her father, her mother, her brothers, and all who belonged to her - they brought all her kindred out - and set them outside the camp of Israel. 24 They burned down the city, and everything in it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord. 25 But Rahab the prostitute, with her family and all who belonged to her Joshua spared. Her family has lived in Israel ever since. For she hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho. 26 Joshua then pronounced this oath, saying, "Cursed before the Lord be anyone who tries to build this city - this Jericho! At the cost of his firstborn he shall lay its foundation, and at the cost of his youngest he shall set up its gates!" 27 So the Lord was with Joshua; and his fame was in all the land.
1 But the Israelites broke faith in regard to the devoted things: Achan son of Carmi son of Zabdi son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took some of the devoted things; and the anger of the Lord burned against the Israelites.
2 Joshua sent men from Jericho to Ai, which is near Beth-aven, east of Bethel, and said to them, "Go up and spy out the land." And the men went up and spied out Ai. 3 Then they returned to Joshua and said to him, "Not all the people need go up; about two or three thousand men should go up and attack Ai. Since they are so few, do not make the whole people toil up there." 4 So about three thousand of the people went up there; and they fled before the men of Ai. 5 The men of Ai killed about thirty-six of them, chasing them from outside the gate as far as Shebarim and killing them on the slope. The hearts of the people melted and turned to water.
6 Then Joshua tore his clothes, and fell to the ground on his face before the ark of the Lord until the evening, he and the elders of Israel; and they put dust on their heads. 7 Joshua said, "Ah, Lord God! Why have you brought this people across the Jordan at all, to hand us over to the Amorites so as to destroy us? Would that we had been content to settle beyond the Jordan! 8 O Lord, what can I say, now that Israel has turned their backs to their enemies! 9 The Canaanites and all the inhabitants of the land will hear of it, and surround us, and cut off our name from the earth. Then what will you do for your great name?"
10 The Lord said to Joshua, "Stand up! Why have you fallen upon your face? 11 Israel has sinned; they have transgressed my covenant that I imposed on them. They have taken some of the devoted things; they have stolen, they have acted deceitfully, and they have put them among their own belongings. 12 Therefore the Israelites are unable to stand before their enemies; they turn their backs to their enemies, because they have become a thing devoted for destruction themselves. I will be with you no more, unless you destroy the devoted things from among you. 13 Proceed to sanctify the people, and say, 'Sanctify yourselves for tomorrow; for thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, "There are devoted things among you, O Israel; you will be unable to stand before your enemies until you take away the devoted things from among you." 14 In the morning therefore you shall come forward tribe by tribe. The tribe that the Lord takes shall come near by clans, the clan that the Lord takes shall come near by households, and the household that the Lord takes shall come near one by one. 15 And the one who is taken as having the devoted things shall be burned with fire, together with all that he has, for having transgressed the covenant of the Lord, and for having done an outrageous thing in Israel.'"
16 So Joshua rose early in the morning, and brought Israel near tribe by tribe, and the tribe of Judah was taken. 17 He brought near the clans of Judah, and the clan of the Zerahites was taken; and he brought near the clan of the Zerahites, family by family, and Zabdi was taken. 18 And he brought near his household one by one, and Achan son of Carmi son of Zabdi son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, was taken. 19 Then Joshua said to Achan, "My son, give glory to the Lord God of Israel and make confession to him. Tell me now what you have done; do not hide it from me." 20 And Achan answered Joshua, "It is true; I am the one who sinned against the Lord God of Israel. This is what I did: 21 when I saw among the spoil a beautiful mantle from Shinar, and two hundred shekels of silver, and a bar of gold weighing fifty shekels, then I coveted them and took them. They now lie hidden in the ground inside my tent, with the silver underneath."
22 So Joshua sent messengers, and they ran to the tent; and there it was, hidden in his tent with the silver underneath. 23 They took them out of the tent and brought them to Joshua and all the Israelites; and they spread them out before the Lord. 24 Then Joshua and all Israel with him took Achan son of Zerah, with the silver, the mantle, and the bar of gold, with his sons and daughters, with his oxen, donkeys, and sheep, and his tent and all that he had; and they brought them up to the Valley of Achor. 25 Joshua said, "Why did you bring trouble on us? The Lord is bringing trouble on you today." And all Israel stoned him to death; they burned them with fire, cast stones on them, 26 and raised over him a great heap of stones that remains to this day. Then the Lord turned from his burning anger. Therefore that place to this day is called the Valley of Achor.
1 Then the Lord said to Joshua, "Do not fear or be dismayed; take all the fighting men with you, and go up now to Ai. See, I have handed over to you the king of Ai with his people, his city, and his land. 2 You shall do to Ai and its king as you did to Jericho and its king; only its spoil and its livestock you may take as booty for yourselves. Set an ambush against the city, behind it."
3 So Joshua and all the fighting men set out to go up against Ai. Joshua chose thirty thousand warriors and sent them out by night 4 with the command, "You shall lie in ambush against the city, behind it; do not go very far from the city, but all of you stay alert. 5 I and all the people who are with me will approach the city. When they come out against us, as before, we shall flee from them. 6 They will come out after us until we have drawn them away from the city; for they will say, 'They are fleeing from us, as before.' While we flee from them, 7 you shall rise up from the ambush and seize the city; or the Lord your God will give it into your hand. 8 And when you have taken the city, you shall set the city on fire, doing as the Lord has ordered; see, I have commanded you." 9 So Joshua sent them out; and they went to the place of ambush, and lay between Bethel and Ai, to the west of Ai; but Joshua spent that night in the camp.
18 Then the Lord said to Joshua, "Stretch out the sword that is in your hand toward Ai; for I will give it into your hand." And Joshua stretched out the sword that was in his hand toward the city. 19 As soon as he stretched out his hand, the troops in ambush rose quickly out of their place and rushed forward. They entered the city, took it, and at once set the city on fire. 20 So when the men of Ai looked back, the smoke of the city was rising to the sky. They had no power to flee this way or that, for the people who fled to the wilderness turned back against the pursuers. 21 When Joshua and all Israel saw that the ambush had taken the city and that the smoke of the city was rising, then they turned back and struck down the men of Ai. 22 And the others came out from the city against them; so they were surrounded by Israelites, some on one side, and some on the other; and Israel struck them down until no one was left who survived or escaped. 23 But the king of Ai was taken alive and brought to Joshua.
24 When Israel had finished slaughtering all the inhabitants of Ai in the open wilderness where they pursued them, and when all of them to the very last had fallen by the edge of the sword, all Israel returned to Ai, and attacked it with the edge of the sword. 25 The total of those who fell that day, both men and women, was twelve thousand - all the people of Ai. 26 For Joshua did not draw back his hand, with which he stretched out the sword, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai. 27 Only the livestock and the spoil of that city Israel took as their booty, according to the word of the Lord that he had issued to Joshua. 28 So Joshua burned Ai, and made it forever a heap of ruins, as it is to this day. 29 And he hanged the king of Ai on a tree until evening; and at sunset Joshua commanded, and they took his body down from the tree, threw it down at the entrance of the gate of the city, and raised over it a great heap of stones, which stands there to this day.
30 Then Joshua built on Mount Ebal an altar to the Lord, the God of Israel, 31 just as Moses the servant of the Lord had commanded the Israelites, as it is written in the book of the law of Moses, "an altar of unhewn stones, on which no iron tool has been used"; and they offered on it burnt offerings to the Lord, and sacrificed offerings of well-being. 32 And there, in the presence of the Israelites, Joshua wrote on the stones a copy of the law of Moses, which he had written. 33 All Israel, alien as well as citizen, with their elders and officers and their judges, stood on opposite sides of the ark in front of the levitical priests who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, half of them in front of Mount Gerizim and half of them in front of Mount Ebal, as Moses the servant of the Lord had commanded at the first, that they should bless the people of Israel. 34 And afterward he read all the words of the law, blessings and curses, according to all that is written in the book of the law. 35 There was not a word of all that Moses commanded that Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel, and the women, and the little ones, and the aliens who resided among them.
1 Now when all the kings who were beyond the Jordan in the hill country and in the lowland all along the coast of the Great Sea toward Lebanon - the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites - heard of this, 2 they gathered together with one accord to fight Joshua and Israel.
3 But when the inhabitants of Gibeon heard what Joshua had done to Jericho and to Ai, 4 they on their part acted with cunning: they went and prepared provisions, and took worn-out sacks for their donkeys, and wineskins, worn-out and torn and mended, 5 with worn-out, patched sandals on their feet, and worn-out clothes; and all their provisions were dry and moldy. 6 They went to Joshua in the camp at Gilgal, and said to him and to the Israelites, "We have come from a far country; so now make a treaty with us." 7 But the Israelites said to the Hivites, "Perhaps you live among us; then how can we make a treaty with you?" 8 They said to Joshua, "We are your servants." And Josha said to them, "Who are you? And where do you come from?" 9 They said to him, "Your servants have come from a very far country, because of the name of the Lord your God; for we have heard a report of him, of all that he did in Egypt, 10 and of all that he did to the two kings of the Amorites who were beyond the Jordan, King Sihon of Heshbon, and King Og of Bashan who lived in Ashtaroth. 11 So our elders and all the inhabitants of our country said to us, 'Take provisions in your hand for the journey; go to meet them, and say to them, "We are your servants; come now, make a treaty with us." ' 12 Here is our bread; it was still warm when we took it from our houses as our food for the journey, on the day we set out to come to you, but now, see, it is dry and moldy; 13 these wineskins were new when we filled them, and see, they are burst; and these garments and sandals of ours are worn out from the very long journey." 14 So the leaders partook of their provisions, and did not ask direction from the Lord. 15 And Joshua made peace with them, guaranteeing their lives by a treaty; and the leaders of the congregation swore an oath to them.
16 But when three days had passed after they had made a treaty with them, they heard that they were their neighbours and were living among them. 17 So the Israelites set out and reached their cities on the third day. Now their cities were Gibeon, Chephirah, Beeroth, and Kiriath-jearim. 18 But the Israelites did not attack them, because the leaders of the congregation had sworn to them by the Lord, the God of Israel. Then all the congregation murmured against the leaders. 19 But all the leaders said to all the congregation, "We have sworn to them by the Lord, the God of Israel, and now we must not touch them. 20 This is what we will do to them: We will let them live, so that wrath may not come upon us, because of the oath that we swore to them." 21 The leaders said to them, "Let them live." So they became hewers of wood and drawers of water for all the congregation, as the leaders had decided concerning them.
22 Joshua summoned them, and said to them, "Why did you deceive us, saying, 'We are very far from you,' while in fact you are living among us? 23 Now therefore you are cursed, and some of you shall always be slaves, hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God." 24 They answered Joshua, "Because it was told to your servants for a certainty that the Lord your God had commanded his servant Moses to give you all the land, and to destroy all the inhabitants of the land before you; so we were in great fear for our lives because of you, and did this thing. 25 And now we are in your hand: do as it seems good and right in your sight to do to us." 26 This is what he did for them: he saved them from the Israelites; and they did not kill them. 27 But on that day Joshua made them hewers of wood and drawers of water for the congregation and for the altar of the Lord, to continue to this day, in the place that heshould choose.
1 When King Adoni-zedek of Jerusalem heard how Joshua had taken Ai, and had utterly destroyed it, doing to Ai and its king as he had done to Jericho and its king, and how the inhabitants of Gibeon had made peace with Israel and were among them, 2 he became greatly frightened, because Gibeon was a large city, like one of the royal cities, and was larger than Ai, and all its men were warriors. 3 So King Adoni-zedek of Jerusalem sent a message to King Hoham of Hebron, to King Piram of Jarmuth, to King Japhia of Lachish, and to King Debir of Eglon, saying, 4 "Come up and help me, and let us attack Gibeon; for it has made peace with Joshua and with the Israelites." 5 Then the five kings of the Amorites - the king of Jerusalem, the king of Hebron, the king of Jarmuth, the king of Lachish, and the king of Eglon - gathered their forces, and went up with all their armies and camped against Gibeon, and made war against it.
6 And the Gibeonites sent to Joshua at the camp in Gilgal, saying, "Do nt abandon your servants; come up to us quickly, and save us, and help us; for all the kings of the Amorites who live in the hill country are gathered against us." 7 So Joshua went up from Gilgal, he and all the fighting force with him, all the mighty warriors. 8 The Lord said to Joshua, "Do not fear them, for I have handed them over to you; not one of them shall stand before you." 9 So Joshua came upon them suddenly, having marched up all night from Gilgal. 10 And the Lord threw them into a panic before Israel, who inflicted a great slaughter on them at Gibeon, chased them by the way of the ascent of Beth-horon, and struck them down as far as Azekah and Makkedah. 11 As they fled before Israel, while they were going down the slope of Beth-horon, the Lord threw down huge stones from heaven on them as far as Azekah, and they died; there were more who died because of the hailstones than the Israelites killed with the sword.
12 On the day when the Lord gave the Amorites over to the Israelites, Joshua spoke to the Lord; and he said in the sight of Israel, "Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and Moon, in the valley of Aijalon." 13 And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in mid-heaven, and did not hurry to set for about a whole day. 14 There has been no day like it before or since, when the Lord heeded a human voice; for the Lord fought for Israel. 15 Then Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, to the camp at Gilgal.
16 Meanwhile, these five kings fled and hid themselves in the cave at Makkedah. 17 And it was told Joshua, "The five kings have been found, hidden in the cave at Makkedah." 18 Joshua said, "Roll large stones against the mouth of the cave, and set men by it to guard them; 19 but do not stay there yourselves; pursue your enemies, and attack them from the rear. Do not let them enter their towns, for the Lord your God has given them into your hand." 20 When Joshua and the Israelites had finished inflicting a very great slaughter on them, until they were wiped out, and when the survivors had entered into the fortified towns, 21 all the people returned safe to Joshua in the camp at Makkedah; no one dared to speak against any of the Israelites.
22 Then Joshua said, "Open the mouth of the cave, and bring those five kings out to me from the cave." 23 They did so, and brought the five kings out to him from the cave, the king of Jerusalem, the king of Hebron, the king of Jarmuth, the king of Lachish, and the king of Eglon. 24 When they brought the kings out to Joshua, Joshua summoned all the Israelites, and said to the chiefs of the warriors who had gone with him, "Come near, put your feet on the necks of these kings." Then they came near and put their feet on their necks. 25 And Joshua said to them, "Do not be afraid or dismayed; be strong and courageous; for thus the Lord will do to all the enemies against whom you fight" 26 Afterward Joshua struck them down and put them to death, and he hung them on five trees. And they hung on the trees until evening. 27 At sunset Joshua commanded, and they took them down from the trees and threw them into the cave where they had hidden themselves; they set large stones against the mouth of the cave, which remain to this very day.
29 Then Joshua passed on from Makkedah, and all Israel with him, to Libnah, and fought against Libnah. 30 The Lord gave it also and its king into the hand of Israel; and he struck it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it; he left no one remaining in it; and he did to its king as he had done to the king of Jericho.
31 Next Joshua passed on from Libnah, and all Israel with him, to Lachish, and laid siege to it, and assaulted it. 32 The Lord gave Lachish into the hand of Israel, and he took it on the second day, and struck it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it, as he had done to Libnah. 33 Then King Horam of Gezer came up to help Lachish; and Joshua struck him and his people, leaving him no survivors.
34 From Lachish Joshua passed on with all Israel to Eglon; and they laid siege to it, and assaulted it; 35 and they took it that day, and struck it with the edge of the sword; and every person in it he utterly destroyed that day, as he had done to Lachish.
36 Then Joshua went up with all Israel from Eglon to Hebron; they assaulted it, 37 and took it, and struck it with the edge of the sword, and its king and its towns, and every person in it; he left no one remaining, just as he had done to Eglon, and utterly destroyed it with every person in it. 38 Then Joshua, with all Israel, turned back to Debir and assaulted it, 39 and he took it with its king and all its towns; they struck them with the edge of the sword, and utterly destroyed every person in it; he left no one remaining; just as he had done to Hebron, and, as he had done to Libnah and its king, so he did to Debir and its king.
40 So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings; he left no one remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded. 41 And Joshua defeated them from Kadesh-barnea to Gaza, and all the country of Goshen, as far as Gibeon. 42 Joshua took all these kings and their land at one time, because the Lord God of Israel fought for Israel. 43 Then Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, to the camp at Gilgal.
1 When King Jabin of Hazor heard of this, he sent to King Jobab of Madon, to the king of Shimron, to the king of Achshaph, 2 and to the kings who were in the northern hill country, and in the Arabah south of Chinneroth, and in the lowland, and in Naphoth-dor on the west, 3 to the Canaanites in the east and the west, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, and the Jebusites in the hill country, and the Hivites under Hermon in the land of Mizpah. 4 They came out, with all their troops, a great army, in number like the sand on the seashore, with very many horses and chariots. 5 All these kings joined their forces, and came and camped together at the waters of Merom, to fight with Israel.
6 And the Lord said to Joshua, "Do not be afraid of them, for tomorrow at this time I will hand over all of them, slain, to Israel; you shall hamstring their horses, and burn their chariots with fire." 7 So Joshua came suddenly upon them with all his fighting force, by the waters of Merom, and fell upon them. 8 And the Lord handed them over to Israel, who attacked them and chased them as far as Great Sidon and Misrephoth-maim, and eastward as far as the valley of Mizpeh. They struck them down, until they had left no one remaining. 9 And Joshua did to them as the Lord commanded him; he hamstrung their horses, and burned their chariots with fire.
16 So Joshua took all that land: the hill country and all the Negeb and all the land of Goshen and the lowland and the Arabah and the hill country of Israel and its lowland, 17 from Mount Halak, which rises toward Seir, as far as Baal-gad in the valley of Lebanon below Mount Hermon. He took all their kings, struck them down, and put them to death. 18 Joshua made war a long time with all those kings. 19 There was not a town that made peace with the Israelites, except the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon; all were taken in battle. 20 For it was the Lord's doing to harden their hearts so that they would come against Israel in battle, in order that they might be utterly destroyed, and might receive no mercy, but be exterminated, just as the Lord had commanded Moses.
21 At that time Joshua came and wiped out the Anakim from the hill country, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, and from all the hill country of Judah, and from all the hill country of Israel; Joshua utterly destroyed them with their towns. 22 None of the Anakim was left in the land of the Israelites; some remained only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod.
23 So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the Lord had spoken to Moses; and Joshua gave it for an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal allotments. And the land had rest from war.
1 Now these are the kings of the land, whom the Israelites defeated, whose land they occupied beyond the Jordan toward the east, from the Wadi Arnon to Mount Hermon, with all the Arabah eastward: 2 King Sihon of the Amorites who lived at Heshbon, and ruled from Aroer, which is on the edge of the Wadi Arnon, and from the middle of the valley as far as the river Jabbok, the boundary of the Ammonites, that is, half of Gilead, 3 and the Arabah to the Sea of Chinneroth eastward, and in the direction of Beth-jeshimoth, to the sea of the Arabah, the Dead Sea, southward to the foot of the slopes of Pisgah; 4 and King Og of Bashan, one of the last of the Rephaim, who lived at Ashtaroth and at Edrei 5 and ruled over Mount Hermon and Salecah and all Bashan to the boundary of the Geshurites and the Maacathites, and over half of Gilead to the boundary of King Sihon of Heshbon. 6 Moses, the servant of the Lord, and the Israelites defeated them; and Moses the servant of the Lord gave their land for a possession to the Reubenites and the Gadites and the half-tribe of Manasseh.
7 The following are the kings of the land whom Joshua and the Israelites defeated on the west side of the Jordan, from Baal-gad in the valley of Lebanon to Mount Halak, that rises toward Seir (and Joshua gave their land to the tribes of Israel as a possession according to their allotments, 8 in the hill country, in the lowland, in the Arabah, in the slopes, in the wilderness, and in the Negeb, the land of the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites): 9 the king of Jericho, one; the king of Ai, which is next to Bethel, one; 10 the king of Jerusalem, one; the king of Hebron, one; 11 the king of Jarmuth, one; the king of Lachish, one; 12 the king of Eglon, one; the king of Gezer, one; 13 the king of Debir, one; the king of Geder, one; 14 the king of Hormah, one; the king of Arad, one; 15 the king of Libnah, one; the king of Adullam, one; 16 the king of Makkedah, one; the king of Bethel, one; 17 the king of Tappuah, one; the king of Hepher, one; 18 the king of Aphek, one; the king of Lasharon, one; 19 the king of Madon, one; the king of Hazor, one; 20 the king of Shimron-meron, one; the king of Achshaph, one; 21 the king of Taanach, one; the king of Megiddo, one; 22 the king of Kedesh, one; the king of Jokneam in Carmel, one; 23 the king of Dor in Naphath-dor, one; the king of Goiim in Galilee, one; 24 the king of Tirzah, one; thirty-one kings in all.
1 Now Joshua was old and advanced in years; and the Lord said to him, "You are old and advanced in years, and very much of the land still remains to be possessed. 2 This is the land that still remains: all the regions of the Philistines, and all those of the Geshurites 3 (from the Shihor, which is east of Egypt, northward to the boundary of Ekron, it is reckoned as Canaanite; there are five rulers of the Philistines, those of Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gath, and Ekron), and those of the Avvim, 4 in the south, all the land of the Canaanites, and Mearah that belongs to the Sidonians, to Aphek, to the boundary of the Amorites, 5 and the land of the Gebalites, and all Lebanon, toward the east, from Baal-gad below Mount Hermon to Lebo-hamath, 6 all the inhabitants of the hill country from Lebanon to Misrephoth-maim, even all the Sidonians. I will myself drive them out from before the Israelites; only allot the land to Israel for an inheritance, as I have commanded you. 7 Now therefore divide this land for an inheritance to the nine tribes and the half-tribe of Manasseh."
8 With the other half-tribe of Manasseh the Reubenites and the Gadites received their inheritance, which Moses gave them, beyond the Jordan eastward, as Moses the servant of the Lord gave them: 9 from Aroer, which is on the edge of the Wadi Arnon, and the town that is in the middle of the valley, and all the tableland from Medeba as far as Dibon; 10 and all the cities of King Sihon of the Amorites, who reigned in Heshbon, as far as the boundary of the Ammonites; 11 and Gilead, and the region of the Geshurites and Maacathites, and all Mount Hermon, and all Bashan to Salecah; 12 all the kingdom of Og in Bashan, who reigned in Ashtaroth and in Edrei (he alone was left of the survivors of the Rephaim); these Moses had defeated and driven out. 13 Yet the Israelites did not drive out the Geshurites or the Maacathites; but Geshur and Maacath live within Israel to this day.
14 To the tribe of Levi alone Moses gave no inheritance; the offerings by fire to the Lord God of Israel are their inheritance, as he said to them.
15 Moses gave an inheritance to the tribe of the Reubenites according to their clans. 16 Their territory was from Aroer, which is on the edge of the Wadi Arnon, and the town that is in the middle of the valley, and all the tableland by Medeba; 17 with Heshbon, and all its towns that are in the tableland; Dibon, and Bamoth-baal, and Beth-baal-meon, 18 and Jahaz, and Kedemoth, and Mephaath, 19 and Kiriathaim, and Sibmah, and Zereth-shahar on the hill of the valley, 20 and Beth-peor, and the slopes of Pisgah, and Beth-jeshimoth, 21 that is, all the towns of the tableland, and all the kingdom of King Sihon of the Amorites, who reigned in Heshbon, whom Moses defeated with the leaders of Midian, Evi and Rekem and Zur and Hur and Reba, as princes of Sihon, who lived in the land. 22 Along with the rest of those they put to death, the Israelites also put to the sword Balaam son of Beor, who practiced divination. 23 And the border of the Reubenites was the Jordan and its banks. This was the inheritance of the Reubenites, according to their families with their towns and villages.
24 Moses gave an inheritance also to the tribe of the Gadites, according to their families. 25 Their territory was Jazer, and all the towns of Gilead, and half the land of the Ammonites, to Aroer, which is east of Rabbah, 26 and from Heshbon to Ramath-mizpeh and Betonim, and from Mahanaim to the territory of Debir, 27 and in the valley Beth-haram, Beth-nimrah, Succoth, and Zaphon, the rest of the kingdom of King Sihon of Heshbon, the Jordan and its banks, as far as the lower end of the Sea of Chinnereth, eastward beyond the Jordan. 28 This is the inheritance of the Gadites according to their clans, with their towns and villages.
29 Moses gave an inheritance to the half-tribe of Manasseh; it was allotted to the half-tribe of the Manassites according to their families. 30 Their territory extended from Mahanaim, through all Bashan, the whole kingdom of King Og of Bashan, and all the settlements of Jair, which are in Bashan, sixty towns, 31 and half of Gilead, and Ashtaroth, and Edrei, the towns of the kingdom of Og in Bashan; these were allotted to the people of Machir son of Manasseh according to their clans - for half the Machirites.
32 These are the inheritances that Moses distributed in the plains of Moab, beyond the Jordan east of Jericho. 33 But to the tribe of Levi Moses gave no inheritance; the Lord God of Israel is their inheritance, as he said to them.
1 These are the inheritances that the Israelites received in the land of Canaan, which the priest Eleazar, and Joshua son of Nun, and the heads of the families of the tribes of the Israelites distributed to them. 2 Their inheritance was by lot, as the Lord had commanded Moses for the nine and one-half tribes. 3 For Moses had given an inheritance to the two and one-half tribes beyond the Jordan; but to the Levites he gave no inheritance among them. 4 For the people of Joseph were two tribes, Manasseh and Ephraim; and no portion was given to the Levites in the land, but only towns to live in, with their pasture lands for their flocks and herds. 5 The Israelites did as the Lord commanded Moses; they allotted the land.
6 Then the people of Judah came to Joshua at Gilgal; and Caleb son of Jephunneh the Kenizzite said to him, "You know what the Lord said to Moses the man of God in Kadesh-barnea concerning you and me. 7 I was forty years old when Moses the servant of the Lord sent me from Kadesh-barnea to spy out the land; and I brought him an honest report. 8 But my companions who went up with me made the heart of the people melt; yet I wholeheartedly followed the Lord my God. 9 And Moses swore on that day, saying, 'Surely the land on which your foot has trodden shall be an inheritance for you and your children forever, because you have wholeheartedly followed the Lord my God.' 10 And now, as you see, the Lord has kept me alive, as he said, these forty-five years since the time that the Lord spoke this word to Moses, while Israel was journeying through the wilderness; and here I am today, eighty-five years old. 11 I am still as strong today as I was on the day that Moses sent me; my strength now is as my strength was then, for war, and for going and coming. 12 So now give me this hill country of which the Lord spoke on that day; for you heard on that day how the Anakim were there, with great fortified cities; it may be that the Lord will be with me, and I shall drive them out, as the Lord said."
1 The lot for the tribe of the people of Judah according to their families reached southward to the boundary of Edom, to the wilderness of Zin at the farthest south. 2 And their south boundary ran from the end of the Dead Sea, from the bay that faces southward; 3 it goes out southward of the ascent of Akrabbim, passes along to Zin, and goes up south of Kadesh-barnea, along by Hezron, up to Addar, makes a turn to Karka, 4 passes along to Azmon, goes out by the Wadi of Egypt, and comes to its end at the sea. This shall be your south boundary. 5 And the east boundary is the Dead Sea, to the mouth of the Jordan. And the boundary on the north side runs from the bay of the sea at the mouth of the Jordan; 6 and the boundary goes up to Beth-hoglah, and passes along north of Beth-arabah; and the boundary goes up to the Stone of Bohan, Reuben's son; 7 and the boundary goes up to Debir from the Valley of Achor, and so northward, turning toward Gilgal, which is opposite the ascent of Adummim, which is on the south side of the valley; and the boundary passes along to the waters of En-shemesh, and ends at En-rogel; 8 then the boundary goes up by the valley of the son of Hinnom at the southern slope of the Jebusites (that is, Jerusalem); and the boundary goes up to the top of the mountain that lies over against the valley of Hinnom, on the west, at the northern end of the valley of Rephaim; 9 then the boundary extends from the top of the mountain to the spring of the Waters of Nephtoah, and from there to the towns of Mount Ephron; then the boundary bends around to Baalah (that is, Kiriath-jearim); 10 and the boundary circles west of Baalah to Mount Seir, passes along to the northern slope of Mount Jearim (that is, Chesalon), and goes down to Beth-shemesh, and passes along by Timnah; 11 the boundary goes out to the slope of the hill north of Ekron, then the boundary bends around to Shikkeron, and passes along to Mount Baalah, and goes out to Jabneel; then the boundary comes to an end at the sea. 12 And the west boundary was the Mediterranean with its coast. This is the boundary surrounding the people of Judah according to their families.
13 According to the commandment of the Lord to Joshua, he gave to Caleb son of Jephunneh a portion among the people of Judah, Kiriath-arba, that is, Hebron (Arba was the father of Anak). 14 And Caleb drove out from there the three sons of Anak: Sheshai, Ahiman, and Talmai, the descendants of Anak. 15 From there he went up against the inhabitants of Debir; now the name of Debir formerly was Kiriath-sepher. 16 And Caleb said, "Whoever attacks Kiriath-sepher and takes it, to him I will give my daughter Achsah as wife." 17 Othniel son of Kenaz, the brother of Caleb, took it; and he gave him his daughter Achsah as wife. 18 When she came to him, she urged him to ask her father for a field. As she dismounted from her donkey, Caleb said to her, "What do you wish?" 19 She said to him, "Give me a present; since you have set me in the land of the Negeb, give me springs of water as well." So Caleb gave her the upper springs and the lower springs.
20 This is the inheritance of the tribe of the people of Judah according to their families. 21 The towns belonging to the tribe of the people of Judah in the extreme South, toward the boundary of Edom, were Kabzeel, Eder, Jagur, 22 Kinah, Dimonah, Adadah, 23 Kedesh, Hazor, Ithnan, 24 Ziph, Telem, Bealoth, 25 Hazor-hadattah, Kerioth-hezron (that is, Hazor), 26 Amam, Shema, Moladah, 27 Hazar-gaddah, Heshmon, Beth-pelet, 28 Hazar-shual, Beer-sheba, Biziothiah, 29 Baalah, Jim, Ezem, 30 Eltolad, Chesil, Hormah, 31 Ziklag, Madmannah, Sansannah, 32 Lebaoth, Shilhim, Ain, and Rimmon: in all, twenty-nine towns, with their villages.
33 And in the Lowland, Eshtaol, Zorah, Ashnah, 34 Zanoah, En-gannim, Tappuah, Enam, 35 Jarmuth, Adullam, Socoh, Azekah, 36 Shaaraim, Adithaim, Gederah, Gederothaim: fourteen towns with their villages.
37 Zena, Hadashah, Migdal-gad, 38 Dilan, Mizpeh, Jokthe-el, 39 Lachish, Bozkath, Eglon, 40 Cabbon, Lahmam, Chitlish, 41 Gederoth, Beth-dagon, Naamah, and Makkedah: sixteen towns with their villages.
42 Libnah, Ether, Ashan, 43 Iphtah, Ashnah, Nezib, 44 Keilah, Achzib, and Mareshah: nine towns with their villages. 45 Ekron, with its dependencies and its villages; 46 from Ekron to the sea, all that were near Ashdod, with their villages. 47 Ashdod, its towns and its villages; Gaza, its towns and its villages; to the Wadi of Egypt, and the Great Sea with its coast.
48 And in the hill country, Shamir, Jattir, Socoh, 49 Dannah, Kiriathsannah (that is, Debir), 50 Anab, Eshtemoh, Anim, 51 Goshen, Holon, and Giloh: eleven towns with their villages. 52 Arab, Dumah, Eshan, 53 Janim, Beth-tappuah, Aphekah, 54 Humtah, Kiriath-arba (that is, Hebron), and Zior: nine towns with their villages.
55 Maon, Carmel, Ziph, Juttah, 56 Jezreel, Jokdeam, Zanoah, 57 Kain, Gibea, and Timnah: ten towns with their villages.
58 Halhul, Beth-zur, Gedor, 59 Maarath, Beth-anoth, and Eltekon: six towns with their villages.
60 Kiriath-baal (that is, Kiriath-jearim), and Rabbah: two towns with their villages.
61 In the wilderness, Beth-arabah, Middin, Secacah, 62 Nibshan, the City of Salt, and En-gedi: six towns with their villages.
63 But the people of Judah could not drive out the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalem; so the Jebusites live with the people of Judah in Jerusalem to this day.
1 The allotment of the Josephites went from the Jordan by Jericho, east of the waters of Jericho, into the wilderness, going up from Jericho into the hill country to Bethel; 2 then going from Bethel to Luz, it passes along to Ataroth, the territory of the Archites; 3 then it goes down westward to the territory of the Japhletites, as far as the territory of Lower Beth-horon, then to Gezer, and it ends at the sea.
4 The Josephites - Manasseh and Ephraim - received their inheritance. 5 The territory of the Ephraimites by their families was as follows: the boundary of their inheritance on the east was Ataroth-addar as far as Upper Beth-horon, 6 and the boundary goes from there to the sea; on the north is Michmethath; then on the east the boundary makes a turn toward Taanath-shiloh, and passes along beyond it on the east to Janoah, 7 then it goes down from Janoah to Ataroth and to Naarah, and touches Jericho, ending at the Jordan. 8 From Tappuah the boundary goes westward to the Wadi Kaah, and ends at the sea. Such is the inheritance of the tribe of the Ephraimites by their families, 9 together with the towns that were set apart for the Ephraimites within the inheritance of the Manassites, all those towns with their villages. 10 They did not, however, drive out the Canaanites who lived in Gezer: so the Canaanites have lived within Ephraim to this day but have been made to do forced labor.
1 Then allotment was made to the tribe of Manasseh, for he was the firstborn of Joseph. To Machir the firstborn of Manasseh, the father of Gilead, were allotted Gilead and Bashan, because he was a warrior. 2 And allotments were made to the rest of the tribe of Manasseh, by their families, Abiezer, Helek, Asriel, Shechem, Hepher, and Shemida; these were the male descendants of Manasseh son of Joseph, by their families.
3 Now Zelophehad son of Hepher son of Gilead son of Machir son of Manasseh had no sons, but only daughters; and these are the names of his daughters: Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. 4 They came before the priest Eleazar and Joshua son of Nun and the leaders, and said, "The Lord commanded Moses to give us an inheritance along with our male kin." So according to the commandment of the Lord he gave them an inheritance among the kinsmen of their father. 5 Thus there fell to Manasseh ten portions, besides the land of Gilead and Bashan, which is on the other side of the Jordan, 6 because the daughters of Manasseh received an inheritance along with his sons. The land of Gilead was allotted to the rest of the Manassites.
7 The territory of Manasseh reached from Asher to Michmethath, which is east of Shechem; then the boundary goes along southward to the inhabitants of En-tappuah. 8 The land of Tappuah belonged to Manasseh, but the town of Tappuah on the boundary of Manasseh belonged to the Ephraimites. 9 Then the boundary went down to the Wadi Kanah. The towns here, to the south of the wadi, among the towns of Manasseh, belong to Ephraim. Then the boundary of Manasseh goes along the north side of the wadi and ends at the sea. 10 The land to the south is Ephraim's and that to the north is Manasseh's, with the sea forming its boundary; on the north Asher is reached, and on the east Issachar. 11 Within Issachar and Asher, Manasseh had Beth-shean and its villages, Ibleam and its villages, the inhabitants of Dor and its villages, the inhabitants of En-dor and its villages, the inhabitants of Taanach and its villages, and the inhabitants of Megiddo and its villages (the third is Naphath). 12 Yet the Manassites could not take possession of those towns; but the Canaanites continued to live in that land. 13 But when the Israelites grew strong, they put the Canaanites to forced labor, but did not utterly drive them out.
14 The tribe of Joseph spoke to Joshua, saying, "Why have you given me but one lot and one portion as an inheritance, since we are a numerous people, whom all along the Lord has blessed?" 15 And Joshua said to them, "If you are a numerous people, go up to the forest, and clear ground there for yourselves in the land of the Perizzites and the Rephaim, since the hill country of Ephraim is too narrow for you." 16 The tribe of Joseph said, "The hill country is not enough for us; yet all the Canaanites who live in the plain have chariots of iron, both those in Beth-shean and its villages and those in the Valley of Jezreel." 17 Then Joshua said to the house of Joseph, to Ephraim and Manasseh, "You are indeed a numerous people, and have great power; you shall not have one lot only, 18 but the hill country shall be yours, for though it is a forest, you shall clear it and possess it to its farthest borders; for you shall drive out the Canaanites, though they have chariots of iron, and though they are strong."
1 Then the whole congregation of the Israelites assembled at Shiloh, and set up the tent of meeting there. The land lay subdued before them.
2 There remained among the Israelites seven tribes whose inheritance had not yet been apportioned. 3 So Joshua said to the Israelites, "How long will you be slack about going in and taking possession of the land that the Lord, the God of your ancestors, has given you? 4 Provide three men from each tribe, and I will send them out that they may begin to go throughout the land, writing a description of it with a view to their inheritances. Then come back to me. 5 They shall divide it into seven portions, Judah continuing in its territory on the south, and the house of Joseph in their territory on the north. 6 You shall describe the land in seven divisions and bring the description here to me; and I will cast lots for you here before the Lord our God.
7 The Levites have no portion among you, for the priesthood of the Lord is their heritage; and Gad and Reuben and the half-tribe of Manasseh have received their inheritance beyond the Jordan eastward, which Moses the servant of the Lord gave them."
8 So the men started on their way; and Joshua charged those who went to write the description of the land, saying, "Go throughout the land and write a description of it, and come back to me; and I will cast lots for you here before the Lord in Shiloh." 9 So the men went and traversed the land and set down in a book a description of it by towns in seven divisions; then they came back to Joshua in the camp at Shiloh, 10 and Joshua cast lots for them in Shiloh before the Lord; and there Joshua apportioned the land to the Israelites, to each a portion.
11 The lot of the tribe of Benjamin according to its families came up, and the territory allotted to it fell between the tribe of Judah and the tribe of Joseph. 12 On the north side their boundary began at the Jordan; then the boundary goes up to the slope of Jericho on the north, then up through the hill country westward; and it ends at the wilderness of Beth-aven. 13 From there the boundary passes along southward in the direction of Luz, to the slope of Luz (that is, Bethel), then the boundary goes down to Ataroth-addar, on the mountain that lies south of Lower Beth-horon. 14 Then the boundary goes in another direction, turning on the western side southward from the mountain that lies to the south, opposite Beth-horon, and it ends at Kiriath-baal (that is, Kiriath-jearim), a town belonging to the tribe of Judah. This forms the western side. 15 The southern side begins at the outskirts of Kiriath-jearim; and the boundary goes from there to Ephron, to the spring of the Waters of Nephtoah; 16 then the boundary goes down to the border of the mountain that overlooks the valley of the son of Hinnom, which is at the north end of the valley of Rephaim; and it then goes down the valley of Hinnom, south of the slope of the Jebusites, and downward to En-rogel; 17 then it ends in a northerly direction going on to En-shemesh, and from there goes to Geliloth, which is opposite the ascent of Adummim; then it goes down to the Stone of Bohan, Reuben's son; 18 and passing on to the north of the slope of Beth-arabah it goes down to the Arabah; 19 then the boundary passes on to the north of the slope of Beth-hoglah; and the boundary ends at the northern bay of the Dead Sea, at the south end of the Jordan: this is the southern border. 20 The Jordan forms its boundary on the eastern side. This is the inheritance of the tribe of Benjamin, according to its families, boundary by boundary all around.
21 Now the towns of the tribe of Benjamin according to their families were Jericho, Beth-hoglah, Emek-keziz, 22 Beth-arabah, Zemaraim, Bethel, 23 Avvim, Parah, Ophrah, 24 Chephar-ammoni, Ophni, and Geba - twelve towns with their villages: 25 Gibeon, Ramah, Beeroth, 26 Mizpeh, Chephirah, Mozah, 27 Rekem, Irpeel, Taralah, 28 Zela, Haeleph, Jebus (that is Jerusalem), Gibeah and Kiriath-jearim - fourteen towns with their villages. This is the inheritance of the tribe of Benjamin according to its families.
1 The second lot came out for Simeon, for the tribe of Simeon, according to its families; its inheritance lay within the inheritance of the tribe of Judah. 2 It had for its inheritance Beer-sheba, Sheba, Moladah, 3 Hazar-shual, Balah, Ezem, 4 Eltolad, Bethul, Hormah, 5 Ziklag, Beth-marcaboth, Hazar-susah, 6 Beth-lebaoth, and Sharuhen - thirteen towns with their villages; 7 Ain, Rimmon, Ether, and Ashan - four towns with their villages; 8 together with all the villages all around these towns as far as Baalath-beer, Ramah of the Negeb. This was the inheritance of the tribe of Simeon according to its families. 9 The inheritance of the tribe of Simeon formed part of the territory of Judah; because the portion of the tribe of Judah was too large for them, the tribe of Simeon obtained an inheritance within their inheritance.
10 The third lot came up for the tribe of Zebulun, according to its families. The boundary of its inheritance reached as far as Sarid; 11 then its boundary goes up westward, and on to Maralah, and touches Dabbesheth, then the wadi that is east of Jokneam; 12 from Sarid it goes in the other direction eastward toward the sunrise to the boundary of Chisloth-tabor; from there it goes to Daberath, then up to Japhia; 13 from there it passes along on the east toward the sunrise to Gath-hepher, to Eth-kazin, and going on to Rimmon it bends toward Neah; 14 then on the north the boundary makes a turn to Hannathon, and it ends at the valley of Iphtah-el; 15 and Kattath, Nahalal, Shimron, Idalah, and Bethlehem - twelve towns with their villages. 16 This is the inheritance of the tribe of Zebulun, according to its families - these towns with their villages.
17 The fourth lot came out for Issachar, for the tribe of Issachar, according to its families. 18 Its territory included Jezreel, Chesulloth, Shunem, 19 Hapharaim, Shion, Anaharath, 20 Rabbith, Kishion, Ebez, 21 Remeth, En-gannim, En-haddah, Beth-pazzez; 22 the boundary also touches Tabor, Shahazumah, and Beth-shemesh, and its boundary ends at the Jordan - sixteen towns with their villages. 23 This is the inheritance of the tribe of Issachar, according to its families - the towns with their villages.
24 The fifth lot came out for the tribe of Asher according to its families. 25 Its boundary included Helkath, Hali, Beten, Achshaph, 26 Allammelech, Amad, and Mishal; on the west it touches Carmel and Shihor-libnath, 27 then it turns eastward, goes to Beth-dagon, and touches Zebulun and the valley of Iphtah-el northward to Beth-emek and Neiel; then it continues in the north to Cabul, 28 Ebron, Rehob, Hammon, Kanah, as far as Sidon the Great; 29 then the boundary turns to Ramah, reaching to the fortified city of Tyre; then the boundary turns to Hosah, and it ends at the sea; Mahalab, Achzib, 30 Ummah, Aphek, and Rehob - twenty-two towns with their villages. 31 This is the inheritance of the tribe of Asher according to its families - these towns with their village.
32 The sixth lot came out for the tribe of Naphtali, for the tribe of Naphtali, according to its families. 33 And its boundary ran from Heleph, from the oak in Zaanannim, and Adami-nekeb, and Jabneel, as far as Lakkum; and it ended at the Jordan; 34 then the boundary turns westward to Aznoth-tabor, and goes from there to Hukkok, touching Zebulun at the south, and Asher on the west, and Judah on the east at the Jordan. 35 The fortified towns are Ziddim, Zer, Hammath, Rakkath, Chinnereth, 36 Adamah, Ramah, Hazor, 37 Kedesh, Edrei, En-hazor, 38 Iron, Migdal-el, Horem, Beth-anath, and Beth-shemesh - nineteen towns with their villages. 39 This is the inheritance of the tribe of Naphtali according to its families - the towns with their villages.
40 The seventh lot came out for the tribe of Dan, according to its families. 41 The territory of its inheritance included Zorah, Eshtaol, Ir-shemesh, 42 Shaalabbin, Aijalon, Ithlah, 43 Elon, Timnah, Ekron, 44 Eltekeh, Gibbetho, Baalath, 45 Jehud, Bene-berak, Gath-rimmon, 46 Me-jarkon, and Rakkon at the border opposite Joppa. 47 When the territory of the Danites was lost to them, the Danites went up and fought against Leshem, and after capturing it and putting it to the sword, they took possession of it and settled in it, calling Leshem, Dan, after their ancestor Dan. 48 This is the inheritance of the tribe of Dan, according to their families - these towns with their villages.
49 When they had finished distributing the several territories of the land as inheritances, the Israelites gave an inheritance among them to Joshua son of Nun. 50 By command of the Lord they gave him the town that he asked for, Timnath-serah in the hill country of Ephraim; he rebuilt the town, and settled in it.
51 These are the inheritances that the priest Eleazar and Joshua son of Nun and the heads of the families of the tribes of the Israelites distributed by lot at Shiloh before the Lord, at the entrance of the tent of meetng. So they finished dividing the land.
1 Then the Lord spoke to Joshua, saying, 2 "Say to the Israelites, 'Appoint the cities of refuge, of which I spoke to you through Moses, 3 so that anyone who kills a person without intent or by mistake may flee there; they shall be for you a refuge from the avenger of blood. 4 The slayer shall flee to one of these cities and shall stand at the entrance of the gate of the city, and explain the case to the elders of that city; then the fugitive shall be taken into the city, and given a place, and shall remain with them. 5 And if the avenger of blood is in pursuit, they shall not give up the slayer, because the neighbour was killed by mistake, there having been no enmity between them before. 6 The slayer shall remain in that city until there is a trial before the congregation, until the death of the one who is high priest at the time: then the slayer may return home, to the town in which the deed was done.'"
7 So they set apart Kedesh in Galilee in the hill country of Naphtali, and Shchem in the hill country of Ephraim, and Kiriath-arba (that is, Hebron) in the hill country of Judah. 8 And beyond the Jordan east of Jericho, they appointed Bezer in the wilderness on the tableland, from the tribe of Reuben, and Ramoth in Gilead, from the tribe of Gad, and Golan in Bashan, from the tribe of Manasseh. 9 These were the cities designated for all the Israelites, and for the aliens residing among them, that anyone who killed a person without intent could flee there, so as not to die by the hand of the avenger of blood, until there was a trial before the congregation.
1 Then the heads of the families of the Levites came to the priest Eleazar and to Joshua son of Nun and to the heads of the families of the tribes of the Israelites; 2 they said to them at Shiloh in the land of Canaan, "The Lord commanded through Moses that we be given towns to live in, along with their pasture lands for our livestock." 3 So by command of the Lord the Israelites gave to the Levites the following towns and pasture lands out of their inheritance.
4 The lot came out for the families of the Kohathites. So those Levites who were descendants of Aaron the priest received by lot thirteen towns from the tribes of Judah, Simeon, and Benjamin.
5 The rest of the Kohathites received by lot ten towns from the families of the tribe of Ephraim, from the tribe of Dan, and the half-tribe of Manasseh.
6 The Gershonites received by lot thirteen towns from the families of the tribe of Issachar, from the tribe of Asher, from the tribe of Naphtali, and from the half-tribe of Manasseh in Bahan.
7 The Merarites according to their families received twelve towns from the tribe of Reuben, the tribe of Gad, and the tribe of Zebulun.
8 These towns and their pasture lands the Israelites gave by lot to the Levites, as the Lord had commanded through Moses.
9 Out of the tribe of Judah and the tribe of Simeon they gave the following towns mentioned by name, 10 which went to the descendants of Aaron, one of the families of the Kohathites who belonged to the Levites, since the lot fell to them first. 11 They gave them Kiriath-arba (Arba being the father of Anak), that is Hebron, in the hill country of Judah, along with the pasture lands around it. 12 But the fields of the town and its villages had been given to Caleb son of Jephunneh as his holding.
13 To the descendants of Aaron the priest they gave Hebron, the city of refuge for the slayer, with its pasture lands, Libnah with its pasture lands, 14 Jattir with its pasture lands, Eshtemoa with its pasture lands, 15 Hoon with its pasture lands, Debir with its pasture lands, 16 Ain with its pasture lands, Juttah with its pasture lands, and Beth-shemesh with its pasture lands - nine towns out of these two tribes. 17 Out of the tribe of Benjamin: Gibeon with its pasture lands, Geba with its pasture lands, 18 Anathoth with its pasture lands, and Almon with its pasture lands - four towns. 19 The towns of the descendants of Aaron - the priests - were thirteen in all, with their pasture lands.
20 As to the rest of the Kohathites belonging to the Kohathite families of the Levites, the towns allotted to them were out of the tribe of Ephraim. 21 To them were given Shechem, the city of refuge for the slayer, with its pasture lands in the hill country of Ephraim, Gezer with its pasture lands, 22 Kibzaim with its pasture lands, and Beth-horon with its pasture lands - four towns. 23 Out of the tribe of Dan: Elteke with its pasture lands, Gibbethon with its pasture lands, 24 Aijalon with its pasture lands Gath-rimmon with its pasture lands - four towns. 25 Out of the half-tribe of Manasseh: Taanach with its pasture lands, and Gath-rimmon with its pasture lands - two towns. 26 The towns of the families of the rest of the Kohathites were ten in all, with their pasture lands.
27 To the Gershonites, one of the families of the Levites, were given out of the half-tribe of Manasseh, Golan in Bashan with its pasture lands, the city of refuge for the slayer, and Beeshterah with its pasture lands - two towns. 28 Out of the tribe of Issachar: Kishion with its pasture lands, Daberath with its pasture lands, 29 Jarmuth with its pasture lands, En-gannim with its pasture lands - four towns; 30 Out of the tribe of Asher: Mishal with its pasture lands, Abdon with its pasture lands, 31 Helkath with its pasture lands, and Rehob with its pasture lands - four towns. 32 Out of the tribe of Naphtali: Kedesh in Galilee with its pasture lands, the city of refuge for the slayer, Hammoth-dor with its pasture lands, and Kartan with its pasture lands - three towns. 33 The towns of the several families of the Gershonites were in all thirteen, with their pasture lands.
34 To the rest of the Levites - the Merarite families - were given out of the tribe of Zebulun: Jokneam with its pasture lands, Kartah with its pasture lands, 35 Dimnah with its pasture lands, Nahalal with its pasture lands - four towns. 36 Out of the tribe of Reuben: Bezer with its pasture lands, Jahzah with its pasture lands, 37 Kedemoth with its pasture lands, and Mephaath with its pasture lands - four towns. 38 Out of the tribe of Gad: Ramoth in Gilead with its pasture lands, the city of refuge for the slayer, Mahanaim with its pasture lands, 39 Heshbon with its pasture lands, Jazer with its pasture lands - four towns in all. 40 As for the towns of the several Merarite families, that is, the remainder of the families of the Levites, those allotted to them were twelve in all. 41 The towns of the Levites within the holdings of the Israelites were in all forty-eight towns with their pasture lands. 42 Each of these towns had its pasture lands around it; so it was with all these towns.
43 Thus the Lord gave to Israel all the land that he swore to their ancestors that he would give them; and having taken possession of it, they settled there. 44 And the Lord gave them rest on every side just as he had sworn to their ancestors; not one of all their enemies had withstood them, for the Lord had given all their enemies into their hands. 45 Not one of all the good promises that the Lord had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass.
1 Then Joshua summoned the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh, 2 and said to them, "You have observed all that Moses the servant of the Lord commanded you, and have obeyed me in all that I have commanded you; 3 you have not forsaken your kindred these many days, down to this day, but have been careful to keep the charge of the Lord your God. 4 And now the Lord your God has given rest to your kindred, as he promised them; therefore turn and go to your tents in the land where your possession lies, which Moses the servant of the Lord gave you on the other side of the Jordan. 5 Take good care to observe the commandment and instruction that Moses the servant of the Lord commanded you, to love the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to keep his commandments, and to hold fast to him, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul." 6 So Joshua blessed them and sent them away, and they went to their tents.
7 Now to the one half of the tribe of Manasseh Moses had given a possession in Bashan; but to the other half Joshua had given a possession beside their fellow Israelites in the land west of the Jordan. And when Joshua sent them away to their tents and blessed them, 8 he said to them, "Go back to your tents with much wealth, and with very much livestock, with silver, gold, bronze, and iron, and with a great quantity of clothing; divide the spoil of your enemies with your kindred." 9 So the Reubenites and the Gadites and the half-tribe of Manasseh returned home, parting from the Israelites at Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan, to go to the land of Gilead, their own land of which they had taken possession by command of the Lord through Moses.
10 When they came to the region near the Jordan that lies in the land of Canaan, the Reubenites and the Gadites and the half-tribe of Manasseh built there an altar by the Jordan, an altar of great size. 11 The Israelites heard that the Reubenites and the Gadites and the half-tribe of Manasseh had built an altar at the frontier of the land of Canaan, in the region near the Jordan, on the side that belongs to the Israelites. 12 And when the people of Israel heard of it, the whole assembly of the Israelites gathered at Shiloh, to make war against them.
13 Then the Israelites sent the priest Phinehas son of Eleazar to the Reubenites and the Gadites and the half-tribe of Manasseh, in the land of Gilead, 14 and with him ten chiefs, one from each of the tribal families of Israel, every one of them the head of a family among the clans of Israel. 15 They came to the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh, in the land of Gilead, and they said to them, 16 "Thus says the whole congregation of the Lord, 'What is this treachery that you have committed against the God of Israel in turning away today from following the Lord, by building yourselves an altar today in rebellion against the Lord? 17 Have we not had enough of the sin at Peor from which even yet we have not cleansed ourselves, and for which a plague came upon the congregation of the Lord, 18 that you must turn away today from following the Lord! If you rebel against the Lord today, he will be angry with the whole congregation of Israel tomorrow. 19 But now, if your land is unclean, cross over into the Lord's land where the Lord's tabernacle now stands, and take for yourselves a possession among us; only do not rebel against the Lord, or rebel against us by building yourselves an altar other than the altar of the Lord our God. 20 Did not Achan son of Zerah break faith in the matter of the devoted things, and wrath fell upon all the congregation of Israel? And he did not perish alone for his iniquity!'"
21 Then the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh said in answer to the heads of the families of Israel, 22 "The Lord, God of gods! The Lord, God of gods! He knows; and let Israel itself know! If it was in rebellion or in breach of faith toward the Lord, do not pare us today 23 for building an altar to turn away from following the Lord; or if we did so to offer burnt offerings or grain offerings or offerings of well-being on it, may the Lord himself take vengeance. 24 No! We did it from fear that in time to come your children might say to our children, 'What have you to do with the Lord, the God of Israel? 25 For the Lord has made the Jordan a boundary between us and you, you Reubenites and Gadites; you have no portion in the Lord.' So your children might make our children cease to worship the Lord. 26 Therefore we said, 'Let us now build an altar, not for burnt offering, nor for sacrifice, 27 but to be a witness between us and you, and between the generations after us, that we do perform the service of the Lord in his presence with our burnt offerings and sacrifices and offerings of well-being; so that your children may never say to our children in time to come, "You have no portion in the Lord." ' 28 And we thought, If this should be said to us or to our descendants in time to come, we could say, 'Look at this copy of the altar of the Lord, which our ancestors made, not for burnt offerings, nor for sacrifice, but to be a witness between us and you.' 29 Far be it from us that we should rebel against the Lord, and turn away this day from following the Lord by building an altar for burnt offering, grain offering, or sacrifice, other than the altar of the Lord our God that stands before his tabernacle!"
30 When the priest Phinehas and the chiefs of the congregation, the heads of the families of Israel who were with him, heard the words that the Reubenites and the Gadites and the Manassites spoke, they were satisfied. 31 The priest Phinehas son of Eleazar said to the Reubenites and the Gadites and the Manassites, "Today we know that the Lord is among us, because you have not committed this treachery against the Lord; now you have saved the Israelites from the hand of the Lord."
32 Then the priest Phinehas son of Eleazar and the chiefs returned from the Reubenites and the Gadites in the land of Gilead to the land of Canaan, to the Israelites, and brought back word to them. 33 The report pleased the Israelites; and the Israelites blessed God and spoke no more of making war against them, to destroy the land where the Reubenites and the Gadites were settled. 34 The Reubenites and the Gadites called the altar Witness; "For," said they, "it is a witness between us that the Lord is God."
1 A long time afterward, when the Lord had given rest to Israel from all their enemies all around, and Joshua was old and well advanced in years, 2 Joshua summoned all Israel, their elders and heads, their judges and officers, and said to them, "I am now old and well advanced in years; 3 and you have seen all that the Lord your God has done to all these nations for your sake, for it is the Lord your God who has fought for you. 4 I have allotted to you as an inheritance for your tribes those nations that remain, along with all the nations that I have already cut off, from the Jordan to the Great Sea in the west. 5 The Lord your God will push them back before you, and drive them out of your sight; and you shall possess their land, as the Lord your God promised you. 6 Therefore be very steadfast to observe and do all that is written in the book of the law of Moses, turning aside from it neither to the right nor to the left, 7 so that you may not be mixed with these nations left here among you, or make mention of the names of their gods, or swear by them, or serve them, or bow yourselves down to them, 8 but hold fast to the Lord your God, as you have done to this day. 9 For the Lord has driven out before you great and strong nations; and as for you, no one has been able to withstand you to this day. 10 One of you puts to flight a thousand, since it is the Lord your God who fights for you, as he promised you. 11 Be very careful, therefore, to love the Lord your God. 12 For if you turn back, and join the survivors of these nations left here among you, and intermarry with them, so that you marry their women and they yours, 13 know assuredly that the Lord your God will not continue to drive out these nations before you; but they shall be a snare and a trap for you, a scourge on your sides, and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from this good land that the Lord your God has given you.
14 "And now I am about to go the way of all the earth, and you know in your hearts and souls, all of you, that not one thing has failed of all the good things that the Lord your God promised concerning you; all have come to pass for you, not one of them has failed. 15 But just as all the good things that the Lord your God promised concerning you have been fulfilled for you, so the Lord will bring upon you all the bad things, until he has destroyed you from this good land that the Lord your God has given you. 16 If you transgress the covenant of the Lord your God, which he enjoined on you, and go and serve other gods and bow down to them, then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and you shall perish quickly from the good land that he has given to you."
1 Then Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem, and summoned the elders, the heads, the judges, and the officers of Israel; and they presented themselves before God. 2 And Joshua said to all the people, "Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Long ago your ancestors - Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor - lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods. 3 Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan and made his offspring many. I gave him Isaac; 4 and to Isaac I gave Jacob and Esau. I gave Esau the hill country of Seir to possess, but Jacob and his children went down to Egypt. 5 Then I sent Moses and Aaron, and I plagued Egypt with what I did in its midst; and afterwards I brought you out. 6 When I brought your ancestors out of Egypt, you came to the sea; and the Egyptians pursued your ancestors with chariots and horsemen to the Red Sea. 7 When they cried out to the Lord, he put darkness between you and the Egyptians and made the sea come upon them and cover them; and your eyes saw what I did to Egypt. Afterwards you lived in the wilderness a long time. 8 Then I brought you to the land of the Amorites, who lived on the other side of the Jordan; they fought with you, and I handed them over to you, and you took possession of their land, and I destroyed them before you. 9 Then King Balak son of Zippor of Moab, set out to fight against Israel. He sent and invited Balaam son of Beor to curse you, 10 but I would not listen to Balaam; therefore he blessed you; so I rescued you out of his hand. 11 When you went over the Jordan and came to Jericho, the citizens of Jericho fought against you, and also the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; and I handed them over to you. 12 I sent the hornet ahead of you, which drove out before you the two kings of the Amorites; it was not by your sword or by your bow. 13 I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and towns that you had not built, and you live in them; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant.
14 "Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. 15 Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord."
16 Then the people answered, "Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods; 17 for it is the Lord our God who brought us and our ancestors up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight. He protected us along all the way that we went, and among all the peoples through whom we passed; 18 and the Lord drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land. Therefore we also will serve the Lord, for he is our God."
19 But Joshua said to the people, "You cannot serve the Lord, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. 20 If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm, and consume you, after having done you good." 21 And the people said to Joshua, "No, we will serve the Lord!" 22 Then Joshua said to the people, "You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the Lord, to serve him." And they said, "We are witnesses." 23 He said, "Then put away the foreign gods that are among you, and incline your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel." 24 The people said to Joshua, "The Lord our God we will serve, and him we will obey." 25 So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day, and made statutes and ordinances for them at Shechem. 26 Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of Go; and he took a large stone, and set it up there under the oak in the sanctuary of the Lord. 27 Joshua said to all the people, "See, this stone shall be a witness against us; for it has heard all the words of the Lord that he spoke to us; therefore it shall be a witness against you, if you deal falsely with your God." 28 So Joshua sent the people away to their inheritances.
29 After these things Joshua son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died, being one hundred ten years old. 30 They buried him in his own inheritance at Timnath-serah, which is in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash. 31 Israel served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua and had known all the work that the Lord did for Israel. | 2019-04-18T13:18:59Z | http://biblical.ie/page.php?fl=NRSV/Joshua |
It has now been nearly three years since Labour Teachers was established to explore ways of putting working Labour-supporting teachers in touch with policy-makers to create a positive dialogue to defend and build on Labour’s excellent record in education. Since then, we’ve worked closely with all Labour’s Shadow Secretaries of State for Education: Andy Burnham, Stephen Twigg and Tristram Hunt.
We’ve hosted policy events for teachers at Labour Party Conferences, including the hugely-successful Labour TeachMeet (and we’re currently putting together another for this coming September). We’ve run a blog which has garnered contributions from a whole range of members of the Labour family: MPs, school leaders, think-tankers and teachers in primary and secondary.
Throughout that time, we have edited the site and run its events in a spirit of open, positive discussion, aimed at ensuring a diversity of views are shared. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved, but the time has come for new people to take control. Both of us are moving on in our careers and neither of us ever intended to edit Labour Teachers forever.
For that reason, we’d really like to hear from people in Labour with a strong interest in education and teaching who would like to take on the role of editor or joint editors after the Party Conference at the end of September. We’d like to pass the site on to people with the same commitment to a strong Labour education policy built on hearing a plurality of Labour voices. We’d like someone who is happy building up links with teachers and policy-makers within and outside of Labour and who wants to make a really positive contribution to Labour’s education policy debate.
If you would like to take on that role (bearing in mind that it is an unpaid position!), please contact [email protected], outlining how you’d like to take Labour Teachers forward and what skills you have that you think would allow you to do that.
Please send in your application by Thursday 11 September, and please do contact [email protected] if you’d like any more details.
This is a cross-post from Michael Merrick’s blog.
This is a cross-post from Matthew Hood’s blog.
2. Regional School Commissioners would be appointed by the Department for Education and be responsible for the opening, monitoring and closing/transferring of all schools. We are sticking with a DfE appointment as we think independence is vital. We would get rid of HTBs because they compromise the independence.
3. RSCs would take annual submissions from the LEA on place-planning need in the area. This which then be used to grant academy extensions and/or new schools.
4. RSCs will use Ofsted, performance data and annual accounts to monitor schools. RSCs can issue pre-warning notices.
5. If a school is in trouble, a six-month target is given for improvement by the RSC with a range of options for support offered by other chains/schools etc (remember: LA ‘trusts’ can offer services too).
6. After six months, if improvement is unacceptable the RSC brokers a chain transfer. The new chain is given two years to improve the school.
7. After two years if the school has not sufficiently improved then steps will be taken to merge the school with a more successful one, or to wind down its operations by no longer accepting new pupils into the school. A new school provider will be found to operate a school for the new intake.
8. Local authorities retain ‘strategic’ oversight and can feed information to RSCs for opening, monitoring and closing. On admissions, transport and other social services the LA has a leading role.
2. Allow parents to ‘trigger’ academy trust reviews at which the trigger group can put forward evidence as to why the school ought to move trusts. This allows for greater flexibility in the system (and is similar to a recommendation in the Blunkett review).
3. Completely transparent processes for opening and closing schools, and the selection of academy trusts to run a school. This includes proper consultation, local hearings (as with planning laws), and all decisions made in public with full explanation of how evidence has been accounted for and decided.
This is a cross-post from Robert Hill’s personal blog.
David Blunkett’s ‘Review of education structures, functions and the raising of standards for all’ is a significant document. It highlights and reinforces the weaknesses of the current mishmash of arrangements for overseeing the development and improvement of all schools. More significantly, for the purposes of this blog post, it provides a real sense of direction about the likely shape of Labour’s education policy and priorities a year out from next year’s general election.
Blunkett’s proposals offer the opportunity to bring coherence to school improvement. The principle of school autonomy remains – not a surprise really since Blunkett did much to affirm the autonomy of schools when he was Secretary of State for Education: substantially raising the level of financial delegation to schools. But the vision is for autonomy to operate within a context of partnership and collaboration. Getting this balance right is strengthened by David’s recognition that the actions of one school can impact on another. Education improvement has to be more than a zero sum game – we need all schools in every area to move forward. So the plans to amend schools admissions, enforcement and appeals procedures and integrate place planning are welcome. And (hallelujah!) there is a single framework for overseeing the progress and development of all schools – irrespective of their type or status.
The document also contains some innovative ideas. For example, encouraging and enabling academies to move in and out of chains to bring greater geographical coherence. Or focusing funding agreements on outcomes and renewing them every three of five years – as recommend by the RSA/Pearson Academies’ Commission. The proposals for commissioning new school places rightly maintain a strong competitive ethos but bring coherence to a system which in many areas has been thrown into chaos by the ad hoc establishment of free schools. The creation of Education Incubation Zones would encourage the education system to continue to evolve in order to meet the changing demands of 21st century society.
I have three reservations about the proposals. I can see the case for kitemarking the supply of major school improvement providers – though I am not convinced that the market is broke. A better way forward might be for the kitemarking to be a voluntary arrangement in the first instance.
I also wish that the review had grasped the nettle of clarifying the role of the Office of Schools Commissioner and making it a statutory independent function. There is case for a revamped Schools Commissioner role to include the functions of the Schools’ Adjudicator – thus creating a single regulatory focus.
The approach towards the Pupil Premium is also slightly worrying. Yes, there is evidence that not all the money is being well used at present. But we are on a journey here. The role of the Education Endowment Foundation, the impact of the Ofsted inspection regime, the role of John Dunford as the Pupil Premium champion and the work of a good number of local authorities means that the additional funding is increasingly being better targeted and used. There is a growing focus on impact, so we should be wary of making major changes to the system at this point.
Draft instructions to counsel – for those not familiar with the Whitehall policymaking process this means preparing a policy document that enables the specialist lawyers to prepare a Bill for Parliament. This would provide a discipline for Labour to define the role and powers of the Director of Schools Standards (DSS) and the education panels that would support them. It would also help to think through how the proposed public duty for local authorities, schools and other providers to cooperate with the DSS in brokering collaboration would work.
Consult with the Local Government Association on the new school oversight arrangements – particularly in relation to potential groupings of local authorities and relations between a DSS and constituent authorities. I don’t take the view – put forward by Jonathan Simons and Sam Freedman on Twitter – that local authorities are being completely written out of the script. As suggested in the Blunkett review it might make sense to take the boundaries of Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) as the starting point – since this would help to integrate work on careers advice and post-16 provision. However, there are already some groupings of education authorities developing – particularly in London – and so there is also scope to explore whether these might provide a basis for some of the new arrangements.
Set up some demonstration models – it might be possible for local groups of Labour local authorities such as in Manchester (where local authorities and schools have a strong history of working together collaboratively on school improvement) to appoint a DSS in a shadow form. However, any such scheme might be stymied if the Government’s formally appointed Regional Commissioner for overseeing academies refused to collaborate with the initiative.
Where authorities could progress the Blunkett agenda without hindrance would be encouraging the creation of Community Trusts for groups of primary schools. Several authorities have already or are currently working with their schools on forming local clusters. Legislation relating to Trust schools is already on the statute book and so the organizational vehicle is there to create formal groupings of primary schools. The only restraint is that it is difficult for voluntary aided faith schools to be formally part of such a Trust – because they are already a Trust. This needs discussion with church representatives – we should be encouraging faith schools to work with other local schools rather than just retreat into faith-based academy chain enclaves.
Assess the costs – the coalition will no doubt try and dub the proposals as bureaucratic and costly. But the Blunkett plan would be able to build on the savings made from scrapping the regional Commissioner posts. There are also substantial resources going into employing a small army of civil servants and brokers who are monitoring, tracking and, where necessary, intervening in the 3,000 plus academies. These costs need to captured and quantified. It might also be possible to make savings from the Education Funding Agency budget. The more transparent financial regime advocated by Blunkett allied with the adoption of prudential corporate governance practices could reduce the need for the extensive financial monitoring that the government has put in place.
The Blunkett review marks a big step forward in Labour’s thinking. For its next trick it might want to think about how to turn the Ofsted regime (which has become an excessively high stakes regime) into something that retains rigour but is more supportive of school development!
Robert Hill (@Robt_Hill) is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Education and Professional Studies at King’s College London, and was previously an adviser to the last Labour government.
This is the full text of the speech delivered by the Shadow Secretary of State for Education to the NASUWT Conference on 19 April 2014.
It is a great pleasure to be here in Birmingham again.
Those delegates who approached Conference from the East cannot fail to have noticed the wondrous new Library of Birmingham.
It serves as a powerful declaration of this city’s belief in life-long learning, whilst demonstrating how seriously it takes its civic duty to make scholarship accessible to all.
This is a city which a young woman who survived an assassination attempt because she dared to demand an equal education for her compatriots has chosen to make her refuge.
Right around the world, Malala Yousafzai has shown that this city prides itself on a culture of learning and equality.
That is something to be extraordinarily proud of – as is the NASUWT role in showing solidarity with Malala’s Send my Friend to School campaign.
Then there is Birmingham’s history.
Because of all the many gifts this city bestowed on England during its halcyon period as the global second city of industry this conference is a celebration of the most important: public education.
(For those wondering about the first it was – as I’m sure you’ll agree Chris – of course Stoke-on-Trent).
Without the agitation of Joseph Chamberlain and his radical allies on the Birmingham Education League, we may not have had William Forster’s celebrated Elementary Education Act of 1870.
And guaranteed public education for all could have eluded us for at least another generation.
Which if is not the only reason why the NASUWT has made this city it’s home, at least makes it the perfect venue for your Reclaim the Promise campaign.
Conference, I have come here today to share with you the Labour Party’s vision for the future of public education – which we will put to the nation in 2015.
And I am extremely grateful to Chris, Geoff and everyone else at the NASUWT for giving me this opportunity.
Because we in the Labour Party passionately believe that it is teaching that makes all the difference to our children’s attainment.
But the global evidence is clear: no education system can outperform the quality of its teaching.
So the purpose of my speech today is two-fold.
First, to demonstrate my party’s commitment to action on what matters: raising the status, elevating the standing and lifting the standard of teaching in this country.
And second, to draw on this city’s rich history of academic and vocational harmony to spell out how Labour would deliver an education system that allows all learners to fulfil their potential.
However, I want to begin this morning by addressing some of the troubling issues that have come to light concerning Birmingham’s own schooling.
We have heard allegations of infiltration, intimidation and the pursuit of a divisive religious extremism through systems of school governorship.
Let me say, first of all, that I value the contribution of all civic-minded people wiling to act as school governors.
I also welcome the growing involvement of often marginalised, ethnic minority communities in the role of schools.
Schools do not succeed as Islands: they work best when they have the effective support and engagement of other schools, parents and communities.
Furthermore, we are not France. Just as we do not ban headscarves in public, nor do we seek to banish religiosity from the school environment.
Across the country, we can all point to many successful, collaborative, pluralist faith schools working with children of particular denominations and of no faith at all.
But we also need to be clear about the duties which a state-funded school is expected to fulfil.
We cannot have narrow, religious motives which seek to divide and isolate, dictating state schooling.
We cannot have headteachers forced out; teachers undermined; curricula re-written; and cultural or gender-based segregation.
Indeed it is more important than ever in a modern, multi-cultural city like this one that schooling serves to unite, not fracture communities.
It should teach the ties that bind, the history that weaves cultures together, a sense of citizenship which meets the complexities of the 21st century.
Anything that undermines that mission needs to be dealt with thoroughly. And so I welcome Birmingham City Council’s investigation of the so-called Trojan Horse conspiracy.
But what the events of the last few weeks also point to is the inability of the Department for Education to manage 5,000 schools from a desk in Whitehall.
It clearly shows the need for a new, more accountable system of local oversight.
Especially as the existing local and regional infrastructure for monitoring schools has been so comprehensively undermined in the last four years.
Within the next few weeks, we will be publishing our answer to this question as part of David Blunkett’s review into raising school standards and rebuilding local collaboration.
Come 2015 we will be inheriting a chaotic schools landscape and so we are determined to rebuild a coherent education structure which addresses underperformance, promotes excellence and builds on the successes of the London Challenge model.
Conference, as I have suggested, if we are to properly prepare pupils as citizens of an open, tolerant and multi-cultural Britain earning its way in the world, we need clear expectations about what a ‘broad and balanced curriculum’ means for contemporary schooling.
Here we have a careful balance to strike between change and churn.
Every week, visiting schools and colleges, one teacher will ask when will you politicians stop coming into office and ripping all the old policies up again?
And the next will ask, when are you getting rid of this, that and other?
So, let me be clear this morning on one misguided, ill thought through and narrow-minded change we won’t be proceeding with.
Having spoken to teachers, head-teachers, parents, students and university vice-chancellors, I can tell Conference this morning that we will not go ahead with the de-coupling of AS and A levels.
Universities value the AS Level as a good indication of future potential. Students value the examination as a good indication of their level. And schools value it as a spur to action for the more lackadaisical.
So when we assume office in May 2015, there will be a swift reversal of this policy and I am giving teachers and school leaders clear indication of that today.
Secondly, I am concerned about the potentiality for the current performance measurement criteria for GCSEs to overly narrow the curriculum.
Even though schools have the capacity and right to teach vocational, creative, and technical GCSEs, more and more schools are leaving their ability to deliver alternative courses severely depleted.
Now, I have long been a critic of the value of semi-vocational, GCSE equivalents, but I am now beginning to fear that the effect of this government’s curriculum changes is a dangerous limiting of options for young people in the other direction.
Just at the time when we need more engineers, technicians and skilled vocational students as possible.
So whilst I am not interested in adding to your planning by ripping up curriculum reforms, I do reserve my right as Secretary of State to address any potential problems with the current accountability weighting system in order to tackle emerging perverse incentives.
Because our priority has to be deliver a curriculum which allows learners to pursue excellence in vocational as well as academic pathways.
To ensure that those young people whom Ed Miliband has called ‘the forgotten 50%’ get the education they need.
So, again, I want to make it absolutely clear that delivering for the “forgotten fifty percent” will be a signal priority for an incoming Labour Government.
It is essential to the bold economic agenda Ed Miliband will take the country: a high wage, hi-tech, high-innovation economy that works for us all.
Yet if we we really want to tear down the deep-seated cultural barriers that exist between vocational and academic routes then we will need to do more.
This summer will mark the seventieth anniversary of Rab Butler’s 1944 Education Act and, quite frankly, our problems go that far back.
Certainly the Technical School aspect of the tripartite system was never fully realised and you could make a convincing case that a lack of focus in vocational education represents the most historic failing of the English education system.
What we need is a clear and coherent strategy for all learners, one that binds different pathways to success together in a rigorous common framework.
So I am absolutely delighted to welcome the recent report of Labour’s skills task-force, which recommended that we develop a National Baccalaureate framework for all pupils aged 14-19.
and would develop their character, resilience and employability skills through a tailored personal development programme that could include work experience or community service.
This should not be seen as more unhelpful curriculum tinkering – the core learning component of the National Baccalaureate would be made up entirely from existing qualifications.
But when we look at the challenges facing our young people today, from global economic competition to increasing mental health problems then I would argue that the need for a broader approach to education, one that delivers excellence and opportunity for all our young people, has never been more stark.
We know that qualifications are essential, but not enough.
We need our education system also to deliver those attributes and aptitudes which the world of work and further education requires: character, resilience, self-discipline, emotional intelligence and grit.
But, ultimately all of this is dependent upon the human capital – which is you.
More than that, this is a vision of schooling which starts to think of the teacher as more than just an imparter of knowledge.
Alongside this the teacher becomes coach, mentor, critic and facilitator.
And the ability to secure this vision begins and ends with a high qualified, motivated and inspiring teaching workforce.
The first step in achieving this, the absolute bare minimum – is to guarantee that all teachers are qualified.
It is bizarre and damaging that the Government’s signature teaching policy is to make us the only country in the world that doesn’t expect its teachers to have a qualification.
And the latest school workforce statistics revealed that there has been a 16% rise in unqualified teachers within the last year.
So under a Labour Government, all permanent state school teachers would have to have qualified teacher status or be working towards it.
However, at times the Government’s dismantling of professional teaching standards has threatened to go much further than allowing unqualified teachers into our classrooms.
We see in the Free School programme the imprint of an aggressively free market ‘fly or fail’ approach to school improvement.
And traces of that philosophy are detectable in the approach to the national architecture for teaching standards too.
Just last week I was speaking to a teacher in Bury, who reflected on how in the mid-1990s being a teacher was not regarded as holding much status.
That is the result of our Social Partnership and it is entirely true – I have sat quietly at the back of quite a few year 10 classes now, and I am completely in awe of your ability to simultaneously stretch the most able, carry the struggling, offer space for reflection, whilst delivering the learning outcomes.
But as the NASUWT’s report today shows, more teaching assistants on an unqualified teacher pay-scale are being asked to take on the role of classroom teachers.
So we have to ensure that the culture of social partnership that this union and the last Labour government won, is not lost in the melee of this Government’s deregulatory agenda.
And we need to look at new ways of getting the sharpest candidates into teaching, placing the best teachers into under-performing schools and, most of all, allowing the best teachers to carry on teaching in the classroom.
Teachers who want to build their expertise in a particular subject or pedagogical skill should be given the opportunity to progress whilst still practicing the calling that first attracted them to the profession.
They should not feel the need to go into management and leadership just to advance their careers.
So we would work with the profession to create a framework of new career pathways for teachers, taking inspiration from the structured career progression routes in Singapore, one of the world’s leading education systems.
And also learning the lessons and building on the best of the Advanced Skills Teacher model.
Because what the Labour Party is interested in, first and foremost, is encouraging teachers to be all they can and should be – professionals whose job is so important it requires the very highest levels of performance.
Yet I have to say, when it comes to teacher training, QTS is the minimum we should expect.
It is only the beginning of a teacher’s professional development.
Because whilst you should all be very proud of our performance in the OECD’s test-run for assessing collaborative problem solving skills, our results on reading, mathematics and science show that we still have a long way to go in our pursuit of excellence.
The world is spinning faster. Global competition is accelerating. And Britain’s future prosperity is far from secure.
This is a matter of economic competitiveness and social justice. Because we know that for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, without social capital or parental input to fall back upon, the quality of teaching they receive is fundamental to their life chances.
Research from the London School of Economics and the Sutton Trust has shown that teacher quality can mean as much as a year’s difference to the learning progress of children from challenging circumstances.
However, the traditional policy response – of focusing upon initial teacher training is – is not sufficient to tackling the wider challenge of teacher development.
Because as that same LSE and Sutton Trust research has demonstrated, if we could just raise the performance of the least effective teachers already in the system merely to the average, then England would rank in the top five education systems in the world in reading and mathematics.
So under a Labour Government, teachers would be expected to undertake regular professional development throughout their careers and revalidate their expertise at regular intervals.
Because we believe it is absolutely vital that teachers keep their skills, knowledge and practice up to date.
We believe that, given the pace of progress, an understanding of the latest pedagogical or technological innovations is sure to benefit pupils.
And we believe that a process of re-validating teachers’ expertise would bring them into line with other high-status, mature professions such as lawyers and doctors.
However, there are two potential obstacles to this strategy.
The first of these is the poor quality, low value and frankly inadequate provision of continuous professional development that currently exists within our system.
Indeed, this is another reason for our revalidation policy – we want to encourage both supply and demand for high quality, peer to peer professional development.
However, the second is time.
Indeed, if the recent Teacher Workload survey is to be believed, the average secondary classroom teacher could spend less than 2 hours a week on individual or professional development.
So, let me clear: I recognise that workload represents a major challenge in your capacity to grow and develop as teachers.
And I recognise that we need to work together in order to make sure school leaders are giving you enough time time to train.
But what I have said to Chris, what we need to do is work together to see where we can strip out the bureaucracy and form-filling which prevent you doing your job.
Because the Workload survey suggested nearly half of teachers say they waste a significant amount of time on pointless paperwork.
Data and intelligent accountability are important. One of the lessons of London Challenge was that the effective use of data allowed fragile schools to be assisted, underperformance addressed, demographics in need identified.
But we don’t want it to kill your ability to function in the classroom.
So, I positively welcome any constructive suggestion that can help reduce the bureaucratic burden, move away from this damaging burn-out model of teaching, and begins to let you focus on what you were trained to do: teach.
And we know that the best way of improving schools is to raise the status, elevate the standing and lift standards in the teaching profession.
So let me finish by thanking you for all the unseen, unsung and difficult work you do in educating young people – often from troubled backgrounds – up and down this country.
As well as taking this opportunity to put on the record the deep appreciation of myself and the Labour Party for your diligence and dedication as public servants.
But more than that can I offer to work with you over the next year to develop the programmes which can end the relentless churn and party political tinkering with education policy – and focus on what matters.
Vocational as well as academic excellence.
Local oversight and partnership across schools.
Rigorous teacher training and continuing professional development.
A curriculum which stretches the most able, but delivers outcomes for every child.
And a vision of education beyond the exam-factory, offering our young people a sense of confidence, a culture of inquiry, character, resilience, and the skills to be work-ready.
All of that is dependent on what really matters in education policy: a world-class teacher in every classroom, studio or workshop.
And, Chris, I look forward to working with you and your members to offer that mandate to the British people and deliver it in office.
Tristram Hunt (@TristramHuntMP) is MP for Stoke-on-Trent and Shadow Secretary of State for Education.
Below is the full text of the Shadow Secretary of State for Education’s speech to the 2014 Conference of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, delivered today in Manchester.
It is, as ever, a great pleasure to be here in Manchester – the second most important city in Britain.
Chartism, Marxism, the Co-operative movement – you can make a convincing case that Manchester is the true home to all these currents so crucial to the intellectual history of the Labour tradition.
From the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 to the home of the Co-operative movement on Rochdale Road (if only they had stayed there) to Chetham Library in Cathedral Gardens, where Karl Marx and Frederich Engels used to sit at that window-side table to discuss the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the educational impact of the 1833 Factory Act (2 hours teaching a day).
Yet most pertinently for today’s speech, Manchester was home of the proto-feminist Elizabeth Wolstenholme-Elmy and so has an important place in the campaign for a woman’s right to an education.
Long before Emmeline Pankhurst and the battle for the suffrage, here in Manchester Lydia Becker was also organising women to get elected onto the new School Boards.
And it was from this ferment of women’s rights, social activism and labour organisation in the late Victorian period that the earliest antecedent of this union, the Association of Assistant Mistresses was formed in 1884.
This union has the representation of women in its DNA and it is to its tremendous credit that we see that tradition so vividly embodied by the leadership of Mary and Alison today.
And in that vein I would like to begin this morning by highlighting a point I made recently at the Association of School and College Leaders conference in Birmingham.
One that given your union’s particular history may carry extra prescience.
That is: when it comes to the appointment of school leaders – and secondary school leaders in particular – like so many other sectors we have a women problem.
Because despite the fact that 62% of secondary teachers are women, when it comes to heads the figure drops to just a third.
Moreover, the Future Leaders charity have presented shocking evidence of governors explicitly making recruitment decisions based upon an applicant’s gender.
We cannot allow this prejudice to continue. After all, how can we possibly talk about giving young women strong female role models, when we don’t practice what we preach in the staff-room?
The independent think-tank Policy Exchange recently published a report on the future of Ofsted. Here, Policy Exchange’s Head of Education summarises the key messages and consider Sir Michael Wilshaw’s response.
In 1839, Hugh Seymour Tremenheere and Revd John Allen were appointed as the first ever of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools (HMI), with a brief to inspect a small number of elementary schools which had recently been given the support of public money and to ensure that this money was well spent. 175 years later, Ofsted employs – in one way or another – around 1700 school inspectors, who between them carry out over 6,500 inspections a year of maintained schools.
The phrase “hello, I’m calling from Ofsted to let you know that your school will be undergoing an inspection tomorrow” ranks as one of the scariest in the education lexicon. But holding schools accountable for £47bn of expenditure, and the education of around 7m children and young people across England is an important job, and those who simply wish away the presence of a regulator are not holding a credible position. But neither can Ofsted – or any regulator – be preserved in aspic. The watchmen must themselves be watched.
Policy Exchange’s report found that significant changes ought to be made to the way in which Ofsted conducts school inspections to make it as effective as it should be and that it needs to be. Most pertinently, it concluded that the single activity which takes up the most time (and therefore money) of an inspection – that of observing lessons – is neither valid nor reliable. The practice of lesson observations has also spawned an industry of consultants, Heads, CPD suppliers and other third parties enthusiastically selling the idea of ‘an Ofsted perfect lesson’ – whose effects range from being a waste of time at best to actively harmful at worst.
Our report argued that for the vast majority of schools, an inspection should take no more than a day, and consist of one inspector, whose role is explicitly to scrutinise and validate – or otherwise – a school’s judgement on its performance. The inspector may walk the halls and watch behaviour. They may stand at the gates and meet parents. They may even put their head round the door and watch teachers to see why a school has made particular judgements. But their role must be analogous to a restaurant hygiene inspector, and less of a food critic. Should an inspector conclude that a school is potentially struggling, or that this short inspection has been insufficient to make a judgement, then a fuller inspection should take place.
It was great to hear Sir Michael Wilshaw endorse many of the recommendations in this report in his speech to ASCL conference this weekend – including the move to a two stage inspection, as well as a “root and branch” review of the outsourced inspection regime, with a desire to move incrementally towards this all being done by Ofsted employed HMIs. In fairness, I must also report that he called the suggestion that all lesson observations be scraped “absurd”.
Making such a change to the structure of inspections is welcome, even if the fight to abolish all routine lesson observations goes on. But there remain perils ahead. Sir Michael Wilshaw caused some consternation in his same ASCL speech by musing, almost without thinking it seems, that it would be helpful if schools continued to use National Curriculum levels to show progress of their pupils, because that was what inspectors knew and understand. Such a ‘helpful’ suggestion, of course, risks the large scale flight back to levels by schools paranoid that any other system will not be understood properly and that they run the risk of being penalised through inspector incomprehension. If Ofsted is to be believed when they talk of the merits of a school led system, then they must design an inspection system which responds to school actions, and checks those, rather than drives them. I very much hope that Tristram Hunt, Michael Gove and Michael Wilshaw recognise this as the reforms roll out.
The speech below was given by Tristram Hunt, Shadow Secretary of State for Education, to the conference of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) on 22 March 2014.
Thank you. It is a great pleasure to be here in Birmingham once more.
And perhaps Brian, Malcolm, Patsy and everyone here at ASCL had a little window into George Osborne’s mind when they settled on the location for this year’s conference.
For when we have heard so much about ‘rebalancing’ the economy’ and ‘encouraging the makers’ – then there is no more fitting a location than Birmingham.
Because apart, of course, from Stoke-on-Trent, the indisputable birthplace of the industrial revolution, is there any city more synonymous with England’s industrial heritage than this ‘city of a thousand trades’?
Yet at the heart of Birmingham’s success lay the realisation that there is a crucial link between enterprise and craftsmanship; between economic competitiveness and educational excellence.
And, no less important, a harmonious relationship between academic and vocational enquiry.
For what were Matthew Boulton, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley and Stoke-on-Trent’s Josiah Wedgwood doing at their Lunar Society meetings in Soho House if not marrying academic theory to applied, practical learning?
Alas, such wisdom appears lost on the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Because despite the national scandal of one million young people not in education, employment or training; despite the fact we languish 21st out of all OECD countries in terms of technical skills; and despite the fact that England’s young people, almost uniquely, have poorer numeracy and literacy skills than their elder contemporaries; last Wednesday’s budget contained next to no recognition of the urgent economic importance of equipping our young people with the skills demanded by the future.
Teaching and teachers have never been better.
I started teaching in 1984. I wasn’t given targets, there was no focus on learning, no-one was interested in the students’ results and I was judged to be excellent because difficult teenagers behaved in my classes! I see young entrants to the profession now engaged in discussions about pedagogy, understanding data and using it, interested in academic study about leadership of teaching and learning and with no expectation of 13 weeks holiday a year completely free from all schoolwork. I think it is sad that the public perception of the modern teacher is so rooted in the past.
Some people will never be able to teach.
This is something that people don’t admit. Too often the fact you have a degree and want to be a teacher is seen as enough. Err, no. Some people, no matter how much guidance and training they are given, would lose control of a dead rabbit! Some people are not natural communicators and teachers need to be communicators. One of the most infuriating things about our profession is the way that everyone from journalists to taxi drivers, from politicians to refuse collectors, from parents to shop assistants know about teaching because they went to school! The constant call for teachers to behave professionally is sadly not reflected with the same level of respect for their professional opinion and ability enjoyed by accountants, lawyers and doctors.
Teachers are essentially sociable creatures.
They like people and they like a job with human contact, particularly with the young of the species. There are very few who don’t like children. I have met the odd one or two over the years who don’t like children, but it is rare and I’d bet they didn’t start out like that. By the time they get to that stage we have to have to get them out the profession, but it’s equally important to make sure that the factors which caused them to reach that stage are removed.
Teachers working together are far more effective than those working in isolation.
Ideas which are bounced around amongst enthusiastic professionals become great. Confident enthusiasts build on each other’s work, learning is accelerated, evaluations are more effective and camaraderie raises morale, which raises enthusiasm and we have a virtuous circle. Teachers’ needs for affiliation, recognition and all that “self-actualisation” stuff is met. The system gets better, the teachers get better and the kids get a good deal.
Far too many teachers work in isolation.
There are many reasons for this. Historically there was a view in the profession that a teacher could close their classroom door and be a king in their own classroom, free from “interference” of others. Just plain daft. There can also be a view that if a teacher admits they could do with ideas or support this means that they are “failing”, when of course the opposite is true: it is the confident who understand the importance of seeking help. This nonsense is, however, still prevalent in lots of schools. Thirdly, and in my view this is the most serious cause of teachers working in isolation, is the school that is in a downward spiral of isolation from governance, through to the head, through to the staff and ultimately the kids.
The downward spiral of isolation.
It works like this: a weakness in governance allows a “bunker mentality” to be adopted by the head. The head knows that other schools have “a better intake”, that they are “favourites with the LA/diocese or both”, that “competitor” schools were “very lucky in their last OFSTED” etc etc. this head doesn’t network much because s/he has little real confidence (although this can be heavily disguised). Decisions are often not made or made by default and student behaviour plummets. The culture of excuses and isolation emanates throughout the building. Teachers who have ideas find it’s best to keep them to themselves because “raising your head above the parapet means you’ll be shot down”. What happens in schools doing this is that those who have a sense of what is happening, and who can, leave; some teachers stay and maintain a good level of performance, but are far from fulfilling their potential and, for the majority their performance is way below what it needs to be.
Heads are the people responsible for monitoring teacher performance and this is a core skill of headship.
1. It is perfectly possible for heads to “sack” / “get rid of” failing teachers in a timely fashion. The processes are there and are used effectively by good heads.
2. If there are heads unwilling or incapable of using existing procedures, that is a capability issue about headship.
3. Teachers who are “failing” can have their performance transformed through excellent leadership and this, together with that downward spiral described in the above paragraph, means that we cannot make judgements about teachers in isolation from leadership.
4. Diluting the responsibility for heads to ensure good teaching will do nothing to improve the quality of leadership.
5. The people who appoint heads and manage the performance of heads are governing bodies. The link from weak governance to weak headship to weak teaching to failing schools is indisputable.
This is Ros banging on again about leadership!
Well, yes I am! If anyone is responsible for licensing or re-licensing my teachers, it is me. And if I am incapable of ensuring quality teaching, then I am incapable of headship and someone should do something about that.
as an independent organisation intellectually, ideologically and professionally committed to raising the quality of teaching and leadership, with a leader who is recognised across all sectors as outstanding and who has the confidence of the NLEs? Give NLEs “teeth” in supporting schools and licensing other heads. Allow the profession to control the CPD, through the college and led by the system.
I promise all the politicians that if you follow this formula teaching will look after itself.
Ros McMullen (@RosMcM) is an academy principal and academy trust CEO in Leeds and a member of the core group of @HeadsRoundtable. She is a Labour Party member. | 2019-04-24T12:06:52Z | http://www.labourteachers.org.uk/author/admin/ |
Economic Important Traits of Buffalo and Their Implication – Bijesh Mishra's Blog!!!
Buffaloes have been raised under farming systems of Nepal throughout the known history. They are the traditional provider of milk, meat, hides, manure, draft power and also the reserve capital for the farm families. They are mainly raised by the smallholder farmers across all the physio-graphic agro-ecological (Agro-eco) zones of the country. Due to a key role played by buffalo in the farming systems of the country from the time immemorial to date, interest in this livestock species is ever growing as more systematic planning is adopted for growth of the country’s agrarian economy.
Economic traits are those traits which monetary value in the production of livestock. Many traits in farm animals are affected by many pairs of genes and there is no sharp distinction among phenotypes but there is more or less continuous range from one phenotypic expression to another. These are known as quantitative trait or economic trait. Environment has great influence on the expression of most quantitative traits.
Official statistics (CBS, 1997) shows that Nepal has currently a population of 3.34 million buffalo which are distributed throughout the country’s Agro-eco zones or the administrative development regions (See map) as presented in Table 1. The statistical figures indicate that the buffalo number is highest in Western Development Region (28.2%), followed by Central (24.3%) and Eastern (20.7%) regions. Overall across the Agro-eco zones, 57% of the buffalo populations are found in the middle hills, followed by Terai plains (33.1%) in the South and Mountains (9.1%) in the North. Analyzing the 1993 data, Moioli (1996) reported that Nepal ranked seventh in total number of buffalo among the countries world over, while there has been the trend of increase in the population between 1979 and 1993 by 28%.
Table 1. Buffalo population distribution across the physio-graphic agro-ecological zones and development regions in Nepal (figures in 000).
The existing population of buffaloes contributes about 71% of the total milk produced in the country . The demand for milk and meat is large, and these animals are also important for religious purposes. The present buffalo populations of the country are not able to meet current market demands, and so large numbers of live animals are imported from India.
Table 18: Per capita meat production in different countries.
The present constraints upon the existing management systems need to be identified to increase the productivity per animal, and some of these are now described.
Animal resources: Buffaloes of Nepal are hardy and are adapted to harsh environments with a low plane of nutrition. Lime have draught tolerant capacity, Gaddi is high yielding heavy breed but have variable rates of offspring survival and exhibit wide variation in productive and reproductive performance at different localities and under different management. Buffaloes in Nepal are generally small in body size, but selection for improvement is not practiced by farmers, and indiscriminate breeding results in maintenance of a low level of productivity from generation to generation. Steps towards the improvement in traits such as litter size, frequency of calving, calf survivability, growth rate, adult body weight, have not yet been taken.
Feed resources: At present, the country is in a state of animal feed deficit. The pressure of increasing human population requires an increase in agricultural production, and this has led to an increase in the area under cultivation. Furthermore, there is a lack of forest and pasture improvement, and a high density of livestock. Pasture management in most parts of the country is traditional, generally inefficient, and efforts made to improve it are inadequate. Communal grazing lands are becoming unproductive due to overgrazing, and the palatable forest undergrowth is changing to unpalatable species and weeds. The total available forage resources of the country are inadequate to meet the nutritional demands of livestock in terms of dry matter (DM), total digestible nutrients (TDN) and crude protein (CP).
The mountain region has sufficient feed resources at present, but the same is not true for the hills and the Terai. For the hill region, Rajbhandary and Pradhan (1991) reported that the high hills have a positive feed balance, but the mid-hills face an acute deficiency. The feed deficiency in the lower hills is forcing animals to move upwards in search of food. The deterioration of pasture quality, deforestation and conversion of forest to scrubland, especially in the densely populated lower and mid-hills, is placing the animals under increasing stress and decreasing their production.
At the present population levels, TDN required supporting dry or unproductive cattle and buffaloes are 23% of the total TDN requirement (Rajbhandary and Pradhan, 1991). Therefore, it is not the small ruminants, but the large ruminants, that are responsible for the shortage of fodder in the country. Since cattle and buffaloes are competing for forage with sheep and goats throughout the year, and particularly during the winter, small ruminants are facing nutritional deficiency. Available resources are not utilized effectively. Alpine pastures are traditionally (and now illegally) owned by certain communities or villages, while other communities or village lack such a traditional privilege. The latter depend upon the goodwill of those who own the land, require permission to take their animals there every year, and have to pay for use of the land. The major drawback of this system is that without traditional ownership of pasture land, often find difficultly in securing adequate grazing, whilst communities that “own” the pasture may not even use it.
Animal husbandry in Nepal, is based on traditional practices, and goats receive very little care. Under the present system, farmers neither practice selection, nor follow an organized breeding system, and a large number of unproductive animals are maintained to compete for feed with the more productive ones. Feed conservation practices are not generally implemented in most parts of the country, and any fodder that is conserved is reserved for large ruminants. Buffaloes lose condition throughout the winter, which can be so severe that it takes up to four months for animals to regain body condition lost during this time (Karki, 1985).
Poor pasture quality forces animals to utilize forest resources. Overgrazing/browsing is adversely affecting the forest vegetation, and so lack of proper pasture management is leading to forest deterioration. The same is true for pastures , and in many “Kharkas” palatable grasses are being replaced by thorny weeds.
There is no organized marketing system for livestock, or livestock by-products in Nepal, so they do not realize a remunerative price. An organized market in the form of a ‘hat’, is observed weekly in some parts of the Terai, where traders and farmers can sell their produce in a competitive manner, but no such system exists in most parts of the hills. Farmers are compelled to sell their animals without market competition, and in a limited market situation which is often controlled by middlemen who have a monopoly over purchase of sheep and goats in a particular hill area. Farmers cannot time their sale to realize an optimum price, but have to wait for a customer. In some remote areas this period is annual, at the Dashain Festival. The lack of a regular market does not encourage a commercial approach. The annual marketing prior to Dashain itself leads to unnecessary retention of animals in the flocks, which is not only uneconomic, but also increases pressure on the limited feed resources.
Present livestock extension policies seem unable to prepare farmers for the adoption of new technologies. Even simple improvements to the existing system which could substantially increase income or decrease losses are not adopted. The inability to implement technologies that are convincing to the farmers, to train them properly, or to make the necessary inputs available may be reasons for these inadequacies. For example, the timely injection of Terramycin is known to be effective in preventing “six-month” disease in young lambs, but the disease is still responsible for high levels of mortality, because the farmers are not aware of the drug’s availability, nor are they trained in its use.
Under such circumstances, very few farmers are willing to relinquish traditional farming practices in favor of new ones. This is mainly because of the lack of necessary inputs for improved farming practices where they are needed. The lack of provision of even a single input may have a negative effect on the adoption of the whole technology. For example, to realize maximum benefit from crossbreeding indigenous animals with exotic breeds, the crossbreds require a better plane of nutrition, preventive health care, and improved husbandry practices. An incomplete set of inputs, and lack of practical training is responsible, to some extent, for ineffective technology transfer, and hence a reduced rate of change from traditional farming .
To fulfill the requirements of an increasing human population, more and more land is being cultivated, and in the hills every piece of land that can be effectively used for grain production, is being cultivated. There is continuous deforestation for agricultural work and fodder provision and large numbers of cattle and buffalo are creating more pressure on the available resources. If the present rate of deforestation and the consequent soil erosion continues, the country may face an ecological disaster, with the consequence that the nutritional problems for livestock will be further aggravated, resulting in reduced production of meat, milk.
Brucellosis is the major disease that causes reduction in the reduction of reproductive performances of buffalo due to abortion. Foot and mouth diseases, black quarter and anthrax are other major diseases that affect the performance. The vaccinations are not given in proper time. The farmers are not cautious of it. Even the farmers are aware about it , in some areas it is not available, and the technicians are not available thouroughout the country.
The pure breed Lime (pronounced as lime) is believed to have originated from wild Arna (Bubalus arnii), and has been domesticated throughout the known history of Nepal. They are found more towards the higher altitude of the hills in the country. The Lime buffalo is estimated at 35% of the total indigenous buffalo population in the hills and mountains of the country as calculated from the data from Rasali (1998) and Rasali (2000).
Phenotypically, the Lime buffalo are light brown and relatively small in body size, with characteristic chevrons of gray or white hair below the jaws and around the brisket, and small sickle shaped horns curved towards the neck (Rasali 1998).They have gray coat color; gray brown or blackish skin color, black muzzle; grayish, brownish or whitish eye brow; grayish, brownish or whitish leg markings; whitish chevron marks around the neck and brisket (Rasali et al., 1998b).
Data averaged for adult females (n=96) are as follows :Body weight=399.1 kg; Height at wither=115.1; Body length =126.3 cm; Girth = 168.4;face length= 44.7 cm; Fore head width= 21.5 cm; Horn base circumference=20.6 cm Horn length= 46.2 cm. (Rasali et al., 1998b). Wither Height averaged 20 cm; Ear length averaged 20 cm; Average tail length is 82 cm (Pradhan et al, 1996).
Parkote buffalo are the typical buffalo of the mid hill and river valleys of Nepal. However, due to traditional practice of crossbreeding this breed with Lime buffalo and also due to recent crossbreeding efforts with Indian Murrah, their population in pure form is declining. Now, pure breed population is estimated at only 25 % of the indigenous population of buffaloes in the hills and mountains in Nepal.
Phenotypically, the Parkote buffalo are dark in coat color and medium built body size, with sword-shaped horns directed laterally or towards the back of the body (Rasali, 1998; Pradhan et al., 1996).They have black coat color; black skin color; black muzzle; black eye brow; usually no leg markings; and chevron marks absent (Rasali et al., 1998).
Biometrical data averaged for adult females (n=88) as follows :Body weight=409.9 kg; Height at wither=114.9 cm; Body length =124.7 cm; Girth = 170.5 cm; face length= 44.6 cm; Fore head width= 21.2 cm; Horn base circumference=20.9 cm; Horn length= 46 cm. (Rasali et al., 1998).
The Gaddi buffalo found in the Dadeldhura, Baitadi and Doti districts of the Far-western region are good milkers that utilize the pasture land in the slopes of mid-hills and high mountains. These animals are usually found in a 5482 km2 area at an elevation of 1500-4500 m. The total number of buffaloes in the region has been estimated at 1,01,500. There are about 16,000 purebred Gaddi buffaloes and 50,000 crosses with the indigenous Lime and Parkote populations, and the Murrah breed. The Gaddi buffaloes are predominantly black in color with a white round patch on the forehead. Occasionally, brown and light brown colored animals are seen. These animals have a long face and flat head with long curved horns. The Gaddi buffaloes are massive with an angular shaped body and sloped hip. The morphological characteristics and production performance of the Gaddi buffaloes are similar to the indigenous Lime and Terai buffaloes. The morphological characteristics and production performance of the Gaddi buffaloes have been summarized. The number of pure breed Gaddi buffaloes is gradually decreasing due to the indiscriminate use of bulls of the imported Murrah breed to increase milk production. If the process continues, the Gaddi buffalo may become extinct in the near future. Thus, an appropriate strategy for the improvement and conservation of the Gaddi buffaloes needs to be introduces.
A study on indigenous Gaddi buffalo of far-western region of Nepal was conducted to understand the production parameters and husbandry practices intending to make future strategy for improvement. The breed is well known in the far-western districts of Nepal and adapted in hills and mountains of the region with diverse climatic conditions. Among 3 identified buffalo breeds (Gaddi, Lime and Parkote) and one under study (Terai), Gaddi was found morphologically larger (p<0.01) and docile in temperament. Major population of Gaddi was found to be black in color and some brown and light brown. Morphologically, it looks like Indian Murrah, however white round patch on the middle of forehead and tuft of the tail, and semi-curved horn shape are the distinguished characters. The average ages at puberty, first calving and calving interval was 3.8, 5.7 and 2.0 years respectively. Lactation length varied from 14 to 22 months and milk yield from 2.5 to 5.5 liters/day. Major problems recorded were lack of pure breeding bulls, negative selection, feed scarcity, poor technical know-how and health management. The paper discusses on the overall buffalo management system in the far-western region of Nepal and suggests improvement plan with maximum utilization of locally available farm resources.
The estimates of buffalo milk and meat production for the year 1996/97 are shown in table 2 showing that most of the milk and meat production was distributed in three of five development regions, Western, Central and Eastern, with their percentage of milk produced being 31.6, 27.6 and 18.9 respectively, and that of meat produced being 22.6, 31.4 and 21.7 respectively (CBS, 1997). The figures of buffalo products amounted to 69% of the total milk production and 65% of the total meat production in the country (Singh and Chapagain, 1999). The level of buffalo milk production also places Nepal among a few other countries, viz. India, Pakistan and Egypt where the buffalo milk has been evidently the main animal food (Moioli, 1996). National Planning Commission estimates for 1993 showed that the total livestock gross domestic product (GDP) amounted to the tune of NRs 11, 314 millions (currently, US$ 1 = NRs 68) which is 26.7% of the total agricultural GDP in the country, and buffalo is the key livestock species contributing about 53% of the total livestock GDP, mainly through the production of milk and meat (Singh and Chapagain, 1999).
Table 2. Buffalo milk and meat production across the development regions of Nepal (1996/97).
Contribution of buffalo to soil fertility management is an integral component of farming systems in Nepal (Rasali et al., 1996). The buffalo drought power is of particular importance to Terai plains and inner Terai valleys. Other by-products from buffalo such as hides and bones, and also the use of buffalo as the reserve capital assets of the smallholder farm families have significant importance to the rural economy of the country. In addition, export of buffalo ghee (clarified butter oil) to India is a traditional foreign exchange earner for Nepal. The total ghee exported through the major customs points located in Bhairahawa, Nepalganj and Dhangadi areas amounted to NRs 44.2 millions in 1994/95 (Customs Dept., 1995). And, recently, an avenue of fluid milk export to India is also opened indicating the further potential contribution from the multipurpose buffalo production in the country. However, despite high economic importance of buffalo with their large domestic population, Nepal has also been importing buffaloes annually from India to the tune of 120 thousands (Shrestha et al 1998) mainly for meat supply in Kathmandu, the country’s capital city and upgrading Domestic herds with Indian Murrah breed.
One of the first steps in developing a breeding programme is to consider which phenotypic traits are of importance. From a practical standpoint, traits with a measurable or at least readily recognizable economic value are generally to be given the most emphasis, although traits that provide a less tangible utility for cultural or other reasons may also be considered important. The economic traits are typically those that affect either the income obtained or the costs of production.
In the South Asia Pacific region (SAP), the sale or home consumption of milk, meat, dung, and skin of the animals and the sale of surplus animals for breeding and meat are the main sources of economic returns of cattle and buffalo farmers. In addition, many farmers use themselves or rent out their animals for draft purposes, either providing an additional source of income or saving the costs of contracting out for these services.
Traits associated with income are typically called production traits. For dairy cattle and buffaloes, these traits are those that are associated with milk production. In most of the countries in the SAP, farmers are paid according to the kilograms of milk sold, so milk yield is obviously a trait of high economic importance. When milk is sold in a formal market, the price paid per kilogram may be adjusted based on concentrations of milk solids.
Fat content is almost always considered under such a system, but payment for protein or solids-not-fat is becoming increasingly common. The milk of buffaloes is priced 1.5 to 2 times than cow milk due to its greater concentration of milk solids(17 to 19% versus around 13%) and in certain areas it may be mixed with cow milk to increase the thickness of cow milk and, in turn, improve its market acceptability.
For beef cattle, economic value of a cow or buffalo is logically based on the amount of meat expected to be obtained from the animal. In contrast to industrialized countries, the sale price is not always based on formally weighing the animal and paying a certain price per kilogram. Rather, the animal is often priced as a whole. Nevertheless, larger animals fetch a higher price, so some measure of body weight is of particular importance. Reaching a mature weight as quickly as possible is advantageous, so weights at different ages, such as weaning, one year-of-age, and slaughter, can be taken to evaluate growth rate.
Age at slaughter can also be used to account for growth rate; younger animals would be favored. Birth weight is also often considered important for beef cattle, but largely for calving difficulty rather than production, so smaller birth weight may be preferred. Carcass quality traits can be important for some of the countries in the SAP, but in most cases this variable is not considered in the sale price, so a farmer cannot economically justify considering it in a selection goal.
Traction is also an important output of cattle and buffalo in the SAP. Animals with long legs, straight barrels and tight skin are generally assumed to be stronger and thus favored for draft purposes. The Bos indicus males with large humps and well-developed dewlaps are preferred because of more dissipation of heat due to a larger surface area and more body reserves for drought periods.
Reproduction traits are also important more so in dairy animals. For beef cattle, the number of offspring produced determines the number of animals available for sale. Consistent reproduction is also important for dairy cattle and buffaloes because daily yield is highest in the months immediately following parturition and because longer dry periods (resulting from failure to conceive quickly) result in greater costs for maintenance without any income. Both late age at first calving (AFC) and long intervals between calving, especially in Bos indicus cows and riverine buffaloes, have been often cited as constraints to profitability in cattle farming in the SAP.
Animal health is important for a number of reasons. First, sick animals require costs for treatment. Healthy animals also tend to produce more meat and milk and reproduce more regularly. The climatic conditions of many of the SAP countries can be demanding, with high temperatures, both extremes in precipitation and high risk for disease, so animals that are naturally resistant to problems associated with these adverse conditions are of high value.
Traits associated with management may also be worth considering. Increased longevity is important for a number of reasons. If their animals live longer, farmers can have the opportunity to sell excess animals or expand their herds, both of which would increase the potential for income. Increased longevity also allows for more opportunities for genetic selection. Because disease often leads to death or culling, the animals that live the longest are often those most resistant to health problems. For many indigenous cattle breeds, the presence of or suckling by a calf is necessary to ensure milk let-down. The milk consumed by the calf can obviously not be sold.
In truth, this may not result in much waste, inasmuch as the milk consumed can improve both the health and growth rate of the calf, but selecting for milk let-down without this source of stimulation would at least allow farmers to choose between selling the milk and feeding it to the calf. Calving difficulty can cause losses to both the calf and the cow, so this trait may be important, especially when crossing with exotic breeds with larger body sizes than indigenous breeds or with known dystocia problems. Temperament is important in any situation where interaction with humans is critical, especially when animals are used for draft purposes or when animals must be milked regularly.
Finally, different aspects of physical appearance may be important. As already mentioned, body size is important for both beef and draft purposes. Coat color or traits of the horns may be of importance for traditional or cultural reasons and thus may affect the market value of an animal. Udder traits may be associated with milk production, resistance to mastitis or ease of milking .
This is already obvious in the fact that some traits, such as those related to reproduction are listed in both columns. In addition, sale of male dairy animals can be a significant source of income and some animals may be used for draft purposes. The relative importance of these traits will be different in different areas and is important in determining the final breeding objectives.
Figures in the parentheses indicate the number of records.
Breeding plans for buffalo should aim to meet the milk and meat quality requirements and marketing channels should be developed. At the same time, it should be realized that the crossbred will need to survive and perform under the indigenous system practiced in the hills.
Meat and milk production should concentrate on prolific indigenous valley breeds under sedentary and stall-fed conditions. Genetic improvement of indigenous breeds should be done. Emphasis should be placed on intensifying buffalo production.
Improvement in genetic potential can only be realized with concurrent improvements in health, nutrition and management. To this end, strategic drenching, mineral supplementation and improved marketing should be prioritized, as well as more general strategies directed towards alleviating the winter feed deficit.
It should be emphasized that it is the large ruminants that are responsible for the nutritional imbalance and environmental degradation associated with present grazing systems. With this in mind, strategies to increase the proportion of large ruminants maintained under stall feeding regimes should be encouraged so that pasture depletion does not take place.
CBS. 1997. Agricultural statistics Nepal -1996-97 Central Bureau of Statistics, National Planning Commission Secretariat, Kathmandu, Nepal. pp. 17-21.
Customs Dept.1995. Customs records for 1994/95. Department of Customs, His Majesty?s Government of Nepal.
Moioli, B.M. 1996. An analysis of recent statistics on buffalo milk production and use in the world. Buffalo Journal. 2:115-126.
Pradhan, S.L., Sherchand, L. and Shrestha, N.P. 1996. Policy and strategy for conservation of animal genetic resources in Nepal. Department of Livestock Services, Lalitpur, Nepal.
Rasali, D.P. 1998. Present status of indigenous buffalo genetic resources in the western hills of Nepal. Proceedings of the 4th Global Conference on Conservation of Domestic Animal Genetic Resources. Rare Breeds International. p. 168-170.
Rasali, D.P. 2000. Recent trends in buffalo production in Nepal- a review. Buffalo Newsletter. The FAO Inter-Regional Cooperative Research Network on Buffalo, Europe-Near East. No. 14, pp-6-10.
Rasali, D.P. and Crow, G.H. 1999. Production of buffaloes (Bubalus bubalis) in the mountains and hills of Nepal: Constraints and opportunities. FAO/ILRI/ICIMOD/CIP Livestock in Mountain/Highland Production Systems E-Conference (Nov.-Dec. 1999) [email protected] .
Rasali, D.P. Gurung, D.B. and Yadav, E.R. 1998a. Performance recording of lactating local and crossbred cows and buffaloes of various exotic breed blood levels under farmers? management in the Western Hills (1995-97). Lumle Agricultural Research Centre, Pokhara, Nepal. Working Paper No. 98/39:14 pp.
Rasali, D.P., Joshi, H.D., Patel, R.K. and Harding, A.H. 1998b. Phenotypic clusters and karyotypes of indigenous buffaloes in the Western Hills of Nepal. Lumle Agricultural Research Station, Pokhara, Nepal. Technical Paper No. 98/2: 24 pp.
Rasali, D.P., Suwal, M.R.S., Vaidya, A.K. and Joshi, K.D. 1996. Contribution of livestock to soil fertility management system in the western mountains of Nepal. Proc. Workshop on formulating a strategy for soil fertility research in the hills of Nepal 17-18 August, 1995. (Ed. Joshi et al.). Lumle Agricultural Research Centre, Pokhara, Nepal/ Natural Resource Institute, London, UK. pp. 43-52.
Shrestha, H.R., Kunwar, B.S., Mandal, P., Thapa, M.S. and Pandey, S.B. 1998. Effect of feeding urea and molasses treated rice and wheat straw diet on the body weight gain and carcass characteristics of male buffalo calves. Proc. 8th World Conf. Anim. Prod., Seol, Korea, pp. 70-71.
Singh, D.B. 1997. Buffalo Production Unit. In: Annual Report- Livestock Development Farm, Lampatan, Pokhara, Nepal-1995/96.
Singh, S.B. and Chapagain, D.P. 1998. Livestock sector in the Agriculture Perspective Plan. In: Proceedings of the first national workshop on animal genetic resources conservation and genetic improvement of domestic animals in Nepal- April 11-13, 1994 (Ed. J.N.B. Shrestha). Nepal Agricultural Research Council, Khumaltar, Nepal. pp. 117-128.
Nowadays people knows the real author within a couple of hours. Provide proper citation before putting in your website.
Thank you for the information. Can you please provide me the link to paper? I will keep it as source. | 2019-04-23T18:30:29Z | https://bijeshmishra.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/economic-important-traits-of-buffalo-and-their-implication/ |
For July 2009 my Net Worth is $616,290 which is up $25,468 from the previous month.
Thats a pretty good jump for one month. The net worth is a new record high.
The main reasons it went up so much are increases in real estate values and retirement accounts. My house value jumped up quite a bit in the past month and our rentals also increased. The value of our house was up about 5% and the other property about 2%. My retirement accounts also grew pretty well and they were up about 5%.
Cash and stock value didn't change a whole lot. I did actually sell some stock but the rest of the stock I've got has increased in value. I've even got some value in stock options now. Previously my stock options were not worth anything since the grant price was lower than what the stock was trading at. We paid half the bill to get our house insulation done so that ate up the profits from the stock sale.
Free credit score and other services from Quizzle.
Quizzle is a free service from Quicken Loans. You can sign up for a free account through their website. One feature that I think is really nice is that when you sign up you don't have to give them your social security number, which makes me more confident in the security risk.
OK so what is Quizzle? From Quizzle's main page they say : "Quizzle is the only place that gives you a simple understanding of your home and your money, all in one spot. You'll get a free evaluation of your credit, home value, mortgage, budget and more, then get important tips on how to make the most of them (minus the confusing financial jargon)."
Quizzle has a few nice features but the best reason to sign up is that they give you a free credit score. The score they use is a "National Equivalency Score" from the Experian credit bureau. So it should be noted that this is not an actual FICO score. The FICO scores are available for purchase at myFICO But for personal use I think a "FAKO" score is just fine to get an idea of how your credit is doing. In addition to the credit score you can also see a copy of your Experian credit report. You get a new credit score and credit report every 6 months.
Quizzle gives you letter grades (A,B,...F) for your financial aspects including : Credit, Home Value, Mortgage, Budget and Rainy day fund. Then Quizzle combines all the financial data in to one overall Quizzle score which gives you an overall financial grade. These scores help you see how you're doing on your finances in general.
How they grade them varies: For the rainy day fund their goal is to have 4 months living expenses. Home value grade is based on how much your home as appreciated or depreciated since you bought it. They get a estimate of the homes current value from CyberHomes. Given that home values have gone down recently, it would be no surprise for many people to have a low score on this category. If you have depreciation overall then you'll get a D or F. The credit score grade is straight basis of how your credit score compares to the population in general. The mortgage grade is a little iffy in my opinion. They seem to grade you based on how much you'd save if you refinanced more than anything. That is very dependent on the ups and downs of interest rates. Personally I think that comparing your debt to your total income would be a better measure of your financial health.
My scores are pretty good. My overall Quizzle score is 96 out of 100. I got all 'A' grades except for home appreciation which is a 'B'. My home was bought 10 years ago and it has appreciated +50% in that time for annual increase rate of 4%.
If you'd like another opinion then here is another review of Quizzle from the blog Stop Buying Crap.
Overall I recommend Quizzle. Its a nice easy way to get access to a free credit score and their financial grades are a nice tool as well.
Buried in the Budget of the US government documents there is information on our government receipts. One table includes receipts broken down by source as a % of GDP.
I pulled out the figures for individual income tax and corporate income tax and graphed them post WWII era from 1944 to 2007. The two graphs are shown below.
For individual income taxes the total receipts ranged from a minimum of 5.7% of GDP to a maximum of 10.3% of GDP. The receipts averaged 8.0% and the standard deviation was 0.83%. The median value was also 8.0%. In 2007 the amount was 8.5%, marginally above the historic average. The black trend line shows a gradual increase over time.
Corporate tax receipts as % of GDP ranged from 1.1% minimum to 7.2% maximum. The mean was 3.1% with a standard deviation of 1.45%. The median value was 2.7%. In 2007 the rate was 2.7% which is close to historical averages. The black trend line shows a fairly steep decreasing trend in the long term.
I've heard of Prosper and Lending club for a while. Both are peer to peer lending institutions. If you're a lender you invest your money and it is loaned to individuals for various reasons. The benefit of these systems is the lender gets a relatively high return and the borrower gets a relatively low rate. I've thought it would be interested in joining to try it out. I can't lend money on Prosper or Lending Club and you probably can't either.
Prosper and Lending Club are both limited to certain states and they have income and net worth restrictions.
Prosper is only available in 16 states. From their website : "Prosper is currently available to lenders in the following states: California, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Illin ois, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New York, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Also, Prosper is always working to make lending on Prosper available in more states, so please check back. "
The graphic on the right shows the states that Prosper lenders can live in.
Those states represent about 115 million people or under 40% of the total population. That means that over 60% of Americans aren't in states that are allowed to be lenders on Prosper.
If you live in Alaska, Idaho, Kansas or Pennsylvania then you have to have 1) income of $70,000 and net worth of $70,000 or 2) at least a net worth of $250,000 and you can't put more than 10% of your assets into Prosper.
For California you can't put more than 10% of your net worth into it and if you invest over $2500 then you need 1) income of $85,000 and assets of $85,000 or 2) net worth of $200,000.
Those rules apply to about 54 million people and exclude about 27 million people. I'm making a rough estimate that about half the people have incomes and net worth below those minimums.
In total 115 million people live in states that are allowed to lend on Prosper. The state specific income and net worth minimums exclude around 27 million of those people. That leaves about 88 million Americans who can actually lend money on Prosper. In total only about 30% of Americans are allowed to lend money on Prosper. So chances are you can't.
California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, Nevada, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Those states are home to about 154 million Americans.
Lending Club also has income requirements but theirs appear to apply to all states. They require 1) $70,000 income and $70,000 net work or 2) $250,000 net worth. If you're in California they require 1) $100,000 income and $100,000 net work or 2) $250,000 net worth.
The income restrictions would likely exclude half of the population. That leaves about 77 million Americans, or about 25% of the population, who can participate in Lending Club as lenders. About 75% of Americans are not able to be lenders on Lending Club due to state of residence or income limitations.
About a year ago I wrote the article: Renting Solar Panels? In that I talked about a company named Citizenre that planned to rent solar panels to people with no cost other than the power of the electricity. Well a year has gone by and Citizenre doesn't seem like they have any concrete details or dates yet for when they would actually start renting solar.
There is a company out there leasing solar panels to consumers and actively installing hardware. That company is SolarCity. They actually had a booth setup at our local Costco a while back. Before I go too far into talking about them I should note that it looks like they currently serve Arizona, California and Oregon.
Solarcity will sell and rent panels to individual homeowners. Their SolarLease lets you pay them monthly payments on your solar panels over a 25 year period which is effectively renting them. Their website says a "typical" 3 bedroom home with an electric bill of $200 would get a 4kW solar system and then end up with electric bills from the electric utility of $65 and a $0 down lease of $115. Thats a $20 month savings. However I suspect that their 'typical' home is in a fairly sunny location.
I ran the numbers for my own home and came out with a -$156 annual savings on their Solarlease. I'd be losing money on the lease setup. So their lease isn't going to work for me. Our electric is currently $175/month. The solarlease would be $41 and the new electric bill would be $147. However using their calculator defaults it said if I bought the system with cash it would cost $34,014 less federal, state and local tax and rebate incentives for final out of pocket cost of $10,132 and I'd save $336 a year on my electric. They calculate the ROI at 2%.
In my last look at evaluating solar panels I figured that the 'sweet spot' to maximize my return would be a 2kW system. SolarCity's calculator seems to default to a larger 3-4kW system. I told their calculator that my electric bill is $25 and it put out a smaller cost system with final cost of $3,638 and annual savings of $168. Thats not the sweetest deal but not too bad either. It amounts to 4.6% annual payback and a 21 year payback period.
SolarCity claims to be the largest installer of residential solar power in the country. Plus they have a lot of positive press including news of installations for major companies. I think their Solarlease system could be a great deal for people in sun drenched areas.
If you're looking into solar then SolarCity is probably worth checking out.
Recently my wife and I have been watching reruns of Friends on TV. She has never seen the show before and took a liking to it. However we've been frustrated that they run the episodes out of order and seem to skip key episodes. So we decided to buy the complete series on DVD. The plan is to buy the DVDs, watch them all and then resell them. I figure this is a pretty good way to watch the show at our own with relatively low cost. Amazon had some for sale fairly cheap but eBay auctions looked a bit cheaper. I started shopping around to buy the complete series on DVD on eBay.
Over the past few years I've bought dozens of items off eBay and never had any real problems. Most sales work perfectly and I've been very happy with the experience. This time was different. I have high confidence that buying on eBay is safe in general but I've also tried to be cautious with who I buy from. There are definitely scammers on eBay unfortunately.
I shopped around for a few days and placed some bids on some auctions but was outbid. Then the other day one seller had multiple copies of the series going for $40-70 range. That is a good price since other auctions were running $80-90 range mostly. The seller had 100% feedback with around 40-50 positive reviews and no negatives. The auction listing said they accept Paypal but don't "prefer" it. Nothing raised major warning flags for me at that point. I went ahead and bid and ended up winning the auction at $75.
Warning sign #1: My first warning sign was when I was looking at the auction listing after I initially bid and I noticed that the DVDs were "unrestricted". Normally DVDs are restricted to certain geographies. DVDs sold in the USA / Canada are only usable on DVD players made for the US/Canada market. All the other Friends DVDs on the auctions were restricted to the US/Canada market. So I was a little concerned that the DVDs being sold may be 'greymarket' from some other country or worse, and more likely they could be forgeries. At this point I was hopping I would not win the auction. But I did end up winning it. So I forged ahead with fingers crossed that I wasn't buying a cheap forgery.
Warning sign #2: The seller then sent me a invoice for Google checkout. I prefer to pay with Paypal so I went ahead and paid via Paypal. The seller then denied my Paypal payment and asked me to pay by Google checkout instead since they "HIGHLY" prefer it, but if not they'll take Paypal. Hmm... ok well I prefer Paypal and their auction says they accept Paypal so I'm paying with Paypal. I sent them a mail asking them to accept Paypal. Now I'm not really very happy with a seller that tries to argue me into paying outside eBay with his preferred method. If he doesn't want to accept Paypal then he should just not accept Paypal. Given the way the guy has acted thus far more warning bells are going off in my head. But I won the auction so I really have to proceed with the transaction at this point, since I dont' have any direct evidence of fraud or anything.
Thats odd. I don't recall auctions being removed that soon after the auction ends.
Oh, oh. That can't be good. Why would a seller be unregistered at that point?
Thankfully the seller never actually accepted the Paypal payment. So the payment didn't go through. I guess he was still waiting for me to send money via Google. I went into Paypal and cancelled the payment. I then sent eBay an email asking them whats going on. I also sent the seller an email telling him that I'm cancelling payment on Paypal and asking him why he's no longer registered in eBay. Its been about 3 days since then and I haven't heard a word back.
Only after the fact did I realize that the seller was using a PO box for their google account. I never followed the Google checkout invoice until after the fact, but when I do it gives a PO box for their address.
Be Extra cautious with very cheap deals. The price seemed pretty cheap and I was wondering how they could be so much lower than everyone else. But I went ahead anyway. A low price alone should not keep you from buying on eBay. But a super "too good to be true" price should be a big warning flag. Generally a very cheap price should be reason for you to be extra cautious.
Be more careful examining auction listings before bidding. If I had read the auction listing more carefully in the first place then I would have noticed that the DVDs were 'unrestricted'. I probably wouldn't have bid on them because of that.
Be wary of people asking for alternative payment. If someone is explicitly pushing you towards a form of payment that isn't protected like Paypal then this could be a warning sign. Of course not all sellers who prefer alternate payment are con artists but its something to out look for. If a legitimate seller really doesn't want to take Paypal then they can simply not take Paypal.
I think was only lucky that I didn't get ripped off for $75. Next time I'll be even more careful on eBay and hopefully continue my trend of successful purchases there. I really do like eBay and 99.9% of the people there are honest. Its the remaining .1% that you have to be wary of.
Trent at The Simple Dollar tries out Amazon's Mechanical Turk : Can You Actually Earn Reasonable Money from Mechanical Turk?
Disclaimer: Investing in individual stocks is risky and I wouldn't take my comments here as investment advice in any way shape or form.
Yesterday I bought some shares of Bristol-Meyers Squibb (BMY) for my Roth IRA. I bought 25 shares of BMY today at $19.60 or $490 worth. Not a huge stake.
Previously I mentioned that I had decided on a high dividend stock strategy for my Roth IRA. I've used this strategy for my 2008 & 2009 Roth IRA contributions, so thats $10,000 total. I had about $200 in cash around the start of the year and I've been accumulating some cash from the dividend payments. I had over $500 in cash so I decided to go ahead and buy something.
1) 6% yield on dividends -- My strategy for my Roth is to get high dividend paying holdings and build a cash flow plus hopefully gain in equity value. 6% yield is pretty good for a solid company.
2) PE of 7.5 -- They are trading relatively low given earnings.
3) Solid financials -- Their revenue and profits have been growing steadily in the past few years. They have more cash than debt.
4) I wanted to add pharmaceutical -- I didn't have any healthcare or drug related stocks in my IRA yet so I wanted to add something in this industry. I think health related businesses are only going to keep growing as the need for their goods and services will not go away.
5) They aren't a one-trick pony -- the company has several drugs on the market and many in development. So I'm not worried about their future depending on FDA approval of a single drug.
Those reasons are not in priority order. The solid financials are a make or break decider for me. If a company doesn't have solid financials then I'm not buying it. The other reasons I bought all add up to make BMY more attractive to me than its peers.
Overall my strategy has been to mix high quality individual stocks with decent dividends: AT&T (T), GE (GE) and Harley Davidson (HOG), high dividend REITs : HRPT properties trust (HRP) and Hospitality Property Trust (HPT) and high dividend ETF : Vanguard High Dividend Yield Index (VYM).
So far GE & Harley Davidson have both dropped dividends significantly since I bought them. The HPT REIT suspended dividends and I'm not sure what if anything I'll get out of that one for the year. REITs have to pay out 90% of their profits in dividends but I don't know what they'll have for profits if anything.
So far I've gotten about $300 in dividends from about $10,000 in holdings in the first half of the year. I'm on track for a total 6% annual return at that rate in 2009. Not bad.
Since the press seems full of nothing but gloomy economic news for the past year or so. In honor of the 4th of July, I figured it would be nice to highlight some positive economic data.
Gasoline prices are 37% lower now than they were this time last summer.
The Housing Affordability Index rose 32.5% in the 12 months from May 2008 to May 2009.
Americans are saving over 4% of their disposable income.
Mortgage interest rates on 30 year fixed loans are 20% lower today than a year ago.
Violent crime rates were down 2.5% in 2008.
90.6% of working Americans are employed.
92.5% of working women in the US are employed.
99.5% of banks are operating successfully in 2009.
99.75% of mortgages did not go into foreclosure in May 2009. | 2019-04-25T00:11:36Z | http://www.freeby50.com/2009/07/ |
Every business or blogger needs to have a reliable hosting service. This is because most consumers usually search the internet for products and services as well as service providers. Many of them also shop online while others use the information found online to make informed decisions regarding the best products or services or the best service providers and points of purchase. That is why every business needs a strong online presence as well as a reliable web hosting service. There are many firms offering reliable web hosting in Australia. To find the best one for your needs, you have to search the internet for the top-rated hosting firms and make a list.
As you commence your search, be sure to check the years of experience a hosting company has. The most experienced service providers should get special treatment. Firms that have been in existence for many years and have hosted tens of thousands of sites are usually the best. Be sure to also check the total number of sites currently hosted by a firm as you assess their industry experience.
The reliability of a hosting service must be taken into consideration. You are looking for a firm that has a proven record of reliability. Only firms that boast a server up-time guarantee of at least 99% should be given any consideration. Therefore, you have to compare the server up-time guarantees quoted by different firms before committing yourself. It is also crucial you search the web for reviews and ratings regarding the reliability of a hosting firm before you make any decision. You want your site to be hosted by a hosting service that is always up and running all the time.
Cost is always a key factor of consideration. You want to host your site on an affordable hosting service. Therefore, it is important you check the prices quoted by different firms for their hosting packages. The most affordable hosting company should be given special consideration.
The hosting packages offered by the shortlisted web hosting firms should be compared to identify the most suitable hosting plan for your web hosting needs. Be sure to compare the server resources provided by each of those packages to identify one that best suits your hosting needs. For instance, you should pay attention to the storage space provided by the hosting plan, the bandwidth, RAM, processing speed and operating system. This will enable you to make an informed decision. After all, you have specific hosting needs, so you should only choose a plan that can best match those needs.
There are two types of virtual private servers or virtual computers. There is dynamic VPS and cloud VPS. Dynamic VPS is normally attained by partitioning the hard drive of a powerful computer to create several virtual computers. Each virtual server can be leased to forex traders as a virtual computer with specific server resources. For instance, a 10TB hard drive can be partitioned 100 times to create 10GB virtual private servers sharing the RAM, processing power and bandwidth of the server. With cloud VPS, the resources of multiple servers are harnessed and sold in a metered service, just like any utility. If you need 5GB of server storage space, that is what will be provided to you, and that is what you will pay for. Both dynamic and cloud VPS hosting plans have pros and cons that you should weigh before making a decision.
When looking for a suitable hosting package, one of the key factors to consider before making a decision is the server resources provided by the company. You want to be hosted on a powerful server with over 16GB RAM, 8 processing cores on the CPUs as well as a huge bandwidth. Be sure to compare the server resources that come with different VPS hosting plans before making a decision.
Obviously, you are concerned about the cost of the hosting service. This is because forex trading usually comes with low margins, so you have to trade frequently to make meaningful returns. Therefore, you do not want to spend more money than necessary on the hosting service. For this reason you must compare the monthly and annual hosting fees quoted by different firms before making a decision.
It is common knowledge that your business needs to have a strong online presence. This includes having a website. Your website does several things including processing transactions and displaying content. The good news is, Australian web hosting gives you several advantages, especially if you are serving local customers.
First of all, you will be able to serve your customers at a faster rates. Since the servers are located locally, there are less delays when people request pages on your site. You will also feel more confident knowing that your content is within your physical reach.
Another advantage is access to customer service. You will be talking with people who understand your culture. This will help reduce unnecessary misunderstandings. Now, there is nothing wrong with customer service in another country if they’re doing their job. However, it’s often much easier to work with people who know exactly where you’re coming from.
In addition, the service you’ll get is world class. In fact, companies from all over the world choose to go with Australian web hosting. So, have no fear. Your content is in good hands.
The key here is to choose hosting that serves your specific needs. Depending on your technical savvy, you may need a certain amount of hand holding. On the other hand, you might be looking for maximum amount of control over the technology. Either way, there are many options available for you.
Keep in mind that your budget may affect your choice as well. There is no cookie cutter solution here. Various companies charge differently. The best way to go forward is to first be clear on what exactly you need. Then you can go shopping for the right solution.
Feel free to contact any potential company you’re interested in. The way they respond may give you some indication about how they approach doing business. You will also have a feel of what it’s like to work with them from your perspective. This can be a great way to decide if a company is right for you.
At the same time, don’t stress too much. Changing hosting solutions is usually not that hard. To make this easier, keep backups of everything you put online. That will allow you to transition quickly if you’re not happy with what you’re getting. But, that shouldn’t be a problem.
The most important thing is to focus on your customers. Make sure what you offer is what they’re looking for. Make your site easy to use and you will be way on your way to turning a profit.
Once you have created your WordPress website, the next step should be to extend its functionality. Take help of best WordPress plugins to do so. These plugins will let you do many things quickly, easily, efficiently and economically. You can automate many tasks, collect different types of data, improve SEO ranking and do many other things. The type of plugins you use depends on the type of website you have and the features you need. There are thousands of plugins for the WordPress websites so it can be difficult to find the right ones. It is also a good thing because you can find the plugins for almost every feature and function you need.
There are some default WordPress plugins that you can use. The anti-spam plugin will check all comments and remove the spammy ones. You can check each comment’s history and see the ones that were removed for being spammy. Many other types of data related to the comments are available through this plugin. A basic security plugin comes with the WordPress. You can use premium paid security plugins if you need more features and enhanced security. The security plugins protects your website from different types of cyber attacks. There are plugins that will monitor your website every few minutes for any downtime. You will receive an alert immediately if any such issue is detected. Some default plugins cover many features and let you handle many tasks from the same interface. Use such a plugin to manage your website’s traffic, performance, security, appearance, image optimization, and many other things.
Contact page is one of the most important pages on any website. Here you provide your contact information to your website visitors. Use a contact form generator plugin for this purpose. It can also be used to create forms for payment, order, email subscription and others. Forms can be created using simple drag and drop features. You can create advanced forms that have drop boxes, date, checkboxes, radio buttons and more. Use a search engine optimization plugin to check and test your website’s compatibility with search engine’s requirements. Use this tool to improve contents and increase online traffic to your website.
Use a user registration plugin to make it easier for your users to register at your website. It is different from the contact form. Users can use the registration form to register at your website using their name, username, email address and password. You can allow access to your website, premium contents or special sections only after verifying the registered users. There are many other types of best WordPress plugins. You will find free, freemium and paid subscription plugins. Use the ones that meet your website development needs, preferences and budget.
When looking for the best web design Orange County residents should pay attention to the experiences of the shortlisted service providers. This is because experienced web designers have designed many similar websites in the past. They also know all the trends in the industry, so they are likely to help you design a website that users will find useful, easy to use and appealing to their eyes. When analyzing the experiences of the shortlisted web design agencies, be sure to pay attention to the years of experience as well as the number of similar sites the firm has designed in the past.
The quality of service offered by a given service provider needs to be checked. This is because you are looking for a firm that has the capability and history of designing amazing sites in the past. You may need to take a good look at their portfolio to learn more about the quality of sites they have designed in the past. In fact, you should consider visiting some of the sites highlighted on the portfolio to check the page load speed, graphics, theme, quality of content, security and ease of navigation among other things. This will help you to choose the right web designer for your needs.
Different web designers usually charge different prices. This can be due to a number of reasons, including; experience, quality of service, profit appetite, overhead costs and many other things. Since you want quality services at a pocket-friendly price, you should obtain quotes from a number of firms and compare them to find the most affordable service provider.
As web designers build sites for their clients, they usually develop a reputation. Those who do a great job usually get positive reviews while those that do a bad job usually get negative reviews. Therefore, it is imperative you search the web for reviews written about the shortlisted service providers. After reading the reviews, you should be able to find a reliable, trustworthy and professional web designer.
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to a set of techniques used by webmasters to improve a website’s ranking on popular search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. Some of these techniques include contents creation, creating backlinks and online marketing among other processes.
The idea with SEO is to find ways to attract traffic to your website when related keywords are typed on search engines. Since you’ll be competing against other websites for the same keywords and visitors, you’ll need to not only add more effort in your SEO campaigns, but also get creative.
While SEO can be done by individual website owners, it is a lot of work and the fact that you’ll be doing it alone means that you have a lot in your hands. The best way to go would be to hire experienced SEO professionals. With these services, you’ll have enough time to focus on the business aspect of your website while experts handle all the complexities associated with search engine optimization.
Brisbane is home to some of the most qualified SEO companies in Australia. With many SEO experts operating here, it will be easier to find one that suits your individual needs.
However, when searching for SEO companies in Brisbane, you’ll come across many service providers, all claiming to offer the best services. Due to this, it can be intimidating trying to decide which company will be best for you.
The first thing to look out for when searching for SEO companies in Brisbane is experience. Anyone can set up an agency and call themselves experts. However, there are many details that go into proper SEO and only someone who’s been around for a while would understand how it works. You should therefore go for someone who has been in the industry for at least a couple of years.
It is also important that you go for an agency that has a good understanding of all SEO tiers. There are three levels in search engine optimization; technical SEO, On Page SEO and Offpage SEO. Someone that had a deep understanding of these levels and is always updated on the ever changing Google algorithms will ensure your website’s visibility improves fast.
Finally, you want a company that gets the job done without breaking your bank. Compare cost by going through different SEO packages Brisbane deals. There’s always a better deal right around the corner and if you take time to search, it will only be a matter of time before you get your hands on an agency that will see your business grow.
Having a great website is a basic necessity in business nowadays. This means that you must invest in great web design. It is important to note that internet users are usually picky or selective about the sites they visit. Therefore, a poor website design will repulse them, so anyone who lands on your home page will navigate away. Therefore, you should take your time to look for a firm that offers the best web design Brisbane North has to offer.
The ideal site should load fast. This is because consumers are very impatient nowadays. Therefore, you have to choose a web designer that can design a site whose pages load in milliseconds instead of several seconds. A great site also has amazing graphics to attract and retain clients. The site must also have user-oriented information. It must also rank highly to attract more internet users. It should also be easy to navigate from one webpage to another on that site.
The most experienced web designers rarely make mistakes. Therefore, they should be given priority consideration. They also know what works and what does not work. They are, therefore, in a position to help you get the best results possible. Firms with the most experience in web design should get priority consideration.
All the web designers you will find have a portfolio showcasing some of their best works. By visiting the websites highlighted on the portfolio, you will be able to decide whether or not a web designer can come up with the type of site you are seeking. The portfolio will also tell you about the types of sites a firm has been designing in the past, whether blogs, eCommerce sites or other types of sites.
Obviously, you want to get affordable services. Therefore, you will need to request quotes from all the shortlisted firms and compare them to identify the most affordable web designer. This is crucial because you do not want to spend too much money on the service.
The guarantees offered by different firms should be taken into consideration. You want a customer satisfaction guarantee as well as a money back guarantee from the web designer, so be sure to carry out the necessary research.
According to Krug’s first law of usability, a web page must easy to navigate. If the navigation and the architecture of the site are not intuitive, it becomes more difficult for users to understand how the system works and how to get from one point to another in the structure. People will not use your website if they can not find what they are looking for easily.
By reducing the cognitive load it becomes easier for the visitors to understand the idea that the architecture of a web supports. Do not waste the patience of the users and manage the elements well to focus the attention of the users.
On a web page, there are always some aspects of the user interface attract attention more than others. Obviously, the images are more striking. Ideally, eliminate all barriers. The registries usually are elements that make difficult or (in some cases) impede the navigation, with the consequence that the traffic to the page can be reduced.
In fact, there are large parts of the page that they do not even look at. The greater the cognitive load and the less intuitive the navigation, the more willing users are to leave the website and look for alternatives.
Wagga Wagga Web Design Companies understand that users do not usually make optimal decisions. Users are not looking for the fastest way to find the information they are looking for. Nor do they scan Web pages in a linear fashion, sequentially going from one section to another. But as soon as they find a link that looks like what they are looking for, there is a high probability that they will be clicked immediately. Optimization for an effective web design is difficult, but it is one of the most important steps.
The users want to have control. Users want to have the possibility to control their browser. For example, they do not want new windows appearing unexpectedly and they want to be able to return with a “Back” button to the place where they were before.
Thinking aloud can be a little strange for some people. After all, humans normally think in their heads — it seems a bit silly to be talking all the time in this way. If your participant is put off by this idea, you can practice beforehand using a stapler, ask them to pick it up and explain how they would use it to fasten some pages together. Use all the questions you are planning to use later: “So what happens next?”, “How does that work?” and so on. They’ll soon get into the habit of explaining their understanding of what is actually quite a complex process.
The most crucial factor of consideration when looking for the best web hosting service in the country is experience. You want to sign up for the most reliable service, so you have to pay attention to the reliability of a hosting service before making a decision. What you should be looking for is a proven 99.99% server uptime guarantee. This means that the hosting service should be up and running at all times. You may need to read a couple of reviews to learn about the actual server uptime of a given service.
You cannot pick a hosting company before checking the types of packages offered. This is crucial because you may not necessarily need the shared hosting or dedicated server hosting plans offered by a given company. The ideal firm should have different types of hosting plans to suit the needs of different types of clients. For instance, they should be cloud VPS and dynamic VPS hosting plans on top of these two packages mentioned above. Depending on your hosting needs, you will be able to pick a plan that suits your needs.
This is always a key factor of consideration for any consumer. Before picking a given hosting firm, therefore, you must confirm that the packages they offer are competitively priced. You will need to visit their websites to compare the fees they charge for the different packages. This comparison will help to ensure you find the most affordable hosting service in Australia.
When you are targeting an Australian audience, you should choose a hosting company that is based in the country. This will help to speed up the speed with which users can access information on your website. For this reason, you should check the relocation of the data centers of a firm before making a decision.
Consumers always want guarantees and assurances before they pay for something. Similarly, you should check the types of guarantees offered by the shortlisted firms to ensure you will be getting a great deal. | 2019-04-23T12:25:51Z | https://word-weight.com/category/web-development/ |
How to Choose a Florist.
The places where occasions are held could appear more beautiful if there are flowers decorating. The use of flowers for decoration has become very important today. There are many people and companies that offer this service. It is however, advisable to find a reputable company in order to get high quality service. A certain set of skills is important in dealing with flowers. Professional florists have skills and knowledge in decorating using flowers and are capable of combining the different types of flowers to bring out the best in them. Here are some of the factors that you should consider when hiring a florist.
The desired style you intend to have should play a vital role. A person may have a specific taste when it comes to decoration. The florist you choose should be able to understand how you would like the decoration of your occasion to appear. this is because preferences when it comes to beauty differ and florists provide different styles.
How good the projects the florist have done have turned out to be. Florists gain experience as they do more jobs. It is therefore advisable that you ask to see what they have done before so as to determine whether you would like to give them the job. It is advisable that you find people who have worked with the florist before to determine whether they are good enough. This will give you the reputation of the florist you are hiring. If they did a good job for the other clients, they are likely to offer great services to you too.
The cost of the florist. The quality you want your decoration to be will determine the cost of the florist you hire. The higher the quality ,the higher the price. This is because the flowers used by high quality florists are expensive too. With high quality florists you get the most beautiful decorations. However, if you are just in need of a simple decoration then you can opt for a lower casting florist.
The event you are having will play a vital role when you are choosing a florist. Flower decorations are different in the different types of occasions. Each event has its way of decoration for example, a wedding cannot be decorated the same as an office party. Different florists have the event they are best at.
Whether the florist is readily available. You should be able to access the florist in person during the day you are hosting the event.The florist should be readily available when you need him. You should notify the florist of your event to be able to make sure they will be there and give them adequate time for preparation. It is convenient that your florist is from around your area because this will make it easy for them to access your venue easily and also reduce the cost of transportation.
Summer time and daylight savings time are other terms which can be used interchangeably with daylight saving time. In daylight saving time, the clocks are adjusted forward, normally by an hour such that the number of evening hours is increased while the number of morning hours is reduced. The clocks are advanced one hour at the start of the spring and one hour backward in autumn. In spring, you will have a few hours of sleeping and during autumn, you will sleep for more hours. The daylight saving was proposed in order to cope up with the energy crisis. Today, there is a daylight savings petition which aims at the daylight savings time being abolished. The End Daylight Saving Time petition should be approved because of the following reasons.
Many road accidents have resulted from daylight saving time. Drivers have fewer hours of sleeping and this is enough proof that in spring there are more accidents. If is after performing four tests that Austin C discovered this. In spring, a lot of road accidents happen due to one hour of sleep being lost and this has led to more deaths. The best way to reduce road deaths is by supporting the petition to end daylight savings.
A lot of people have had heart attacks because of DST. Immediately after forwarding the clocks forward and losing an hour of sleep, many people experience heart attacks. Blockage of vessels that carry blood to the heart can be caused by DST. Risk of a heart attack is high by 25% during spring and lower by 21% after gaining an extra hour of sleep. The End Daylight Saving Time petition should be approved.
DST increases the power bills. The daylight saving time will enable one to save on the lighting cost since the bulbs will be off for more hours but the heating and air conditioning costs are hiked. The extra hour of extended daylight will increase the cost of energy used in air conditioning and this is the reason by the daylight savings time should be abolished.
Finally, the daylight saving time has the same effect just like the jetlag. Immediately daylight savings time is activated, a lot of people complain of symptoms such as those of jetlag the next morning because of losing an hour.
This article shows that we no longer need the daylight savings time.
How to Choose Accounting Services.
When an individual hears about accounting services, it clicks in mind that the matters being talked about are of money as they participant in the discussion. The importance of hiring of accounting services to a business is good handling of the money by the business. Therefore for safe handling of business money, it is really important that a business should have appropriate accounting services. A clear indication of business prosperity is the proper money handling by the business. Therefore, this should be highly prioritized by all entrepreneurs. Enhancement of this fact is by offering and hiring of such services. For proper functioning of the businesses, it is good to keep in consideration some of the tips of selecting proper accounting services which are listed here.
The first fact to consider when choosing the best accounting services is the size of your business. The size of the business may either be a large firm or a small firm. The factors considered in determination of the size of the business are quite diverse. Speaking in terms of the accounting services offered, it is clear that small businesses require less accounting services. However, on the contrary, the large firms need the most adequate of the accounting services. A difference may also be incurred in the quality of the accounting services offered for the different business sizes but still would be regarded relatively as best for that business in particular. When choosing the accounting services to be offered for your business, it is of importance to consider the size of your business.
Another factor to consider when choosing accounting services for your business is the cost incurred for hiring the accounting service provider The cost to be incurred should meet your planned budget, and if not so, it advisable to turn down that accounting service provider. The affordable services are better to be considered. Cheapness of the services being offered is however not a guarantee of good quality of accounting services offered.
Testimonials and recommendations by other clients is a really important factor to consider. Good testimonials and a highly recommended accounting service provider is a virtue of good accounting service providing companies. Hence this should a good consideration when choosing an accounting service provider.
An individual’s own specificity is another factor to be considered when choosing an accounting service provider. Satisfaction of one’s owns needs is of great importance in accounting service provision. Also, the clients’ specificity determines which type of accounting service provider to select.
An important factor to consider when determining the best accounting service provider is the availability of one. Availability is in the sense that the accounting services will be offered to the businesses in times of need. It is therefore very important to choose a highly available accounting service provider.
One of the most important things that you may need to make sure that you have done is to live ion good homes. It is indeed very true to state that you may be able to do so many things so that you can be able to have a good home. One way through which you may be able to achieve this is through home remodeling. Home remodeling involves a lot of activities and chances made to your house so that it may have a whole new look. One of the most important things that you must make sure you are aware of is that you may be able to benefit through very many ways. One of the most important things that you may need to make sure that you have done is to make sure that you have your house well, remodeled and this is because through it you may be able to have to have the house look so nice.
There are indeed very many ways through which you may be able to remodel your house. One of the best things that you may need to make sure that you have done for you to be able to achieve this is to make sure that you look for a goods remodeling company. One thing that you must make sure that you are aware of is that there are very many companies that may be able to remodel homes and therefore for you to be able to have your house well remodel, it is very clear that you will have to make sure that you find the best remodeling company. It goes without say that there are some very important things that you will have to make sure that you have done for you to be able to find the best company.
The very first thing that you will have to make sure that you are aware of before you decide to go for a particular company is to know their level of experience. It is indeed very true that when you want to have your house remodeled well, you will have to make sure that you have gone for the best company and the one that is highly experienced and this is because such companies are always known to do better jobs.
One pother very important thing that you may need to make sure that you have checked is how fast the company is. One thing that you must make sure you are aware of is that you may have to make sure that you hire a company that is known to be very fast so that you may be able to get back to your house very fast.
Residential roofing is there to cater for the need of leaking, damaged or worn out roofs. Residential roofing is great as it is close to people’s homes. One knows that his or her roof needs a replacement when they have rotting wood, missing shingles and ceiling spots. Residential roofing ensures that the residents of that particular area are getting their services from professional roof specialist that are accustomed to roofing and know all it is about. Roof specialists are there to talk to homeowners and enlighten them on some of the many roofs that there are and which would be good for them. Residential roofing is really great as they help in the installation and repairing of roofs at people’s homes and workplaces. Residential roofing gives so many people a chance to take care of their roofs as they are helped in the budgeting of everything and this way money to fund all the roofing stuff is found and maintained.
It is not expensive to get roofing services and this is why residential roofing is there to make sure that one gets to enjoy these services. Residential roofing is cost effective as it helps one in getting a great roof at a cost that one can afford to get. They also ensure that the budget does not go overboard and this means they are able to stay on the right budget that they have been given by the home owners. It is so easy for people to get the residential roofing services as one can get to their offices fast and also the contractors that they use all follow all the guidelines that are associated with roofing. Residential roofing ensures that a person has gotten a roof that is of high quality. Roof repair done on the roofs helps one save money as they don’t have to buy a new roof to replace the other one as this is really expensive.
Roofing a system that comes with residential roofing is very much durable and this works in favor of one roof. Durable roofs are great as one does not have to worry about always buying new roofs to replace the damaged ones and this an advantage to the homeowner. In case of an emergency that involves the roof, one is able to contact residential roofing contractors and explain the situation. Residential roofing is wonderful as they are able to be reached by the residents and the people are able to get the assistance with their roofs and this way the problem gets solved. Roof repair can be very tricky but with residential roofing, it is so easy and fast for the roof to be repaired. Residential roofing offers people with services that are so worthy and their homes end up having a beautiful looking roof.
Students resort to buying essays online for a variety of reasons. The reason this practice has gained traction in the academic field is due to the many advantages that it gives to its users. Due to the perpetual emphasis on a theoretical strategy of studying, students find more value addition when they settle for external help for their assignments.
Learners are concerned that they never seem to fulfil their tutors’ expectations upon submission of a class assignment hence resorting to buying the essays online. The learners feel a lot of emphasis is placed on the errors that is found in their work without giving due attention to the areas where they have performed excellently. As a result, online professionals are viewed as the better option as they are qualified to provide top notch assignments.
Buying essays online makes you take control of your educational affairs and decide the course you will take as you aspire to achieve your academic goals. Apart from making sure that the instructions you have given out are obeyed, you get to pick who will undertake your assignments. People ding the assignment must also deliver the finished work on your terms and on time.
You have the guarantee that the person working on your essay online will provide an authentic piece that has not been copied from anywhere on the web. The helper go out of their way ensuring that they put in your assignment ideas that may found in other areas online but are tailored to meet the requirements of the work given. Applications that are used to detect the presence of plagiarized material are employed by the online specialists.
Ensure that you source your essays online from people who have a good standing in the industry. This information can be accessed by going on the internet and reading the reviews of students who have sought the services of those professionals in the past. It is also essential to buy you essays from people who have been in the business for a considerable length of time.
You should only buy your online essays from a company that employs writers with exceptional skills. Ensure that the writers have an excellent command of written English. It is a b good move to be availed previous assignment that have been successfully undertaken by the firm. That accords you the chance of ascertaining whether you will be the recipient of exemplary output once you engage them.
You should buy your online essays from a firm that has a pricing structure that you are comfortable with and can easily afford. Alongside that they must demonstrate commitment to deliver finished work in time as per your agreement with them. Failure to do so they must be in a position to refund the payments you had made to them.
Dental services are usually made inside a dental office and will be covering a lot of various dental procedures. Dental services today are as simple as just cleaning the teeth or as complicated as making someone sleep in order to do a more extensive dental work in a very short time. If you have dental problems and want to get it done, then you must look for simple dental procedures that will really make the dental work more productive and less evasive.
Part of the dental services routine is performing an examination. The examination must be done prior to any dental procedure. The dentist will be talking to the patient about the treatment and procedures that will be done to the teeth and will take x-rays during the examination. A dentist will do his or her best to fix the teeth with no discomfort in a short period of time.
Right after the first visit, you will then start the process of repairing your teeth and taking care of them so that you can avoid more damages in the future. You will also learn a lot of facts from these dental services about how you can take care of your teeth so that it will be healthy as much as possible and will last for a longer period of time.
Today, the most popular dental service is the tooth whitening. Many people would like to have white teeth and seeing a dentist to get this dental services is not only common but also the most affordable way. The dentist will be doing a lot of dental services using many techniques in order for the patient to have a whiter and brighter teeth. You can do some teeth whitening at home but you should know that it is not that effective compared to the teeth whitening you get from dental services.
There are a lot of different dental services that a dentist can offer. Aside from the dental services that are listed here, there are other dentists that can also provide various dental services. You can talk to your dentist if ever you are interested in some other dental procedures to let you have a healthy set of teeth that can also be bright and white.
Every time people will see you, the first thing that they will notice will be your teeth. It is really important that you should always look your best all the time in order for you to be confident as much as possible. You need to take good care of your teeth and accept the teeth that you have. Every time you know what you like with your smile, you can improve it by brushing your teeth regularly and be always careful on the food you eat. If you want to learn more about this, you can read here now. | 2019-04-21T07:12:49Z | http://jayadeepatv.com/category/clothing-fashion/page/4/ |
LED lamp arrangement is a critical issue in indoor visible light communication (VLC) system. In this paper, we analyze the illumination distribution under the arrangement of 2×3 and propose a method to find the optimal lamp arrangement. The method, based on the MIMO (Multiple Input/Multiple Output) system model and taking the first order reflection into consideration, enables accurate analysis of the arrangement of the LED lamps for any room. The studies show that under the optimal arrangement the uniformity of illumination is improved from 0.55 to 0.86, which guarantees that users can get almost equal lighting effects, no matter where they locate themselves. At the same time, the RMS delay spread distribution which is used to evaluate the inter-signal-interference (ISI) is analyzed, and the simulation results indicate that the optimal arrangement also can improve the communication quality by reducing the fluctuation of the RMS delay spread.
Since white LEDs (light-emitting diodes) were invented in the1990’s, they have been extensively researched [1 , 2] . Compared with the previous lighting devices, the white LED is more advantageous in terms of high brightness, lower power consumption, smaller size, longer lifetime, and environmental protection [3 - 5] . Because of these advantages, the white LED is considered as a strong candidate for the future lighting technology and will replace most of the conventional light sources in offices and homes [6 - 8] . Generally speaking, the LED lamps are not only used as a lighting device, but also to be used as a communication device . The dual function of the LED lamps has aroused a lot of research interests in recent years. The lamp arrangement is one of the most critical issues in indoor VLC systems. It is known that a single LED lamp can’t provide sufficient illumination, so we tend to install several LED lamps on the ceiling to illuminate the room as evenly as possible. A lot of research has been done in the field [10 - 12] . And the research has shown that different LED lamp arrangements will have different illumination and communication quality, that is, both the lighting effects and the communication quality are closely related to the arrangement of the LED lamps [10 , 13 , 14] . Actually, in the same room, with the same number of the lamps, there is always an optimal arrangement, which can make full use of the LED lamps and gain the best uniformity. For the sake of simplicity, the word ‘lamp’ refers to ‘LED lamp’ in the rest of the paper.
The lamps can be, in principle, arbitrarily distributed, however, it is convenient to distribute regularly on the ceiling, for the purpose of uniform illumination. Most attention has been paid to the arrangement of 2 × 2. In the literature , for example, Toshihiko Komine et al. proposed a room model 5 × 5 × 3 m 3 , in which the size of the ceiling is 5.0 m × 5.0 m. This room model is called the square room model, since the plane where the lamps locate is square. Similarly, if the ceiling of a room is a rectangle, we called it a rectangular room model. In the proposed square room model, a method of determining the location of the lamps is to divide the ceiling plane into 2 × 2 parts and put one lamp in the center of each part. This method of determining the location of the lamps is easy, but not accurate or optimal. What we pursue is a method that can help to find the optimal arrangement accurately for any room model, such as the square room model, rectangular room model and so on. What’s more, when determining the locations of the LED lamps, the effect of reflection is always neglected, which make the results not so accurate for a real scenario. Actually, in a real scenario, the reflection is always there. According to literature , the ratio of the first order of reflection is 4.84 percent, which will exert influence on the arrangement of the lamps. So, in order to gain the optimal arrangement accurately, the first order reflection is taken into consideration when determining the location of the lamps. And in the calculation, the Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) system model is applied to reduce the amount of calculations.
In addition, the previous research has been mainly based on the square room model, as far as we know, no study of the rectangular room model is available. However, in the real environment, the rectangular room model is more common, so we choose a rectangular office room scenario for our study, in which 2 × 3 lamps distribute on the ceiling symmetrically. The real scenario is illustrated schematically in Fig. 1 . Since the most important and common target illumination function in daily life is still uniform distribution around the room. Hence, in this paper, we focus on the uniform illumination distribution by the 2 × 3 lamps, with other environmental parameters unchanged.
Original arrangement of the lamps.
To get the best uniformity, we propose a method to calculate the optimal location of the lamps and to gain the optimal arrangement, in which the first order reflection is taken into consideration. In literature , the received optical power is used to analyze the optimal arrangement. Since the distribution of illumination has the same shape as that of the received optical power when the FOV is 90 degrees, so the optimal arrangement would be the same no matter whether illumination or received optical power is used to analyze the lamp arrangement. In this paper, we focus on analyzing the optimal arrangement from illumination. Under the optimal arrangement, a better illumination distribution is achieved, which proves the validity of the method. Meanwhile, when the lamps work as a communication device, the optical signals of the lamps travel via different paths and arrive at the receivers at different intervals in time. The optical path difference between the multiple sources triggers inter-signal-interference (ISI), which will significantly degrade the performance of the indoor VLC system [1 , 9] . To judge the influence of the optimal arrangement on the communication quality, the root mean square (RMS) delay spread is studied, which is a better measurement for the spread of multipath and can predict ISI accurately [1 , 15] . Simulation results indicate that the fluctuation of the RMS can be mitigated by the optimal arrangement, comparing with the original lamp arrangement.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: in Section Two, the principle parameters of LED, the real office room scenario and illumination distribution are presented. In Section Three, the method to gain the optimal arrangement is introduced and the optimal arrangement of the office room is presented. Section Four shows the simulation results under the optimal arrangement, including the illumination distribution and the RMS delay spread distribution. Finally, Section Five presents the conclusion.
LED has two basic properties, a luminous intensity and a transmitted optical power. The relationship between photometric and radiometric quantities is explained in [16 , 17] . In this paper, the Lambertian radiation pattern is applied to model the LED radiant irradiance .
Where, θ is the angle of irradiance from the LED lamp, m is the order of Lambertian emission and is defined by the semi-angle at half illuminance of an LED lamp θ1/2 as = -ln2 / ln(cos θ1/2 ), especially, when θ1/2 =60°, the corresponding value is 1.
Where, I0 is the center luminous intensity of an LED, φ is the angle of incidence, and d is the distance between an LED transmitter and a receiver’s surface. The illumination expresses the brightness of an illuminated surface.
The consideration for illumination of LED lighting is required. Generally, illuminance of lights is standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). According to this set of standards, illuminance of 300 to 1500 lx is required for office work .
In this subsection, the room scenario we choose and the illumination distribution under the original arrangement is introduced. The size of the office room is 7.8×6×3 m 3 . The lamps are installed at the height of 3.0 m from the floor. The height of the desk is 0.8 m, and the receiver is put on the desk. The number of the lamps is six. Each lamp has a total luminous flux of 3600 lm, and the transmitted optical power 36 W. These represent the measured and calculated values of the commercial product PAK310612 PAK-A02-118-DZ. It has a size of 0.625 m × 0.121 m × 0.08 m. The ceiling, wall, and floor have reflective index values of 0.2, 0.8, and 0.7, respectively. The conditions are summarized in Table 1 .
Here, we define the x-y plane as a plane parallel to a floor face, and the z -axis as a height direction. As shown in Fig. 1 , the central position of the lamps are ( 2.1, 1.8, 3 ), ( 2.1, 4.2, 3 ), ( 3.9, 1.8, 3 ), ( 3.9, 4.2, 3 ), ( 5.7, 1.8, 3 ) and ( 5.7, 4.2, 3 ). This arrangement is called the original arrangement. Note that in the simulation, to closely approximate the real scenario, the size of the lamp is considered.
Where, Emin is the minimum illumination, Eave is the average illumination on the receiving plane, which refers to the 0.8 m plane of the office room in this paper. The higher the U 0 is, the more uniformly the illumination is distributed in the room. The maximum of U 0 is 1, which is only theoretically possible, in practice impossible, but we can try to get close to it. When U 0 is closer to 1, the uniformity of the illumination distribution is considered to reach a better state. Generally, U 0 should be over 0.7 according to lighting engineer .
The distribution of horizontal illumination under the original arrangement is shown in Fig. 2 , where the minimum and the maximum are 186 lx and 475 lx, respectively. And the U 0 is only 0.55, which means the value of illumination varies substantially in the room, i.e., the lighting’s effect is associated closely with user’s location. The users in the corner of the office will obtain less than 60.8 percent (289 lx) of the illumination in the center of the room. That is, only the central regions of the room can meet the requirement of 300-1500 lx, according to ISO. Note that in the simulation, the reflections of the wall, the ceiling and the floor are considered.
Illumination distribution under the original arrangement (Max: 475lx, Min: 186lx, Ave: 337lx, Uniformity ratio: 0.55). (a) Spatial illumination distribution (b) Contour lines distribution.
The poor illumination distribution in Fig. 2 is caused by the unreasonable arrangement of the lamps: the six lamps are mainly concentrated in a small region of the center. The distance between the lamp source and the receivers in the central regions is much shorter than the receivers in the corners. According to equation (3), the intensity in the central areas is definitely much higher than that in other places, which, finally, lead to the un-uniformity of the illumination. So we try to rearrange the location of the lamps.
In this part, we will introduce the theory of optimal lamp arrangement taking the first order reflection into consideration. Note that in this paper, all the lamps point vertically to the plane where the receiver is located. And the lamp is assumed to be a point source when calculating the optimal lamp arrangement.
Here, dik correspond to the illumination from lamp i to receiver k , which can be easily calculated by equation (3).
To calculate the illumination from reflection, we make the following assumptions: to model the reflection from a differential reflecting unit with area dA and reflectivity ρ , and first consider the small unit as a receiver with area dA and calculate the luminous intensity it receives, and second model the different small reflector as source and an ideal Lambertian radiation intensity pattern, as given by equation (1). The other parameters are listed in Table 1 .
Since the reflective surfaces do not offer perfect reflection, and illumination is inversely proportional to the distance that light travels, a finite unit number of reflective units is considered in calculating the illumination from the reflective planes. And in our discussion, we assume the internal surface is made up of n neighboring units of equal area. Generally speaking, the smaller the area of the reflecting unit, the more accurate the simulation result is. However, the numerous units would increase the run time. Sometimes it can be several days or years. Reducing the number of the units would shorten the run time at the expense of reduced accuracy. So a modest number of reflective units would be better. For a room with a size of L × W × H , the total number of the reflective units is then given by .
Where, cos ( θij ) is equal to dot product of two unit vectors. The first is perpendicular to the source i , and the second originates from source i and extends toward reflective unit j . The angle φij is the angle between a vector perpendicular to reflective unit j and a vector that lays on the straight line that connects source i and reflective unit j . dij is the distance between the source i and the reflective unit j .
Where, ρj is the reflection factor of the reflective unit, dA is the area of the reflective unit j , θ jk is the angle between the normal vector of the jth reflective unit and direction vector from the jth reflective unit to the k th receiver, φjk is the angle between the normal vector of the kth receiver and direction vector from the kth receiver to the jth reflective unit. djk is the distance between the j th reflective unit and the kth receiver. Once the matrices Dt×r , Ft×n , and Mn×r are determined, the illumination on the receiving plane can be gained by equation (6).
Different arrangements will lead to different illumination distributions. To evaluate whether the arrangement is good, here, we introduce the variance of the illumination intensity. When the value of the variance reaches the minimum, the illumination distribution will be the most uniform one. Then we regard the arrangement as optimal. The variance is defined as follows.
is the average illumination. Both of them can be gained from the matrix Et×r easily. The smaller the variance is, the smaller the fluctuation of the illumination distribution, which means better uniformity.
A computer program is written to implement the algorithm described above. Since the location of the lamp is symmetric with respect to the center of the ceiling. To keep the symmetry, we fix two of the lamps on the ceiling with their abscissa both at 3.9 m, as shown in Fig. 3 . So assuming the location of the first lamp is ( x0, y0, 3 ), then the coordinates of other lamps can be expressed as ( x0, 6-y0, 3 ), ( 3.9, y0, 3 ), ( 3.9, 6-y0, 3 ), ( 7.8-x0, y0, 3 ), and ( 7.8-x0, 6-y0, 3 ), respectively. With the value of the x0 and y0 changing, the arrangement will be different. Under different lamp arrangements, there will be a different illumination matrix Et×r , and variance. Note that, in the simulation, t is 6, and we are assuming that there are 26×20 receivers on the receiving plane, that is, r is 520. The ranges of the x0 and y0 are both 0 to 2. By computer simulation, we find that when x0 is 0.7 m, and y0 is 1.2 m, the variance reaches the minimum. Thus, when x0 is 0.7 m, and y0 is 1.2 m, the optimal lamp arrangement is gained. The optimal arrangement is shown in Fig. 3 . We can see that the lamps are no longer concentrated in a small range of the center, but scatter near the wall, which can help to achieve a better uniformity. Note that the optimal arrangement is not affected by the value of lamp power. Once the dimensions of the room, the reflection units and the lamps are determined, the optimal lamp arrangement is determined, regardless of the power of the lamps.
Optimal arrangement of the lamps.
In this subsection, the distribution of horizontal illumination under the optimal lamp arrangement gained in Section Three will be discussed. To ensure that the results are consistent with the practical situation, the reflection of the walls, the ceiling and the floor are considered. The reflective factor is listed in Table 1 . To compare with the illumination distribution under the original arrangement, the environment of the room, the total number of lamps and power of each lamp remains the same.
Figure 4 shows the illumination distribution under the optimal arrangement. The illumination ranges from 266 lx to 363 lx. It can be seen that the maximum illumination doesn’t occur in the center of the room, but occurs in the areas under each lamp. It is because the lamps are not concentrated in a smaller range of the room any more, but are closer to the walls. With the distance between the lamps and the receivers reduced, the receivers close to the walls can receive more light, which helps to mitigate the fluctuation of the illumination. Table 2 shows the comparison in illumination distribution between the original arrangement and the optimal arrangement, it can be seen that compared with the original arrangement, the uniformity U 0 increase from 0.53 to 0.86, which means the illumination distribution is more uniform and the lighting effects in different places are not so associated with the user’s location. Note that when the power of lamp changes, the uniformity would not change, as long as the arrangement of lamps is as determined. For example, when the power of lamp increases to 72 W, the average illumination increases to 619 lx, while the uniformity is still 0.86. In this paper, we mainly focus on the performance of the uniformity. So though the average illumination decreases from 337 lx to 310 lx comparing with the original arrangement, the arrangement is optimal, since the uniformity of the illumination is improved greatly.
Illumination distribution under the optimal arrangement (Max: 363lx, Min: 266lx, Ave: 310lx, Uniformity ratio: 0.86). (a) Spatial illumination distribution (b) Contour lines distribution.
, NLED is the number of the lamps, the corresponding value is six in this paper. RMS delay spread represents an effective delay of the channel impulse response, and it is a remarkably accurate predictor of ISI. It varies in the level of ns . The smaller the value of τRMS is, the better the quality of communication.
RMS delay spread under the original arrangement. (FOV 90 deg., Min: 0.96 ns, Max: 3.64 ns, Ave: 2.39 ns). (a) Spatial RMS delay spread distribution (b) Probability.
Where, max τRMS and min τRMS are the maximum and the minimum of the RMS delay spread, respectively, and aveτRMS represents the average of the RMS delay spread on the plane where the receiver is located. The smaller the Q is, the smaller the fluctuation of the RMS delay spread on the receiving plane.
In Fig. 5 , the maximum RMS delay spread is about 2.7 times higher than the minimum. And the value of the Q is only 0.4, which means a great fluctuation of the RMS delay spread. The fluctuation will limit the system’s ability to provide equal communication quality to multi-users in different places. The poor performance of RMS results from the unreasonable lamp arrangement. Generally, a reasonable arrangement can mitigate the fluctuation. Figure 6 shows the RMS delay spread under the optimal arrangement. We can see the fluctuation is not so obvious and the value of the Q increased from 0.4 to 0.62, increased by 55 percent. As shown in Fig. 6 (b) , the probability of the smaller RMS delay spread is much higher than that in Fig. 5 (b) .
RMS delay spread under the optimal arrangement. (FOV 90 deg., Max: 3.82 ns, Min: 1.75 ns, Ave: 2.83 ns) (a) Spatial RMS delay spread distribution (b) Probability.
Though the fluctuation can be mitigated under the optimal lamp arrangement, we must note that there is still a big difference between the maximum and the minimum and the average RMS delay spread increases from 2.39 ns to 2.83 ns, which will not be beneficial to the improvement of the communication quality. It is because in the real scenario, the lamp is not a point light source, but has a certain size, as shown in Fig. 1 , while when calculating the optimal locations, the lamps are considered as point light sources for the sake of simplicity. In addition, in this paper, our studies mainly focus on the fairness in providing equal lighting effects and communication quality for the users in any place of the room. So, the Q is more desired. What’s more, the increase of the average is smaller compared with the improvement of the Q . Based on these reasons, though the results are not so perfect, it is still a strong proof that method we proposed to calculate the optimal arrangement is reliable, since under the optimal arrangement, not only the fluctuation of the illumination but also the fluctuation of RMS delay spread is mitigated greatly.
In this paper, we have investigated and studied the LED lamp arrangement, and analyzed the illumination distribution by using a rectangular room model, in which there are 2×3 lamps distributed symmetrically in the ceiling plane. In the analysis, we applied the MIMO system model in our work and proposed a method to determine the location of the lamp taking the first order reflection into consideration, and finally, we gained the optimal arrangement. Under the optimal arrangement, the illumination and RMS delay spread distribution were analyzed. The simulation results show that compared with the original arrangement, the uniformity of the illumination can be improved from 0.55 to 0.86, which ensures almost equal lighting effects for all users at different locations in the room. Meanwhile, the dramatic change of RMS delay spread that incurred by the unreasonable lamp arrangement is mitigated by the optimal lamp arrangement from 0.4 to 0.62.
This study has been financially supported by University of Electronic Science and Technology Postdoctoral workstation of Suzhou Capbayer 3-D technology Co., Ltd., and Wenfeng Innovation and Venture Fund of Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications (cxjj2014006).
HG Hao , DD Zhang , and S Tang , “Analysis of the LED Lamp Arrangement for Uniformity of Illumination in Indoor VLC System”, Current Optics and Photonics, vol. 6, no. 6, Dec 2014. | 2019-04-19T18:31:57Z | http://www.kpubs.org/article/articleMain.kpubs?articleANo=E1OSAB_2014_v18n6_663 |
This glossary provides basic definitions for the words used on our site when referring to blogs. Wherever we have found a good source for more detailed information on a particular term, we have included it after the definition.
You'll note that we do NOT include definitions for words as used in other ways. For instance, we do not include the mark-up definition of Tag as used in HTML, only the weblog community's use of the word. We will include information about other definitions or derivations only when it helps define the term as used in relationship to weblogs.
A tool used by readers of a feed to collect and display information from feeds. When it is set up like email or a browser, it is often called a "reader". When it runs along the bottom of another screen like a news ticker, it is (appropriately) called a "ticker".
An XML feed format with origins in RDF, Atom is slightly less well supported than RSS.
1. A personal publishing website that posts journal-style, editorial, news release, or commentary-style entries in reverse chronological order (newest at the top). Also known as a weblog. Originally used exclusively for non-commercial purposes. 2. The verb that refers to the action of creating content for a weblog.
Usually used to refer to the collective blog owners of the world. More broadly, has been applied to the numerous people around the world who create, organize, market or otherwise dip their fingers into the world of weblogs and weblogging, as well as the bloggers themselves.
Blog search engines usually collect a feeds or re-crawl the blog homepage whenever they are pinged. The search engine then adds the new content only into a constantly updated and shifting index. Blog search engines usually rank by most recent, then by most relevant, and therefore the results change very quickly.
This is not the same as email SPAM, or UCE (unsolicited commercial emails). When used in reference to a blog, it means a blog that scrapes its content from other sites or was created to trick a search engine and be a commercial vehicle. SPAM blogs usually are created by the hundreds with automated software that pulls content from either a bunch of SPAM emails, someone else's copyrighted website materials, or other source. Scraped content occasionally slips into the blog search results for unrelated terms, and are usually created entirely to get into blog search engines for certain keywords. Usually, it is limited only to the above, but some bloggers consider anything commercial or aimed at selling anything to be blog SPAM. Of course, this definition shifts depending on who you talk to, because it discusses web etiquette.
1. Refers to the creator of a post on a blog.
2. When used as a proper noun it refers to the company called Blogger or the blogging tool that they provide.
The act of posting journal-style entries to a weblog. Here is a good explanation of blogging.
This is a software hosted locally or on the internet that allows you to easily generate content for your blog and post it to the internet in a standard XML blog format. It also runs all the categorization, allows you to add functionality like comments, tags or search, organizes uploads, and other functions we have come to associate with a blog. Examples of commonly used blogging tools are Blogger, TypePad and WordPress.
Refers to the entire world's blogs, blogging-related websites, and the bloggers themselves as a whole. Also referred to as the blog community.
This is a statement about a blog entry that is posted as an addendum, either by a reader or by the entry creator.
This is the act of overseeing what the content of blog comments contain and keeping out comments that are objectionable, unwanted or spam. If a comment is marked as needing moderation, it is usually kept unpublished until the blogger can review and delete or post it.
This is not the same as email SPAM, or blog SPAM, or trackback SPAM. When used in reference to blog comments, Comment SPAM means a comment unrelated to the blogger's post that promotes something for personal gain or in order to generate an unapproved link to a URL that cannot generate links by its own merit. Of course, this definition shifts depending on who you talk to, because it discusses web etiquette.
A popular blog folksonomy website that allows members to set information about their bookmarks (browser-saved URLs) and then share it with del.icio.us. Del.icio.us then gathers collective information about those tagged bookmarks and indexes it.
Any blog post, entry or comment that is created and saved but not made public is a draft. The word "draft" is borrowed from the publishing industry.
A dynamic page gets newly generated from a database whenever requested by a server and therefore may be different depending on variables like who is asking for it, the date, or form input. Most pages on a blog are dynamic, generated by search or categorization and change with every new post. (As opposed to static).
A feed is a file containing the content of a web document or collection of web documents (like your recent blog posts) that has been stripped down -- removing display-related data like style and most mark-up -- to leave only content and basic information about that content. A feed syndicates the content of your website without all the display-related formatting included, just the content. A feed allows for easy download and display in another software program reader or on another site, such as a syndication website like a news service, as well as letting a blog search engine or folksonomy site easily gather just your content for indexing. If unspecified, the word feed always refers to an XML file, usually to an RSS feed.
A labeling system commonly used on blogs that lets you choose the basic keyword, subject or category of a block of content, such as a comment or a blog post. The term is an amalgamation of the words folk and taxonomy. Technically, you can add tags to any text, but the blog community uses folksonomy nearly exclusively to label their posts. Commonly known as technorati tags, adding something to del.icio.us, or the like, it is all actually "tagging" for folksonomy purposes. The practice is incorporated into nearly every blogging tool out there.
This means the direct URI to a blog page that shows only a particular entry or comment, rather than showing a category of posts or the main page of the blog. Unlike the remainder of the blog, permalink pages will always call only that post, without chronology or other factors changing the page later on. Permalinks are still dynamically generated but the URL will continue to work to display just that post so long as the blogger doesn't change the permalink settings in his blogging tool at a later date.
A ping is a very basic signal sent from one computer to another. Since the beginning of computer networks, pings have been used as a verification, a quick "are you there?" to the other computer. In blogging, it means a signal you send to a blog search engine or directory, a ping service, a feed service or other website so that they know your blog has fresh content for them to get. While we call this a ping, it is more technically accurate to call it an RPC, but ping is catchier sounding.
A ping client is a program, usually included in your blogging tool, that pings every site on your ping list automatically when you post new content.
Most blogging tools allow you to add any number of pingable locations to a ping list and automatically sends a ping to every URI on that list without intervention whenever new content is posted. It usually contains a list of ping services, rather than pinging each eventual recipient directly.
A subscription service for pings that broadcasts your ping to the major blog search engines or directories that you choose to ping. A ping service often requires registration before it will react to your ping.
Ping SPAM is when a ping is sent when certain conditions are not met. What conditions? For instance if there is no new content, or it has not been an alloted length of time since the last ping (for instance pinging every ten seconds). Sometimes it is accidental, as in when the receipt point requires registration -- your signal is trash until you register. Ping SPAM is usually when a ping is sent under completely false pretenses, or you're sending a ping to a completely unrelated website. Of course, this definition shifts depending on who you hear it from, because it falls under the heading of web etiquette.
[Verb] 1. To publish content for public consumption. 2. To add an entry to your blog. 3. ~ a comment: used to refer to the act of publishing a comment to an existing entry. [Noun]4. A single blog entry.
RDF is a framework for handling resources (like web pages, images, software programs - anything that can be located as existing on the internet) and descriptions of them. RDF is short for Resource Description Format, and sometimes Resource Definition Format. RSS is a common form of RDF.
This is a program for reading blogs that runs on your own machine and downloads the RSS feed for you. Often it is where you will read whatever blog subscriptions you've subscribed to.
RPC stands for Remote Procedure Call. Generally, this can be described as your computer sending a command (a procedure call) to a remote server to execute at that end and return a response to (or vice versa - their computer calling yours). In blogging, it usually refers to the process of pinging a blog search engine that you have new content. You are remotely calling that server to process the command to go fetch your blog's newest content. Hence, that ping is a Remote Procedure Call, or RPC. The section of the distant website that you can remotely call (execute commands to) is understandably separate from the remainder of their server to dissuade hacking and is usually called something like http://rpc.exampleblogsearchengine.com or http://www.exampleblogsearchengine.com/RPC/.
RSS is a feed format in the XML language. RSS is known as meaning "Real Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary". Those refer to different versions of RSS, which split apart from one another years ago. There have been versions 0.9, 1.x and 2.x, all valid depending on your side of the issue. However, the original meaning, what it originally stood for before the kinds of RSS split apart from each other, was "RDF Site Summary" (proof). So, 1.0 is "RDF Site Summary", 2.0 is "Real Simple Syndication", and sometimes "Rich Site Summary" is used for either version.
Technically, RSS is a sub-set of RDF designed for making a Summary of a webSite, such as a blog, and is in XML.
RSS is one of many RDF formats to have been created, and is the most commonly used right now. RSS competes for market with Atom as a common feed format. RSS is widely accepted by blog search engines and directories. RSS 2.x appears to be most widely accepted.
To scrape is to steal content from elsewhere that is then displayed without crediting the source, sometimes in violation of copyright. It is often in partial or garbled form. Scraping is a method used in SPAMmy blog to fill in content without having to think, or to steal the rank of a well-ranked blog by copying successful content to hundreds of websites, diminishing the rank of the original site. Scraping is different than quoting someone without remembering to add a trackback or link. It is malicious violation of fair use and copyright law.
Comes from the publishing industry. Originally used to refer to the leading (pronounced lehding - the blank, shallower strips of lead used to fill gaps) placed between lines of type. The meaning was broadened to refer to the internal nickname given to a news story or article. In blogging, the slug is YOUR name for the post, and is not technically a piece of the post. It often becomes part of the permalink URL, though, so should be something you are willing for your visitors to see, and contain a keyword. If you don't or can't choose a slug yourself, any automated blogging tool will usually do it for you.
A static page does not get newly generated from a database whenever requested by a server. A static page remains the same and is there whether being requested or not. In a weblog (which that is otherwise made up of dynamic blog posts) the "about me" page is often static. See also the opposing definition for dynamic.
This is a post that is always displayed in a certain position in the categorization, without regard to chronology. Derived from "sticky note" (also known as a Post-It Note™) –. Stickies (pl.) serve the same purpose in chronological websites as their counterparts do in paper document use. Example stickies could include a post defining the subject matter of the following posts, stating rules for leaving comments, or welcoming people to the blog. Sticky posts originated on forums, but the tradition continues with blogs, which utilize much of the same technology.
This is a word for telling an aggregator or reader to fetch the RSS feed for you on a persistent basis. Usually a "subscribe" link is just a simple link to the feed, and your browser knows what to do automatically. Sometimes it is a link to Feedburner or some other feed management website.
Specific to blogging, syndication means having a working feed on your blog and making it easy to find and download. Rarely, it is loosely used to refer to the marketing of a blog.
Means the same as feed format. See feed format.
to the mark-up of the link. It is nearly synonymous with the blog search engine called Technorati which organizes its blog search results by tags in a popularity-based system. The word is also generally used to refer to the blogging practice of assigning a keyword label to the tail end of a post (sometimes as a link to a folksonomy engine like digg or delicious or technorati). In some cases, tags completely replace categories, accomplishing internal or folksonomy purposes as well. Here is some more information about tags in general or tagging or Technorati tags specifically.
A popular blog folksonomy website that collects and indexes certain tags from current blog posts and organizes them by keyword (aka topic). Technorati indexes both purposefully created Technorati tags and any other incidental data that describes your blog post such as categories, topics, and the assignment of keywords -- but only if that information is included in your feed.
A trackback is way of sending a notification of a resource from one blog to another. It is used to inform any blogger that they are being blogged about elsewhere or quoted by another blog. It is sent by the one doing the quoting or mentioning. Although originally used by just one blogging tool, it is now part of standard blog etiquette and is included as an option in nearly all blogging tools. A trackback is sometimes called a pingback. Its use has been somewhat expanded to include informing another blogger of necessary resources the originator found useful in relation to the other blogger's needs.
This is not the same as email SPAM, blog SPAM or comment SPAM. THe spammers have found yet another way to bother us with useless or malicious links. Trackback SPAM is when a blogger receives a link by trackback that has nothing to do with the original blog and everything to do with trying to get the blogger to link to a sales pitch or check out the included resource against their will. Of course, this definition shifts depending on who you talk to, because it discusses web etiquette.
The original word for a blog. Blog is short for weblog.
Blogs are displayed in browsers in XHTML. XHTML is short for eXtensible HyperText Markup Language. XHTML is similar to but not the same as HTML. HTML is a sub-set of a different family of languages that all follow SGML (standard generlized markup language) rules. HTML is not going to be improved further, and has been replaced by XHTML, which is a sub-set of XML. It is still very similar to HTML, but has some important changes such as different nesting rules. It also doesn't allow unclosed tags. There is way more information available through the W3C specification than I can easily put here. Many people think of XHTML 1.0 as HTML 5.0.
XML is short for eXtensible Markup Language. XML is designed to be extensible - meaning it can be used to do mark up pretty much any file in any way so long as you clearly define what your markup means with a schema and follow XML structural rules, etc. Your blog pages, feeds, posts and comments are probably all displayed exclusively in various formats of XML. You could even create your own XML file format if you want to take the time, but you probably won't need to because there are already plenty of them in use in blogging today including XHTML, RSS and Atom. The world wide web consortium has lots more data.
Here is another glossary, the GIANT blog glossary, for those of you not quite done learning yet.
Summary: This is a glossary of terms as defined by us in our own words as we find them to be used by the blog community. It is an extremely simplified glossary and sometimes says where to go for more complete information and study.
You'll note that we do NOT include definitions for alternate usages. We will include information about other definitions only when it helps define the term as used in relationship to blogs and blogging.
Using this page does not substitute for studying blog technology in detail - but it can be hard if you don't have a clue what something is! So this glossary is provided only to make your life easier until you can dig into the techish geeky stuff.
Comments, additions or corrections? Let Desi know. | 2019-04-20T11:19:46Z | https://www.wordsinarow.com/blog-glossary.html |
Rated 4 out of 5 by MsA59 from 4 STARS! I recently completed the game and found it interesting with a surprising ending. It has nice graphics & very helpful hints that direct you wherever you need to go. It was quite short but I enjoyed it.
Rated 4 out of 5 by pinklub from If your a history buff you'll love this. So I first read some of the reviews before I played the game and thought oh well this is going to be another straight HO with just a little bit of adventure, but I actually liked it a lot!. I loved the history in this game and how they presented it, even though you had to go to the past it kept me intrigued the whole demo. I liked how the hints showed you exactly what need it to be done at the time, like when you clicked on it it will even make you back track if it was in another scene what you had to do. This is one of those games that if you like the story more than the game itself you should buy it.
Rated 4 out of 5 by lea_anna from Played the demo I loved and respected JFK to the max, and recall what I was doing and where I was at, on that fateful day. Although many folks seemed to think it was...tacky, I didn't. Realistically speaking, when one returns from beyond to seek help for creating the 'better' future, a person would need a great knowledge of the challenges we are now facing, and compare them to the time of his murder. It's an entirely different ballgame when one is killed, then if they die from natural causes or a disease. Their soul/spirit cannot rest until things are accomplished. I could see the in the story line immediately. JFK left several things undone; things that were setting on his desk when he was murdered. He wasn't perfect, but as a President he stands with MLK. And for those who respect the truth about what actually is, can understand where this story is going. This game, to me and my insight, is telling the player...help me to change things, for the future. Unfortunately, and in reality, they've literally gone undone and have taken many turns to the dark side.
Rated 4 out of 5 by pears45 from i like game the game is good to play about how did the jfk die and you can be the one to fine out how did it .
Rated 4 out of 5 by flaxin from Very Interesting! I enjoyed this little game. I was very intrigued right from the get go, being a baby boomer myself. It kept my attention the whole way through, but with a bit of sadness. I enjoyed the puzzles, hidden objects were fairly easy, just whipped through those. Seeing the places and reading the placards I liked a lot, though like I said, with a tinge of sadness. All in all, it was a great 2 hours. Thanks BF! and developers!
Rated 4 out of 5 by Sheerija from REVIEW OF COMPLETED GAME Good little game, if you do not mind it being only 3 hrs long. I did not as it is only a SE and I enjoyed it. The graphics are really good - precise and sharp. The HOS are quite plentiful, but also sharp and very clear and do not take long. The puzzles are mostly ones I have not seen before, and rather fun. Your mother witnessed the assassination of JFK and was plagued by visions all her life. When she died, the visions passed to you. You fade in and out of reality and keep getting taken back to 1963. There is someone with the same ability, but they are bent on doing something they shouldn't ought to and you have to stop them. I went to the Book Depository, the Grassy Knoll, Parklands Hospital, Jack Ruby's Club, the Oval Office, Condor Island and Lee Harvey Oswald's house, among other places, where I also encountered his wife and child. I met JFK and Oswald, There is live footage of that tragic day, which is sad and brought a lump to my throat. So long ago, yet when you view it again, you are again struck by the enormity and horror of that day. People in shock and disbelief, wandering around, trying to comfort each other, unable to comprehend what just happened. Although it is a different dev., it is very much along the lines of Gracelands, but on a much smaller scale, as that game was much bigger and grander. The voice overs and music were good and the text ran at a reasonable speed. There is a very good jump map, which I always appreciate. The hint/skip button were not as fast as I would have liked, but they were not too bad. Navigation is good enough not to rankle, if not instant. The hint button, outside the HOS, actually leads you straight to where you have to go, which I felt was a bit superfluous, given the jump map, but some people have a problem with jump maps, so might appreciate this feature. It was done well enough to keep me interested.. I enjoyed it and am glad I bought it. A little longer next time, devs., people are put off by short games. 4 hrs would be more acceptable and earn you more sales.
Rated 4 out of 5 by Jeriann64 from well made HO game! This game was rather different then any I've played in awhile. The graphics are excellent but I didn't like the music.The voice-overs were good as were the HO scenes. The hint button told you where to go next but it was rather slow in recharging. All in all, a rather enjoyable game.
Rated 3 out of 5 by sandrah212 from For history lovers I enjoyed the beginning of the game - the menu is set to look like a 60's style radio. Gameplay graphics are okay, but not outstanding. Gameplay itself was clunky and I found myself thinking of the things to do as chores instead of having fun solving the puzzles! I didn't think the storyline itself was very logical lots of the time, either. But the live footage and documents from the time period are very worthwhile and a nice touch! Being German, I will not rate the storyline - I didn't have a problem with it and thought it was really interesting, but apparently, it's still a sore point with alot of Americans! I can see kids having fun with this one, though, and at the same time they learn about history! Unfortunately, a no buy for me, though, but I've definitely seen worse, that's why this game gets a recommendation from me!
Rated 3 out of 5 by catbag8717 from I'm On The Fence! This game is one of those average ones. It's one of those that are likely to have people on both sides (recommend, non recommend# and I don't know which side to pick! Good Parts: The HOS were great, hardly needed to use the hint button. Great graphics. The daydreams or flashbacks, whatever they called them, were great. A good, unique addition to this game, allowed me to travel between 1963 #to points before and after JFK was assasinated) and the present day. OK Parts: The storyline. It's a unique idea and has potential, but no voice-overs and a little boring. In my opinion, there weren't enough HOS. Bad Parts: Hint and skip took a little too long to recharge. A lot of going back and forth. Sometimes, I had no idea what to do next. The demo ends quite abruptly. Nothing after playing really made me want to continue. Well, I think I'll have to recommend the trial... See what you make of it.
Rated 3 out of 5 by dancemom1 from No thanks! Yes, I too can remember that day quite well. For some reason, using this particular incident in history just seems a bit disrespectful (for lack of a better word)...I think because they use Kennedy as a ghost! Would have been better if they used an "unknown" for that particular part. Just my personal opinion. That aside, the graphics were okay (a bit old school), sound good, but no music to keep you interested. Hint used even if it just tells you what direction to go to. Game play a little choppy. This game did not keep my attention, nor did it make me want to run out and get it to see what happens. Personally, I don't think this is even worth the SE price, so not a buy for me. I gave this one a 2.5 actually..wish we had half stars. As always, try it for yourself and see if it is a game for you. We all have different tastes in games and you may find it quite enjoyable. Thanks for the reviews.
Rated 3 out of 5 by Nilosh from I Am Perplexed About This Game I am rather conflicted about this game and I suppose it starts of with the subject matter. Althought the Kennedy assasiation has always been an intriguing mystery that still remains unsolved, I find it rather macabre that it should be part of a game. However we have played games that deal with deaths of famous people, however I do find seeing Kennedy being portrayed here as a ghost quite unsettling. But that is just me being over sensitive. The game itself is not bad, although the graphics looked outdated and the silence was bothersome. The game looked old and rather tired looking. There are no voice-overs (hence the silence) and you have two game modes to choose from. Game features a journal along with a map that allows you to jump and does indicate where there are tasks that need to be done. Actually the map was a great deal of help as I found that there are many areas to investigate. Game mechanics are your standard HOPA where you need to investigate and pick up inventory items to use. There are junk-piled HO scenes that have no interaction and a series of mini-games which we have seen before but suprisingly there was a level of difficulty in some of them which made the game slightly more challenging. There is an interesting storyline that still I haven't figured out even after an hour of game-play. Is our Heroine in a constant dream-state? or is she truly able to jump through time portals and who is that mysterious hooded man that is following her? and what clues does the pink teddy bear hold?. But the most important question I do have is what do they all have to do with Kennedy's murder? It seems I will have to continue playing if I want answers and thank God I do have some game credits on hand to spare. There is a strong nastolgic feeling about the game and it really looks like it has come to us via a time machine. Gameplay does become a bit tedious after a while, however ike I said, I find that I personally am intrigued at the story and will recommend it for those who enjoy history and mystery thrown into an average HOPA game. However, it seems that we will continue to remain in the dark regarding who shot Kennedy.
Rated 2 out of 5 by ldzach02 from Not much fun This is a pretty boring game. The graphics are outdated & the story line is all over the place.
Rated 2 out of 5 by walkswithdogs from Very Disappointing I disliked this game so much I couldn't play longer than about 20 minutes before getting disgusted with it and deleting it. Many found the graphics crisp but I would describe them as dated and amateurish. The lack of music and voice over only added to my disinterest in this game. What little animation present was slow and jerky. All in all, a disappointment to me.
Rated 2 out of 5 by IdahoForever from Old-School HOS/Ghost game The memory is as fresh as if it happened yesterday, instead of the day before my 16th birthday, 49 years ago. I was a freshman in high school, happily day-dreaming about my birthday party, when the school superintendent announced President Kennedy's death over the loudspeaker. Most of us girls were crying, and the boys just sat there, stunned. The news that "Jack" Kennedy, as he was known then, had been assassinated was a huge blow. I wasn't sure if I wanted to play this game, but decided to try it out. What a let-down. This game has the look and feel of one that was made a few years ago. A lot of easy HOS. Easy puzzles. Some animation, no voice-overs. The graphics are beautiful. Music is soft and suspenseful. There is a map, but it doesn't let you teleport. There is a journal, as well. I almost never say "Don't recommend" but this game is awful.
Rated 2 out of 5 by roesbud from Good idea, not a good game I'm interested all things JFK, so I cashed in a credit for this one. It is the shortest game I've ever played. Little challenge. Even if it were a daily special, I don't think it is worth it.
Rated 2 out of 5 by donadriedger from It's in bad taste I'm not sure what the devs were thinking, but this is completely cheesy. Using the assassination of President Kenndy for a game?...wow, yeah, that was sure a fun time! Even if the concept was not ill conceived, the overall quality of everything else would still kill this game. The graphics are simplistic, the HOs are boring and non-interactive...and WHY does every object you pick up have to pulsate four times?? That is really annoying. The story line is fuzzy...is she in 1963 when the HO scenes are being played? If so, the anachronisms bug me...maybe she is in present time though..who knows? I think they need to go back to the drawing board...start over with something fictional!
Rated 2 out of 5 by wdwrn312 from Boring! Played the full demo only because I went to the trouble of downloading it.
Rated 2 out of 5 by rainice from History as an excuse for another super natural themed HOG I am of the generation who remembers exactly were they where when they heard of Kennedy's assassination. So when I saw this I was curious as to what it was all about. Turns out, it's about a woman who is having visions about that incident and a pink teddy bear that belongd to her mother. Games that center around supernatural or occult themes do not interest me in the least. Others may find this a good game, but as soon as I saw where it was leading I uninstalled. .
Rated 2 out of 5 by rosekaufmann from PASSABLE ONLY Nothing new in this game. Familiar cutscene of Kennedy’s assassination day, but after that people look like they’re made of plastic. Graphics are passable and animation is rather shaky (ex: plane shaking from turbulence looks obviously made up – not in the least trying to be realistic). Could have put more effort into developing game. Compared with what’s out there today, game resembles those put out 2-3 years ago. STORY: You’re going to Dallas to follow-up on your mother’s visions. In flight, you suddenly have your mother’s teddy bear (not very cuddly) and you dream for an instant of a strange guy, whom you later see on the ground in Dallas and who claims the teddy bear is his. BASICS: Casual and expert modes of play. You have a journal and an interactive map. Good blend of HOS and puzzles. HOS scenes are not too crowded and objects are readily identifiable. Puzzles vary and are easy to moderately challenging. Hints are helpful, but the recharge time is rather lengthy. I don’t know that I would buy this game even if it was a DD. Or maybe I just think Kennedy’s assassination deserves more respect and thought.
Rated 1 out of 5 by slhswims from Crushing theme ruins modiocre game This game dragged me back to a depressing time when most people (including me) were in shock for an extended period of time. Such poor taste to create this game and to put it on BFG. Better screening please!
Rated 1 out of 5 by mistyandtiny from worst game i have ever purchased this would be without doubt the worst game i have ever bought from big fish. the hint/items for use defy logic, asked to rate storyline, what storyline apart from the kennedy assassination which obviously was used just to sell the game, any other link is purely accidental. and fun factor , totally non existant.
Rated 1 out of 5 by mrssharon from Worst Game on Big Fish Ever The fact that the main theme is related to an actual assassination of an American president should make this "game" a non-starter. But, out of curiosity over what other reviewers have said, I went ahead and played the demo to its end. The game had no logic. If the person is having visions, why are real items appearing out of them? Running back and forth trying to find the items you need to progress was frustrating. The puzzles were awful. I think I skipped 3 of them because, again, there was no logic in them. Some dude kept popping up out of thin air, and I never did get a clue who he was or why he was part of this story. It made no sense. The graphics were amateurish and the items were really not hidden. There was no interaction in the HOS. Most of the items I collected would probably have been explained further into the game, but at the point where the demo ends, you have no clue what you would possibly do with them. The dialog by other characters had no energy and amounted to not much more than one-liners. The biggest puzzle of all is why the developers created this "game", and I use the word loosely. A game is supposed to be fun and when you think of what happened on that day in 1963, it makes me sad and a bit angry that anyone would think this "game" would be fun. Very tasteless is the kindest thing I can say about it.
Rated 1 out of 5 by taigood from Flop!!! I can only advise you to try for yourselves. Because my personal opinion is that this game is totally obnoxious. A very very sad attempt of drawing peoples' attention by naming a historical figure that actually has nothing to do with the theme except for the place and date. Depressing colours. Cluttered Hos. Puzzles with poor and/or confusing instructions. All in all, I couldn't force myself to play it beyond 15 minutes and deleted it straight away. | 2019-04-20T13:26:15Z | https://www.bigfishgames.com/games/7951/lost-secrets-november-1963/?bvrrp=8524-en_us/reviews/product/2/16524.htm |
Fugitive Candidate John McAfee Speaks To TPM From His Bunker!
John McAfee wants you to know he’s dead serious about running for President.
You’d be forgiven for being skeptical. McAfee, who describes himself as an “eccentric millionaire,” made a killing in the early ‘90s when he departed from his namesake anti-virus software company. Since 2012, McAfee has mostly made headlines for his action-movie-like exploits in Central America, where he was wanted for questioning (not as a suspect) by Belizean police in the murder of his neighbor. So when his presidential campaign came out of nowhere this week, it felt like a stunt at least in part.
First, TPM obtained a Sept. 7 email in which McAfee announced his intention to run for President. Then he filed his statement of candidacy with the FEC the next day and launched a new website. A campaign announcement video followed Wednesday night. Curiously, the software pioneer didn’t utter the standard, if banal, phrase “I’m running for President” on either the campaign site or in the announcement video.
McAfee may become less of an enigma to U.S. voters in the coming weeks during what is sure to be an unconventional campaign. He says he doesn’t plan on hitting the trail or debating any other candidates. What he proposes instead is something of a direct line between candidate and voter, facilitated by the Internet technology he’s mastered over the course of his career, where the American people can follow him and debate him freely over the web.
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of TPM’s conversation with McAfee.
TPM: Your announcement was something of a surprise this week. How did this all come about and what motivated you to take such a big step?
McAfee: I’ve been pushed by my friends and my fans for over a year to run for President. I merely assumed it would be a quixotic sort of idea. I’m now taking it very seriously. I made a statement on my Facebook page which put my position in very clear perspective. … So I’m taking it seriously. I’m running because I was pushed into it. And yet I really feel an obligation to myself, to my friends, family and the American people to do what I can.
You’re running under what you call the Cyber Party. What’s that all about?
We live in a world where everything is interconnected by cyber science. It’s the sciences of computer processing and electronic communications. In China, you cannot become the top leader of the country unless you are a computer programmer or understand computer architecture to a great extent. Why? Because it is like being illiterate. It’s like a congressman saying, “I cannot read or write and I don’t understand many words. But I do have advisers that explain words to me.” Which is [inaudible]. No. It’s the same thing today. We have a largely illiterate [inaudible] and executive branch of the government as proven by the fact that the Office of Program Management [Ed. note: It’s the Office of Personnel Management] allowed China and Russia very easily to steal 21 million records of every American who’s ever worked for the U.S. government since the 1950s, including all of the people with top-secret clearances, many of which are covert agents in foreign countries, putting their lives at risk and the security of America in a very tenuous position. This is unthinkable in countries like Japan, China or Russia and could not be done. Why? Because they are literate in the science of cyber sciences. We have to change that in America. We have to understand that our country has changed and the basic fabric of our society is based upon cyberscience. To be illiterate in that area is unforgivable if you are in government.
So would you say that you’re sort of a single-issue candidate right now? Or can we expect any policy platforms from you in the future on other issues?
Absolutely. We’ve got a lot of policies and my campaign manager who’s sitting in the room with me right now, Drew Thompson, he has a baseball bat and he said he will break my kneecaps if I deviate from the rules of this interaction in any way whatsoever. So I cannot tell you because he [inaudible] what the exact detailed policies are. But I can promise you that the number one will be privacy. Privacy, not necessarily cybersecurity, but privacy of the American individual. We know now from a number of sources, including Edward Snowden, that we have been spied upon by our government to an enormous degree and that we have very little privacy left. If you take any street corner in any city and look up, you will find 10-15 cameras and extremely sensitive microphones able to pick up and hone in on conversations. We are being watched, monitored and listened to at an alarming rate. Yet without privacy, what is society? What is humanity? You, and me and every human on this earth, we choose privacy hundreds of times per day. When you talk to the grocery clerk you choose a level of privacy. You will not reveal the deepest details of your life. To your spouse, maybe you will, maybe you won’t. But with every relationship that we have we have a different set of privacy rules. Without these, society would collapse because if everyone knew everything about everyone else we would have chaos and you know this for a fact.
There was actually a big shouting match on the Republican debate stage last month between Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator, and Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor, over government surveillance. Rand Paul has styled himself as the pro-civil liberties candidate in the GOP who’s representing people who are concerned about privacy. How can you better address that issue?
First of all, I’m not concerned about what Rand Paul or Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or anyone else has to say, or in debating them. No matter what I say to them, I am not going to get their vote. If I debate anyone it will be the American public. Not just the right or the left, or the young and the old, the male and the female, the gay or the straight, but everyone. Because we are all living under the burden of the same nightmare of loss of privacy, loss of freedom in an insane paranoid government. They say that they are protecting us through the Transportation Security Administration, yet when you are standing in line with your shoes off and your belt off, your outer clothing off, while your personal belongings are being scrutinized closely and you have your hands in the air and you’re being patted down, do you feel like you’re being protected? I do not. I feel like the enemy. And if I feel like the enemy, if my heart says I feel like the enemy, maybe I am. Maybe the government perceives me as the enemy. That’s the first sign of a paranoid government. So I’m not representing left or right, I’m not trying to represent a special interest or a way of thinking. No. I’m trying to get everyone to see the reality that we all, all of us, live under the same insanity and it must be fixed. So I’m not even going to debate any of these people because no matter what I say to them, I promise you they won’t vote for me. But I’ll be happy, and I’ll create a facility using my own understanding of cyber science, I can debate the entire American public. The entire American public. And would be happy to do so. Because it is their minds that I am interested in. I’m not interested in the minds of my competitors and trying to change them. That’s nonsense. I don’t have the time for that and no one should.
Obviously you filed the proper paperwork with the FEC to run for President. But I’m curious as to why you don’t say in your campaign announcement the actual words “I’m running for President,” or have that anywhere on your campaign site?
Well it should be very clear I’m running for President. I just told you, I’ve told everybody in the press for the past 24 hours and maybe if you want I can put that also — Drew, can I do that? — he just shook his head yes so we’ll do that. But it just appears obvious to me but again what is obvious to me isn’t always obvious to the American public. So especially if we go through the popular press. No offense intended here.
It just struck me as curious.
You are in a profession that is more besieged than the American citizen is by the government in that you are trying—not you personally, but the entire American press—trying to find a place of relevance in the world of the Internet, especially the printed press. My heart goes out to you, it does. But the problem for people like me is it’s far more lucrative to paint me as an off-the-wall madman than it is to paint me as someone serious because, really, who wants to read about someone serious. You’d much rather read about the colorful madman. I understand that and I do not fault you for it. But I do want you to print these words if you can.
Also, Spike TV announced yesterday before your campaign video came out that they’re filming a docu-series about you.
Unfortunately, that director is right here outside the door. I did not let him in the room. But I am wearing his microphone and there’s cameras looking through the window. Yes, they have been doing that and will continue to do so for the next six months. They’re doing a six-part miniseries.
Well, if I were making any money off the Spike thing, that’d be great. In fact, if you would want to call the producers for me and say, “Why shouldn’t McAfee get paid?” then that would make some sense. But believe it or not, I am not getting paid. I just agreed to do this at the behest of a friend, Francois Garcia. I do not know why. He must be a hypnotist or something. But I simply agreed to do this at the behest of a friend who is actually producing this series. So no, and you may call Spike TV and they may verify that we’re not giving him a dime. [Ed note: Spike TV spokesman David Swartz confirmed via email that McAfee wasn’t being compensated for the series.] In fact, you know, why don’t you suggest that I renegotiate the contract and then we can connect the two events? No, I had nothing to do with the timing of that release. It’s all Spike TV taking advantage of what is happening in the world to try to make a dime. No offense to Spike.
The director, by the way, is Billy Corben, the director of “Cocaine Cowboys” who actually is a very decent young man. He’s misguided and still wet behind the ears but a very decent person. He’s listening to these words as I’m saying them, of course. Spike TV I know nothing of. I’m just doing this, again, just because I’m doing it.
Now we only have a few more minutes so if you want to get to some real questions I’d be happy to address them.
Your whereabouts always have been a subject of intense interest. Where are you now? You’re living in Tennessee, campaigning out of Alabama?
I’m living in Tennessee. My campaign headquarters is Opelika, Alabama. The reason we’re here is that it’s one of the six cities in America that has a one gigabyte fiber-optic link to the Internet, which I will absolutely need for my presidential campaign because I do not intend to go on the campaign trail and shake hands and kiss babies.
I intend to run a brand new sort of campaign entirely based on wherever I am. If I’m in my bedroom, the CEO of my company’s office (sic), wherever. I’m in some strange conference room they put me in today. They call it the Orange Room. So, it will be a different sort of campaign. It will reach the American people in a way that no other candidate has ever reached the American people. I will be the first truly accessible presidential candidate.
Oh absolutely. In fact, there’s no mud that you can throw at me that I’ve not already thrown at myself. Go ahead with the questions.
I’m curious as to what would you say is your biggest regret, in life or in business, if you have any regrets?
Well, honestly it’s difficult to say. If I said I had any regrets, then that would have changed the course of my life. Where I am right now is I think where I should be. If I had not done everything exactly as I have done them, I would not be sitting here right now. So it’s difficult to say. I have done things which people have judged as wrong. I myself, if I were to go back, might think them through differently. But we have all made mistakes. None of us are perfect, no matter what we may say. Unlike President Clinton, I also smoked marijuana but did inhale and took other drugs as well. So you may judge me for that or not, that is entirely up to you. But I am as open as could possibly be and I am not afraid of revealing anything to you that I have ever done.
So you’d say voters can trust you despite your DUI arrest last month and the episodes in Belize and Guatemala a few years back?
Yes. Absolutely. If you really look at the episodes in Belize and Guatemala a few years back, at what really happened, there was nothing that I would have done any different. I was being extorted by a third-world banana republic, and refused, and paid the consequences. If you don’t read the American press and go back and actually read the Belizian press you will see exactly what happened. As for the DUI, I was taking a prescription medication called Xanax. I had never taken it before. That was the first day I had ever taken it and I was arrested two hours after taking my first dose. I don’t function on it, I do admit that. My lawyer insists the case will be dismissed. Even if not, again, if you judge me based on that and say that my vision is therefore corrupted because I had a DUI, then that’s certainly your choice as a U.S. voter. I think that many people will see beyond that.
Do you think that it could be a liability if you were to become commander-in-chief that, as you’ve also said in some previous interviews, there still may be some people who are out to get you from the time you spent in Central America?
Well, no. Actually, I think that’d be great. The Secret Service is there to try to prevent the assassination of U.S. Presidents. So far, they’ve been statistically, largely successful. So no, that does not concern me. Neither does Belize concern me. They’ll be the least of my problems.
Here’s the biggest problem. Everybody in the campaign is going to tell you what they’re going to do when they become President. Now, why is it that you make jokes about presidential promises? Because it’s not the President’s fault.
It wasn’t Obama’s fault that he couldn’t close the base in Cuba. He got into the Oval Office completely unaware of the reality of the nightmare behind the curtain. Because 90 percent of our government is unseen. Edward Snowden proved that. We had no clue the NSA was spying on us. We assumed they were spying on our enemies. But they had assumed we are the enemy.
So for me to say I’m going to do this and this — it’s like a doctor and a curtain. Behind the curtain, doctor, I have a patient who is sick. What are you going to do? Well I don’t have a clue, unless you let me get behind the patient and let me examine him. And then, if he’s a decent doctor, he will then quickly do something. Anybody who tells you different is either a fool, or self-deluded or is lying. One of those three. Because there is no way, from the perspective—no, Hillary Clinton is different. Because she actually lived through a presidency, of her spouse being President, and probably has some insights that nobody else has. But other than her, there is not a single candidate who can tell you what to do because they haven’t handled the patient. Then they pull the curtain back and find a brand new automobile or a case of the measles. They don’t have a clue. Neither do I. But I do know this. I am quick on my feet. And I am quick-thinking. I have lived through situations that have taught me a great deal. If anybody can help cure the patient, it’s me.
How does McAfee make it to the White House? What’s your path there?
Doing exactly what I’m doing. Talking to the press. Being honest and open. Creating a campaign that — my campaign manager just gave me the throat sign, I’ve gotta cut it off here — creating a campaign that America hasn’t seen yet. Something that makes me accessible, using technology, something the American public and these campaigns have never dreamed of. My campaign manager and everyone around me truly believes that I will make it to the office. The problem is, can I actually do anything to cure the patient any better than anybody else? I do not know. I will make my best effort.
TPM illustration by Derick Dirmaier. Images via AP, Canadian Press Extra, and Shutterstock/guteksk7. | 2019-04-21T22:17:15Z | https://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/john-mcafee-tpm-interview |
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According to reports in Hindu on 24th and 22nd May and in many other media, there is a cacophony of protests and howls by the leaders of Tamil political parties in India against the invitation extended to His Excellency the President of Sri Lanka by the next Prime Minister of India to attend his swearing in ceremony on May 26.
“Rajapaksa is the butcher of Tamils”, according to Vaiko, as stated in a DNA report dated 23rd May, and he has further said, “Rajapaksa should be prevented from attending the ceremony”. Concurrently, the vitriolic anti-Sri Lanka Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu considers the invitation as being “tantamount to rubbing salt into the wounds of the already deeply injured Tamil psyche”. Not to be left out, Ramadoss too has joined the protestors. The Congress Party has sided with the Tamil parties, probably with the hope that the Tamils in the Southern state will help it to come back to power at some future date, after having faced a humiliating drubbing by the voters at the just-concluded election.
Clarifications by the authorities in New Delhi that the foreign policy of the government of India is a matter for the Central Government and is not a decision left to be made at the state government level has clearly fallen on deaf ears, especially of those in Tamil Nadu. Not only are the latter deaf, but they are completely blind as well: the venomously racist Tamil supremacy that they hold dear to the hearts prevents them from seeing what exists in the real world as far as Sri Lanka and its Tamils are concerned.
The war that culminated in May 2009 was not a civil war, nor was it a war waged by the Sinhalese (government) against the Tamils living in Sri Lanka. It was a war of liberation that was forced upon the legally elected government of Sri Lanka by a band of ruthless terrorists in the Tamil ethnic group. The LTTE that was instrumental in implementing the armed aggression in the pursuit of its mono-ethnic Tamil Eelam has been categorized as a terrorist group in nearly 32 countries worldwide.
If one were to read only the statements and the lamentations that Jayalalitha, Karunanidhi, Vaiko, Ramadoss and others of their ilk keep on dishing out to the gullible Tamil Nadu voter and look at the bucketfuls of tears that the Tamil Nadu big boss keeps on shedding on behalf of the ‘suffering’ Sri Lanka Tamils, one can be excused for running away with the idea that LTTE was a bunch of innocent babes that were massacred by Sri Lanka’s armed forces. If the reader cares to venture beyond that, he or she will then see how the blood thirsty LTTE killers, which included women as well as the young, cut to death or blew to smithereens innocent farmers, monks, worshippers, schoolchildren and other members of the public that belonged to all ethnic religious groups.
When someone invites another for an event, it is simple and traditional politeness to accept the invitation, unless the two are mortal enemies of each other. Therefore, it is natural to expect the President of Sri Lanka to attend the swearing-in ceremony. Vaiko has got hold of the whole issue at the wrong end when he says “Rajapaksa should be prevented” from attending the event. The President of Sri Lanka is not barging in or gatecrashing into a private party hosted by Modi: the incoming Prime Minister of India has invited the Heads of State of all the SAARC countries to attend an august and momentous event, and Mr. Rajapakse just happens to be the Heads of State of Sri Lanka ” a matter that the loud-mouthed political leaders in Tamil Nadu cannot swallow. Furthermore, the broad-minded Mr. Modi has invited even the Prime Minister of Pakistan to the event, when everyone knows that the two leaders cannot be the best of buddies going by the foreign policy stands of the two countries.
Leaving the matter of the Swearing-in Ceremony alone, it is long overdue for Sri Lanka to do something substantial to show the Jayalalithas, Karunanidhis, Vaikos and Ramaadoss’s of Tamil Nadu that the island nation is not ready to put up with the lies and unsubstantiated allegations thrown at it any more. For a start, SriLankan Airlines may consider closing down its branch office in Tamil Nadu and the government could think of winding up dealings carried out by its consulate in Chennai. The moves certainly would result in financial losses, but the sovereignty of Sri Lanka is not a wayside tree at which any passing stray dog could empty itself. Additionally, Sri Lankan pilgrims who travel to Bodh Gaya through Tamil Nadu should opt for alternative routes, and others who travel to Tamil Nadu to worship at Hindu temples or pray at Catholic churches need to choose other locations for carrying out their religious observances.
Bravo BJP! We applaud your opposition to pressure from the Racist Demagogues of Tamil Nadu who aided and abetted their terrorist proxies to destroy 150,000 lives of Sri Lankan citizens!
NOW, India should undo as far as possible the damage done to Sri Lanka by its previous Govts and those Tamil Nadu leaders!
It is HIGH TIME that the Indian Government … with an overwhelming majority in Parliament … upheld the supremacy of the Union Government and disciplined the states governed as personal fiefdoms beholden to no one. That will only lead QUICKLY to the DISINTEGRATION of India as ONE NATION.
India should recognize that it faces the same kinds of CENTRIFUGAL FORCES that bedevils Sri Lanka, and that the Central Government is the ONLY NATIONAL ENTITY that holds the country together.
In Sri Lanka, the VAST MAJORITY of Sri Lankan citizens have empowered their elected government to do all that is NECESSARY to maintain the INTEGRITY of their Motherland against internal and external enemies.
Likewise, in the 2014 Lok Sabha Elections, after 30 years, the People of India spoke with ONE VOICE and gave the same mandate to their National Government to do whatever is necessary to hold their country together, erect barriers to the exploitative agendas of their internal and external, overt and covert, enemies, and to uplift their lives.
India should realize that the WEAK FEDERAL FORM of Government in India is ONE REASON why India suffers from INDISCIPLINE and CHAOS while the West inanely applauds it as evidence of “Democrazy”, and cannot move forward while its demagogues flout the National Govt and waste money building palaces and temples for themselves instead of toilets, schools and hospitals for all of their people.
Given the massive size of India, a Federal Form of Government may be NECESSARY for India, but it is not necessary for minute Sri Lanka.
Therefore, understanding that the Federal Form of Govt for India is ONLY A NECESSARY EVIL, India should CEASE & DESIST from imposing one on Sri Lanka.
Let Sri Lanka REPEAL the 13th Amendment IMPOSED BY FORCE by India upon Sri Lanka … without PRESSURE and OPPOSITION!
May 24 (Hindu) The chorus against Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s participation in the May 26 swearing-in of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister grew louder on Friday, with DMK chief M. Karunanidhi and PMK founder S. Ramadoss seeking reconsideration of the invitation.
MDMK general secretary Vaiko met Mr. Modi and BJP president Rajnath Singh in New Delhi and made a fervent appeal that the Sri Lankan President be prevented from participating in the event. Mr. Modi is learnt to have assured him that no bilateral issues will be discussed with Mr. Rajapaksa.
Hope Modi will stand firm. He has nothing to lose from RACIST Tamil junk who REFUSED him and BJP TOTALLY.
MR should NOT fall into the FEDERAL TRAP Modi is preparing for him. After the swearing in, MODI plans to FORCE MR to fully implement 13 amendment and give other things to Tamilians. NO WAY IN HELL!
IF MR tries to do those things that will be END of MR. Election next year MR. Don’t forget that. Tamils will NEVER vote for MR or BR. NEVER! Only Sinhalese and Muslims who DON’T want power devolution.
The Modi swearing-in has all the trappings of a great emperor inviting the petty kings of vassal states to his coronation.
“enter into my parlour said the spider to the flies”.
For all the fanfare and trumpets of the inauguration ritual, the Modi government is already wrapped up in foregone conclusions: It begins with a BANG but will end without even a WHIMPER. The problems India grovels in are far too big and deep for any government to solve.
This Modi display has all the elements of a bollywoodian show. He is aware that bollywood means all to India. It is India’s life blood superseding even food and shelter. It will surely mesmerize the population for while. But its joys will grow dim when the lights come on and its glory will fade away. Such is the writing on the wall.
As for our MR, Modi will do his best to make him into a ‘Modaya’ with the sugar coated DRUG of fraternity and benevolence. If MR cedes to ‘Tamil aspirations’ he is doomed. The sugar coated drugs of Modi the self proclaimed great emperor will make or break MR. Already the TNA is flexing its muscles by demanding the de-listing of the banned diaspora units and Wiggie disdained MR’s invitation.
The Modi government has unleashed ethnic and religious frenzy. My guess is that Modi will himself be washed away by those relentless and uncontrollable floods. He will leave India in tatters.
I hope the oracles that are will reveal all this to MR, so that he will not be a Maha Ranee lining up behind India’s ‘MODI’ (read in Sinhala).
OK, I grant you that Modi’s invitation to the heads of state of surrounding nations sounds like a demand for vassal states to pay homage.
But really, none of these states are “vassal states”. Pakistan’s President had asked previously asked ManMohan Singh to attend his own inauguration.
You and I do share a fear that Modi may pressure MR into implementing the 13th Amendment fully, but rest assured MR is too smart to fall for such a ploy, and Modi will not discuss any serious matters during this visit with anyone.
I believe that Modi has invited all the heads of states of neighboring countries to attend his inauguration, because he has little prior experience in foreign policy, or familiarity with these leaders, and he wants to get to know them and establish good relations at the earliest possible opportunity.
During the time he was CM of Gujarat he established contacts with both Chinese and Japanese leaders to bring investments and business to Gujarat, but he has not had contact with neighboring countries for political purposes.
I applaud Narendra Modi for the initiative he is taking, and President Mahinda Rajapaksa for accepting his invitation as an opportunity to establish a good PERSONAL relationship with this important neighbor of Sri Lanka, in the National Interest of Sri Lanka.
Take it easy guys. MR is not a fool and neither is Modi. Today I saw,as usual, DJ has come out with his dooms day prediction that if 13A is not implemented Modi will see to a federal solution. This is exactly what the US is also doing,threatening in to submission.
Modi has nothing to gain by appeasing Tamil separatists at the cost of a friendly neighbor Sri Lanka, on the contrary he has a lot to gain by maintaining friendly relations with Sri Lanka with India’s security concerns topping the list.
ANURADAHAPURA, SIGIRIYA ETC. TO SHOW HOW THOSE KINGDOMS LOOK LIKE.
country, not supposed to live in those areas.
papers. Naturally then universites are full of Tamils.
SL Tamils have beggar’s wound syndrome. So they use it get more and more of the cake. These are PACHA (LYING) PEOPLE. THEY’VE GOT MORE THAN FAIR SHARE OF THE CAKE. BUT THEY WANT MORE AND MORE. FREE EDUCATION, FREE MEDICATION.
IN SRI LANKA. HOW MANY TN TAMILS CLAIM ASYLUM IN THE DEVELOPED COUNTRIES? THEY ARE NOT JUST CLOWNS. FOOLS AS WELL. SL TAMILS TAKING THESE FOOLISH CLOWNS FOR RIDE FOR THE LAST SO MANY YEARS!
May 25, Colombo: Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has instructed the officials to release all the Indian fishermen in custody of Sri Lanka as a goodwill measure on the occasion of Narendra Modi’s swearing-in as the new Prime Minister of India.
This is the second time the President ordered the release of Indian fishermen as a goodwill gesture.
He ordered the immediate release of all Indian fishermen in Sri Lanka’s custody when India decided to abstain from voting for the United States-led resolution against Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council in March.
President Rajapaksa has ordered the release of all Indian fishermen ahead of his visit to New Delhi to attend Mr. Modi’s swearing-in ceremony Monday, a presidential spokesman said. The President has accepted an invitation extended by Mr. Modi to attend the occasion.
However, Mr. Modi’s invitation to Sri Lankan President has created uproar among the Tamil political party leaders in Tamil Nadu, especially, the Chief Minister of the state Ms. Jayalalithaa.
The GOSL SHOULD NOT repeal the ban on ANY Eelamist Tamil organizations … EVER!
This is the ONLY SENSIBLE THING the GOSL has done since the war was concluded to DEFEND Sri Lanka from these UNREPENTANT proxies of the LTTE.
Despite overtures by the GOSL to these undeserving TRAITORS, what was saw was an UNREMITTING WAVE of plotting and underming the GOSL by the TNA.
The more the GOSL held out its hand in FORGIVENESS, the MORE the TNA came to believe they DESERVED that FORGIVENESS and the MORE ARROGANT and THREATENING they became.
Clearly the TNA is cast in the same mold as the late unlamented SunGod Velupillai Prabhakaran and his murderous followers of the LTTE . They do not understand leniency or forgiveness. To them such gestures are SIGNS OF WEAKNESS to be met with further outrageous demands.
Since they will not take the CARROT, GIVE them the STICK!
Stop FORGIVING them, and DESTROY them now, by ARRESTING, PROSECUTING, and SEVERELY PUNISHING them for ALL TREASONOUS ACTS against Sri Lanka in collusion with the Eelamist Tamil Diaspora, Tamil Nadu politicians, India, the Neocolonialist Western Countries pursuing their own geopolitical agendas, and the international and local NGOs collaborating with them.
This is the GIST of the recent 12-point Proposal from the NFF and the JHU to the GOSL; that proposal should be accepted in its ENTIRETY and IMPLEMENTED IN FULL …. NOW!
More Importantly, it is HIGH TIME that Sri Lanka wrested its Sovereign Crown AWAY from India by REPEALING the 13th Amendment and replacing the Provincial Council System it with Districts Administered by Appointed Government Agents. Permanently Secure Sri Lanka’s Territorial Integrity NOW by dismantling ALL Centers of Separatist Power.
NEVER Empower TAMIL SEPARATISTS hidden in Wolves Clothing!
May 25, Colombo: Sri Lanka’s major Tamil party, Tamil National Alliance (TNA) has asked the Sri Lankan government to review its decision to designate diaspora organizations and individuals as having links to the defeated Tamil Tiger terrorist organization.
The party asked the government to review its decision to proscribe 16 Tamil organizations and over 400 individuals under the Prevention of Terrorism Act and remove from that list organizations and individuals against whom there is no evidence of engaging in or supporting any ‘terrorist acts’ under the Act.
Issuing a statement to media Saturday, the leader of TNA, R. Sampanthan “unequivocally” condemned the government’s measure to designate several Tamil diaspora organizations and individuals as having links to the terrorist group Liberations Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
The government on April 01 has banned the LTTE and 15 other Tamil diaspora groups that are alleged of having terror links and involved in reviving the terrorist movement in the country.
Sampanthan noted that the government’s measure was taken in the wake of the passage of UN Resolution on Sri Lanka that called the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to conduct a comprehensive international investigation into the alleged war crimes.
The TNA noted that according to UN regulations, the Competent Authority must notify the UN, in writing, of the designation of such organizations and individuals and the written notice should contain information relating to the reasons for such designation.
However, Sampanthan said, two months has passed since the gazette notification of the ban, but the government is yet to present any reasons for the designation of the organizations and individuals.
“While acknowledging the right of any government to take appropriate steps to counter violent threats to national security-provided those steps comply with domestic and international human rights and humanitarian law-we note with serious concern that this regressive step taken by the government is consistent with many other measures that it continues to take in the North and the East that are against the spirit of reconciliation,” he said.
“We therefore call on the Government of Sri Lanka to review the decision to designate all of the said organizations and individuals and remove from that list organizations and individuals against whom there is no evidence of engaging in or supporting any ‘terrorist acts’ as defined by the 2005 Act,” the TNA leader added.
According to the government, the ban was based on the recommendation by the Secretary, Ministry of Defence and Urban Development, as the Competent Authority regarding the identification of persons, groups and entities, believed on reasonable grounds to be committing, attempting to commit, facilitating or participating, in the commission of acts of terrorism.
SO WHAT AND WHO CARES???
Waiko and mad hatters are all INDIAN TAMILS SUPPORTING THE LTTE TERRORIST GROUP JUST TO GAIN A POLITICAL VICTORY WHERE THEY ALL HAVE BEEN WIPED OUT FROM INDIA!!!
Modi’s facial expression CLEARLY SHOWS THAT HE WILL NOT BOW DOWN TO THESE IDIOTS LIKE THE FORMER PM!!!
May 25, Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Police have arrested three men suspected to be members of Sri Lanka’s Tamil terrorist group, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a top Malaysian police official has said Sunday.
Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar said the suspects were arrested in multiple raids in Petaling Jaya and Klang, Selangor, and were being held under the Immigration Act.
Malaysia’s Counter Terrorism Division of the police’s Special Branch has arrested the three suspects on May 15, the Malaysian National News Agency Bernama reported.
According to the police official the suspects had been in Malaysia since 2004 after entering the country illegally.
Initial investigations have found that the suspects had used Malaysia as a base to collect data and spread propaganda, while trying to revive the defunct LTTE terrorist group at the international level.
During the raids, the Malaysian Police also have seized LTTE propaganda material, media equipment and currencies from 24 countries worth RM 20,176.53 (approximately US$ 6,280), the Inspector-General said in a statement.
He said all suspects were registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and used UNHCR) cards to stay in the country and to avoid legal action by the local authorities.
Khalid said one of the suspects even possessed a working permit at a non-exist company.
Khalid said the police would work closely with the UNHCR Office to ensure that terrorists would not exploit and abuse the UNHCR cards to turn Malaysia as their operation base or to carry out terrorism activities, which could pose threats to Malaysia or other countries.
We should call a SPADE a SPADE, and ARREST, PROSECUTE, CONVICT and PUNISH ALL of these TNA TRAITORS for their CRIMES & TREASON committed over the last 35 years.
They should be RECONCILED to their CRIMES and PUNISHED. That is all the Reconciliation they Deserve. Anything else is just PANDERING to Criminals!
Just ENFORCE the Law of the Land! … NOW!
The TNA’s decision to prevent Northern Chief Minister C.W. Wigneswaran from joining President Mahinda Rajapaksa at Indian Prime Minister-elect Narendra Modi’s swearing-in ceremony thwarts efforts towards reconciliation, Plantation Industries Minister and President’s Special Envoy on Human Rights Mahinda Samarasinghe said.
All SAARC leaders including President Rajapaksa have been invited by the BJP to take part in the swearing-in ceremony of the new Prime Minister-elect. Tamil Nadu had opposed the invitation extended to President Rajapaksa. The Indian media forecast that with a majority in Parliament the BJP is not dependant on Tamil parties to run the government, hence there will be a ‘more independent policy on Sri Lanka’ by the Centre.
Minister Samarasinghe said the President should be congratulated for thinking so broadly when he decided to invite the Northern Province Chief Minister to accompany him to New Delhi tomorrow.
The Government has taken a positive step by symbolically inviting them to be part of the Sri Lankan delegation to India, a country where the issue of Northern Tamils has been in the forefront, but they have outrightly declined that offer.
The Minister said the Government is of the view that the extremist forces within the TNA, linked to the pro LTTE diaspora, may have influenced this decision since they are hell-bent on destroying any concrete steps being taken towards reconciliation.
“Sri Lankan President orders release of all Indian fishermen as a goodwill gesture”- excellent move !
All gestures shall come at the cost of Jaffna Tamils.
Next time MR visits other nations, he must donate a Tamil to the leader of that country. Let the elephants stay in Sinhala forests.
“We will arrest them, feed them with better food, give them lodging for 2 weeks and release them with gifts. Look friend, I too have to win my votes” this is what MR must tell Modi.
I am sure LTTE is helping with USA agenda in Malaysia. They are the CIA there.
I love your suggestion … “he must donate a Tamil” ….. “Let the elephants stay in Sinhala forests” … LoL! | 2019-04-20T00:20:45Z | http://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/2014/05/24/invitation-to-president-of-sri-lanka-by-mr-narendra-modi-stirs-up-a-hornets-nest-in-tamil-nadu/ |
Successful sociological research stems from a variety of factors. Clearly avoiding any ethical problems is a priority, as the safety and interests of those being researched and the researcher are paramount. However, to be successful, research must overcome any practical barriers, too, as these can impact on both the quantity and quality of the data collected. However, the nature of undertaking research that involves studying people means that it is not uncommon to encounter unintended consequences. Sociologists must always be alert to the fact that their research can have an impact on their respondents. It follows that conformity to professional ethical guidelines, such as those published by the BSA, is essential in the pursuit of successful research.
This is a detailed introduction focusing on the question.
Practical problems are often overlooked and not seen as so important in research but they can sometimes make or break it. An obvious starting point in considering factors that determine the success of research is the issue of adequate funding. Because research is expensive, without adequate funding the research proposal will have to be either reduced in scope or terminated prematurely. Either way the quality and quantity of data collected will be affected.
This paragraph examines the practical problems that can derive from funding issues.
Research can be time-consuming and therefore expensive. This is particularly the case with long-term research projects. If funding runs out prematurely then the research may be terminated. Another practical problem with long-term research is when participants drop out. When this happens the representativeness of the sample becomes undermined, lessening the value of the research.
The practical problem of time is unpacked in this paragraph. A good methodological point is made in the last sentence.
Sometimes the research method can be problematic for the researcher. If it is not the first choice of the sociologist, he or she may feel the research suffers from using a method he or she doesn’t feel comfortable with. However, the research situation often dictates which method would be most appropriate. Large samples necessitate the use of questionnaires. Therefore it is difficult to collect qualitative data when samples are large.
The problem of using methods that are not necessarily the ideal choice of the researcher can be problematic. This paragraph gives examples of how and why this situation might arise.
The career-based motives that lie behind a lot of research can shape the nature and extent of investigations. Because universities put enormous pressure on academics to publish their research, this means that what they choose to study is rarely a free choice. Research can be influenced by factors like their career specialism, what area might lead to funding or to promotion. It follows that whether research is qualitative or quantitative, such practical factors can shape it either positively or negatively by undermining its quality.
The issue of how pressure to publish from academic institutions and career aspirations can drive research and certain research areas is discussed here.
The first duty of any researcher is to obtain informed consent from the respondents. Sometimes this is not practical, as with the case of covert observation, which raises the interesting question as to whether all covert observations are ethically dubious unless shown to be appropriate and justified. Covert participation could be seen as unethical because deceit is essential. For non-covert research, participants must be able to sign their consent; they should be informed of the purpose and nature of the research; they should have the right to withdraw at any time; and they should not be made to participate under duress. However, it is worth noting that informed consent does not in itself make the research ethical.
The ethical issue of confidentiality and informed consent is discussed here. Note the two evaluative points at the end of the paragraph.
Another problem associated with participant research is the practical problem of ‘going native’. This refers to when researchers get too close to the people they are studying. While this can increase the quality of valid data, it can also be problematic by undermining the judgement and objectivity of the researcher. If a researcher is seen to side with one particular group in research this could lead to conflict or cause other groups to become resentful. Clearly, the dynamics of research and the interaction between researchers and their subjects can be problematic and professional judgement should always be used to ensure that research practice is correct and appropriate. However, any research that involves children is especially sensitive.
The potential problems of going native and professionalism are discussed here. A useful point about children is included at the end.
An essential ethical issue is that all respondents should be guaranteed anonymity and everything they say treated in the strictest confidence. A problem here is that identity can be inadvertently disclosed when research is published, simply from the way roles or situations are described. An essential feature of good research is that nobody should be harmed or disadvantaged, and inadvertently disclosing an identity could have serious consequences. Researchers must protect respondents, especially when researching sensitive issues where people are vulnerable. However, anonymity cannot be provided in research that involves focus groups as people voice their views in front of others.
The ethical issue of anonymity is discussed here. There is a good AO2 evaluative point in the final paragraph.
In conclusion it is clear that if researchers adhere to the professional research guidelines of the BSA then the risks of research becoming problematic are lessened. However, it follows that good research does involve overcoming the many practical and ethical issues that can render it problematic.
This is a short conclusion but one that refers back explicitly to the question, supporting the statement.
Can sociology be regarded as a science?
1 Positivism is a theoretical approach to research associated especially with the classical sociologists, who argued that the only approach to unbiased knowledge is through adoption of the methods of science. It is associated with the quantitative approach and research is centred on the collection of social facts. Durkheim demonstrated a positivistic approach in his famous study of suicide.
2 Durkheim used the term ‘social fact’ to refer to objective measurable facts that exist in society.
3 The term ‘empirical’ applies to data that can be measured or counted. Therefore the term ‘empirical evidence’ refers to supporting data that have been measured in an objective manner that can be subject to some form of verification. Thus empirical evidence of suicide statistics refers to the suicides that have been officially recorded by coroners — this does not necessarily prove, however, that it is a true reflection of suicidal behaviour; just that it is a measured amount.
4 The ‘hypothetico-deductive method’ is associated with the positivistic/scientific approach to research. It is centred on the deduction of a problem or relationship in a logical and systematic fashion that involves four stages: observation of a particular phenomenon; developing a hypothesis; experimentation; and analysis of the data collected. The hypothesis should then be either confirmed or rejected. If the latter occurs then another hypothesis needs to be constructed.
5 Quantifiability is important to positivists because adopting a scientific approach means that data collected are essentially numerical and factual. Statistics can therefore be compared, correlations identified and, if possible, cause-and-effect relationships established.
6 The research method most commonly used by positivists is the social survey in the form of questionnaires or structured interviews. Durkheim also favoured the comparative method, but this is not used exclusively by positivists as Max Weber also used it. Another method that could be used is the experiment, but sociologists do not commonly use this method.
The subject matter of sociology is different from the natural sciences. Our subject matter has consciousness, and therefore is aware it is being experimented on. As a consequence, behaviour may change and no longer be natural. This is referred to as the ‘experimenter effect’, which renders the data collected largely useless.
When scientists undertake experiments in the laboratory they ideally are able to isolate all variables except the one independent variable they are testing. With people it is impossible to control for all variables, so it is impossible to prove categorically that an outcome in the laboratory is due to an independent variable, or something that has influenced the person earlier in their life, such as socialisation, culture etc.
Many consider the very principle of experimenting on people as unethical. The subject of psychology is full of suspect experiments such as Milgram’s experiment on authority. It is claimed that researchers pay scant regard to the trauma and distress people can take away from the experiment.
8 Interpretivists’ starting point is that the subject matter of sociology is fundamentally different from the natural sciences as people are conscious and aware that they are being studied. In addition, their actions are voluntaristic and driven by meanings rather than being shaped by structures beyond people’s control. As a consequence, positivism is viewed as over-deterministic, ignoring people’s agency.
9 Weber used the term ‘verstehen’ to refer to the process of empathising with those being researched. He argued that the task of the researcher is to investigate how those being investigated interpret the world. In order to succeed in this task, the sociologist has to get inside their heads and see the world through their eyes. ‘Verstehen’ literally means ‘to understand’.
10 Realism is sometimes compared with peeling an onion because, unlike positivists, realists do not believe that social phenomena are necessarily observable. So just as the rings of an onion are only observable when the paper skin is removed, so the researcher has to probe beneath the surface of society to discover what is really going on.
11 Realists recognise strengths in the positivist approach and phenomenology and so attempt to break down the division between a preference for quantitative data (mainly by positivists) and the opposing view of interpretivists who insist on the primary importance of qualitative data. Therefore a realist approach will typically collect both quantitative and qualitative data.
12 The comparative method was developed first by Emile Durkheim within a positivist framework in his classic study of suicide. It supports the scientific approach to research as it involves the systematic comparison of apparently similar phenomena between societies or of groups in a society. However, it is also a method embraced by Max Weber who is most closely associated with the interpretivist approach to research. It is therefore a practical method that cuts across the traditional theoretical dichotomy of positivism/interpretivism and has been widely used by anthropologists in the past.
The interpretive approach was developed by Alfred Schultz and Edmund Husserl from the work and ideas of Max Weber. It developed as an alternative to the positivist approach associated originally with Comte and Durkheim who argued that sociology should adopt the same positivist approach that had enabled natural scientists to establish laws of nature. The interpretive approach regards this scientific approach as flawed as humans are distinctly different from the research matter of scientists and therefore cannot be studied objectively. However, the interpretive approach itself has been criticised for lacking rigour and inevitably resulting in subjective analysis. This essay will explore the merits of each and explore whether the logical approach is that of realism, combining the strengths of each approach.
This introduction focuses on the question and unpacks briefly the interpretive approach and how it developed as an alternative response to positivism. There is a brief critique of the interpretive approach with signposting of how the answer will progress. It gets the answer off to a good start — an important function of introductions.
The positivist approach embraces the scientific method. In addition, it should be viewed as a feature of its time of development: that is, a product of the period of modernity. The essence of positivism is that something can only be researched if it is directly observable. Positivists believe that external structural forces determine behaviour and ideas. Comte advocated an approach to research that embraced a rigorous methodology that would give sociology the same status as the natural sciences. To achieve this he stressed the importance of seeking out facts through observation in order to establish law-like regularities. However, although Durkheim supported this scientific method of inquiry, he felt that Comte was wrong to predict that it would one day lead to sociology being ‘the queen of sciences’!
Although this question is on the interpretive approach, it was felt necessary to discuss what preceded it and why it developed in opposition to it. The last evaluative point is interesting, as it differentiates Durkheim from Comte and offers a hint as to its potential weakness.
The interpretive approach completely rejects the deterministic view of positivism. It fundamentally disagrees with the assumption that people’s behaviour is shaped by external forces beyond their human control. Instead, interpretivists argue that human behaviour needs to be understood in terms of the meanings that lie behind people’s actions. Behaviour is thus linked to agency, rather than structures. Research is therefore embracing the approach of microsociology with the individual as the starting point and Weber’s ideas of social interaction. This approach focuses on the way individuals interact with one another and embraces Weber’s concept of ‘verstehen’, which means ‘to understand’. However, because understanding the social world depends so much on the interpretations of the researcher, it is argued that this could lead to a dangerous and subjective interpretation of people’s behaviour.
This paragraph outlines the interpretive approach in some detail and links it to the work of Weber and ‘verstehen’. Credit could have been given here to Schultz and Husserl who particularly developed the interpretive research position. A good evaluative point is made and there is a return to the question at the end of this paragraph.
It is argued by its advocates that interpretive sociology has produced some of the best sociological research. They argue that for sociology to really understand human behaviour it has to get to the heart of its subject matter, or as Hughes expressively stated: ‘get the seats of your pants dirty!’ As a consequence some amazing research has been undertaken into gangs (Whyte), schools (Willis) and religious groups (Barker’s participant observation of Moonies). However, critics argue there is always a danger of researchers getting too close to their subject matter, a process known as ‘going native’. If this happens, it will inevitably result in subjective and biased interpretations. Positivists thus argue a degree of distance and rigour is necessary in any research to remain objective and faithful to the truth.
This paragraph gives further justification of the interpretive approach. It is good to include examples; these are all classics and a little dated. Examiners will applaud evidence of awareness of recent research (Blundell and Griffiths, Sociology Since 2000 is a good source). Candidates could take a case study (or two) of interpretive sociology and write a paragraph either defending its approach (challenging the question) or criticising its approach (supporting the question). The evaluation point at the end again will secure AO2 marks and is a further reference back to the question.
Since the 1960s some sociologists, such as Berger and Luckman, have argued that the debate about structure versus agency is a sterile and meaningless exercise. Instead they have advocated a new approach embracing both action and structure. Their argument is that it is not possible to make sense of people’s behaviour without considering the sort of societies they live in. They have claimed that both the positivist and interpretive positions have some validity. People through agency create structures; however, once created, these structures shape and influence people.
There is an interesting inclusion of Berger and Luckman in this answer. They are not prominent sociologists, but their contribution to this debate is quite well known. Examiners will reward critical inclusions like this.
Anthony Giddens developed a similar idea through his theory of structuration whereby he argued that we cannot isolate structure and action from each other. His idea is an attempt to understand how people create structures but at the same time how structures constrain our actions. His bottom line is that if there were no structures, then human experience would not be possible. This fundamentally challenges the interpretive view that we can make sense of human behaviour by simply attempting to understand the motives that lie behind actions.
The work of Giddens and structuration theory is also an interesting inclusion. Like Berger and Luckman, he wants to get away from the idea that a valid approach is either structure or agency. Instead an approach that embraces both is advocated.
Realism recognises strengths in both the interpretivist and positivist approaches, yet it is also critical of key elements in both. Realists share the positivist view that the social world is made up of structures, but it disagrees that these are necessarily observable. It also shares the view of interpretivists that, because people have consciousness, they can both create and recreate the social world. Realists often adopt a triangulation approach to research and will collect both quantitative data and qualitative data, arguing that the strengths of each compensate for the weakness of the other.
The approach of realism is discussed and unpacked here. The paragraph could do with an evaluative point at the end of it.
Ray Pawson, as a realist, supports the premise of the question. He argues that the problem with the interpretive approach is that it can result in multiple interpretations. It therefore follows that there can never be any definitive, literal accounts of social action but only versions of why it has taken place, produced from the point of view of different observers. Therefore, realists criticise the interpretive approach on the grounds that if we have no access to the original data, how can this be objectively verified? With only descriptions of observations or accounts of interviews, we have to rely entirely on the researcher’s integrity in remaining unbiased.
The first sentence of this paragraph, mentioning the work of Pawson the realist, refers back to the question. Further critical ideas undermining the interpretive approach are discussed in the second half of this paragraph.
It is because of the problems discussed above that many research sociologists now embrace a combination of both interpretive and positivist approaches. By using this third approach of realism they can undertake research that embodies the strengths of each approach. The strengths of one approach can compensate for the weaknesses of the other. Therefore any risk of subjectivity in an interpretive approach can be balanced by the rigour and objectivity of the positivist nature of the realist approach. Realism, by advocating a triangular approach to methods and the collection of both quantitative and qualitative data, thus helps to overcome any accusation of subjectivity on the part of the researcher.
The approach of realism is reinforced here. There is further critical focus back to the question, which will be appreciated and rewarded by examiners.
In conclusion, although the interpretive approach can take some credit for producing engaging research, it does run the risk, as positivists have argued, of being little more than subjective interpretation. In response to this accusation, realists would argue for a third way that recognises both the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
This is a short but competent conclusion that is focused on the question. Note that conclusions do not have to be long, but are an essential part of an essay and should always return to the question. | 2019-04-24T08:00:44Z | http://essaydocs.org/aqa-a2-sociology-unit-4-crime-and-deviance-with-theory-and-met.html?page=18 |
In politics, business, advocacy, and media, there are veterans on the American landscape who have the potential to make a big difference in the months ahead. Some of them are well-known; many of them are not (but should be).
William McNulty is a former Marine infantryman who later transitioned into the intelligence community. In 2010 he assumed a new mission with what would eventually become Team Rubicon, a non-profit disaster relief organization he co-founded with fellow Marine Jake Wood.
Since then, Team Rubicon has grown considerably. The permanent staff now oversees some 16,000 volunteers who deploy wherever disaster strikes. Late this year, McNulty stepped back from the main organization to focus on an ambitious project to take TR international.
In 2015, with McNulty now managing director of Team Rubicon Global, look for greater impact from the five-year-old organization as it expands to support relief efforts worldwide. This franchise approach will model Team Rubicon's successes with American veterans and allow foreign military vets to continue to serve in their communities.
Annapolis grad and former Marine Don Faul got to his new job by way of Google and Facebook, a great training track for the task he faces as Pinterest's head of Operations.
Faul is already making waves with his innovative approach to the site's ad units, substituting the standard way of charging an advertiser per one thousand impressions for a model that charges by the amount visitors actually click on an ad – a huge benefit for the small businesses that frequent Pinterest. Faul's leadership could make a big difference in Pinterest's performance, and beyond that, in how social media is monetized next year and beyond.
A day after winning the most contested Senate race in the country -- a race punctuated by ads that showcased her talking about castrating cows -- Maj. Joni Ernst showed up for duty with the Iowa National Guard where she's served since 1993.
She now arrives in D.C. as the only female combat veteran in the Senate, and the Republican side of the aisle is ready to use that for all it's worth. "It's really good for our National Defense," Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley told National Review Online, "having [Ernst serve] in the Senate will be good for all debate on national security."
Along with co-founder and West Point grad Taylor Justice, Air Force reservist and tanker pilot Dan Brillman has figured out a way to leverage web technology to allow eligible parties to effectively navigate the "Sea of Good Will" -- the 40,000 organizations dedicated to helping veterans that have historically presented a challenge because of their sheer number and dizzying overlap.
Brillman created Unite US, a website that uses "interactive, proximity-mapping technology" to match vets to the services they need – sort of like Yelp for the military dot-org ecosystem. If you haven't used UniteUS.com yet, by the end of 2015 you will have.
Seth Moulton's reluctant entry into politics was spurred primarily by his experiences as a Marine across four tours during the Iraq War – a war he didn't believe in. After getting his MBA at Harvard and working for a start-up for a while, he decided to run for Congress as a Democrat in Massachusetts sixth district.
He ultimately won the election after unseating a longstanding incumbent during the primary. The same work ethic, intelligence, and moxie that made him a Gen. Petraeus acolyte should serve him well on the Hill. If anyone has the pedigree and problem solving skills to get something done from across the aisle in a Republican-majority Congress, it's Moulton.
After an award-winning career as a Marine Corps combat correspondent, Brian Adam Jones honed his journalism chops at Business Insider, working as a reporting intern for the military section.
This year he joined (and helped launch) the HirePurpose blog "Task & Purpose" as editor-in-chief, and in short order his content choices and writing helped that website become a breakout property among a host of emerging military-affinity destinations.
And he's just getting started; Jones is currently working on a political science degree at Columbia in addition to his gig at Task & Purpose. Make it a point to find his byline in 2015.
PATRICK MURPHY -- Host of MSNBC's "Taking the Hill"
Patrick Murphy was the first Iraq War vet to be elected to Congress in 2007, but his political career was short-circuited in 2011 when the Tea Party helped orchestrate his defeat in Pennsylvania's 8th District, primarily because of his work in repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
Murphy fell back into legal work until he was approached to host a new show on MSNBC. "Taking the Hill" is the only broadcast network program dedicated to military issues and veteran advocacy, and the show was just picked up for a second season. Look for bigger impact in 2015 as Murphy continues to find his voice as a host and gains more creative control over program topics.
PHIL KLAY -- Author of "Redeployment"
The New Yorker said this about Army vet Phil Klay's debut Redeployment: "The best literary work thus far written by a veteran of America's recent wars . . . Klay's fiction peels back every pretty falsehood and self-delusion in the encounter between veterans and the people for whom they supposedly fought."
This year Klay was awarded National Book Award for Fiction -- the first Iraq war veteran do so -- and he was also named a National Book Foundation '5 Under 35′ honoree. Whenever he puts pen to paper going forward, his will be an important and credible voice on behalf of those who served during our most recent wars.
Tom Cotton first came to the attention of conservatives when he wrote The New York Times a nastygram from the Iraq War because of a story the paper published that he believed hazarded the safety of his troops. Since that time he's been shaped into a new breed of veteran politician: an anti-progressive in spite of his Harvard degree, one who's Tea Party-friendly but whose views are shaped as much by reason as ideology.
A recent Atlantic Monthly article put it this way: "He unites the factions of the Republican civil war: The establishment loves his background, while the Tea Party loves his ideological purity." That combo could be used to good effect – the kind that actually causes outcomes – as he continues to represent the people of Arkansas' 4th District next year.
While working toward his undergraduate degree at Georgetown University, former Marine and Afghan War vet T.M. Gibbons-Neff has emerged as a high-impact writer with bylines in vaunted publications like The New York Times andThe Washington Post.
As an intern with The Post, Neff landed a significant scoop earlier this year with a story that revealed that Maj. Doug Zembiec, the "lion of Fallujah" who was killed in 2007, was actually working for the CIA at the time.
Gibbons-Neff is a guy to watch in that he shows a deft hand by leveraging his warfighting experience while remaining an objective journalist -- a skill few possess who deign to cover the topics surrounding national security.
Tulsi Gabbard deployed to Iraq with the Hawaii Army National Guard in 2004, and eight years later she was elected to represent Hawaii's second congressional district. With a diverse background -- she's just 33, thereby one of just a handful of millennials in the House -- and the first member of the Hindu faith to be elected to Congress. She's also just one of two female combat veterans in office.
"I saw in Congress we had fewer veterans serving than had ever served before in our nation's history and you have people making very important decisions about where and when our troops go into battle," Gabbard told Yahoo News. As the Obama Administration continues to struggle with how to best counter threats like ISIS, watch how Gabbard leverages her war experience going forward.
After earning his MBA, Navy veteran Todd Connor started to miss military life while working as a consultant, so he approached Chicago-based tech incubator 1871 with the idea of creating an effort dedicated to veterans.
The result was "The Bunker," a group of entrepreneurs helping vets avoid the pitfalls of tech start-up life as they struggle to get their businesses off the ground – sort of like a friendlier version of the TV show "Shark Tank." Connor has a vision of national dominance, and "The Bunker" detachments have sprouted up from Boston to Austin to Los Angeles.
Anu Bhagwati's path to becoming an advocate on behalf of female service members started during her time in the Marine Corps where she weathered myriad examples of sexual harassment and found no quarter within the system designed to protect her and then found no justice when she attempted to go around it.
She channeled her frustration and anger into action in the form of the Service Women's Action Network, a nonprofit organization that works to end discrimination, harassment and assault in the military. In short order Bhagwati's clear voice and unflinching approach to SWAN's mission has influenced policies at the VA and legislation on Capitol Hill. Look for her to keep the pressure up into the new year.
Business Insider labeled Owen West as "the most badass banker on Wall Street" a couple of years ago, and his efforts since then have done nothing but reinforce that title.
West left his lucrative job at Goldman-Sachs three times to serve during the Iraq War. He defines "Renaissance Man": Novelist and historian; triathlete, world traveler, and philanthropist. But perhaps most importantly, his day job as the director of Goldman-Sachs' veterans networkunderwrites the impact of that program and ensures this generation of warfighters have a place in the halls of power on the south end of Manhattan.
Dawn Halfaker was serving as a military police officer when she lost her right arm in an ambush in Iraq in 2004. Her employment struggles after being medically retired from the Army motivated her to start Halfaker and Associates, a consultant firm that specializes in government tech solutions.
She's built the business with an eye on veteran hiring, and, in turn, used the lessons learned as a board member for the Wounded Warrior Project, specifically with WWP's "Warriors to Work" employment program. "A lot of business leaders say they want to hire veterans, but don't know ultimately how they can bring veterans in and empower them to be successful, given the cultural differences of the military," Halfaker told The Huffington Post. Look for her to continue bridging that cultural divide in 2015.
Army vet Anthony Noto was named Twitter's CFO this summer after shepherding the social media giant through its IPO, and he'll need to channel the aggressiveness he used as a football player at West Point as the company attempts to, as the Wall Street Journal put it, "transform its mainstream presence into widespread adoption."
Noto's job this year is to diminish investor skepticism by growing Twitter's user base beyond its already gigantic footprint – a suitable challenge for a former Ranger who honed his business chops at Goldman-Sachs and the NFL.
The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America marked a decade of existence in 2014, and the organization is showing no signs of slowing down going into next year. Under the leadership of the well-networked and media-savvy founder Paul Rieckhoff, IAVA championed the Clay Hunt SAV Act – legislation designed to combat the veteran suicide rate – at the end of the year, although the bill's passage was singularly impeded by Sen. Tom Coburn.
As military vets continue to take their own lives at a rate of 22 per day, don't expect Rieckhoff to give up on this issue in 2015.
Former Army intel officer Guy Filippellini co-founded The Commit Foundation to address what he saw as a fundamental flaw in veteran career transition programs he'd seen: One-size-fits-all approaches are largely ineffective.
The Commit Foundation's mission statement is at once lofty and matter-of-fact: "[The foundation] creates serendipity for veterans by fostering mentorship, extending and growing professional networks, promoting familiar camaraderie, and setting the stage for inspiring moments."
The foundation's approach is different than most in that it's focused on what Filippellini calls "small touch high impact efforts," which means they focus on small numbers of veterans at a time and give each "sustained attention." The veteran unemployment problem isn't going away next year, but Filippellini's foundation is poised to lessen it.
Senator John McCain returned to the spotlight at the end of 2014 when the Intelligence Committee's report on CIA enhanced interrogation techniques hit the streets. "[The CIA] stained our national honor, did much harm and little practical good," he said on the senate floor.
McCain also took over as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee this year, which could be sporty considering his criticism of wasteful spending and his currently rocky relationship with the Pentagon. With his unique ability as a Hill provocateur, 2015 could be an exceptionally bad year for weapons programs that are over budget and behind schedule.
Former Army Ranger Robert McDonald took the reins of the VA on the backside of a massive scandal that revealed administrative ineptitude at the agency had led to the deaths of more than 40 veterans.
McDonald was brought aboard primarily because of his experience as CEO of Proctor and Gamble, but also because he has more charisma than his predecessor, the phlegmatic Eric Shinseki. McDonald has already been more visible than Shinseki was, threatening to fire large numbers of entrenched bureaucrats and even making his cell phone number public. As more veterans transition to VA care next year, the pressure is on the new secretary to improve the way the agency has performed overall since 9-11.
The Aspen Institute's Franklin Project "envisions a future in which a year of full-time national service -- a service year -- is a cultural expectation, a common opportunity, and a civic rite of passage for every young American,"according to their website. Jason Mangone is a former Marine Corps infantry officer and the director of the project.
Although he served three tours in Iraq, he is quick to point out that he never saw actual combat and that service is not about that. "While those who bear the costs of battle carry a heavier burden, the rest of us can still rightly say we've served our country," Mangone writes at The Huffington Post. "Serving my country means that I gave up the normal progression of my life -- high school, college, work -- to do something whose end was civic. The same could be said for the veterans of many other types of national service."
In an era where the social contract is increasingly challenged by diverging political outlooks, economic circumstances, and cultural backgrounds, Mangone's effort in leading the Franklin Project may ultimately design the road map toward preserving our national identity.
Though Mat Best did five combat tours to Operation Enduring Freedom/Operation Iraqi Freedom with the 2nd Ranger Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, he's best known for his collection of hilarious videos on YouTube. He's doing something right: His videos that poke fun at military life have been viewed a whopping 13 million+ times.
Besides his videos, he's also written on important topics like PTSD. Best is also the founder and president of Article 15 Clothing, a successful business selling everything from t-shirts to patches to branded coffee. While 2014 has been a huge year for the company, next year looks to be even better. Article 15 is launching their own whiskey brand and the team is scheduled to appear in major movies outside of YouTube.
Tim Kennedy is many things: Special Forces sniper, YouTube video star, and philanthropist. As if that weren't enough, his main gig these days is a professional mixed martial arts fighter in the UFC.
Fighting since 2001, the 35-year-old Kennedy now has an 18-5-0 record in the UFC. In 2014, he had two major fights: a dominant win against Michael Bisping, and a controversial loss against Yoel Romero. (Kennedy maintains Romero cheated during the fight by sitting on his stool an extra 30 seconds before the final round).
Look for Kennedy to continue his rise in the UFC next year. Also keep an eye out for more of his hilarious videos, which are usually put together by Ranger Up.
MAXIMILIAN URIARTE -- Creator, "Terminal Lance"
In 2010, then-Marine Lance Cpl. Max Uriarte launched "Terminal Lance," a web comic that captures the grunt-level view of life in the Corps. Drawing on his time in the service -- with two deployments to Iraq -- Uriarte runs a 300,000+ fan-strong Facebook empire that drives readers to his site where he posts two new comics each week.
Now four years old, the strip has matured into a must-read for military personnel, while also making Uriarte a celebrity among Marines. His Terminal Lance brand helped him fund a successful Kickstarter campaign for a graphic novel he's working on, which brought in more than $160,000. While he works on the novel -- working title "The White Donkey" –Max also has plans to move into animation next year.
Jas Boothe was a captain who'd been in the Army for 13 years when she was hit with a double whammy: She found out she had cancer and her home in New Orleans was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
The single mother was suddenly homeless and unemployed. As she fought for her family and her dignity, she discovered there were many other female veterans suffering the same plight. She founded Final Salute to address the problem, and she created the Ms. Vet America event (don't call it a "pageant") to bring visibility to the organization. Look for more from Boothe and the Ms. Vet America event in 2015.
We Are The Mighty (WATM) is dedicated to serving the military community with authentic entertainment and original content. With a team of military veterans and civilian military supporters, WATM features premium original and curated video programming of all genres as well as photography, stories, quizzes, lists and much more. For more, visit the We Are the Mighty site. | 2019-04-23T19:15:28Z | https://www.military.com/veterans-day/25-military-veterans-impact-in-2015.html |
Seeing as how at the time I had about as much insight into my behavior as, say, George Costanza — who, in a short-sighted moment of his own, almost certainly would have elected to have the world populated with six billion of himself — in my fit of righteous indignation I was unable to see that a world populated with six billion of me would be a freakish and frightening place.
There would be certain obvious and immediate benefits, but also some weird side-effects. I can say without doubt that sidewalk traffic would always be an orderly affair, with everyone walking smartly past each other on the right, though their eyes would be permanently averted to avoid that accidental sidewalk-glance awkwardness.
Libraries would grow to be among the richest institutions in the world, because every citizen would find himself mysteriously incapable of returning his books on time no matter how hard he tried. The fines would generate billions.
Politics would be even duller than it is now, particularly because none of the citizens would be quite outgoing enough to run for office, even though anyone who did would win in a landslide.
Nobody would ask for directions, or seek help with their schoolwork, which is just as well because they’d have nothing new to teach each other anyway.
And perhaps most obviously, considering the circumstances, they would definitely all be gay. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) Now, as it stands right at this moment, I can’t imagine finding any inclination to get down with a dude. But with drastically different circumstances — whose weight and feeling I couldn’t possibly comprehend until I’m in them — I suspect it would be inevitable that I’d behave in ways I currently find to be unimaginable.
As much as I like to think I’ve matured a lot since eleven, when someone else’s behavior irks me I often still find myself thinking that people really should be acting in ways that make sense to me — how I would act, or at least how I think I would. I often think “If I can act this way, they should be able to also.” If I can refrain completely from drinking and driving, or getting in fist-fights, or taking eight minutes to count out my change at the counter, it is reasonable to expect that any other given person can, at all times.
The undeniable fact (and I think I’m only half-joking at this point) that a population of Davids would by its very nature find itself to be entirely gay highlights an important point. You see, I’m not gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but it’s clear that the same person in different circumstances would do different things, and develop different values, different capabilities, different needs and different fears. Different things would make them lash out. Different things would make them crumple and sob.
And all we see as outsiders is what others do. We get no reliable insight as to why. It’s hard enough accounting for your own behavior.
Differing life situations and personal experiences are what create our inclinations to act the way we do. Even if everyone started out the same, the variety of our respective experiences carve a different arc for each person’s story. Yet, if you’re anything like me (maybe you’re not, what do I know?), you can easily slip into the belief — usually when you’re pissed off — that any given person, at any time, should have the insight, the know-how, and the inclination necessary to act like you think they should.
That asinine thought — that other people need to be more like me — is really a demand of the most childish kind: I want things to be easy for me, and when they’re not it’s because other people are being stupid, and I know better. There is more than a bit of that eleven-year-old left in me.
So if you ever find yourself thinking that thought — that other people need to be more like you, I urge you to think about that dismal, womanless world of six billion Davids, each struggling to find happiness with what their imperfect world has given them. If you can appreciate their plight, then it should be easier to make do with a world that at least offers a little more variety in its dysfunction.
After all, that’s what we’re always working with anyway. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I can’t say I have ever considered that the world would be a better place if everyone was like me but I do think some of those commons sense behaviours you mentions could be a little more adhered to by the general population. Blocking walkways and door ways, selfishly using the entire bike rack, not being mindful when driving, pushing in when there is a line up, not using manners drive me nuts at times. But like you say if everyone was the same the world would be a boring place Oh well never mind!
I liked your picture at the top of the post it proves men should not be left at home with a tripod and a digital camera as they get up to all kinds of mischief. My husband did the same thing recently. I love him dearly but one of him is enough too.
What I was trying to get at was that the values we uphold ourselves become what we call “common sense,” while we remain oblivious to the ways in which we are undoubtedly vexing others on a regular basis. It’s as if we always consider ourselves to be the people who are meeting a reasonable standard of conduct. We calibrate “common sense” based on how others inconvenience us. The phrase common sense tends to be used only when describing the apparent shortcomings of other people.
don’t worry I know I have plenty of short comings of my own and I try to discipline myself not to inflict those on the unsuspecting public. Needless to say I am sure I am not successful 100% of the time but at least I am trying.
I am actually thinking same thing. Until now, I can’t totally understand why people have different attitude like me. Personally, I find myself responsible. So if everybody possess that kind of attitude, they might have much better lives. On the other hand, that’s why God created us differently so we can play different roles in this world.
I’m usually fairly good at excusing other people for their behaviour, especially when other people around me are being overly judgemental or angry, so usually I don’t find myself wishing for a world of people like me. I tend to think most people are like me anyway, in some ways. Sometimes I figure someone acted ‘badly’ because they had a bad day (like I sometimes do), or they had their head in the clouds (as I nearly always do), or were a bit forgetful or thoughtless (as I often am). Although I admit there are some acts that I can never explain, so matter how hard I try to rationalise them.
The initial thought I had when I saw the blog post and before reading it was: if there was just another one of me, I may well become gay. I think in the end we’re all looking for someone who can really understand us, who can relate to our weaknesses and faults, and enjoy the same things that bring us joy. And yet, it seems pretty much impossible in theory to find someone who is like us in so many ways (and heck, maybe that’s not as desirable as I think it might be, anyway – though I am perhaps a little narcissistic anyway, so I’m aware of my bias) so we make do with something close to comfortable.
Great title! If everyone in the world were exactly like me, I’d have to find a new way to be. It would be my worst nightmare to be exactly like everyone else.
I usually embrace the differences. When someone seems extraordinarily rude or obnoxious, I assume they are either lower on the spiritual ladder, or maybe they found out their loved one is cheating on them that day… so I tend to feel a little sorry for them, rather than upset. I’m sure it’s just as inappropriate as wishing they would behave as I do, but… whatever. We do what we’ve gotta do to cope with those who “travel” with us.
I’ve never pondered a world with 6 billion Lindsays, but I do often think/wish others were as thoughtful as I (try) to be, etc…More than wishing more people were like ME, though, I just often get indignant about how others are. It’s not that I think I’m perfect. I know I’m not. It’s just that it’s far easier to notice how *not* perfect everyone else is.
Attribution error~ gives me the opportunity to see what it is about me that drives me nuts.
Part of the problem is the Golden Rule so many of us learned in Sunday School ~ “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It encourages us to consider how we want others to treat us.
I suppose it could be intriguing to see the different aspects of myself in action, all at the same time, all looking the same (although I would hope I might discover an part of myself with good dress sense), acting independently of each other – so to speak. But isn’t that what we are doing anyway? All different aspects of our own perception of who we are surrounded by. I know I only see a certain side of the people I know and at the same time I can surprise myself by being something to somebody I didn’t know I could be! haha.
I’ve often contemplated how scary the world would be if there were two of me. I’m not sure I want to think about six billion of me.
Honestly though, every time I think about how nice it would be if everyone thought like me, I have to think about how unhappy most of us would be. I’m a computer programmer and I like what I do, but if the world was all like minded to me, society would be completely nonfunctional. There would be no Janitors, no construction workers, no accountants, no artists, no farmers, no teachers, and even though the largest building in any given city would be a Chipotle with a frozen yogurt machine, there’d be nobody making burritos.
I guess what I mean is that thinking of a world full of me gives me a profound respect for the billions of people out there who do the things I don’t want to.
I *love* the title and I love how your mind thinks!
I’ve always said that we need a more enlightened world, and by enlightened I mean what everyone means: more like me.
That’s what I’m getting at. I’m not so sure I got my point across. A world with 6 billion of me isn’t something I ever wished for, it’s just the logical extension of that absurd kind of thinking: that my way is better.
I think you got your point across quite clearly :-) It is an important thing to remind ourselves of often, as the ego likes us to think our way is THE way – or that we even really understand what is happening at all (such as WHY that person is walking so slowly, or that our need for speed is more important than their needs, etc). Such thinking distorts our expression of ourselves as the loving compassionate beings we are when ego falls away.
Such thinking also highlights the ways in which we like to think that our one wee mind can possibly understand, interpret, assess, and analyze every possibility and probability occurring in the world around us and know the best course of action for each and every individual to take as we move together through this human story, in order to create the best outcome. No, rather, we only see one tiny perspective. It is like we are peering through the lens of a microscope at one cell of a larger organism, and trying to say that OUR decision about that one cell and its needs are OBVIOUSLY more important, logical, practical, and necessary than that of any around it. Little do we recall, it seems, that we live in a closed system, wherein everything is interconnected. It is akin to your heart thinking it is separate from the rest of your body. Well, we know that when one system in the body is out of whack, it affects the rest of the organism. Perhaps if the heart understood what its greater demand was doing to the rest of the body, it would think twice…?
Or one could look at it another way: just as we think others are expendable, perhaps we are equally so. Even in a closed system, energy is often transformed. Even our human body decomposes, and becomes food for worms, which eventually weaves us into the ecosystem in a new way. Sorry for the morbidity here. Just…we like to think we are so consequential, and so all-knowing. Personally I used to want to ‘save the world’ or at least ‘change it for the better.’ But then I realized, all I can change is me. And that…quite honestly, what is ‘better’ for me, and fits my definition, may not be better for everyone. I tried at first to change that to ‘sustainable’ but … sustainable for WHOM? For humanity. A virus, though, could argue otherwise, and that humans are only necessary as hosts, and that other hosts could be found were humans to disappear. Not that I’m arguing for such :-) I’m just saying, it is ALL egocentric in the end. And when I really got down to it, I realized: Why do I think My Way, or even ME, am more important, or wiser, or better, than all the great minds that have passed before me, and which will come after me?
Don’t take that wrong – I’ve not got low self-esteem. I love the body I have here and now to enjoy, and I treat it well. I wake each morning loving the fact that I am ALIVE, and appreciating the faculties with which I can enjoy exploring this earth and everything in it. But….at this point, I never take a moment of that for granted, or assume that it is mine to have and hold. I am simply honored with the privilege of enjoying it through the lens of conscious awareness at this moment in time. Right here, right now, I have this lens through which to peer, to enjoy a close-up perspective of reality.
Another way I like to look at is this: Think of an impressionist painting. Stand close and all you see are a bunch of little dots. Step back, and you see a whole picture, you understand what story those little dots are telling. But right here, right now, in this body, on this planet, all I see is one little dot. My perspective is that little dot. I am IN IT. I am IN LIFE. That means I am too close to POSSIBLY EVEN BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND the big picture I’m living inside. That thought is, for me, pretty humbling. And to circle back to your 6 billion Davids….what a boring picture that story would be if every dot were the same! We need variety to create differentiation in the picture, to shade and pattern it, to give it depth and add perspective.
Life is beautiful, especially when we realize all we can know, change, or do is to be as perfectly ourselves as humanly possible, living in alignment with what we know at our core, and to stop interfering with others thinking we know who they should be. Fall in love with learning who you are, and the job of BEING just that…and it takes you out of the obsession to worry about how others should be.
I love your words David. I am so grateful for your blog, I am quite falling in love with it. I have hungered for a new font of external intellectual stimulation, and I am, for now, finding that hunger sated here. Much gratitude.
So i made a decision to make my and others life easier. First, communicate with others always with a smile (its nice to share something positive like smiles) and when ever i get into annoying situation i think of three possibilities: there is some kind of lesson for me to learn i.e. patience, understanding, listening etc., the person might be having a bad day, or the person haven’t had any lesson learned yet from his/her attitude.
What a great article David. I personally believe there is a lot of that 11 year old left in all of us. The overwhelming majority of people think they know what’s right, thus the desire is there to impose our expectations on others. But when you think about it for a while you know better. If everyone decided to think, speak, act and live the same; we’d be bored out of our freaking minds. The joy of life is in the variety, but I admit it doesn’t always feel that way.
For me, there would always be long lines at cash registers. I have a that inability to simply take out a reasonable-sized bill and hand it over. I spend a minute flipping through my wallet to see what’s in there, take a bill out, decide I don’t want to break it, start looking again from the beginning, and then desperately just pull out a few bills and hope they cover the price. Do a quick count as I hand them over, then throw a couple more in. Five seconds later I am handed coins, bills, receipt, and coupons. I just stuff everything into my pockets in a ball.
I really don’t know how people do it smoothly.
The key is to be patient after you’ve paid, move aside and take the time to put all the bills into your wallet in order. Then when it’s time to pay again, you know where your twenties, tens, fives and ones are. You can always find the right combination that way. And don’t be afraid of breaking bills. You end up with the same money.
Thanks for finally filling me in on that. :) Nah, I understand it, but it just seems like everyone is better at it than me. That’s okay though.
There would be so much random awesomeness if there was 7 billion me’s.
would there be both male and female personifications of me? | 2019-04-25T22:20:53Z | https://www.raptitude.com/2011/01/if-the-world-was-populated-by-six-billion-of-me-id-totally-be-gay/ |
Said Hammami was born in Jaffa in 1941. His father, Adil, was a member of the city council and of the Istiqlaal (Independence) Party. In 1948, when war broke out, many Palestinian supporters of the Hashemite family fled eastward to Jordan, while backers of the mufti of Jerusalem, who was then in an alliance with the Egyptian regime, tended to go south, towards Gaza. The Hammamis, however, decided to stay in Jaffa.
But the Haganah (the Israeli armed forces) soon began deporting Arabs from the city. The Hammami family ‒ mother, father, five daughters, and seven sons ‒ were placed on a lorry, along with what possessions they could muster, and driven south. At a crossroads, they were ordered off the lorry and directed toward Gaza. Their possessions remained behind. Said Hammami spent the early years of his exile in Gaza [according to his daughter Rasha, the family went to Port Said for a while, then lived in a camp in Lebanon, before ending up in Jordan two or so years later], but later managed to make his way to Lebanon, where he became active in the Palestinian resistance movement. In the early 1970s, he became the official representative in London of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Hammami took a keen interest in the political groupings in Britain, and in particular in those that concerned themselves with the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict. He became aware of the activities of a group of anti-Zionist Israelis living in Britain and several other European countries, as they participated in a number of movements together. Some personal contacts were established.
After the October war of 1973, an intense factional struggle erupted within the Palestinian movement over the prospects of what came to be called “the peaceful solution”. Discussion of closely related matters arose alongside this debate. What is the nature of the Israeli Jewish population? Do they constitute a collection of coreligionists, an ethnic group, a nationality? What rights should they have, if any, in a “liberated” Palestine? Could anti-Zionist Israeli Jews play any part in the fight against Zionism? Was any cooperation between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs possible, and if so, on what basis?
In 1975, the Socialist Organization in Israel, publishers of the journal Matzpen, approached Said Hammami with the proposal that he grant them an interview dealing with some of these questions, to be published in Hebrew in Israel. The interviewer would be Moshe Machover, a member of Matzpen, a founder of Khamsin and member of its editorial group, and one of Israel’s most active anti- Zionists abroad, who had established friendly personal relations with Hammami in London. Hammami agreed to this request; subsequently, at his suggestion, the interview was transformed into a dialogue, with a more active participation by Machover.
The final text of this dialogue was translated into Hebrew and published by Matzpen in Israel, where it achieved some notoriety. It was also published, in a French translation, in Khamsin 3, under the title “Vivre Ensemble“.
There had, of course, been previous written exchanges of views between Palestinian organizations and Israelis ‒ but these were conducted at long range, so to speak, the participants merely writing articles discussing one another’s positions. On the other hand, there had been informal, personal contacts between Israelis and Arabs. But this was the first time that an official representative of the Palestinian movement had agreed, in his official capacity, to engage in a face-to-face exchange of views with an Israeli in a format designed from the outset to produce a discussion intended for publication ‒ and publication in Israel at that. For that reason alone, the dialogue is of historical interest. But its sequel lends it a special poignancy.
Whatever may be said about Hammami’s political views on particular points, with which one may agree or not, there is no denying the non-sectarianism of his attitude to the Israeli Jewish population: he recognizes that they constitute a nationality just as much as the Palestinian Arabs, and that they, too, are entitled to national right in Palestine. To hear a Palestinian spokesman say this was not necessarily congenial to fanatics on both sides. To the Zionist leaders, Said Hammami was just another “terrorist”, an epithet they freely apply to any Arab who fails to grasp the majesty of the Zionist endeavour. To chauvinists in the Arab camp, he was a traitor simply because he saw the Israelis as a people too, and considered some of them potential partners in a struggle against injustice.
In February 1978, Said Hammami was murdered in London. The assassins were never captured, and no organization claimed responsibility for the act. But it was widely assumed at the time that those responsible were members of the Palestinian group led by Abu Nidal, which had split away from the PLO.
Although the conjunctural situation has changed since this dialogue took place, the deeper issues raised in it are as pressing as ever. In that sense, it has lost none of its significance.
Moshé Machover: If you don’t mind, Said, I’ll start with questions about the long-term aim of the PLO, the unitary democratic secular state. The first question is very simple. In Yasser Arafat’s speech in the UN, and in your article about Palestinian strategy, you say that the Jews now living in Israel are welcome to stay, provided they live together as equals with the Palestinian Arabs. On the other hand, there is that well-known paragraph 6 of the Palestinian Covenant. How do these things square with each other?
Said Hammami: You are right in saying that it is a long-term solution; it cannot be anything but a long-term solution; it cannot happen tomorrow. In paragraph 6 we say that all Jews who were living in Palestine before the Zionist aggression are Palestinians. When did Zionist aggression start? This is not said in the Covenant. If we consider that Zionist aggression started in 1917, then it is true that Jews who were living in Palestine then are Palestinians. Even if we consider that Zionist aggression started in 1947, then again, it is true that Jews then living in Palestine were Palestinians. There was then no state of Israel.
The Covenant was drawn up in 1964 and it was then considered a major step forward in the Palestinians’ understanding of the Jewish community in Palestine, in the Middle East, in Israel. Before 1948, the reactionary leadership ‒ the mufti and the rest ‒ considered that only those Jews who had always lived in Palestine (in old Jerusalem, some in Tiberias, and so on) were Palestinians. The rest had no right to be there and they had to go back. In 1964, Shuqairi and the Covenant said that all Jews who came before the aggression are Palestinians. It was a step forward because the Covenant didn’t speak of the Jews as a religious group opposing us as a religious group. It was no longer a question of holy war.
The Covenant was the only authorized Palestinian charter until 1970. In 1970, in the political programme, the Palestine National Council decided that all Jews living in Israel could be citizens of the democratic state for which we struggle.
Moshé. So the formulation of the 1970 programme supersedes that of Paragraph 6 of the Covenant?
M. In your article about Palestinian strategy and also in some other recent articles by people of the PLO, you talk about the Israeli Jews as a people, not as a religious group. In the past, Palestinian spokespeople have always called the Israeli Jews a religious community. This is implicit, for example, in the formula ‘democratic secular state in which Muslims, Jews, and Christians can live together’. This often-repeated formula refers to the ‘Jews’ exactly as it does to the ‘Christians’ and ‘Muslims’, in other words, as a religious community. From our point of view, this is a mistake. First of all, the majority of Israeli Jews are not religious and consider themselves not as part of a religious group but as part of a national group. Second, from an objective point of view as well, the Jewish community in Israel possesses a national character, since it has all the usual national characteristics, in particular a language of its own. We reject, of course, the Zionist claim that all the Jews of the world constitute a people. But we do think that the Jews of Israel surely constitute a nationality. It is true that this nationality was artificially created through the Zionist colonization and that this process occurred at the expense of the Palestinian Arab people. But just as a hill created by a bulldozer rather than by natural processes is none the less a hill, so a people created artificially is none the less a people, and this fact cannot be ignored. The question then becomes, How will the national character of the Israeli Jewish people find expression, and what will its status be, in the unitary democratic state? There is also another side to this question, concerning the Palestinian Arabs: they have a national character of their own too; they are a people. How do you envisage the way in which these two national entities will find expression in a common unitary state?
S. Well, as you said, I believe, and all progressive Palestinians believe, that the Israeli Jews now living in Palestine constitute a people, a new people, a people that has been created in the fifty years of conflict, but specifically from the mid-forties or so. There is an Israeli working class, there are Israeli progressive organizations. Now, the fact is that there are two peoples: the Palestinian Arab people and the Israeli Jewish people. These two peoples have a just claim to Palestine. I believe that we belong to Palestine, that the country is ours. I also believe that every genuine Israeli Jew, especially those who were born there and have lived there for years and years, believe that they come from this country, that it is their country. I don’t blame them for what Herut have done. I don’t blame them for what the Zionist reactionary and terrorist organizations did to my country. I don’t even blame the present Israeli generation for what their fathers did to me personally, expelling m from my country. But they should also know that we exist as a people and have a just claim to that country. Not a single progressive Palestinian can say to an Israeli Jew, ‘You don’t have a right to this country’. But not a single Israeli Jew can say to a Palestinian Arab, ‘I have more right to this country than you’. We probably have a bit more right to Palestine than the Israeli Jews. The fact is that we both exist as peoples. The question is: ls conflict the only relation possible between these two peoples?
My reply is: Definitely not. This conflict started as a result of the policies and ambitions of the agents of imperialism. On both sides. The reactionary Zionists and reactionary Arabs. The question is now how to bring peace between these two sides, the Palestinian Arab and the Israeli Jews. They both believe that they belong to one country, so the simple answer is, let them both live in it. How can two peoples with different languages and cultures live together? In a secular state, in a democratic state, in a non-sectarian state, or perhaps in a binational state. But they both must live in the same country. Probably as a first step ‒ and I believe that it is a necessary step, an inevitable step, whether we or they like it or not ‒ Palestine should be partitioned between the two peoples.
I say as a first step, and only as a first step, because it is ridiculous to think of such a tiny area divided permanently into two states. You stand at the mountain of al-Salt and you can see the whole country from Baisan to Wadi ‘Araba. You can motor from this side of Palestine to the other in half a day. Apart from the Negev desert, Palestine is a very small country. In the long run, it cannot be divided into two viable independent states. But for the sake of peace between the two peoples, there must be two states as a first step, and from that first step I think the solution will be in the hands of the progressive forces on the two sides.
M. But supposing now that we have managed to unify these two states ‒ I’m talking now about the future. How would the distinct national characters of these two peoples find expression within this unified and common state? I ask this question because the formula repeated so often by PLO spokesmen ‒ ‘a democratic secular state in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews can live together’ ‒ has been rejected by many Israelis who have the best intentions. They would say, more or less: ‘The Palestinian Arabs are waging a war of national liberation, and consider themselves as constituting a national community. But on the other hand, they speak of us as only a religious community. It thus seems that they deny the national existence of the Israeli Jews and do not intend to permit this existence in the future’. Recently, you have explicitly spoken of the Israeli Jews as a people. I would like to ask you, Said, whether within this future unified state that you envisage, there will remain national institutions through which the distinct national cultures, different languages, and so on will be expressed?
S. Yes. It is in our political programme. There will be freedom of expression, freedom of faith, there won’t be any racial discrimination, no national discrimination, and all people will have the right to form their own political and national organizations. I remember in 1971, during the discussion of this first paragraph of our political programme, there was a two-day-long argument about the word ‘national’. Do we accept that the Israeli Jews are a nation and have the right to establish their own national organization in the future Palestine? We did accept this.
You remember, you and I used to discuss this point, and I used to ask you how an anti-Zionist would define the people now living in Israel. I remember you once used the expression ‘Hebrew-speaking community’. And in fact I used this term for some time. Through our continuing discussion of this point, you and I can now call that community the Israeli Jewish people.
As I have said, the Palestinian programme has accepted the idea that within the future unified Palestine, the Israeli Jews will have the right to their own national organization. They have the right to keep their language, their traditions, their faith, their culture. Once we agree that it must be a democratic state, it must be a real democracy, not the kind of so-called democracy that gives privileges to some people while others are under-privileged.
M. And of course, on the other hand, one cannot require from the Palestinian Arabs that they sever their contacts and connections with the rest of the Arab world.
M. I think that the right to form separate trade unions for each nationality ought to be excluded from that list. Trade unions are, or anyway should be, class organizations, and should be organized on a supra-national basis.
You mention the Kurds. Their unhappy existence is often used to show that it is impossible for different peoples to live together. Here are the Kurds in Iraq, and they are being suppressed, and their right to self-determination is not respected. Also, more recently, the events in Lebanon are used by a lot of Zionists to show that living together in a pluralist society does not work.
M. But it was a state composed of different communities having some arrangement to live together. And it does not seem to work.
S. Yes, It did not work for two reasons. First because it was not secular, and second because it was not socialist.
It could not be a secular state when the president must be a Maronite, the prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim, the leader of the Parliament must be a Shi’i Muslim, the commander of the army must be a Maronite, the chief of staff must be a Druze. This is not a secular state. I think the roots of the latest bloodshed lie in the National Pact of Lebanon, in the so-called gentlemen’s agreement between the heads of the religious groups. These people were not really religious; it was only class interest. This leads to the second point. It was not a socialist state. What Lebanon has seen lately was inevitable. In a society like this, where the rich got very much richer, especially in the past five years, and the poor got very much poorer, also especially in the past five years, it was very much to be expected. But to say that it was a conflict between Christians and Muslims and Druze is not true. The leader of the Phalangists, the right-wing Maronite Kata’ib, is Pierre Gemayel, and he is a Maronite. All right. But the vice-chairman, Kazem Khalil, is a Shi’i Muslim from the south, from Tyre. The leader of the left-wing, so-called Muslim alliance, is not a Muslim. He is a Druze, Kemal Jumblatt. Another leader of this alliance, Nicola Shaawi, is a Christian, and a third, George Hawi, is a Communist. To say that it is Muslims against Christians is as wrong as it is misleading. From the papers you might think it is between Christians and Muslims, but if you lived there for just five weeks, you would say, ‘My god, there must be a civil war one day in this country’. If you see all these great buildings, the shopping areas in Beirut, all the luxury of the West, and then you drive for just five minutes, and you see the slums ‒ and these are Lebanese people! In Lebanon, the number of proper Lebanese people living in camps is double the number of Palestinian refugees living in camps.
M. Let us now take up a problem relating to the short term. I want to ask you about the demand of the PLO to establish an independent Palestinian authority in the areas from which Israel is compelled to withdraw. Since this is a transitional stage towards the establishment of a unitary state in Palestine, and since, as you say in your document, you hope that the future stage can be achieved by peaceful means, how do you estimate the reality of this demand now, two years after the October war? How realistic do you estimate it to be? It is known that the USSR supports this demand. What about the Americans? Do they support it? Do you know of any steps they have made to indicate support for such a settlement?
S. This should be known very well. When we demand the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, those parts of Palestine from which Israel should withdraw, it is not a conciliatory step, it is a realistic step. Whether there is a peaceful settlement or not, there is a fact we should be aware of: that there is an Israeli Jewish people, and there is a fact they should be aware of: that there is a Palestinian Arab people. And in order to bring these two peoples together to live in one state, there must be, as a first step, two states. The Russians did not support this in the beginning. Now we are very happy to see that the USSR understands us better, and lately Pravda has written that they believe that the legitimate rights of the people of Palestine are the central issue of the conflict, and that there won’t be peace in the Middle East so long as there is Zionism. This is a very big change in the USSR.
So far, the Americans say that they will not talk to the Palestinians if the Palestinians do not recognize the state of Israel as an independent state and guarantee its future security, integrity, and independence. We never tried to contact the Americans. They tried to contact us indirectly and they wanted some private secret talks. We said no. If you want to talk to us, you talk to us openly. If we do something, we are not ashamed of it, so why do it secretly? No secret talks, no secret deals! And so long as we continue to struggle, I believe that there will come a day, probably soon, when the Americans realize that if they, for their own reasons, want to avoid war, then they will have to speak to us. I can see this day coming.
M. Everyone knows that there are factions within the Palestinian movement, known by the name ‘Rejection Front’, that oppose this demand for a Palestinian state on any territories that Israel is forced to evacuate. George Habash’s Popular Front is part of that faction, as is the group of Ahmed Jibril. On our side of the border as well, some people echo the same rejection. Abroad, some far-left Israelis, as individuals not really representing any group, are opposed to the principle of self-determination in any event ‒ not only in the case of the Israeli Jews or the Palestinian Arabs, but for any people. Also in Israel, there is a Trotskyist group, which split from Matzpen about four years ago and became the Israeli branch of the Trotskyist Fourth International. (This group is sometimes confused with Matzpen, because they sometimes use the same name, although their political line is different.) These Trotskyists, although they accept the principle of self-determination in general, oppose this immediate demand for a Palestinian state.
These advocates of the ‘Rejection Front’ sometimes claim that the creation of a Palestinian state in any territories Israel is forced to evacuate is no more than one element of an entire arrangement for pax americana, an objective of American imperialism in the Middle East. What is more, in their eyes, this demand for a Palestinian state has no meaning outside the context of an imperialist settlement. In raising the demand for such a state, they therefore argue, the PLO is making itself an accomplice of American imperialism. Arguments like this have been made on both sides of the border. What have you got to say to this?
S. Some of those who say this are American agents who want to sell this idea to the people: that nothing can ever happen without an American OK. So that if a Palestinian state comes into existence, it would be just because the Americans approve it. If there is no state, it is because the Americans don’t want it. The idea is that the Americans are like God. If they withdraw from South-East Asia, it is because they had a deal with Russia. This would mean that peoples should go to sleep and do nothing; it is the super-powers who do everything. It is very dangerous, and I always suspect those who preach this idea.
The other sort of people who talk this way are anarchists or ignorant people who don’t know what a people’s struggle is. Anyone going to the Middle East, to any Palestinian refugee camp, in Lebanon, seeing the people, how they train, how they behave, their morale, and tries to remember how things were, say, ten years ago, can realize the change. This change took place as the result of a long and bloody struggle. If you and I can see this, the Americans can see it. If our demand to establish a Palestinian state is ever fulfilled ‒ and I hope it will be, soon ‒ it will be the result of the bloody struggle of the Palestinian people. To those who say that this will be just a part of pax americana, I say this: imperialism, especially American imperialism, has never given a people a homeland or anything good. I know of imperialism giving people napalm, death, destroyed cities, destroyed countries, bloodshed. But they don’t give them states. If American imperialism is to become a charity organization giving the Palestinians a state and giving the South-East Asian people independence, then we will have to change our mind about imperialism. To put it briefly, those who believe that if the Palestinians liberate any part of their country and establish an independent state on it, then it will be part of an American deal, those people should go and see the Palestinian fighters who have been fighting for it for ten years. If this does not convince them, then nothing will.
M. I also believe ‒ and I think that this is the opinion of the majority of the comrades of Matzpen ‒ that there is no chance of the Americans offering the Palestinian people the slightest independent state on a silver platter, so to speak. The reason flows from the nature of relations between the United States and Israel, and from the fact that the Zionist leadership is opposed in principle to the creation of a Palestinian state.
Today, since the October war of 1973, Israel is no longer the exclusive ally of the United States in this part of the world; but it is still the closest and most reliable of Washington’s allies. The United States now also has allies among the Arab states. But the relations between the United States and the Arab countries have always been based on exploitation, and that is still the case. Therefore, even if the regime of a given Arab state is at present prepared to collaborate with the United States, there will always exist in this country significant social and historical forces that threaten to shift state policy in an anti-imperialist direction. For Israel, the situation is different. This state is not economically exploited, but subsidized by imperialism. Hence, so long as imperialism remains dominant in the region and is in a position to control Israel, this country will remain a sure ally. The Americans are prepared to exert pressure on the Israeli government and to impose concessions on it here and there, but I think that this pressure will not be so great as to compel the Zionist leadership of Israel to make concessions on what is, for it, a question of principle.
I therefore think that opposition to the creation of any independent Palestinian state is a question of principle for the Zionist leadership. The reason for this rejection is not that they fear such a state militarily, in the short term. The problem is more fundamental. The entire legitimacy of the existence of Israel as a Zionist state has never been based on the right of self-determination of the Jews who live there, but on the so-called historic right of the Jews of the entire world to Palestine. From that starting point, to acknowledge that another people exists in Palestine who can legitimately lay claim to this country would amount to undermining the legitimacy and self-justification of Zionism.
It seems to me clear that for the immense majority of the Zionist leadership ‒ whether in the government or in the right opposition ‒ this is an absolute principle. And given the importance of Israel for American interests in the region, I surmise that the United States will be in no hurry to compel Israel to make any concession on this point, on which the Zionist regime will remain intransigent. Consequently, I also conclude that a Palestinian state is not something that the Americans will hurry to offer the Palestinian people; such a state can arise only from struggle. By the sound of what you just said, I gather that this is your opinion too.
S. Yes, of course, and it may be a long struggle, and certainly bloody. It is a demand: that is the correct word. We demand the establishment of a Palestinian society, a Palestinian authority, a Palestinian state on any part of Palestine that we can liberate. Once this is established, there will be a new atmosphere, a new situation, that might require a new strategy.
I find that the rejectionists confuse the slogan, the demand, and the aim. Our slogan is ‘Revolution until victory!’. Our demand is the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in any part of Palestine that is liberated. And our aim is the establishment of one united, secular, non-sectarian Palestine in which all the Israeli Jews and all the Palestinian Arabs can live democratically, according to ‘one man, one vote’. We should not mix up these three things, or else we shall be misled into the realm of the Arabian Nights, of Alladin. Because of what has happened in the Middle East during the past two years, the number of people who believe that this Palestinian state will be established as a result of pax americana is becoming very small, and these days I see hardly any of them around.
M. Some further questions connected with this demand for a Palestinian authority, a Palestinian state. The first is this: I can see how the establishment of such an authority will give some satisfaction to those people now living under Israeli occupation. But what about the Palestinian refugees of 1948, those living in Jordan on the East Bank, in Lebanon, and other places? How will this relate to their problem? We members of Matzpen, along with other progressive groups and organizations within Israel, struggle for the right of the Palestinian people to create its own state, as a part of its right to self-determination. But at the same time, we think that the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza would directly satisfy the needs of only that part of the Palestinian people which lives in the occupied territory. In our view, for those who live outside Palestine, other demands must be added. In fact, isn’t there a danger, as some people say, that if a Palestinian authority is established, then some of the Arab governments will try to expel the Palestinians living in their countries, so that rather than helping these people, the establishment of such a state may be detrimental to them?
S. Nothing could be worse than the present life of the refugees of 1948. The establishment of a Palestinian state cannot make things worse. Things will be much worse if such a state is not established. Some people say that the Arab states will expel the Palestinian refugees to this newly established state. Well, the Arab states won’t have to expel them; we will ask them all to come and live in their own country, in their own Palestine. There is something about us, the Palestinian people, that everyone should understand; it is not that I come from Jaffa or Acre or Nablus or Jerusalem. I come from Palestine. I am a Palestinian. And this state will be a part of Palestine and it is going to be called the Democratic State of Palestine. We believe in a democratic state over all of Palestine, and if we take one inch we will call it the Democratic State of Palestine, and it will be a democratic state. And as I said in my paper, I would like to see this state welcome any Jew who wants to come and live with us without discrimination. We shall have our own law of return, but it will not be a racist, reactionary law of return. It is going to be a democratic progressive law, and we want as many Palestinians as possible to come and live in their country. I can’t see any logic in the argument of those who say that the establishment of such a state will endanger the interests of the 1948 refugees.
M. But what about their right to return to the other side of the border? The part that will be in Israel, within the pre-1967 borders? Ever since the formation of Matzpen, about five years before the 1967 war, we have fought for the right of the refugees of 1948 to return to their homes. We believe that this demand is equally just today, and we fight for it, while at the same time supporting the right of the Palestinian people to create an independent state.
S. Yes, their right must be maintained. I believe that in principle everyone should have the right to live and work anywhere. This is in the Human and Civil Rights Charter of the United Nations. But let us take an example. In 1948, seventy thousand people were expelled from Jaffa and became refugees. I was one of them, and I was physically expelled. I remember it very well, in great detail. My father, my mother, all my family, we remember it in detail. Now, if we bring these seventy thousand people to Jaffa tomorrow, and I am one of them, I am sure that the next day there will be a civil war. We will come to a town called Jaffa that will be very new to us; we will find people living in our homes; we don’t speak their language, and they don’t speak ours. We have different cultures, and this background of violence cannot be a very good step towards coexistence.
So I say, let us have a state. This would draw the poison out of the hatred. This would relax the exaggerated alarm of the Israeli Jews; this would reduce the tension among the Palestinians. And then give it time: ten, fifteen years. In ten or fifteen years, the Israeli Jews will find out what nice people we are ‒ and I really believe in this. They will realize that we are not monsters, but people like them; that there are many things that make us friendly, many things that make us happy, that there are many things that we would die for: first freedom, and we have been dying for freedom for the last ten years. We want them to know this. But what is more important than all this is that the progressive organizations among the Palestinians and the Israelis will have a much better atmosphere for struggling, for a dialogue.
Today, with this alarming slogan that the ‘enemy is at the gates’, progressive Israelis cannot speak freely to progressive Palestinians, and vice versa. Not because we, the PLO, do not want to speak to progressive Israelis. But even when we want to speak to them, we have to go to Europe. We can’t go to Israel and we can’t invite them to any Arab country. If we have our own state, we can invite them to our capital, they can come and talk to us there. And this will, of course, disarm all those right-wing chauvinists in the Zionist movement in Israel, and it will also disarm or weaken the already weak position of the right-wing chauvinists among us. This is another reason why I believe that a Palestinian state must be a necessary first step. We, the PLO, know very well ‒ and this is in our documents ‒ that in all our meetings we issue greetings to all the progressive elements in Israeli society. Why can’t we invite them to our meetings? Simply because our meetings are held outside Palestinian territory. It is not our territory, we are guests there. If we had a state, it would make dialogue much easier, and it would make it easier for them to struggle against Zionism.
M. I would like to mention another portion of the Palestinian people: those living in Israel within the pre-1967 borders. Some members of Matzpen are members of this community, and many Arab workers, students, and peasants in Israel read our publications. In other words, we know the problems of this community close up. We support ‒ and we have always supported ‒ their double struggle: against discrimination and the negation of their individual rights, and against the negation of their national rights as members of the Palestinian Arab people. The members of this community, about half a million strong, are Israelis in the legal sense. But from a national point of view, and in the light of their own consciousness, they are part of the Palestinian Arab people. It does not seem that the creation of a Palestinian state in the territories Israel is compelled to withdraw from would directly improve their lot. What about their right to self-determination?
S. We are very much concerned with what happens to the Palestinians living in Israel, but we believe that the immediate problem facing us is not them. Their problem is a big one, but the biggest problem is that of the refugees and the people living under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, because there is a Palestinian society that the Zionists are trying to destroy. If that society were destroyed, it would be the greatest setback to the Palestinians. I personally think that if we establish a Palestinian state on part of Palestine, we should say: Because we believe in the reunification of Palestine, anyone with Israeli citizenship can also have Palestinian citizenship. And I hope that this will be reciprocated. Of course, the Zionist authorities of Israel will say, ‘No, we want an exclusive Jewish state’. But this would be an objective and realistic demand for progressive people in Israel to raise. And without the immediate danger of war, the atmosphere for struggling for this demand will be better.
The Palestinian people in Israel were once called ‘Israeli Arabs’. When we began struggling, they became Palestinian again. The Israeli authorities realized that they were no longer Israeli Arabs, but that they now define themselves as Palestinians. I think that their identification as Palestinian will become stronger when there is a Palestinian state. As I have already said, there will be a new atmosphere in the Middle East: you won’t be in danger of being called up to the army at any moment; I, living in a camp, won’t be in danger of being bombed by napalm at any moment. For the Palestinians inside Israel, this will be a major step forward for consolidating their national identity.
The problem of the Palestinians in Israel is one more reason why I think that a Palestinian state is just a first step. It should be followed by further steps, to consolidate peace. It is only a first step because it is not going to solve all the problems. But ‒ and I will never tire of repeating this again and again ‒ it will create a new atmosphere of understanding.
The establishment of such a state will also be a major retreat for Zionism. I, as a Palestinian, whose entity was ignored, who was never accepted as a Palestinian, I know what it would mean to the Zionist authorities to recognize the existence of the Palestinian people, and our right to have our own state in Palestine. For Zionism, to recognize us would be a great retreat. We hope that by struggle we will gain such recognition. By struggle only. To go back to what we were talking about before, about the rejectionists, they should realize what it is for a Zionist, especially members of the Israeli cabinet, to recognize us as a people, and to acknowledge our right to have a state. To many of them this would mean the end of Israel. In fact, I know that it is not going to be the end of Israel. The state of Israel will probably continue to exist for four or five decades after the establishment of a Palestinian state. But it might be the beginning of the end of Zionism. The beginning of the de-Zionization of the state of Israel.
M. I now have a delicate question. You have spoken of the Israeli Jews as a national entity. You did so both in this discussion and in your article, which, I should mention, we have published in Israel, in Hebrew. Is this just your personal opinion or is it the opinion of part of the PLO, or the whole PLO? Are these things also said in Arabic?
S. I wrote this paper about Palestinian strategy while I was an official representative of the PLO. That was about ten months ago and so far I am still an official representative. I signed this paper ‘Said Hammami, PLO representative’. If you represent an organization, then what you say should represent the organization. However, I am not a civil servant. We are not a bureaucratic organization with ambassadors and civil servants who just echo what is said in headquarters. I am also a member of the Palestine National Council (PNC), I am also a member of Fatah, and what I said in that paper had enough support within the PLO and Fatah to keep me in my position. If it did not have the support of a substantial majority, I could not have remained a PLO representative.
It is true that it is not the official position of the PLO. The rejectionists’ policy is also not the official position of the PLO. But the difference is that the rejectionists have never had an official PLO representative expressing their views, while there are many PLO representatives who speak the way I do. I have the support of the majority of the Palestinians, the Democratic Front supports me, the great majority of Fatah supports me. I am very proud to say that when Chairman Arafat was asked about my paper, he said, ‘I read it and I think it is full of logic, full of logical proposals’. He was also asked whether this was official PLO policy. He said, ‘It is not, but it is full of logic’. What he meant is clear. In the next meeting of the Palestine National Council, I shall present my paper and propose it for official endorsement by the PNC, and I hope it will be endorsed.
M. I have another difficult question. Let me first make it clear that we in Matzpen thoroughly denounce the cruel actions of the Israeli army, very often against civilians, including women and children ‒ indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations and of refugee camps, for instance. Having said this, I would like to ask what you think of such actions as the one carried out in Ma’alot, and similar incidents, in which the victims were civilians, especially children? I am not asking about the legitimacy of armed struggle, which is another issue. I am asking about the specific choice of civilian targets, especially children.
S. Like you, I denounce the killing of civilians, especially children, women, and old people, whatever the circumstances. But I also believe that the Christian-like attitude of standing up to condemn terrorism and then sitting down with a clear conscience is as facile as it is futile. It means nothing. Without finding the roots of the conflict you cannot put an end to it. Terrorism is just a symptom of the real disease, which is aggression, which is Zionism, which is the destruction of Palestinian society, which is the creation of a state in the Middle East on the ruins of Palestinian society. If we do not start from this point, we will get nowhere. There is a conflict, there is a war, between us and the Israeli establishment; and in the course of this war many crimes have been committed. It is ironic to hear some Zionists talking about the Palestinians as terrorists, because terrorism was brought to the Middle East by the Zionists. Take a man like Yalin-Mor ‒ a terrorist. My friend Abdullah al-Hourani told me that during a conference in Paris, Yalin-Mor stood up and said: ‘I am a terrorist, and I killed civilians. I bombed, I burned, I shelled civilian targets, and I know very well that without terrorism there would not have been a state of Israel. You, the Palestinians, are now engaged in terrorism; it could be justified, but I want to tell you that politically it is not doing you any good, because it pushes the Israeli public into the arms of the establishment’.
Many of the leaders of this present Israeli establishment are ex-terrorists, aren’t they? Perhaps all of them are: Allon and Rabin were in the Palmach, Begin was the leader of the lrgun, and so on. Under British law they were all terrorists. As for Ma’alot, the real criminal was Dayan, who misled the Israeli cabinet about the intentions of the Palestinians from the Democratic Front. He then gave the troops an order to start shooting, and the children were killed in the cross-fire. I don’t want this to be understood as if I am justifying terrorism. I cannot accept terrorism, not only for moral but also for political reasons. Because I am a progressive Palestinian, and I believe that if you kill Israelis indiscriminately, you are playing into the hands of the Zionist establishment. Our enemy is Zionism, not all the Israelis. But I want to say that if the Israeli public does not realize that in this state of conflict any one of their children might be killed, exactly as any one of the Palestinian children might be killed by the Israeli air force, if they don’t realize this and also grasp that this killing can be stopped only by a peaceful solution ‒ then terrorism will go on, and I am afraid that it might become worse.
M. To conclude, I would like to raise another point. We in Matzpen have never regarded ourselves as working for a separate and isolated revolution inside Israel, but as part of the revolutionary forces of the entire region, of the whole Arab East. Our aim is the creation of a socialist union of the entire Arab East, a union in which all the non-Arab nationalities living in the region can participate, on a basis of equality and respect for their rights. For us, our support to all the just struggles of the region ‒ and most particularly to the fight being waged by the Palestinian Arab people for their national and social liberation ‒ is a matter not merely of abstract solidarity, but of close participation. In this respect, I would like to ask: what can the progressive and anti-chauvinist forces on both sides do? In particular, what can be done in a co-ordinated way, towards a common goal?
S. Well, we don’t give lessons. I think the progressive organizations in Israel should themselves say what they can do. We can’t tell them. They know their society better than we do. We don’t believe in giving lessons or in taking them. But once we and they agree on basic and fundamental facts, we and they can be sure that we are going in the right direction. I think that they have a very great role to play. It takes a lot of courage for any Israeli Jew to stand up in Israel and say: ‘Look, fellow Israelis, you have got to withdraw, you have got to negotiate with the Palestinians, they must have their own state, and the state must be a first step towards the reunification of Israel-Palestine, of the whole country’.
What can we do together? Well, they can help us in educating our masses and we can help them to educate their masses. We need to know more about Israeli society, and they need to know more about Palestinian society. We need to know more facts about the Israeli working class, about the future potential of that society, and they need to know similar facts about us. If it was not a crime under Israeli law, we would invite progressive anti-Zionist Israelis to come and participate with us in the PNC. We believe that the PLO, as an organization struggling for a united secular Palestine, should itself be a reflection in miniature of that envisaged society, and that is why we would invite all progressive anti-Zionist elements in Israel to come and participate in planning our policy. This might sound a bit optimistic. It is. But first we need to know more about each other. We need a continuous dialogue. Then we can cooperate in publicizing their literature among our masses, and they can publicize our literature among their masses. A lot can be done together, but first we need a common understanding.
M. Thank you very much, Said. I hope that our discussion today may contribute to this understanding and this dialogue. | 2019-04-20T04:58:13Z | https://matzpen.org/english/1984-10-01/to-live-together%E2%80%92a-dialogue-said-hammami-and-moshe-machover/ |
She is giving all the proceeds from Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately to the center that helped her family.
My guest this week is Alicia Cook, author of Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately. Alicia is 29 and hails from New Jersey. She earned an English Degree in 2008 and her MBA in 2012. She works in the marketing division at a private college in New Jersey. She is a contributing writer for many blogs and news outlets, including the Huffington Post and multiple Gannett Publications. Her work has been seen nationwide thanks to features on CNN and USA Today. She has an instagram following where she posts daily poetry. She writes regularly on drug addiction and how it directly affects families. She enjoys the ocean, champagne, and hour-long crime dramas on TV. Today she is stoked to announce she has released a “surprise” book for her readers for just $6.99 and is donating 100% of her royalties to the Willow Tree Center in NJ to help families where addiction is present.
Listen as she shares her story of how her cousins heroin addiction impacted her at a very early age. We talk about the impact her writings have had on herself and others. You’ll also hear us get a tad political. One thing is for certain, by the time you finish listening to this podcast, you’ll know you are not alone. There are others out there who care about what you are going through.
If you’d like to receive a copy of Alicia’s book, at no cost to you, just leave me a review on iTunes and email me [email protected] – letting me know which review is yours. I’ll be giving away up to 5 copies of the book to people within the USA. If you live outside of the USA and want a copy, I’ll pay for the book if you cover the shipping cost. =) I’ll be running this contest through January 31st, 2016. Here are instructions for leaving a review on iTunes. If you haven’t done that before, it can be tricky.
*TinaCan2222 – thank you for your iTunes review! Please email me and let me know where I can send your book!
Follow Alicia on Instagram: @thealiciacook or check out her website: www.thealiciacook.com.
Go to Alicia’s website thealiciacook.com, you can read more of her work, connect with her either by email or on social media and buy her book.
Full disclosure; I have an Amazon account and sometimes I link products through my account to try and offset some of the cost of the podcast. I have not done that here – if her royalties are going to Willow Tree (which is focused on Alcohol, Tobacco, Drug and Violence Prevention, Education and Counseling for Adults, Youth, and Families) then that’s where I want them all to go.
Radiant Sky is the writers’ collective that Alicia mentions. She was able to work with them and self-publish her book. …which BTW went #1 in Amazon as soon as it was released under Women in Poetry! Congratulations Alicia!
Thank you so much for joining me this week. Have some thoughts you’d like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below!
Also, please leave an honest review for The Addiction Support Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, help more people find us, and I read each and every one of them.
If you would like to email me, head on over to OakCreekWellness.com/contact.
Special thanks to Alicia Cook for joining me this week. Until next time!
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Addiction Support Podcast, episode number Nine.
Podcast Intro: [00:00:08] Hi Oak Creek Wellness Family! Welcome to the Addiction Support Podcast, where I talk with inspiring people who share their knowledge and experience of addiction and what’s working for them. This is addiction support for family and friends, from people who’ve been there. I’m your host Melissa Sue Tucker. Encouraging, Inspirational, Life-Changing Content that makes a difference! Created specifically for you – by Oak Creek Wellness.com.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:00:36] Hello. I hope you’re having an amazing week. I have a great guest for you. My guest this week is Alicia Cook. You may know her from thealiciacook.com. She is a contributing writer for many blogs and news outlets including The Huffington Post and multiple Garnett publications. She writes regularly on drug addiction and how it affects families. I’ve seen multiple articles that she’s written gone viral. That’s how I found her. I came across one of her articles that I really loved and reached out to her on her web site. She has a tab there that says if you want to share your story let me know and I sent her an e-mail saying, “hey this is my story. This is what happened with my brothers and this is what I’m doing now because of it.” She got back to me within a couple of days which astonished me. We just started a friendship and decided that she is going to write my story. So that’ll be coming out soon and I’ll be sharing that. I’m just honored that she would come on the podcast and share her story. One exciting thing is the day that we recorded this she released her second publication. It was her first book that she self-published and it’s cool. She has chosen to donate 100 percent of the royalties to the willow tree Center in New Jersey and she talks about that in the podcast. And yeah, she’s just a cool down to earth person. She loves those old mix tapes so her book, she did the artwork for and she set it up so that instead of a table of contents there’s a track list, and its just kind of cool. She’s a very loving and grounded woman. And one of the things that she brought up that I hadn’t thought about before was so true. It’s like we are part of a club that unfortunately is not that exclusive and that nobody wants to be a part of. And in this day and age our club is growing. And she’s out there doing what I’m doing. Only she’s doing it on a much bigger scale and she’s doing that through her writing. The book itself just covers all aspects of the human condition. You know everything from death, love, moving on, evolving, growing up, hometowns, family dynamic, life after trauma, and make ups and break ups. That’s on side A, and then on side B, she has the remixes of those poems. And so, it’s a form of blackout poetry known as Fallen poetry. So, it’s cool. This is a fresh twist by creating new poetry out of sight. So very cool. And like I said all the proceeds go to Willow Tree center. The book is less than $7 on Amazon so you guys got to check it out. You got to pick up her book. I’m running a contest if you would like a free copy of her book. I’ll be happy to give those away. I have the contest on the show notes, so you can just click on there and find out more information. Basically, what I’m asking for is reviews in iTunes. Honest reviews and iTunes, what’s going to happen is the more reviews we get the more other people out there are going to be able to find us and tap in and tune in and become a part of this community.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:03:54] And I want to encourage you and incentive you in sharing in that if this is something that’s touched. If it’s something that you feel like you want to do. So, with no further ado, I hope you enjoy Alisha’s podcast interview and reach out to her. She’s a real person, pretty phenomenal. Follow her work and buy her book. Thank you.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:04:18] Thank you so much for joining us today and the addiction support podcast and I was hoping that you could share more about your story with addiction how it’s touched your life.
Alicia Cook: [00:04:28] OK well unfortunately addiction has touched my life immensely. And usually when I say Touch my life it could mean you know in a positive way. Addiction has ruined a lot of my life. It’s a monster, 10 almost 10 years ago. I lost my cousin to a heroin overdose. We were 19 years old at the time. Obviously, I was completely, ignorance is bliss, and I knew nothing about this drug. It also wasn’t on the forefront of the news like it is now. I feel like now. Everywhere you turn every corner is someone directly affected by some kind of addiction. It’s truly an epidemic. But 10 years ago, we were stunned when we first found out my cousin Jessica was battling addiction. She battled addiction for 18 months before losing her life. So, she didn’t even have that long when she fell into addiction to beat it. But she did try multiple rehab, counseling, everything, detox, and unfortunately though she lost her battle.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:05:39] I’m sorry to hear that.
Alicia Cook: [00:05:40] I was young, I was young when I was first faced face head on with the reality of this drug and what it does to families and everything like that. So, in a way I was educated very early on, on this topic. Yeah but that’s sad. Ten years ago, almost now.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:06:00] So you’ve done a lot of writing and a lot of other things since then too. Are you trying to help other people or their families that are going through it? Or what do you think your goal is or your driving forces.
Alicia Cook: [00:06:16] Well she’s been gone almost 10 years now. But you know it’s all over the addiction everywhere now. Like I said it’s truly an epidemic so the fact that all this is everywhere now. I think it’s bubbled up to the surface. I didn’t even write about my husband or my experience for the first six years after I lost her, I just wasn’t ready to do that. I mean I knew one day I was going to write about this, but I didn’t know that it was going to be you know a fictional way loosely based on my life. But then with the digital age and the Internet and everything I kind of just started putting my thoughts out there really just to be cathartic. I think writing is my therapy in a lot of sense. You know in a sense, but I do. Hope I could help people that unfortunately we are members of a club that no one really wants to be a member to. That’s always the way I describe it is that we are such a large community now the families and the loved ones have been directly affected by addiction. It’s unbelievable how many are touched by this now and that no one really wants to relate to this topic. You know what I write about is not pretty. Most of the time it’s not helpful but it’s the reality of it. And I think I was one of the first younger bloggers to get on this head on and be like this it’s horrible it’s an illness it’s affecting everyone. You know it does not discriminate and in turn a lot of people have connected to my work. So, I think that I’m grateful for the connections but at the same time no one really wants to connect to it but if they could find any kind of peace or solace or hope in what I’m writing then I think I’ve done my part. I’m never compensated for my articles on addiction. I refuse payment because I don’t want to benefit off my trauma or any other family’s tragedy. Truly just writing it to connect to people to let them know they’re not alone.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:08:29] I think you’re doing a really huge service too in just removing the stigma. You know looking at your last article about, and I might say it wrong so correct me here about like stop calling them junkies. Yes, like that when I was just like yeah. Like you start crying right now. It was just really powerful, and it was really it’s so true. It’s not know these people that we can just throw away because they made a bad choice these are people that truly have addiction and we need to stop labeling them and figure out how to come together and you know ideally get in front of it for people that haven’t started and then you know come together and come up with a way that we can treat the addiction as that was.
Alicia Cook: [00:09:21] Stop calling them junkies. I wanted to write that for a very long time. I just never did. Not for the fear of people attacking me in the comments section or anything like that, but I wanted to not just race from my point of view with that. I wanted to get a counselor’s perspective, an actual addicts point of view. And then I wanted to talk to people that don’t dedicate so much of their time. They volunteer their time, they’re not even paid to run organizations in hopes of helping them. But that article was a long time coming. And it was hit with a lot of criticism. These people are stuck in their ways. But exactly what you said. I really can’t even add to it because what you said sums it up. I am so tired of that word because it takes a multilayered unique individual living breathing humans and just makes them one dimensional like their fictional characters who can just run right off and race them. I try to stay away from the comments section on a lot of my articles because of what people say and I just get so heated and I know I have to stay to be Switzerland and everything a lot of the time. But I’m so sick of comments that are just born out of being uneducated on topic. And you know what I think I’ve said it before that they’re lucky. I’m jealous that they are educated and ignorant in a way because that means that they have never been directly affected.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:11:07] Yeah you have to stay away from those comments. You don’t have haters. You are not doing your life’s work. That’s kind of my attitude about it and I try not to look at them either. But sometimes it’s hard.
Alicia Cook: [00:11:18] Yeah that junkie article, you know that I don’t even like saying that that junky article, but that that article I wrote on the word junkies I’ve never read such hate before in the comments section. So, after that I was like you know what. At the same time the positive that you know the positive emails I’ve received from people and the out pour of support and saying you know yes, we need to stop using that word. And I am a writer, so I understand you know the first amendment people are going to say what they want but that word does nothing to help the cause. And you know the use of such negative language decreases people who use drugs to stigmatize stereotype that is honestly antiquated now because it does not discriminate at all. It could affect anyone, any time, any family, any upbringing. People forget that. And I just hope you know I hope with every article I write I just chip away at that stigma just a little bit.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:12:22] Yeah. Good for you. Well, I’m definitely saying, yeah keep going. People that I’m talking to that are also involved in this we’re watching you, and reading you, and sharing your articles, and just keep going. Hopefully you are, and hopefully they will never know the pain, and hopefully, they’ll never know what that feels like. And you know if God forbid it does impact them in some way then than they had that experience of you. And you know maybe who knows maybe they’ll become a big advocate too. You just never know you’re planting seeds you know.
Alicia Cook: [00:13:04] Yeah, I mean I wouldn’t wish that on even my worst enemy because it’s completely it’s been 10 years since my cousin died. And you know we’re still you know dealing with the ramifications of her not being there every milestone every graduation every wedding. It’s just the elephant in the room that the other person my age you know my own flesh and blood. You know we grew up similarly we had a lot in common. She was she loved writing and she was very artistic as well before addiction got a hold of her. And it’s just a reminder almost every day that a person that should be here is in because of because of drugs.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:13:49] It’s you know so out of all your articles that you’ve written so far do you have one that know they’re not you know they’re not the bright side, but do you have one that you like the most or you feel like it’s been shared a lot or is get you know gotten a lot of positive feedback on.
Alicia Cook: [00:14:09] Yeah. One of my articles back in October, I think it was called “Lessons I Learned from Loving a Drug Addict,” that ended up going viral. NBC, CBS, you know a lot of Gannett publications pick that up. It was shared hundreds of thousands of times according to the editor there was read millions of times. That was that was what actually propelled me to keep writing about addiction not because of the attention it gathered but for when I because of the attention it gathered. I said while there may be a need for this. Some people might need to read stuff that I’m writing in private not sharing. So that’s kind of what started my whole addiction eccentric writing in some articles because I realized you know if it’s being shared this much and it’s resonating with this many people. There’s a need for it. And I know you know 10 years ago when I was trying to learn about drug addiction the internet exactly was it what it is now. There’s no smartphones. I went to bookstores and just to learn. I wanted to read a book, a memoir, anything written from a family member’s perspective regarding drug addiction and I just could not find it. Well maybe I’ll do it one day but for now I’m doing the smaller articles that are touching on the family side of things. The other side of addiction.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:15:50] Well let me know if you do end up writing it. I’m going to be one of the first customers.
Alicia Cook: [00:15:56] Yeah it wouldn’t be anytime soon. I mean I would I would imagine it would be a memoir of that kind of documents my experiences with addiction. And you know I’m someone who’s never even smoked a cigarette. So, it’s just it’s polarizing sometimes to think about everything that this drug takes away from families. And it’s not just it’s not just heroin really any kind of addiction alcoholism you name it.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:16:25] Right, anything that takes them away.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:16:48] Good title!
Alicia Cook: [00:16:53] Yes. Because it is. And it’s not it’s almost you follow my work and you know who I am already if you it’s not until halfway down the article that you realize that I’m not an addict. So, it draws parallels between the pain that the family goes through and the pain that the actual ad it goes to do and sometimes you know you would think that it’s reading that article many think until halfway down that I, I’m the addict that heroin is the worst thing that happened to me because I’ve used heroin where that’s not the case, but I loved someone that has. That was just something real, it’s a 700-word article, but I really just had to get that out of my system. So, think about it you know like this might be the worst thing that ever happened to me and it didn’t directly happen to me.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:17:45] I’m going to link to all the articles in the show notes to so if anybody’s interested. and obviously they can go google them or they can go to your website. Can they find it from your web site or just from Google?
Alicia Cook: [00:17:57] They could, all my writing is on my web site. So, thealiciacook.com. If they click. “drug addiction” it will bring them all to my articles on addiction. If they don’t want to read any of my fluffy pieces that it’s so the right from time to time.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:18:13] Are those the pieces that kind of help balance you out?
Alicia Cook: [00:18:16] Yeah, it makes my dad happy when I write about happier things. Sometimes he just, he’s funny with that. He gets that I get it, and he gets other people really get it, but at times he doesn’t like that his daughter always seemed so sad. But I always tell him we have to separate the art from the person a lot of the time.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:18:42] That’s funny. That’s sweet. He cares.
Alicia Cook: [00:18:45] Yeah, he’s a great dad. But it’s just fun. You know how you react to some of my pieces.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:18:51] That’s awesome. All right. So as of this time of this recording you have some exciting news because you just self-publish a book and release that today, is the second book is that right?
Alicia Cook: [00:19:04] Yes, it’s my second book but it’s my first book that I kind of just did on my own. I wrote it. I designed it. I drew the cover, I did everything by myself. I’m not connected to a formal publishing house anymore but, Radiant Skies Publishing Group is a writing collective that I’m connected to. They are just a bunch of great people that love art and love producing art and they volunteer their time and they really helped me polish this.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:19:38] So I want to get into the book. But before we do can you tell me why Willow Tree Center in New Jersey is important to you?
Alicia Cook: [00:19:46] Yes. Willow Tree Center in New Jersey, it’s in Morris County New Jersey. It’s very important to me because it’s important to my aunt and uncle, my cousin Jessica’s parents. During the 18 months with Jess battling addiction and following her death, Willow Tree Center was and is a major resource for my aunt and uncle. Now my aunt actually volunteers a lot of her time helping them out as well. They do a multitude of things with an organization, they do have you know the outpatient, they do have direct resources for the person suffering from addiction. However, what I like as a family member is they have so many resources for the family. They even have something that is specific for parents who lost someone to addiction. Where you know not that you would want to involve yourself in the group if he were directly affected like that. But they really have targeted groups to help. You know with each person, and that’s also people lose sight of, each person’s experience so we could all relate to each other. They’re all very different because there are different people in different families and different dynamics like that. So, will it really help my aunt and uncle out. And I just want to help them out in their turn because you know my, just the fact that they a helped my uncle during the worst time of their life. I’m indebted to them for that.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:21:24] And I just wanted to mention that because, for all of our listeners, Alicia has chosen to donate 100 percent of her royalties for this book to that center. So, this isn’t, I mean not that it would matter if it was, but it’s not something that you’re looking to make money on. This is something that you want to make money on so that you can give back and I think that’s just really beautiful. And I wanted to make sure we pointed that out.
Alicia Cook: [00:21:46] Thank you so much.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:21:48] You’re welcome.
Alicia Cook: [00:21:49] I mean every little bit helps. I’m not, you know, this isn’t going to, this book is a chat book, it’s poetry, it’s not going to end up on you know a New York Times bestseller list or anything like that. But I do have very dedicated, supportive, readers that we’re just excited for the fact that I released the book in the first place and that I’m only charging $6.99 for it not you know $20. And I am donating 100 percent of the royalties to try to help families where addiction is present. To be completely transparent with that. And every month I’m going to actually share the transaction. So, I mean not that I think people think I’m a liar, but I just know that I just want them to know that their money is going where I promise that it’s going.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:22:40] That’s cool. Will that be on your website or where are you going to be sharing that?
Alicia Cook: [00:22:44] Yes, it’s on my web site and it’ll continue to be on my web site under I think it’s a tab, something like my new book release or something. And as I get more promotional articles and press on the book and donations and everything like that I’m going to be posting all of that they’re just so it’s completely you know full transparency and people know that their money is going to this cause.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:23:13] That’s awesome. So, is the book just for people that are dealing with addiction or is there something in there for everyone?
Alicia Cook: [00:23:20] I made a conscious decision not to include writing on addiction in this book. I did it, so it really just follows every up and down that that a lot of people experience in their lives. You know wanting to grow, adulthood, evolving into a new person after something tragic could happen. Life, love, loss, everything. It covers the you know the human condition.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:23:54] That’s awesome.
Alicia Cook: [00:23:54] I’m a huge music fan. I’m a hip hop head which people seem to find funny for some reason, so I designed the book in the style of an old school cassette mixtape. So, there’s two sides. There’s side A and side B, so like back in the day when we had to like to flip the tape around and everything like that. It’s broken down into two sections side A, is the 50 poems. Side B is those same 50 poems remixed in the form of black out poetry. And instead of a table of contents there’s track listings. So, did it kind of in a fun way.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:24:37] That’s cool. And you drew the cover yourself right.
Alicia Cook: [00:24:40] Yes, yes. I drew the cover myself. I’m not you know, I’m not an artist by any means, but I’m going for a minimalistic simple feel and I’m really happy with how it turned out.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:24:51] It’s beautiful.
Alicia Cook: [00:24:53] Thank you.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:24:54] You’re welcome. And we’ll be running a contest to, so I’ll be giving away some of your books and I’ll put the notes in the show notes for anybody interested. If you’re interested in picking up one of her books you can buy it on Amazon. Tell us the name of it.
Alicia Cook: [00:25:11] It’s called, “Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:25:15] So they can search by that or your name right and find it?
Alicia Cook: [00:25:18] Yes. If they type in Alicia Cook and even write the word, “stuff,” I think the book comes up if they don’t want to go through my website. So yeah, it’s called, “Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately,” I named it that because I think that’s what I’ve named one of my like burnt CDs or mix tapes before.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:25:34] Cool. And so, if you’d like to get a free copy. Well free to you, I’m happy to buy one. Just check out the show notes and check out the contest. You can go about it that way. Or go to Amazon or do both. I don’t, I’m up for whatever I think it’s a great cause. You know I love reading what you write so I’m really happy to support you in that area.
Alicia Cook: [00:25:56] So, so happy we connected. Though the book doesn’t focus on addiction. I did dedicate the book to anyone who loves someone struggling with addiction. And I put the Willow Tree Center’s wit website on there and then I just, of course I thanked my mom and dad because they’re my pillars and I love them.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:26:17] That’s awesome. What else do you want to share with us. Do you want people to go to our website and like input their information to do a story with you or are you kind of filled up on that right now?
Alicia Cook: [00:26:30] Oh no. I’m always accepting the interview forms. I am backed up probably until May, but that does not mean that I won’t. I still write back immediately to them and let them know that there is a way, but every single person’s story is so important to this cause. I was watching the anonymous people and they said something that stuck with me and they said public opinion here on public policy. And so, the more people whose story I could share about this the better.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:27:03] That’s awesome. I love that movie.
Alicia Cook: [00:27:06] Yeah, I mean I, and then two days later, the anonymous people their Facebook page and website shared my article and I just almost passed out.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:27:17] How cool is that.
Alicia Cook: [00:27:19] Yeah, I was like, I just saw your documentary, I loved it!
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:27:23] That’s awesome. What are some I guess life hacks or tips, or advice do you have for other people that God forbid are going through what you’ve gone through?
Alicia Cook: [00:27:38] Whatever I say here is probably going to sound cliché, but I can only speak from my own experiences. And you need to educate yourself. You’re all of a sudden you could wake up in your world can be entirely different and never the same again. So, I would just hope that you know people do their due diligence and they educate themselves and they read about you know whatever drug or substance their loved one is that you know starting to use and fall. It’s really is a rabbit hole. I wouldn’t say there’s a life hack basically, I mean especially in the beginning, when I lost my cousin who just I did not know how my uncle woke up every single day after that and lived their life. That’s how the one thing that one day I will write about is how resilient we are as humans as well because the pain of losing someone, a child, a cousin, a sibling. Your life is forever changed.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:28:45] You know if there’s somebody listening that wants to start writing but they’re just not sure where to start. What type of advice do you have for them on that?
Alicia Cook: [00:28:53] Writing about addiction?
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:28:54] Yeah.
Alicia Cook: [00:28:56] I would say start, start with you know open a blog. There’s so many free blogs nowadays, Tumblr, WordPress, anything like that. And just start showing that conscious, write what you’re feeling. It’s almost like when I finally started really writing about it and I had felt like for a long time just holding my breath that feeling of always being like that sucking air feeling. And then when I started writing about it even before I thought anyone even read it was a relief. So, I always say to write honestly don’t write what you write in the hopes of going viral or you know gaining a large readership. If you write honestly. you know stay truthful. You know hone your voice and people will naturally be attracted to your work, they will gravitate towards you. They will start trusting what you’re saying, they’ll start believing in what you’re saying and just start blogging and then the Internet’s great and horrible waste that starts if you want to really start submitting your work. There’s so many recovery and rehab and things like that, that want to hear what you’re saying. If you do a quick google and you Google, you know share my addiction story so many people including my own website that ask for your addiction stories will pop up. So unfortunately, there is a market because, so many people are suffering from this now and everywhere.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:30:39] That’s good to know.
Alicia Cook: [00:30:40] And I mean they can always e-mail me. I mean I get probably 100 e-mails a day. I respond to every single one of them.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:30:47] Wow.
Alicia Cook: [00:30:48] Yeah. I mean, I don’t know how long you can sustain this. But for now, I am responding to every single e-mail within 48 hours.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:30:58] Because you have a job to, right? This isn’t your job?
Alicia Cook: [00:31:01] No, no, no. It would be great if it was. I work full time in marketing, so I am a writer in real life as well. But I write for a private college in New Jersey so completely different type of writing but like today I got home from work and now I called you. So, I really, I’d probably technically work until you know I go to sleep but it doesn’t feel like work for me because I’m so passionate about this cause. I believe that if enough people come together and they say no this problem is not going away. There needs to be you know public changes in public policy there needs to be more beds in rehab centers. I just read this one mother’s story she e-mailed me at 3:00 in the morning a couple of days ago and she said her daughter was abusing heroin for maybe six months before she found out. Immediately when she found out her daughter broke down cried she wanted help and where she’s from in the Midwest, the waiting list to even get into a rehab with six to nine months. And her daughter, her daughter unfortunately didn’t have nine months left. She died two months later.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:32:17] Wow.
Alicia Cook: [00:32:18] I mean you never know relapses happen. People go in and out of rehab a lot. You don’t know how many second chances you’re going to get if any. But at the time you don’t wanted to recover. She wanted to get help she knew she was sick. And there just, the hope was there for her there. The waiting was too long. So, it’s just it’s heartbreaking. The e-mails I get, but yeah, I just I believe in this cause I believe that if we come together we could make a real difference. Much like how AA did years ago.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:33:00] We have to do something like an anonymous people they talk about when somebody says they need help. They need to have services available right then and there. And you know if you go to the hospital and you’re having an appendicitis they’re going to get you in. But for whatever reason our society doesn’t see this as the same level of importance or urgency or even the same category. And then also like if you get arrested because and I don’t know how it is in New Jersey but in Arizona if you have paraphernalia or you know even a seed from marijuana you’re going to go right to jail like they’re arresting you and they’re taking you right in. We need those types of services for people who are ready for help or need help. We need to be able to say OK here we go like we have a bad for you we’re going to take care of you and provide that.
Alicia Cook: [00:33:50] It’s scary because like you said what you just said made me think of my cousin. Because they need a bed immediately, they need to be it when they’re when they’re seeing when they’re when they’re lucid and they know that they are in trouble and they know what they’re doing to themselves they’re few and far between. Once they fall down the rabbit hole where will they have these lucid moments of oh my god I need help. And you know they can say that one minute and then if you waited a day goes they’ll say, oh you know I’ve heard of families and I know even you know my cousin and they forget. So, they could change their mind and if they’re over 18 you cannot force them to go either. So, when they’re lucid and they want help you need to give them help right then and there. I just I honestly don’t know. It’s in the DNA. And now it’s in the American Society of Addiction Medicine that this is a chronic disease. It’s not a social disorder and people are still thinking that what we’re saying what the advocates are saying is opinion and it’s not it’s fact now. And I don’t know how many more premature eulogies need to be written before we all realize that those who suffer from addiction are suffering there. They’re not happy.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:35:15] Right.
Alicia Cook: [00:35:15] And they are not weak or immoral. They’re sick. And then another argument that comes up is well you know a sickness is AIDS, a sickness is cancer, a sickness, you know it goes on. And yes, you’re right that every illness is different but it’s not about comparing physical diseases to addiction. It’s about understanding how addiction impairs the user and show signs and symptoms just like every other illness. I’m not saying addiction is cancer. That’s a very hot button issue right now that God forbid we call addiction an illness they throw cancer in my face. Our face.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:35:55] Yeah.
Alicia Cook: [00:35:56] It could be its own chronic disease it could be in you know connected to mental it’s just a whole that whole admiral argument is a whole other beast. But like you said there’s not going to be any kind of change if we don’t change our perception of it.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:36:17] I’m kind of feeling like I should I’m going to go ahead and say this. So, part of the reason why I’m doing this podcast is because in the past I had a lot of judgment on my brothers and I don’t know I was I was you know not one of those people that would go on the internet and say stuff, but I definitely had judgment on them and what they were doing. And I said some stuff that I really regret and so I’m just going to say this out to anybody that’s listening if you’re in those shoes where you have judgment on somebody that has addiction. Please just take a setback like Alicia is saying do educate yourself. Look at some of these things and don’t say or do anything that you’re going to regret down the road because the people that have addiction they really are sick. And it’s there’s nothing you can do to take it back after they’re no longer in your life. So.
Alicia Cook: [00:37:17] And I’m also not saying I don’t romanticize addiction. I don’t, I’m mad a lot of the time and that’s another thing that I write about is as the loved ones of addicts you are allowed to be mad without feeling guilty. You are allowed to be really pissed off because this is not the life that you signed up for. You did not. You did not ask for this nightmare to be brought into your life. So, I’m not glorifying addiction. I’m not saying that there should be no ramification for crimes committed in order to support a habit or anything like that. I’m just saying I just don’t know where any of the compassion that humans should hold. I don’t I don’t know where that is when it comes to addiction. There seems to be zero compassion by the majority. It’s sad because it can happen to anyone. Like I didn’t wake up 19 years old and was like, today’s the day that my whole family’s life is going to be disrupted by addiction. No. I didn’t, the day I got the phone call that I that we lost my cousin. I was at my private all girls’ Catholic college in class. This is not, just, I don’t know. I don’t try to glorify the addiction because a lot of times it does make me mad as well.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:38:47] Yeah.
Alicia Cook: [00:38:47] But yeah you never you never know. You, you can’t, you can’t know what’s going to happen a week from now a month from now. Your whole life can be turned upside down and there were times where I was mad at my cousin when she was alive and I never, I never let her know that. And again, people would say that that we should have let her know that I’m able to sleep at night because I know that I love her no matter what. And I mean she even thanked me once for treating her like she was normal. We would go get French fries and things like that, I kept as much of our traditions as I possibly could before she was gone. And because of that, you know, I had I mean I it’s a positive. You know I think about her smile a lot of times. I don’t regret anything. And I’m sure I hope you could say the same about your brother.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:39:47] No. I have regrets, but I feel like he’s forgiven me.
Alicia Cook: [00:39:54] Well that’s good.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:39:55] Yeah.
Alicia Cook: [00:39:56] Maybe you’re doing, it’s almost like I don’t want to say retribution, but the fact that you’re doing this podcast and you’re putting your story out there, and you’re spending time you know hearing other people ramble like me. I just want you to know like what you’re doing matters. But every single person in this you know that is that’s in this, every single person, what you’re saying matters.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:40:18] Yeah.
Alicia Cook: [00:40:19] And you are making a difference.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:40:21] Thank you. Thank you for saying that. I just want to be. I think that there’s a huge shift coming. I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I think there’s a bunch of us that are coming together and are saying no you know society needs to change. There needs to be changes in how we treat those and how we talk about it. And I’m just honored and grateful to be a part of that cause. And I know we’re going to make a big difference, I know. You know I think three to five years from now we’re going to look back and it’s going to be completely different and we get to you know say that’s partly because of us.
Alicia Cook: [00:40:56] I just, I mean, I really, three to five years the amount of people that are going to be dead because of this.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:41:01] I know that I wish it was over.
Alicia Cook: [00:41:05] It’s scary.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:41:06] And maybe we can do it sooner. You know hopefully.
Alicia Cook: [00:41:11] I definitely feel like we see a shift because there are so many more people that are speaking out on it and I think that’s directly related to the fact that we are saying now speak out. There’s no shame attached to that if you have nothing to be embarrassed of, that don’t you know the stigma attached to it. I’m hoping I’m hoping is, kind of fading away and giving people the confidence to speak out and be like this happened to me it could happen to you.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:41:39] It’s not something to be ashamed of. If you have a family member that’s going to this, we need to speak out to be able to get the help and the support to make it through it.
Alicia Cook: [00:41:47] Right. I mean even in 06 so and when my cousin is going through this and you know not a lot of my friends knew, we kept a very close within our family, because of everything associated all those you know pigeonholing stereotype. And now it’s like it’s a little more out in the light out in the open and not both with someone important finally hears us.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:42:16] I hope so.
Alicia Cook: [00:42:17] Because we could drive change, you know.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:42:21] Yeah. Well I hope that the CDC decides to stay with their stricter guidelines because I do believe that. I mean at least a lot of people that I know that have gone down that path started out on prescriptions from their doctor that they didn’t probably need.
Alicia Cook: [00:42:37] Right. And we don’t even talk about that.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:42:40] We can, if you want, if you have time.
Alicia Cook: [00:42:43] That’s, but people don’t wake up one day, 16, 17, 18, years old 30 years old, they don’t wake up and they say today I’m going to go somewhere and I’m going to purchase heroin.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:42:57] Right.
Alicia Cook: [00:42:59] It starts. I mean again it started with my cousin. It started with a lot of people that I’m very close to in Ocean County New Jersey. It started with just going into a medicine cabinet or rightfully having a prescription and getting hooked on it. You know after car accident, after a leg, injury. I mean I got my wisdom teeth out and they prescribed me like Vicodin and I took a half a one, and couldn’t even, I was out cold for hours. Back when I was younger, so it does start with the pharmaceuticals and the prescriptions. And if they’re buying 20s, 30s, 40s, that’s street language for different pills. Xanax, OxyContin, if they’re buying those. That’s the number that they’re paying per pill. In a lot of places, I know I only speak about New Jersey and with my limited scope of knowledge but if they’re going to buy 20s, or 30s, that they’re paying 20 or 30 dollars per pill.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:44:05] Yeah and a lot of those polls at least at my son’s high school are coming straight from the parent’s medicine cabinets.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:44:13] So people need to keep track.
Alicia Cook: [00:44:15] It has a whole, “Mind Your Meds” campaign.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:44:19] Yeah.
Alicia Cook: [00:44:19] And by the time, you know, they start young or if they start old. I mean I can’t afford paying $30 a day, three or four times a day. And if the alternative is quote unquote better high for $4 a bag, why didn’t they make the national transition to heroin. And a lot of people still think that even just we got them there like an experiment with heroin today no one says that. I mean no one thing no one but it’s scary. It started with pills.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:44:53] Right.
Alicia Cook: [00:44:54] For some it started with pills it was a medicine cabinet and it got out of control because we’re humans and we think we can control a substance. But the substance controls you it becomes a chemical dependency it does you know psychologically and physiologically it alters you forever.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:45:15] Yeah.
Alicia Cook: [00:45:16] That’s the pills. This is insane. Did you watch that keep calm then the Cape Cod documentary on heroin?
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:45:23] No. Is it on Netflix?
Alicia Cook: [00:45:24] It’s on HBO.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:45:29] Oh it’s on HBO?
Alicia Cook: [00:45:29] Do you have HBO?
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:45:29] Yeah.
Alicia Cook: [00:45:29] Go on HBO Go. And this documentary it’s called Cape Cod USA heroin or something. It’s not going to teach you anything you don’t know already if you’ve been doing your research but it’s something you just need to watch.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:45:47] So basically that was pretty much the end of the podcast. The documentary that she mentions is Heroin, Cape Cod USA and it’s on HBO Go. We wrapped it up though we are talking about some other stuff. And Alicia went on to mention just how we were talking about how we found each other how I found her, and she gives a shout out to her editor Shari. So, I want to go ahead and leave that in the podcast if you go ahead and listen to the rest of it then we’ll share that, and I’ll wrap it up.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:46:17] Well you’re definitely making an impact and I really appreciate you. So, thank you.
Alicia Cook: [00:46:22] Aw, thank you. I’m so glad we connected on here.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:46:25] Me too.
Alicia Cook: [00:46:25] Randomly, you filled out the forum, right? That’s how I connected with you?
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:46:28] Yeah somebody shared one of your articles on a group that I’m in and I saw that and so then it was through the advertiser?
Alicia Cook: [00:46:38] Yes. She, I mean Shari Twittermen, I’m giving her a little shout out she’s my editor at the advertiser. She was in the at the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey and started printing my articles and publishing articles when I was only getting you know a couple hundred views and she really believed in me and cause and she really was a big pusher of getting my voice out there early on and she is the person that runs all of my addiction articles. Even before the Huffington Post publishes them.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:47:12] Wow. Yeah, I saw your article in there, oh go ahead.
Alicia Cook: [00:47:17] I said I owe her you know a lot for the exposure that I would that I received.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:47:23] That’s awesome. Yeah, I saw that, and I filled out well I went to your website then and so on to find out more about who you are and then I saw that you had an option for submitting your story and I had just been challenged earlier. I think that day by someone who said that I needed to write out my story and I haven’t been a huge writer I thought you know this would be a cool way to do it. It could do it with you know and then share it with you know your audience and you never know it might positively impact somebody before they get to where I am.
Alicia Cook: [00:47:56] You know if one person reads your story and they’re like oh my god, I’m not alone. I am not alone in this because it’s very I feel very isolated in this.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:48:08] Oh yeah.
Alicia Cook: [00:48:09] And um and that’s been my biggest driving force too. Isn’t that like you’re not alone as much as you feel alone as much as your situation is unique. There is a support system out there people that are like I don’t 100 percent get your situation because it’s yours, but I understand what you’re going through.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:48:28] Yeah.
Alicia Cook: [00:48:29] And, I’m glad I am going to share your story and I’ll write it to the best of my ability and we’ll definitely get it out there.
Melissa Sue Tucker: [00:48:38] All right what did you think. She is pretty phenomenal. So, go ahead. Come back to the show notes, addictionsupportpodcast.com/episode9 or if you just go to Addiction Support Podcasts it will all show up on the main page and check out the show notes. Check out the contest. If you have any questions on how to leave a review on iTunes I also have a video that I made on how to get through and do that on your computer, so you can watch that. I know it’s not easy, but you know it will help other people. And it’s one of those things so please do that if you feel so inclined and be kind to yourself just know, you know there’s other people out there we know what you’re going through and I love you. Make it a great day.
ASP027: Forgiveness with Dr. Chris – How to forgive yourself. How to forgive someone else. | 2019-04-23T11:52:06Z | https://addictionsupportpodcast.com/stuff-ive-been-feeling-lately/ |
On Microsoft design teams, our process for creating apps consists of five distinct stages: concept, structure, dynamics, visual, and prototype. We encourage you to adopt a similar process and have fun making new experiences for the world to enjoy.
When planning your Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app, you should determine not only what your app will do and who it's for, but also what your app will be great at. At the core of every great app is a strong concept that provides a solid foundation.
Say you want to create a photo app. Thinking about the reasons users work with, save, and share their photos, you’ll realize that they want to relive memories, connect with others through the photos, and keep the photos safe. These, then, are the things that you want the app to be great at, and you use these experience goals to guide you through the rest of the design process.
What's your app about? Start with a broad concept and list all of the things that you want to help users do with your app.
Get maps of all the places on an itinerary, and take them with you on the trip.
Find out about special events happening while you're in a city.
Let travel buddies create separate but shareable lists of must-do activities and must-see attractions.
Let travel buddies compile all of their photos to share with friends and family.
Get recommended destinations based on flight prices.
Find a consolidated list of deals for restaurants, shops, and activities around your destination.
What's your app great at? Take a step back and look at your list of ideas to see if a particular scenario really jumps out at you. Challenge yourself to trim the list to just a single scenario that you want to focus on. In the process, you might cross off many good ideas, but saying "no" to them is crucial to making a single scenario great.
My travel app is great at helping friends create itineraries collaboratively for group trips.
My workout app is great at letting friends track their workout progress and share their achievements with each other.
My grocery app is great at helping families coordinate their weekly grocery shopping so they never miss or duplicate a purchase.
This is your app's "great at" statement, and it can guide many design decisions and tradeoffs that you make as you build your app. Focus on the scenarios you want users to experience in your app, and be careful not to turn this into a feature list. It should be about what your users will be able to do, as opposed to what your app will be able to do.
It’s very tempting—having thought of an idea you like—to go ahead and develop it, perhaps even taking it quite a ways into production. But let’s say you do that and then another interesting idea comes along. It’s natural that you’ll be tempted to stick with the idea you’ve already invested in regardless of the relative merits of the two ideas. If only you’d thought of that other idea earlier in the process! Well, the design funnel is a technique to help uncover your best ideas as early as possible.
The term "funnel" comes from its shape. At the wide end of the funnel, many ideas go in and each one is realized as a very low-fidelity design artifact (a sketch, perhaps, or a paragraph of text). As this collection of ideas travels through toward the narrow end of the funnel, the number of ideas is trimmed down while the fidelity of the artifacts representing the ideas increases. Each artifact should capture only the information necessary to judge one idea against another, or to answer a particular question such as "is this usable, or intuitive?". Put no more time and effort into each than that. Some ideas will fall by the wayside as you test them, and you’ll be okay with that because you won’t be invested in them any more than was necessary to judge the idea. Ideas that survive to move further into the funnel will receive successively high-fidelity treatments. In the end, you’ll have a single design artifact that represents the winning idea. This is the idea that won because of its merits, not merely because it came along first. You will have designed the best app you could.
When you're happy with your concept, you're ready for the next stage—creating your app's blueprint. Information architecture (IA) gives your content the structural integrity it needs. It helps define your app's navigational model and, ultimately, your app's identity. By planning how your content will be organized—and how your users will discover that content—you can get a better idea of how users will experience your app.
Good IA not only facilitates user scenarios, but it helps you envision the key screens to start with. The Audible app, for example, launches directly into a hub that provides access to the user's library, store, news, and stats. The experience is focused, so users can get and enjoy audiobooks quickly. Deeper levels of the app focus on more specific tasks.
For related guidelines, see Navigation design basics.
If the concept stage is about defining your app's purpose, the dynamics stage is all about executing that purpose. This can be accomplished in many ways, such as using wireframes to sketch out your page flows (how you get from one place to the next within the app to achieve their goals), and thinking about the voice and the words used throughout your app's UI. Wireframes are a quick, low-fidelity tool to help you make critical decisions about your app's user flow.
Your app flow should be tightly tied to your "great at" statement, and should help users achieve that single scenario that you want to light up. Great apps have flows that are easy to learn, and require minimal effort. Start thinking on a screen-to-screen level—see your app as if you're using it for the first time. When you pinpoint user scenarios for pages you create, you'll give people exactly what they want without lots of unnecessary screen touches. Dynamics are also about motion. The right motion capabilities will determine fluidity and ease of use from one page to the next.
Outline the flow: What comes first, what comes next?
Storyboard the flow: How should users move through your UI to complete the flow?
Prototype: Try out the flow with a quick prototype.
Create a trip with general information.
Invite friends to join a trip.
See itineraries recommended by other travelers.
Add destinations and activities to trips.
Edit and comment on destinations and activities that friends added.
Share itineraries for friends and families to follow.
Once you've established the dynamics of your app, you can make your app shine with the right visual polish. Great visuals define not only how your app looks, but how it feels and comes alive through animation and motion. Your choice of color palette, icon, and artwork are just a few examples of this visual language.
All apps have their own unique identity, so explore the visual directions you can take with your app. Let the content guide the look and feel; don't let the look dictate your content.
Prototyping is a stage in the design funnel—a technique we talked about earlier—at which the artifact representing your idea develops into something more than a sketch, but less complicated than a complete app. A prototype might be a flow of hand-drawn screens shown to a user. The person running the test might respond to cues from the user by placing different screens down, or sticking or unsticking smaller pieces of UI on the pages, to simulate a running app. Or, a prototype might be a very simple app that simulates some workflows, provided the operator sticks to a script and pushes the right buttons. At this stage, your ideas begin to really come alive and your hard work is tested in earnest. When prototyping areas of your app, take the time to sculpt and refine the components that need it the most.
To new developers, we can't stress enough: Making great apps is an iterative process. We recommend that you prototype early and often. Like any creative endeavor, the best apps are the product of intensive trial and error.
When you know what your users want and how you can help them get there, you can look at the specific tools in your toolbox. Explore the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and associate features with your app's needs. Be sure to follow the user experience (UX) guidelines for each feature.
Platform research: Find out what features the platform offers and how you can use them.
Association diagrams: Connect your flows with features.
Prototype: Exercise the features to ensure that they do what you need.
App contracts Your app can participate in app contracts that enable broad, cross-app, cross-feature user flows.
Share Let your users share content from your app with other people through other apps, and receive shareable content from other people and apps, too.
Play To Let your users enjoy audio, video, or images streamed from your app to other devices in their home network.
File picker and file picker extensions Let your users load and save their files from the local file system, connected storage devices, HomeGroup, or even other apps. You can also provide a file picker extension so other apps can load your app's content.
For more info, see App contracts and extensions.
Different views, form factors, and hardware configurations Windows puts users in charge and your app in the forefront. You want your app UI to shine on any device, using any input mode, in any orientation, in any hardware configuration, and in whatever circumstance the user decides to use it.
Touch first Windows provides a unique and distinctive touch experience that does more than simply emulate mouse functionality.
For example, semantic zoom is a touch-optimized way to navigate through a large set of content. Users can pan or scroll through categories of content, and then zoom in on those categories to view more and more detailed information. You can use this to present your content in a more tactile, visual, and informative way than with traditional navigation and layout patterns like tabs.
Of course, you can take advantage of a number of touch interactions, like rotate, pan, swipe, and others. Learn more about Touch and other user interactions.
Animations Use our library of animations to make your app fast and fluid for your users. Help users understand context changes and tie experiences together with visual transitions. Learn more about animating your UI.
Toast notifications Let your users know about time-sensitive or personally relevant content through toast notifications, and invite them back to your app even when your app is closed. Learn more about tiles, badges, and toast notifications.
App tiles Provide fresh and relevant updates to entice users back into your app. There's more info about this in the next section. Learn more about app tiles.
Settings Let your users create the experience they want by saving app settings. Consolidate all of your settings on one screen, and then users can configure your app through a common mechanism that they are already familiar with. Learn more about Adding app settings.
Roaming Create a continuous experience across devices by roaming data that lets users pick up a task right where they left off and preserves the UX they care most about, regardless of the device they're using. Make it easy to use your app anywhere—their kitchen family PC, their work PC, their personal tablet, and other form factors—by maintaining settings and states with roaming. Learn more about Managing application data and see Guidelines for roaming application data.
User tiles Make your app more personal to your users by loading their user tile image, or let the users set content from your app as their personal tile throughout Windows.
Device capabilities Be sure your app takes full advantage of the capabilities of today's devices.
Proximity gestures Let your users connect devices with other users who are physically in close proximity, by physically tapping the devices together (multiplayer games). Learn more about proximity and tapping.
Cameras and external storage devices Connect your users to their built-in or plugged-in cameras for chatting and conferencing, recording vlogs, taking profile pics, documenting the world around them, or whatever activity your app is great at. Learn more about Accessing content on removable storage.
Accelerometers and other sensors Devices come with a number of sensors nowadays. Your app can dim or brighten the display based on ambient light, reflow the UI if the user rotates the display, or react to any physical movement. Learn more about sensors.
Geolocation Use geolocation information from standard web data or from geolocation sensors to help your users get around, find their position on a map, or get notices about nearby people, activities, and destinations. Learn more about geolocation.
Share: Users share upcoming trips and their itineraries to multiple social networks to share the pre-trip excitement with their friends and families.
Search: Users search for and find activities or destinations from others' shared or public itineraries that they can include in their own trips.
Notifications: Users are notified when travel companions update their itineraries.
Settings: Users configure the app to their preference, like which trip should bring up notifications or which social groups are allowed to search the users' itineraries.
Semantic zoom: Users navigate through the timeline of their itinerary and zoom in to see greater details of the long list of activities they've planned.
User tiles: Users choose the picture they want to appear when they share their trip with friends.
You have a lot of options for earning money from your app. If you decide to use in-app ads or sales, you'll want to design your UI to support that. For more information, see Plan for monetization.
This is about getting the basics right. Now that you know what your app is great at, and you've figured out the flows that you want to support, you can start to think about the fundamentals of user experience (UX) design.
How should you organize UI content? Most app content can be organized into some form of groupings or hierarchies. What you choose as the top-level grouping of your content should match the focus of your "great at" statement.
To use the travel app as an example, there are multiple ways to group itineraries. If the focus of the app is discovering interesting destinations, you might group them based on interest, like adventure, fun in the sun, or romantic getaways. However, because the focus of the app is planning trips with friends, it makes more sense to organize itineraries based on social circles, like family, friends, or work.
Choosing how you want to group your content helps you decide what pages or views you need in your app. See UI basics for more info.
How should you present UI content? After you've decided how to organize your UI, you can define UX goals that specify how your UI gets built and presented to your user. In any scenario, you want to make sure that your user can continue using and enjoying your app as quickly as possible. To do this, decide what parts of your UI need to be presented first, and make sure that those parts are complete before you spend time building the noncritical parts.
In the travel app, probably the first thing the user will want to do in the app is find a specific trip itinerary. To present this info as fast as possible, you should show the list of trips first, using a ListView control.
After showing the trips list, you could start loading other features, like a news feed of their friends' trips.
What UI surfaces and commands do you need? Review the flows that you identified earlier. For each flow, create a rough outline of the steps users take.
The user opens the app and sees a list of trips she created.
The user taps on the trip she wants to share.
The details of the trip appear on screen.
The user accesses some UI to initiate sharing.
The user selects or enters the email address or name of the friend she wants to share the trip with.
The user accesses some UI to finalize sharing.
Your app updates the trip details with the list of people she has shared her trip with.
During this process, you begin to see what UI you need to create and the additional details you need to figure out (like drafting a standard email boilerplate for friends who aren't using your app yet). You also can start eliminating unnecessary steps. Perhaps the user doesn't actually need to see the details of the trip before sharing, for example. The cleaner the flow, the easier to use.
For more details on how to use different surfaces, take a look at .
What should the flow feel like? When you have defined the steps your user will take, you can turn that flow into performance goals. For more info, see Plan for performance.
How should you organize commands? Use your outline of the flow steps to identify potential commands that you need to design for. Then think about where to use those commands in your app.
Always try to use the content. Whenever possible, let users directly manipulate the content on the app's canvas, rather than adding commands that act on the content. For example, in the travel app, let users rearrange their itinerary by dragging and dropping activities in a list on the canvas, rather than by selecting the activity and using Up or Down command buttons.
In the command bar: You should put most commands on the command bar, which is usually hidden until the user taps to make it visible.
On the app's canvas: If the user is on a page or view that has a single purpose, you can provide commands for that purpose directly on the canvas. There should be very few of these commands.
In a context menu: You can use context menus for clipboard actions (such as cut, copy, and paste), or for commands that apply to content that cannot be selected (like adding a push pin to a location on a map).
Decide how to lay out your app in each view. Windows supports landscape and portrait orientations and supports resizing apps to any width, from full screen to a minimum width. You want your app to look and work great at any size, on any screen, in either orientation. This means you need to plan the layout of your UI elements for different sizes and views. When you do this, your app UI changes fluidly to meet your user's needs and preferences.
For more info on designing for different screen sizes, see Screen sizes and break points for responsive design.
Tile and notifications The tile is the face of your app. Among the many other apps on a user's Start screen, what will make the user want to launch your app? Be sure your tile highlights your app's brand and shows what the app is great at. Use tile notifications so your app will always feel fresh and relevant, bringing the user back to your app again and again.
Splash screen The splash screen should load as fast as possible, and remain on the screen only as long as you need to initialize your app state. What you show on the splash screen should express your app's personality.
First launch Before users sign up for your service, log in to their account, or add their own content, what will they see? Try to demonstrate the value of your app before asking users for information. Consider showing sample content so people can look around and understand what your app does before you ask them to commit.
Home page The home page is where you bring users each time they launch your app. The content here should have a clear focus, and immediately showcase what your app is tailored to do. Make this page great at one thing and trust that people will explore the rest of your app. Focus on eliminating distractions on the landing page, and not on discoverability.
Before you get too far into developing your app, you should validate your design or prototype against guidelines, user impressions, and requirements to avoid having to rework it later. Each feature has a set of UX guidelines to help you polish your app, and a set of Store requirements that you must meet to publish your app in the Microsoft Store. You can use the Windows App Certification Kit to test for technical compliance with Store requirements. You can also use the performance tools in Microsoft Visual Studio to make sure that you're giving your users a great experience in every scenario.
Use the detailed UX guidelines for UWP apps to stay focused on important features. Use the Visual Studio performance tools to analyze the performance of each of your app's scenarios. | 2019-04-26T00:13:41Z | https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/get-started/plan-your-app |
Woah-ho! Here comes the Priest with yet another live album! How many does this make it? Officially that’s six, not including live discs within deluxe editions, or live DVDs! Battle Cry is the newest, recorded last year at Wacken (August 1 2015).
Some fans like to moan and complain every time an older band like Priest or Maiden release a live album. You can see their point, but at the same time, how much longer will Priest be touring? Don’t you want a live album with all their newest songs? Priest’s last album, 2014’s Redeemer of Souls, was a triumphant return for the band, who had suffered a major lineup change. KK Downing was out, and new kid Richie Faulkner was surprisingly able to take his place on the stage, and in the songwriting. Rather than suffer from this blow, Priest simply kept going full speed ahead. A live album is compulsory after this much activity. Three of the new songs are included on the disc, in among a smattering of classics, but nothing from Nostradamus (2008) or Angel of Retribution (2005). Fear not; you can get some of those songs on the live CD A Touch of Evil.
Here is a handy-dandy chart to show you where these songs originated, not counting intros “Battle Cry” and “The Hellion”.
You’ll notice a huge 23 year gap in the music presented. This isn’t uncommon for rock bands of Priest’s age. There are so many classics, not to mention new songs to play, but not enough time. As such, albums from later periods, or “cult” songs, are often overlooked. The unfortunate effect of this is an unspoken implication that maybe the music between 1990 and 2014 wasn’t very good. Now granted, Priest did have a lineup change during that period. From 1997-2004, they were with singer Ripper Owens, and Priest have yet to revisit any of that material.
Proving that nothing has been lost with the departure of Downing, “Dragonaut” opens the show on a fast heavy note. Faulkner is a perfect fit, acting in unison with Glenn Tipton to produce the same kind of Priest guitarmonies that you’re used to hearing. “Halls of Valhalla”, another new track, rocks just as hard, but with the complexity of the Priest of yesteryear. The musical chops of this band often go overlooked, but just listen to them play. As for Halford? He ain’t no spring chicken, but his singing style has changed to suit. Within that framework, the man is a demon. He can still do things with his voice that few can. The final new song is “Redeemer of Souls”, a little stiff by comparison but certainly up to snuff.
A few lesser-played songs really spice up the set. “Devil’s Child” from Screaming For Vengeance is a treat, and “Jawbreaker” from Defenders of the Faith is a nice switch up from “Freewheel Burning”. Wacken probably would have rioted if songs like “Breaking the Law” and “Metal Gods” were not played, so of course you can count on the hits being represented. A long guitar solo and instrumental section during “Another Thing Coming” is another surprise. Halford used to do a long singalong at this point of the show, but that’s been shortened in favour of a pretty damn cool Richie Faulkner guitar solo. Way to give the spotlight to the new kid — that is really classy.
Because there’s not enough time on a single disc, “Living After Midnight”, the final encore of the show, was axed. Instead, “Painkiller” ends this CD, certainly an interesting choice for a closer. This is the only song during which Rob’s voice can’t keep up. The song is just insane; it always has been, and you can’t fault the guy for not quite getting there.
Battle Cry is yet another in a long string of great live Judas Priest albums. Shoulda woulda coulda been a double CD. The only two songs missing from this show are “Turbo Lover” and “Living After Midnight”, but wouldn’t you prefer having them?
Yesterday we examined Judas Priest’s British Steel, the original album and first CD of this three disc set. Today we’ll look at the live stuff and packaging. If you missed yesterday’s installment, click here.
iTunes download with all the music from both CDs plus the missing song (“Prophecy”).
The 2 CD/DVD edition is beautifully housed in digipack, with lots of photos in a nice booklet with essay. The photos are all from their recent tour; none are vintage, which disappointed me. I would have loved some fly-on-the-wall photos of them recording this album at Ringo Starr’s house, Tittenhurst Park. Maybe no such photos exist?
The second CD, only available in this edition, is packed to the brim. “Prophecy” wouldn’t have fit or the CD would have run over 80 minutes. Otherwise, it is a straight stereo mix of the same content on the DVD. With audio being my primary medium to enjoy, I obviously needed the version that came with the live CD. The iTunes bonus track was available for separate purchase, so that was easy to add to my files, once ripped.
The third disc of course is the DVD. Backed by a British Steel backdrop, Priest played the album in sequence remarkably well considering their ages! Only drummer Scott Travis wasn’t around for the original album, but he plays the drum parts pretty straight to the original, minus Dave Holland’s robotic coldness.
The main question people have when discussing Priest live is, “What was Halford’s voice like?” It is true that he is an older man today and has to restrain himself and change arrangements in order to sing the songs. This is no exception, but man, when he screams, he still has it! He just screams less, which makes sense. The vocal melodies of some songs have been re-arranged, which may or may not be to your taste. Surely, the vocal melody is such an important part of each song. Halford sings what sounds like harmony parts to the original melodies in order to sneak around certain high parts. It is what it is. And, as per many concerts, the audience sings some choruses on their own when it comes to the big hits.
I was pretty impressed with the live stuff after British Steel. This is surely one of the best live versions of “Victim of Changes”. Halford nails that angry end scream perfectly, I thought his head would explode. “Hell Patrol” was a nice touch. “Freewheel Burning” stumbles a bit. “Prophecy” was excellent, and I’m glad a Nostradamus track was included. Halford seems to relish spitting out the words. Satisfyingly, “Diamonds and Rust” is done in its electric version. An excellent surprise. The album ends, predictably, with Halford’s “audience participation” thing, and “Another Thing Coming” which I could probably do without at this point.
One thing I’m starting to notice, is that Priest are sort of nerdy live. From Rob’s audience participation thing (“Yeah, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah YEAH yeah!”), to the stage moves, to Scott Travis’ weird drum stick thing on “United”, this is the concert equivalent of a Star Trek convention in some ways. But Priest have never been trendy, and they’ve always seemed oblivious to it. I guess that’s what makes them cool.
The DVD is rounded out by 30 minutes of interviews with Rob, KK, Glenn and Ian (no Scott). This is the kind of thing most people would probably only watch once, especially when the Classic Albums series already released a full DVD of the making of British Steel.
Now to the British Steel 30th Anniversary set as whole: As good a package as this is, I wish there was less emphasis on the “today” portion and more attention paid to the 30th anniversary of the original album. There is at least one unofficial full concert CD from the 1980 tour out there (live in Denver), released unofficially. Surely Priest could have included some vintage live recordings as well?.
4/5 stars. Despite my beefs, this is a great collection for your collection!
It’s the end of PRIEST WEEK! It was all Judas Priest all week, and what better way to end it then with a 12 CD remastered box set?
In late 2001, local record store legend Al “the King” dropped into my store to sell some discs. Nimble-minded readers will recall that on day 1 of Priest Week, Al King sold me my vinyl copy of Rocka Rolla in 1989! Al now worked at another store in town called Encore Records. Al’s a good guy. He didn’t see us so much as competition, because really we catered to different groups of people. There were certain discs that Al couldn’t sell at Encore (pop and mainstream stuff), and he knew I would give him the fairest prices in town, so he came to me. It was a good mutually beneficial arrangement. I wanted his stock and he wanted the money!
On this afternoon, I chatted with Al while going through his discs, and he informed me of a forthcoming Priest collectible.
“Tell me more!” I said to Al.
The details were scant. The box set was titled The Re-Masters, and it contained four CDs with room for the other eight, sold separately. The CDs included with the box were the first four of the Columbia years: Sin After Sin, Stained Class, Killing Machine (Hell Bent for Leather) and Unleashed in the East. It was an attractive box, printed to look like it is held together by metal rivets. There was also supposed to be a booklet included. At the time, I was obsessed with collecting the “best” versions of anything. This meant having all the songs, and the best packaging available. I asked Al to hold the box for me. At various points in the conversation, I felt like Al was trying to talk me out of buying it due to the price! What Al didn’t understand was my deep obsession for this band.
A few days later I headed down to Encore and bought my treasure. I eagerly opened it up and discovered one little additional bonus! Nothing major, but cool enough for me: the four CDs included had embossed silver logos on both front and back covers, instead of the regular printed ones. This differentiated the discs from the versions I could buy separately at retail. Also, Hell Bent for Leather was indeed included under the UK name Killing Machine, something I hadn’t seen on CD before. Finally, once all 12 discs were collected, together the CD spines read JUDAS PRIEST and depicted their “devil’s tuning fork” logo. The spaces for the 8 discs sold separately were taken up by individual foam spacers.
Back covers with silver embossed “tuning fork” logo, and without.
The bonus tracks were a mixed bag of live and demo songs from all over Priest history, but some, such as “Race With the Devil” (The Gun cover) were incredible and classic. One by one, I added to the set. Some discs came in used rather quickly: Point of Entry was one such disc. Others I had to order via Amazon, or buy in-store at Encore, such as Turbo and Painkiller. But I did get them all, and my complete Priest Re-Masters set has served me well for over a decade now. Although I have since bought the newer deluxe editions of Screaming for Vengeance and British Steel (with bonus DVDs) I have felt no need to replace this box set with anything else. Having to buy the discs individually and complete it myself makes it rare to find, not to mention the box was made only in small numbers. Some fans expected more out of the box set, and some were upset that the Gull Records and Ripper Owens years are not represented inside, even though Ripper was still the current singer. My attitude was and is, “Who cares?” It’s a great looking set and it comprises a complete era of Priest. I like it a lot and according to Al King I’m one of two guys in town that own it. Cool.
1973 to 1993? But didn’t the first album (Rocka Rolla, which has no songs on this CD) come out in 1974? Doesn’t this CD only actually include music from 1977-1990? And didn’t Al Atkins form the original Judas Priest in 1969? 1973 was the year that Atkins left to be replaced by Rob Halford, who himself quit in 1992. So, 1973-1993? OK, I guess I’ll play along.
Due to complications and conflicts with Gull Records, Metal Works 1973-1993 contains no songs from the first two albums (the aforementioned Rocka Rolla and Sad Wings of Destiny). Instead, a live version (from Unleashed in the East) of “Victim of Changes” is subbed in to represent the early period of the Priest. After that, every album is given a look-see.
Aside from the tracks that couldn’t be included for legal reasons, it is hard to argue with most of this track list. It is a near-perfect representation of pre-Ripper Priest, with the odd track I’d swap out for another, but more or less awesome all the way through. Personally I think “Night Crawler” is and pretty much always has been an excessively cheesy song…like sharp cheddar. I would have put on something else from Painkiller, like “Between The Hammer and the Anvil” or the battering “Hell Patrol”.
Most conspicuous by its absence is “Green Manalishi”. Maybe the band decided not to include a cover (Fleetwood Mac), even if it’s one of the best things that Priest have ever recorded. I think “Green Manalishi” today is equally associated with Priest than Fleetwood Mac, if not more so by a hair. It may as well be their own song.
Many longtime personal faves are included: I love “Bloodstone”, “Desert Plains”, “Night Comes Down”, and “Blood Red Skies”. These are songs that weren’t necessarily “hits”, but were huge hits with my teenage self. There’s one inclusion that bugs me, and that’s “Headed Out to the Highway”. I love that song, but unfortunately somebody chose to use the Priest…Live! version over the original Point of Entry track. Furthermore, none of the live substitutions are listed as such on the back cover. There is no indication on the back that any songs are anything but the original. I consider that dishonest.
The liner notes are interesting for a quick read; tales from four of Judas Priest’s members (Rob, Ian, KK and Glenn) for each of the songs. Nothing earth shattering, just some fun brief stories. It’s interesting, however, how Priest completely glossed over Rob’s departure in the liner notes. Indeed, by reading, one would have no idea he was gone. A little misleading to the metal mongers of the time, especially with Rob about to debut his new band Fight a couple months later….
This 2 CD set is polished off with some fine artwork from Mark Wilkinson, tying in the “metal works” theme with a nod to Birmingham with some iconic characters and images from Priest covers past. The Painkiller does battle with the bird of prey from Screaming For Vengeance, with lots going on in the background.
The summer of ’93 was loaded with expensive sets for metal fans to buy. Ozzy Osbourne put out the double Live & Loud. Van Halen released Live: Right Here, Right Now, also a 2 CD set. Iron Maiden had two separate single disc live albums, followed by a double live in the fall. That right there is a lot of cash to be spent, and that’s just a handful of essential purchases that fans had to choose from. There was a ton of new music to buy, not including the grunge bands vying for our dollars that year. Priest failed to deliver in terms of value. Metal Works 73-93 was an expensive collection featuring no music fans didn’t have, and those darned live tracks. It felt tossed off.
Its PRIEST WEEK! Yesterday’s installment: Rocka Rolla (1974).
I have a long history with Priest…Live! My cassette was originally bought at Stedman’s in Kincardine Ontario, July 1987. An LP copy was sold to me by a co-worker named Chris from his own collection about a decade later. Finally I bought a 2 CD remaster which is the last version I hope I’ll need.
Because of this album’s crucial role of introducing me to “old Priest”, I have a really hard time being critical about it. I will say this: This version of “Metal Gods” with the really melodic chorus is awesome. It’s my favourite version of this song, by a fair bit. I don’t know if that was live or overdubs or backing tapes or whatever. It sounds really cool.
Regardless of how I feel about “Metal Gods”, I can tell you that Priest Live covers pretty most all of the critical post-Unleashed numbers from 1980 (British Steel) to 1986 (Turbo). You get all the tracks you’d expect from the 1980’s: “Freewheel Burning”, “Turbo Lover”, “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin'”, “Living After Midnight”, “Heading Out To The Highway”. Clearly the concept here is to have no songs that overlap with the band’s previous live album, Unleashed in the East, a tactic used by other bands such as Kiss, on records like Kiss Alive II. While being fair to the fans economically speaking, as a live concert experience that means you’re missing out on “Green Manalishi”.
Luckily this remaster is now expanded to two CDs, and decked out with three bonus tracks including the crucial “Hell Bent For Leather”, but this remains the only holdover from the pre-1980 period. While the home video/DVD version of Priest Live contains “Green Manalishi”, that video was taken from just one show (Dallas, Texas) while the CD has songs from an Atlanta concert as well. Essentially the CD and DVD versions are two different things. In addition to “Green Manalishi”, the DVD also has “Locked In” and “Desert Plains”. Live versions of these songs do exist on Priest remasters, but they are different versions, not the Dallas recordings.
Live in Dallas, but not the version on the album.
I know from an old Guitar World interview that KK and Glenn felt the album could have been mixed better, that too much time was spent “fixing it” in the mix. Sure enough the crowd noise sounds artificially enhanced and there are backing vocals that I am certain are not live. Otherwise, the record sounds pretty good! But that could just be the nostalgia talking. The guitars could have had more teeth; it was the 80’s though. Dave Holland’s snare sound is in the annoyingly high range, but these are not major concerns. Halford’s interaction with the crowd is more friendly than usual, which is nice especially after viewing something like the Rising in the East DVD. He does do a couple annoying sing-alongs, with the crowd…I’m sure it was fun to be there, they’re not fun to listen to on headphones.
One more nostalgic point: I remember buying this back in that summer of the 1987 and thinking, “Why did Priest change their logo?” I loved the old logo. I never really thought this was a good album cover. Very plain, which seemed to be the fashion in the late 80’s, a decade that Priest Live embraces without shame. | 2019-04-18T10:21:26Z | https://mikeladano.com/tag/glen-tipton/ |
Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) as a key group of non-coding RNAs have gained widely attention. Though lncRNAs have been functionally annotated and systematic explored in higher mammals, few are under systematical identification and annotation. Owing to the expression specificity, known lncRNAs expressed in embryonic brain tissues remain still limited. Considering a large number of lncRNAs are only transcribed in brain tissues, studies of lncRNAs in developmental brain are therefore of special interest. Here, publicly available RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) data in embryonic brain are integrated to identify thousands of embryonic brain lncRNAs by a customized pipeline. A significant proportion of novel transcripts have not been annotated by available genomic resources. The putative embryonic brain lncRNAs are shorter in length, less spliced and show less conservation than known genes. The expression of putative lncRNAs is in one tenth on average of known coding genes, while comparable with known lncRNAs. From chromatin data, putative embryonic brain lncRNAs are associated with active chromatin marks, comparable with known lncRNAs. Embryonic brain expressed lncRNAs are also indicated to have expression though not evident in adult brain. Gene Ontology analysis of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs suggests that they are associated with brain development. The putative lncRNAs are shown to be related to possible cis-regulatory roles in imprinting even themselves are deemed to be imprinted lncRNAs. Re-analysis of one knockdown data suggests that four regulators are associated with lncRNAs. Taken together, the identification and systematic analysis of putative lncRNAs would provide novel insights into uncharacterized mouse non-coding regions and the relationships with mammalian embryonic brain development.
Copyright: © 2013 Lv et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The National Natural Science Foundation of China [No. 31171383,No.31271558]; The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [No. HIT.NSRIF.2010027]; Natural Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province [No. 201217]. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: Qiong Wu is currently an academic editor. This does not alter the authors′ adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.
Recent transcriptomic researches have revealed that a significant fraction of genome can transcribe non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs), the proportion of which is much larger than previously anticipated , . Over 90% of nucleotides in the human genome can be transcribed, as predicted by the ENCODE project . In the ncRNA world, long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) which are manually defined by their size (at least 200 nt) are a distinct group from small RNAs (<200 nt, such as miRNAs and siRNAs). In general, lncRNAs are mRNA-like transcripts that lack long open reading frames and conserved secondary structures and show low sequence conservation, making it hard to be computationally identified from genome sequences . It is speculated that lncRNAs can be transcribed by RNA PolII and are capped, spliced and polyadenylated (polyA) . Previously considered to be ‘transcriptional noise’, lncRNAs are less expressed than protein-coding genes while in a highly tissue-specific expression pattern . LncRNAs have diverse roles in genomic regulation, involving transcriptional regulation, imprinting and epigenetic regulation –. For instance, lncRNAs such as Kcnq1ot1 and Air mediate the silencing of multiple genes in the Kcnq1 and Igf2r imprinted gene clusters, respectively, by recruiting chromatin modifying machinery –. LncRNA HOTAIR expressed from HOXC cluster is shown to epigenetically repress the HOXD locus by involvement of the PRC2 complex . In addition, Imprinted lncRNAs, such as Rian and Mirg –, can also be precursors of small RNAs such as snoRNAs and miRNAs.
Embryonic brain development is a precisely and dynamically regulated process involving participation of many lncRNAs and also coding gene isoforms from alternative transcription and splicing . A recent research reveals that genomic regions evolving more rapidly between human and other primates were located in several non-coding regions, including one brain-specific lncRNAs expressed in developmental stage of human cortex . Other studies also suggest that lncRNAs might be involved in the development of brain , –. Though tiling arrays are widely used to detect gene expression at different developmental stages, the information is limited for unannotated regions because they are unable to detect unknown gene structure . RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) allows sensitive identification of lowly expressed transcripts and is independent of current gene annotations , which is ideal for detecting novel transcripts, including lncRNAs . RNA-seq has been used to identify thousands of long intergenic non-coding RNAs (lincRNAs) in human , , –, mouse , , and other species –. Several studies in mouse identified over 20,000 lncRNAs in various murine tissues and cell types by RNA-seq , , . Mammalian embryonic brain development is a complex process involving synaptogenesis and cell differentiation. The characterization of embryonic brain related lncRNAs provides evidence regarding the roles of lncRNAs in brain function regulation , , . For NONCODE lncRNAs, brain-specific lncRNAs account for 40% of the most differentially expressed 121 lncRNAs across 31 tissues/cell lines . However, the current RNA-seq based strategy would miss expressed lncRNAs in narrow developmental time windows, especially in developmental periods. Systematic identification and characterization of organ development related lncRNAs are still few until now. Given the tissue-specific and developmental stage-specific expression patterns for lncRNAs, more lncRNAs would be identified when combining several independent transcriptomic data.
Here, we use publicly available RNA-seq data from embryonic brain tissues to excavate novel embryonic brain development related transcripts. Due to that many previous lncRNA studies focused on Embryonic Stem cells (ES cells) , , , we also analyze lncRNAs in ES cells to faithfully compare with embryonic brain lncRNAs. We build a pipeline to assemble, filter and report novel embryonic lncRNAs by unifying available RNA-seq data in developmental brain. After RNA-seq based de novo transcript identification and stringent filtering out of putative protein-coding potential transcripts, we obtain a confident set of 29,837 lncRNA transcripts in embryonic brain. Then, we characterize putative lncRNAs by diverse features including transcript structure, evolutionary conservation and chromatin data. A considerable number of putative lncRNAs are not supported by available annotations, such as Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs), mRNAs and cross-species information. Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analysis suggests that putative embryonic brain expressed intergenic and intronic lncRNAs are involved in brain development and transcription regulation, embryonic development and metabolic processes. It is suggested that the putative lncRNAs expressed in embryonic brain tend to be close to known imprinted genes. Collectively, the systematic characterization of embryonic brain expressed lncRNAs is expected to provide novel insights into the uncharacterized mouse genome regions and relationships with embryonic brain development.
To systematically discover novel lncRNAs with potential regulatory functions in embryonic brain, we collected a set of 17 mRNA-seq datasets (Table S1) involving three stages that mark important developmental time points/stages: (1) Embryonic day 14.5 (E14) brain; (2) Embryonic day 15.5 (E15) brain and (3) Embryonic day 17.5 (E17) brain (refer to Materials and Methods). Furthermore, data from ES cell were also processed separately in same way to be used for comparison with putative embryonic brain lncRNAs. Though the initial aims of producing these publicly available data were mainly to analyze expression of known mRNAs and non-coding RNAs, it was viable to obtain known and novel mRNA-like lncRNAs based on the assumption that they are capped, spliced and polyadenylated. Generally, non-polyA+ RNAs are less stable than polyA+ RNAs and non-polyA+ non-coding RNAs are not favorable for experimental studies. Though ribo-depleted RNA-seq can provide non-polyA+ non-coding RNA information, it is not meaningful to use different RNA data with different preparation methods. Therefore, we only analyzed datasets based on selection of polyA+ transcripts. On average, 84% of the initial reads could be aligned to the mm9 assembly of the mouse genome sequence. Aligned RNA-seq data were combined for same developmental time points/stages.
As shown in Figure 1, the transcripts analyzed in this study were assembled using a widely used yet modified protocol . Briefly, we used TopHat to align reads of embryonic brain RNA-seq datasets. Then, we used Cufflinks to assemble transcripts into known gene models or novel gene models by cufflinks guided by known gene annotations. The assembled transcripts were then merged by the Cuffmerge utility provided by the Cufflinks package, resulting in the assembly of 678,324 nonredundant transcript isoforms from 321,413 loci in embryonic brain, which provided the unique basis for further filtering putative transcripts and characterizing expression. These transcripts were concurrently annotated by Cuffcompare program in Cufflinks suite, of which known transcripts were used as reference to screen for novel lncRNAs. Small RNAs were filtered out using a minimum length threshold of 200 nt, further decreasing the number of transcripts to 421,379. In order to obtain a reliable dataset of putative lncRNAs, single exon genes were filtered out, unless supporting evidence from at least two developmental time points was available. Same procedure was also used in another study . We also removed transcripts with Reads Per Kilobase per Million mapped reads (RPKM) <0.3 (refer to Materials and Methods). Applying the threshold, the number of transcripts in embryonic brain decreased to 72,544. Next, we removed transcripts that were likely to be assembly artifacts or PCR run-on fragments (refer to Materials and Methods). Among the different classes, only those annotated by “u”, “i”, “j” and “x” were retained, which represent novel intergenic, intronic, alternative spliced and cis-antisense transcripts, respectively. But here, most analysis focused on intergenic, intronic and cis-antisense lncRNAs.
Figure 1. Pipeline for identification of lncRNA.
Refer to main text for details.
The CPC program was used to distinguish novel lncRNAs from protein-coding mRNAs, which was widely employed in lncRNA identifications –. We retained transcripts with CPC score<-1 (refer to Materials and Methods). However, CPC's SVM classifier could not accurately distinguish transcripts that fall entirely within UTR regions from those true non-coding transcripts. To deal with the limitation, we removed intergenic lncRNAs whose distances with nearest coding genes <1000 bp, resulting 29,837 lncRNA candidates involving embryonic brain, including 21,744 non-coding alternative spliced isoforms, 523 intergenic, 7488 intronic and 82 cis-antisense lncRNAs. Intronic as well as intergenic regions were also shown to be the major sources of non-coding RNAs . Our results suggested that most of novel lncRNA candidates were regulated by alternative splicing, though not focused in this study. Intronic transcripts were another major sources of independent transcriptional units. In fact, previous studies revealed many alternative splicing patterns were associated with neurodevelopmental processes , .
Only 24 and 49 lncRNAs from the identified putative lncRNAs from embryonic brain and ES cell respectively overlapped with the intergenic lncRNAs identified by Guttman et al. , indicating embryonic brain lncRNAs were less likely to be expressed in ES cell, compared to putative ES cell lncRNAs. Of these putative embryonic brain lncRNAs, ∼82.1% had spliced EST support. The support rate was calculated as the proportion of lncRNAs with at least one nucleotide overlap with any previously annotated spliced ESTs (The calculation was also performed in following sections and were not stated again). Another 2.4% of embryonic brain lncRNAs were further supported by unspliced ESTs. The high EST coverage suggested that previously uncharacterized genomic loci may be an abundant source for studying lncRNAs.
Novel lncRNAs may have a significantly shortened 5′ ends resulting from the 3′ bias in RNA-seq, which may be caused by polyA+ selection, fragmentation of cDNA and random hexamer priming . To rule out of this, we characterized putative lncRNAs by CAGE clusters for the putative lncRNAs. Each CAGE cluster was enriched with various short CAGE reads which were termed as CAGE tags that were produced by high-throughput sequencing. We evaluated if putative Transcription Start Sites (TSSs) of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs tended to close to any CAGE clusters which were representative of potential TSSs. We calculated the shortest distance of any CAGE clusters to putative TSS from each putative lncRNA in embryonic brain. We also compared the distances with that of other lncRNA categories as well as permutated putative embryonic brain lncRNAs (refer to Materials and Methods). We observed that the putative embryonic brain lncRNAs were comparable with other lncRNAs, but distances are significantly lower than permutated embryonic lncRNAs (Mann-Whitney U test, p<2.0E-10, Figure 2A). The results suggested that the inherent 3′ bias of RNA-seq may not result in significantly shortened 5′ ends of putative lncRNAs by our pipeline.
Figure 2. Genomic and transcriptional characterizations of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs.
(A) Putative embryonic brain lncRNAs tend to have complete 5′ ends based on the annotation of CAGE clusters. The shortest distances of any CAGE clusters to all putative TSSs of putative lncRNAs are calculated. We compare the distances with that of putative ES lncRNAs, known genes and permutated putative embryonic brain lncRNAs. The red dash line indicates the median distance of permutated lncRNAs. (B) Few putative embryonic brain lncRNAs are translated. We apply Ribosome footprint data to investigate the proportion of translation ability for our lncRNA sets. Remarkably here, we observe significant low proportion of putative lncRNAs in ES cell and embryonic brain, while comparable with known long non-coding genes (NR_) expressed in ES cell and embryonic brain. (C) Annotation of putative lncRNAs by genomic resources. Stacked plots are shown for putative lncRNAs mapped to spliced ESTs, known mRNAs, lncRNAs from NONCODE database, and the left are classified as “Unannotated”. To avoid redundant annotations among different genomic elements for lncRNAs, the order of annotation is forced bottom-up from ESTs to TransMap, leaving those without any annotations labeled as “Unannotated”. For putative embryonic brain lncRNAs, the major annotation sources are ESTs and mRNAs. (D) The cumulative distribution of median PhastCons scores across 33 placental mammal subset of species for putative embryonic brain lncRNAs, compared to introns of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs, known lncRNA and protein-coding genes, exons of known long protein-coding genes and known lncRNAs and UTRs of protein-coding genes. Only a small proportion of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs are highly conserved among mammals and most of those lncRNAs show low overall conservation level. Introns of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs, however, show even less conserved fractions, compared to putative lncRNA exons. X-axis, normalized PhastCons score; Y-axis, Cumulative frequency. NM_, known coding RefSeq genes; NR_, known long RefSeq genes; E14_, embryonic E14.5 brain; E14_NR, known lncRNA genes (NR_) expressed in embryonic brain; ES_NR, known lncRNA genes (NR_) expressed in ES cell; Permutated, positions of all lncRNAs are randomly chosen (details refer to Materials and Methods).
It was still difficult to reliably distinguish non-coding RNAs from coding mRNAs or short peptides using only computational approaches . Even, short ORFs can also be translated, therefore it is not reliable to judge translation of non-coding RNAs based on ORF length . Recently, ribosome profiling, an approach based on sequencing of ribosome-protected RNA fragments, was carried out to screen for potential translation of mRNAs in mouse ES cell . Surprisingly, a significant proportion of lncRNAs were predicted to be translated to short ORFs , , implying so-called ncRNAs can still produce short peptides. Therefore, analysis of lncRNA translation using experimental data was necessary. We applied the data from that study to investigate the translation of our lncRNA sets. To make a reliable comparison of different types of lncRNAs, same number of known and putative ES cell lncRNAs with putative embryonic brain lncRNAs were sampled with replacement, while keeping comparable expression level. The sampling approach was also used in other analysis in next sections. Remarkably in Figure 2B, we observed significant low proportion (∼5%) of known and putative lncRNAs in embryonic brain. However, known and putative lncRNAs in ES cell tended more to be associated with ribosome footprints, consistent with the ES cell context from which ribosome profiling data were generated. A recent study estimated that about 92% of lncRNAs were not translated in two human cells , which further supported our results. Collectively, the evidence suggested that the majority of the putative lncRNAs may not be associated with translation machinery.
For the putative embryonic brain lncRNAs, we then characterized their genomic and transcriptional features, compared to known protein-coding and known lncRNA genes expressed in embryonic brain when necessary. Firstly, as shown in Table 1, the length of putative embryonic brain intergenic lncRNAs was on average 605.2, comparable with those in previous studies . The number of exons for putative embryonic brain intergenic lncRNA genes (on average, 1.32 exons) was less than known lncRNA genes (on average, 5.11 exons). Furthermore, the average exon number of putative embryonic brain intergenic lncRNAs was comparable with putative intergenic ES cell lncRNAs. As a more abundant group, 7488 putative embryonic brain intronic lncRNAs were more spliced with on average 1.6 exons and were comparable with putative ES cell lncRNAs. However, we may underestimate the exon number and length of putative lncRNAs, because their low expression levels may lead to incomplete assembly. We also successfully assembled 82 cis-antisense lncRNAs relative to known genes with ∼1.34 exons per transcripts and an average length over 1000 nt. The distributions of transcript length and number of exons for putative and known lncRNAs were shown in Figure S1 and S2. A full list of putative lncRNAs with details of genomic characterization was available in Table S2.
Table 1. Characterization of putative embryonic brain and ES cell lncRNAs with known lncRNAs for comparison.
When mapped to publicly available transcripts, it was indicated that 44.8% of putative intergenic lncRNAs in embryonic brain contained at least 10% overlap in exons with any annotations from Spliced ESTs, mRNAs, NONCODE lncRNAs and the orthologous gene information in the TransMap annotation based on pairwise genome alignments from other vertebrate species (details of data refer to Materials and Methods). We found that 71.4% and 77.5% of putative intronic and cis-antisense lncRNAs in embryonic brain overlapped at least 10% in exon with any of these annotations (Figure 2C). For putative lncRNAs in embryonic brain, the major annotation sources were ESTs and mRNAs. Notably, NONCODE lncRNA annotations contributed only to putative intronic lncRNAs in ES cell, implying a possible bias towards ES cell in known lncRNA list (Figure 2C). Taken together, putative lncRNAs were poorly understood based on available genomic and evolutionary data.
Comparative genomic analysis of mouse lncRNAs indicated that their primary sequences, splice sites and promoters were under purifying selection . However, the entire sequences may not be conserved, as lncRNA genes were significantly less conserved than protein-coding genes , . To determine whether putative embryonic brain lncRNAs were evolutionary conserved, we investigated the average PhastCons scores across 33 placental mammal subset of species for putative embryonic brain lncRNAs (refer to Figure 2D). We found that only a small proportion of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs were highly conserved among mammals and most of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs contained conserved elements though showed low overall conservation level. Introns of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs, however in general, were even less conserved compared with putative lncRNA exons. The low overall conservation may result from rapidly evolvement of unnecessary lncRNA stretches, as many lncRNAs showed lineage specific conservation restricted to close species such as rat (data not shown).
According to a previous finding, ∼18% of TSS regions defined by CAGE was estimated to overlap repetitive elements . We also found that ∼40% of known lncRNA genes (NR_) expressed in ES cell and embryonic brain overlapped with repetitive elements (>5% of length of lncRNAs), which were comparable with putative lncRNAs (Figure S3). The association of repeats for lncRNAs implied that the evolution of lncRNAs may be driven by repeat elements, which was also proposed by a recent study .
Given the tissue and developmental stage expression specificity of lncRNAs, we then investigated the expression of putative and known lncRNAs expressed in different developmental stages. The expression of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs, known long protein-coding genes (NM_ RefSeq genes) and lncRNAs (NR_ RefSeq genes) over ES cell and developmental brain was shown in Figure 3A,B. Consistent with previous studies, the expression of known long protein-coding genes was significantly higher than known and putative embryonic brain lncRNAs. Previously untested transcriptional loci including our lncRNA sets would be expected to be expressed at lower levels. Indeed, the putative embryonic brain lncRNA genes were expressed at a low level, but comparable with known lncRNA genes (Figure 3C). Notably, putative embryonic brain lncRNAs were expressed at about one tenth on average compared with known protein-coding RefSeq genes. The lower lncRNA expression levels were consistent with previous reports , indicating it was a common property of lncRNAs. The overall expression increased gradually during brain development for known NR_ transcripts, but the trend was not evident for all types of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs.
Figure 3. Expression distributions of known long protein-coding, lncRNA genes and putative embryonic brain lncRNA genes.
The expression of (A) known long protein-coding (long NM_ RefSeq genes) and (B) known lncRNA genes (long NR_ RefSeq genes) and (C) putative embryonic brain lncRNAs over ES cell and developmental brain are compared. Consistent with previous studies, the expression of known long protein-coding RefSeq genes is significantly higher than known lncRNAs. The novel lncRNAs we identified are expressed at comparable levels with known NR_ transcripts. Notably, putative embryonic brain lncRNAs are expressed at about one tenth on average compared to known long protein-coding genes. Intergenic, intergenic lncRNAs; Intronic, intronic lncRNAs; Cis-antisense, cis-antisense lncRNAs. The gene expression (X-axis) is measured by RPKM which is a normalized metric for comparing gene expression of different genes.
Inspired by Liao et al.’s study , we further explored whether lncRNAs expressed in embryonic brain were restricted to embryonic stages. To this end, we compared expression patterns across different tissues for microarray probes (Mouse 430 2.0 array) overlapping putative embryonic brain lncRNAs (>99% genomic coverage for lncRNAs by probes) by BioGPS server . Of the putative embryonic brain lncRNAs, we found that eight lncRNAs have matched probes for putative intergenic lncRNAs. Intronic and cis-antisense lncRNAs were not focused here because of potential ambiguous probe assignments. From Figure S4, we found that seven of eight probe-mapped lncRNAs were brain expressed and even brain-specific expressed, of which four lncRNAs were highly expressed markedly in brain. Therefore, putative intergenic lncRNAs in embryonic brain were also expressed in adult brain related organs and tissues. This phenomenon at least indicated that embryonic lncRNAs tended to continually express after mouse birth.
To further explore the lncRNA expression over brain development, we then randomly selected six putative lncRNAs specifically expressed in embryonic brain compared to ES cell and investigated their expression using RT–PCR for different developmental time points extending to 8-week whole brain (Figure S5, Figure 4). Conceptual translation of these lncRNAs revealed no obvious long ORFs (>100 amino acids) by ORF Finder (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gorf/gorf.html). Further details and annotations of our lncRNA locus models, together with whether these are validated by RT–PCR, were provided in Table S3. We found that except one lncRNA, others showed embryonic brain restricted expression patterns compared to 8-week whole brain. The false positive lncRNA had a low expression in RNA-seq data (RPKM <1.0), while the minimum of 1.0 RPKM was cited as required to obtain convincing expression in RNA-seq studies . This result provided independent experimental evidence that most of embryonic brain specific lncRNAs were also, though lowly, expressed in adult brain, which implied that lncRNAs may play specific physiological roles in distinct developmental stages.
Figure 4. Chromosomal distribution of lncRNAs in the mouse genome.
For each chromosome, the annotations shown from left to right are: Imprinted genes, miRNAs, intronic lncRNAs, intergenic lncRNAs and cis-antisense lncRNAs. For each chromosome, the chromosomal coordinates start from top (0) to bottom. Six lncRNA candidates investigated by RT-PCR with four developmental time points are marked by blue horizontal bars overlaid on chromosomes, while genomic details are in Table S3.
Though lncRNAs were considered as regulators of chromatin states, the transcription of lncRNA itself was also believed to be regulated by chromatin modifications . A recent study characterized lncRNAs by DNA methylation and four histone modifications and found that lncRNA and protein-coding genes exhibited distinct chromatin patterns . However, it was still unclear whether and how lncRNAs were regulated by specific chromatin marks and the degree of developmental stage specificity contributed by chromatin regulators, as the brain tissue showed a distinct chromatin pattern in Sati et al.’s study . We analyzed ChIP-seq data of five representative chromatin marks in E14.5 brain for putative embryonic brain lncRNAs. To show the enrichment of chromatin modification signals in TSS proximal regions of the lncRNAs, we aligned ChIP-seq tags to the mouse genome (mm9) by Bowtie and performed peak calling by MACS . Enriched chromatin domains for five chromatin modifications were individually intersected with putative and known NR_ RefSeq lncRNAs by comparing genomic coordinates. Proportions of lncRNAs overlapped (at least 50% of lncRNA length) by chromatin marks were calculated as proportions of lncRNAs with any peaks of specific marks in TSS-proximal regions (5k upstream and 5k downstream of TSSs). We restricted this analysis to intergenic and intronic lncRNAs since unambiguous assignment of chromatin marks to the cis-antisense lncRNAs can be confounded by their exonic overlapping genes.
As expected, we found around a half of lncRNAs for putative intergenic and intronic lncRNAs in both ES cell and developmental brain were associated with H3K4me3 enriched domain, a hallmark indicative of transcription initiation of active genes in TSS-proximal regions, comparable with known lncRNAs expressed at same developmental stage (Figure 5B). Again, the result implied the identified 5′ ends of putative lncRNAs were close to bona fide TSSs. It was known that enhancer elements were characteristic of p300 with high H3K4me1 and H3K27ac and low H3K4me3 occupancy . The lncRNAs with H3K27ac+H3K4me1− signatures were once considered to be associated with active enhancers in Creyghton et al.’s study . We were interested to investigate whether and to what extent the putative embryonic brain lncRNAs were enhancer related. As a result, we observed that lncRNAs were more associated with H3K27ac, which is more evident in known lncRNAs, compared to H3K4me1 (Figure 5D, E). Putative lncRNAs were also occupied by CTCF and PolII, which were comparable with known lncRNAs (Figure 5A, C). Therefore, the data indicated that ∼30% of putative lncRNAs were possibly enhancer related and around a half of putative lncRNAs were supported by active chromatin marks.
Figure 5. Proportions of lncRNAs that overlap with chromatin marks in TSS-proximal regions for all known long non-coding RNAs and putative lncRNAs, respectively.
We analyzed ChIP-seq data of five representative chromatin marks for putative embryonic brain lncRNAs, that is (A) CTCF, (B) H3K4me3, (C) PolII, (D) H3K27ac and (E) H3K4me1. ChIP-seq tags are aligned to the mouse genome (mm9) by Bowtie and then are used to perform peak calling by MACS. Enriched chromatin domains for five chromatin modifications are intersected with putative and known lncRNAs by comparing genomic coordinates. Proportions of overlapped (at least 50% of lncRNA length) lncRNAs are defined by proportions of any peaks of specific marks in TSS-proximal regions (5k upstream and 5k downstream of TSSs) for known long non-coding RNAs and putative lncRNAs, respectively. We restrict this analysis to intergenic and intronic lncRNAs since unambiguous assignment of chromatin marks to the cis-antisense lncRNAs can be confounded by their exonic overlapping genes. NR_, known long RefSeq genes; E14_, embryonic E14.5 brain.
Nearly 40% of GENCODE v7 lncRNAs were estimated to flank protein-coding gene loci . Intergenic lncRNAs were expected to have particular regulatory functions for nearby protein-coding genes. Recent studies also indicated that lncRNAs may affect gene expression of their neighboring genes in cis , , –. Manual inspection revealed many lncRNAs that were close to or within well-characterized protein-coding genes in embryogenesis, but showed distinct expression patterns. For example, we detected an intronic lncRNA (chr15∶66,090,924–66,092,050) that was selectively expressed in early embryonic brain and was then turned down to basal level in E17.5 brain, while the host gene Kcnq3 was expressed increasingly in late fetal life to infancy . Kcnq3 was possibly important for regulating neuronal excitability, as shown by the in situ hybridization (ISH) data in the Allen Brain Atlas (ABA) website. As another example, we identified a lncRNA (chr14∶55,672,316–55,711,295) that was organized antisense to Zfhx2, which was different from the documented antisense transcript zfhx2as (chr14∶55,671,907–55,703,972) in lncRNAdb . The zfhx2as transcript had the highest expression in E13–E16, but only had basal expression in brain after birth, while the novel antisense transcript peaked at E17 in our data (data not shown). The novel transcript we found in the loci suggested that there were also other transcript variants of zfhx2as for Zfhx2 expression regulation in developing brain, consistent with available experimental evidence .
In vertebrates, enhancer elements can generate a class of transcripts termed eRNAs (enhancer RNAs), which were correlated with position adjacent protein-coding genes . It was reasonable to explore relationships of putative intergenic lncRNAs and neighboring genes, given that lncRNAs were potentially enhancer related . Closest known genes of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs were collected to detect enriched GO function terms , KEGG terms and gene expression specificity terms UP_TISSUE (“Uniprot Tissue”) using DAVID . First, we investigated whether nearby genes of putative intergenic embryonic brain lncRNAs were enriched in any terms within the UP_TISSUE list, a curated list of gene expression specificity based on literature mining. Indeed, we found that genes expressed in brain and brain-related tissues in the list were significantly enriched by genes in the vicinity of putative intergenic embryonic brain lncRNAs as well as genes overlapping of intronic and cis-antisense lncRNAs, accounting for more than a half of them (Table S4). We then considered whether closest genes of putative intergenic lncRNAs were enriched in specific GO function terms, assuming that intergenic lncRNAs tended to regulate transcription of proximal genes rather than transcription of other genes. Our data suggested that these closest known protein-coding genes were enriched in GO categories involving brain development and transcription regulation. In addition, genes were also significantly associated with spliceosome assembly and ribonucleoprotein complex assembly, only detected by ChIPseeqer software but not by DAVID, which was consistent with the scaffold function of lncRNAs .
Conceptually, transcription of intronic lncRNAs may interrupt the expression of their hosting genes. Previously, intronic lncRNAs were shown enriched in genes regarding transcription regulation and may have interaction with promoters to mediate hosting gene regulation . Our data suggested that genes overlapping in intron with putative intronic lncRNAs in embryonic brain were enriched in GO categories related to a variety of biological processes including embryonic development, transcriptional regulation and metabolic processes. Metencephalon development term ranked first in the GO term list, followed by hindbrain development (Table S5). A KEGG term “mmu04360:Axon guidance” was significantly associated with putative intronic lncRNAs in embryonic brain (Table S6).
Cis-antisense lncRNAs were found to relate to gene regulation including alternative splicing and termination , genomic imprinting , X chromosome inactivation and development . Here, we analyzed the enriched GO categories of genes overlapping cis-antisense lncRNAs. However, no GO terms were enriched. A forebrain development term was insignificantly associated with cis-antisense lncRNAs. Though not statistically significant, this could be due to that the number of cis-antisense lncRNAs was relatively limited. Taken together, the GO and UP_TISSUE enrichments for each lncRNA type were generally in agreement with expectations, implying potential functions for putative lncRNAs in embryonic brain. The complete lists of the enriched UP_TISSUE, GO and KEGG terms and relevant information were shown in Table S4–S6.
Imprinting which was highly associated with antisense RNAs was shown to have important role in regulating brain development and function , . Until now, lncRNAs were demonstrated to act in cis to induce the expression of other imprinted genes in imprinted clusters . In addition, it was interesting to explore if any putative lncRNAs within imprinting clusters were potential imprinting lncRNAs. However, besides cis-antisense RNAs, whether lncRNAs of various types played a widespread functional role in imprinted cluster regulation was still uncertain. In addition, identification of imprinted lncRNAs from transcriptome data was viable, as a recent study demonstrated that imprinted lncRNAs can be identified by RNA-seq . To this end, we examined whether putative lncRNAs in embryonic brain were close to or in known mouse imprinted clusters. We pre-compiled a list of imprinted transcripts, only kept 216 nonredundant entries with respect to genomic positions. We found that a significant proportion of putative intergenic and intronic lncRNAs expressed in embryonic brain were located within 100 kb of known imprinted clusters in which 43.1% of all imprinted transcripts were involved (empirical p-value <0.0005; Figure 6A). In ES cell, the tendency was comparable with that in embryonic brain. Taken together, putative embryonic brain lncRNAs may indeed relate to imprinted regulation.
Figure 6. Putative embryonic brain lncRNAs are related to imprinted genes and unspliced ESTs.
(A) Shown are the proportions of putative lncRNAs and permutated lncRNAs within 100k distance of compiled imprinted genes. Putative embryonic brain lncRNAs are involved in imprinted regions, comparable with putative lncRNAs in ES cell. (B) Shown are the proportions of putative lncRNAs and permutated lncRNAs that overlap with unspliced ESTs. Putative lncRNAs are significantly overlapped with unspliced ESTs. Embryonic, lncRNAs expressed at embryonic stages; ES, lncRNAs expressed at the ES stage; Red bar, the proportion of lncRNAs; Box, the proportion of permutated lncRNAs; whiskers denote the 10th and 90th percentiles.
Imprinted lncRNAs were usually unspliced, consistent with their nuclear localized property , in contrast to the non-nucleus localization of a majority of protein-coding genes. Here, putative embryonic brain lncRNAs were found to significantly overlap with unspliced ESTs (empirical p-value <0.0005, refer to Figure 6B). The putative lncRNAs in ES cell were also associated with unspliced ESTs in statistics. Altogether, it was implied that a large proportion of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs may excise regulatory roles in imprinting regions by transcription itself.
Then, we analyzed several lncRNAs in the well characterized Dlk1-Dio3 imprinted cluster to investigate whether they themselves were potential imprinted lncRNAs. As an example, we found one putative embryonic brain lncRNA LncRNA_6 (Table S3) resided in the Rian locus exhibited an expression pattern comparable with that of the Rian locus , during brain development from E12.5 to E18.5 brain. We also identified a putative intergenic lncRNA LncRNA_1 (Table S3) located in an imprinted cluster between Rian and Mirg flanked by mir882 and mir379. Given that mir379 was an imprinted miRNA , LncRNA_1, which was selectively expressed in embryonic E18.5 brain and was comparable in expression with transcripts in the Rian locus , , was a candidate imprinted lncRNA. Though not systematically investigated, our findings indicated that novel imprinted non-coding RNAs can be identified by our pipeline.
Though at least thousands of lncRNAs were identified here and before, few were functionally characterized , , , , . Previous studies demonstrated that intergenic lncRNAs were associated with transcription factors related to pluripotency and it was estimated that ∼30% of lncRNAs can cooperate with specific chromatin regulatory factors to exercise trans-regulatory function . We successfully aligned 187 from over 60,000 probes to putative embryonic brain lncRNAs in exon by comparing genomic coordinates (refer to Materials and Methods). We found that Knock Down (KD) of transcription factors or chromatin components affected expression of on average 25.5 putative embryonic brain lncRNAs (13.6 up-regulated versus 11.9 down-regulated) (Figure 7). Consistent with our expectation that KD of lncRNAs impacted little on other lncRNAs, we observed that KD of lncRNAs altered expression of down to on average ∼15.6 and maximum ∼28 putative embryonic brain lncRNAs, which can represent as negative controls (Figure 7).
Figure 7. Distribution of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs and permutated lncRNAs with affected expression upon RNA interference of 226 lncRNAs and 40 regulatory proteins based on a published microarray data.
Microarray probes aligned to putative embryonic brain lncRNAs by comparing genomic coordinates are used to explore the expression alteration of putative lncRNAs by comparing microarray profiles of RNA interference of 226 lncRNAs (and 40 regulatory proteins) and controls. The thresholds of 95th percentile and 5th percentile of ranked overall control expression in control profiles are used to obtain up- and down-regulated lncRNAs, respectively. Up-regulation and Down-regulation of putative lncRNAs are not separately analyzed for putative embryonic brain lncRNAs with altered expression. We observe that the distribution of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs with altered expression by RNA interference is separated from putative embryonic brain lncRNAs with altered expression by control interference by Red dash line.
We then tested whether putative embryonic brain lncRNAs were associated with chromatin components and transcription factors. We showed that Sall4, Suv39h2, Iws1 and Ruvbl1 were among the top four chromatin components with most altered expression after KD, while all of them were significantly different from permutated putative embryonic brain lncRNAs (Figure 7). Specifically, KD of Sall4, a known regulator of stem cell pluripotency, up-regulated 81 lncRNAs and down-regulated two lncRNAs. KD of Suv39h2, a histone H3K9 methyltransferase, was associated with aberrant expression of 67 lncRNAs, including three up-regulated and 64 down-regulated lncRNAs, implying potential epigenetic regulation involving lncRNAs. Last, Iws1 and Ruvbl1 were two nearly untouched proteins in literature and had no known links with lncRNAs in mouse until now. Here, KD of Iws1 was associated with the up-regulation of 62 lncRNAs and down-regulation of two lncRNAs. KD of Ruvbl1 was only associated with the down-regulation of 47 lncRNAs. We presented that a large number of lncRNAs were potential regulators for embryonic brain development. Taken together, the data pointed out the existence of potential functional lncRNAs which were associated with specific key transcription factors and chromatin components in transcriptional regulation.
In this paper, publicly available RNA-seq data from embryonic brain tissues were collected and mined to excavate novel embryonic development related transcripts. To this end, we have built a pipeline to assemble, filter and report novel embryonic brain lncRNAs. After RNA-seq-based de novo transcript identification and stringent filtering out of putative protein-coding potential transcripts, a confident set of lncRNA transcripts is obtained. We then characterize putative lncRNAs by diverse features including transcript structure, evolutionary conservation, chromatin information, known transcript annotations, CAGE, ribosome profiling data and RNA interference data. Collectively, the systematic characterizations of embryonic brain expressed lncRNAs are expected to provide novel insights into the uncharacterized mouse genome regions and the relationships with mammalian embryonic brain development.
Earlier, the functional significance of lncRNAs is quite controversial , . The most of mammalian genome were considered to have nearly no functions and most of non-coding transcripts might be experimental artifacts . However, a large number of tissue-specific and development-specific lncRNAs and related function analysis argue against that they are simply transcriptional noise , , , , . More and more evidence indicates that genome is pervasively and specifically transcribed , . Consistent with these, our studies revealed many more lncRNAs that were not reported in previous studies, even many were not annotated by relatively comprehensive genomic annotation data. Our data imply that a large number of lncRNAs are expressed in embryonic brain. It can be expected that when expanding the research targets, such as more normal state and perturbated tissues/cells, more lncRNAs can be identified , , . When expanding the surveyed tissue types, we analyze the expression of eight intergenic lncRNA matched probes in Mouse 430 2.0 array in other tissues/cell types. Unexpectedly, most of these probes were specifically expressed in brain tissues, at least suggesting the putative lncRNAs may have continuous expression pattern after birth.
Several lncRNAs have recently been found to be associated with enhancers . A plausible mechanism is that lncRNAs can act through transcription factors to regulate local chromatin remodeling, which in turn might enhance nearby gene activation . Our data indicate that <40% of embryonic brain lncRNAs are associated with potential enhancer mark H3K4me1 and <10% for H3K27ac mark, respectively (Figure 5). In addition, ∼40% of putative lncRNAs both in embryonic brain and ES cell are associated with H3K4me3, a representative mark indicative of active transcription initiation. Several studies have indicated that lncRNAs can be independently transcribed and be positively correlated with neighboring coding genes , . Jia et al. suggested that most of lncRNAs near protein-coding genes had chromatin marks related to independent mRNA transcripts . Based on the above studies, it is reasonable to assume most putative long non-coding transcripts filtered by our pipeline are independent of neighboring genes and enhancer.
Mapping of the RNA-seq data from embryonic brain reveals a significant number of intronic lncRNAs, constituting the major component of the putative lncRNA repertoire. Recently, Klevebring et al. reported that ∼50% of the intronic transcripts were transcribed from antisense strand , contrary to respective hosting gene transcription. Therefore, the intronic lncRNAs detected here may have antisense characteristics, although untested because single-ended RNA-seq data lacked strand information. GO enrichment of genes that are overlapped with putative intronic lncRNAs further indicates that the putative embryonic brain intronic lncRNAs are closely related to biological processes including embryonic development, transcriptional regulation and metabolic processes. Altogether, intronic lncRNAs may play important roles in regulating gene expression during embryonic brain development.
The putative lncRNAs are comparable in length and exon number with that in other studies, but significantly less than known lncRNAs, which could be caused by low expression levels that could lead to incomplete assembly. Moreover, a large number of lncRNAs in embryonic brain are unspliced (empirical p-value <0.0005), which may imply that many lncRNAs are functional in nucleus (refer to Figure 6B). A recent work suggested that the transcription of Airn, spliced or unspliced, can suppress Igf2r promoter, which is more important than Airn transcription product . A recent study also suggested that the transcriptional process of cis-antisense lncRNAs rather than transcriptional product regulated the overlapping imprinted protein-coding genes in the Gnas cluster . Taken together, these examples at least imply that many characteristics of lncRNAs, such as lack of conservation, shorter transcripts , few exons and large variation in lncRNA stability , are consistent with inefficient splicing of lncRNAs. However, whether the unspliced tendency of lncRNAs is caused by relatively not deep sequencing is not easy to answer though many RNA-seq data are integrated, which would be efficiently explained by the availability of more RNA-seq data and the continued development of sequencing technology.
Furthermore, KD of lncRNAs often leads to significant transcriptional perturbation . Our data further show that KD of transcription factors or chromatin components can lead to expression changes of average ∼25 putative embryonic brain lncRNAs, significantly less than controls, suggesting widespread yet specific regulatory functions for lncRNAs. More characterization of lncRNAs by loss of function experiments would be helpful to thoroughly elucidate regulatory function of putative lncRNAs.
Previously, most studies focused on lincRNAs, as the surrounding transcript structure of lincRNAs is simpler than non-coding RNAs overlapping genic regions. Other merits include the decrease of potential genomic noises and the exclusion of other transcripts in following experimental validation. The number of our putative intergenic lncRNAs is comparable with that of Guttman et al. , but few of which overlap with those reported in ES cells in their study, which is not unexpected, given that the tissue specific nature of lncRNA expression and different identification pipelines. Although RNA-seq provides information useful for non-coding RNA identification, it would be necessary to further explore the lncRNA world by integrating different technology, such as ChIP-seq, and poly(A)-site seq, though beyond the scope of this study. We envision that combination of different data sources including sequencing data and functional genomics data by more effective high-throughput data processing algorithms and pipelines would greatly enhance the understandings of lncRNA function and help identify additional lncRNAs for functional studies.
Based on the publicly available mRNA-seq data from embryonic brain, we excavate putative embryonic brain development related lncRNAs based on a customed pipeline. We characterize putative lncRNAs by expression, genomic annotation and epigenomic data, confirming the validity of our customed pipeline. The putative embryonic brain lncRNAs show significant association with neighboring genes having regulatory function in brain development and transcription regulation. Furthermore, putative embryonic brain lncRNAs tend to close to or themselves are potential imprinted genes. Chromatin regulators Sall4, Suv39h2, Iws1 and Ruvbl1 are most likely to associate with putative embryonic brain lncRNAs. Taken together, the systematic analysis of putative lncRNAs would provide novel insights into uncharacterized mouse genome regions and into the relationships with embryonic brain development.
Care and handling of all experimental animals used in this work were conducted in accordance with Harbin Institute of Technology’s institutional animal care and use committee policies and all efforts were made to minimize suffering. The protocol was approved by School of Life Science and Technology, State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology (Permit Number: 2012–56).
Seventeen PolyA+ RNA-seq datasets from different stages of developmental brain tissues and six datasets from ES cells were collected from the ENCODE project and were downloaded from the NCBI SRA website. The sample information of RNA-seq data are listed in Table S1.
Known long coding and lncRNA gene annotations were compiled from RefSeq and Ensembl gene annotation with further filtering of length >200 nucleotides.
Other data used for lncRNA analysis including small RNA-seq and ChIP-seq data were also downloaded from the NCBI SRA website . Known gene information and annotation data (ESTs, mRNAs and Transmap) used for lncRNA annotations were downloaded from UCSC and another known lncRNA list was downloaded from the NONCODE database . Known imprinted genes were manually compiled based on a compiled list from NCBI GEO with the accession number GSE27016 . The CAGE cluster data were downloaded from the FANTOM4 website . The processed Ribosome footprint profiling data were downloaded from NCBI GEO with the accession number GSE30839 (only processed files of GSM765295 and GSM765298 were used). Chromatin modification ChIP-seq data of ES and E14 brain were download from UCSC with the accession number GSE31039. Expression microarray data of knockdown of lncRNAs and proteins were downloaded from NCBI GEO with the accession number GSE30245.
Sequencing reads in FASTQ format were mapped to mouse genome (mm9) and novel splice junctions were automatically determined using TopHat (version 1.4.1) , with default parameters except “-G” option together with Gene Transfer Format (GTF) file of Ensembl gene annotation used for read mapping, followed by a rRNA removal step based on collected rRNA sequences from NCBI . Unmapped reads of RNA-seq data from mouse strain different from C57BL/6 were aligned to SNP corrected mouse genome sequence according to the data processing illustration at GEO (GSE22131). Splice junctions after initial de novo mapping were compiled and merged with splice junctions of known genes in initial genome mapping, which were used in the final round of mapping. The pool of mapped reads were merged separately for each stage of E14.5, E15.5 and E17.5 brain. Only reads with Phred score >20 were kept. Because the amounts of data varied from different sources, an equal number of reads were sampled without replacement based on the stage with the minimum read number. The sampled alignment data were then fed to an assembler Cufflinks (version 0.9.3) to assemble aligned reads into transcripts . The data of ES cell were also processed following a similar protocol.
Transcript abundances were estimated by Cufflinks in Fragments Per Kilobase per Million mapped reads (FPKM) for paired-end reads or Reads Per Kilobase per Million mapped reads (RPKM) for single-end reads . All transcripts identified by Cufflinks were matched to and guided by the RefSeq and the Ensembl gene models (excluding RefSeq overlap) by Cuffcompare which was included in the Cufflinks suite. To effectively address the issue that a sequenced read can align to different isoforms of the same gene, Cufflinks used maximum likelihood estimation based on a numerical optimization algorithm. By using customed scripts, the resulting files were further analyzed to extract candidate lncRNAs as well as known coding and non-coding genes.
We filtered the assembled novel transcripts from different developmental stages of brain as well as novel transcripts from ES cell to obtain putative lncRNAs. Firstly, identical and overlapping transcripts were merged to remove redundancy. Then, transcripts overlapping with known exons of genes were removed. Only transcripts with length >200nt were retained. In order to obtain a reliable dataset of putative lncRNAs, single exon models were filtered out unless supporting evidence from at least two developmental time points was available. Next, we removed transcripts that were likely to be assembly artifacts or PCR run-on fragments according to class code annotated by Cuffcompare. Among the different classes, only those annotated by “u”, “i”, “j” and “x” were retained, which represent novel intergenic, intronic, alternative spliced and cis-antisense transcripts, respectively. But here, most analyses were focused on intergenic, intronic and cis-antisense lncRNAs. Extremely low gene expression is generally considered to be transcriptional noise . On average, 84% of the initial reads could be aligned to the mm9 assembly of the mouse genome sequence. Transcripts with RPKM/FPKM under lower bound of single tail 84% confidence interval (<0.3) for all expression values were removed. The bottom 16% expression signals were considered as noises, which was deduced from the average mapping rate in RNA-seq read alignment. Interestingly, the threshold of 0.3 was also used by a systematic transcriptomic study to balance the false negatives and false positives , justifying the suitability of threshold determination.
Lastly, we calculated the protein-coding capacity of novel transcripts using CPC which incorporates the sequence features into a support vector machine to assess the protein-coding potential of each transcript. CPC used six features extracted from nucleotide sequences to define transcripts as coding if conceptual translations were long and were similar to known proteins. The proportion of coding transcripts miss-classified as non-coding RNAs by CPC was previously shown to be marginal , , suggesting CPC is a robust approach for distinguishing coding from noncoding RNAs. Then those putative transcripts with CPC score<−1 were retained as candidate lncRNAs for the further analysis. However, CPC’s SVM classifier could not accurately distinguish transcripts that fall entirely within UTR regions from those true non-coding transcripts. In most mammalian genomes, the 3′ UTR regions of a coding transcript may extend for several kilobases (kb) and were abundant in many EST libraries. To explore influences of the limitation, we manually searched dozens of intergenic lncRNAs proximal to coding gene against UTRs from UTRdb but found no overlap with UTRs. To eliminate the potential inclusion of unannotated UTRs (Untranslated Regions) and also promoter related divergent transcripts, we removed intergenic lncRNAs whose distances with nearest coding genes <1000 bp.
Other than putative lncRNAs in embryonic brain and ES cell, we also quantified the expression of known lncRNAs. To make a reliable comparison with putative embryonic brain lncRNAs, same number of known lncRNAs with putative embryonic brain lncRNAs were sampled with replacement, while keeping comparable expression level.
The assembled putative lncRNAs were divided into three categories: (1) lncRNAs without any overlaps with any genes (RefSeq or Ensembl) were classified as intergenic overlap lncRNAs (intergenic lncRNAs); (2) lncRNAs that were entirely contained within intron of any protein-coding genes in either sense or antisense orientation were classified as intronic overlap lncRNAs (intronic lncRNAs); (3) lncRNAs with exonic overlaps with any exons of RefSeq transcript on the opposite strand were classified as cis-antisense overlap lncRNAs (cis-antisense lncRNAs).
Permutated lncRNAs were generated based on putative lncRNAs in embryonic brain to control for putative lncRNAs by bedtools (http://code.google.com/p/bedtools/). We avoided sampling repeat masked regions and RefSeq gene regions that were download from UCSC by a particular parameter -excl in bedtools for putative intergenic lncRNAs while keeping comparable length with putative intergenic lncRNAs. Only introns of Ensembl genes were sampled to obtain permutated lncRNAs for putative intronic lncRNAs. We also avoided sampling repeat masked regions with parameter -excl in bedtools for putative cis-antisense lncRNAs. 10,000 permuations were performed for each analysis, in which false positive rate <0.05% was considered as statistically significant.
PhastConsElements30way data for mouse genome (mm9) downloaded from the UCSC database were used to investigate conservation of lncRNAs. To assign a conservation score to a transcript, the average PhastCons score for the concatenated exonic regions of each transcript model was calculated. The conservation score of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs (putative intronic, intergenic and cis-antisense lncRNAs, separately) was compared with introns and UTRs of known long protein-coding genes and known lncRNA genes as well as exons of known genes (known long protein-coding genes and lncRNA genes).
DAVID was used to perform gene function enrichment analysis based on GO , KEGG and UP_TISSUE annotation by submitting closest gene lists for putative embryonic brain intergenic lncRNAs, host genes for putative embryonic brain intronic lncRNAs and overlapping genes for putative embryonic brain cis-antisense lncRNAs, respectively. Only putative embryonic brain intergenic lncRNAs with distance to closest genes <500 kb were kept for this analysis, which would eliminate long-distance irrelevant genes. Furthermore, putative embryonic brain intronic lncRNAs embedded in long introns (>100 kb) of known genes were also discarded to avoid the bias of large introns. Functional terms with Benjamini-Hochberg adjusted p-values <0.05 were considered to be significantly enriched.
C57BL/6 mice were time mated overnight. Total RNAs were extracted from the brain tissue at E12, E15, E18 and 8 week by Trizol reagent (Invitrogen, Eugene, USA). Noon on the day of the presence of a plug was considered to be embryonic day 0.5 (E0.5). E0.5 was omitted to simplify the notation by default throughout the paper.
Agarose gel electrophoreisis was used to identify total RNA integrity. The ratio of A260:A280 was used to indicate the purity of total RNAs. The cDNAs were synthesized using a SuperScriptTMIII RNase H-Reverse Transcriptase kit (Invitrogen, Eugene, USA). Subsequently, cDNAs were used for genes expression analysis of lncRNA candidates by semi-quantitative RT-PCR.
Semi-quantitative RT-PCR was performed using Taq DNA polymerase (TaKaRa, Dalian, China), and the reaction was performed 30 cycles. The β-actin (Accession No. NM_007393, nt. 520–717, sense: 5′-taccacaggcattgtgtaggact-3′, antisense: 5′-ttgatgtcacgcacgatttccct-3′) was also performed 30 cycles and used as a loading control. A DNAse treatment step was performed to remove possible genomic DNA contamination, which was further confirmed by testing a known intron genes (not shown). The details of experimentally investigated lncRNAs were listed in Table S3. All PCR products were of the expected sizes, as shown by gel electrophoresis. All primer sequences were designed not to amplify nonspecific sequences and they did not target repeat elements (Table S7).
We aligned the probes of Agilent Mouse 60 K lincRNA Array customized by Guttman et al. to exons of our putative embryonic brain lncRNAs to investigate if any probes can represent our putative lncRNAs and quantify the expression levels. Although the lncRNAs in Agilent Mouse 60 K lincRNA array were used to study ES pluripotency, 187 from over 60,000 probes can be aligned to putative embryonic brain lncRNAs in exons by comparing genomic coordinates (>99% overlap). Based on the customized array, Guttman et al. chose 40 proteins and 226 intergenic lncRNAs to knock down and screened the genome-wide expression. They were knocked down and were measured the expression profiles with two replicates for each, accounting for 532 microarray profiles altogether. Fifty-five non-experiment microarray profiles were used to control for RNA interference. The thresholds of 95th percentile and 5th percentile of ranked overall control expression in control profiles were used to obtain up- and down-regulated lncRNAs, respectively.
The distribution of transcript length for putative embryonic brain and ES cell lncRNAs and known NR_ lncRNAs. (A) The distribution of transcript length for putative embryonic brain and ES cell lncRNAs. (B) The distribution of transcript length for known NR_ lncRNAs expressed in embryonic and ES cell, respectively.
The distribution of exon number for putative embryonic brain and ES cell lncRNAs and known NR_ lncRNAs. (A) The distribution of exon number for putative embryonic brain and ES cell lncRNAs. (B) The distribution of exon number for known NR_ lncRNAs expressed in embryonic and ES cell, respectively.
The proportion of putative lncRNAs and known lncRNAs that overlap with repeat elements. About 40% of putative and known lncRNAs are associated with repeat elements (>5% of length of lncRNAs). NR_, known non-coding RefSeq genes; E14, embryonic E14.5 brain.
The distribution of expression across adult tissues (Mouse 430 2.0 array) for probes matched with putative embryonic brain lncRNAs. The expression information is taken from BioGPS server . We obtain eight lncRNAs which are associated with non-redundant probes, of which seven probes are brain expressed and even brain-specific expressed. Even, four probes are highly expressed markedly in brain. Therefore, putative intergenic lncRNAs in embryonic brain are also expressed in adult brain related organs and tissues.
Chromosomal distribution of lncRNAs in the mouse genome and randomly chosen putative embryonic brain lncRNAs for exploring expression in adult whole brain. For each chromosome, the chromosomal coordinates start from top (0) to bottom. Six lncRNA candidates are marked by blue horizontal bars overlaid on chromosomes and are investigated by RT-PCR with four developmental time points (refer to Materials and Methods), while genomic details are in Table S3. LncRNA_x represents putative embryonic lncRNA ID in Table S3.
RNA-seq genome mapping using Tophat.
Details of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs by RT-PCR.
Full list of putative embryonic brain lncRNAs.
Gene function enrichment analysis based on UP_TISSUE annotation for putative embryonic brain lncRNAs.
Gene function enrichment analysis based on Gene Ontology (GO) annotation putative embryonic brain lncRNAs.
Gene function enrichment analysis based on KEGG annotation putative embryonic brain lncRNAs.
Primer designs for six putative embryonic brain lncRNAs.
The authors thank Zhijun Huang and Jianzhong Su for useful suggestions regarding this work.
Conceived and designed the experiments: YZ QW. Performed the experiments: JL WC HBL. Analyzed the data: HH YX JG. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: HL QL TZ YC. Wrote the paper: JL WC HBL.
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Understanding seems to be somewhat hard to attain. Wisdom and knowledge can be quite elusive and without it, we can’t seem to completely understand. I’ve been on a bit of a journey in recent years and there is still so much I don’t understand.
Why am I the way I am? Why do I react the way I do? Was there a specific event that molded my mind to work a certain way? Some deep questions I never really expected I would be on an Indiana Jones type adventure to find!
I was challenged this week by a friend when our conversation took a deeper turn into the topic of confidence. We were talking primarily about our kids, and the ways in which we as parents should be strong advocates for the strengths of our children, to develop a sense of confidence in them that will allow them to flourish in their growth into adults. My friend made a comment about my strong musical / drumming ability and how I seem very confident when I play. This made me think (as most deep conversations tend to do)…I have never really felt confident about my ability to play music. Every time I sit behind a drum kit, my stomach turns and I get extremely nervous. I suppose I have developed a habit of eating my feelings to hide how I’m truly feeling. (Maybe that is why I chose to play drums… I get to hide behind a kit, behind the rest of the band!) I have an incredible fear of failure…I mean, I’m the drummer, if I screw up, there goes the song! Not many people will notice a missed note from the guitar or bass, but miss a beat and all eyes send immediate laser glances in your direction that can cause soul crushing combustion that wreaks havoc for your entire musical career! I can still remember shows where I dropped a stick or skipped a beat…haunting!!
This is when I began to question the sense of my confidence in my abilities, but mainly my unspoken level of unattainable perfection. I know I have made comments in previous posts about my lack of self confidence, but this just seems a little different. I feel as though I have lived most of life with a false sense of outward confidence trying to reach this level of perfection in my craft or ability (or in life), that seems impossible to attain. This incredible pressure I have placed on myself could likely be part of the influences that have driven some decisions I have made through some challenging times in my career that unfortunately were not the right choices to make. Please know that by no means do I use my personality flaws or mental influences as an excuse for some poor choices. We all make choices in life, and ultimately those choices are our responsibility. Yes there can be external or internal pressures, influences or reasons beyond our control that will all factor into those decisions and I will not negate that, as I feel those pressures daily. I also know the weight of the destructive turmoil that can be created when we allow those internal dialogues to ultimately cloud our judgment and understanding of the decision we are making. This is the lack of wisdom that so often prevails.
So how has this affected my confidence? I will never attain the level of perfection I seem to have placed upon myself.
This is my consistent internal dialogue that I allow to influence everything in my life. Something as simple as playing drums in my Sunday morning church service or teaching a workshop I have taught for years brings me an anxiety and nervousness that is unwarranted and yet, unrelenting.
This is what I’ve been trying to unpack since my conversation with my friend this past week. And to be honest, I can’t seem to figure that out yet. Maybe it will be the topic of my next therapy session. But for now, I seem to go back to my childhood and the heavy influence my parents had on me. My parents are incredible human beings, who have displayed a love and devotion to family and to each other that is to be honored and respected. Their outward expression of unconditional love and support for me, my sister and all those they come in contact with is beyond anything I deserve… and when I dive into my development as a child and young boy, I can’t help but wonder if I misinterpreted the messages I received from them, or if I didn’t receive what they were trying to send…. Maybe because my childhood was void of negative or challenging times to where I might consider myself to have had a sheltered life, that once I began to experience failure or rejection, I didn’t know how to accept it and would therefor challenge myself to constantly aim for perfection so I wouldn’t need to experience that pain….
It is like dropping a stick or missing a beat, yet the eyes that are focused on me are the ones of my own children, and those eyes mean everything to me. To feel like a disappointment as a father is one that I can never let go of. As my journey continues and I begin to unpack this in my own life, I will search for wisdom to understand and to make sure they know that even though they too may someday miss a beat or drop a stick, they have the choice to let that define them, or they can pick up, dust off and play their heart out without the expectation of an unattainable perfection.
I took a drive to clear my head and drown my thoughts with music and podcasts, and soon found myself next to the water just north of the city. Being next to water, in nature, observing creation at it’s finest has always been a calming place for me. Growing up, I was incredibly fortunate to be exposed to the great outdoors at a young age, when my dad would take me camping each summer from the age of eight. Although it seemed like injuries were a common, consistent and inevitable right of passage for the Martin boys camping weekend, I looked forward to it each year. These weekends above most other childhood memories are vivid and are cherished. They have helped shape me, have affirmed a love of the outdoors, a deep appreciation for back woods first aid skills, and encourage a peace that can only come from being in that environment.
As I sat trying to admire the beauty, trying desperately to ease the storm inside, I was mesmerized and drawn to the rushing water as it cascaded down the river. It was loud, reckless, uncontrolled and dangerous. Yet sitting on the shore, I knew I was safe from the unpredictable current of turmoil raging just a few feet in front of me.
The trajectory of my life has followed a similar path. What seems to start as a calm, flowing river, quiet and serene, quickly turns into a raging, roaring, and unpredictable series of waves and rapids. There is a term used in WhiteWater circles called “Reversal”. This is a place where the current swings upwards and revolves back on itself, causing a treacherous meeting of currents that can drown swimmer and rafters (sourced from https://www.pinnacle-travel.org/whitewater-rafting-glossary/). This seems to be the place I currently find myself, in an inescapable, treacherous current; almost drowning.
I’m sure there are plenty others who feel stuck in this rotating spiral of vicious waves, trapped with no visible way out, unsure of which way is actually up! But what actually calmed my own head (and eventually inspired this post), was that although I was fixated on the raging water and the noise it created, turning to look further down stream to see the water become calm, the noise died, the current slowed and peace being found. The chaos that was so unpredictable, soon made sense. It became tame, controlled and quiet. It brought back those soul reassuring and refreshing feelings of being a young boy standing feet from the water, breathing the beauty of the outdoors, weightless and free. It certainly doesn’t mean that the problems, anxieties, fears and burdens are not still present…they are very much still there… but there is hope that someday soon it will make sense. The turmoil and chaos of our lives is only there for a time; it may toss and turn again, swell up, force us back down….
but eventually it becomes quiet, becomes meaningful, and rest and peace will come.
one of the most obvious life lessons I have had the (unfortunate) pleasure of learning over the past few years, is the life is not in my control. As much as I can try and take control of things and try to steer situations, outcomes, even people in a direction that I feel they should go…I am reminded constantly that it is a futile waste of effort.
Please understand me, I completely agree that there are elements of our days that we do and can control. We make decisions and choices constantly throughout the day, from the decision to wake up, what to eat, what to wear, to what email to read and send, to bigger life altering and financial decisions etc. So I certainly agree that parts of this life is choices and control…. it reminds me of one of my favorite prayers.
I’ve began to notice how worn my hands are. If I hang on to something for too long or grip tight for an extended period, my hands begin to hurt. Working in my field for as many years as I have has caused some physical changes to the musculature in my hands that elicit this unfortunate reaction. When I am able to open my hands and relax, pain goes away, circulation and feeling returns.
This has been a reminder of living life holding too tight. Trying to grip and hold tight to aspects, situations or people that I can’t control. I want to, and the thought of letting go is frightening. It is full of worry, doubt, fear and anxiety. And when these things are pulled and ripped out of my hands, it hurts because of how tightly clenched my hands are.
But slowly (very, incredibly slowly), I have begun to let go, to open my hands. To allow those situations that I know I cannot control to just ‘be’. To be free, to not let them cause me so much discomfort and pain. I have been told several times by a couple of counselors and therapists over the years that pain and suffering are different. That I don’t need to suffer from the pain in my hands if I just open them and allow the life to flow through them again. There is still pain there, and the memories and past experiences will always be etched in my mind, but I don’t need to let those things hold so much weight that they consume everything. Holding so tight also limits our ability to be given anything else, as our hands are now full.
Living life with open hands not only eases the suffering, but it allows for opportunities, gifts and situations to be given to us. Nothing can be given, if we are not ready and open to receive it. So just as letting go of control can relieve so much stress, suffering and pain, the opposite is true. It can allow for more to be freely given.
So friends, how are you living? with open hands or holding too tight to the things you can’t control?!? Trust me, I know how hard this is. It is so much easier to write the words, then to put them into practice. But if there is anything I have learned, it is that the eventual ability to begin to let go and open your hands will begin to bring feeling back and ease the suffering. It is a work in progress, when we know nothing else but holding tight, the letting go is hard. I hope and pray that you will be able to begin to open your hands.
as always, my cell is 7058682616, send a text if you need to!
To be able to pen words of wisdom and enlightenment, with an inspirational depth unattainable by another human while being consistent and concise with cadence and and incredible advice… is a dream that one day I wish to realize.
In my opinion, the book “Oh the Places You’ll Go”, is by far the most inspirational and affirming collection of words I have had the privilege of reading. When my eldest daughter was born 12 years ago (almost 13…as she continually reminds me), it was the first text I read to her. With emotional and likely tired tearful eyes I would struggle through the sentences as the truth of its contents spoke to me and my aspiration for her as she would grow and develop into the independent, beautiful and compassionate young lady she is today.
This book was not only read to her, but to my 4 other children when they were all newborns. It became a father’s tradition.
Somewhere along the years, I let go of the truth of Dr. Seuss’ wisdom and became complacent in my days and struggled with inspiration and motivation. Each day became a chore and getting myself together in the morning to go to work, put on a friendly face, pretend to care, and just get through, became exhausting.
I found the book the other day while tidying up after putting my kids to bed. Giving it a read again brought me to tears (which isn’t hard to do), but it brought a swell of emotions of failure, disappointment and grief. The situations I currently find myself facing these days have been difficult and challenging, and with the recent events that have unfolded in the hockey community with the devastating bus crash that took the lives of sixteen Humbodlt Broncos, I am holding my own kids a little tighter; yet I have a strong feeling of failure as a father. My kids are my everything; to feel inadequate as a dad and not ever wanting my children to go through life’s difficulty was incredibly heavy in that moment.
I still struggle to get through most days, and when I’m in a dark place of fear, panic and anxiety, believe it or not, I try to remember the words of this book. Dr. Seuss seemed to know just what I need! And I think the reason is simple… he was human too, had his own struggles (I’m not going to go through his complete story as it’s a long one), but it makes me realize that I am not alone, and neither are you. We all have a story and if you feel you are stuck or in a slump, just remember the words of the Dr.
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)KID, YOU’LL MOVE MOUNTAINS!
Don’t give up friends! Days are hard and long and that’s for real, but if you focus on you struggle, your mountain you’ll never succeed. If we work together to lift each other up, our mountains we can climb, up to the top. Be free of your pain you will not, but learn, lean and hope for tomorrow we can have, because you are strong, not alone and loved.
I hope you can be inspired or find some strength to carry on… today is your day! move you mountain and see the places you’ll go. feel free to text 7058682616 if you need someone to talk with, share your story with or just say hi!
I feel like I live with this strange dichotomy. I love to teach, to educate and share my knowledge. To be in front of others; a group of strangers leading them into a deeper understanding of a particular topic I am passionate about.
I hate the feeling of being judged. The thought of standing in front of a group of students or a group of my peers brings on huge anxiety. Days leading up to an event or course that I am presenting, I begin to experience a dreaded panic, anxiety, worry and fear. It seems ridiculous and I’ve had a difficult time trying to put reasoning behind the emotion I feel, especially after I’ve taught the same course and given the same talk several times before. Yet without fail, I’m struck with an anxious fear that keeps me up at night!
I certainly can’t be the only one to feel this way?!?
I could spend some time writing about the dangers of judging others. How its imperative that we choose to live with an open-mind, trying to understand life’s various perspectives and not judging others as they are likely fighting a battle we cannot see. But that would be a long post and you likely wouldn’t make it to the end (see what I did there…judged your attention span and your character a little…sorry).
But what I will say is that if we allow ourselves to impose our own judgment on others and how they perceive us, we will do them a complete disservice. When I question the motives and intent of my good friends, I rob them of the joy of being a blessing to me and sharing their love with me. When I push my insecurities onto those I’m teaching or speaking to, I limit the potential for them to truly experience and engage in what I can offer, because I hesitate to give the best of me…out of fear of an assumption, nothing legitimate.
The big question is how to change that mindset… how does one escape the fear of the assumption of being judged? I wish I had the answer! for now, managing the stress and anxiety is the only thing I seem to be able to do (even though I still don’t do that very well). Being present in the moment, focusing on the here and now, may offer some distraction to the thoughts of what others are thinking…. but today I will start by apologizing to those I have projected a false assumption that you are judging me… to my friends, thank you for being true to your geniuine love and friendship, and sorry for not being fully present to receive your gift.
Thank you for continuing to read this blog… I truly do hope you find some encouragement in the words and thoughts of a rambling, broken, imperfect human!! as always, feel free to to text 7058682616 if there is anything I can do to help.
Yet as ‘connected’ as I am (and as we all are), the less it seems we understand how to work as humans. Speaking for myself, I can’t shake the feeling of loneliness that I feel when I’ve sat in Starbucks, updating every profile, creating new promo for the clinic, posting pictures, blogs, ads, and when I lift my head from my screen…I’m alone. Apparently after nine at night is not a popular time for coffee?!? Yet even on a busy weekend with a line up out the door at the local caffeinated establishment, I will still feel that same loneliness. In a crowded place, I feel alone, vulnerable and intimidated.
I’ve reached out to hundreds of online people who visit me on Instagram or Facebook, but I’m sitting alone…and the juxtaposition is sometimes a little depressing.
I’ll be the first to admit that there is a small sense of excitement, or relief when there is some sort of acknowledgement with something that I post. Whether it’s just one person who “likes” a picture or blog post… and the more I think about it, the more I realize that this attitude can’t be healthy. I understand the difficulty that results from putting any of our worth in the hands of those on the other side of a screen, especially when we likely don’t have an actual relationship of any sort with 3/4 of our friend list on the ol Facebook. The danger is to become a false representation of ourselves; an unrealistic version of who we truly are. When we reveal the true side of our daily grind and struggle, we face the reality that we have placed so much worth in the thoughts and response of others on social media that our identity and self worth become compromised.
I’m an individual who thrives on connection with others. Coffee and Conversation is extremely fulfilling…and not necessarily a deep, theological, philosophical or spiritual conversation…just the chance to be in relationship and take time. Time to be genuine, attentive and engaged in someone else. Time to put the screen away and connect with a person. This, to me, is beautiful, powerful and meaningful. I’m never going to solve the worlds problems, but just to share time with someone is priceless.
I was extremely fortunate tonight to meet up with an old friend from High School, who I haven’t seen in almost twenty (yes twenty) years. And I’ll admit that it was all thanks to social media that we connected again. We live and work in the same city that we grew up in, and yet we haven’t connected until now. So there certainly is a place for the social media machine. However, it was all due to the desire to truly connect with someone, and this I appreciate. I have been guilty on too many occasions of not following through on the actual human connection of an invitation to meet up for coffee or drinks with someone. And although the intention is genuine, the action is missing. So to my friend I met with tonight…Thank You for your intention and your willingness to sit and talk. It truly meant a lot and I do hope we do it again soon!
We have become a society that is so connected, yet so incredibly disconnected from one another. I hope to be able to bring back the human element of connectivity to my life. To not allow the surface connection of social media to effect my self worth. I do believe that the social media connection is a part of our society now and should certainly be embraced and used to connect, however, for me, it will truly never replace the human interaction.
Much like last week, I think I’ll challenge us all to do this… meet with someone, put the phone away, and have a coffee (or tea) and genuine conversation. It’s a beautiful thing! Break the loneliness we feel in the crowded places. If you feel alone in the crowd, please know you are not the only one… 7058682616 text if you need someone to share some time with over a coffee.
Jon Acuff’s book “Quitter” is a great book about being caught in the tension between your day job and your dream job, and the steps you need to take in order to quit said day job to exceptionally succeed in your dream job. I have to admit that there were some concepts in a couple of his earlier books that I have a hard time with… yet I’ve still read all his books and truly appreciate that he recognized some of the faults in his earlier writing and in his latest book “Finish”, has hit a home run!
But here I find myself, 14years as a therapist and dealing with personal struggles that have caused some serious hard places. I’m finally in a place with my business that I am happy with…I work with amazing people, in a great atmosphere and see a ton of potential for the future…but I’ve gone backwards personally. So now I find I’m drawing parallel between the idea in ‘Quitter’ about finding small joys in the daily grind that will help me move forward in my career, now trying to implement into my personal daily life.
Finding hope in the journey continues to resonate with me daily, likely because it seems so hard to do…even though I’ve written about it in several posts already, I still wrestle with it.
Finding opportunity in the hard places sounds easier said then done and I honestly think my struggle with this has been due to my entrepreneurial side; that part of me looking for that big business opportunity. The giant eye opening, face melting, thunder punch to the solar-plexus kind of opportunity. Because I have such a difficult time with self care, my mind and efforts go to my business, as this is the primary way in which I support and provide for my family.
I think I got it a little wrong… or a lot wrong.
I’m starting to think that by changing the focus from a tangible, material opportunity, I should start looking for the small personal opportunities to help guide through the hard places. As much as it is important, and my goals, dreams and passion for the future of my business are legitimately worth some space in the daily meandering of my mind; if I’m personally not in a good place, but constantly feeling the weight of life’s difficulty, I won’t appreciate, honour and respect the business opportunities that come. I understand that not all of you who are reading this are business owners, and may be sitting at your desk at the office right now, reading this…but I hope you can see that maybe the daily grind wouldn’t be so grinding, if, instead of focusing on the promotion or the need for the new cappuccino maker in the lunch room (that’s a big deal), that starting to focus on finding smaller opportunities to lift yourself out of the hard places can make the day seem bearable and worth it!?!
It might be as simple as taking five minutes and stepping outside to take a deep breath of fresh air and simply appreciating the opportunity to breathe… or sending a quick message to a friend just to say hi and appreciating the opportunity to be able to speak into someone’s day who may need it… or taking a coffee break (this one is more habitual for me, so more of an opportunity to feed my caffeine addiction then anything).
There is beauty in the misery (sounds like a great band name…some will get that reference). So I guess I’ll challenge us with looking for the small opportunities in the hard places. When life feels overwhelming and too difficult to find any hope in the difficulty or mundane mediocrity, appreciate the small opportunities, as rare and sparse as they may seem. I really think that once it becomes a part of our day to find a small moment to appreciate some opportunity we can create a small space for hope and a small reprieve. It certainly doesn’t make the struggle go away, or that difficult co-worker or nagging boss, or broken coffee maker disappear, but maybe it will make them seem a little less heavy. | 2019-04-23T17:57:31Z | https://joshmartinwords.com/category/uncategorized/page/3/ |
Disasters can be defined as a natural or human-made event that leads to large-scale destruction of life and property resulting in permanent changes to human society and environment and untold suffering which require extraordinary response usually from outside the affected area.
The term MCI refers to disasters that involve many people., The frequency of disasters and MCIs is increasing, and calamities always involve mass casualties because they are unpredictable.
According to UN report, from 1994 to 2005, the world witnessed over 67,000 deaths and 260 million people wounded yearly due to disasters. An estimated loss of U$204 billion occurred due to natural disasters in the 1980s. Disasters and MCIs consume local resources in the short-term and long-term, and therefore, appropriate preparation is required to avoid high death and failure rates in such cases.
Recurrent industrial action across all sectors of the economy is a major problem in Nigeria over the years. The health sector has witnessed its own share of industrial disharmony and recurrent strike actions. The Nigerian public hospitals had been repeatedly shut down in the past 4 years due to industrial actions by health workers leaving patients and victims with no other options than to seek for an alternative. With the emergence of Boko Haram sect, there were series of terrorists' attacks when either the Doctors or other health-care providers were on strikes. The lack of functioning disaster team which coordinates activities as well as lack of any special training or rehearsals on handling disaster in the majority of public hospitals in recent past has made the management of MCI a big challenge.
The day of 28th November 2014 witnessed one of the major suicide bombings in Kano, Nigeria, targeting the public in Friday prayer grounds within the densely populated ancient city of Kano. The multiple bomb explosions and shootings resulted in one of the biggest MCI ever recorded in the city. There were about 500 dead and more than 1000 injured victims according to an official report. This was preceded by a similar attack on the general public in January 2012, after many of such attacks in the North-Eastern cities of Nigeria.
There was an industrial actions by the joint health staff union in the biggest federal teaching hospital in the state capital, where services were virtually non-functioning, this lead to some Samaritan to take victims to the state hospitals where either or both the trained personnel and facilities to handle disaster were not available. Not until after about 3 h of negotiation with the union leaders to allow their members to cooperate after which the announcement of opening the teaching hospital casualty was made, and patients/victims were rushed.
This study aimed at determining the types of injuries, location, severity and time of presentation, as well as a presentation to intervention interval. It also assesses the challenges encountered.
We retrospectively reviewed the records of all victims of suicide bombing and weapon shooting who were admitted at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, Kano, on Friday 28th November 2014.
The management protocol highlighted that each admitted patient was delegated to a resident surgeon and an anaesthesiologist/Intensive Care Unit resident who accompanied the patient throughout the initial evaluation and into the operating room if required. Every 3–4 patients were assigned an attending surgeon who supervised the process of triage and the initial evaluation and treatment. Medical students on surgical postings were mobilised to help in records, and minor procedures such as catheterisation, distribution of drugs and intravenous access.
Data were retrieved from medical records. The charts of all patients admitted to the hospital with the diagnosis of trauma were reviewed and demographic data such as gender, age, ethnic group, occupation, the cause of trauma and types of injuries and their location as well as severity. Time of presentation after the injury was also noted.
The records database was screened for patients who had physical injuries and were admitted to the hospital following the Friday mosque attacks.
Data were entered into Microsoft excel spreadsheet and then exported into SPSS Version 16 (University of Bristol Information Services, UK, October, 2008) for Windows for analysis. Qualitative variables were summarised using frequency and percentage while quantitative variables were summarised using mean and standard deviation or median range as the case may be.
There were a total of 194 patients who presented to the accident and emergency unit of the hospital, 20 (10%) were dead on arrival, 37 (20%) had major injuries, while the remaining 137 (70%) had minor injuries and were treated and discharged on the day of the presentation. The available records that were analysed were for the 37 who had major injuries.
The mean age of the patients was 33.4 ± 19.25 years, whereas the age group is depicted in [Table 1]. More than half of the victims are in the age group of 21–40, while about a quarter is in the range of 0–20. Least is the group of 81–100 years.
The victims were all males, Muslims and Hausa/Fulanis.
The mean time of arrival to the hospital in hours was 2.7 ± 0.96 h. [Figure 1] shows the distribution of the time of arrival of the victims to our facility. More than half presented within 3 h while about 40% were brought within 2 h. Least was those brought at 1 and 5 h.
The time of surgical intervention after arrival to the emergency room is shown [Table 2]. More than half of the victims were operated within 6 h of presentation.
The distribution of the nature of injuries based on a number of systems involved is shown in [Figure 2]. About 78% had single system injuries while 22% had multiple organ system injuries.
[Table 3] shows the level of the intervening surgeons and anaesthetists. About 30% of interventions were by consultants, 49% by senior registrars while the rest were by registrars. About 9% were performed by consultants, 41% by senior registrars while almost half were by registrars. Those with minor injuries required only local anaesthesia and were given by the operating surgeons.
Majority of the patients did not require a blood transfusion. About a quarter of had at least one pint transfused each as depicted in [Table 4].
Musculoskeletal was most commonly affected, accounting for 62% of the cases, this was followed by the abdomen (14%) as shown in [Table 4].
The types of surgical intervention performed are shown in [Table 5]. Out of the 37 patients that were managed by surgical intervention, only one (2.7%) died, the majority of the (89%) did well and were discharged without permanent disability. The outcome was generally good.
The mean age was 33.41 ± 19.25. Majority of victims were in the age groups of 0–60 years, indicating the young to middle age being the bulkiest of our population and more likely to attend prayer grounds, and in keeping with the median age of 35 years of victims of Jakarta bomb blast as reported by Chim et al.,,, The age groups are wide because it cuts across all the age groups from a minimum of 4 years to a maximum of 81 years. This may be because all age groups attend Friday prayers according to Islamic rights.
We found all the victims to be males and belong to Hausa/Fulani tribe as is typical of Kano metropolitan city and their religion is Islam in keeping with the mosque attack. There were no collateral victims among passer-by as usually non-Muslim avoid the roots due to traffic during prayer times.
The mean time of arrival at the casualty room of our institution from the time of the blast was 2.730 ± 0.962 in hours. The hospital is located about 12 km from the scene of the attacks. The delays can be explained by the presence of a specialist hospital within 2 km, where victims would be rushed at first and only to come to the teaching hospital on spillage or referral from there. Moreover also the knowledge that there was an ongoing strike action of joint health workers around the time. We triaged the victims based on the general physical conditions such as external bleeding, vital signs and a patient is assigned to a group of medical workers for immediate further assessment and preparation for surgery and those considered stable by the head of triage will be in the waiting area, until any of the teams is less busy enough to review again or attention is called by the severity of pains or routine reassessment.
Within 3 h of presentation, 1 (2.70%) had his intervention done. 11 (29.73%) had their initial treatments within 6 h of presentation. A further 13 (35.14%) were within 12 h. The remaining 13 (32.3%) where operated from 24 to 72 h after the presentation. Although, there is no specific trauma and mass casualty practical training of health workers as in other centres and obvious lack of emergency preparedness training which we ought to have had with the coming of insurgency in northern Nigeria, there was high willingness among faculties, residents and other health workers which led to immediate care to the victims. The reasons for the delay in the last 32% was either due to undertriage or patients who were initially thought to be stable but only to deteriorate on observation and not due to inadequate workforce or resources.
About 29 (78.38%) of the victims sustained single system injuries, whereas 8 (21.62%) have multiple systems involved in injuries. Sustaining multiple system injury is more typical of gunshot injuries and blasts as found to 62% in the explosion and 47% of gunshot injuries. We did not classify the victims based on the mechanism of injury, but the low level of those who sustained multiple injuries to our centre could be explained by the possibility of those with multiple injuries dying at the scene or being rushed to the closest hospitals and likely to receive early attention on triage due to the multiplicity of the injury.
There was serious dedication and willingness by the Hospital staff to attain to the victims, sufficient hands including faculties, residents, medical students and other health staff with 5 h before the arrival of the victims. Although we did not count the number of personnel mobilised and the exact time they arrived as reported by Shen et al. where 10,630 medical workers were activated within 2 h, but the percentages of the victims treated by different levels of surgeons and anaesthetists hold to that. Eight victims (29.73%) were operated by faculty surgeons, 18 (48.65%) operated by senior registrars and 11 (21.62%) were by registrars.
Victims of blast and shootings usually sustained a various degree of injuries with some suffering combination of blast, penetrating missiles and shrapnel, blunt and burns injury and that usually require more abdominal, vascular and neurosurgical procedures compared with other forms of trauma and as well most intentional blasts tend to cause more severe injury. The distribution of injuries shows a higher distribution when compared to 51.6% extremities, 24.5% torso (chest, abdomen, trunk and pelvis) and 21.8% head and neck as reported by Boonthep et al. However, almost closely similar to what was obtained in Jos, Nigeria during the 2001 mass casualty according to Ozoilo et al.
Majority of victims closed to the blast died instantly or on their way to the hospital, which in our environment is hardly recorded, but for those who reached the hospital and survived to our intervention, majority 19 (51.36%) had penetrating gunshot or shrapnel injury followed by blunt injuries 10 (27.02%) and burns of varying degrees 8 (21.62%), unlike 52.2% and 41.4% who sustained injuries from gunshot and attack by matches and knives, respectively.
There were various interventions provided based on the multiplicity of injuries. Up to 8 (19.05%) had exploratory laparotomies, 4 (9.52%) thoracotomies and 2 (4.76%) craniotomies, 3 (7.14%) had fracture reduction with or without fixation. Twenty-five (59.52%) had other interventions including enucleating an eye, maxillary fracture wiring, neck exploration and removal of shrapnel and indicated bullets. The injuries were, however, not mutually exclusive.
Only 4 (10.81%) had laparotomy alone, whereas 2 (5.41%) had a combination of laparotomy and thoracotomy and 2 (5.41%) others had laparotomy and fracture fixation. Thoracotomy alone constitutes 5.41% of the total intervention while craniotomy alone was 2.71%. Fracture reduction and fixation alone forms 8.11% while others exclusively form 59.46%. The pattern of these injuries based on its multiplicity and distribution on the parts of the body involved are in keeping with mass casualty incidences reported by Sylvain in Rwanda and Chad conflicts.
The outcome of our intervention was impressive, apart from those who died on arrival before anything could be done, only one victim (2.70%) died after surgery. He suffered multiple injuries including facial, head and ocular injuries. Up to 89.19% were discharged home after successful treatment, whereas 8.11% were discharged with some disabilities. One of the victims was referred most probably due to proximity and our ability to provide all the needed care. We did not take into consideration the duration of stay in the hospital; usually, because a separate ward was provided and it did not interfere with our routine clinical work or available bed space and all resources for their treatments were paid by the government. Unlike what Peleg described in the outcome and characteristics of Israel terror-related injuries.
We did not grade the severity of injury based on an acceptable formula.
Drills for disaster management should be introduced and sustained.
Despite the industrial actions which delayed victims from coming to our facility and subsequent intervention, we were able to operate Up to 30% within the first 6 h of presentation. We would have done better, and the outcome would have been much better if there were not any of such disharmonies.
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Rigal S, Pons F. Triage of mass casualties in war conditions: Realities and lessons learned. Int Orthop 2013;37:1433-8. | 2019-04-21T12:55:58Z | http://www.njbcs.net/article.asp?issn=0331-8540;year=2018;volume=15;issue=2;spage=132;epage=137;aulast=Yunusa;type=3 |
1989-11-08 Assigned to QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY AT KINGSTON, DU PONT CANADA INC. reassignment QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY AT KINGSTON ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST. Assignors: BARNETT, RICHARD I., KNAPP, WILLIAM C.
1997-02-14 Assigned to SIERRA MEDICAL SYSTEMS, INC. reassignment SIERRA MEDICAL SYSTEMS, INC. ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS). Assignors: DU PONT CANADA INC.
1997-11-17 Assigned to MICROPULSE, INC. reassignment MICROPULSE, INC. CHANGE OF NAME (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS). Assignors: SIERRA MEDICAL SYSTEMS, INC.
1998-06-05 Assigned to WILMINGTON TRUST COMPANY reassignment WILMINGTON TRUST COMPANY SECURITY INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS). Assignors: MICROPULSE, INC.
A support system that reduces the likelihood of breakdown of human skin, and hence formation of decubitus ulcers, is disclosed. The system comprises two sheets of flexible material bonded together to provide a plurality of separate cells that are capable of being alternately and repeatedly inflated and deflated by means of a fluid contained in the cells. The flexible material is impermeable to the fluid. The cells are of a size and shape and with an intercellular spacing such that in at least one of the width and length of the system, the distance between centers of adjacent inflated cells is less than the human two-point discrimination threshold and the support system is capable of supporting a human body with bottoming out either of or between the inflated cells. In particular embodiments, the support system is in the form of a mattress. The support system may be used with persons who are confined to bed, wheelchairs or the like for periods of time or who are otherwise fully or partially immobilized, including for therapeutic reasons.
The present invention relates to a clinical support system and related devices for use in the reduction of the breakdown of human skin, and especially to reduce the likelihood of formation of decubitus ulcers in persons who are confined to beds, wheelchairs or the like for periods of time or who otherwise are fully or partially immobilized.
"human two point discrimination threshold" is measured on a person's back, being the minimum distance at which two objects may be distinguished by touch when the objects are placed on the skin, that distance being understood in the anatomy profession and being approximately 25 mm on a person's back.
Persons may become confined to a support surface e.g. beds, wheel chairs or other devices for a large variety of reasons, for instance as a result of injury or illness or as a consequence of the requirements of a job function during employment. Elderly persons may be confined to bed or other devices for extended periods of time.
Decubitus ulcers, which are also referred to as pressure ulcers, pressure sores and bedsores, are a pervasive problem in the health care field, with high cost both in terms of individual human suffering and in the financial cost to society. The incidence of decubitus ulcers in hospitalized patients ranges from about 3% to about 17% and may increase to the 20-30% range for hospitalized elderly patients (D. Norton et al, An Investigation of Geriatric Nursing Problems in Hospital, Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh (1962)). For neurologically impaired patients, the incidence may be in the range of 30-60% of the patients (Richardson and Mayer, Gerontol. 19 235-247 (1981); Taylor, J. Gerontol. Nurs. 6 389-391 (1980)).
Decubitus ulcers are localized cellular necroses that tend to develop when soft tissue is compressed between a bony prominence and a firm surface for prolonged periods of time. External pressure exerts its influence by occluding blood flow, leading to ischemic injury. With the interruption of blood flow and hence oxygen supply, a sequence of intracellular events occurs which proceeds to an irreversible stage if the blood flow is not restored. Ischemic injury results in cell death i.e. necrosis, and the accumulation of cell debris within the tissues.
The most crucial factors in the formation of decubitus ulcers are the intensity and duration of the pressure being applied, with the relationship between these factors generally believed to be a parabolic intensity-duration curve. If the patient remains immobile and in the same position for periods of time that are less than about two hours, the ischemia is reversible and generally no long term or irreversible damage is done to the soft tissues i.e. skin, subcutaneous tissues and muscle, over bony prominences. However, if the period of immobility exceeds about two hours, decubitus ulcers begin to form, which is sometimes referred to as the formation of Stage 1 pressure sores. It is for this reason, in particular, that it is the policy of many hospitals and institutions to position patients about every two hours. However, this practice is not totally effective. In addition, there is a trend towards the care of patients in the home, rather than in a hospital, and in such circumstances nursing care may not be available for twenty four hours/day.
Both extrinsic and intrinsic factors are considered to act to reduce tissue tolerance to pressure. Extrinsic factors that exert influence on soft tissue include shear friction, moisture and temperature. Intrinsic factors that determine the susceptibility of tissue to breakdown include sensory loss, impaired mobility, advanced age, malnutrition, vascular disease, anemia, incontinence and infection.
Among the aging-related skin changes that might predispose the elderly to the formation of decubitus ulcers are: flattened dermo-epidermal junction (Montagna and Carlisle, Journal of Investigative Dermatology 73 47-53 (1979)), reduced number of Langerhans cells (Kripke, Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology 14 149-155 (1986)), decreased dermal density which becomes relatively acellular and avascular (Montagna and Carlisle, ibid.), alterations in collagen and elastic fibres (Shuster et al, British Journal of Dermatology 93 639-643 (1975)), decreased sweat and sebaceous gland function (Foster et al, Age and Ageing 5 91-101 (1976); Plewig and Kligman, Journal of Investigative Dermatology 70 314-317 (1978)), and impaired immune response (Barrett et al, Clinical Immunology and Immunopathology 17 203-211 (1980)). Versluysen (British Medical Journal (Clin. Res.) 292 1311-1313 (1985)) reported that 90% of patients with hipfractures who were over 70 years of age, developed decubitus ulcers. Failure of a decubitus ulcer to heal has been associated with nearly a six-fold higher rate of death in the elderly (Reed, MD State Med. J. 30 45-50 (1981)). Complications of decubitus ulcers include osteomyelitis and sepsis, and the mortality rate of sepsis approaches 50% (Galpin et al, American Journal of Medicine 61 346-350 (1976); Sugerman et al, Arch. Phys. Med. Rehabil. 66 177-179 (1985); Bryan et al, Arch. Intern. Med. 143 2093-2095 (1983)). Thus, decubitus ulcers are potentially a very serious problem in the health care field.
There are a variety of systems available that are intended to reduce the formation of decubitus ulcers. Most of them function on one of two principles viz. static devices e.g. foam mattresses, air mattresses, water beds and sheepskins, which attempt to redistribute support away from bony prominences, and active devices e.g. alternating air mattresses, which function by alternately shifting support pressure. Although such devices are improvements over the use of conventional mattresses, there is a need for further improvement in effectiveness and/or in efficiency of use.
Many of the static devices have only a limited life span of use because they are not capable of being cleansed in an effective manner for re-use by the same or another patient.
A critical problem with the active devices, and some static devices, is that they may be incapable of supporting the weight of a body in regions of the bony prominences. Under such circumstances, the support system collapses under the weight of the bony prominence, which comes to rest on the mattress beneath i.e. "bottoming out". This occurs because such devices tend to be composed of one or more air-filled chambers of expandable plastic material, regardless of the configuration of the chambers. The force applied by a bony prominence over a relatively small region of the support device causes the collapse of the associated portion of the air chamber, since the remainder of the air chamber only has to undergo a minor expansion in order to equalize pressure in the chamber.
Another cause for concern is the configuration of the air chambers. Most often the chambers are drawn into inter-digitating patterns of tubular or diamond or other shaped sections or cells, such that when one section is air-filled, the adjacent sections are deflated. However, the five centimetre or greater cell sizes of typical support devices have been incapable of lifting the patient sufficiently clear of the mattress beneath the device to provide effective alternating pressure, particularly over bony prominences. While the larger cell sizes of some devices have sufficient excursion i.e. height, to overcome this problem of bottoming out (Bliss et al, British Medical Journal 1 394-397 (1967)), they have experienced other problems e.g. large areas of the body are left unsupported leading to discomfort and uneasiness experienced by the patient. Even the five centimeter cell sizes are unable to prevent small bony prominences on a body from falling between the inflated cells and resting on the mattress beneath i.e. bottoming out. While the use of higher pressures in such tubes may be used to prevent bottoming out, there would be a resultant comfort problem for the patient and effective alternating pressures would not be achievable. Another limitation to these devices relates to the cycle frequency and more particularly to the time required to inflate supporting cells and deflate adjacent cells. A prolonged period for inflation and deflation precludes a pressure relief phase i.e. an interface pressure below internal capillary pressure, of sufficient duration to allow normal blood flow and tissue recovery.
Support systems that reduce the tendency for formation of decubitus ulcers have now been found.
Accordingly, the present invention provides a clinical support system comprising: two sheets of a flexible material in planar overlying relationship and bonded to each other at selected areas so as to provide a plurality of separate cells of selected size and shape in a monolayer between said sheets; said material being sufficiently impermeable to a fluid contained in said cells so that each cell may be alternately and repeatedly inflated and deflated; said cells being of such size and shape and having such intercellular spacing so that, in at least one of the width and length of said clinical support system, the distance between centres of adjacent inflated cells is less than the human two-point discrimination threshold and said clinical support system is capable of supporting a human body without bottoming out either of or between said inflated cells.
In an embodiment of the clinical support system of the present invention, said cells are of a shape and size such that a weight of 2.5 kg and having a spherical surface with a diameter of 2.67 cm placed on the clinical support system will not cause bottoming out of the clinical support system.
(b) means to inflate and deflate the cells.
In a preferred embodiment of the support system of the present invention, said cells are of a shape and size such that a weight of 2.5 kg and having a spherical surface with a diameter of 2.67 cm placed on the clinical support system will not cause bottoming out of the clinical support system.
In another embodiment of the support system, the means to inflate the cells is controlled so that when one cell is inflated, adjacent cells are deflated.
In further embodiments of the support system, the cells are capable of being inflated and deflated independently.
In still further embodiments of the support system, the means to inflate the cells is a compressor or a liquid that is capable of being vaporized to inflate the cells, especially vaporized by use of electrical heating elements or thermoelectric means.
In yet another embodiment of the support system, each cell is of a geometry that precludes complete collapse of the cell when deflated.
said cells being of such size and shape and having such intercellular spacing so that, in at least one of the width and length of said clinical support system, the distance between centres of adjacent inflated cells is less than the human two-point discrimination threshold and said clinical support system is capable of supporting a human body without bottoming out either of or between said inflated cells; (b) means to inflate and deflate the cells; (c) a layer of cushioning material; and (d) a layer of material having a high coefficient of friction.
In another embodiment of the support system, a fabric layer, especially a removable fabric layer, is located above the layer of flexible material, said fabric layer being between a moisture absorption layer and the layer of flexible material. The moisture absorption layer is preferably a microporous film layer, preferably a disposable layer.
The present invention additionally provides a cell that is capable of being alternately inflated and deflated, said cell being formed of flexible impermeable thermoplastic material and containing an inert liquid having a boiling point in the range of 0°-50° C., said cell additionally having means to heat and/or cool the liquid.
In a preferred embodiment of the cell of the invention, the liquid is one or more fluorocarbons, or one or more liquids of the type being developed to replace flurocarbons for environmental reasons, especially such fluorocarbons and liquids having a boiling point in the range of 10°-40° C., especially 20°-34° C.
While the present invention is particularly described herein with reference to clinical support systems and mattress support systems, it is to be understood that especially in some end uses, the systems may not be in a form that would commonly be referred to as clinical supports or mattresses, but rather in the form of seating or other supports, as discussed below.
FIG. 11 is a graph of thermal response of tissue versus time as measured in Example VI.
In FIG. 1, a single row of cells 1 is shown on a substrate 2, substrate 2 being a layer of flexible material. Cells 1 are separated by spaces 3 that are substantially smaller than the distance, d, between the centres of the cells, as indicated by 4.
The cells 1 are shown as being elongated, but it is to be understood that the cells may be of any convenient shape; nonetheless the cells should be of a size and shape that precludes "bottoming out" i.e. precludes collapse of the cell such that the top portion of the cell comes into contact with the bottom portion of the cell under the influence of a weight e.g. the weight of a patient. An example of a cell is shown as a computer simulated drawing in FIG. 4. In use, the cells 1 would be associated with means to inflate and deflate the cells in a controlled manner; such means are not shown.
The cells 1 of FIG. 1 are capable of being inflated and deflated, as is shown in FIG. 2. In the embodiment shown, inflated cells 11 are separated by a deflated cell 12. The distance between the centres of the inflated cells is less than the human two point discrimination threshold, and thus a person lying on the cells is unable to distinguish by touch that alternate cells are inflated and deflated. Moreover, the patient is generally unable to sense deflation of cells 11 and inflation of cells 12.
In FIG. 3, a mattress system, shown generally as 20, is comprised of a closed cell layer 21 on top of a heating element layer 22, a fibre layer 23 and a high friction layer 24. On top of the closed cell layer 21 are a fabric layer 25 and an outer microporous layer 26. The closed cell layer 21 has a plurality of cells 27 which may be of the type shown in FIG. 1. The cells 27 are shown as being elongated and being aligned in both the axial direction of the cells and in the transverse direction. However, the cells could be of alternate shapes and/or be in a more random pattern.
The cells are referred to herein as being "separate cells"; it is to be understood however that even though the cells have the physical appearance of being separate cells, any one cell may be interconnected with one or more other cells for purposes of inflation and deflation of the cells.
Cells 27 are capable of being inflated and deflated. A variety of means may be used to inflate and deflate the cells. For example, the cells may be attached by means 30 of tubing to a system that will alternately supply a compressed gas e.g. compressed air, at a pressure that is sufficient to inflate cells 27 when in use, and subsequently cool or apply a vacuum to cells 27 to the extent necessary to deflate cells 27. The amount of vacuum applied may be small i.e. just sufficient to deflate the cells 27 to the extent that cells 27 no longer would support a patient on the mattress system 20. Compressors to supply the compressed air tend to be noisy and, alternatively, the supply of compressed gas could be from a source that is remote from the area of use of the mattress system e.g. from a compressor or other source of compressed gas at a remote location. Alternatively, the alternating pressure in the cells could be applied by hydraulic means on a liquid in the cell. Examples of such liquids include water and silicone oils.
A preferred method of inflating and deflating the cells 27 is to incorporate a liquid into the cells. In use of such a liquid, the liquid is heated, especially by thermoelectric means, to cause vapour to form and thereby inflate the cells 27; such heating may increase the temperature of the liquid above its boiling point but it may not be necessary to do so, provided that sufficient pressure is generated to inflate the cells 27. On cooling, the pressure in cells 27 decreases, and the cells deflate. The liquid must be selected so that sufficient vapour may be generated to cause the cells to inflate while at the same time remaining at a desired or preselected temperature. In addition, the liquid may have to be selected for a particular end-use location. For instance, in some locations the ambient temperature around the patient may be as low as about 18° C. whereas in other locations the ambient temperature may reach as high as about 40° C.
The liquid placed in the cells 27 is preferably inert, non-toxic and non-flammable, and not of concern to health authorities with respect to both the patients and persons e.g. doctors and nurses, who tend the patients. Moreover, the cells 27 need to be constructed from a material that has adequate barrier properties to the liquid, so that a supply of liquid may be retained in the cells for at least the anticipated period of use of the mattress system; such material is referred to herein as being impermeable. It is to be understood that the anticipated periods of use of a clinical support system could be six months or as long as two years, or longer. As discussed herein, the material may be a multilayered structure, including a coated structure, in order to obtain an acceptable level of impermeability.
Examples of liquids incorporated into cells include fluorocarbons, especially mixtures of chlorofluorocarbons that exhibit changes of vapour pressure over the temperature range used in inflation and deflation of the cells 27, and fluids of the type being developed to replace chlorofluorocarbons for environmental reasons e.g. hydrochlorofluorocarbons. Fluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons are available from Du Pont Canada Inc. under the trademark Freon, examples of which are sold under the trade designations 114, 113, 22, 11, 123 and 141B.
The boiling point of the liquid should be in the range of 0°-50° C., preferably 10°-40° C. Liquids with the lower boiling points of that range could be used for cooling purposes e.g. of limbs or other parts of the body. In certain embodiments, the liquid has a boiling point in a comfortable range for a patient but below the normal human perspiration threshold, especially in the range of 20°-34° C.
Cells 27 shown in FIG. 3 are of a type that would contain a liquid. While the liquid could be heated solely by body-heat of a patient, it is preferred that electrical or especially thermoelectric means be provided to heat and cool the liquid. In FIG. 3, heating and cooling layer (thermoelectric layer) 22 located underneath closed cell layer 21 has heating and cooling means 28 and 29 that may be used to vaporize or condense the liquid. While reference is made herein to a heating and cooling layer, it is to be understood that in some embodiments the layer may be singularly a heating or cooling layer.
Heating and cooling means 28 and 29 are separate electrical circuits and are associated with adjacent cells 27, heating and cooling means 28 being used to heat and cool one cell and heating and cooling means 29 being used to heat and cool the adjacent cell. One of heating and cooling means 28 and 29 would normally be associated with each cell so that the inflating and deflating of the cell may be readily controlled. Only two heating and cooling means 28 and 29 might be used to control the entire mattress system or a variety of heating and coolng means could be used to control different parts of the mattress system in a different manner, for example using a microprocessor. It is preferred that the heating and cooling means operate on a low non-hazardous voltage i.e. a voltage substantially lower than that normally used for heating and cooling appliances.
As noted above, the flexible material must be sufficiently impermeable to permit use of the clinical support system for the anticipated periods of use. The nature of the flexible material to meet such impermeability requirements will depend, in particular, on the fluid contained in the cells of the clinical support system. For instance, flexible materials suitable for use with an inert gaseous fluid e.g. a hydrochlorofluorocarbon, may not be suitable for use if water is used as the fluid, and vice versa, as will be understood by those skilled in the art. The flexible material is preferably a polymeric material and in particular will be a laminated, heat bonded or coated polymeric material. In embodiments, the flexible material is a thermoplastic polymer that has been laminated or coated with a polymeric material that exhibits barrier properties to the liquid to be contained in the cells of the clinical support system. In one embodiment, the polymeric material is a linear low density polyethylene that has been coated with or laminated to polyvinylidene chloride (PVDC). Such a flexible material exhibits both barrier properties and flexibility and toughness properties, which are important with respect to the useful life of the clinical support system. In other embodiments, the flexible material may be polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, polyvinylidene chloride, polyester, polyamide, chlorosulphonated polyethylene, vinylidene fluoride/hexafluoropropylene copolymers, polyurethane, ethylene/propylene/diene terpolymers, copolyetherester polymers, silicon rubber, butyl rubber and natural rubber, coated if necessary to obtain the required barrier properties.
The closed cell layer 21 and the thermoelectric layer 22 are shown in FIG. 3 as being located on a layer of fibre 23. Layer 23 is intended to provide cushioning to and good pressure distribution on the mattress system and thereby provide greater comfort to the patient. Layer 23 may be formed from a wide variety of fibres or foam materials, including synthetic fibres e.g. polyamide, polyester and/or polypropylene, natural fibres e.g. cotton, cellulosic or wool fibres including sheep skins and the like. In most instances, the fibre layer will be formed from synthetic fibre that has been sufficiently bulked to provide cushioning effects. An example of a preferred fibre is Quallofil® polyester fibre that is used in the manufacture of pillows. In another embodiment, layer 23 may be an air mattress.
In FIG. 3, the fibre layer 23 is shown as being located on friction layer 24. The friction layer is provided for stability and safety of the patient, especially to prevent the mattress system from sliding off the bed or other structure on which it may be used. A variety of friction layer materials are known, including foamed thermoplastic polymers e.g. polystyrene, woven textile structures, Velcro® materials and the like.
The mattress system shown in FIG. 3 has two layers superimposed on the closed cell layer. The layer shown immediately adjacent to the closed cell layer is a fabric layer, 25, which is primarily intended as a cover sheet or a sheet enclosing the mattress system of the invention, to retain the integrity of the mattress system and for aesthetic reasons, as well as for reasons of cleanliness and sterility to prevent infections. The outer layer shown is a microporous layer, 26, which is primarily intended for comfort of the patient. In particular, the microporous layer 26 permits perspiration or other moisture associated with the patient to be removed from the location of the patient, and improve the comfort of the patient. The microporous layer is intended to be a disposable layer. The fabric layer 25 and microporous layer 26 must be of a thickness and formed from materials such that the beneficial effects of the operation of the closed cell layer 22 are not negated. In an alternate embodiment, the outer layer could be a non-stick layer, especially such a layer that would be used with burn patients or in some therapeutic end-uses.
In operation of the mattress system of FIG. 3, a patient is placed on the mattress system, in contact with the microporous layer, or a sheet or similar layer over the microporous layer. It is preferred that the mattress system be constructed such that the cells are aligned obliquely to the axis of the patient body, and in embodiments aligned transversely to the body. The cells of the closed cell layer are then alternately inflated and deflated e.g. by applying heat using the heating element layer, and then allowing the liquid to cool or actively cooling the liquid.
The cycle of inflation and deflation may be varied, from one minute to in excess of one hour. The cycle should however be more frequent than once every two hours. Different cycles could be used for different areas of the body e.g. those areas where the body exerts greater pressure could be on a shorter cycle than areas where less pressure is exerted, or different cycles could be used for therapeutic or other reasons; it is to be expected that there will be different optimal cycle times depending on the intended use of a mattress system or clinical support system.
Reference is made herein to the cycle time for inflation and deflation of the cells. That cycle time actually includes the period of time required for transfer of fluid out of or into a cell in order to actually effect the deflation and inflation of the cell, or for condensation or vapourization of fluid wholly contained within a cell, as well as the period of time during which the cell is inflated or deflated. Such a period for transfer of fluid is finite and may be minutes in length. It is to be understood that the beneficial effects of deflation of a cell, especially restoration of normal microcirculation in the layers of the skin adjacent the deflated cell, are primarily limited to the period of time when the cell is not supporting a patient, which may be significantly shorter than the cycle time. The period of time for transfer of fluid in relation to the cycle time becomes more important at short cycle times, and may need to be considered in the operation of systems of the invention.
The inflation and deflation of cells is generally described herein in the sense that as one cell is inflated, an adjacent cell is deflated. It is to be understood that such inflation and deflation may occur simultaneously or in sequence, the latter involving inflation of a cell followed by deflation of an adjacent cell. In addition, the inflation and deflation may be carried out in the manner of a wave passing across the clinical support system, including according to a peristaltic cycle; in some instances a patient may have a sensation of such wave or peristaltic action but the action may have e.g. beneficial therapeutic effects and could be used for that or other reasons. In embodiments of the invention, a cell that is inflated would be surrounded by cells that are deflated, and vice versa, or a row of cells may be inflated and the immediately adjacent row of cells deflated, or other configurations of inflated and deflated cells may be used provided that the arrangement of inflated and deflated cells is capable of supporting a patient, as described herein.
The mattress system of the present invention provides alternating support for a patient in a manner that the patient has little or no sensation of the alternating support being provided by the mattress system i.e. parts of the patients body are alternately being supported and not supported with the patient having little or no sensation of movement in the bed on which they are lying. Any such sensation could be very disconcerting to the patient. However, the spacing, in at least one direction, of the inflated cells at distances that are less than the human two point discrimination threshold substantially eliminates or overcomes any sensation and permits the mattress system to perform its intended function. In addition, the pressure exerted on the patient's body juxtaposed to a deflated cell is less than the human internal capillary threshold e.g. 20-32 mm Hg; if this were not so, blood circulation to the particular area of the patients skin over the deflated cells would not occur and decubitus ulcers would result. The internal capillary pressure will vary from patient to patient and probably from one area of a patient to another. Capillary pressure threshold e.g. the surface pressure above which capillaries can be expected to collapse, is about 20-32 mm Hg, depending on the patient and the area of the patient in contact with the mattress system. Thus, in embodiments, it is important that the pressure exerted on the patient by a deflated cell be less than about 20 mm Hg; the more generic requirement is that the pressure exerted over the deflated cell be less than the capillary pressure threshold.
As noted above, the clinical support system is capable of supporting a human body without bottoming out either of or between the inflated cells. In an embodiment, the human body is simulated by a spherical surface. In particular, the following procedure may be used to determine whether a clinical support system is capable of supporting a human body without bottoming out: the procedure uses a jig having a head with a spherical surface having a diameter of 2.67 cm, the head having an actual diameter of 7.5 cm. The jig also has a rod axially attached to the head on the side opposite the spherical surface, the rod being adapted to receive weights. In the test procedure, the jig is placed on a surface of cells such that the jig is centrally located over a deflated cell and supported by two adjacent inflated cells. Weights having an axial hole are then added to the jig, using the rod, until the surface of the jig contacts the bottom surface of the deflated cell; at such time, the total weight of the jig should be at least 2.5 kg. Under such circumstances, the cells of the clinical support system would be of a shape and size such that a weight of 2.5 kg and having a spherical surface with a diameter of 2.67 cm placed on the clinical support system would not cause bottoming out of the clinical support system.
In FIG. 9A, a portion of a human torso, generally indicated by 40, is shown on a mattress or cushion system 41 having large inflatable cells 42, only one of which is shown in cross-section. The inflatable cell 42 is shown as having bottomed out at area 43, which is the region of the cell directly under the ischium 44 of the torso 45, with the gas in the inflated cell 42 being shown as having been forced away from the area 43 at which the cell has bottomed out, in the direction of the arrows 45.
In contrast, in FIG. 9B the torso 40 is shown on a mattress system of the present invention. The mattress system is comprised of a monocellular layer 46 of cells, which are shown as being alternately inflated cells 47 and deflated cells 48. The layer of cells is attached to a flexible thermoelectric layer 49. Flexible thermoelectric layer 49 has located therein a series of heating and cooling circuits 50, each circuit 50 being located under either an inflated cell 47 or a deflated cell 48; in the embodiment shown, the heating and cooling circuits 50 under an inflated cell 47 are heating the gas 52 in the cell whereas the heating and cooling circuits 50 under a deflated cell 48 are cooling the vapour in the cell. The flexible layer 49 is shown as being located on a fibre layer 51. As is illustrated in FIG. 9B, the torso is resting on the inflated cells 47 and is not bottoming out and touching the surface of the deflated cells 48. Thus, the torso located above the deflated cells 48 has no pressure exerted on it. Activation of the heating circuits below the deflated cells 48 and activation of the cooling circuits underneath the inflated cells 47 will cause a reversal, such that the portion of the torso now shown as in contact with the inflated cells will become out of contact with the cells, and vice versa.
The mattress systems of the present invention function below both the capillary pressure threshold and the two point discrimination threshold, thereby providing the patient with the benefits of enhanced circulation of blood and a reduced tendency for formation of decubitus ulcers and at the same time provide the patient with comfort. The mattress system is easy to use, especially when a liquid capable of under going a phase change is used to provide inflation and deflation of the cells, may be readily cleaned and may be operated in a quiet manner. In embodiments, the mattress system could be operated by a microprocessor and be portable i.e. it is adaptable to portable use e.g. on wheelchairs and other portable systems, including for limbs and other parts of the body, which offers the patient the possibility of being mobile. In addition, the liquid in the cells could be cooled, to permit cooling all or part of a person's body e.g. as a cooling wrap for use in surgery or for therapeutic reasons.
While the support system of the invention have been generally described herein with reference to medical uses i.e. as mattress systems, it is to be understood that the support systems may be used in a variety of forms and for a wide variety of end uses; in many such end uses, the systems would be more commonly referred to by other names, including support systems, seats, chairs and the like. For example, systems described herein may be used in the health care, transportation and recreation businesses, examples of which include aircraft, automobile, office, home, truck and other seating.
Holes of circular cross-section and differing in diameter were cut in a series of metal plates of different thicknesses. The diameters of the holes were as follows: 31.5 mm, 39.0 mm, 45.0 mm and 51.3 mm. The plates were of thicknesses of 4.2 mm, 5.4 mm, 6.6 mm and 7.8 mm.
The ischial prominence of a human was placed, in turn, over each of the holes; the human was a healthy male aged 46, height 173 cm, weighing approximately 84 kg and of average build. A pressure sensing device was placed in or on the opposite side of the hole, such that the desired excursion was obtained. The sensing device was on a wooden surface so that the pressure, if any, exerted by the human on the device i.e. at the plane of the opposite side of the hole, could be measured.
The results obtained are shown in FIG. 5. In only three instances did the ischial prominence of the human fail to exert pressure i.e. to bottom out viz. the 31.5 mm hole with excursions (as measured by the distance from the surface of the plate to the pressure sensing device located in the hole) of 6.6 and 7.8 mm and the 39.0 mm hole with an excursion of 7.8 mm. Thus, for such combinations of hole diameter and excursion, bottoming out did not occur. Cells of such dimensions and of smaller diameter would not result in bottoming out for the ischial prominence of the human subject used in this example.
In a series of related tests, cell dimensions that would support a human body in a variety of positions were determined e.g. ischium in the sitting position, greater trochanter lying in the side position, and the sacrum and scapula in the supine position.
Such tests give guidance as to the cell dimensions required to prevent bottoming out in the clinical support systems of the present invention. The results obtained differ with the position of the human body.
Using procedures similar to those described in Example I except that the holes were rectangular holes, a series of tests were conducted to determine the effect of cell geometry on the pressure exerted by ischial tuberosity. In all tests, the thickness of the sheet i.e. the excursion, was 8 mm. The holes were aligned in the anterior/posterior direction, and were of widths ranging from 18 to 34 mm and lengths of 20 to 100 mm. The results obtained are shown in FIG. 6. The capillary pressure threshold of 32 mm is also shown in that Figure.
Example II was repeated, using the holes aligned in the transverse direction. The results obtained are shown in FIG. 7.
It will be noted that the results of Example II show that where the long axis of the holes was aligned in the anterior/posterior direction, only short cell lengths of 20-36 mm at widths of 18-34 mm gave pressures of less than the capillary pressure threshold. In contrast, the results of Example III show that much longer cells could be tolerated.
The pressure exerted by a male lying in the supine position on a mattress of the type used in hospitals and on a synthetic fibre layer that was on the mattress was measured at a plurality of positions on both the mattress and the layer in order to illustrate the pressure profile of a patient.
The results obtained are shown in FIG. 8. The three areas of high pressure exerted by the human were, in descending order, the buttocks, the shoulders and the head. The use of the synthetic fibre layer on the mattress resulted in a substantial reduction in the pressure exerted in the above three areas, that reduction being as high as about 60% in the area of the shoulders, but the pressure was still approximately an order of magnitude above the capillary threshold level in all three positions.
The recovery to the normal (pretest) skin temperature of a person's buttocks following various period of time in a sitting position was monitored using a thermographic camera. The person was a healthy male aged 46, height 173 cm, weighing approximately 84 kg and of average build. The person sat on a soft cushion or a mattress system of the present invention operating on a cycle time of ten minutes for various periods of time, and then the time for his skin temperature to return to normal was monitored using an Agema Infra-red Thermographic camera, Model 870, with Image Analysis.
The results obtained are shown in FIG. 10. As skin temperature is directly proportional to blood flow in the skin, the recovery of skin temperature to normal values is an indicator of the state of blood circulation within the skin.
The results show that the recovery time increased exponentially with the length of the period of sitting. Moreover, the results show that recovery from sitting on a mattress system of the present invention for 30 minutes is almost as rapid as from sitting on the soft cushion for 5 minutes and significantly better than from sitting on the cushion for 7 minutes; it will be noted that the regression lines through the data for cushions at 3 and 5 minutes and for the mattress system of the invention tend to converge at about six minutes, whereas the regression lines for data with cushions at longer periods of time indicate a substantially longer period for recovery.
For optimal operation, the time of recovery to normal blood circulation in the pressure relief phase over deflated cells in a mattress system of the present invention should be matched with the pressure duration phase over inflated cells. The results show that a suitable cycle frequency of a mattress system of the present invention for use by the person described above in the sitting position would be approximately 10 minutes.
The recovery of skin temperature of a person's sacral region following two hours in the supine position was monitored with infra red thermography. The person was a healthy male aged 46, height 173 cm, weight approximately 84 kg and of average build. The person was placed in the supine position on a standard hospital bed or on a mattress system of the present invention operating on a ten minute cycle time. Following a period of two hours on the bed or mattress, the person was repositioned on his right side for immediate monitoring of the sacral region using the thermographic camera of Example V. The average temperature change with time relative to control temperature for the person was measured. The results obtained are shown in FIG. 11.
The thermal response following the two hour period on the hospital bed indicates an erythema paratrimma, as shown by the persistent elevation in temperature relative to the control. Erythema paratrimma is characterized by an immediate skin reddening and temperature elevation following a period of stasis over a pressure point. In contrast, following the two hour period on the mattress system of the present invention, the thermal response approached normal temperature after 15 minutes without inducing erythema paratrimma.
1. A support system comprising: a plurality of separate cells of selected size of shape in a monolayer, said cells being formed from flexible material; said material being sufficiently impermeable to a fluid contained in said cells so that each cell may be alternately (with respect to the adjacent cell) and repeatedly inflated and deflated; said cells being of such size and shape and having such intercellular spacing so that, in at least one of the width and length of said support system, the distance between centres of adjacent inflated cells (including the distance across a deflated cell) is less than approximately 25 millimeters; and said support system is capable of supporting a human body without bottoming out either of or between said inflated cells.
2. The support system of claim 1 in which, when the support system is supporting a human body, a deflated cell exerts a pressure of less than the human internal capillary threshold on the body.
3. The support system of claim 1 in which said cells are of a shape and size such that a weight of 2.5 kg and having a spherical surface with a diameter of 2.67 cm placed on the support system will not cause bottoming out of the support system.
4. The support system of claim 1 in which cells are capable of being inflated and deflated independently.
5. The support system of claim 1 in which the fluid is a fluorocarbon or a mixture of fluorocarbons.
6. The support system of claim 1 in which the fluid is an environmentally acceptable replacement for a fluorocarbon.
(b) means to inflate and deflate the cells, said means having a cycle time that promotes restoration of normal microcirculation of human skin while the cells are deflated.
8. The support system of claim 7 in which, when the system is supporting a human body, a deflated cell exerts a pressure of less than the human internal capillary threshold on the body.
9. The support system of claim 7 in which said cells are of a shape and size such that a weight of 2.5 kg and having a spherical surface with a diameter of 2.67 cm placed on the system will not cause bottoming out of the system.
10. The support system of claim 7 in which cells are capable of being inflated and deflated independently.
11. The support system of claim 7 in which the fluid is a liquid that is capable of being vaporized to inflate the cells.
12. The support system of claim 11 in which the means to inflate and deflate the cells is heating and cooling means.
13. The support system of claim 7 in which the fluid is a gas.
14. The support system of claim 7 in which the fluid is a liquid.
15. The support system of claim 13 in which the means to inflate the cells is a compressor.
16. The support system of claim 14 in which the means to inflate and deflate the cells is hydraulic means.
17. The support system of claim 12 including electrical heating means or thermoelectric means and in which the liquid is adapted to be vaporized by means of such electrical heating means or thermoelectric means.
18. The support system of claim 7 in which each cell is of a geometry that precludes complete collapse of the cell when deflated.
19. The support system of claim 18 in which the means to inflate the cells is controlled so that when one cell is inflated, an adjacent cell is deflated.
20. The support system of claim 14 in which the liquid is adapted to be both heated and cooled.
21. The support system of claim 14 in which the liquid is adapted to be either heated or cooled.
22. The support system of claim 7 in which the cells are adapted to be inflated and deflacted over a cycle time of less than two hours.
23. The support system of claim 7 in which the distance between adjacent inflated cells is less than 30 mm.
24. The support system of claim 7 in which the cells are inflated and deflated using a simulated wave motion over the support system.
25. The support system of claim 7 in which the cells are inflated and deflated using a simulated peristaltic motion over the support system.
(d) a layer of material having a high coefficient of friction.
27. The support system of claim 26 in which, when the system is supporting a human body, a deflated cell exerts a pressure of less than the human internal capillary threshold on the body.
28. The support system of claim 26 in which said cells are of a shape and size such that a weight of 2.5 kg and having a spherical surface with a diameter of 2.67 cm placed on the system will not cause bottoming out of the clinical support system.
29. The support system of claim 26 in which a fabric layer is located above the layer of flexible material, said fabric layer being between a moisture absorption layer and the layer of flexible material.
30. The support system of claim 29 in which the fabric layer is a removable fabric layer.
31. The support system of claim 29 in which the moisture absorption layer is a microporous film layer.
32. The support system of claim 29 in which the moisture absorption layer is a disposable layer.
33. The support system of claim 26 in which the fluid is a fluorocarbon or a mixture of fluorocarbons.
34. The support system of claim 26 in which the fluid is an environmentally acceptable replacement for a fluorocarbon.
35. The support system of claim 26 in which the fluid is a gas.
36. The support system of claim 26 in which the fluid is a liquid. | 2019-04-19T07:37:08Z | https://patents.google.com/patent/US5010608A/en |
This provocative simile was apparently proposed in comments over at the WSJ. It's hard to know how to even begin disassembling the assumptions underlying this question. My colleague Lisa McElroy takes a good shot at that project over at Dorf on Law.
Known as the “grandfather of empirical legal studies,” Eisenberg was a passionate teacher, beloved colleague, and prolific scholar during his 33 years at the Law School.
The implications of the ill-considered decision in Massachusetts v. EPA comes to the Supreme Court today in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA and its related and consolidated cases. In Massachusetts the Court concocted a dubious standing rule for states as parens patriae, and then concluded on the merits that the EPA had authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate CO2 emissions from new cars as a "pollutant." As a result, the EPA takes the understandable position that CO2 is an air pollutant, no matter its source. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate stationary sources of air pollutants that emit more than a specified amount of such pollutants. The levels set by the Act are fairly low (around 100 tons annually) because Congress had in mind such pollutants as sulfur dioxide, not CO2. But practically every building of consequence emits more than the threshold amount of CO2, so the EPA is mandated to regulate all these point sources: small businesses, residential facilities, schools, churches. If it burns carbon to ward off winter cold it's probably subject to mandatory EPA regulation. Even the EPA couldn't go that far, so it set an arbitrary threshold of 75,000 tons per year, a threshold that has no warrant in the Clean Air Act. The EPA had to do something like this, as the agency estimated that it would take over $20 billion annually to comply with the statutory mandate, and the EPA doesn't have that amount of money.
Now the wages of Mass. v. EPA are to be paid. The EPA has no statutory authority to set an artificial threshold for point source CO2 emissions, but it is utterly impracticable to comply with the statutory mandate. The sensible course would be to revisit Mass. v. EPA and conclude that CO2 emissions are not a pollutant for purposes of the Clean Air Act. But that option is not before the Court, so it will either rule that the EPA threshold is invalid and leave the EPA with the impossible task of creating an army of carbon cops to monitor your home furnace or contort the statute to say that CO2 is a pollutant when it comes out of new car exhaust pipes but not when it spews out of your chimney. The Supreme Court made this mess; it's up to them to fix it. Of course, Congress could act, but that seems to be asking too much of them these days.
Nationalism in nineteenth-century America operated through a collection of symbols, signifiers citizens could invest with meaning and understanding. In Confederate Visions, Ian Binnington examines the roots of Confederate nationalism by analyzing some of its most important symbols: Confederate constitutions, treasury notes, wartime literature, and the role of the military in symbolizing the Confederate nation.
Nationalisms tend to construct glorified pasts, idyllic pictures of national strength, honor, and unity, based on visions of what should have been rather than what actually was. Binnington considers the ways in which the Confederacy was imagined by antebellum Southerners employing intertwined mythic concepts—the "Worthy Southron," the "Demon Yankee," the "Silent Slave"—and a sense of shared history that constituted a distinctive Confederate Americanism. The Worthy Southron, the constructed Confederate self, was imagined as a champion of liberty, counterposed to the Demon Yankee other, a fanatical abolitionist and enemy of Liberty. The Silent Slave was a companion to the vocal Confederate self, loyal and trusting, reliable and honest.
The creation of American national identity was fraught with struggle, political conflict, and bloody Civil War. Confederate Visions examines literature, newspapers and periodicals, visual imagery, and formal state documents to explore the origins and development of wartime Confederate nationalism.
This sounds like a great book -- I think legal opinions are an often-overlooked source of data on ideas about nation and region during the Civil War. Some years ago I published an article looking at the opinions of five Confederate state supreme courts on whether a person who had provided a substitute for service in the Confederate army could be conscripted "again." All of the courts upheld the statute (you may recall that there was no Confederate Supreme Court, so this was all decided in state courts). Though the rationales differed widely -- I was particularly interested to see the differences in the reasoning styles. Judges who had been Democrats were much more willing to decide on broad governmental power grounds than those who had been Whigs. The latter were more likely to decide in favor of the statute on narrow grounds, such as the terms of the contract to provide a substitute did not promise perpetual exemption from service. It was really quite an interesting exercise to look at so many opionins (there were some seritam opinions and also one dissent), on such an important issue decided more or less simultaneously. I've thought that I'd like to reprise this methodology on some other issues for the pre-Civil War judiciary.
I'm also interested in how ideas about southern nationalism began to grow in the decade before war -- particularly on college campuses like UNC and the University of Alabama. I think a lot of really excellent work that looks at Confederate Nationalism (like Michael Bernath's Confederate Minds and Drew Faust's The Creation of Confederate Nationalism) have ideas that could very profitably be applied backwards to the 1850s, particularly to what judges and lawyers were saying.
The image is the Richmond Equine Statute, which was an important symbol of Confederate nationalism (even though it was put up in the 1850s). About that I hope to have a lot more to say down the road.
For those who haven't kept up with the state of law school tuition in Ohio, the NLJ reports that four schools there - Toledo, Ohio Northern, Akron and Cincinnati - have sliced tuition in some fashion over the past year. Two weeks ago, Toledo (a public school) cut tuition for Ohioans and Michiganders from $20,578 to $17,900. A year ago, Akron (another public) announced it would give all out-of-staters the same tuition as in-staters. Ohio Northern (a private school) just cut tuition from $33,700 to $24,800. And in June, Cincinnati (a public school) chopped out-of-state tuition by 30%, to $29K.
I imagine that the other Ohio law schools are also chopping effective tuition, but they're being less transparent and doing it on a case-by-case basis. The real question is whether these four schools will reduce their scholarship outlays to pay for these cuts - or whether scholarships will continue, and the schools will cut other expenses.
It would be a mistake to see this as a purely Ohio story. Many of these schools compete with other non-Ohio schools - particularly in Michigan, Kentucky, Western Pennsylvania, Indiana, and West Virginia - and the reductions in out-of-state tuitions are designed to expand the applicant and student base of these schools.
The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation offers an annual prize of $2,500 for the best article in American legal history published by an early career scholar. Articles published in 2013 in the field of American legal history, broadly conceived, will be considered. There is a preference for articles in the colonial and early National periods. Articles published in the Law and History Review are eligible for the Surrency Prize and will not be considered for the Cromwell Article Prize.
The Cromwell Foundation makes the final award, in consultation with a subcommittee from the American Society for Legal History. This subcommittee invites nominations for the article prize. Authors are invited to nominate themselves or others may nominate works meeting the criteria that they have read and enjoyed. Please send a brief letter of nomination, along with an electronic or hard copy of the article, by May 31, 2014, to the subcommittee chair, Alfred Brophy, University of North Carolina School of Law, Campus Box #3380, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3380 or via email, abrophy [at] email.unc.edu. Other members of the articles subcomittee of the Cromwell Prizes Advisory Committee are Daniel W. Hamilton of the Univeristy of Nevada Las Vegas, Michelle McKinley of the University of Oregon, and Kristin A. Olbertson of Alma College.
Past winners of the prizes are listed here. If I might offer a personal note, I have been absolutely astonished and inspired by the high quality of work that is being done by newer scholars in legal history. I've been on the prize subcommittee for two years now and have been really impressed by how deeply scholars are thinking and writing and also how broad the field of legal history is these days. I think it is an incredibly vibrant field right now.
Lawyers earned a median salary of $113,530 in 2012, according to the BLS. The best-paid earned more than $187,999, while the lowest-paid made approximately $54,310. The highest earners worked in the metropolitan areas of San Jose, Calif., Dothan, Ala., and San Francisco.
I'm thinking folks like this are pushing up average incomes in this town of 65,000.
I'm delighted to report on the University of Pittsburgh Law Review's sympoisum in honor of Derrick Bell, which will be held on March 27 and 28. There will be a roundtable discussion on Thursday afternoon with Kristina Campbell, University of D.C. David A Clarke School of Law, Timothy Golden, West Chester University (Philosophy), Llezlie Green Coleman, American University George Washington College of Law, Tanya Asim Cooper & Therese Beaudreault, University of Alabama School of Law, Patience Crowder, University of Denver Sturum College of Law, Justin Hansford, St. Louis University School of Law, Marissa Jackson, Law Clerk to Hon. Damon J. Keith U.S. Court of Appeals (6th Circuit), Melinda Molina, Capital University Law School, William Rhee, West Virginia University College of Law, Josephine Ross, Howard University School of Law, Rakhi Ruparelia, University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law, and Andre Smith, Widener Law. Ian Haney Lopez of Berkeley Law will give the opening night keynote address.
And on Friday the first panel has papers by Andrea Freeman, University of Hawaii William S. Richardson School of Law, Derrick Bell and Food Oppression; Montré Carodine, University of Alabama School of Law, Race as Character Evidence; SpearIt,Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall School of Law, Economic Interest Convergence in Downsizing Imprisonment. The second panel has papers by Paul Finkleman, Albany Law School, Slave Law was American Law: Slavery Stories and the Scholarship of Derrick Bell; Stacey Gahagan and me, Reading Professor Obama: Race and the American Constitutional Tradition (available here); Juan Perea, Loyola Chicago School of Law, Doctrines of Delusion: Bakke, Fisher and the Case for a New Affirmative Action. Richard Delgado of the University of Alabama will then deliver the luncheon keynote, Law's Violence: Derrick Bell's Next Article. And the third panel will have papers by Pat Chew, Pitt Law, Challenging Authority; George Taylor, Pitt Law, The Object of Diversity; Jean Stefancic, University of Alabama School of Law, Discerning Critical Moments: Lessons from the Life of Derrick Bell. The closing keynote address will be by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Devon Carbado, and Cheryl Harris all of UCLA.
Here is a flyer about the symposium. And here is the final program.
Update: here is a podcast of my talk at Pitt's Bell Symposium.
The 2014 Conference on Race, Class, Gender and Ethnicity will be "Captive Audience: Incarceration and the Family." It will be held in the Rotunda of Van Hecke-Wettach Hall on Saturday, February 22.
The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with nearly two and a quarter million individuals housed in state or federal prisons at the end of 2011. A great many of these prisoners--the vast majority of whom are men--have families: partners, children, and extended family members living outside prison walls and yet, at the same time, captive to the prisoner’s sentence.
This year, UNC School of Law’s Conference on Race, Class, Gender, and Ethnicity will explore the myriad social dynamics implicated by incarceration’s destabilized families, including both causes of the destabilization and their results.
The Conference will invite speakers from the law, the academy, and the advocacy world to share their expertise on diverse topics such as how our war on drugs has contributed to mass incarceration and the destabilization of poor families, the way our education system continues to fail children and adolescents, how incarceration further (and permanently) divides immigrant families, the psychological effect of solitary confinement on individuals and their families, the way incarceration destabilizes and reorders community and family economies, and how families of North Carolina prisoners will adapt in our new political and social climate.
Please see the conference schedule page for more information on the individual panels and speakers!
I am tempted to reply with Honey Boo Boo and Mommie Dearest videos, but instead I’ll leave you with Mary Poppins and her superlative routine.
Details of the school's search and a call for applications and nominations are here.
On March 14-15, 2014, the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law will host the fifth annual ASU Legal Scholars Conference. The purpose of the conference is to gather together “juniorish” academics (generally, those who have been in the academy for fewer than 10 years) to receive constructive feedback on their scholarship, to network, and to enjoy Arizona’s March weather! Each registrant is asked to submit something for comment and feedback. The paper can be a draft of a work in progress, a recently accepted piece, or even just a half-baked idea; the only limitation is that it should not be a piece that is already published (because the whole point of the conference is to get feedback to improve the piece). Based on the subject of the paper, each conference attendee will be assigned to a group of other attendees with similar scholarly interests. The members of each group will read the papers of the other members of the group, and then provide feedback on those papers.
Details here. Given this nasty winter, there's never been a better time to spend a weekend in Tempe!
The University of Missouri School of Law seeks proposals for a works-in-progress conference affiliated with a symposium that is being convened at the University of Missouri's Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution on Friday, October 10, 2014. The symposium is entitled "Judicial Education and the Art of Judging: From Myth to Methodology" and addresses a number of issues relating to the role of judges and the goals and methods of judicial education. The symposium features the Honorable Duane Benton of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit as keynote speaker as well as an accomplished group of judges, academics, and judicial education experts from the United States and Canada as panelists.
The day before the symposium (October 9, 2014), the law school will host a works-in-progress conference relating to the subject matter of the symposium, broadly interpreted. Presentation proposals should be no more than one page in length and can include analyses that are practical, theoretical or interdisciplinary in nature. Participants can discuss judges at the state, federal or international level. Proposals for the works-in-progress conference should be directed to Professor S.I. Strong ([email protected]) and will be accepted until May 26, 2014. Decisions regarding accepted papers will be made in June 2014. Prospective attendees should note that there is no funding available to assist participants with their travel expenses. | 2019-04-22T00:10:22Z | https://www.thefacultylounge.org/2014/02/page/2/ |
The United States is divided today as much as it was during the Civil War. We aren’t shedding blood in furious, literal warfare, but the hatreds–the differences in thought–divide as surely as did the north-versus-south issues of the mid-1800s.
Muslims are called peaceful while Christians are called homophobic, Islamophobic, etc.
The liberal mindset is that we should do all for the children, yet they are responsible for 58 million being murdered in their mothers’ wombs.
Marriage is between one man and one woman, and this culture now says it is legally a marriage between man and man and woman and woman.
The mindset is to say, “God Bless America,” yet the government has kicked God out of public affairs in 1963 and since.
Schizophrenia exists as Islamists commit heinous attacks out of hatred for anyone who doesn’t see things their way (bow to Allah), yet the mindset is that we must have open arms and welcome people from those countries–without questioning and examining (vetting) them.
Christians are called intolerant, yet the progressives won’t tolerate the Christian worldview–they see it as intolerant and hateful.
Men want to become women, women want to become men–now men want to be made into women who can have babies.
Presidential administration always looks for a “motive” when it is obviously Islamists who murder. Never call them Islamic terrorists.
Israel has only a sliver of land and the Arab nations have vast lands, yet the world diplomatic community (and many among the ideological left in America) demands that the Jewish state divide its land and give it to make a Palestinian state–from people blood-vowed to kill all Jews.
NEW YORK – Anti-Semitic incidents in the United States surged by 34 percent in 2016 compared to 2015, and have jumped 86 percent in the first quarter of 2017, new data released by the Anti-Defamation League on Monday showed.
In its annual ‘Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents’, the ADL reported that there has been a “massive increase” in the amount of harassment of American Jews, particularly since November, the month of the US presidential election.
Jesus’ disciples came to him privately while He sat upon the Mount of Olives and asked Him three questions (Matthew 24:1-3). One question dealt with the time of the destruction of the temple. The other two questions were concerned with the end of the age. “…What will be the sign of your coming…?” and what will be the sign of “…the end of the age?” The “end of the age” question was answered by Christ at the beginning of His Olivet discourse.
Jesus told the Pharisees and Sadducees that they needed to produce good fruit (righteous works) like a tree that brings forth good fruit. If they did not produce good fruit, worthy for repentance, they were spiritually worthless to God. As a tree that does not produce good fruit is cut down and thrown in the fire, so would their destiny be if they did not produce good works that were worthy of repentance (Matthew 3:7-10, 7:15-20; Luke 3:7-9, 6:43-45).
The principle that a tree should bring forth good fruit was taught by Jesus on several occasions. In the parable of the barren fig tree, Jesus used a fig tree (symbolic of Israel) that had not produced fruit for three years to represent the nation of Israel. The fig tree in the parable had not produced any good fruit (ripe figs) during the three years of Christ’s ministry to the Jewish people. Jesus was telling the Jewish nation that His ministry with them was drawing to a close, and if they did not produce fruit within the next year, their opportunity to repent and accept Jesus as their Messiah would soon pass.
Since Israel did not produce good fruit (ripe figs) at Jesus’ first coming, the nation was cut down, as a tree, in A.D. 70 by the Roman army, and the Jewish house of worship, the temple, was destroyed. Jesus’ prophecy about the destruction of the temple, with not one stone left upon another, was accurately fulfilled (Matthew 24:2). As King Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom was cut down like a tree, taken from him and later restored, the nation of Israel, represented by the fig tree, was cut down for failing to recognize Jesus as their Messiah and not recognizing “the time of their visitation” (Daniel 4:1-37, Job 14:7-9, Luke 19:41-44). The Kingdom of God was taken away from Israel but will be restored after the Lord refines them “as silver is refined,” and tests them “as gold is tested” at the end of the age (Matthew 21:42-43, Zechariah 13:7-9, 14:1-16).
Figs are symbolic of the Jewish people in several places in the Scriptures (Jeremiah 24:1-10, Hosea 9:8-10). When Israel did not produce good figs at Christ’s first coming, He cursed the fig tree, which is symbolic of the Jewish nation of Israel (Matthew 21:17-20; Mark 11:11-14, 19-22).
The question posed earlier in Matthew concerning “What will be the sign of your coming?” is answered by Jesus with a parable (Matthew 24:32-34, Mark 13:28-30, Luke 21:29-32). The importance placed on this particular parable, as distinguished from the other parables, is magnified by its appearance in three of the gospels. In Matthew and Mark’s versions of the parable of the fig tree, Christ tells us to “learn a parable of the fig tree” while Luke’s version instructs us to “look at the fig tree and all the trees” (“look,” “watch,” or “behold”).
The practical application Jesus gave was to be learned from observing the fig tree. When you see a (literal) fig tree with branches full of sap (becoming tender), and producing new leaves, these signs meant that summer was near. The spiritual application, hidden to many, teaches when the fig tree (symbolic of Israel) comes back to life, we are to know that Christ’s return is near. The generation that sees Israel come back to life will not die off until all the events involved with the second coming of Christ take place. All current and future generations were to watch the fig tree (Israel) for signs of new life. This parable could not be properly understood until after Jerusalem was destroyed in A.D. 70 by the Romans, and the Jewish people were scattered throughout the world.
Luke’s version of the parable of the fig tree gives additional insight into what to watch for in order to understand when Christ will return (i.e., “the sign of your coming”).
We are told by Jesus in many Scriptures to “watch” for Christ’s return (Matthew 24:42-43, 25:13, Mark 13:33-37, Luke 12:37-40, 21:36, Philippians 3:20, 1 Thessalonians 5:4-6, 2 Timothy 4:8, Titus 2:13, Hebrews 9:28, Revelation 3:3, 16:15).
When the fig tree (Israel) and all the trees (Gentile nations) come to life, the parable of the fig tree, which is a date specific and generation specific prophecy, begins its countdown to the return of Christ and the setting up of the Kingdom of God.
Has the Fig Tree (Israel) Put Forth Leaves (come to life)?
The Balfour Declaration, dated November 2, 1917, paved the way for the United Nations partition resolution for Palestine on November 29, 1947 and the subsequent formation of the state of Israel on May 14-15, 1948. The fig tree (Israel) came back to life during the first half of the 20th century (1900-1950), and Israel is now producing young figs (potential Jewish believers) that will be harvested at the end of the age.
Have All the Trees (Gentile nations) Put Forth Leaves (come to life)?
Trees are symbolic of nations, kingdoms, and empires in several places in the Bible (Daniel 4:10-26; Ezekiel 17:22-24, 31:3-18; Judges 9:7-21). In Luke’s version of the fig tree parable, many trees are pictured as coming to life around the same time as the fig tree (Luke 21:29-32). Jesus said to “watch the fig tree and all the trees.” When they begin to show signs of life, by producing leaves, you are to “know” that the generation that sees this take place will also be the generation that sees the Kingdom of God established on earth.
The number of new nations in the world multiplied quickly after World War II (1945) and continued at a rapid pace for the next 50 years. This proliferation of new nations during the second half of the 20th century (1950-2000) abruptly ended on October 1, 1994 after Palau became a nation. Only five nations have become sovereign states since 1994 with the last, South Sudan, receiving statehood on July 9, 2011.
The forerunner of the United Nations was the League of Nations, an organization conceived in similar circumstances during the first World War, and established in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles “to promote international cooperation and to achieve peace and security.” The League of Nations ceased its activities after failing to prevent the Second World War. (12) The name “United Nations” was coined by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was first used in the “Declaration by United Nations” on January 1, 1942, during the Second World War, when representatives of 26 nations pledged their governments to continue fighting together against the Axis Powers. In 1945, representatives of 50 countries met in San Francisco at the United Nations Conference on International Organization to draw up the United Nations Charter.
The judgment of nations and peoples at the end of the age (the harvest) is found throughout the Old and New Testaments and in corresponding passages in the book of Matthew (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43; 25:31-46, Zephaniah 3:8, Zechariah 14:1-19). Jesus’ description of the end of the age after His return involves the gathering of all nations together by His angels, who will separate the people, as the sheep and goats are divided. The saved (sheep) will inherit the Kingdom of God and eternal life, and the unsaved (goats) will suffer the same fate as the devil and his angels.
Because the nations of the world have scattered the Jewish people throughout the world for nearly 2000 years (A.D. 70 to present) and have been, since Israel became a nation in 1948 till now, persistently harassing Israel to give up their land to obtain “peace and security,” God will, at the end of the age, take vengeance on those who have been afflicting and oppressing His people (Deuteronomy 32:35-36).
While the nations of the world, with the United States taking the lead, have been involved with on-going negotiations in Middle East peace talks to force Israel to accept a diabolical peace agreement, these unwitting persecutors of Israel do not realize they are setting a trap for themselves that will lead to their “sudden destruction” (Luke 21:34-36, 1 Thessalonians 5:1-3, Revelation 3:10).
The four main participants pushing the Israel-Palestinian peace process, referred to as the Quartet (US, Russia, EU, UN), who use the words “peace and security” on a regular basis in their speeches and formal documents, send veiled signals to those who are watching for signs of Christ’s return, that we are living in the “times and seasons” of the rapture and the day of the Lord (1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:1-11).
The words “peace and safety” or “peace and security” are ancient code words used by the apostle Paul, in his essay to the Thessalonians, that could not be fully understood until Israel had been restored to their land and the Israel-Palestinian peace process had become a major concern of all the nations in the world.
The code words “peace and security,” that are used frequently in the ongoing Israel-Palestinian peace process, signal the imminent arrival of “the times and seasons” of the catching up of the saints (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18). The repetitive use of the words “peace and security” by the globalists is also a harbinger of the “sudden destruction” linked to “the day of the Lord” that follows the translation of the saints (1 Thessalonians 5:1-11).
The apostle Paul describes two types of people: Those who are caught off guard by “the day of the Lord” and those who escape “the day of the Lord.” There are those who are in darkness, and those who are not; those who are overtaken, and those not overtaken; children of the light and day and those of the night and darkness; some who are awake and others who are asleep; some who are watching and are sober and others who do not watch or remain sober; those who receive wrath, and those who receive salvation (1 Thessalonians 5:4-9).
The day of the Lord brings wrath to some (1 Thessalonians 5:2-3, 9; Luke 21:34-35, 2 Peter 3:10), and the day of redemption brings salvation to others (Ephesians 1:13-14, 4:30, Romans 8:19-23, Luke 21:28, 36, 2 Peter 3:9). For those living just prior to “the day of the Lord,” the only way to escape “the day of the Lord” will be removal before it begins, which will be accomplished by the catching up of the saints on “the day of redemption” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-18).
The coming to life of many nations during the 20th century also lends additional support and meaning to the Parable of the Net (also dragnet) where many people (also nations) are gathered together for judgment at the end of the age. Is there solid, Scriptural proof in the Bible that confirms we are nearing “the end of the age,” and the generation that is now present on earth will see the return of Christ and the establishment of His Millennial Kingdom?
Are we living in the “times and seasons” just before “…the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus?” (2 Thessalonians 1:7-8, 9-10, 2 Peter 3:3-14, Jude 14-18).
The prophet Daniel was not given understanding of events that would take place at the time of the end; however, he did understand that God would give wisdom to those living in the end times who knew the Scriptures, especially the prophetic Scriptures, and understood “the times and seasons” of the coming of the Lord (Daniel 2:20-23, 2 Timothy 3:14-16, 1 Chronicles 12:32, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18-5:1-11).
The total number of sovereign, independent nations present in the world grew from 44 at the end of the 19th century (1900) to around 195 nations in just over 100 years. Nearly all the nations of the world (193) have agreed to the United Nations Charter and have become members since its formation in 1945. Since the growth of new nations in the world appears to have reached its climax, and the majority of nations now belong to a world order (UN) that wants to eliminate national borders and form a one world government, are “all the trees” (Gentile nations) alluded to in Luke’s parable now in place for the rise of Antichrist and implementation of global government? Are we approaching the end of the age where one global ruler will create a surveillance society and control all commercial transactions involving buying and selling? (Daniel 7:15-27, 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12, Revelation 13:1-18).
And he opened his mouth in blasphemies against God to blaspheme His name and His tabernacle, that is, those who dwell in heaven. It was also given to him to make war with the saints and to overcome them, and authority over every tribe and people and tongue and nation was given to him.
Does conclusive evidence exist in the Scriptures and today’s headlines that reveal the “times and seasons” of Christ’s return? (Acts 1:7-9, 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11, Hebrews 10:23-25, Luke 21:28-32). Are we seeing prophetic stage setting take place in the Middle East with Russia (Magog), Iran (Persia) and Turkey (Togarmah) forming alliances that will come against Israel as predicted by the prophet Ezekiel over 2500 years ago? (Ezekiel chapters 38 and 39).
Jesus told His apostles before His ascension that it was not for them “to know the times or the seasons” when the Kingdom of God would be established on earth (Acts 1:6-7). Rather, Christ reserved the understanding of this mystery about “the times and seasons’ of His return for the generation that would see “the fig tree and all the trees” come to life (Luke 21:29-32, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18-5:1-11).
The Pharisees and Sadducees were spiritually blind to the signs of Christ’s first coming (Matthew 16:1-3). When they asked Him for a sign, Jesus acknowledged their ability to interpret the weather, based upon the appearance of the sky, but they failed to grasp “the signs of the times” present everywhere. How much more are many of the religious leaders of this generation blind to the “signs of the times” that are heralding Christ’s second coming?
According to Christ’s words, when “the fig tree and all the trees” put forth leaves (come alive), we are to absolutely and confidently “know” the Kingdom of God is near, and the generation that is living at that time “will not pass away until all is fulfilled.” The preponderance of Scriptural and global evidence is overwhelming that we are the generation Christ was talking about.
Unless specified otherwise, all scripture quotes are from the English Standard Version (ESV), NASB—New American Standard Version, or NKJV—New King James Version.
Jack pointed out in the article that, tragically, the rich man Jesus told about in the rich man and Lazarus story is still in the place of torment, eternally regretting depending on his own righteousness to get him to Heaven. Jack’s posthumous post delivers to me the profoundly personal exhortation to do more to reach the lost with the Gospel at every opportunity–opportunity I’ve been given by having been returned to earth for awhile longer.
No prophetic indicator more precisely relevant to our time can be determined than what we have seen develop within recent weeks and days to my way of analysis.
“This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be…traitors, heady, highminded…” (2 Timothy 3:1a, 2a; 4a).
One particular young man has been at the center of this end of the age display of God’s prophetic truth since 2013. Paul’s perilous times characteristics have been manifesting before our eyes on an hourly basis. Edward Snowden is stuck in Moscow, awaiting word on possibly being given sanctuary. Of course, we all know his story by now. He divulged massive amounts of National Security Agency (NSA) information regarding the snooping agency’s intelligence gathering.
Most troubling, apparently, to the powers that be in Washington has been the revealing of the methodologies the NSA uses to collect the data and use it–even against American citizens. The 30-year old contractor, who reportedly doesn’t have a college degree, was in position to collect information on the capabilities of, arguably, America’s most secretive clandestine service.
Everyone in power, from the Obama Administration to senators and representatives, and mainstream media pundit-types were at the time calling him a traitor and demanding that he be immediately extradited to the U.S. Snowden claims he divulged the information–and would divulge a lot more─because the NSA and other clandestine services are spying on individual American citizens and collecting dossiers in a way that violates the Constitution. For example, the Fourth Amendment.
Snowden went to China and to Russia with the information─America’s traditionally most powerful, antagonistic opponents─so the word “traitor” is a term that is appropriate, it can be argued. –Thus, although the betrayal might be viewed as well as being carried out against a corrupt, intrusive government, not as against the American people.
Regardless of his motive–and only the Lord and Mr. Snowden know for certain what that is—he has opened himself up to appear to have selfishly performed a traitorous act by placing himself in a position to be debriefed on these sensitive documents by America’s most dangerous foes, in terms of geopolitical intrigue.
Now, I would like to look at an even more worrisome matter in all of this — the betrayal or traitorous activities by those in the high places of government who are so heady and highminded─to use Paul’s Holy Spirit-inspired Words. Those In the NSA, the IRS, and other such agencies who have wantonly and recklessly disregarded the Constitution the founding fathers gave this nation have violated, and continue to violate, apparently, the very spirit of what has made this unprecedented experiment in human liberty unique in all the ages of human history. That they do their dastardly, enslaving activity under the guise of “national security” makes the crime worse.
The traitorous, heady and highminded are among us. We have come to a time very near that of a Constitutional crisis. These times in which we live look to be the perilous times that Paul said, will be prevalent at the moment Christ calls His church to be with Him forever. | 2019-04-19T20:40:02Z | https://terryjamesprophecyline.com/2017/04/ |
I am a professional with 38 years of progressive responsibility in a technical field. I placed my resume on a job website and had 37 hits and zero inquiries. There is no apparent interest in a person 59 years old. Why are companies totally resistant to hiring someone my age? Should I mask the evidence in my resume?
I applied for a job in a company and heard nothing for three months. I called once and got tossed around on their voice mail system, but never talked to anyone. I just received a rejection letter, an ice-cold form letter that has several typos. Even my name is spelled wrong. I'm annoyed and I'd like to write them back, but I'm wondering if it is worth it.
I am in a sales/marketing position with a manufacturing company, and I am considering changing jobs. I informally met with a marketing manager from a dot.com company. I am not a techie, but I am not ignorant in technology either. I could hardly understand what this person was saying. The vocabulary was almost completely foreign, and I am wondering if this is his problem or mine?
I have every single qualification that a company required in its ad for a manager, and I sent them a cover letter and electronic resume, but I heard nothing. I sent a follow-up note and even left a voice-mail message for the person doing the search, but I cannot get a reply. I really think I would be a good match with this company. Is there anything else I should do?
During a job interview earlier this week, the interviewer took two cell phone calls. He didn't mention that he might have to take some calls, and he didn't say anything afterwards. I was annoyed, but didn't say anything because this was a job interview. If this happens again, is it worth saying something?
Last year I gave notice to the company where I had been for 11 years. I stayed on for three extra months until they found the right person to replace me. During this time, I suffered a severe medical condition which required surgery and a long recovery. I am now searching for a new job and am unsure how to explain the break in my employment history. My previous company will provide excellent references, but I am afraid I will be passed over, even though I am highly qualified.
I have been laid off for the past five months. I went on two interviews that appeared to go very well, and the interviewers said they would call me either way. I actually turned down another position because I felt assured an offer was coming. I left voice messages and e-mails, but heard nothing. Is this a new trend? Should I continue to press for a response or just let it go?
I was fired from my previous job as a medical assistant. A specimen was lost and I was told that it was my fault, but it wasn't. The office manager would not listen to my side, so I was dismissed. I have completed several applications that ask if you have been fired and why. What do I write? What will they do? Will they give me a chance to explain? What if I don't write it down?
I know that screeners do not spend much time reading resumes, so I am changing my resume to include only job titles and dates of employment. Anyone who reads the resume should understand my work just by the titles. With this approach, I think I stand a better chance of getting called for an interview. Do you agree?
I had a very good job interview a little over a week ago. My experience was a perfect match, and the interviewer and I got along real well. At the end, he said that he would contact me and set up the next step. Since then, I have heard nothing. I have sent a couple of e-mails, and I have called him, all with no response. What should I do?
I am a 58 year-old woman with over 15 years in executive support and a great resume. Even though there is not supposed to be any age discrimination these days, do you feel there is? What are we mature people supposed to do? I am applying through agencies, newspaper ads, and the Internet. What other advice can you give?
I was laid off from an accounting clerk job I held for just two months. The company was very small and unorganized, and the boss's daughter constantly told me she would be coming in to help, but she never did. I'm wondering how to avoid a situation like this in the future. Can I ask a job interviewer how they are planning on training me? Should I even put this two-month job on my resume?
I'm going to a job fair in about three weeks. I went to one last year and there were long lines for the employers I wanted to meet, so I met with several smaller companies and ended up with nothing. I don't want to spend all of my time in line, but I don't want a repeat of last year. What's the best strategy?
I am in the middle of a very frustrating job hunt. I have made follow-up phone calls after being interviewed, but after experiencing the annoyed voices of human resources officials telling me that they will call me if they wish to follow up, I have to ask, is it me or have standards changed?
I was terminated in my last 3 jobs, but there are two sides to each of these stories. I have been through several job interviews recently, but I am not getting called back, and I am certain that this is because of the terminations. Do you have any suggestions?
I recently registered with several employment agencies to assist me in my job search. I am a qualified receptionist/administrative assistant with good references. The job interviews that I am sent on are "less than professional" places to work. I wish I could find an agency that would truly be interested in helping me find a decent place to work. Any suggestions?
I am moving out of this area, and the pay levels where I am going are lower than what I have been making here. I don't want to price myself out of the market, and I was thinking of telling possible employers that my pay is lower than what it really is. What do you think?
Many advertisements are searching for applicants who have a sharp eye for detail. Do the placement professionals intend for these ads to be poorly written so that the applicant will proofread and correct the grammar, spelling and punctuation errors as a type of screening? By doing these corrections and sending back the revised version, along with my resume, will I insult or offend the writer?
I have had several different jobs in my career, and I recently completed a rather expensive technical training program. I have been sending out resumes, but all I get back are rejections or nothing at all. I keep trying different resumes, but none work. What do you suggest?
I am going for a job interview at a high tech company. The attire there is pretty casual, but I am wondering if I should wear a tie to the interview.
I am a 58-year-old maintenance worker with 33 years of experience in my field. I have had many interviews for better jobs, and every time they say that I would fit the job well, and they often use the word "great," but then I get a letter saying they picked someone else. I am in very good health, happy, and a great worker, but I am feeling left behind because of my age. What can I do?
There is a company that I would like to join, and they seemed to respond favorably to my resume. They set up an interview, but canceled it at the last minute, and then canceled two later interviews. Is there anything I should be doing to get an interview with them?
I am going on a job interview next week, and I am supposed to be interviewed by a panel of 4 people. I have never had this type of interview before, and I am somewhat nervous about it. Are there any hints?
I just graduated from college with a management degree and will be looking for a job shortly. I completed an internship over the last five months but left the company on bad terms. I gained a lot of knowledge and experience from the internship and it is a great addition to my resume. I know that I won't be able to have references from anyone except another intern. Should I still include this internship on my resume?
Many employers are requesting or even demanding that resumes include one's salary history. Some ads even say that resumes without a salary history will not be considered. Why is this demand being made?
I just completed my second job interview with a company, and they want me to start working for them immediately. I have been with my present employer for 2 years, and I feel it is only right to give a couple of weeks notice, but I will lose the new job if I do.
I am a recent college grad and I have been working for a start-up company for substantially less money than I would have been paid if I had accepted a more conventional job, mainly because there are stock incentives here. Things are not working out, and I am going to leave. My question is whether my low salary is going to hold down my starting salary level in my next job.
We are spouses of active duty military personnel. Many of us have at least a BS/BA degree, but are only able to get entry level positions because moving across the U.S., Europe, and the Far East has made our resumes look like we are unable to get full time employment, and our references almost impossible to contact. How do we get employers to think of us when they seek employees?
I spent nearly six years as a Marketing Coordinator while I was trying to break into marketing management. I was passed up for promotions, and I was told it was because I needed a bachelor's degree. At great expense, I went back to college and obtained a bachelor's degree and an MBA. Now I'm hearing I don't have enough on-the-job experience to be a manager. I've been looking for over a year, and I'd even take a marketing coordinator position to get my foot in the door. Although it's lying, I'm considering removing my education from my resume. Do you think that would help?
I am beginning my career, and I want to know how to respond to a job interview question about my goals if I don't have a particular objective. I know what direction I want to go in, and I want to do well, advance, and continue to learn, and maybe my goals will crystallize when I join the company.
During a job interview a few days ago, the interviewer took several phone calls and his secretary came in three or four times. I thought this was rude and inconsiderate, and I think the interruptions prevented me from doing well. What is your take on interruptions in job interviews?
I quit my job due to a co-worker's interference with my work. This person was messing with my remittance reports when I was at lunch, among other devious tactics. I spoke to my employer several times, but my employer did not believe me! How do I answer the question, "Why did you leave your last job?" without sounding like I can't get along with people?
I sent my resume electronically to a company, and they invited me in for an interview. When I arrived, I was asked to complete an application blank. Isn't that out of date? If a company still uses them, maybe they are behind the times in other areas. What do you think?
I am applying for a new job, and I have a strong resume. Since it speaks for itself, I have not been attaching a cover letter because it's extra work and does not seem worth the trouble. How important is it?
A friend of mine has been job-hunting for five months and finally landed a good position. What he and I found exasperating was the number of human resources people who made promises to call at a specific time and date, but never did. Some would promise to meet him, but never followed through. We were wondering how these people rose to these positions.
When I submit a resume, I keep it brief. I give my job title, rough dates of employment, and company names, and that's about it. I think if I write much more, the screener won't read it. I have gotten some interviews based on this strategy. What do you think of it?
I am a receptionist and I have this job through a temp agency. The position is currently being advertised, and I applied for it and was interviewed. I keep asking the Human Resources recruiter and the temp agency for feedback, and I am told I did a great job, but they are still actively interviewing candidates. Should I speak up or keep looking for another job?
I have applied several times to the same company for the same job that they keep advertising over and over. I know I am well qualified for it, and I really want it, but I never hear anything back. I have emailed and faxed my resume several times, but still nothing. What do you suggest?
When I interviewed for this job, I met with the person who became my boss. In the interview, he was friendly and professional. Now I see that my initial impression was wrong. He is mean, abusive, and cold. I am going to leave, and I am wondering what I can do to prevent this from happening again.
When I was looking for a job, I completely misread my current employer. The company is different from what I thought, and I am looking for a new job sooner than I hoped. I do not want to repeat this mistake, and I am curious about ways to learn more about a potential employer.
I had three interviews with a company I liked, but I just got a rejection letter. A friend said I should send them a letter to thank them for interviewing me and let them know how impressed I am with them and their company. My feeling is they hired someone else and that's it. What do you suggest?
I just had a job interview, and the interviewer spent much of the time badmouthing the company, his boss, and the work atmosphere. I have never experienced this before, and I wonder what you make of it.
About four months ago, I was "let go" during a probationary period from a job where I had very limited experience. I have a bachelors degree and this position did not require a degree, and it paid substantially less than my previous jobs, most of which have been professional. After 15 years in social services, I decided to change the direction of my career and do something different. I have now taken this risk and it did not work out. Should I list this job on applications? If I don't, there will be a six-month gap in my employment history. This dilemma is causing me great stress and anxiety.
I have heard about successful people who embellished their resumes to get a job. I added office computer skills onto my resume in order to qualify for a certain job, and I got it. When my lack of computer knowledge came out, I was fired. I think this was unfair of the company. When they saw I was a good employee except for this, they could have given me some training. Do their actions seem fair to you?
I went on a job interview and the interviewer said I was dressed inappropriately. I thought I looked just fine. I have been on many interviews and no one ever said this to me. Do you think his comment was appropriate?
I have been responding to employment ads for several months, and I have not had one interview. I know there are many applicants in my field, but my background seems to be more than satisfactory. Do you have any special steps that might help? Some of my friends suggested I show up at some companies and ask if they are hiring. I think this idea is worthless, and I wonder if you agree.
I am a very punctual person, and now that I am looking for a job, I try to arrive for an interview around 30 minutes early. I think this sends a good message about my enthusiasm and eagerness, but some of my friends say I should not arrive that early. What do you think?
I worked for 16 months in customer service at a company that had “quality control” techs monitoring incoming calls. They made no mention of all the times the customers praised our work, but they quantified the negative comments. The company fired many employees for ridiculous reasons, and then asked the rest of us to work overtime every day. How should I describe 16 months of torture to a potential employer without sounding overly negative?
I am currently looking for a job, and one of my friends told me that he heard that putting a “P.S.” at the end of a cover letter is a good way to get some extra attention. Is this a good idea, or is it something that might put an employer off?
I went for a job interview, and it was apparent that I was not in sync with the interviewer. By the end, he stopped asking questions and started criticizing me. Among other things, he that my answers were too wordy and my clothes were wrong. I’m still upset, and I wonder what you think about this.
I have been trying unsuccessfully to find a job, and I think one problem is my resume. I read an article saying that a resume should not have much detail. It said to remove employment dates and most responsibilities. The idea is that the reader will be intrigued and call you. Is this a fact?
I have a professionally prepared resume, and I think it looks good. I have sent it out several times, but I have not gotten any responses. I have tried calling the companies that list their names in the ads, but that has not helped. What else can you suggest?
I am 55 years old and having problems finding a job. I believe I am qualified for advertised jobs, but when I submit my resume, I hear nothing. One of my friends suggested I leave earlier jobs off of my resume, and then explain things if I get an interview. What do you think?
I have been in the retail industry since 1968. I have only worked for four companies, all in managerial positions, but I cannot find a job. I am registered with all of the major online sites, but I get no calls or emails. How can I find out why? I have rewritten my resume several times, but nothing works. | 2019-04-19T02:24:29Z | http://jerksatwork.com/index.php?view=advice&category=169 |
My Dad was concerned. He thought he heard noises from the backyard and maybe saw some movement there at night. My Dad grows fruit trees and vegetables, which might attract intruders. His neighborhood is not the safest place; his house had recently been burglarized. He wanted a way to check that the perimeter was safe before leaving the house. The obvious answer, besides moving away, was an outdoor video surveillance system.
After days of research, I settled on the CleverLoop Smart Home Security System. CleverLoop is expensive. I could get video systems (especially coaxial ones) with more cameras for significantly less. However, my primary concern is usability. My Dad is going to use it so it has to be very easy to use.
CleverLoop’s selling point is usability, implemented by their mobile user interface and smart backend (a base station device is included with the cameras). They admit that their cameras are the same generic ones made in China as the other video surveillance systems use. Hardware is not what CleverLoop is competing on, it is software. CleverLoop’s mobile phone app (for iPhone or Android) looked to be more user friendly and feature rich than the competitors’ versions.
When I was researching, CleverLoop was selling a kit containing 3 outdoor cameras. At the time, the base station only supported 3 cameras. This was a problem because a house is usually square shaped and I needed 4 cameras to cover the 4 sides. Thankfully, when I was ready to buy, CleverLoop offered a kit containing 4 outdoor cameras. A camera at each corner of the house looking down each side will cover the whole perimeter of the house, albeit with blind spots under each camera. I supposed that they had updated the base station software to support 4 cameras, instead of 3.
Before purchasing an outdoor video surveillance system, you must decide on the type of wiring because that is the hardest part of the installation. I had decided that the most future proof wiring is PoE (Power over Ethernet) Cat6 (Category 6) Ethernet cable. PoE reduces installation to running just one cable conveying both power and data. The Cat6 Ethernet cable will support higher data rates for when more powerful cameras become available. If I use a coaxial or non-PoE Ethernet cable, I would need to run a second cable for the power. Trust me on using a PoE cable, because you don’t want to have to drill a second extra hole through two or more plywood layers (common for exterior walls).
While CleverLoop does not support PoE, there is a way to simulate it. Basically, use adapters, passive PoE injectors and splitters, to feed both data (non-PoE Ethernet cable) and power through the “PoE” Ethernet cable. To protect the PoE adapters from the elements, you can use an outdoor electrical outlet cover box. This very helpful Youtube video, Installing CleverLoop Outdoor IP Camera, was my installation bible. CleverLoop has a support page, Powering an outdoor camera using Power-over-Ethernet (PoE), that references the video along with useful pictures of the PoE injector and splitter wiring.
500 ft of Cat6 Ethernet Cable (from Amazon). I think I used 100-150 feet at best.
100 Cat6 RJ45 cable connectors (from Amazon). Maybe used a dozen.
RJ45 Crimp, Cut, and Strip Tool (from Amazon). Used to cut the Cat6 Ethernet cable and crimp the RJ45 connectors onto the cable ends.
4 Passive PoE Injector and Splitter Kits with 5.5×2.1mm DC Connector (from Amazon). Double-check that the splitters and injectors have 5.5×2.1mm DC connectors because that is what CleverLoop cameras use.
4 Weatherproof Outlet Covers (from Home Depot; Bell Outdoor Weatherproof In-Use Cover for $8.44 each). Get the 2 inches thick cover, not the 1 inch thick cover; you’ll need the extra space to hold the PoE splitter, Cat6 Ethernet cable, and CleverLoop Ethernet data and power cables.
I ordered way more Cat6 Ethernet cable and RJ45 connectors than I needed. You can safely order much less, depending upon the size of your house.
If I had to do the installation again, I would also purchase a Network Cable RJ45 Tester (like this one from Amazon). The tester can determine whether the RJ45 connectors are crimped onto the ends of the Ethernet cable correctly or not. Instead, I used an Internet-enabled router and my Macbook to test the cable, which was very inconvenient.
Besides the above, you will probably need a power drill with a long drill bit (one foot or longer). The external frame on my Dad’s house under the roof line (where we placed the cameras) consisted of two 2×6 planks with an inch spacing between. The long drill bit was necessary to punch an Ethernet cable-sized hole all the way through.
After everything arrived, I reserved a weekend to complete the installation. The idea was to run the Cat6 Ethernet cables in the attic and drill holes from the attic to the outside at each corner of the house. I didn’t look forward to working in the hot and dirty attic. Thankfully, my older brother volunteered to do the cabling and drilling.
It took my brother the better part of the first day to drill the necessary holes and to run the cables, though with a long break in the middle. He had to drive home to get his 1.5 feet long drill bit and disposable coveralls (for getting into tight, dirty corners filled with insulation) once he realized both were necessary.
I crimped the RJ45 connectors onto the ends of the Cat6 Ethernet cables and tested them; I only had to redo 5 connectors. When installing the RJ45 connectors, the sequence of color wires needs to be the same at both ends. I found this page, Making Ethernet Cables – Tricks of the Trade, helpful and followed the sequence of colors that he used to make a straight through Ethernet cable.
On the second day, my brother mounted the cameras and outlet covers (containing the PoE splitters, assorted Ethernet cables, and CleverLoop power cables). Because the drilled holes, cameras and outlet covers were located under the eaves, he did not bother to waterproof the drilled holes (the Ethernet cables fit the holes quite snuggly). He also didn’t bother arranging drip loops for all the cables coming into and leaving from the outlet covers.
Tip: When inserting the cables and adapters into the outlet cover, make sure not to put a bend in the Cat6 cable ends that you made. My brother jammed everything in and within a year, the tension caused two of the four RJ45 connectors to fail. I had to replace them. Thankfully, I had already purchased a Network Cable RJ45 Tester, which made the verification process smoother.
In the attic, the Cat6 Ethernet cables from each camera met at a point above where my Dad’s Internet router was located. We tried to run a Cat6 Ethernet cable down the wall to the router, but a horizonal wood frame member prevented it. (Makes no sense; who would put a solid, horizontal plank of wood in the middle of an interior wall? Even fish tape would not have helped in this scenario!) We ended up drilling a hole in the ceiling close to the wall and running the Cat6 Ethernet cable down the wall to the router. It’s a little ugly, but the alternative, ripping out the dry wall, is even more undesirable.
Good thing I had a spare 5-port Ethernet switch; otherwise, I would have had to purchase one. In the attic, I connected all the camera’s Cat6 Ethernet cables to the switch and then the switch to the Internet router. Thankfully the attic had an outlet sockets nearby because I needed to plug in all the CleverLoop cameras’ power bricks (I used two power strips) and connect them to the PoE injectors, and then the PoE injectors to the Cat6 Ethernet cables. In the end, I ended up with a rat’s nest of cables, PoE injectors, and power bricks. I put the whole pile on a sheet of wood to prevent any contact with the attic’s insulation material.
Unfortunately, the cameras did not have any power indicators. (Though, if it was at night, I might have been able to see the IR LEDs light up.) Even worse, the camera took up to 5 minutes to come online (for it to be accessible by IP address) and to start streaming video. (The CleverLoop manual says it takes 90 seconds to boot up the camera.) Initially, I thought that the passive PoE injectors and splitters didn’t work because the Cat6 Ethernet cables were too long (one ran over 50 feet in length). I re-tested the longest Cat6 Ethernet cable and double-checked that there were no loose connections. Thankfully, one camera’s IP address appeared on my router’s client list (minutes had past during my debugging) and slowly the rest came online. Everything was fine; I just needed to be patient.
I connected the CleverLoop base station directly to the router. I installed the CleverLoop app onto my iPhone, created an account, and scanned the QR code at the bottom of the base station. In the CleverLoop app, I added the four cameras and started seeing their video streams (have to view each camera and click the play icon).
Now that we could see what the cameras were seeing, my brother made final adjustments to the cameras’ positions with my Dad’s input. Be careful when adjusting the positioning screws! Because the camera case is plastic, too much force could easily strip the screw holes. My brother did strip one of the positioning screw holes. He fixed it by screwing in an even larger screw.
When it got dark, the cameras automatically switched to black-and-white IR night vision mode. I was impressed by the night vision; I was able to see pretty far and the video was clearer than expected.
In the morning, one camera had an “Access Denied” error. And a second camera was still stuck in black-and-white IR mode. Rebooting the two cameras, removing and re-adding them did not fix the problem. As common with software, it turned out the cameras needed firmware updates to eliminate these and other bugs.
Tip: To reboot a camera, I can open up the camera’s outlet cover and disconnect the camera’s power cord from the PoE splitter. This is a lot easier than going into the attic, locating the particular camera’s Cat6 Ethernet cable and disconnecting its power plug from the PoE injector.
Per the CleverLoop support page, Check your camera firmware version (For X series indoor camera and outdoor camera only), I upgraded all the cameras’ firmwares to the latest recommended version. Note that you cannot upgrade directly to the latest version, you must upgrade incrementally. For example, I upgraded from version 00.10.01.0037 to 00.10.01.0037P1, and then from 00.10.01.0037P1 to 00.10.01.0039cl (latest version).
Upgrading to the latest firmware fixed both the “Access Denied” and stuck in black-and-white IR mode errors. And then 10 minutes after the upgrades, all cameras went offline (inaccessible by the CleverLoop app or browser). I had to power all cameras off and on to get them back. So, I recommend that you always manually reboot the camera after a firmware update.
Tip: You can browse to the camera’s IP address and view its video feed in the browser. The default username and password is “admin” and “123456”. On my Chrome browser running on Windows 7, I had to select “view video -Mode 2” (which uses Adobe Flash) to see the streaming video feed. Selecting “view video -Mode 1” (which uses “application/x-hyplayer” and QuickTime Player) did not work.
By default, the cameras are set to stream SD (Standard Definition 480p or 640×480 pixels) video quality. On a smartphone’s small screen, SD video looks pretty sharp. I did enable the 720p HD video on the cameras and only saw a slight improvement in quality on my iPhone 5’s tiny screen (it could be my imagination). I was more concerned about overwhelming the Internet connection’s upload bandwidth (for streaming over the Internet) so I changed it back to SD quality. So far, no complaints about video quality from Dad, who uses an iPhone 6 Plus.
When I first installed the CleverLoop app, CleverLoop allowed multiple users to log in using the same account. So both my Dad and my sister (who lives with our father and has an Android phone) used the same account. A month later, that was no longer allowed. Logging into an account would log out anyone currently logged into that account. My sister had to create a new Cleverloop account and then add the base station (by scanning the QR code at the bottom of the base station). Thankfully, she didn’t need to re-add the cameras.
I think that CleverLoop disallowed account sharing in order to better support the Geo-Fencing function (automatically arms the motion detection system when your smartphone leaves the home location). However, because my Dad wanted alerts regardless of whether he was home or not, I had disabled the Geo-Fencing feature.
At first, I was confused by the movement and alert notifications. After reading up on it, I learned that we needed to train the base station to distinguished between harmless movements (like a branch waving in the wind) and important alerts (an intruder at the door). We are expected to view the video clip attached to each notification. And if we don’t agree with the classification (movement or alert), we can inform the system so by clicking on the “This should be an alert/movement” text at the bottom of the video feed.
To eliminate the clutter caused by many notifications, you can manually delete the alerts and movements. There is a delete button that you can press when viewing the movement or alert. Additionally, there is an batch action (the top-right pencil icon when viewing a particular camera) that allows you to select multiple notifications for removal.
You can fine-tune the motion detection by marking areas of the video feed for analysis. Go to camera settings (the top-right gear icon when viewing a particular camera) and select “Fine-tune Smart Detection”. You can create up to 3 rectangular areas (a.k.a. hotspots) for motion detection and analysis. The parts of the video outside of the hotspots are not analyzed.
One major problem I see with the motion detection video clips is that the first few seconds are not shown. So, if you have someone who enters the video feed and exits quickly, the video clip won’t show that person. For example, when someone comes to the front door, drops off a package, and leaves, all I see in the video clip is a part of his back or his shadow as he is leaving. This is a known problem with a known solution called video pre-buffering. Basically, the system records continuously and when motion is detected, the generated video clip includes the previous 5-10 seconds. Hopefully, the CleverLoop base station will be updated to do pre-buffering soon.
When my Dad first asked about video surveillance for the backyard, he mentioned putting a camera on the detached garage and pointing it at the back of the house. Because I didn’t want to run an Ethernet cable from the house to the detached garage, I decided that a wireless camera was a necessary requirement.
Given a choice, I would prefer to avoid a wireless solution. Having a camera constantly streaming video across a wireless connection does not sound like a good idea, especially if it is 720p HD video. I can foresee complaints about Youtube and Netflix being flaky and having to reboot the wireless router frequently. Besides, if you’re wiring for power (which the camera needs regardless), you might as well wire for data too.
Thankfully, we managed to avoid using the camera’s wireless function. I asked my Dad to wait, to use the existing four wired cameras first. If he still wishes to have a camera on the detached garage, we can buy another CleverLoop base station with one or more outdoor cameras. So far, no requests for additional cameras from Dad.
After a month of operation, the CleverLoop base station stopped working (no alerts sent and CleverLoop app showed blank video feeds) and had to be rebooted. This is normal. I remember when cable modems and wireless routers first came out, I had to reboot them once a week. Then as they were improved, once a month. Now, several months go by before a reboot is necessary. I expect the same progress for the CleverLoop base station.
Because the CleverLoop app showed blank video feeds, I thought the cameras had stopped working. But it was the base station that had gone kaput. The base station pulls video from the cameras, analyzes the video for motion, and sets alert notifications. The CleverLoop app, in turn, pulls video from the base station. So, if the base station stops working, you get no video and no alerts in the CleverLoop app. Browsing directly to the cameras show all four video feeds working. Surprisingly, all cameras continue to function flawlessly without requiring any reboots.
Tip: The base station is responsible for doing the motion detection and sending the alert notifications. If you don’t get motion detection alerts after arming the system, check that the base station is powered on and connected (blinking LEDs in the back right on top of the ethernet jack).
After 1.5 years, half the cameras would die after a few days and would need to be rebooted. Unfortunately, access to the attic (or going outside to each camera) is required to power cycle the cameras. I thought about pulling wires from the attic down to the house, but that would have been a lot of work. Instead, I installed a Defiant Wireless Indoor/Outdoor Remote Plug in the attic, which allowed us to remotely power cycle the cameras.
CleverLoop app to have a user-only mode where administrative functions like add/remove base station, add/remove camera, and camera settings are not accessible. In the current user interface, my Dad could easily remove the base station, remove a camera, or modify a camera’s settings with some accidental touches.
Camera list screen to update snapshot images of all four cameras once per second (or even once per 5-10 seconds). Currently, outdated snapshot images are shown.
Like the above, camera screen to update camera’s snapshot image once per second.
CleverLoop app to disallow adding a 5th camera to a base station. Even though I have added the maximum 4 cameras, the camera list screen still shows the “Add a New Camera” option.
Install CleverLoop app on an iPad. Currently, the iPad’s App Store does not list the CleverLoop app. It would be nice to see a bigger video feed on the iPad.
One feature that I think my Dad might like is to display all four video feeds on his large LED TV. If he ever asks for it, I think I can create an HTML page that shows the video feeds from all four cameras (using Adobe Flash). Run it on a laptop (or tiny desktop) attached to his TV and voila, a security guard’s dream come true! | 2019-04-22T07:58:18Z | https://www.chanhvuong.com/2949/outdoor-home-video-surveillance-with-cleverloop/ |
A crazy idea came to me on the train taking me to the 2016 White Horse Samhain (Hallowe'en) Camp, held at the Wild Ways crafts and retreat centre in Shropshire, UK. Having seen the already full schedule of events planned for the camp, I had felt there might not be anything I could add to it. For years, however, I had pondered the possibility of holding an all-night ceremony in the Iron Age roundhouse (right) we had built in nearby woods. I thought perhaps this might fit in as it wouldn’t start until everything else had finished, running through until sunrise the following morning, Sunday, November 30th. People would be welcome to come and go whenever they chose to or needed to. Even so, it was a bit of a cheek to arrive out of the blue with this crazy notion without having discussed it with any of the organisers beforehand. However, one of the great things about White Horse camps is the openness of the organisers to the unexpected and strange and their willingness to make room for them.
These threads all came together through a Lakota prophecy that a Black Snake would come to devastate their land, causing people and animals sicken and die. Many Lakota see the DAPL oil pipeline as that Black Snake and, therefore, see opposition to it as both a vital necessity and a sacred duty. I had already been led to the conclusion that individual healing in our Druid tradition comes about partly through invoking the power of a White Serpent of Healing to set against the power of a Black Serpent that brings disease. My thinking for this roundhouse ceremony was to try to harness the power of the White Serpent to oppose the DAPL Black Snake and as many other manifestations of its destructive force in the world as we could fit into one long night.
The ceremony was duly announced to the camp at the first morning meeting, for which I particularly thank Richard and his fellow organisers, Ariane and Hilde. As we wouldn’t be starting until around 11pm at the end of a full day, and would continue until sunrise at 6.50am, I had no idea whether anyone would want to come at all, let alone how many. However, a few friends immediately expressed not only interest but excitement, so there were willing helpers to join me in transporting things to the roundhouse and preparing it. Thanks to Becky, who wields a fine besom, to Amanda, Daru, and Elaine, who not only runs the centre but loaned us two large reindeer hides, some saining sticks and a couple of warm woollen blankets from her house.
When I mentioned our intentions for the ceremony on the BDO Facebook page, people in countries around the world said they would join us in ceremonies timed to coincide with ours. This was a wonderful gift and a further inspiration to us. Thank you friends, heart to heart, spirit to spirit.
Adding to an already potentially rich mix, Elaine also donated a bag of Chaga, a remarkable medicinal plant, a hard, woody fungus that grows on Birch trees in Northern climes. This had been given to her by a remarkable couple, Morten Wolf Storeide and Louise Degotte. Morten organises the global travels of The World Drum, a powerful healing Drum made by a Sami drum-maker following the vision of Kyrre Franck White Cougar. Morten and Kyrre, with their friends, LeNa Paalvig Johnson and Will Rubach, brought us the gift of an amazing ceremony centred around Chaga when we hosted The World Drum at Wild Ways in 2013.
For use in ceremony, Chaga needs to be brewed for at least four hours. This meant that a few of us had to miss the Saturday evening eisteddfod and go to the roundhouse shortly after 7pm to begin the brewing process. Amanda, who had taken part in an initiation in the roundhouse, stayed on to set up the tripods over the central fire to support the two pots in which we would brew the Chaga. The water was already heating when I arrived. We sat and talked for a while as we waited for it to boil. Then we began adding Chaga, taking it in turns to put a handful into the two pots and stir them. We talked through ideas about what we might do during the ceremony and the Chaga crew came up with several ideas while helping my sketchy ones to take shape. For the rest, I was relying on the spirits to guide us, and on all those who came, both seen and unseen, to bring their own inspiration and ideas to the mix.
A few more people drifted in after a while, followed by quite a crowd once the eisteddfod ended. Having doubted whether anyone would come, we found the 20 log seats we’d set out were not enough. Of the 55 people on the camp, about 25 joined us.
As for how we were going to work, I thought we might do some personal healing, using a technique I developed, or rediscovered, while researching for the British Druid Order ovate course. I felt we should drum and chant for the animals. I already have a Wolf chant (naturally), and a Deer chant, and thought we could come up with something for the Badgers. I also knew we had to work with the power of the White Serpent, though I wasn’t sure how. Again, I trusted the spirits to show us the way.
The fact that we were working through Saturday night into Sunday morning, and that Sunday 30th was the day of the New Moon of Samhain, helped. Samhain (‘Summer’s End’) is the old Irish name for the seasonal festival known in Wales as Nos Galan Gaeaf (‘Nights of Winter Calends’) and in England as Hallowe’en (‘Hallowed, i.e. Sacred, Evening’). Originally held over three nights, it marks the end of summer and the beginning of winter.
The Moon has its own serpentine associations, its nightly waning from the full being likened to a snake shedding its skin. A snake within a Moon appears on many Celtic coins, as in the top left corner of this image from our Druid Tarot deck, taken from one of those coins.
It struck me very strongly that the New Moon of Samhain would be exactly the time at which the White Serpent would go down into the earth, as the leaves were falling from the trees and the last of the wild plants dying back into dormancy.
This phase of the year’s cycle is reflected in, among others, the Greek myth of Persephone, and the ancient Middle Eastern legend of Inanna’s descent into the underworld. In native British lore, the goddess who possesses the serpent power appears as Olwen of the White Track, daughter of the giant, Ysbaddaden (‘Hawthorn’), as Creiddylad, daughter of Lludd (or Nudd) of the Silver Hand, and as Arthur’s queen Gwenhwyfar, whose name means ‘White Enchantress.’ All of these three feature in the archaic tale of Culhwch and Olwen, as preserved in the 12th century collection of tales known as the Mabinogi.
The night of our working, then, was the last during which our Serpent Goddess’s power would remain above the earth prior to its descent into the underworld where it would spend the winter. This seemed the perfect time to invoke her aid. In our ceremony, then, we invoked the healing power of the White Serpent against the destructive power of the Black Snake.
I think it was Ariane who drew our attention to the fact that Ineos, one of the companies involved in fracking in the UK are calling their fleet of huge, Chinese-built oil tankers ‘Dragon ships.’ Is this a deliberate invocation of Black Snake energy on their part? Who knows?
The insidious way in which oil companies and governments are conspiring together to force the unwanted, unnecessary and polluting technology of fracking on unwilling populations around the world is symptomatic of a wider malaise in which democracy has long ceased to be what it was in pagan Greece, i.e. ‘people power,’ becoming instead a means by which wealthy and powerful elites retain dominance over increasingly powerless populations. Polls show that 81% of the UK population would like to see more investment in renewable energy sources, while only 19% favour fracking. In Norway, there is an identical split between the majority who want to see Wolf numbers remain the same or increase and the minority who want them killed. Meanwhile, polls in the USA show that 86% of the population are with the protectors at Standing Rock and against the DAPL pipeline. Fortunately for us, this huge public support for what we were trying to achieve through our ceremony meant that there was a huge impetus behind us. Trying to work magic against opposition is hard. It's easier if the vast majority of the people of the world are with you in spirit. Knowing that they are is encouraging, to say the least.
One of our group brought a flag bearing the symbol of the Pagan anti-fracking movement in the UK and we lodged it into the rafters of the roundhouse, where it stayed throughout our ceremony. I'm not sure what it was originally designed to represent, but to me it looks like a Dragon's head!
We drummed to raise energy for ourselves and the groups and causes we had been asked to pray for and send power and healing to. As with the people at Standing Rock, we directed some of those prayers towards those causing the harm, asking that they realise that what they are doing is destructive and wrong, and that it is in their long-term interests to change.
Long ago, in talking with spirit workers from other cultures and traditions, there emerged a strong sense that we should be working together for our shared Great Mother Earth and all her children. Subsequent meetings with healers and fellow spirit workers have strengthened this sense that now is the time for us to set aside the surface differences that divide us and recognise the commonalities that we share. As spirit workers, we regularly work with altered states of consciousness, and so are ideally placed to work towards changing the consciousness of those who seek to despoil and pollute our planet, bringing them to the light of realisation and understanding that will lead them to change what they are doing for the benefit of all.
We cast our circle with sound and saining herbs, we invoked into it all those powers for good that we work with, the spirits of place, the elemental spirits and guardians of the four directions, of our ancestors of blood and spirit, of the old gods of our lands, and of the White Serpent of healing (as painted on my drum, right) and the Dragon power through which it also manifests. We chanted the Awen, the holy spirit of inspiration and creativity. We shared Chaga brewed on our sacred fire. We drummed and chanted long into the night. From around 2am, people began to drift away, thanking our ancestors as they passed across the threshold and went in search of sleep.
By around 3.30am, our numbers were reduced to around nine, of whom eight were lying on the piles of furs we had provided or on the bare earth floor, most under blankets. While they drifted in and out of sleep, I continued to quietly drum and chant. I had thought to go into trance with the drum, but this didn’t happen. I realised that my role was to drum for the others, both seen and unseen, in the roundhouse and around the world. Between drumming, I made sure the central fire was kept fed with logs.
My lone drumming vigil continued until around 6.30am, at which time, without prompting from me, the others began to stir, wake up, and reach for their drums. We formed a circle around the central fire, linked hands and chanted the Awen again. Then we began to drum the sunrise, beginning quietly and building to a thundering crescendo that carried us across the moment of dawn and into the light of a new day, the day of the New Moon, blessed by the White Serpent of Healing.
I shared a gift of insight the Awen had given me during the night; the reason why our ancestors were called Nadredd. As Druids, we are the Serpent, we are the Power, we are the Dragon. Our role is to embody the Serpent Power, to carry it within us at all times, to use it for the benefit of our communities, our Great Mother Earth and all her children. When the White Serpent Power of the Goddess of Life, Light and Healing goes down into the earth for the long Winter months, we, as Druids, continue to embody it in the world so that the light of life never dies.
I am a serpent; I am reverence, that is an open receptacle..."
Profound thanks to all who made our ceremony possible and took part in, both seen and unseen, in the roundhouse and around the world. Thanks to the spirits of place, spirit animals, ancestors and old gods of our lands for their gifts of Awen, and thanks to the Serpent Power of Life, Light and Healing. May that power be with all who need it in these strange and troubled times. May the Light shine strong within you.
Sunday May 1st 2016, Wild Ways Retreat & Crafts Centre, Highley, Shropshire.
It started in 1974, the year I simultaneously discovered Druidry and shamanism and realised that classical Druids must have been the British and North-west European equivalent of shamans in other cultures. I sensed from the beginning that a vital feature of our tradition had been a strong spiritual bond between humans and animals. Twenty years later, I encountered my spirit animal brother in a sweat lodge. Ten years after that, I visited the Quileute people on the shores of the Olympic Peninsula and was honoured to be made a member of their drum circle. The Quileute are descended from shape-shifting wolves.
Then, in 2013, four friends arrived from Norway for my 60th birthday party at the Wild Ways Retreat and Craft Centre in Shropshire. Kyrre Franck and Morten Wolf Storeide are core members of the World Drum Project and, with LeNa Paalvig Johnsen and Will Rubach, members of the shamanic band, Baalfolket, 'the People of Fire.' They brought with them an amazing ceremony, centred around a medicinal fungus called chaga, which grows on birch trees in cold, Northern climes. Among other things, chaga boosts the immune system, reduces stress levels, is used for a variety of stomach ailments and has anti-cancer properties. For use in sacred ceremony, it must be prepared over several hours. I joined our Norwegian friends in our Iron Age roundhouse for the preparation. We drummed and sang as the chaga brewed and Steve Rumelhart and I then acted as doorkeepers in one of the most powerful, beautiful, joyous ceremonies I've ever taken part in.
When Barry Patterson asked me to do something for the White Horse Camps Beltaine celebration at Wild Ways this year, I agreed, if I could think of something genuinely worth doing, rather than just filling a slot in the schedule. It had to be of real, transformative value to the people attending, powerful and enriching of our tradition, and truly honouring of our ancestors. It was a long time coming. Eventually, another visit to the roundhouse gave the answer through a vision in which people in body paint, masks and animal hides burst through the doors, accompanied by Barry, wearing a full set of antlers and a blue cloak (right). So I knew there had to be a ceremony in the roundhouse involving animal guising. Then came the question of how to fully involve people in that ceremony. The single two-hour session originally intended then grew into four interlinked sessions that could also be experienced separately.
My encounter with my Wolf spirit in 1994 had completely transforming my spiritual practice. If I could bring some of the power of that experience to people at the camp, that would certainly be worthwhile. A journey to encounter spirit animals then, plus the animal guising, would fit perfectly with the theme of the camp which was to be the Wildwood. I could also bring to it some of the work I've been doing for the British Druid Order courses, researching and writing about spirit animals and how our ancestors have understood and worked with them over the last 40,000 years.
The vision given to me in the roundhouse reminded me of traditional Pacific North-western ceremonial societies, including the Quileute Wolf Warrior Society. Like many indigenous ceremonies, those of the Quileute societies performed many functions.
Quileute dancers wearing Wolf masks, from a public dance held in 2011.
They were communal celebrations as well as offering healing and transformation for individuals, all things I wanted our ceremony to achieve. I realised early on that my connection with the Quileute nation has a purpose meant to be beneficial for all in ways I don't yet fully understand. I believe part of it is to help us, as British Druids, to restore lost aspects of our own native traditions. Knowledge of the Quileute ceremonial societies prompted me to look for evidence of similar societies among our own ancestors. That evidence exists and is compelling, from Central Asia, to Vedic India and pagan Europe to early medieval Ireland. The ceremony shown to me in vision suggested another way in which we might begin a process of re-connection with another lost aspect of our ancestral heritage.
It took a lot of organising and the dedicated assistance of many people, beginning with Morten, who gave us enough chaga for two cups for fifty people, gathered near his house in the forests of Eastern Norway. Morten sees chaga (left) as a sacred gift from Mother Earth to be shared with those who need it and will use it well. Next was Elaine Gregory, who co-runs Wild Ways with her partner, Garth Reynolds. She was unfailingly supportive every step of the way. Then there was Barry, willing not only to allow me to run with my increasingly wild ideas but to actively participate in them in a leading role, a role I forgot I hadn't told him about on the usual planes of existence, but we communicated so well in spirit that he already knew, so that was good. In the event, all our efforts came to beautiful fruition.
I arrived a week before the camp was due to start, much of which was was spent cleaning and arranging the roundhouse, making sure it would accommodate the expected fifty people, stocking up its wood supply, clearing the area around it and rigging a temporary tarpaulin shelter in case of rain, assisted by Elaine. We took down a cauldron and a large cooking pot. As ever, I spoke with the spirits of the place and made small offerings to them.
This was followed by the Otherworld journey in search of spirit animals, for which I drummed. As it happened, most people on the camp already knew their spirit animals, but some had not encountered them in the Otherworld, some took the opportunity to check in with them, others undertook the journey for other reasons. The few newcomers were in uncharted territory. This being the last event of the evening, I hoped it would create or renew links between people and their spirit animals which would then continue to 'brew' overnight in dreams and visions, preparing people well for the transformation they would engage in in the woods next day.
The fact that so many people did know their spirit animal or animals was interesting. If you'd asked the same question twenty years ago, when we started holding Druid camps, few would have known. Another measure of how much Druidry has changed, and how rapid those changes have been.
On May Day morning, having reminded everyone that there was to be no photography during the animal guising or the following ceremony, and that it was to be an alcohol free and caffeine free day, because neither work well with chaga (it was, in any case, an alcohol free camp), our Chaga Crew set off for the roundhouse shortly before 11 am. The Crew was largely recruited at the last minute from the ranks of campers and consisted of Amanda Foale-Hart, a great and loving soul I'd seen in action in ceremony many times; Paul Beer, remembered from our World Drum gathering at Cae Mabon in North Wales; Hilde Liesens, who took a central role in our Midwinter ceremony a couple of years ago; and Ariana Power, who was so keen to be a part of the team I just couldn't refuse; Elaine and myself. Never having worked together as a group before, I was a little apprehensive as to how we would jell for what needed to be done. I decided to trust in the spirits. It was a good choice.
Our job for the next several hours was to oversee the brewing of the chaga, stirring into it all the magic we could muster between us. Part of this process was to come together as a group and discover what we were going to do during the ceremony itself.
Our first task, though, was to get the fire going. A couple of bits of log from the previous night were still glowing, so we began blowing dragonwise, as only Druids can. We blew and blew and took it in turns to blow, and eventually fire sprang into being. Building up a cone of sticks we soon had a good blaze going. There's a real art to building fires in roundhouses so that they don't smoke too much. Part of it is using very dry wood, another is maintaining a cone shape so that the wood catches quickly and burns brightly rather than smouldering for a while before catching.
We filled our cauldron and big pan with water, hooking the former on a chain suspended from a wrought iron tripod and standing the latter on a horseshoe trivet. We then waited for them to boil. With so much water in them, even with a good fire directly underneath, this took a while. As we waited, we talked about what we were going to do when folks arrived and drummed together for the first time, tentatively at first but with growing confidence.
Ghillie Dhu, 'The Dark Lad,' by Brian Froud.
I talked a bit about chaga and our native spirit of the birch tree, on which the chaga fungus grows. In Scotland, he is known as Ghillie Du (pronounced Gilly Doo), 'the Dark Lad.' In Welsh, that's Hogyn Ddu (pronounced Hogun Thee). He is a friendly, helpful spirit, small and wiry with tangled black hair, dressed in birch bark, leaves and moss. If you come across him when you genuinely need help, he will help you. If you try to find him for the wrong reasons, you will fail. I also revealed the name and identity of the roundhouse's deer spirit guardian, something I rarely do.
The cauldron, being smaller, boiled first, noisily boiling over, causing hands to quickly reach in and pull it away from the fire. I reduced the level of the fire and we returned the cauldron to its place. Once the big pan was also boiling, we began adding chaga, each of us putting two handfuls into the big pan and one into the cauldron, adding more until we'd used the whole bag. We took it in turns to stir the brew with the hazel stirring stick I'd made, into which John Whittleston had burned the Ogham letters for Birch and Hazel. And so the brewing began.
We continued to drum and sing. I suggested a few chants we might do, including, in view of the powerful deer energy in the place, my native British Deer chant. Of course, I couldn't resist adding my Wolf chant too, excused by the fact that many of those attending the ceremony would first have spent time in the woods being their spirit animals. Paul started to drum and Amanda began to chant the word chaga. The rest of us joined in and a rhythmic chant soon evolved that sounded good and felt as though it had power. Another time, Paul started drumming and chanting the name of the Birch spirit, Hogyn Ddu, which morphed into “Come to me, Hogyn Ddu,” to which I added, “Hogyn Ddu, Hogyn Ddu, spirit of the great Birch tree.” More chaga, more stirring. I started a beat that fit with the name of our deer spirit guardian and we began to chant his name. After a while, I started improvising calls over the chant such as, “I hear your hoof-beats thunder through the forest, I hear your hoof-beats coming to our circle, I hear your hoof-beats dancing in our circle...” By the time the first people arrived at the roundhouse for the ceremony at 3.45 pm, we had quite a repertoire of chants ready.
While we conjured, sang and stirred inside the roundhouse, other things were happening outside. Barry shepherded about thirty people to the log store at the back of the roundhouse where we had provided body-paints Elaine and I had made from charcoal from our fires and coloured clays dug from the land. Some opted to go naked apart from body-paint. Others donned animal hides and masks on top of face and body-paint. Some wore ragged clothing of leather or wool. Once their spirit animal guise was complete, Barry led them into becoming their animals, after which they ran off into the woods. There was a boar, a horse, fox, raven and various other creatures among the guisers, even a chameleon and a hedgehog. They snuffled among bluebells, climbed trees or trotted along paths, according to their nature.
A dozen or so early arrivals who had opted not to do the animal guising saw some of the animals in the woods as they made their way along the deer path to the roundhouse. We opened the doors to them and they were sained and blessed by Elaine and Hilde, our doorkeepers for the night, who marked their foreheads with an awen symbol. They were then welcomed in and shown to their seats. Saining is a native tradition of purifying and sanctifying with smoking herbs, leaves or strips of animal hide. We used a saining stick made from St. John's Wort (left) and Meadowsweet. St. John's Wort is a protective and cleansing herb with a very long history of magical use. Meadowsweet is one of the ingredients from which the enchanters, Math and Gwydion, create the maiden, Blodeuwedd ('Flower Face') as a May bride for the young god of light, Lleu Llaw Gyffes in the Branch of the Mabinogi called Math, son of Mathonwy.
About ten minutes later, we heard the yowls, growls and howls of many animals outside, racing around the roundhouse while Barry's bagpipes skirled them on. A bang on the doors, we flung them open, and in charged thirty or so wild animals. They cavorted, leapt and crawled around the roundhouse interior, shrieking, screaming, grunting, howling, eyes wide and wild. It was an amazingly impressive entrance, exceeding my wildest expectations. To enhance the sense of natural chaos, the Chaga Crew drummed wildly. Barry entered amongst the untamed ones, ducking low so that his antlers wouldn't catch on the roof, wearing his full red deer hide and head (known as Donald), and my dark blue cloak underneath. The scene exactly mirrored what I'd seen in my vision. It was a wild, wonderful, magical moment.
Following the rampage, the animal folk exited the roundhouse. Once outside, they reverted to more human form before re-entering, carrying cups for the chaga. As they came in, each was sained and blessed. After the last person was admitted, the doorkeeper's role reverted to guarding the doors against any unhelpful spirits who might try to get in. When you're doing powerful magical work, good spirits are attracted to it, but more tricky ones sometimes also try to get in, hence the need for doorkeepers. Paul (left) ushered our new arrivals sunwise around the interior, pointing them to their seats.
When everyone was seated, we began ladelling out the chaga brew into the cups they'd brought with them. I couldn't resist throwing in a little Mrs. Doyle impersonation (from Father Ted in case you were wondering), saying “Will you have a cup of chaga now? Ah, g'won, g'won' g'won, you know you want to.” Other Chaga Crew members joined in, and this set off Bee with a fit of giggles. It is in the nature of Bee that when she laughs, she finds it very hard to stop. She told me later that she forced herself to stop when it got too painful to continue. Her joyous, bubbling laughter spread around the circle and was a perfect start to our ceremony.
The roundhouse is a perfect setting for ceremonies, not only inherently beautiful in a way that sings powerfully of our ancestors, but also interwoven now with seven years of ceremonial use and sliding between the worlds, and filled with good, strong, protective, guiding spirits. Such an environment tends to bring out the best in ritualists. Having realised how easy all our chants were to join in with, we encouraged everyone to do so. Then we began.
At one point, while Ariana, Paul and Amanda were busy refilling cups with the sacred brew, I started idly tapping a gentle heartbeat rhythm on the drum and adding a wordless song. This was soon picked up and embroidered on by people around the circle so I kept drumming but stopped singing to listen to the sounds being woven by the group. It was a rising, falling chant in which voices merged together and wove around each other in ever-evolving patterns. It was utterly beautiful. When it came to a natural end in silence, I was so moved the I was unable to speak for a few moments. I dubbed it the Song of the White Horse Tribe.
We performed my wolf chant, giving folk the opportunity to howl along at the end. We ended with what was, at one time, the closing song of the Quileute Drum Circle. The chant presented perhaps the best singalong opportunity of the night, since pretty much everyone knows it. I shan't spoil it for you, in case you happen to run across one of our ceremonies. It's right to maintain a little mystery.
When we were done, the roundhouse end everyone in it were buzzing with energy and joy. People got up, hugged each other, and began to filter out through the double doors. The ceremony complete, photography was allowed and Elaine got some great shots of blissed out smiling faces as folk emerged into the late afternoon light. There's a palpable sense of joy, wonder, and a kind of elevated calm produced by a chaga ceremony that it's hard to describe but beautiful to observe and to feel. That's why the Chaga Crew are smiling so broadly in this photograph. We did a good job, folks, as did all those who attended. If you want it enough and put the work in, there's no reason life shouldn't always be this good. Smile on!
People were so well attuned with their spirit animals by the work we did together over the first weekend that animal energy continued to flow through the rest of the week, being especially apparent during the lodges into which the camp divided mid-week. From my own point of view, I'd had the opportunity to test a type of ceremony that has several millennia of history behind it but that I'd not tried before. I was delighted with how well it worked and it will form the basis of ceremonies in the BDO Druid course. I've also been drinking chaga daily since the May Day ceremony in the roundhouse and am feeling physically, psychologically and spirititually better than I have done for years!
Ever since 1974, I've been trying to re-create the vision of Druidry that came to me then, a wild, animistic, magical, powerful image encapsulated for me in the antlered man portrayed on the Gundestrup cauldron (right). Over the years, I've come to call this process of re-creation 'rekindling the sacred fire.' The sweat lodge Wolf vision, the Quileute drum circle, building of the roundhouse, drum-making, creating ceremonies based on those of our ancestors, and sharing these things with others on the path, are all a part of this rekindling.
This prophecy suggests that the Anishinabe, in common with many other indigenous peoples around the world, and in common with us as Druids, are in a period of recollection and restoration of ancestral ways.
Part of my vision for Druidry is that we, having chosen the right road, may take our place around the sacred fires alongside folk of other indigenous cultures. Through a growing network of links, the process of rekindling has already begun. In coming together, we, the spirit workers of the world, may yet kindle that Eighth, eternal fire.
Eagle shape-shifter. Bronze from Oxfordshire.
The first stage in preparing a ceremony is to know its purpose. There's little point creating a ceremony just because it's that time of year, or there's a slot to fill at a camp, or someone's asked you to. There has to be a valid, spiritual imperative to it, otherwise there's no point. Ceremony should always be, first and foremost, a sacred act, rather than a theatrical performance or an historical re-enactment, although it may include elements of both these things.
When I was asked to do something for the White Horse Beltaine camp at Wild Ways this year, it took me a long time to work out what to do and why to do it. It wasn't until I visited Wild Ways again and sat in our Iron Age roundhouse that an answer came to me. As so often in that magical place, I slipped between worlds and had a vision. I saw a stream of people entering through the double doors. They were naked apart from animal hides, masks, face and body paint. They danced into the roundhouse and circulated around the central fire while I drummed along with three or four other drummers, all with frame drums. At the end of the line came Barry Patterson, wearing a dark blue cloak and a deer mask with a full set of antlers.
Horse woman. 1st century Gaulish coin.
Following this vision, what I felt it right to do on the camp came into focus. Central to it is our sacred relationship with the rest of animal life on our planet. This is, in itself, a complex web rather than a single relationship. It is also a foundation stone of our spirituality. Not just Pagan spirituality either. The spiritual links that humans have had with other animals since the remote depths of prehistory underlie all religions. For our pagan ancestors, and for many modern indigenous peoples, animals were/are models of strength, speed, intelligence, kinship bonding, hunting ability, and spiritual connectedness. More recent faiths have significantly altered these relationships, introducing the idea that we are in every way superior to other animals, and that, because of our innate superiority, we are justified in exploiting 'lesser' animals in any way we see fit.
So the theme for my contribution to the camp is to be our spiritual relationships with animals.
Antlered 'Lord of the Animals' figure from the Gundestrup Cauldron as portrayed in my Druid Tarot deck.
The next question was how to make that work in the context of a Beltaine camp. I already had the vision of the roundhouse ceremony to work towards, so the question became how to get there. An obvious way in is to offer a talk on the spiritual links between humans and other animals and then, for those who want to explore those links more fully and deeply, to offer a spirit journey in search of spirit animals. Which begs the question, what do we mean by spirit animals?
In 42 years as a Druid, I have found that most of us are accompanied by one or more spirit animals, of which one is usually dominant. They fulfil many roles, acting as guardians, guides and teachers, all of which come together in the word 'helpers.' They fulfil this role whether we are aware of their presence or not. Once we do become aware of them, we are obliged to interact with them more often and more deeply; the relationship becomes reciprocal, and we need to work to maintain it. For what our animal helpers give us, we take on the responsibility of keeping them strong and well nourished. We do this by entering into a new level of relationship with them. If you feel ready to take on this level of commitment, then connecting with your animal helpers can be an incredibly enriching experience. When I first encountered my wolf spirit brother, it completely altered my approach to my spirituality and, therefore, my life.
Ghillie Dhu, 'The Dark Lad,' a native British Birch tree spirits, by Brian Froud.
The purpose of the ceremony is to cement our relationships with our spirit animals, encountered during last night's spirit journey if not before, and to explore ways in which we can strengthen and maintain them.
Getting to the ceremony itself will require a certain amount of preparation. The roundhouse will need to be cleaned and arranged, and a plentiful supply of dry wood got in. Water, a large cooking pot and various other items will need carrying down. Then, on Sunday morning, I will need three or four people to help me in and around the roundhouse for the rest of the day. They will need to have frame drums and be able to play them well and keep good time. Ideally they should be fairly strongly connected with their own spirit animals. Our role from straight after morning meeting will be to prepare chaga. Chaga is a medicinal fungus that grows on Birch trees in Northern climes. It's most important effect is in strengthening the immune system, and it is widely used for this property throughout Eastern Europe and Asia. To prepare it for use in ceremony requires several hours. I should add that it is not hallucinogenic. The 'chaga crew' will have important roles during the ceremony.
After lunch, folk planning on attending the roundhouse ceremony will need to prepare for it by creating their animal guises. One way to cement our relationship with our animal helpers is to dress ourselves as them. This can be achieved by wearing hides, masks, body painting, etc. As said, my vision had people entering the roundhouse naked apart from animal accoutrements and body paint. We have some water-based stage paints that can be used, but we will also have natural paints made from clay-based pigments dug at Wild Ways. Our idea is for everyone to get into their animal guises at (but not in) the roundhouse. You'll need to bring all your costume bits and a bag in which to store your clothes. You'll also need to bring a cup for chaga. You might also like to bring a cushion if you want to sit more comfortably in the roundhouse where the seats are logs or the hard earth floor.
Once into your animal guise, you'll become your animal, roaming off into the woods and behaving as that animal. After a while, you'll be called back to the roundhouse. Staying 'in character,' you'll roam sunwise around the roundhouse making as much animal noise as you like. At an appropriate point, the doors will be flung open and you'll rush in, still in your animal form. This will be chaotic. That's fine. It's supposed to be. You'll then leave the roundhouse again, still in animal form. Once back outside, you'll 'humanise' yourself. Once the roundhouse is clear of everyone who isn't a member of the 'chaga crew,' two of the 'crew' will take up places on either side of the doors. Everyone else will pick up a cup and re-enter the roundhouse calmly (and walking upright!), being blessed and sained on the way in by the two doorkeepers. Then take a seat and sip your chaga. There should be enough for two cups each. We will be in the roundhouse from around 4 pm to 6 pm.
There will be about 50 people on the camp. We have previously managed 47 people in the roundhouse. It is quite tight, but it can be done.
Sunday will continue with dinner followed by the Beltaine fire ceremony on the stone circle field.
Author GreywolfPublished on June 23, 2015 March 17, 2018 8 Comments on Merry Midsummer!
A similar ceremony is mentioned in the 4th century Acts of Saint Vincent as having taken place amongst pagans in Aquitane in southern France, who rolled their fiery wheel down a hill and into a river, from which they rescued the charred pieces to reassemble them in a temple to their sky god.
Why, then, do most modern Pagans celebrate midsummer on the day of the summer solstice and not, as our ancestors did, a few days later on June 23rd-24th?
The answer is not hard to find. The idea of celebrating the summer solstice comes from William Stukeley, who associated Druids with Stonehenge and, in 1720, was the first writer to mention the solstice alignment of the Hele Stone with the centre of the circles there. Iolo Morganwg, founder of the Gorsedd of Bards of Britain in 1792, visited Stonhenge and followed Stukeley in believing that Druids celebrated the solstice there. The same alignment was central to a book called 'Stonehenge and Other British Stone Monuments Astronomically Considered,' published by Sir Norman Lockyer in 1906. This book influenced the Ancient Druid Order, who started holding rituals at the henge a few years after its publication. By the time Gerald Gardner and members of his coven were creating Wicca in the late 1940s, the idea of celebrating the solstices had become firmly fixed in the public imagination, and so the solstices became part of its festival wheel of the year. All of them either ignored, or were unaware of, the ancient and pan-European tradition of celebrating on the 24th.
Why then, you may ask, is the Stonehenge Hele Stone aligned on the summer solstice sunrise, as is an avenue of stones at Callanish in the Orkneys and some of the stone rows at Carnac in Brittany? First, we may question whether the alignments actually are on the solstice or on Midsummer's Day. After all, it is the nature of solstices that the sun's rising position barely alters for about a week. Given the once pan-European custom of celebrating Midsummer's Day, by far the most likely explanation for the alignments is that they were designed to be watched in the run-up to midsummer, giving those who understood them time to spread the word that the festival day was approaching. Early agricultural communities were spread out over wide areas and travel was largely on foot. We know that people came to Stonehenge from all over southern England and as far afield as Switzerland. A decent amount of advance warning of festival dates was essential.
Incidentally, it is currently fashionable to say that the major alignment at Stonehenge is not on the summer solstice sunrise, but on the midwinter sunset. While there can be no doubt that there is a midwinter alignment at Stonehenge, there is also, as Stukeley correctly surmised in the early 18th century, an extremely clear midsummer one. One does not cancel out the other.
You may ask if it matters which day we celebrate midsummer or midwinter on? Personally, I think it does. Having been a Pagan for half a century or so, I've observed a lot. One of the things I've observed is that celebrating the solstices often causes problems. An obvious example is the amount of aggression that has often been associated with celebrations of the summer solstice at Stonehenge. In the early 20th century, the then head of the Ancient Druid Order became so incensed at being asked to pay sixpence to get in to the the henge that he uttered a long and angry curse on their owner. In the 1950s, the Ancient Order of Druids, who had been meeting at the henge annually since 1905, vowed never to do so again after loud, drunken hecklers climbed all over the stones during the AOD's solstice ceremony. In 1985, the police and soldiers in police uniforms smashed up vehicles attempting to get to the henge for the solstice, beating unarmed men, women and children in what became known as The Battle of the Beanfield. When I attempted to hold a ceremony for world peace at Avebury on the summer solstice of 1996, it was disrupted by angry drunks. By contrast, those I've held on Midsummer's Day have been peaceful, joyous and focused.
A kind of testosterone madness kicks in at the summer solstice which has dissipated by Midsummer's Day, a few days later, when the solar tide has turned. If we are truly attempting to restore, or at least be inspired by, the spirituality of our ancestors, then surely it makes sense to try and follow the ways in which they rode the cosmic tides. This is perhaps especially true of the solstices, the two annual festivals our ancestors regarded as vital, pivotal times of the year, times of magic and divination and of great power.
When Emma Restall Orr and I founded the Gorsedd of Bards of Cor Gawr at Stonehenge in 1997, we made sure it would celebrate Midsummer's Day. This works out well, as a quiet, focused ceremony attended by no more than a hundred people restores a sense of peace to the place after the wildness of the solstice celebrations which attract many thousands.
In Cornwall, the old tradition has been maintained, and a string of hilltop fires are kindled each year on Midsummer's Eve, June 23rd, just as the sun is setting. The accompanying ceremony is spoken in Cornish and climaxes with a Lady of the Flowers casting into the roaring flames a garland made up of good herbs, those believed to have medicinal qualities, along with bad herbs, those that are poisonous, and sprigs of oak, rowan and foxglove.
I suppose rolling flaming wheels down hills would land us in trouble with Health and Safety regulations these days, but there's no reason why more of us shouldn't celebrate midsummer at Midsummer.
Now here's a little treat for you for having read this far. "Oh do not tell the priest of our rites, for he would call it a sin, for we've been out in the woods all night, a'conjuring summer in..."
Published on June 23, 2015 March 17, 2018 Categories British Druid Order, Druidry, Gorseddau, History, Ritual, Sacred SitesTags British Druid Order, Druidry, Festival, Gorsedd, Stonehenge8 Comments on Merry Midsummer!
As my sons and I were walking up the hill out of our Wiltshire village, heading for the bus stop where my journey was to begin, a mother fallow deer and two young fawns emerged from the hedgerow and crossed the road a few yards ahead of us. I took this as a very propitious sign.
The ostensible purpose behind my trip was three-fold; to visit old friends in Seattle, to offer teaching in Druidry, and last but by no means least to spend time at La Push, home of the Quileute people out on the Pacific coast of the Olympic Peninsula. The Quileute connection began ten years ago, when my sons and I were made members of the drum circle at La Push following an extraordinary series of 'cosmic coincidences', not least of which involved one of the tribal elders having a vision of my coming five days before we arrived. All three purposes were achieved, but another soon became apparent: a dear friend had been diagnosed with cancer and was going into hospital for exploratory surgery shortly after our workshop weekend at La Push.
An important part of my Seattle home from home is the Travelers Thali House Indian restaurant on Beacon Hill, run by my friends, Leon and Allen. Allen is an artist and an amazing cook who has spent time travelling around India gathering recipes, so the food at the Thali House is about the most authentic Indian dining you'll find outside of India. Allen's own art (that's his Goddess Yantra below left) and many beautiful Indian artefacts adorn the restaurant, adding to its relaxed, peaceful atmosphere. However, I only had a couple of days in Seattle before heading to LaPush for the first of the trip's workshops.
As we approached LaPush, we passed two black-tailed deer (below) grazing at the side of the road. Another propitious sign and another link between my Wiltshire home and the Olympic Peninsula.
Our workshops being so far from the city and stretching over three days, we didn't bring a huge crowd with us, but one was provided for us by a surfing contest taking place over the same weekend all along the beach in front of the lodge building my friends had hired for us. This mostly ruled out moving any of our sessions onto the beach, though we did drum on the last evening as a brilliant moon created a path of light out across the Pacific to the far horizon.
The talks and workshops went well, particularly a drum journey to find one's personal place of healing. My friend with cancer, who'd been feeling understandably rough for quite a while, was particularly blissed out by the journey, which was good. I also shared a system of healing I'd found in a medieval Irish manuscript.
After the weekend, I stayed on at La Push in one of the little A-frame cabins, sharing it with a friend who was to drive us back to the city after the Wednesday evening potluck feast and drum circle at the Community Hall in the village. I'd brought along a new drum I made earlier this year, a big thunder-drum with an Ash hoop and Red Deer skin (left). Previously, I've used a Remo Buffalo Drum with an artificial skin, bought on my previous trip to Seattle and first played in ritual with the Quileute Drum Circle.
On Monday afternoon we walked along the beach and watched seals fishing close inshore. To my delight, they were joined by a small flock of my favourite Druid birds, cormorants. The beach ends in a narrow spit that juts out to the base of tall island stacks that lie just offshore. One of these is called A'ka'lat in the Quileute language, meaning 'top of the rock.' 8-9,000 years of tribal chiefs were lain to rest there in cedar canoes placed in the branches of the trees that cover the top of the island. A'ka'lat (below) is a powerful spiritual focus of Quileute life.
On Tuesday, my friend wanted to find a beach she'd last visited more than 30 years ago. She recalled it being called Third Beach but decided that it wasn't the Third Beach just along from La Push but another, further North on the Makah reservation. So we set out in her car in search of a memory.
We called in at the Makah Tribal Museum, a wonderful place, containing a full-scale replica of a Makah longhouse, based on those excavated at Lake Ozette in the 1970s. These had been remarkably well preserved due to the village having been swamped by a mudslide some 5 or 600 years ago. The picture (left) shows Richard Daugherty, who led the excavations and changed American archaeology forever by working on the site mainly with local Makah folk. He died earlier this year aged 91. The carved and decorated whale-fin in the picture is one of many objects from the excavations housed in the museum which is large, well laid out, and covers all aspects of tribal life, weaving, fishing, woodworking, decorative arts, myths and legends and much more. In common with other peoples of the Olympic Peninsula, the Makah hold the Orca (left) sacred and have legends of a Thunderbird who brings storms and of Raven as trickster and culture hero. They call the Orca the Sea-Wolf. The first exhibit I came across, however, was devoted to the eagle and its role in tribal culture. This was interesting as I'd spent much of the drive thinking about eagles, a spirit bird with whom I've worked a lot in the UK.
We drove on to the end of a trail that leads out to a clifftop perch that is the furthest Northwest tip of the United States, at least before you get to Alaska. The cliffs there have great caverns that pierce right through them. Just before we arrived, folk had been watching an Orca circling through these sea-caves. We drummed and sang, much to the delight of an 11 year old girl who sang along, and of her grandfather, who turned out to be a retired professor of environmental science and a really nice guy. No memory beach though.
On Wednesday morning, we decided to try the Third Beach that's near La Push. It turned out to be the one. My friend remembered the trees as being huge. However, a sizeable part of the tribe's income is derived from logging, so most of the big trees had been felled and the area replanted since her previous visit. There were, however, some big stumps left, some still several feet tall. We followed the long path down to the beach.
During the walk, I felt a sense of sadness from the earth for what had been lost through the long years when the government had banned the Quileute from speaking their own language or conducting their sacred ceremonies. This, however, was overlaid with a sense of returning power and growing strength. I felt that this stems from the tribe's renewal of traditional ceremonies through the Drum Circle, and through other renewed traditions, like that of holding an annual canoe journey along the coast in company with other coastal tribes. This was revived in 1997 and has grown larger each year since.
Long ago, K'wati, the Transformer, changed wolves into humans to create the first members of the Quileute tribe. He told them their descendants would always be brave and strong because they were descended from wolves. He was right. In the late 19th century, the government told the Quileute to move to a reservation on the land of their Quinault neighbours. They refused and stayed in their own village. They're still there. Some years later, a white settler burnt down most of their houses while the villagers were away working. They rebuilt. The photograph (left) dates from around 1900 and shows members of the tribe on the beach at LaPush dealing with a fish catch. In the early 20th century, the tribe were denied their fishing rights, removing both an important source of income and a primary source of food. In the worst of times, Quileute numbers fell to below 50. Now, there are around 750 Quileute, they have regained their fishing rights, built a tribal school in which their language is being taught, have seen tourist numbers and the resulting revenue increase tenfold in the last ten years and have been given back an area of their original tribal land on which to rebuild their public buildings inland, away from the coastal tsunami zone.
My friend, Leon Reed , Seattle's longest-serving Wiccan Elder and Druid priest, had suggested I bring with me to La Push a wolf-skin he'd been given many years ago. It's a single hide of what must have been a huge grey wolf. It's now moulting, though the leather is still in very good shape. Since we'd been on the coast, I'd envisioned myself drumming whilst wearing this wolfskin, but it had never felt right to do so on First Beach at La Push. Third Beach turned out to be the place of my vision, so I fastened the hide across my shoulders, picked up my drum and walked to the shoreline where waves were breaking across the sand.
It had been misty, cool and damp for the previous couple of days so my drum had absorbed moisture and not been at its best. A minute of holding it up to the bright sun and blue skies that greeted us on Third Beach was enough to bring back its voice and it sang for me. As the drum sang, so I began to sing with it, wordless sounds that expressed and evoked a powerful, joyous energy rising up in me. There was something so right about being there and doing what I was doing.
Eventually, realising that time was passing, I drummed and sang a farewell song to the spirits of the place. Again, it consisted of whatever sounds or words came to me and whatever rhythm seemed right. This is often the way. Songs come for whatever your intention is, stay long enough to do what they are needed to do and then float away on the wind, perhaps never to be heard again in this world, or maybe to come back as and when they're needed. That time on Third Beach was beautiful, soul-nourishing and filled with power and magic. It will long stay with me.
The feast was laid out on trestle tables near the kitchen and consisted of two big trays full of fresh cooked salmon, a big cauldron of beef stew, a range of vegetables and bread. There was plenty to go around. Soon two lines of trestle tables filled up with villagers and visitors sharing this rich feast. We sat opposite a mother whose 12-year-old daughter was a huge Twilight fan.
In case you've missed the Twilight phenomenon, it began as a series of books written by Stephanie Meyer and burgeoned into a series of incredibly successful films. Apparently Meyer wanted to set a vampire novel in the wettest part of the United States and a google search revealed that to be the town of Forks, located on the Olympic Peninsula not far from the Quileute reservation. She noticed the presence of the village of La Push and then found the Quileute sacred legend of their descent from shape-shifting wolves. She therefore decided to portray the young males of La Push as werewolves. As far as I can discover, she has offered the Quileute nothing from the millions she's earned from this bastardisation of their sacred history and nor has the film company. The Burke Museum in Seattle hosts an excellent site that looks at the reality of Quileute life as compared to their Twilight portrayal. The tribe has seen some benefits as Twilight-related tourism has swollen tribal coffers and created some new jobs. Native American actors from the films have lent the weight of celebrity to local causes. Twilight's huge popularity amongst children has helped pressure politicians into acceding to the tribe's request for the return of some of their land. This road sign greets visitors.
Ten years later, much had changed. There was no Potlatch giving ceremony apart from three youngsters who had birthdays who sat on chairs in the middle of the dance circle and were given small gifts, mostly dollars. The dance circle now is painted on the floor of the Hall, marked with the four directions. Chairs were placed in a circle around it, where before they'd just been pushed back against the walls.
Before the dances began, three men of the Drum Circle led songs in rich, vibrant baritone voices that filled the hall with powerful waves of sound. The format was for one of the three to begin, then for others who knew the song to join in.
The Drum Circle then gathered in a corner of the Hall next to the gap between chairs that formed the entrance to the dance floor. The drummers were mostly younger than I remembered. I joined them, as did a handful of other non-Native folk. The only comment to me from a member of the Circle was “Big drum.” Being a drummer, you naturally take a keen interest in everyone else's drums. These were a varied group, some clearly hand-made, several small Remo drums whose artificial hides are not prone to changes of tone in the same way that natural hides are, a real bonus in a climate as wet and cool as that of the Northwest Pacific coast. Some were painted, others not. Of the painted ones, the ones that registered most strongly with me was painted with an image of T'ist'ilal, the Thunderbird (left).
Then we started. Again, the format was for one of the three lead singers to start a song and for others to join in after the first round. Drumming was carried out the same way, the lead singer starting to drum, the rest of us joining in after a few beats and following his rhythm. I had my back to the dance circle, focused on following the lead drummer. The rhythms were powerful, strong, the varied voices of the drums blending well together. A shortish, thin guy in the corner was one of the three lead singers and had a big Remo drum. It was he who'd commented on mine. He smiled a lot, laughed a fair bit, had a great singing voice and did a good deal of the leading of both songs and drumming for the first part of the evening.
The songs were very different this time. Gone were the cowboy songs that had formed part of the repertoire a decade earlier, replaced with a more structured programme of local, traditional songs. The dances too were more formal.
After the first few songs and dances, dancers wearing traditional masks appeared among us. Some masks were of wood, others of thick card, each painted with a character from Quileute sacred history, powerful spirit beings such as Thunderbird (T'ist'ilal), Wolf (K'wali) and Orca (K'wal'la, literally 'Wolf of the Ocean'). Photography is not allowed during the ceremony. The picture here, taken around 1905, shows two Quileute men with carved wooden dance masks.
There were, if memory serves, six masked dancers, the youngest of whom seemed about nine years old, the oldest perhaps early twenties. The young boy showed a focus I've rarely seen in one so young. They took the lead in the next group of dances while we drummed and sang for them. The power in the hall and amongst the drummers and dancers seemed to ramp up several notches.
When the masked dancers arrived, the grey-haired man who had earlier commented on my T-shirt came and drummed beside me. He wore a traditional hat of woven cedar-bark and a red blanket around his shoulders. The dancers wore similar colourful blankets which flew out around them as they danced. The next image shows Quileute mask-maker, Roger Jackson, with some of the dance masks he's made. Another of the three main singers took the lead for the masked dances, a big guy with a lined face, dressed in blue. He handed over his drum and used a fan of dark feathers to beat out time. When a dance was coming to an end, he inverted the feathers and beat downwards with them until the stop. These stops came suddenly and I admit to missing a couple of them and throwing in an extra beat after everybody else. I'm reminded of a piece of liturgy I've found in several places, from ancient Greece to modern America. Basically, it asks the gods and ancestors to forgive us for our mistakes in sacred ceremonies. Mostly though, I stopped along with the rest. The use of the feathers really helped a novice like me, unfamiliar with the songs, giving a clear visual focus.
Our role was not only to drum and sing for the dances themselves, but also to drum fresh energy into the masked dancers between them. When each dance came to an end, they would file out from the dance circle and hunker down on the floor in the middle of our little group of drummers. We would then abandon rhythm, close in around them, and just drum powerfully and fast to raise power for the dancers. This was also amazingly powerful for us, renewing our own energy to drum and sing for the next dance. I was being terribly English and taking a respectful step back each time the dancers rejoined us until one of the dancers waved me back in to the knot of drummers. From them on I made sure I leaned in close with the others. As said, photography is not allowed during these ceremonies. The wolf-masked dancers here were photographed in 2011 at a public event, the Northwest Native Community Celebration. After the masked dances, there were a few more songs and less formal dances. The evening ended with a light-hearted exchange between the male drummers and singers and a party of female dancers. This took the form of a mock singing contest in which the women would sing a verse while the men pretended to be straining to hear them and made comments to each other like, “Do you hear something? Nope, me neither.” Then the men would sing a verse, sometimes wandering over to the group of women and making a cheeky comment, to which the women would respond either with a similarly cheeky comment or by bopping the miscreant on the head with a plastic water-bottle or whatever else came to hand. It was very funny. Afterwards, we all drifted out into the night.
I feel honoured to have had this opportunity to be a part of such a powerful ceremony. The Quileute are the People of the Wolf and, as such, I think of them as brothers and sisters.
On Saturday we made a sun-blessed ceremony with the Gorsedd of Bards of Caer Pugetia (aka Bards of Turtle Island) in a Seattle Park. On Sunday I conducted a workshop on the '12 Doorways of the Soul' healing technique that features in the British Druid Order ovate course. This took place at the Seattle healing practice of my friend, Amy, who I'd shared the technique with earlier in the week. It was a very successful session and I've accredited Amy as a practitioner of the technique. She's since used it with clients with great success. Amy, a Reiki practitioner for many years, was kind enough to pass on comments from a regular client who told her that the 12 Doorways technique seemed much more potent than Reiki.
Incidentally, in case anyone's wondering, I am not a Wannabee Indian. I'm an English Druid, have been for forty years and will continue to be so 'til my last breath. I do, however, greatly enjoy sharing ceremonies with folk of other cultures, whether that be joining ceremonies in LaPush or welcoming Lakota or Australian Aboriginal visitors to Druid ceremonies at stone circles in the UK. I am always delighted to find how much we have in common. Through honouring and learning to work with our own ancestors and the spirits of our own land, we open our hearts, minds and spirits to others who do the same in other lands. Spirit workers from many traditions I've communicated with over the years agree that if humanity is to be steered away from its current path of destruction, it will be the spirit workers of the world who bring it about. Shifting consciousness is, after all, a basis of our art and a shift in conscousness is what's required to open humanity to a better path. This won't be easy, but by sharing ceremonies, knowledge and understanding, we strengthen and support each other in the difficult task that faces us.
My friend with cancer has had some good news. Following chemotherapy and good vibes flowing in from around the world (he's very well liked), the tumour has shrunk and medics are discussing whether they need it to shrink further or whether they can operate to remove it without another course of chemo.
This latest trip to the Pacific Northwest was a remarkable one, as each previous one has been. There is undoubtedly a powerful link between my sons and myself and the land and people of this distant region, the two-legged, the four-legged, the feathered and the finned. It's a great mystery how I allowed ten years to pass between visits and I shall strongly endeavour not to let so much time elapse before the next.
You may have noticed that I have a bit of a thing about animals. As a child, I had an instinctive understanding that they were a special breed of people. I suspect this is an extremely common human experience. After all, traditional stories told to children around the world are full of talking animals, animal helpers, teachers and guides, and animal transformations.
In my book, Druidry: A Practical and Inspirational Guide (Piatkus, 2000), I wrote of an experience at a Druid camp of swapping consciousnesses with an eagle and soaring high above the world on powerful wings. I've also written of the sweat lodge in which I first encountered the spirit wolf who was to become such a central part of my life and from whom I draw the craft name, Greywolf. He and I have also traded spirits so that I perceive the world through his eyes and he through mine. In other circumstances, when called for, I have become a serpent or a dolphin.
These experiences of becoming other-than-human are well described in Whitman's poem, famously quoted by Lord Summerisle as played by Christopher Lee in the film, The Wicker Man.
I share Whitman's sense of animals having a different, much clearer, less encumbered engagement with life than we humans with our tangled webs of guilts and fears. They perceive clearly what needs to be done and go about doing it in the most efficient way possible. We, on the other hand, often fail to act, held back by worry about possible consequences. While in many cases this is clearly a good thing, we often take it to extremes where we are paralysed from taking any action at all, even when circumstances demand it. The results of inaction then often add to our worry and frustration, erode away our sense of self-worth, and can lead to severe psychological imbalance.
Becoming animal breaks us free of this destructive cycle by allowing us a clearer perspective, enabling us to see what is really important and to discard the rest. This has been proven to me time and again. Things that have angered and frustrated me as a human and which I have felt unable or unwilling to address have often melted into insignificance when I have become wolf or eagle. Either that or, in animal form, the right and only course of action to pursue has become crystal clear and my animal self has had the strength and courage to follow it through.
In shape-shifting, the physical perspective alters, so that as an eagle you see fields and houses way below and have a clear, unbroken view to the far horizon, while as a wolf, your visual perspective is much nearer the ground while your sense of smell and hearing are hugely enhanced. However, it is not just the physical perspective that shifts. Inhabiting the body of an animal, seeing through its eyes, experiencing the world through its other senses, also changes how we feel about the world and our place in it. As Whitman says, animals “do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.” For us as humans, this psychological shift is profound, freeing us from doubt, fear and all the other stifling emotions that prevent us from achieving clarity and acting decisively on it. The importance of this gift cannot be over-stressed.
In my experience, we all have spirit animals who protect and guide us. At least, I've only ever encountered one person who didn't. He was a long-term drug addict whose physical and mental state had deteriorated to such an extent that no spirit animal had felt able to remain with him.
It is my belief that we do not choose which spirit animals we have, but that they choose us, drawn to us by who we are, how we think and what we do. When these things change, one set of spirit animals may leave us and another take their place. With me the major transition was from solitary heron as a child to pack animal wolf as an adult.
How we discover our spirit animal guardians, guides and helpers varies from person to person and place to place. They may be encountered in vivid dreams or spontaneous or deliberately sought for visions, or may emerge simply through a deep fascination with one particular species.
Having discovered one's 'power animal', what happens next? In my case, the discovery of 'my' wolf was quickly followed by the acquisition of a wolf-skin cloak, wolf stories and images, a wolf tooth and a wolf chant. The chant as originally given to me in the 1990s originated with the Seneca people of North America. However, it immediately transformed into a native British wolf chant very different from the Seneca original. I posted it on youtube a while ago.
Having studied other cultures and shared ceremonies with indigenous peoples including the Quileute ('Wolf People') and Makah tribes of the Olympic Peninsula in the Pacific Northwest U.S.A., I know that such animal spirit songs and chants are common around the world. In Britain and Northern Europe, they have been largely lost to the erosion of history and in particular to the onset of Christianity. Early Christian edicts specifically outlaw dressing up as, and acting like, animals. In spite of this, animal-like costumes are still worn as part of folk festivals across much of Europe. Charles Fréger has photographed several such costumes in a series called Wilder Mann.
While some of these folk figures may have traditional songs that accompany their appearance, as does the Padstow 'Obby 'Oss in Cornwall, they have no doubt changed considerably over the years under the influence of a hostile church.
Having been given the two chants featured here, it struck me as a good idea to try and restore a set of spirit animal power songs to our native tradition. The wolf and deer chants represent a beginning and other chants will be added as they come. I've worked with eagle quite a lot, so have high hopes there. My son, Joe, has strong bear magic, so I hope we can come up with a good bear chant. I already have a serpent chant, though not yet recorded. The plan is to establish a collection of songs and chants relating to some of our most prominent native (or formerly native) species and to put them out on CD. In the meantime, I'll post them on youtub e and facebook as and when they emerge and I have time to record them.
I'd appreciate your help. If you work with an animal spirit and have a song or chant that you use to help maintain your link with that animal, please record it (however roughly), post it (letting me know where), and we'll polish it up, re-record it if necessary, and add it to the collection. When the CD comes out you will, of course, be fully credited. Having no idea how much interest in this project there might be, I'm unable to make any estimate as to what, if any, royalties might flow from it. To be honest, that's not my concern. The intention is simply to restore or re-create another, potentially very powerful, aspect of our native spiritual tradition and to share it with those who might find it useful in making, enhancing and maintaining their own relationships with the spirit animals who have so much to teach us and share with us. | 2019-04-22T07:04:01Z | https://greywolf.druidry.co.uk/tag/druidry/ |
On Wednesday morning, several media outlets, including the Irish Times, the BBC, and the CBC, reported that Savita Halappanavar, a Hindu woman living in Ireland, had died from blood poisoning after doctors in a Galway hospital refused her request to abort the fetus that she was told she was miscarrying.
Since 1992 it has apparently been legal in Ireland to terminate a pregnancy that poses a “substantial” danger to a woman’s life. But there is quite a bit of uncertainty surrounding just what this implies in practice, since there are a range of ways one can interpret the notion “substantial”. This may be why doctors were reluctant to cede her request. Unsurprisingly, given the legal situation, it is in their interest to interpret this notion conservatively.
This lack of clarity imposes serious costs on women. It imposed the ultimate sacrifice on Ms. Halappanavar. Indeed, the costs of forcing a woman to sustain the life of a fetus with no hope of survival are vastly greater than any benefit (direct or indirect) one might see in sustaining such a fetus.
Three serious costs are worthy of note. The first of which is, of course, the cost of dying against one’s wishes in a way that appears to have been entirely preventable. Related to this harm and perhaps a consequence of imposing them are two further harms.
The first is the harm of forced intimacy. The American moral philosopher Margaret Little has brought this harm to light in her powerful and nuanced article “Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate.” Little argues that pregnancy is a kind of intimacy. It involves being physically intertwined with, “inhabited” and “occupied” by, another being. Most will agree that being forced to be intimate with another being is harmful. It follows from this that forcing a woman to remain pregnant without her consent is harmful to her; it is similar to the harm of being forced to be sexually intimate with another person. It is therefore wrong to force women to sustain unwanted pregnancies.
The final kind of harm is one that involves being forced to live according to a religious doctrine that one reasonably rejects. This harm was done to Ms. Halappanavar, a Hindu, in the most overt way. It was reported that she was told that she was in Ireland and that therefore she had to abide by the religion of its majority. Ireland is a Catholic country and its laws reflect that. But it is also increasingly a pluralistic and multicultural society. Approximately twenty percent of its population are not Catholic. This means that in its borders are people who reject on entirely plausible grounds its predominant religion but who are nonetheless bound by its laws. Forcing someone to live by religious code that they reasonably reject offends against their liberty and their equality because it involves coercing them by mechanisms that they do not see as legitimate. It does violence to a woman’s liberty to make her live by a religious doctrine that is not justified to her with reasons that she can accept from her own point of view.
It was wrong to impose these costs on Ms. Halappanavar merely in order to sustain the life of a fetus for a few extra days. No law should ask for such a sacrifice from any woman. It’s time that Ireland liberalized its abortion policy. The rights of women and religious minorities require nothing less.
1. Little, M. O. ‘Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2 (1999), 295-312.
2. Skelton, A. ‘Henry Sidgwick’s Practical Ethics: A Defense’, Utilitas 18 (2006), 199-217.
I agree doctors go through the dilemma in their practices daily. But they completely blocked their medical decision making capacity in the name of religion and legality.
Was there any ethics committee or could they have convened one ASAP to immediately address the issue?
When the personal belief system contradicts the patient’s and family request at least they should transfer the care to another doctor / institution / closest hospital in another country who would have seen the sense in their request.
In medical termination of pregnancy act there was a provision to end the incomplete miscarriage when it was threatening the life of mother even in Ireland. Why was it not followed?
To deny the required evacuation of the uterus in the background of incomplete miscarriage with a dying heart rhythm of the foetus is exposing the patient to sepsis and DIC (Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation).
When once DIC and sepsis sets up as nothing was done in the golden hour, there is no way the patient survives.
As per reports, Savitha was not asking abortion which connotes another meaning. She was asking medical help to evacuate the uterus from the incomplete miscarriage. Looks like it is scary to seek medical help in a foreign country. It takes a lot for patients to come to a doctor for help. This was clearly medical negligence .
There is another religious practice which I can not understand. This comes from Jehowa witness group. They decline blood transfusion even after discussing the pros and cons of their decisions. Again do not get me wrong. They are entitled to their choices.
This makes the doctor’s life miserable when the doctor knows that the patient can survive provided they get the replacement of blood.
But this is entirely different platform.
It is hard when legal, religious practices prevent the doctor – patient relationship to see things in perspective.
Savitha should have signed AMA ( against Medical advice ) and release herself from the hospital take a flight and get to India rather than to suffer there in a foreign hospital under the religious fanatics. I know it is hard when you have pain and bleeding. But that was her last hope and straw while sinking.
The politicians and sections of the media seems to have gone gaga over the case of Savita, who was reportedly denied an abortion in Ireland, resulting in her death. The right wing, Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), Ministry of External Affairs, Communist Brinda Karat… et al jumped into the act, taking potshots at the universal Catholic Church’s and Ireland’s abortion laws, based on feedback received by Savita’s family. Two investigations are on and its results should have been awaited. It is yet to be conclusively established that the cause of death was denial of abortion, which is illegal. The incident has been wrongly portrayed, giving it religious or even racist connotations, without the Catholic viewpoint being equally emphasized.
The Church’s stand on issues like abortion, may be practiced more in breach than in practice; but this is hardly any justification for Vatican to change its doctrine . The Church respects the Catholic victims of such tragic circumstances and uses its resources to care for the child or the affected, like those with critical deformity, chronic illness, AIDS/HIV patients, senior citizens, homosexuals, destitute, etc. But so is the Church’s stand at variance with the popular one, on matters such as divorce, contraception, gay marriage, right to die, alternate fertilization, women priesthood… Christians worldwide are in the forefront of the human rights and social justice movements and yet are the most persecuted or opposed for their beliefs, which appeal to their conscience.
The Savita case is not a religious one. The right to life is universally accepted as the most basic human right out of which all others flow, with society and rulers duty bound to protect life. Murder is taking of life intentionally by choice and this is what abortion is, which violates an even higher moral law or the right to conscience and hence cannot be acceptable.
2. Its the law of the land.
Millions of various nationalities work or reside abroad and it is a must that they follow law of the land. Many Indians are in the gulf or Islamic states, where they dutifully follow laws and there seems to be little outcry for their basic human or religious rights, if violated. Can we expect foreigners in India to disobey Indian law eg. Italian marines case.
3. Its asking the doctors to commit a crime.
The issue of Ireland’s abortion law has come up in many referendums over the last 30 years, under different powers-that-be and the citizens of that country have repeatedly rejected abortion for the asking. Unless the law is amended suitably, it stands and advocating the doctors to kill the child is asking them to commit a cognizable offense and violate the law.
4. Ireland as per WHO is one of the safest for mothers.
The World Health Organization (WHO) in Its most recent report on global maternal death rates found that only 3 out of every 100,000 women died in childbirth in Ireland. Compare this with an average of 14 in Europe and North America, 190 in Asia and 590 in Africa. Thus, Ireland is one of the safest nation in the world to be pregnant, which speaks commendably for its mother’s health care system.
5. Ireland has abortion precedents and its laws are humane.
How many times have we seen relatives of a departed blaming the doctors? The grief and anguish is understandable, but to say her death was because the child was not aborted, is something only qualified medical professionals may conclude. The Irish Supreme Court has ruled in favour of abortion, if there was reasonable risk to the mother, including her threat to suicide. Further, Savita died 3 days after a miscarriage. It is not that doctors sat there doing nothing. Complications do arise and one cannot blame the doctors for every miscarriage or death, as is natural, but unfair to their efforts.
6. Ireland and the medical institution is not ‘Catholic’ as alleged.
Ireland is not a theocracy, but a sovereign republic, where a democratically elected government rules. Ireland Catholics stand up vociferously against Catholic clerical pedophilia and Church abuse. The Galway Hospital is not a ‘Catholic’ medical facility, in that it is not run or owned by any official Catholic Order or even affiliated to any Christian church. It is managed, along with several other hospitals in the region, by a management team put in place by the government’s Health Services Executive. Doctors have called for further focus on optimal care to pregnant women.
7. A track record of abortion, with strictest limitations, proves it get widespread.
In England and Wales in 2011 alone, there were about 2 lakh ‘murder’ by abortion cases recorded. In India, a minimum of 11 million babies are ‘murdered’, many of cases of female infanticide. In the 5 year period preceding 2012, it is estimated that around 25 lakh legal abortions took place. At the time the Indian Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act (MTPA) in its present form came into being in 1972, there were only 25,000 cases reported. Thus, the culture of death by choice tends to become all pervasive, even in India, where it is lawful to abort. Given these facts, there Is need to amend MTPA and make it reflective of Indian culture and protect the unborn girl child.
8. The Church’s stand on abortion, reflects its views on the sanctity of life in all its forms.
9. Life begins at conception and thereafter both mother and child have equal rights as different humans.
European states like Malta, Poland, Monaco, Andorra, San Marino, N.Ireland part of UK… have stringent abortion laws. A person or life begins at conception. One cannot give more rights to the mother and less to the unborn child. Both have an equal right to life. An unborn child has a right to be treated with dignity and respect, especially since the unborn life cannot defend itself. Science shows that a child is no less human, with a heartbeat as early as 18 days after conception. The unborn child on conception is not potential life, but life with potential – new, unique & not to be snuffed out or extinguished. It is therefore also wrong to permit ‘murder’ by abortion even a day into pregnancy, as allowed by legislation, ranging from as less as 20 weeks in India. An unborn life is the most vulnerable & defenseless member of the human race, who has no choice or say.
10. The Christian basis for abortion is its concept of life and the body. But abortion is no quick fix solution, from the secular view.
Christians believe – Life and our bodies are sacred as they come from God. They are temples of the Holy Spirit, created in the image of God and saved from eternal damnation through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our bodies are not our own, to do with them what we will. The body is to be used with respect, not selfishly, but rather in service, after which we move on to spend eternity with God in heaven. Until then, Christians are called upon to be stewards / guardians, caring for His creation, especially all forms of life and all kinds of human beings. From a purely secular and medical point of view too, abortions are undesirable, as they are proved to have serious traumatic psychological impact on the mother, create a skewed / warped society to the disadvantage of women and irresponsible world citizenry.
11. Devout Catholics want no change in the Church’s stand. We call upon the government to create a society where abortion on demand will not be necessary.
The Church’s stand on abortion stems from creation as described in the Genesis story of the Bible and specifically from the 6th Commandment – thou shall not murder. Repeated Vatican documents & exhortations of the popes, ever since then have emphasized the same. Catholics do not expect the Church to change its doctrine according to what deviants from the faith want. The essence is life and treating the body with respect. The Church has never said the life of the unborn is more important than that of the mother. The answer lies in the government providing both mother and child with equal and adequate health and medicare. The government must revisit the abortion legislation to protect the life and human dignity of the unborn child, as these laws have proved to be disastrous, succeeding only in the ‘murder’ of millions of lives, with severe moral and social impact. The Church offers victims of abortion, its love, care and support – where ever possible.
Frequently man lives as if God did not exist, and even puts himself in God’s place… He claims for himself the Creator’s right to interfere in the mystery of human life. Rejecting divine law and moral principles, he openly attacks the family.
can’t you see wake up people your life is the only treasure.
Clearly there is much that we don’t know about his case, and inquiries are underway. There may have been malpractice or misdiagnosis, the staff may have misinterpreted the law. In which case it would be prudent to clarify the law. Or none of thees may be the case, and it was simply a tragic result of applying the laws and standards which the medical staff were obliged to follow. But this does not entail that the law should be changed. Hard cases make bad laws.
In Ireland the unborn have a constitutional right to life. This is not religious law, it is secular law. Ireland, as a country governed by elected politicians, has taken the decision that the rights of the woman do not automatically trump the rights of the unborn. So no religious rights are infringed by applying it. It will not do to claim that this law only exists because Ireland is a historically Catholic country. No country can have laws which are independent of its historical development. I daresay that the strict laws on narcotics in parts of south-east Asia are substantially informed by Islamic rules against intoxicants – does that make them automatically immoral or invalid? Does it mean foreigners ought not to have to obey them? Laws on human rights are a product of Christian beliefs in the sanctity of life and the value of each individual before God. Should we therefore get rid of them, and enforce entirely communitarian laws instead? Nor is a ban on abortion a specifically Catholic matter – the original Hippocratic oath contains it, some five centuries before Christ.
Surely a society has the right to determine its laws in a way which will be for the benefit of society – which is pretty much the point of having laws at all. Although one might disagree about the philosophical basis of particular laws, where a law is coherent and morally defensible, it won’t do to say it should be changed, simply on the basis of a rare negative outcome. Ireland has decided that the loss of a handful of mothers’ lives is a price worth paying for the security of the presumably thousands of lives of children who would otherwise have been aborted. Stripped of religious rhetoric, that seems to me a perfectly defensible position (which is not to say you have to agree with it).
And the fact that the couple were of a particular religion does not mean that they should have an opt-out from the laws of the state in which they choose to live, or the right to apply their own legal system. Should Muslims in Europe be allowed to cut off the hands of any one found stealing from their houses? Or should non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia be allowed to bring vast quantities of alcohol into that country, simply because they don’t want to observe the laws? Religion aside, I’m sure we could all think of laws with which we disagree and would rather not have to follow (like paying for parking tickets?). Bu as members of a society we follow its rules. Otherwise society breaks down, and everyone loses.
I plan to read the Margaret Little piece,because it looks deeply flawed from the summary; I’ll comment later. | 2019-04-18T14:27:04Z | http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2012/11/abortion-and-the-senseless-death-of-savita-halappanavar/ |
Do you older folks remember the TV show called “Jet Jackson, Flying Commando”? I grew up in Yakima, WA, and the show aired on our KIMA TV circa 1956-1958. It told the story of a World War II veteran who, along with his sidekick, Ichabod Mudd, fought evil-doers all around the world. The show was originally entitled the “Captain Midnight” show; but when it went into reruns, which we saw in Yakima, it was renamed. The jet which was featured in the series was the Douglas Skyrocket, named the Silver Dart.
I met “Jet Jackson” when I was about eight years old. My Dad, radio/TV personality Al “Cowboy Pinkeye” Bowles, was either still employed at KIMA, or he had contacts, and he scored my brother Al III and me an invite to a “meet and greet” at KIMA with Jet Jackson, who was actually the actor, Richard Webb. He shook my hand, and gave me an autographed photo, which I’m sorry to say I tossed years ago, not being a collector, at the time. — I certainly know better now! I save everything!
It wasn’t until recently that I learned the Jet Jackson show was actually the old Captain Midnight show. Due to legal issues, the program had to change its name. The producers (poorly) dubbed in dialogue in order to change “Captain Midnight” to “Jet”. I was just a kid when I watched, so I didn’t notice how badly it was done.
I remember Mr. Webb, the actor, being very tall and handsome — a very nice, patient gentleman. I was one of many children who met him that evening at the television station. We inquired about his funny sidekick, “Ikky” Mudd, who was played by Sid Melton. He said Ikky was doing fine. It turns out the two actors were good friends in real life.
My brother and I loved watching this early adventure-almost-sci-fy show for several years, and always talked about how much fun it was to meet its star, Richard Webb. He was eventually awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. So: do you remember Jet Jackson?
Your author in 1969, sitting on the front lawn on 40th Avenue, in Yakima.
Oh, the stuff I threw away! Posters, magazines, record albums, love beads, incense burners, pipes, comics. My black light! I could go on. Yes, I could. Most of the trappings of my late 1960’s/early 70’s, Yakima, Washington hippie boy lifestyle landed in the trash heap decades ago. Perhaps I did sell a few things; but I received pocket change for them, compared to what I would rake in now. I did, however, save a few iconic treasures.
I suppose my peace symbol should come first. After all, that was the basis of the whole hippie thing, at least for me: peace. I’ve owned this since 1968-’69. Sorry I can’t remember the exact year I purchased it at a store in Yakima. But actually, I remember quite a bit about those times, considering…. The pendant is made of cheap, cast metal; but, it’s seemingly indestructible. These days, I wear it when I play all-ages, folk-rock concerts. I’m sort of a “rent-a-hippie” performer. I provide the young folk with a chance to see a real live hippie relic, while I serenade them with the songs of Dylan and Donovan. And, I help bring back memories of those great times, for folks of my generation.
Here is a real Keep On Truckin’ patch, vintage 1969. No reproduction, this fine item! The patch far outlasted the pair of 501’s my Mom sewed it onto, by hand, for me. (Thanks, Mom.) The patch was designed by a man of many talents: R. (for Robert) Crumb; or at least, it was based on his work. Mr. Crumb, the subject of a well-known documentary film, has been written about extensively. — An interesting guy. Hippies liked old things from the 20’s and 30’s; much of R. Crumb’s art paid homage to that era.
My mom sewed this early, most-likely first edition Rolling Stones logo patch, designed by Royal College of Art student, John Pasche, onto my baby blue cords in late 1971. I sported it all over our small, Eastern Washington town. If you search for this image on the interweb, you’ll readily see that this is an early release. I’ve saved it all these years. Being much more of a Beatles fan, I didn’t know what for, until now. — I needed it for this story!
This is chronologically out of order; but I wanted to keep all of my apparel together, above. This is my one and only comic or in this case, “komix”, from the day. I saved it because it pays tribute to my all-time favorite hippie band, the legendary Canned Heat.
Canned Heat was/is a Los Angeles, California electric blues band. The band’s best work focused on electrified delta blues. The guys could play Chicago blues with the best of them, and definitely, their own brand of psychedelic blues. But their electric delta blues efforts remain unmatched to this day, in my view. The comic came as a bonus insert with their Future Blues LP, which was released in 1970. I purchased my copy that year, at Yakima’s Bon Marche, and I still have it. I’ve seen the comic, alone, listed for sale for as high as $60, plus shipping, on E-Bay, for one in very good condition. But I’ve seen it listed for much less. I kept mine because I love it, not as an “investment”.
Hey kids! Start your own collection! You can find examples of these artifacts all over the internet, and you can purchase your own. Or make me an outstanding offer. Hee hee.
Is it cold out? I didn’t notice!
Your humble scribe in 1968, a few miles north of Yakima, perched contentedly on the roof of Chris Baker’s old jalopy. And yes, it was cold. — Yakima cold, as I call it. But I was stoned on weed, so I didn’t really care. On this snowy, frigid afternoon, we were on our way to watch the wild elk get fed, an event which took place outside of town, every winter. Chris and I painted his car with “official” Standard Oil Chevron Filling Station red, white and blue paint — the paint they used to paint their stations. We hand-painted it with brushes, in the garage of Tom Baker Chevron in Yakima. Later, my brother Al III purchased the car from Chris, cut off its top, and drove it around Yakima!
Wearing my peace symbol, flashing the peace sign, at Seattle Hempfest 2018. With “SeattleFreeze”. Photo by Michael Macdonald.
I wore my peace symbol on Saturday, August 18, along with a couple other iconic items I’ve managed to acquire over the years: my 1995 Dr. Seuss “Lorax” tye-die, and my Lee Riveted Dungarees overalls, which my late, beloved ex-wife gifted me around 1997. If I hang onto the shirt and overalls long enough, they’ll also become “artifacts of a small-town hippie boy”. Except, now I live in Seattle, where we have huge, amazing, free festivals, like Hempfest. In the above photo, I’m with my friend/favorite human being, Sheen “SeattleFreeze” Hunter, who also puts a lot of thought into what she wears. And yes, if you look right above my veggie burrito, there’s the peace symbol. BTW, I was at Hempfest, to see the legendary Climax Blues Band. I’ve only seen two blues bands at that park (Myrtle Edwards Park): Climax, who were great, and…. Canned Heat. I saw them in 1994, on the 4th of July — another free concert! Life is good.
Charles of Colorado definitely likes his patches and buttons.
Note: In order to preserve them for future generations, I sold my Keep On Truckin’ and Rolling Stones Tongue patches to an old hippie (I mean that as a compliment) in Colorado, who has youngsters that collect this type of item. He promises to keep them into his old age, and then to pass them on to his offspring. I feel good knowing they are in Colorado with a cool family. They could have ended up in the trash heap, along with all of that other great stuff I thoughtlessly discarded. As part of the deal, I threw in a 1970, Jesus Gives Real Peace pin-back button I discovered I still had. (I found two, so I even have one of those!) And I gave the Canned Heat Comix to my great young friend in Hungary, Péter Garami, who will assure that it lives on for a good while longer.
Peter, displaying his own “future artifact”, a copy of the Velvet Illusions LP my very own Yakima band released in 2016. Everything’s connected.
On August 9, 1995, the day Jerry Garcia passed away, impromptu gatherings took place all over the world. As word of the passing of the great genius behind “our band” spread, people just naturally came together, to mourn, and to pay tribute.
The beautiful, recently restored, Horiuchi Mural, created for the 1961 Seattle World’s Fair.
There were newspaper photographers in attendance, who were taking pictures of those of us who were gathered together. I approached one, and said, “Look up! Take a picture of that!”. He didn’t. Well, I did. Here it is. Jerry was smiling.
The author in his tie-dye, with other good folks. We made friends with the sweet young woman on my right.
There was a good-sized crowd.
I love Christmas; and I enthusiastically collect manager scenes. I received my first one in 1952 from my parents, Al and Jeannie, when I was three years old. We were living in the parsonage of an old country church in Lower Naches, Washington. The photo above was taken this year. Yes, I still have this ancient manger, which was made from cardboard, lithographed paper and painted chalk figures. I’ve treasured it for nearly my entire life, so you can be sure I take good care of it.
In addition to my American-made manger, I collect folk-art mangers, or retablos, which are imported chiefly from Peru and Mexico. Some are made from wood, some from clay, some from gourds. Some are even created from match boxes. The Nativity figures are often made of clay; however, artisans may use a mixture of potato flour and water to form the scene’s figures. They may also use papier mache.
Shown above is my permanent display of Peruvian/Mexican retablos and accessory figures, including an El Salvadoran enameled cross and a carved model of the Christ of the Andes. This is constantly on view in a rustic cabinet in my living room. I could never bring myself to closet this display eleven months out of the year!
Here is the piece de resistance of my collection: my largest, most ornate Peruvian retablo. I purchased it new, approximately 25 years ago. It is made of painted wood, clay or papier mache figures, and it is held together with small leather hinges. It portrays an almost-celestial scene; one which I find spiritual and inspirational. The quality of craftmanship is quite high. Newer retablos are not always as well-made.
This little scene is indeed made from a matchbox. I purchased it, and most of my Peruvian collection from the now-defunct import store, Seattle, Washington’s Trident Imports. Sadly, the store closed its doors in 1997, following the passing of its proprietor. I had made a practice of visiting the huge emporium the day after Christmas, when I was able to pick up these great little displays at half-price. That is how I built my collection. At Christmastime, I hang this little treasure on my tree.
These three small retablos or dioramas are made from painted clay. They feature simple Nativity figures in their interiors. These also hang from my tree at Christmas.
For variety’s sake, I am inserting this Peruvian candelabrum-style creche here. It is rather primitively constructed from heavy, painted clay. While the little figures of Joseph, Mary and Jesus, as well as the animals and birds, were most likely formed by hand, the candelabrum itself appears to have been formed in a mold. This differentiates it immediately from an artisan-crafted piece. It’s simply an average set. However, it is charming, and prettily-painted. I purchased it around 1995. For its type, that makes it a newer piece, actually. And that helps explain why it was chiefly made in a mold, in a rather hurried manner.
Gourds are often incorporated by Peruvian creche makers. In creations such as these, the Nativity scene is often paired with a scene depicting traditional Peruvian musicians. To create these, the artist carves the gourd’s outside, then cuts it in half, hollows it out, paints the interior, and inserts figures made of clay/potato paste/papier mache.
Peruvian gourd diorama/retablo carved exterior.
Here is a similar retablo; however, it is made of clay which has been formed and painted to represent a seashell. Below is the reverse side, which has been beautifully painted.
Here is a small, doored Retablo, one which again pairs a Nativity scene with a scene featuring musicians. The painting here is especially fine.
Above, is yet another doored Retablo. I love this style, because it is beautiful whether the doors are open, or closed, as below.
This retablo doesn’t feature a Nativity scene; however it features the traditional musicians so often found in retablos, so I group it with my Nativity display. It is unique in that it has only one door. It has a certain lop-sided look to it. Below, it is depicted with the door closed.
Bamboo retablo featuring an array of scenes.
This unusual retablo is made from bamboo; the figures are made from painted, dried, mashed potatoes! I know this, because my late wife and I bought it directly from the visiting Peruvian artist, at Sante Fe, New Mexico’s great folk art store, Jackalope. The retablo features not only a manager scene in its first section; it also features other scenes from Peruvian life and/or folklore. We picked this up on our late-80’s car trip from Seattle, WA, to New Mexico. Seeing the West and Southwest via car, staying in inexpensive, quaint little motels with kitchenettes and vintage swimming pools along the way, was unforgettable.
My collection includes one ceramic Nativity scene created in Tonola, Jalisco, Mexico. When I encountered this beautifully-decorated, used set ten years ago, I noticed it was missing one of the magi, and perhaps an angel. But it is the only example I’ve ever found, so I acquired it. I display it year-round, in my living room.
This retablo depicts a Peruvian hat seller. The iconic hats of Peru can be seen, offered for sale. This piece is perhaps 25 years old. I purchased it used, so cannot date it exactly. I bought it at the old Westlake Antique Mall, from my friend, manager Bill “Blenko Bill” Agle.
This retablo, which I purchased twenty years ago at the wonderful Jackalope in Sante Fe, New Mexico, is somewhat different from the others in my collection. It is only partially painted, so that the wood it is constructed from can be seen. Plus, it has no doors. Not only that, but: is that Elvis? It looks like Elvis! I find it humorous that, when not depicting the Nativity scene, the artist has chosen to depict another King: the King of Rock and Roll!
I am always on the lookout for traditional depictions of the Nativity. I am looking for those with some age on them, as the quality of crafting is usually higher. I’m not enamored with “traditional” art which is partially pre-made via the use of molded products. I love the fact that extra care and effort has been used in the creation of the retablos in my collection. And I love that they are dedicated to the celebration of my favorite holiday!
What’s Better Than Playing A Folk Festival On Bob Dylan’s Birthday? Not a lot!
The author with his beloved 12-string.
I awoke Friday, May 24, 2013, not quite prepared to play my first Northwest Regional Folklife Festival in 19 years. What was the problem? – Well, I wasn’t sure what songs I wanted to play for my concert. Since I’d let 19 years transpire between appearances at such a big event as “Folklife”, I wanted to give the best possible show. I wanted to bring the “world’s best set-list”. For weeks I agonized over what to play. I finally found it easier to jot down four set lists, each one having a theme. I figured I would pick one right before I did my show, depending upon my mood, or upon the makeup of the audience. — You know, after performing for 51 years, I like to think I can determine what an audience wants!
I excitedly got dressed-up and ready to go, garbed in my finest “folksinger denim”. I called a cab, took it to Seattle Center (all the while, extolling the virtues of the Festival to the driver, who sadly, had never heard of it). I arrived at my venue, The Folklife Café, in McCaw Hall, accompanied by the requisite butterflies inhabiting my stomach. I checked in, and waited for my time in the spotlight.
I started with The Times They Are A-Changin’, a song which doesn’t require the performer to be in a good mood. By the time I had wrung all of the emotion and meaning out of that song, I forgot all about the confusion, about the late start, and I found the proper groove and state of mind to play the first request. A member of the audience called out for Tomorrow Is A Long Time. Before I started the song, I thought of, and mentioned, how the young group, Nickel Creek, did a great version of that very romantic song. I envisioned Sara Watkins’ beautiful delivery, and I tried to “sing it pretty” myself. When I had sung that song, a listener asked for Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, which just happens to be one of my all-time favorite Dylan songs. I probably took eight or nine minutes to get through that number. It’s a down-tempo song, comprised of about a million verses. By the way, I have no idea what its lyrics mean! But it’s a great song; I don’t need to decipher it; I just try to “nail it” every time.
Martin Luther King Memorial, from the author’s collection.
The next thing I knew, the stage manager signaled “one more song”. Someone called out “Blowin’ In The Wind”. That was so apropos, because it gave me the opportunity to mention that Peter, Paul and Mary, the great, historic, folk trio, sang that very song 50 years prior, at Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream Speech”, at the March On Washington. I put everything I had left in my 64-year-old body into my performance of that classic, and that was it. That was my show. But! I found out later that two great friends of mine, sisters Kyle and Evan, were in the house, and they had surreptitiously filmed me doing Blowin’ In The Wind. They were kind enough to load it onto YouTube.
And here it is, for your enjoyment. Thank you for allowing me to relive the memory of one of the most satisfying shows I’ve ever given, in my 51 years of performing. Enjoy the song.
If you haven’t had enough, well, I have one more present: here is a younger, less-hairy version of myself, doing The Times They Are A-Changing, on a very cold November morning, at Seattle Occupy.
Sketcho Mutcho Busker’s Sign, Or My Street Singer Sign Was Made By A Famous Artist!
Here is a little piece of Seattle, Washington history: I’ve busked (played on the street) and played at many basket houses (where you are paid via audience tips) throughout my musical career. I’ve been using this sign to solicit tips for more than forty years. Will Mutch, aka Sketcho Mutcho, the great Pike Place Market artist and sign painter, created it for me in the winter of 1974.
Will Mutch, aka Sketcho Mutcho, circa late 1970’s.
I also happen to have the very first Pike Place Public Market Musician Permit ever sold. A regulation was put into effect which required buskers to obtain permits to play in the market. My singing and guitar-playing act was pretty well-liked. When I went to the office in January 1976, to buy my permit, the market representative pulled out button #1, and said, “We saved this for you, Randy”.
The author performing at Couth Buzzard Books/Cafe, June 2014.
Reader Tiffany Doody was kind enough to email me photos of two prints of Sketcho’s work. You can get a fairly good idea of the artist’s style. He used a lot more strokes of the pen on these, compared to my simple little sign.
And, in June, 2016, I heard from a person who aptly described herself as a lucky art lover and bargain hunter from Port Orchard, WA. She sent me a photo of this print from 1970. She was fortunate to find it at an incredibly good price. I love it. It shows the Market from Stewart Street, looking south. I really appreciate her sharing! I’ve played music many times on the street corner portrayed in the lower left section of the photo.
Corner Market Building at First and Pike.
More blessings: in August 2018, a young man named Corey Alba contacted me to share a photo of a print his grandparents gave him to commemorate his graduation from college. (Perhaps they visited here, long ago?) Sketcho would have made this in the late 1960’s to early 1970’s (I’d say 70’s, judging by the car in the sketch). It features the beautiful, old Corner Market Building at Pike Place Market, here in Seattle. Not old as in gone! Old as in built as the keystone of the block in 1912, and still standing. As recently as 2013, I’ve spent many an hour singing for tips in front of Left Bank Books, the long-time radical bookstore nestled in the Corner Market. In this image, Sketcho shows the Market on a “rainy Sunday”, when the big, accordion-style metal doors of the various businesses were not rolled up. Because back in the day, the Market was closed on Sunday.
If you have an example of Sketcho’s work (more like play!) please contact me. Leave a comment here; or message me at my Facebook page, “Randy Bowles, Folksinger/Storyteller/Photographer”. I’d love to share an image of it here. My blog stories are meant to be dynamic. I add to them all the time!
Let’s close with one more photo, above: Will (Sketcho) was fond of donning white-face and strolling around the market, saying hello to all. He cut quite a figure. I loved him. I last saw him in the early-mid 1980’s, at the Moore Theater. The Moore had just been restored. It was a beautiful theater. It still stands! Will has passed on; I don’t have any details…. Just great memories.
Will someone please tell Anthony Apsay I’m blogging about him?
How does the cosmos appear in the imagination of a nine-year-old? Anthony Apsay’s answer to this query is the striking painting pictured herein. Anthony’s vision of the cosmos is a multi-colored phantasmagoria of stars, comets, suns, planets, and other heavenly objects, boldly outlined in black, and executed with confidence, imagination and skill. I was captivated by this painting upon first viewing, circa 1994. I was able to rescue it, and it has hung in my home(s) for more than twenty years. The 12” x 18” tempura painting has long added color and whimsy to my daily life, and will continue to do so.
My late, former spouse, Sally Jo Davis, was for many years, a Seattle, Washington school teacher. Having earned a Masters degree in incorporating the arts in the classroom, she enjoyed having her students engage in art projects. One assignment she gave her fourth grade class in 1994, was to paint the cosmos, as it appeared to them. She hung the results on the walls of her room, for students and visitors alike, to enjoy. After the art hung on the walls for perhaps a few weeks, SJ announced that any student who wanted his or her art was welcome to take it home, and many did. But not everyone….
It was my custom to help Sally Jo dismantle her classroom at the end of each school term. One task she gave me in early summer 1994 was to take down the art which had been left behind. This painting was included in that group.
Perhaps Anthony Apsay saw something in his beautiful rendition of the cosmos that didn’t measure up to his standards, so he left it behind. I can’t imagine what that may have been. — There were at least a dozen orphaned “cosmos” paintings remaining on the walls; thus, I had quite a few from which to choose. Anthony’s jumped out at me. Being an art collector who was always on the lookout for more things of beauty, I asked SJ if I could have the painting. She said, “It’s either that or the recycling bin”. I removed it from the wall, carefully rolled it up, and took it home. I have not let it out of my sight since that day.
I remember in 1957, when I was a third grader in Yakima, WA, my mother found a tempera painting of a blossoming apple orchard, which I had created at school. It was folded up and stuffed in the back pocket of my jeans. She immediately placed it on her ironing board, laid a towel over it, and ironed the creases out of it, as best she could. She framed and hung it on my bedroom wall. She then asked me to bring home any future projects in a more pristine condition. She said, “Your painting is very good! Please don’t fold-up the next one”. — I think as children, we may be tough critics when it comes to judging our artistic endeavors. I thought my painting was pretty bad; Mom loved it.
Again, Anthony must not have cared for this artwork. But I enjoy seeing it every day. Its bright colors, fantastic heavenly objects and outright excellent execution continue to inspire and delight.
By Anthony Leata, Steilacoom, WA.
I recently spent a fabulous day touring and photographing the Washington State Fair, which is held at Puyallup, WA. I spied this painting which was included in an exhibit of junior and senior high school art. I’m happy to see the tradition continues! While examining the work, I fantasized that perhaps a teacher whom Sally Jo mentored in the Seattle School District had his or her class do a similar project. | 2019-04-26T11:39:26Z | https://randybowlestories.wordpress.com/2014/10/ |
With most government departments in the UK facing 20-25% cuts over the next year or so, DFID employees are sheltering behind a funding ringed fence. They must be pinching themselves at their good fortune. But their privileged position also forces them to be as penny-pinching as possible--if not, other departments will do the pinching.
But how sturdy is the fence and are there any gaps through which resources can leak out?
The fence is coming under increased fire. The recent article in the Daily Mail was particularly scathing. These attacks, in turn, generate stock responses about aid's all-conquering properties.
In an era where the aid debate risks becoming ever more polarised we are in need of nuance. But for busy UK policymakers nuance is about as welcome as England having to face Germany in the round of 16 (I suspect this may not hold for German policymakers).
can aid deliver the output or outcome?
can these outputs or outcomes make a long term difference?
can impact be demonstrated in a relatively short time period?
You can see the potential contradictions. It is difficult to show the short term impact of things that can make a long term difference (e.g. investments in innovation in science and technology). Things that aid can deliver (e.g. more children in school) may not make a long term difference (e.g. if class sizes are so large that the average student's ability to learn diminishes). Things that aid can deliver (e.g. stronger health systems) can present problems for the demonstration of impact (e.g. in terms of lives saved).
What can the development community do to make these contradictions more visible but less severe?
The effort required to deliver a convincing answer often dwarfs the effort put into thinking about whether it was the right question to answer in the first place (e.g. why has no-one asked whether conditional cash transfers make sense in sub-Saharan Africa? Most of the effort has been spent on answering if cash transfers have an impact on hunger. Of course they do.). This means consulting with a wide range of stakeholders about the questions worth asking (see "this book fills a much needed gap").
The "randomistas" and even the quasi-experimentalists often answer the question "does it have an impact?", sometimes "for who?", but rarely "why?". This requires innovative issue-driven blends of quant and qual.
It will always be more challenging to evaluate policy changes that generate consequences that are indirect and lagged, for which indicators are not yet developed, and for which all the pathways of change are not yet fully understood. But we must help to expand the set of things that are "evaluable" by developing methods to consider these dimensions.
Your idea of success is probably not the same as mine. Add in experiential, cultural and value differences and the gap may widen. Getting multiple views of success from different stakeholders will help to home in on what really counts and help uncover unintended consequence land mines further down the road.
Most methodologically rigorous analyses--whether quant/qual or some blend--have, by definition, high degrees of internal validity. They are fit for purpose in the context in which they are applied. But by building in more variation and diversity - either within the context or across it by, say, systematic case study meta analyses--we can make plausible guesses about how portable an intervention is and the associated risks of assuming it is.
In short the development research community must nuance the impact debate, not disown it.
If we do the latter, then aid will only be used for things where it is easiest to demonstrate impact and the rest will be wrung out of DFID, despite the ringed fence.
We need to expand the radius of evaluability if we are to help protect the parts of the aid spend that may do the most good.
Last month One.org released their DATA REPORT 2010: Monitoring the G8 Promise to Africa. It just hit my desk today.
G7 commitments on aid to Sub-Saharan Africa have been more than half met. The target increase for 2009 was about $18bn, with actual G7 increases standing at $9.9bn.
investments in agriculture, primary education, malaria, HIV/AIDS and child survival are rated as good, but water and sanitation have lagged behind.
lessons learned: need to engage with new partners (e.g. new non G7 donors); accountability of donors and African governments is key; Africa is "teeming with new opportunity"
The way forward says that no group of countries have put forward a comprehensive and collective plan focused on how to help support the vision of "an Africa driven by its own citizens", but it would have been useful to provide a forum in this report for African voices to say where and how they would like that support to be focused.
This is the last in a series of very useful reports, but I hope the next set will be less about aid and more about development and less about donors and recipients and more about development partners. I also hope it will be led by Africans.
I attended a Panos London Board meeting yesterday. Panos London is an NGO focusing on communication: voice, dialogue, ICT and media in areas such as climate change and public health. It is doing a lot of innovative work and I urge you to check them out.
At the end of the Board meeting I participated in a panel on "From Emails to Firestorm: the role of the Media in Climategate", set up to coincide with the completion of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change meetings in Bonn.
Six months on from Copenhagen I argued that the "climategate" fiasco set up 3 tests of trust for the science community -- and that we failed two of those tests.
First, the trust in the credibility of the science base. This was attacked for sure, and took some hits, but my sense is that it emerged bloodied, not bowed. That's largely because of the multi-sited nature of the IPCC. It's not seen as a rich country club--it brings together perspective from all over the world, and because of that roundedness, it is more resilient to attacks from the media and elsewhere. So I think we passed that test of trust--just about.
I think we failed the second test, however, and that is the test of communication. Science is not easy for most scientists to communicate to nonscientists, and much of the furore could have been prevented and dampened with better communication: why were the data "altered"? What does "altering" mean? What are the uncertainties around the conclusions? Which phenomena can't be attributed to climate change? If you don't agree with me does that mean you are against me? When public opinion is with you these questions seem less important, and when the tide inevitably turns you realise how ill-prepared you are. We need to spend more time and care in dialogue with the media, resisting the temptation to polarise the debate.
Third, we failed the information openness test. By not releasing publicly funded climate data it looked as though something was being covered up. The scientific process is also stymied by this. No-one is covered in glory by this withholding. Scientists (including social scientists) have to realise that they do not own the data--especially when it guides public money spent on public goods. They may have spent a long time getting it into the necessary shape to analyse it, but surely their rights are to first analysis, not lifetime patent. The story cannot be about the withheld data, it must be about what the data say to a range of different researchers.
If there was one thing the research councils and DFID could do to vastly increase the value for money of research they fund and build trust with the media and public, it would be to incentivise open access data.
Today the Royal Society hosted the launch of the STEPS Centre Manifesto on Innovation, Sustainability and Development. STEPS is supported by the ESRC and hosted by IDS and by SPRU at the University of Sussex.
The Manifesto draws on work that STEPS has done over the past 4 years and over the past year it has been co-developed in over 20 roundtables from around the world, a process convened by Adrian Ely of SPRU. The Co-Directors of STEPS are Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones of IDS and Andy Stirling of SPRU.
The starting point for the Manifesto is the massive disconnect between ever expanding volumes of research and development in science and technology (S&T) and the persistence of poverty, social injustice and environmental damage. How can these resources be made to work for goals that go beyond commerce, beyond economic growth and beyond simple private gain?
Direction – often we think that the dominant pathway of innovation is the best one. But often this is simply a reflection of path dependence in investments or a manifestation of the power held by those who support the pathway. In reality there are many candidate pathways if we can only open up spaces for them.
Diversity – this has to be deliberately constructed – otherwise the most powerful will drown out the rest. Diversity is important because it is a hedge against an uncertain future and it can throw up creative and previously unimaginable questions, pathways and options.
Distribution – diversity, yes, but what kind of diversity? The poorest and most marginal are those excluded from choices about which science and technology is prioritized. These voices must enter the debate in ways that give them some chance of influencing the debate.
• Agenda setting—who decides what are the key questions to address through S&T?
• Funding—what are the institutional incentives to align public and private S&T spending towards poverty alleviation, social justice and environment?
• Monitoring, Evaluation and Accountability—measure the effect of S&T on things we really care about, report funding allocated towards development goals, report back to national parliaments on the 3 D impacts of investments in S&T.
Overall, the Manifesto team was commended for its vision, energy and inclusiveness. Many opportunities for influencing were noted (ranging from the UK’s Research Excellence Framework to DFID’s Emerging Technologies funding window to the new Government’s focus on transparency and accountability).
The key question for me was “does the Manifesto action agenda rely on a powerful actor seeing the light?” If it does, how will this happen? Can it be accomplished by mobilizing civil society? Or will the action agenda have to bypass the powerful status quo organizations and rely on change from the emerging voices who are at the margins now?
The STEPS team knows that these kinds of changes don’t come quickly and they were clear that this report is just one moment in a longer process.
The Chair of the ESRC, Alan Gillespie, reminded us how long change processes can take. In reflecting on the original Sussex Manifesto from 1970 he noted that the report called for the UN to establish clear outcome orientated development goals. The MDGs were established 30 years later.
Being born in South Africa I had to find a reason to get a cheesy picture of the World Cup into the blog.
1. What are the economic determinants of World Cup success?
2. What are the economic returns to hosting a World Cup?
On the determinants, some very serious econometrics have been dedicated to this issue (see this one from the International Association of Sports Economists!). Population seems to matter more than GDP/capita and past performance in Cups seems to matter more than the proportion of professional footballers in the population. Being the host country is important for success. Goldman Sachs also get in on the act with their World Cup and Economics Report--they find little correlation between a country's 2009 Growth Environment Score (GES) and FIFA football rankings although improvements in the GES are correlated with improvements in the FIFA rankings. Their picks for the semi finals? England, Argentina, Spain and Brazil.
More important, what are the economic returns? This is more serious but very difficult territory. What has been the infrastructure addition? Is it multi-use? Was it geared towards labour intensive job creation? What has been the increase in tourism? Have football tourists spent more than non-football tourists? What have been the spillovers in terms of kickstarting sport, tourism, and opening up the country to new investments? The evidence is all over the place (where are those systematic reviews when you need them?).
For a country like South Africa, with unemployment rates of about one third, this is no joke. We know that public works projects can have very different impacts on poverty depending on how they are designed (some work I was involved in in the late 90s showed that for 100 public works projects in Western Cape, the ones led by communities were the most cost efficient at transferring resources to the poorest), so it will be interesting to see how many jobs were created and if the differences at the 10 stadium sites and economic hinterlands can be explained by process, institutional and infrastructure design features.
However the most interesting paper I found from a quick look argues that it is the non-economic impacts, especially the internal "psychic income" (estimated using contingent valuation technique) that really matter when economic communities invest in large sports events. Civic pride, identity and a sense of belonging really seem to matter.
the finest, but also one of the economically most long-term effects of the 2006 World Cup."
I hope you enjoy the tournament and the positive image of Africa that it will surely present.
My pick: Spain. Any team that cannot find a regular place for Cesc Fabregas must be seriously good.
Can DFID Leverage Reform in the Multilateral Aid World?
DFID, as part of its review of spending has launched a review of its multilateral aid spend.
Is the UK taxpayer getting value for money from 30 or so global organisations? Let's look at some of the potential criteria.
Transactions costs. Channeling money through multilateral aid agencies may reduce transactions costs for recipients and for bilateral donors. But on the ground, countries still have to deal with 30 or so bilateral donors and 30 or so multilaterals. In addition the UK taxpayer may simply be paying two sets of administrators--in the UK to get the money out and in Washington, Rome and New York to allocate the money.
Ownership. Can multilaterals support government systems better than direct budget support? I'm not sure. And I'm not even sure the best way to find out-who to ask? Civil society in the South? Recipient Governments? The new Aid Watchdog?
Impact. It is harder to demonstrate to donor citizens that their taxes are having a particular effect when resources are pooled in multilaterals. Interesting to note that the main point made by the International Development Select Committee when they reviewed the DFID-World Bank relationship in 2008 was that the World Bank needed to do better on making impact a central part of how it measured its effectiveness.
Credibility. This depends on governance and representation. While the heads of multilateral agencies bypass standard human resource best practice (job and person description, open competition, selected on merit by internals and externals) it is hard for these agencies to lecture on governance. On representation, change seems to be happening very slowly.
Perhaps the multilateral review can incentivise some movement along these lines.
There are lots of people out there who are much more knowledgeable than I am on these global public goods issues. I would love to hear from you.
The events of the past 2-3 years should have re-focused the development community's attention on ethics, faith and morality. The Global Financial Crisis has made a few of us turn our attention again to the values underlying the global economic system. Climate change has highlighted the purpose of consumption int he rich countries, and has forced us to consider tradeoffs between our consumption opportunities and those of future generations.
1. these faith based organisations clearly felt that trust in outsiders is vital if outsiders are going to have any traction, and that being identified as "faith based" is very helpful in establishing such trust quickly--even across faiths.
2. the organisations are actively questioning the very nature of progress. For example, CAFOD, Tearfund and Theos are involved in a project considering Human Flourishing in development which will be launched in the Autumn. Here is one background paper from Bath University on this issue.
3. they feel they have a lot to contribute to the current debate about the effectiveness of aid. Through their strong local connections and trust dividends they think they can contribute a lot to assessing impact--both in terms of defining impact from the recipient perspective and in terms of getting feedback on what is and is not working.
The ideas from this roundtable will be more fully reported back to this group and will influence the Reimagining Development Report due out later in the year.
Social protection refers to a set of interventions that seek to help families protect themselves against shocks, protect the assets they have, and climb out of poverty.
A new report by the Centre for Social Protection argues that, in sub-Saharan Africa, social protection may have lost its way.
Despite lots of donor investment, many African governments remain reluctant to embark on the high recurrent costs of social welfare and the political irreversibility of its introduction.
The report suggests a change in emphasis. Instead of introducing a plethora of pilots that use imported recipes, focus on the objectives of social protection--vulnerability and poverty reduction--and build on existing government initiatives, innovating and experimenting with these as they are strengthened. Importantly, the report recommends that African citizens are more involved in the upstream design and the downstream evaluation of such programmes. It is noteworthy that the biggest global successes in social protection come from Mexico and Brazil and these were home grown ideas, financed by a mix of domestic and external finance.
But the picture is not that simple--it's not as if there are legions of African leaders straining to get their homegrown social protection policies financed. A report released last week from Kofi Annan's African Progress Panel highlights the disconnects between African countries' GDP/capita growth rates and the continent's lack of progress in poverty reduction. This, it is argued, is the result of weak leadership, capacity and governance. This puts a premium on the donors being politically nimble and switched on to the policy process.
Country-led opportunities for strengthening social protection in Africa will not be commonplace. When they arise, the donors must be ready--not to produce their own solutions but to support the reformers working in the countries they are trying to help. | 2019-04-24T06:05:53Z | http://www.developmenthorizons.com/2010/06/ |
University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia.
Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC, Melbourne, Victoria.
Submitted: 15 June 2017. Accepted: 13 September 2017.
This study undertakes an economic analysis of flood mitigation options for a high flood-risk catchment in Adelaide. To date, economic analyses have focused primarily on estimating the tangible (market) costs and benefits of mitigation strategies and have largely ignored the intangible (non-market) costs and benefits. This analysis improves upon previous studies by conducting a benefit-cost analysis that incorporates the intangible costs and benefits of mitigation. The benefit transfer method was used to include intangible values in the analysis. It was found that, for this particular case study, the inclusion of intangible values does not change the attractiveness of the mitigation options evaluated and the benefit-cost ratios remain below one.
To be able to select the most beneficial mitigation option for floods, management agencies need information on a broad set of disaster impacts: direct and indirect, tangible (market) and intangible (non-market) impacts. Direct market losses are those directly caused by the flooding water, resulting from the physical damage to buildings, their contents, infrastructure, etc. Indirect market losses correspond to the flow-on effects caused by the flood, such as business disruptions and clean-up costs that may occur inside or outside the flooded area and can span over a long period. Floods can also cause direct and indirect damages to things that cannot be easily measured in monetary terms (intangible values), such as environmental assets and social values (see Figure 1). Tangible flood losses are usually well documented but intangible losses are typically ignored because they are difficult to quantify. Intangible goods and services are not exchanged in markets and do not have prices, thus assigning dollar values to them is a complex exercise that requires resources and specialised knowledge. However, intangible losses may be substantial, and in some cases, more important to people than tangible losses (Joseph, Proverbs & Lamond 2015). Ignoring intangible impacts may lead to sub-optimal decisions.
One of the shortcomings of standard benefit-cost analyses (BCAs) is that they rarely include intangible values (Hammond et al. 2015, Hansson, Danielson & Ekenberg 2008). For floods, only DEFRA/EA (2005) and Joseph and colleagues (2015) have estimated the dollar values of intangible impacts, but these values have not been incorporated into BCAs. The purpose of this paper is to incorporate intangible flood losses into a BCA, using the Brown Hill and Keswick creeks catchment in Adelaide as a case study. This approach is also relevant to other natural hazards, and economic analyses of mitigation for other hazards need to include intangible impacts.
Figure 1: Cost of natural disasters.
The catchment has four creeks that are important drainage watercourses in metropolitan Adelaide (see map in Figure 2). The five councils in the catchment (Adelaide, Burnside, Mitcham, Unley and West Torrens) have a combined population of 233,000 (about 86,000 households) and 38,000 businesses. About 2,090 households and 350 businesses are located in the 100-year floodplain, including Adelaide airport. The risk of flooding is relatively high, but until recently there were no clear plans for mitigation due to a lack of agreement between the councils affected (BHKCP 2016). Widespread flooding has not occurred since the 1930s, but the catchment has experienced moderate flooding in recent years (2005, 2016).
Part A works - designed to mitigate flooding in the lower parts of the catchment.
Part B works - intended to mitigate flooding from the upper Brown Hill creek. Part B will only be implemented once Part A is completed.
In this study Part A was evaluated and three options from Part B (B1, B2 and D). Options B1 and B2 involve the construction of dams in a recreational park and have generated considerable community opposition. Option D involves creek upgrades to contain higher water flows and is the preferred option by the community (BHKCP 2016). All Part B options are expected to achieve a similar level of protection.
The economic attractiveness of each option is evaluated against a baseline scenario of doing nothing (i.e. no mitigation). The most recent BCA conducted for the mitigation works (BHKCP 2016) includes damages to residential, commercial and industrial properties, infrastructure, clean-up costs, emergency assistance grants and business disruptions. Because Adelaide airport is located in the catchment, business and infrastructure disruption could be significant. In BHKCP (2016), impacts on the airport were estimated through interviews with airport owners and other stakeholders. Although the importance of intangible losses was recognised, only tangible flood losses were assessed. Table 1 shows these losses per event as reported in BHKCP (2016).
Table 1. Tangible flood losses per event (AUD ’000).
Losses per event are converted to average annual losses (AAL) that combine the losses per event with the probability of each event. The benefits of mitigation correspond to reductions in AAL. Table 2 shows the results reported in BHKCP (2016).
Table 2. Tangible average annual losses for different scenarios (AUD ‘000).
Intangible values can be estimated by surveying people to elicit their preferences and inferring from their answers their willingness to pay (WTP) for intangible assets (Johnston, Rosenberger & Rolfe 2015). These techniques are usually resource-intensive and expensive, and thus an alternative method has been developed, called ‘benefit transfer’, which involves transferring values from existing studies and adjusting them to a different context (Johnston, Rosenberger & Rolfe 2015).1 Since there are no studies estimating WTP for avoiding intangible flood impacts in the case study area, the benefit transfer method is relevant to this analysis. Although high uncertainty is attached to the values derived from overseas studies, it is better to include information with uncertainty than to ignore it completely (Pannell & Gibson 2016). A sensitivity analysis was conducted to deal with the uncertainty associated with these estimates. Table 3 provides details on the intangible values included in the analysis, how these values were estimated, and the dollar values assigned to them. For more information on the references reviewed, see Chalak and colleagues (2017).
Table 3. Intangible values, analysis and estimated dollar values (AUD).
The number of fatalities was estimated as a function of likely flood depth in the catchment for different ARI floods. Total number of fatalities was then multiplied by the VSL.
Morbidity costs were estimated annually for the total number of households at the risk of a 100 year ARI flood under the different mitigation options. DEFRA/EA (2005) surveyed people exposed to this level of risk in the UK. This value was adjusted for income differences.
WTP for user (non-users) of an urban recreation park in Australia was adjusted for income and multiplied by the annual number of visitors to the park (nearby residents).
WTP estimates from the literature were adjusted for income and multiplied by the number of households that would experience electricity outage in the event of a flood.
WTP to avoid noise-related traffic annoyance was adjusted for income differences and multiplied by the potential number of people affected.
The value of time reliability was multiplied by the potential number of people affected by road traffic delays. A conservative delay of 0.5 hours was assumed.
WTP to avoid the inconvenience of being displaced was adjusted for income differences and multiplied by the potential number of people affected.
WTP for the protection of one monumental tree was adjusted for income differences and multiplied by the number of nearby residents.
AAL for intangible values are presented in Table 4. The largest intangible value is morbidity, as people put relatively high values on reducing flood-related stress. The second largest intangible value is road traffic delays that would affect a large number of people. Conversely, mortality is low because flood fatalities are rare in the catchment. Other intangible losses are also low, primarily because floods in the area tend to recede relatively fast (BHKCP 2016). Recreation and cultural heritage have a value of zero for the base case (there is no loss without mitigation) but an annual intangible loss is incurred by the construction of a dam (options B1 and B2).
Table 4. Average annual losses for intangible values (AUD).
The combined AAL figures for tangible and intangible values are shown in Table 5. When intangible values are accounted for, AAL are between 8 per cent and 23 per cent larger, but the ranking of the mitigation scenarios remains unchanged.
Table 5. Tangible and intangible average annual losses for different scenarios (AUD ‘000).
These benefits need to be compared to the costs. The costs of implementing Part A alone are $111 million and the costs of Part B are $41, $44 and $36 million for options B1, B2 and D, respectively. Since Part B is an add-on to Part A, total costs are the sum of Parts A and B. Therefore, the total costs of combining Part A with options B1, B2 or D are $152, $155 and $147 million, respectively. These costs are assumed to be spread over a period of seven years, the time that it will take to complete the works (BHKCP 2016). They also include asset maintenance costs over 30 years.
The benefits are fully realised after completion of the works and only partially realised before that. For present value calculations, a time horizon of 30 years and a discount rate of 6 per cent were used, consistent with the original analysis in BHKCP (2016). The benefit-cost ratios (BCR) and the present values used to calculate them are presented in Table 6.
Table 6. Present values and benefit-cost ratios (AUD million).
Part A generates a benefit-cost ratio of 0.44. This means that every dollar invested in Part A generates only $0.44 in benefits. The option that generates the highest benefits is option D ($44.3 million) but the costs ($116.8 million) are much higher, resulting in a benefit-cost ratio of 0.38 (even smaller than for Part A alone). None of the options considered pass the benefit-cost ratio test. In this particular case study, adding intangible values does not change the attractiveness of the options significantly. Intangible losses remain relatively small, representing only between 6 per cent and 21 per cent of total losses. The strong opposition from the community to the construction of the dams is not adequately reflected in the intangible values estimated here. Losses in recreation and cultural heritage are small compared to tangible losses. Although no survey has been conducted to assess people’s WTP for having or not having a dam constructed in the recreation park, the fact that the catchment has not experienced major flooding in many years (BHKCP 2016) may contribute to the community’s resistance towards the dams, because the discomfort of flooding is not experienced frequently enough to tilt the balance towards supporting additional mitigation measures.
In this study, conservative (lower-bound) values for intangible were used but since no survey was conducted to estimate them, there is a high level of uncertainty attached to these figures. Therefore, it is useful to evaluate how sensitive the results are to changes in intangible values.
For the sensitivity analysis, all intangibles were increased by 200, 500 and 700 per cent (Table 7). Regardless of the increase in intangible values, the option that generates the largest benefits is still the combination of Part A with option D. However, on the basis of benefit-cost ratios, Part A generates higher returns up to an increase in intangibles of 700 per cent. Beyond this point, option D becomes more attractive.
Table 7. Results with increases in intangible values (AUD million).
For the mitigation options to pass the benefit-cost ratio test, intangible values need to be increased by at least 700 per cent. For such numbers to be valid, households located in the 100-year floodplain would have to be willing to pay roughly $6,000 per year to avoid intangible flood impacts. However, this is unlikely unless people are exposed to more frequent flooding. The literature on this topic shows that households are, on average, willing to pay up to $1,864 per household per year to reduce all flood impacts, and about $1,177 per household per year to avoid intangible flood impacts (Joseph, Proverbs & Lamond 2015, Owusu, Wright & Arthur 2015).
Intangible values were incorporated into a BCA of flood mitigation for the Brown Hill and Keswick catchment in Adelaide. The results show that the most substantial intangible values in terms of AAL are morbidity and road traffic delay. However, intangible losses remain relatively small compared to tangible losses, representing only between 6 per cent and 21 per cent of total losses.
This study showed that, although intangible values are important, their inclusion does not always significantly change the economic attractiveness of mitigation options. After including intangible values, all options still generate benefit-cost ratios below one. This may be explained by several factors. First, the costs of the mitigation works are substantial; in other flood-risk areas, mitigation may not be as expensive. Second, conservative estimates were used and, since no survey was conducted, there is a lot of uncertainty about the magnitude of these estimates. Third, the catchment is relatively small and is not subject to very frequent flooding. Fourth, other people who would be affected, such as visitors to the catchment and business employees, are not included in the model. Fifth, climate change has not been incorporated in the analysis, which may cause frequent flooding and increase the WTP of residents to avoid damages (and increase the benefits of mitigation). Finally, some intangible values have not been included such as the WTP to avoid losing memorabilia, dealing with insurers or enduring the recovery process.
Some of the information used here was taken from studies evaluating different flooding environments. This catchment would experience flash floods, which are particularly dangerous because water levels increase rapidly and many people could be caught by surprise inside the flooding area. Although efforts were made to adapt the different values to the context of the case study area, another limitation is that studies from different contexts, both physically and socially, have been relied on and this increases the level of uncertainty. It is acknowledged that using information from different environments is a limitation in the study. Also, flood impacts are highly contextual and determined by many factors including flood depth, velocity, warning time, duration of isolation and time of the day. If a flood occurs during the night, it would cause less disruption to traffic. However, this has not been accounted for in the model. Despite these limitations, this study is a step forward in the inclusion of intangible values in economic analyses of flood management.
To better understand intangible flood impacts on this catchment, additional information needs to be obtained from a non-market valuation survey. Such a study would generate more accurate estimates than the benefit transfer method. However, original non-market valuation studies are expensive and time consuming. Benefit transfer provides an alternative approach to determine if it is worth conducting further investigations. The lessons drawn from this study can also inform assessments of other natural hazards.
The authors acknowledge the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC for funding this research. They also thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that greatly improved the manuscript.
BHKC Project Steering Group (BHKCP) 2016, Brown Hill Keswick Creek catchment- Stormwater management plan. Adelaide, South Australia, Australia: Report prepared for the Cities of Adelaide, Burnside, Mitcham, Unley and West Torrens.
Chalak M, Florec V, Hailu A, Gibson FL & Pannell DJ 2017, Integrating non-market values in economic analyses of flood mitigation: a case study of the Brown Hill and Keswick creeks catchment in Adelaide. Working Paper 1702, Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia.
Environment Agency and DEFRA (DEFRA/EA) 2005, The appraisal of human related intangible impacts of flooding. Joint Defra/EA Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management R&D Programme. R&D Technical Report FD2005/TR. London, UK: DEFRA Flood Management Division.
Hammond MJ, Chen AS, Djordjević S, Butler D & Mark O 2015, Urban flood impact assessment: A state-of-the-art review. Urban Water Journal, vol. 12, pp. 14-29.
Hansson K, Danielson M & Ekenberg L 2008, A framework for evaluation of flood management strategies. Journal of Environmental Management, vol. 86, pp. 465-480.
Johnston RJ, Rosenberger R & Rolfe J 2015, Benefit Transfer of Environmental and Resource Values: A Guide for Researchers and Practitioners, Dordrecht, Netherlands, Springer.
Joseph R, Proverbs D & Lamond J 2015, Assessing the value of intangible benefits of property level flood risk adaptation (PLFRA) measures. Natural Hazards, vol. 79, pp. 1275-1297.
Owusu S, Wright G & Arthur S 2015, Public attitudes towards flooding and property-level flood protection measures. Natural Hazards, vol. 77, pp. 1963-1978.
Pannell DJ & Gibson FL 2016, Environmental cost of using poor decision metrics to prioritize environmental projects. Conservation Biology, vol. 30, pp. 382-391.
Dr Veronique Florec is a Research Associate at the University of Western Australia. Her research focuses on improving the management of the natural environment through multidisciplinary projects that combine social, environmental and economic information. She currently leads a project investigating the economics of natural hazards.
Dr Morteza Chalak has a PhD in Environmental Economics. He was a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Western Australia until 2017. His research focused on improving decision-making for the management of the environment, agriculture and natural resources. He is now with the Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance.
Associate Professor Atakelty Hailu is at the University of Western Australia. His research includes efficiency and productivity analysis, whole-farm bioeconomic modelling, environmental policy design and agent-based computational economics.
1 Other methods exist for estimating WTP for intangible assets based on observations of existing markets, but these are also resource intensive and require large amounts of data. If intangible assets are not measured in dollar values (WTP), they cannot be fully integrated in BCAs. | 2019-04-24T11:08:55Z | https://ajem.infoservices.com.au/items/AJEM-32-04-17 |
Competitive Battling Other Pages: An Introduction to Competitive Battling | Class 101 : Competitive Battling for Dummies!
Competitive Battling is an aspect of Pokemon that separates "casual" players from players that aim to battle using Pokemon bred and trained for competitive battling. This guide will teach you the ins and outs, not only of competitive battling itself, but of building Pokemon that are suitable for competitive battling in Pokemon Black and White.
For this Reuniclus, we see that it is aimed mostly at utilizing Special Attacks, with Recover used to heal itself. Since we're not using any moves that use the Attack stat, a nature that lowers Attack would be the most beneficial. Looking at Reuniclus' stats, Modest nature (+Sp. Attack, -Attack) would likely be the most beneficial here, hitting harder with the attacks it has, without lowering any of the stats that it uses. Neutral natures are never a good idea, since there is always a stat that can afford a 10% drop to raise a more useful stat. Likewise, Lax and Gentle nature are never a good idea, because raising one defense while lowering the other leaves your defensive Pokemon far more susceptible to being knocked out. Defensive Pokemon in general tend to use only one attacking stat, while the other can afford to be lowered.
Pokemon with the ability Synchronize will have a 50% chance of passing their nature to a wild Pokemon when placed in the lead position of your party.
Breeding is a very important aspect of competitive Pokemon. Not only can you breed for a Pokemon with the correct nature, but you can pass on Egg Moves, which are moves that the Pokemon can only learn when the father passes them down through breeding. You can also pass down IVs (see the IV guide below).
The mother Pokemon will always determine the species of the Egg produced. Having a female Salamence breed with a male Gyarados will always produce a Bagon Egg. Attaching an Everstone gives the mother or father a 50% chance of passing the nature of the Pokemon holding the Everstone to the Egg it produces. This is especially useful for Ditto, which can breed with any Pokemon that can have an Egg. Having a Ditto of every (useful) nature will aid in getting competitive-ready Pokemon.
Egg Moves are moves that are passed from the father Pokemon to the baby Pokemon. Using the aforementioned example, let's assume we have a female Salamence in the daycare with a male Gyarados. Gyarados knows Hydro Pump, Flamethrower, Thunderbolt, Ice Beam (a terrible moveset for Gyarados, but just for the sake of example, bear with me). The level 1 baby Bagon will have this moveset upon being hatched: Rage, Hydro Pump, Flamethrower. But why? I'll explain.
Rage is the move that Bagon will always know upon being hatched. Hydro Pump is an Egg move, only possible to learn when the father knows the move. There is no other way for it to be learned. Flamethrower is learned because Bagon can learn Flamethrower via TM, and any time the father knows a move that the baby can learn via TM, it will be passed to the child. Thunderbolt and Ice Beam cannot be passed to Bagon, and it cannot be learned via TM, so these moves are not passed to the child. To find a list of Egg moves that can be passed to a Pokemon, you can check our online Dex.
3. Stats and "EV Training"
You may notice that two Pokemon of identical nature and level have different stats. This is due to two factors, the first of which are called "EVs", or Effort Values. Effort Values are invisible values that your Pokemon obtains every time it defeats a Pokemon. There are EVs for each of the six stats (HP, Attack, Defense, Sp. Attack, Sp. Defense, Speed). This is very simple once you learn it, and is a very important factor in obtaining competitive-ready Pokemon.Your Pokemon can obtain 510 EVs total in it's lifetime, and only 255 can be allocated to a single stat.
Defeating a Patrat gives 1 Attack EV. For every four EVs your Pokemon obtains in a single stat, the actual stat will go up one. So, for example, defeating four Patrat will get you 1 extra point in your Attack stat at level 100. Defeating eight Patrat will earn you 2 extra points in Attack at level 100, and so on. For this reason, you should never invest more than 252 EVs in any stat, because that is the highest number that is divisible by 4; any further EVs in that stat will be wasted, since the EV cap in a stat is 255, and 255/4 won't yield a higher result than 252/4.
PokeRus doubles EV gain of any Pokemon infected with it, or cured of it. Defeating a Duosion using a Pokemon with PokeRus, for example, will give 4 Sp. Attack EVs instead of just two. Macho Brace is a held item that doubles EV gain as well, so equipped with that and PokeRus, the Duosion would give 8 Sp. Attack EVs!
PokeRus x (Pokemon EV given + 4 from Power Item).
If your Pokemon doesn't have PokeRus, that's removed from the equation. Assuming you have a Pokemon with PokeRus and holding a Power Lens (gives +4 Sp. Attack EVs) battling a Litwick, you'd gain 10 Sp. Attack EVs.
HP - Stunfisk gives 2 HP EVs, and can be found Surfing on Route 8 (Unova), Icirrus City and Moor of Icirrus.
Attack - Patrat and Lillipup each give 1 Attack EV, and can both be found on Route 1 (Unova).
Defense - Sewaddle and Venipede each give 1 Defense EV, and can be found in Pinwheel Forest.
Sp. Attack - Litwick gives 1 Sp. Attack EV, and can be found in Celestial Tower.
Sp. Defense - Frillish gives 1 Sp. Defense EV, and can be found Surfing on Route 4 (Unova).
Speed - Basculin gives 2 Speed EVs, and can be found Surfing on Route 1 (Unova), Route 3 (Unova) and Route 6 (Unova).
"IVs", or Individual Values are the second part of why two Pokemon at the same level will have different stats. Individual Values are determined when the Pokemon is captured or hatched, and cannot be changed once they're set. IVs range from 0-31 in every stat, and effect how high or low your Pokemon's stats will be at level 100.
For example, let's say you have two level 100 Unfezant. For the sake of argument, they're both Jolly nature, and have 0 EVs in all stats.
As you can see, IVs play a huge part in determining a Pokemon's stats, and have a more dramatic effect when combined with EV Training.
Determining IVs isn't possible with a Pokemon that's been EV trained, unless you know the exact EVs it's been given. The most accurate way to do this is to use newly bred Pokemon that has never taken part in any battles. The best way to determine the IVs of a newly hatched Pokemon is to first take it to the judge in the Battle Subway to see what he has to say about it. If the Pokemon has a 31 in any IVs, the judge will tell you "The best aspect of your Pokemon seems to be (stat here). It couldn't be better in that regard!". With this message, you will know if your Pokemon has a perfect IV. The judge will also tell you if the Pokemon has multiple perfect IVs, so no need to talk to him more than once per Pokemon.
Once you've got down which IVs are perfect, the next easiest step is to enter the new Pokemon into a Battle Subway challenge. This will set it's level to 50. From there, you enter the stats and nature into an IV calculator. This will give a close range of the Pokemon's IVs, allowing you to see if the Pokemon is a suitable parent, or even possibly, if it's the one you'll want to train competitively.
The parents of the Egg will pass along 3 IVs to the child naturally. One from the mother, one from the father, and one third, chosen randomly from either parent. Note that any of these can over-lap, and will still count as the one that is passed.
As you can see, the RNG replaced the father's Speed with his Speed again, thus only passing two IVs: the mother's Attack and the father's Speed. Here is where Power Items will, again, be of use. Power Items will pass the IV that they would boost in battle. Power Lens, for example, will pass the Sp. Attack IV of the Pokemon holding it, to the Egg Pokemon. Note that if both parents hold a Power Item, only one of the IVs will be passed. For this reason, it's best to use one parent to pass the nature, and the other to pass a specific IV.
When dealing with IVs, Speed is always important, as a single IV more (or less, if you're using Trick Room) can be the differece between winning and losing. Make sure to know what IVs you're aiming for the most when breeding, and remember that breeding for a single Pokemon can be a long process, but is well worth it once you get the correct IVs on the Pokemon you want.
Building a team sounds easy; put six Pokemon together, and defeat the opponent. But it's much more complicated than that. You want to build a team of Pokemon that works well together, and doesn't have Pokemon with redundant roles. Again, it's always good to refer to Smogon for this, as they're the leading authorities on Competitive Battling, and have standard movesets for every Pokemon.
Synergy is the first thing you want to look for when creating a team. Synergy is when things are more successful as a result of working together. This is ideal for a team. You want six Pokemon that each support each other with roles that don't clash. It's best to start with an idea for a team. Maybe you want to center a team around one powerful Pokemon, or maybe you want to create a team that uses and abuses Trick Room. Once you've got an idea, you can build off that.
Giving a brief explanation about what the Pokemon does, and why you've chosen the moves that you've given the Pokemon.
For the sake of the example, let's pretend I want to build an entire team around Heatran. Heatran is one of the most common Pokemon in the metagame, sporting two great types in Fire and Steel, checking things such as Scizor, Ferrothorn and Magnezone.
Heatran is an incredible offensive threat in this metagame, and can find time to come in on a variety of threats and scare them out. Fire Blast is Heatran's main STAB, plowing through things that don't resist it. Earth Power is for coverage, and allows Heatran to come in on other Heatran whose Balloons have been popped, and kill them. Hidden Power Ice allows it to kill Dragons. In the last slot, I've got Stealth Rock, which is probably the best move in the entire game, since it hurts every Pokemon that the opponent will switch in (except Magic Guard Pokemon) for some damage. Heatran can come in on the extremely common Ferrothorn to set this up, as well as a variety of other Pokemon that get scared away.
Now that we have Heatran, let's consider Pokemon that would do well with it. Heatran has a huge weakness to Water and Fighting moves, so a great partner would be Jellicent, immune to both of those types of attacks!
Jellicent is bulky defensive Pokemon. Scald is a good STAB with a 30% Burn ratio. Recover keeps Jellicent alive. Toxic will break down opposing specially defensive Pokemon, while Taunt stops the opponent from doing anything except direct attacking, which will help ensure Jellicent isn't Poisoned, and that the opponent can't recover. Will-O-Wisp, on the other hand, is a more safe way to ensure you Burn an opponent, cutting their Attack in half. The EVs outspeed Scizor to try to Burn it before it can hit you. For the sake of this example, I'm picking Will-O-Wisp.
Now we have two Pokemon, Heatran and Jellicent. We need a physically offensive Pokemon, or else special walls like Blissey will wall us forever. Dragonite has good synergy with both Heatran and Jellicent, taking Fighting and Ground attacks for the former, and absorbing Grass attacks for the latter.
Bulky Dragon Dance Dragonite is both an offensive and defensive force to be reckoned with. After a Dragon Dance, Dragonite can Roost off damage and begin wearing opposing Pokemon down. Dragon Claw is your main STAB move. Fire Punch hits Steel types like Ferrothorn, Skarmory and Air Balloon Magnezone, but leaves it helpless against the likes of Heatran. Earthquake hits Heatran, Terrakion, Tyranitar and some others harder than Dragon Claw would. Roost not only keeps Dragonite alive, but activates Multiscale at 100% health, which allows Dragonite to take 50% less damage from attacks when at 100% health. Since we have Heatran for Fire attacks, I'm picking Earthquake.
Heatran/Jellicent/Dragonite. This is a pretty solid core already. What I'd like to incorporate is a Choice Scarfed Pokemon. Choice Scarfed Pokemon serve an important function, not only to revenge kill an opponent after one of your Pokemon faints, but to kill Speed boosting Pokemon before they get too fast. For this, I love Terrakion, who is already naturally fast.
Terrakion can come in on things like Salamence and Dragonite with one Dragon Dance, outspeed them, and crush them with Stone Edge. Close Combat and Stone Edge are both excellent STAB moves that hit many, many Pokemon for absurd amounts of damage. X-Scissor is good for dealing with weakened Psychic types like Latias and Latios. Rock Slide is in the last slot for two reasons: It can more reliably kill weakened Pokemon that are weak to Rock, since Stone Edge has risky 80% accuracy. The second reason is that Terrakion has a pretty shallow movepool, so it can't really do much else.
Now we've got Heatran, Jellicent, Dragonite, Terrakion. I'd like another defensive Pokemon, because Jellicent can't handle everything itself. A Pokemon with good defensive synergy with Jellicent (and just about everything) is Ferrothorn, since Jellicent resists Fire and is immune to Fighting, while Ferrothorn can take Electric and Grass attacks aimed at Jellicent.
Ferrothorn is a team player if there ever was one. Spikes can stack up to three layers, which will chip a total of 25% off any opponents Pokemon that aren't Flying type, have Levitate and/or have Magic Guard. Leech Seed keeps Ferrothorn alive, sapping the opponent's health and returning it to Ferrothorn, and can be used to ease the switch to one of your own Pokemon. Protect allows you to scout what the opponent will do, and rack up more Leftovers and Leech Seed healing. Thunder Wave on the other hand will Paralyze anything the opponent brings in (barring Ground types), which can cripple common switches such as Heatran, Dragonite, etc. Power Whip is a strong STAB that can deal sufficient damage, should Ferrothorn find itself in a position where it has to do some damage.
Heatran, Jellicent, Dragonite, Terrakion, Ferrothorn. We've got one slot left, and we already have a very solid team built. What I'd like to add is a Pokemon that can serve as an offensive pivot.
U-Turn is the pivot move here, doing damage, and allowing us to immediately escape. Why is this useful? Because Scizor tends to cause a lot of switches, so you can hit whatever the opponent switches in with a powerful STAB U-Turn, and immediately escape to something that handles what they switched in better than Scizor does. Bullet Punch is our other STAB move, which is boost not only by STAB, but by Technician and Choice Band, making it the most powerful move we've got. It also has priority, meaning it'll hit the opponent before they can hit us. Superpower smashes things like Magnezone, Ferrothorn and Heatran switch-ins that expect Bullet Punch or U-Turn, OHKOing all of them. Pursuit traps Psychic types that flee in fear of U-Turn.
So there, we've got a solid team that works well together. It's easy to see how these six Pokemon could support each other and come together to form a successful team. In Pokemon Black and White, you and your opponent see each other's Pokemon before the battle begins, so it would be handy to write them down to remember and reference throughout the battle, crossing their names out after they've been defeated.
Here is where I'll make several lists of helpful things to remember.
Note that Item Clause is NOT a standard Clause, and is never used in serious competitive battling with the exception of the official VGC Tournaments.
Thanks to Skyler and Blazer for giving me the idea of writing this guide.
Page written by Richard and Blaziken. Additional contributions by f3raligatr.
Avian on Mon 03 Sep 2012 03:32:24 UTC.
Page generated with 140 queries, excitingly. | 2019-04-19T04:15:40Z | http://pkmn.net/?action=content&page=viewpage&id=8903&parentsection=84 |
Australia’s banking market is relatively concentrated by international standards. The share of banking assets owned by the four largest banks in Australia is higher than equivalent shares in most other jurisdictions.1 Concentration has increased since the global financial crisis (GFC), with the major banks’ share of total ADI assets increasing from 65.4 per cent in September 2007 to 78.5 per cent in March 2014.2 However, it is not unusual for concentration to increase following a financial crisis or economic downturn.
Since the GFC, the major banks have benefited from better access to funds and lower funding costs than their competitors, allowing them to grow faster.
Some submissions, particularly those from smaller ADIs and non-bank lenders, propose that increased concentration has led to less competition. They point to the robust returns on equity earned by the major banks as an indicator of excessive profitability. However, the major banks argue there is adequate competition, pointing to low net interest margins and returns on equity around international norms.
On balance, the Inquiry considers the banking sector is competitive, reflecting a number of indicators.
Further, bank lending fee income, non-deposit fee income and deposit fee income as a percentage of assets have all fallen since 2000.11 Fees paid by households have declined in absolute terms since 2010, with that decline largely driven by decreases in account servicing fees and transaction fees. However, fee income from businesses has increased, mainly due to an increase in account servicing fees and the volume of loans. Merchant service fees have also increased, although these have grown by only 13 per cent since 2003; whereas the value of transactions accepted has more than doubled.
Capital requirements are largely determined as a proportion of ADIs’ risk-weighted assets. Risk weights affect the extent to which a bank must fund its assets using regulatory capital (equity, preferred shares and subordinated debt), rather than potentially cheaper deposits and wholesale debt. The purpose of risk weights is to ensure the size of an ADI’s regulatory capital buffers reflects certain risks to which the ADI is exposed.
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) sets minimum capital standards for banks. APRA enforces these minimum standards in Australia. The first of the Basel accords, known as Basel I, established standardised asset risk weights for calculating capital requirements, which applied to all ADIs in Australia. The Basel II framework allowed banks to seek regulatory approval to determine risk weights using IRB models that reflect their actual loss experiences. IRB modelling incentivises ADIs to improve their risk management practices by requiring less regulatory capital for lower-risk assets.
The four major banks and Macquarie Bank have had their internal risk models accredited by APRA. Other ADIs are not accredited, mainly because of the current standing of their risk management systems and the costs involved in developing internal models. Instead, they rely on standardised risk weights.
The banking sector is competitive, albeit concentrated. The application of capital requirements is not competitively neutral. Banks that use IRB risk weights have lower risk weights for mortgage lending than smaller ADIs that use standardised risk weights, giving the IRB banks a cost advantage.
In early 2014, the average risk weight for housing lending under the IRB approach was 18 per cent, as compared to 39 per cent under the standardised approach.
All else being equal, an ADI using the standardised approach would have to charge 23 basis points more than an IRB bank to achieve the same return on equity for a mortgage.
IRB and standardised risk weights cover credit, market and operational risk. IRB banks are subject to additional requirements for interest rate risk in the banking book, whereas standardised ADIs are not. This means that direct comparisons between IRB and standardised risk weights overstate any competitive advantage for IRB banks.
The aggregate regulatory capital requirements of an ADI should reflect its overall risk profile. Although small ADIs may benefit from detailed knowledge of their customers, they also have relatively concentrated loan books and, in the case of credit unions and building societies, limited capacity to raise new equity. They also tend to have less sophisticated risk management systems, albeit with less complex risks. These factors suggest smaller ADIs may need higher regulatory capital buffers than their larger competitors.
The Inquiry considers smaller ADIs most likely face a disadvantage due to the differences between standardised risk weights and risk weights determined by IRB models. However, the extent of the disadvantage would be difficult to determine and would vary between ADIs over time, depending on the riskiness of their assets.
Standardised risk weights do not provide incentives for the ADIs that use them to reduce the riskiness of their lending, as this would not reduce their risk weights. Conversely, IRB banks receive strong incentives to reduce the riskiness of their lending.
It may be possible for Government or APRA to work with smaller ADIs to help them attain IRB accreditation. Submissions indicate some non-IRB banks are actively considering how to attain IRB accreditation, but are finding this difficult. The Inquiry would welcome views on how Government or APRA may be able to assist with this.
Another option could be to increase the risk weights for IRB banks. This could involve setting a minimum risk weight for mortgages determined by IRB models, or indirectly determined by setting or increasing floors for key parameters in IRB models. For example, for stability reasons, APRA already requires that IRB banks assume a 20 per cent ‘loss given default’ rate for their mortgage book, even when their models produce a lower rate. Increasing the risk weights for IRB mortgages could increase stability and competition, and incentivise more lending away from housing; although, it could also increase costs for IRB banks and may therefore reduce efficiency.
In its submission, APRA notes that risk weight floors have been introduced in Sweden and Hong Kong, and the BCBS is investigating measures, such as floors and benchmarks, to limit risk weight variability while retaining appropriate risk sensitivity. However, the prospective introduction of floors and analysis by the BCBS is driven primarily by stability rather than competition concerns, and is not limited to mortgage lending.
Other suggested options would have trade-offs between stability and competition. They would also be inconsistent with Australia’s commitment to the Basel framework, and so may risk the international reputation of Australia’s banking system.
It may be possible to develop a tiered system of standardised risk weights that incorporates some components of IRB models. Such a system could potentially be more accurate than standardised risk weights, while less burdensome than IRB modelling. The Inquiry welcomes views on how such an option could be implemented.
A number of submissions propose APRA should lower standardised risk weights for mortgages.14 This option would have several drawbacks. It could lower the incentive to improve risk management models and further incentivise non-IRB ADIs to undertake mortgage lending, rather than business or personal lending. This option could also increase risk, which could increase funding costs.
A final option would be to allow smaller ADIs to adopt IRB for residential mortgages only, rather than for all asset classes. This would likely only benefit mid-tier ADIs that have the capacity to model their own mortgage risk weights. This option could also reduce stability, as the IRB accreditation process is designed to ensure ADIs manage their entire loan book effectively – and this would be lost.
How could Government or APRA assist smaller ADIs to attain IRB accreditation?
A number of submissions argue that large banks receive an additional funding advantage, as they are perceived as too-big-to-fail.15 The Stability chapter explores this in more detail. In short, creditors may believe that, in times of crisis, the Government will provide taxpayer support to banks whose disorderly failure could damage other parts of the economy. Thus, creditors may be willing to lend to these banks at a reduced rate.
During the GFC, the RMBS market became dislocated and the cost of RMBS as a funding source for mortgage lenders increased. This disproportionately affected smaller ADIs and non-bank lenders, which rely more heavily on these markets for funding, and compounded the wholesale funding cost advantage that the larger banks already had. The introduction of the Financial Claims Scheme (FCS), which protects retail bank deposits up to $250,000, also affected non-bank lenders, who could not benefit from it.
*CUBS = Credit unions and building societies.
Further, smaller ADIs have relied more on deposit funding since the GFC, which has become relatively more expensive as all ADIs have shifted towards deposit funding and away from short-term debt.21 This has further reduced the competitive position of smaller ADIs.
It is not clear if changes in the RMBS market, and the associated deterioration in the competitive position of smaller ADIs and non-bank lenders, relate to an ongoing market failure. For example, the increase in RMBS spreads likely relates to a correction in the price of RMBS to reflect risk, rather than any ongoing issues with the market.
Other proposals that submissions raise include charging the major banks to ameliorate the funding disadvantage, or to explicitly guarantee all ADIs. The Inquiry does not consider that there is a case for options of this nature. Charging for a perceived funding advantage may strengthen the perception of Government support. Explicitly guaranteeing all ADIs would create significant moral hazard, expose taxpayers to very large contingent liabilities and put non-bank lenders at a competitive disadvantage.
Before recommending such interventions, the Inquiry would need to be convinced of a clear market or regulatory failure in the RMBS market. Although Government support may have been appropriate during the crisis, the recent market recovery weakens the case for further intervention. All options, to varying degrees, would create contingent liabilities for taxpayers. The options may also require the Government to intervene in the market to ensure lending standards and could potentially create moral hazard.
Other proposals involve changes to regulatory arrangements governing ADI issuance and investment in RMBS. Some submissions suggest RMBS be treated as a high-quality liquid asset for the purpose of the liquidity coverage ratio. This would encourage major banks to purchase RMBS from smaller ADIs and non-bank lenders, as it could be a cheaper way of meeting these requirements than holding Commonwealth Government Securities or paying the fee for the committed liquidity facility. At present, RMBS holdings are only eligible as collateral for the RBA’s committed liquidity facility.
Approximately 50 per cent of small businesses rely on bank loans to fund their businesses.22 Small businesses do not have access to the alternative funding channels available to larger corporations, such as debt market funding. This makes them more dependent on bank credit.
Individuals can access unsecured loans through a number of means, including personal loans and some credit cards. Individuals relying on loans from these sources may not have access to cheaper sources of financing.
During the GFC, the spreads between lending rates and the cash rate increased for all loans. However, spreads for SME and personal lending increased by more than spreads for mortgages and corporate loans (Chart 2.2), which largely increased in line with banks’ funding costs.23 Terms of lending also tightened. This has generated concerns about the strength of competition in the SME and personal lending sectors.
*Spreads for small business loans are for residentially secured small business loans.
However, the increase in SME and personal lending spreads reflects, at least in part, a re-evaluation of risk in these lending categories and a general increase in the price of risk. As SME and personal lending is more risky than mortgage and corporate lending, it follows that their spreads increased by a greater margin.25, 26 It is not clear if any of the increase in spreads was due to reduced competition.
The Inquiry would welcome views on whether there is evidence that spreads in SME and personal lending reflect reduced competition.
Most policy suggestions relate to how the SME lending market operates, rather than the level of competition. The Funding chapter discusses options that may improve the funding environment for SMEs.
Some submissions suggest expanding comprehensive credit reporting (CCR). CCR was introduced in March 2014 to enable market participants to share consumers’ repayment histories. CCR expands on the previous credit reporting regime, where market participants could only share negative credit events, such as a default. The shift from a negative to a positive credit reporting system has the potential to promote competition by enabling credit providers to more accurately assess the credit worthiness of borrowers, and to compete for customers by offering risk-based pricing.
However, CCR is voluntary and the Inquiry understands that, to date, none of the major banks have participated. This is likely because the cost of sharing their information with competitors is greater than the benefit of gaining access to other competitors’ databases. Some submissions propose making CCR mandatory, which may improve the value of CCR for smaller lenders.
Some submissions also suggest increasing the number of fields reported to include additional information, such as outstanding account balances. This could further address information asymmetries in the credit assessment processes and enable risk assessment at a more granular level. These benefits would need to be balanced against privacy concerns, as well as the upfront investments credit providers make in establishing customer relationships.
Another option could be to extend credit reporting to SMEs. This may have the potential to improve SME credit risk assessments and improve SME access to funding.
Is there evidence that spreads in SME and personal lending reflect reduced competition?
Competition relies on consumers being able to compare the value of different products. Since the Wallis Inquiry, technology has enabled the growth of online aggregators and price comparison websites that better enable consumers to compare value. In the banking sector, aggregators have focused on mortgages, term deposits and savings accounts.
However, there is little gain in improving the capacity of consumers to compare the value of products if there are impediments to switching between products. The Government and industry have reduced switching costs for banking products since the Wallis Inquiry, and a number of industry trends will further lower costs in the future.
Some product terms can reduce the functionality of aggregators. For example, account aggregators enable consumers to view several bank accounts through one interface and identify alternative banking products that may offer superior value. However, where a consumer permits an aggregator to access their account, this may constitute a breach of the account terms and conditions. Consequently, the consumer may have invalidated protections they would otherwise have been afforded in cases of fraud or stolen funds.
Some submissions argue that the Government should go further and introduce full account portability. The New Payments Platform industry initiative facilitated by the Australian Payments Clearing Association and RBA may assist in this regard. One of the platform’s build requirements is for consumers to be able to attach a unique address, such as their mobile phone number or email address, to their bank account. Implementation of this addressing system will begin in 2016.29 Direct debits and credits could then be made to addresses, rather than underlying bank account numbers, which would allow a consumer to change accounts without switching address. In addition, consumers with multiple accounts would be able to use multiple addresses. Such a system could also work for new banking products that do not use bank account numbers.
However, the introduction of the new platform would not connect existing direct debits and credits to consumers’ addresses. This means the benefits would accrue over time, as consumers roll over their direct debits and credits and attach them to their address.
Steps have also been taken to improve switching for mortgages. The Government banned exit fees for mortgages in 2011. Industry initiatives, such as e-conveyancing, are also likely to reduce switching costs. Future initiatives could further assist, including a national e-mortgage regime, standardised mortgage discharge forms and timelines, and improved online identity verification processes, as discussed in the Technology chapter.
In 1990, the then Government introduced a ‘six pillars’ policy whereby the four major banks and two major life insurers were prevented from merging with one another. This has since evolved into the ‘four pillars’ policy maintained today, which applies to the four major banks.
The policy arguably assists with both competition and stability. For competition, it ensures that the banking sector does not become overly concentrated, which could materially lessen competition. For stability, if larger and more systemically important banks fail, they tend to be more difficult to resolve in an orderly fashion, so four pillars may assist by limiting the size of Australia’s largest banks.
In its final report, the Wallis Inquiry recommended abolishing the (then) six pillars policy. It argued that general competition law was sufficient to address competition issues in the banking sector. This reflected the Wallis Inquiry’s philosophy that competition in the financial sector should be treated no differently to other sectors of the economy. The Wallis Inquiry also saw little stability benefit, given the major banks were already very large.
Successive governments have maintained the four pillars policy. The Inquiry views this as appropriate and does not plan to recommend changes. The banking sector is already concentrated; further significant concentration has the potential to limit competitive pressure in the market and reduce the choices available to Australian individuals and firms. Although general competition law may prevent a merger between the major banks, the Inquiry sees merit in retaining the four pillars policy.
The major banks have increased concentration and integration in the banking sector through acquiring other banks and integrating with mortgage brokers. Mortgage brokers enable consumers to compare the value of different banking products better, including mortgages, personal loans and term deposits. The major banks have also integrated horizontally and vertically into other sectors of the financial system, including wealth management and insurance.
Some submissions argue that the increasing concentration and integration of the major banks is harming competition. They submit the major banks can cross-subsidise products to drive out competitors in some markets. Submissions also argue that the major banks’ market power has led to oligopolistic competition and higher prices for consumers.
The major banks have market power across a range of markets. However, it is not clear they are abusing this power. The ACCC has taken relatively little action against the major banks in recent years. The Inquiry would welcome views on the level and exercise of market power across the various markets in which the major banks operate.
Vertical integration of mortgage broking may create conflicts of interest, which could hamper competition. Mortgage brokers can improve competition by enabling smaller players to access a broader range of consumers than their standard distribution networks would allow. However, vertical integration may have the potential to distort the way in which mortgage brokers direct borrowers to lenders. The extent of this issue is not clear. The Inquiry welcomes views on this issue.
Is integration in the banking sector causing competition issues?
Is vertical integration distorting the way in which mortgage brokers direct borrowers to lenders?
If so, what would be the best way to limit the adverse impacts?
Lenders mortgage insurance (LMI) protects a lender against default by a borrower, if there is a shortfall after realising the security. Lenders use LMI to make loans to borrowers with low deposits (usually where the loan-to-valuation ratio (LVR) is greater than 80 per cent) or without a regular earnings record, such as the self-employed. About one-quarter of new mortgage loans are covered by LMI,30 which is generally paid by the borrower.
Under Basel I, lenders were able to apply a lower risk weight to loans with a high LVR or to non-standard loans if they were covered by LMI. This incentive does not exist under Basel II for IRB banks, as APRA’s floor of 20 per cent for the loss given default on residential mortgages means that the risk weight is the same, whether or not the mortgage is covered by LMI.
Some submissions argue that, under these policy settings, the major banks will reduce or stop their use of LMI, as they can carry the default risk themselves and have no capital incentive. They state the LMI industry may not be viable as the market size reduces and major banks accept lower-risk, high-LVR loans, leaving higher-risk loans in the LMI pool. This may in turn reduce access to mortgage lending for those with low deposits or the self-employed. It could also increase the major banks’ competitive advantage over RMBS issuers and smaller ADIs that seek the risk protection of LMI.
There could be stability implications. In its submission, APRA states that the 20 per cent loss given default floor for housing lending has been set until IRB banks develop appropriate methodologies and estimates for a downturn period.
Decreasing risk weights for insured loans may affect the competitive situation between IRB banks and smaller lenders.
1 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 2012, ‘Australia:Addressing Systemic Risk through Higher Loss Absorbency—Technical Note’, IMF Country Report no. 12/311, IMF, Washington DC, page 7.
2 Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) 2014, Quarterly Authorised Deposit-taking Institution Performance Statistics, APRA, Sydney, March 2014. Note: this statistic captures all assets held by ADIs, not only assets associated with borrowing and lending.
3 Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) 2008, Public Competition Assessment: Commonwealth Bank of Australia – proposed acquisition of Bankwest and St Andrew’s Australia, ACCC, 10 December.
4 Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) 2008, Public Competition Assessment: Westpac Banking Corporation – proposed acquisition of St George Bank Limited, ACCC, 13 August.
5 Reserve Bank of Australia 2014, First round submission to the Financial System Inquiry.
6 World Bank 2013, Financial Development and Structure Dataset, World Bank, Washington DC, November.
7 Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) 2014, Quarterly Authorised Deposit-taking Institution Performance Statistics, APRA, Sydney, March 2014. Note: this return on equity statistic includes returns on all ADI activities, not only borrowing and lending.
8 Reserve Bank of Australia 2014, First round submission to the Financial System Inquiry.
9 Roy Morgan Research 2014, State of the Nation: Report 18, April.
10 Based on review of Canstar website on 20 June 2014.
11 Craig, A 2014, Banking Fees in Australia, Reserve Bank of Australia, Sydney.
12 Australian Prudential Regulation Authority 2014, First round submission to the Financial System Inquiry.
13 Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) 2014, Chart Pack: The Australian Economy and Financial Markets, June, Sydney, page 29, viewed 20 June 2014.
14 For example, the Regional Banks’ submission to the Financial System Inquiry on behalf of Bank of Queensland, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, ME Bank and Suncorp Bank proposes lowering standardised risk weights for mortgages to 20 per cent.
15 Submissions to the Financial System Inquiry include those by the Customer Owned Banking Association, the Regional Banks and Yellow Brick Road.
16 International examples include: Schich, S and Lindh, S 2012, ‘Implicit Guarantees for Bank Debt: Where Do We Stand’, OECD Journal: Financial Market Trends, vol 2012, issue 1, OECD; and Santos, J 2014, ‘Special Issue: Large and Complex Banks’, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Economic Policy Review, vol 20, no. 2, New York. Australian studies are scarcer, but include: International Monetary Fund (IMF) 2012, ‘Australia: Addressing Systemic Risk through Higher Loss Absorbency—Technical Note’, IMF Country Report no. 12/311, IMF, Washington.
17 Oliver Wyman 2014, Do Bond Spreads Show Evidence of Too Big To Fail Effects, April.
18 Westpac, RP Data, cited in Joye, C 2012, ‘Credit where it’s due to RMBS’, The Australian Financial Review, 2 November.
19 Australian Office of Financial Management 2013, Residential Mortgage-backed Securities, viewed 11 June 2014.
20 Reserve Bank of Australia 2014, First round submission to the Financial System Inquiry.
21 Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) 2014, Statistical Table: Retail Deposit and Investment Rates – F4, RBA, Sydney.
22 Australian Bankers’ Association and Council of Small Business Australia 2013, Small Business: Access to Finance Report, Year to March 2013.
23 Robertson, B and Rush, A 2013, Developments in Banks' Funding Costs and Lending Rates, Reserve Bank of Australia, Sydney.
24 Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) 2014, Statistical Table: Indicator Lending Rates – F5 and Statistical Table: Interest Rates and Yields – Money Market – Monthly – F1.1, RBA, Sydney.
25 Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) 2014, Chart Pack: The Australian Economy and Financial Markets, June, RBA, Sydney, page 30, viewed 20 June 2014.
26 Australian Prudential Regulation Authority 2014, First round submission to the Financial System Inquiry, page 79.
27 Roy Morgan Research 2014, data provided to the Financial System Inquiry. Note: the statistic refers to the Australian population aged 18 years and over that switched their main financial institution in the 12 months before April 2014.
28 Treasury 2014, data provided to the Financial System Inquiry.
29 Australian Payments Clearing Association 2013, Real-Time Payments, Summary of RTPC Proposal to the Payments System Board, viewed 20 June 2014.
30 QBE 2014, First round submission to the Financial System Inquiry. | 2019-04-20T12:44:30Z | http://fsi.gov.au/publications/interim-report/02-competition/banking-sector/ |
Local parks, schools, and playgrounds are great places to start, but eventually everyone yearns for more adventure.
On this page, you’ll find some great places to ride with kids in almost every corner of Auckland. Our suggestions are aimed at children under 10; abilities and appetites for challenge vary, so use your best judgement.
We now have a new Rides page with easy-search functions, plus Facebook group, Bike Auckland with Kids – come and join the conversation!
And if you have a favourite park, boardwalk, or other place where young children can safely spin their wheels, let us know!
Extra info on food, comfort stops, and any other parent-friendly tips warmly welcome.
Hot tip: it’s free to bring bikes on trains and ferries, which can really extend your range. The reality is many of us with small kids will park-and-ride, so we’ve included car parking information where we can.
Lightpath/ Te Ara i Whiti is a must-ride, for the photos as much as anything. It’s even more spectacular at night when the lights come on – you can race them along and watch them change colour. Here’s a map; if you’re arriving by car, the best parking is at the Canada St/Karangahape Road end. K Road is also your best bet for food and bathroom breaks.
Silo Park in Wynyard Quarter has a fantastic playground with room to roam; there’s also a public bathroom and lots of food options nearby. Keep little ones clear of the through-roads, and watch for the tram tracks and the water’s edge, but there’s heaps of interesting space to explore. You can wander eastwards through Wynyard Quarter towards the exciting Te Wero bridge which opens to let the big boats through.
The Westhaven Boardwalk is in the process of being safely linked to Wynyard Quarter via a shared path. For now, you can start on Westhaven Drive just past Swashbucklers (there’s a carpark) and winds its way around the marina towards the harbour bridge. A section of wide boardwalk takes you as far as tiny Westhaven Beach, then a shared path on Westhaven Drive (watch the driveway entrances) brings you to another stretch of boardwalk alongside the parked yachts, which delivers you to Buoy Cafe right at the foot of the bridge. A fun outing for those who like boats as much as bikes – and you can tell your kids that one day, they’ll be able to bike over that bridge!
Northcote’s Onepoto Reserve (just off the SH1 Onewa Road exit) is a favourite for families, with plenty of great facilities. The park is huge and grassy, and has two playgrounds within view of its learn-to-ride track, which is handy for those juggling kids with competing interests.
The track is long and there are plenty of spots where they’ll be out of sight, but that never seems to worry the littlies tearing around. It is busy, especially on weekends, so keep that in mind if confidence around other riders is an issue. The track is varied, mainly asphalt but with a few interesting bits, like a wooden ‘bridge’ and a cobbled section. There’s also a lovely boardwalk which offers a nice change of scenery when you’re all bored with the playground and the bike track.
There are toilets on site, near the playgrounds, and if you’re looking for a big day out, there are barbecues too. BYO food and drink as there are no cafes in the immediate vicinity.
Normanton Reserve in Glenfield is less well known, but well worth checking out. It has a nice big playground that the ride track loops around; a smaller loop inside a larger loop. And the two concrete courts with hoops are popular with older kids and adults.
If your kids are small enough to need an eye on them at all times, this is a better choice than Onepoto as it’s smaller but still has plenty of room to frolic. If you want to ride or scooter with the kids, it’s quiet enough to do that. There’s also adult exercise equipment around the outer loop, and lots of shady trees to picnic under.
Greville Reserve in Forrest Hill has a bike track painted on the concrete top of the reservoir. Kids love following the track, and it’s all smooth concrete with lots of room to manoeuvre, making it a great place for those building their confidence or taking the next step from balance bike/trainer wheels to pedals/two wheels. Do note, there’s a 1m drop between the reservoir surface and the path or grass below, so this track may not be suitable for absolute beginners or little ones who can only go in a straight line.
The Forrest Hill Road entrance is the best entrance for the bike track; plenty of parking there and on the road on both Forrest Hill Road and East Coast Road.
There are toilets (including one with a baby change table) by the sports turf, which is right next door on the East Coast Road side. There’s also a small playground and a small court with a hoop. A shared bike/walking path goes past, making access easy for locals, and a short way down Forrest Hill Road there’s a small skate park.
There’s a small dairy across Forrest Hill Road, and several food options on the way there or home: Delish Cupcakes on Raines Avenue (off Tristam Avenue); dairies, bakeries and cafes down East Coast Road; and the Milford shops.
Grey Lynn Park is home to the famous new community-built pump track, which is smooth, fun, and wildly popular (best accessed from Dryden St). It gets crowded, so pick your moment if you’re there with very small kids.
The park has lots of nice wide paths that wind around the park, and there’s a small playground near the Grosvenor St entrance, with a supervised paddling pool in summer. There’s a handy dairy just outside the park entrance on Williamson Rd.
If you’re feeling adventurous, you could follow the Grey Lynn Greenway along Dryden St towards Hakanoa Reserve, through the alleyway past Farro and Mitre 10, and into Cox’s Bay Reserve. There’s a boardwalk along Cox’s creek, leading to paths around the playing fields and eventually to another great playground just beyond the sports clubhouse (NB still under construction in July 2017).
Cornwall Park is huge: head for the Cornwall Park Cafe, which has great natural loops around the garden (which kids love) and coffee & tea (which parents love). The most direct way to get to the tracks is via Pohutakawa Drive, off Greenlane West; however any of the roads into the park will get you there (if you’re not familiar with the park, the map is helpful).
Avondale’s learn-to-ride track is tucked in behind the Great North Road shops next to the racecourse. The best access is from Great North Road, more or less opposite Crayford Street West – just look out for the sculpture of the giant spider and spiderweb up high on a pole.
This bike park has a lovely urban community feel and a really social vibe, and because it’s quite compact, kids have more contact with each other as they weave around the little ‘streets’.
There’s a playground nearby (although a bit too distant to keep an eye on one kid on a bike and another on the slide). Good coffee options nearby, and a handy public toilet just up on Great North Road.
There’s also a public library close to hand, and plenty of food options on the main street, including the famous donuts at Salvation Kitchen a short walk away on Great North Road.
Bonus: this one is easily reached by train, for the junior transport enthusiast! On Sunday mornings, the Avondale Markets are on at the racecourse next door and are very busy – so if you’re driving, remember that car parking will be at a premium.
Western Springs Park – readily accessible from the Northwestern Cycleway – offers a scenic loop around the lake, the perfect addition (or alternative!) to a day at MOTAT or the Auckland Zoo. The lake is home to all sorts of interesting birdlife, and writhing tangles of eels.
The zoo end of the park has a great playground with public toilets, and handy access to the zoo’s Watering Hole snack bar (when open), and a flock of wild chickens to delight younger visitors – plus, you’re close enough to hear the lions roaring.
The MOTAT end of the park features a rocky outcrop just made for climbing. BYO picnic, or buy snacks and coffee at the zoo cafe.
Over in Henderson, Parrs Park has nice flat tracks around the park, plus an epic playground; and you can also check out the Twin Streams paths, which travel beside Henderson Creek and connect all the way to the Northwestern Cycleway if you’re feeling very ambitious.
If you want to ride around with your kids but haven’t brought your own bike, nextbike.co.nz have 8 bikes in 2 locations at Hobsonville Point. You need to register online with them (which costs $4), then the first 2 hours is free, then $4 per hour per bike. Registered riders can rent up to 4 bikes.
To get there (it’s around 30 minutes from downtown), head north on SH1, exit at Greville Rd, drive through Albany Village, take the turn towards Paeremoremo, go left onto Merewhiwa Road, and follow the signs from there.
Tamaki Drive can’t be beat for enchanting views and fresh air. The shared path on the ocean side is old but serviceable, and you can roam for miles. Note: it gets busy on weekends, you’ll be sharing space with joggers and walkers, and there’s the odd yacht club driveway to watch out for, but mostly it’s plain sailing and sea breezes.
Useful to know: it’s about 2km from Okahu Bay (which has a great playground with a flying fox, public bathrooms by the beach, and is close to Kelly Tarlton’s) to Mission Bay, which has lots of food options, a playground, and the famous fountain. Pick a starting point and see how far you get!
Remuera’s Little Rangitoto Reserve on Upland Road has a bikeable track next to a playground, and a skatebowl as well.
Te Puru Park in Beachlands is the outdoor hub and local sports focus. The pathways are vast and sweeping across the beach, and connect well to the shore and up along the hill. The hills might be challenging for the very small kids but once they get up they will be enjoying the ride down. An enjoyable ride that connects through to Omana Camping ground reserve and the ever popular Maraetai beach with a great shared path.
Barry Curtis Park in Botany Downs is a real gem for family cycling, and larger than the Auckland Domain! The pathways lead through the park, with the choice of a nice paved surface or a dirt track. The family will love looping around, with lots of foliage and small ponds to explore. The track now extends under the bridge to connect to the skate park and basketball courts, so don’t worry about entertaining the teenagers as there is plenty to do for all ages.
There’s a large and very popular playground, and public toilets. If you’re accessing the park from Stancombe Road (closest to the playground), there is a carpark plus on-road parking, which can be at a premium on busy weekends.
Pakuranga’s Cascades Shared Path could easily be called the ‘spaghetti junction’ for bikes, but it is worth the visit. Be sure to take a map with you, as you can get lost on the almost 10km of shared path, which now extends up to Botany’s Te Irirangi Drive. You’ll find playgrounds, tunnels and more, so take a picnic and a soccer ball. You can start at many points, so this ride is worth the repeat visit to explore every nook and cranny.
Also in Pakuranga, the famous Rotary Pathway runs for 9km along the Tamaki Estuary, from Farm Cove to the Panmure Bridge. The best place to start riding with small kids is near the Pakuranga Sailing Club on Bramley Drive, Farm Cove. This is because it is near the famous ‘Snakes and Ladders’ playground (which has a public toilet). A real treat for the kids, and something distinctive to the park.
The pathway is entirely off-road, and winds in and out along the shore, and is shared with walkers, so be sure to have those bells ready to ring, and keep a close eye on the small ones. The path is usually drenched in sun but the sea breeze can sometimes make riding a challenge.
The path connects to Half Moon Bay (lots of eating options there) via quiet streets (more suitable for older kids). With bikes free to bring on the ferry, this path could form the basis of a truly epic day out.
Mangere Bridge/ Kiwi Esplanade shared path is a narrow path frequented by local joggers but is a great place to take the kids, with its playground and small beaches ideal for picnics. If you feel adventurous, take the family around to Ambury Farm as far as the Mangere Ponds, or head the other way until you reach Southdown. Crossing the bridge is the real treat, and something the entire family will enjoy. Try the old Mangere bridge and the under-bridge path on the new bridge. They’re both awesome!
Taumanu Reserve, Onehunga is the result of a massive foreshore reclamation project that finished in 2015, designed to restore the foreshore amenities that existed before the motorway was built across Onehunga Bay in 1977. It’s got great cycle paths, and you can bike over the pedestrian/cycling bridge to the Onehunga Bay Reserve which has a playground. If you time it right, you can even take a dip one of the sandy beaches at high tide. Keep going and you’ll discover the new boardwalk around the bottom of Hillsborough.
Wattle Downs shared path is in a quiet residential area. Its views of the Manukau harbour, green space and playgrounds make it an ideal picnic destination, with enough pathways to keep the kids riding for ages.
Pukekohe’s Samuel Miller Reserve on the corner of Nelson St and John St is fun for all ages. It has a great playground with two new ‘serpent slides’ that opened in December 2016 (replacing the infamous Big Red slide that was breathtakingly steep), and a flying fox.
The bike track has built-in road signs, and a mock roundabout; take care on the hills, as you can get kids on balance bikes flying down at speed.
In Papakura, Bruce Pulman Sports Park is a popular spot for locals. This park may not be suitable for the very young but the large carparks and wide drives are ideal for children who are more confident and have learned some road biking skills. It has a few shared paths along the edges, and contains a little pond and some seating areas for picnic. Be careful of the cars attending sports matches, as they can cut through driveways and car parks where you may be riding.
Minogue Park, at the northern end of Hamilton, is handy for Aucklanders looking for a short day trip. Accessed via Moore St, off Forest Lake Rd, the playground features a newly paved tiny bike-track for beginners, with bumps and curves suitable for scooters as well as little bikes – plus decent play equipment and flying foxes.
Next to the playground is a brilliant BMX track, which is enjoyed by up-for-it kids as young as 5. The first time round can be a bit nerve-wracking, but once they get the hang of it, try stopping them! A treat for confident riders, equally popular with girls and boys, and entertaining for spectators with dreams of glory.
You can make a day of it by bringing your togs and visiting nearby Waterworld (call ahead to double-check when the hydroslides are running). And if you’re visiting on a Sunday, you must check out the Hamilton Model Engineers’ miniature ride-on trains, in another corner of Minogue Park – a toot-toot hoot for adults and kids alike.
The Avantidrome in Cambridge, south of Hamilton on SH1, is the home of sport cycling with all sorts of options for family fun.
There’s a fantastic bike skills park with working traffic lights, plus a great kid-friendly BMX/pump track. It’s open 7 days a week from dawn to dusk and is totally free (although the traffic lights only operate from 8-5).
The bike skills park has little ‘roads’ for the kids to bike on, which makes it lots of fun. Littlies are fine on their balance bikes and trainer wheels, so long as they have control of where they’re going; watch out for those just learning or moving up to a bigger bike, as the tracks can be a bit narrow when they get the wobbles. When we visited, we found all the kids were careful around each other and keen to all have a good time.
There’s a fairly large playground on site, and toilets. The Bikery Cafe at the Avantidrome has great food and coffee, and is open 7 days a week.
Never ridden on a real velodrome? Avantidrome has ‘Have a Go’ sessions (for ages 10 and up), at $25 for an hour. They say: ‘If you’ve never ridden on the Avantidrome and want to give it a try, this is the session for you. An Avantidrome coach will fit you with a bike and helmet and will guide you through your session on the track.’ Times vary, so check out their website for the latest information.
The Avantidrome also marks the beginning of the lovely leisurely Te Awa cycle path along the banks of the mighty Waikato. Depending on family energy levels, you could do a quick explore out along the river and back, or bike the easy, flat 3.2km into Cambridge for lunch and a spot of antiquing, or go the full 19km to Karapiro. Avantidrome has bikes to hire, including e-bikes that can go 100-150kms before they need to be recharged. Check out this useful map; more details here. | 2019-04-24T04:25:07Z | https://www.bikeauckland.org.nz/maps-rides/rides-for-kids/ |
I'm in NYC currently and make a good living doing remote web development work and I get a 1099 at end of year. My taxes take about 35% of my paycheck.
I was thinking about incorporating in another state or moving to reduce this amount. I've read some states have NO income tax, but I'm unsure, does that mean federal too?
I hear Puerto Rico is another possible U.S. tax haven too. Which state/locale has the best tax rate for a self-employed individual like me?
Incorporate a company in Singapore or Luxembourg, where there is limited income tax.
Make your clients pay to the company.
Give yourself a job in your company and relevant amount of shares in the company. Take less money as your salary and more money as dividends.
I do not know the complete legal implications, but taking the money as dividends may reduce the percent tax that you have to pay on your income. A thing to note is that while my friend lives in US, he may not be an American citizen (nor am I). I have heard that Americans have to pay tax on income from outside the country, which may change your case.
This is by no means a legal advice, and I would recommend you talking to a lawyer about this before taking an action.
Whether or not you owe state income tax is determined by state residency rules. Say you work remotely for a company in Texas (no income tax state) but you spend all of your non-liesure time in NY, the office you keep is in NY, you receive your mail in NY, NY wants income tax from you because you are a resident. Now say the company you work for that's based in Texas is actually one you own 100% of called Patoshi, Inc. If you pass all of the income from Patoshi, Inc to yourself either via payroll or dividend(s), you're still a resident of NY, NY still wants that income tax. But now if you get sued you might have to handle the case in TX where your Corporation is "located." So you think, what if I let my company just retain the earnings. Then the Corporation retains its earnings in Texas, and then it's the company's money, not yours. In this situation the earnings never get to you so you don't pay tax on them, the company does. Perfect!
But wait, Texas doesn't have a personal income tax, but it does have a corporate tax. So Texas is out but you can set up in South Dakota where there are neither personal income taxes or corporate income (or gross receipts) taxes. Great! South Dakota has no corporate income tax but Patoshi, Inc will owe federal corporate income taxes on retained earnings. Darn it!
If you ever wanted this money, to buy yourself a house or whatever, you'll have to take receipt and THEN you'll owe the personal income tax on money that's left over after Patoshi, Inc paid federal corporate income tax on it.... :( Corporations are double taxed at the individual level.
Considering what you're really dealing with. Even if federal income tax did not exist. At a tax rate of 5% you'd have to forego $20,000 of income to avoid paying $1,000 of tax to New York. Personally, I'd rather have $19,000 than $0. You're giving up the utility of a lot of your earnings over nothing.
The major benefit of an LLC or S-Corporation or Limited Partnership is the ability to simply take the business income personally thus eliminating double-taxation while still receiving the limited liability benefits. If you're a resident of NY (or whatever state) you'll owe the income tax regardless of where you put your corporation because the money ultimately flows to you. If you think you can beat the residency rules in NY, good luck.
If all a person needed was a PO box in Texas to avoid state income tax, Texas would have a comically booming PO box/mail forward industry and no state would receive any income taxes.
First let me say, I AM NOT AN ACCOUNTANT! And you should talk to one. They're really great, and they save you a ton of money.
For instance, I'm a mobile app developer based in NYC. I was in a similar situation: whenever I did freelance work, I got a 1099, on which I was taxed like crazy.
My accountant had me incorporate a DE as an S-Corp which I owned completely. I pay myself a reasonable, startup-sized salary, and the rest of the money (when there is some – and there almost always is) I get as profit distribution. As a result, I only pay employment related taxes on my salary, and not on the profit distribution.
This does not, per se, save you from NYC taxes. However, it does reduce your total tax liability – and that includes in NYC.
If you're wondering if this is too good to be true, you're not alone. This recent question asked that very thing. As you can see from the answers to that question, it is a totally reasonable thing to do!
Again – talk to a good accountant. They will be able to tell you the best options for your particular situation, and save you the most money on taxes.
Since the current form of the question asks about moving to another state, yes, that's really probably your best option, provided that state is not something like California or Massachusetts.
You will, however, still be required to pay federal individual income taxes in any state. These apply equally to every state.
However, there's an even better reason for moving to another state to make financial sense, especially for someone who works remotely and, therefore doesn't have to live in a particular place: cost of living.
You may already be familiar with the concept of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), which is used to adjust nominal money figures (such as nominal incomes or GDP) according to the amount of goods and services that amount of money can actually purchase in an area. This is used to allow for more apples-to-apples comparison on figures like incomes and GDP from one place to another. Typically, these are assigned by country with the U.S. being customarily defined as having a conversion factor of 1. However, the U.S. is very large and cost-of-living can vary dramatically within the U.S., too. As a result, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis has begun publishing Regional Price Parity (RPP) information to allow for more accurate comparison between different states or regions within the U.S.
So, if you were to move from NYC to, say, Tennessee, in addition to not paying state income taxes, the money you keep would be worth about 35.6% more than that same number of dollars would have been worth in New York, even if you had been allowed to keep that much. This turns out to make the economic benefit of leaving NY much larger than the tax rate difference alone would make it seem.
There are many famous people who enjoy New York City, but do not enjoy the taxes.
Many people commute to the city from Connecticut, New Jersey, or even further away. If you live in another state but commute to the city for work, you will still incur tax liability. If you move away and visit the city only for leisure or occasional work, you can reduce your liability significantly.
Because of the the wording of your question before it was edited, I want to be clear: if you do not wish to move away from New York City, you will still be liable for the state taxes that apply. You're not the first person to realize the tax rates are high and attempt to avoid/evade the taxes. They have many ways of detecting tax fraud if you simply set up a fake address elsewhere. It will likely end badly for you.
Some states have no STATE income tax. But you still have to pay FEDERAL income tax. New York State income tax rates range from 4% to 8.82% of your income, so eliminating that could make a significant difference to your take-home pay. But sorry, you are still subject to federal income tax if you live in any of the 50 states. States with no income tax often make up for it by having higher sales tax, but the total tax burden in most states is less than New York.
Setting up a corporation in another state wouldn't really help you. You'd still have to pay state income tax on the income that you as an individual receive to the state in which you live, and the corporation would be liable for income tax in both the state in which it is incorporated and any state in which it operates, which in your case means, the state where you live. State tax laws usually let you take a credit for taxes paid to another state, but what that comes down to is that, AT BEST, you pay the higher rate of the two states, and sometimes more.
I don't know a lot about the taxes in Puerto Rico. My understanding is that residents of Puerto Rico do not pay federal income tax and the Puerto Rican "commonwealth tax", like a state income tax, is only 4%. But there may be catches to that. Anybody else on here know the answer to that part?
In the end, the answer to your question is largely opinion-based, because no matter what you do, there are advantages and drawbacks.
I want to start with a data point: California, just like NY, is said to have among the highest taxes in the nation. And you routinely see media reports about a supposed "exodus" of people. Yet California's population is booming, and people in CA (as well as in NY) tend to be wealthier than the rest of the nation. So the higher taxes may end up being balanced by other advantages.
Incorporating is usually a good idea, not so much because of taxes but to avoid liability issues.
Incorporating is a vast subject on its own. Some forms of incorporating don't even affect your taxes at all, or only minimally. For instance, a single-member LLC (at least in California) can provide you with the liability shield of a corporation, while it is disregarded for tax purposes.
If the corporation is not disregarded, it may actually cost you more in taxes because the corporate income is taxed, and then when you take it out, it is taxed again as your personal income.
If the corporation does help you save taxes, you will be earning the scorn of many people. Especially larger corporations get a lot of negative press from perfectly legally avoiding taxation.
But the main point of my answer is that, as always in life, you get what you pay for. I live in California, and happily pay the California state tax (which actually is fairly modest compared with my federal tax burden), because it buys me a lot of things. For instance, a state disability insurance. A decent unemployment insurance (for when consulting projects dry up). In-state tuition at some of the best universities in the country for your children.
Another fallacy: don't just look at income taxes. Many states that don't have an income tax make up for it with astronomical property taxes. I believe Texas is among them.
Other states may also have lower income potential for you. Even if you do all your work over the Internet, you may have a harder time landing new clients, and those you can reach may expect to pay lower rates based on where you are.
Also look at other factors. If you have family in New York, you may end up spending on airfare whatever you saved in expenses. You may experience a culture shock just as much as moving to another continent.
If you want to move to another state - by all means move. But if you do it for the sole reason to save a couple of bucks in taxes, you may be penny-wise, pound-foolish.
Won't help you. The first thing your Nevada company must do is go to the state and register to do business in New York as a foreign company (foreign state). Most states set this fee same as to register a domestic company company (no savings there). And taxes on income earned in NY state will be the same.
Your customers may check, and refuse to pay a non-registered business, since this is a common "trick".
You also need a registered agent in your state of residence unless you actually are home most of the time between 9-5. Process servers are used to occasional misses and will retry a couple times, but if you miss him 3 times, you failed.
What's more, anything but a C-corporation (or LLC electing C-corp taxation) is a pass-through entity -- meaning the entity's income passes through and is taxed as part of your personal 1040 -- the very thing you are trying to avoid.
You can go C-corp, but the C-corp still has to pay NYS taxes. And then you get the "double taxation" problem of the corporation paying profits and then you paying taxes on the dividends/stock sale value.
* You may have heard of a game called "evading service" where you make yourself difficult to serve. That has some force in evictions, automobile repos and other lowbrow actions where a "holding action" is meaningful. It's worse than useless in corporations. The judge will scoff at your lack of registered agent and let the plaintiff exploit the advantage of your absence. Holding actions are a lost cause in tax matters because the state has infinite patience and no statute of limitations.
New York state income tax is about 6.65% for people earning under $214,000. Assuming your income is high for a web dev at $100,000, you're looking at saving about $6,000 per year. NYC is a pretty awesome place to live. I'd say it's worth it. But you're not going to be able to save much beyond that with some complex tax plan involving shell companies, lawyers, accountants, all while keeping up with current tax laws. You'll probably make more money per hour just getting more clients or working more hours instead of trying to minimize your tax liability.
1) You will always have to pay federal income tax on your income.
2) The corporate tax rate is now lower than the personal tax rate (for incomes above a certain threshold).
3) Even if you have a corporation you have to pay yourself and then pay taxes at the personal tax rate.
There's very little you can do to change any of the 3 statements above. What's usually suggested to people like you is to create a corporation and not pay yourself 100% of the profits (more on that in a minute). This also has some tax advantages when you buy things that you need for your business.
Your business generates profit which turns into the business' money. You could pay yourself all of that money (if you were the only employee/shareholder). This will not reduce your tax burden a significant amount. The advantage only comes if your business buys/pays for things that you usually would, or if you don't pay yourself more money than you need.
Say you need $70k a year to live off, but you make significantly more than that. In your current situation you pay the 35% tax rate on all the income. However, if your business makes significantly more than that, the business only pays 21%. You can then pay yourself $70k per year (or even less, if your business pays for the business related things that you now have to pay for), and pay taxes on the $70k. The rest remains in the business' accounts until it's needed. The business could also invest the remaining money.
Either way you're going to have to contact an accountant/tax professional to see how much exactly you're going to save (if any) at which income levels.
Adding more to explain what you've heard about Puerto Rico. This obviously applies if you, like hundreds recently, decide to move to Puerto Rico for fun and profit.
As others have mentioned, you can't escape NY taxes without moving out of NY. I'd strongly consider moving, given your geographical flexibility and the nature of your business.
US citizens, green card holders owe Federal income tax no matter where they live in the world. Plus state taxes in 50 states and PR/other territories. Usually this would mean that you can only tinker with your tax rate by moving; no matter where you go, you pay federal + state or federal + foreign country taxes, with a few exemptions here and there that phase out as your income increases. At least in TX/FL & other no income tax states, if you don't like taxes, you just downsize your consumption of housing and goods, so you can in fact tailor your tax rate dramatically with those choices (calculation left up to the reader). Your tax rate floor is federal taxes even for the best of the 50 states, so this is where the Puerto Rico opportunity comes in.
EXCEPT if a US citizen lives in Puerto Rico: then they enter a unique US federal tax twilight zone that applies to their earnings traceable to activities in PR (so still not lowering taxes on worldwide business activities).
Puerto Rico residents (living 183 days/year on island or more) pay income tax to Puerto Rico instead of the IRS, except federal self employment taxes (around 15% if self-employed in PR).
So far, at 33% top PR/state rate which with self-employment can go as high as 48%, this sounds equivalent to moving to Florida or Arizona.
EXCEPT EXCEPT - There are 2 ways to have much much lower taxes in PR that are commonly used and 100% legal. To get the much lower taxes, you have to live in Puerto Rico. There is no way to do this remotely - staying in NY means NY taxes.
(4% corporate tax + capped personal tax - target 10% or lower overall tax rate) Incorporate an LLC in PR with a service business (e.g. consulting, software/app, other services) where the revenue to your business in PR originates from (e.g. clients or customers) outside PR, and the LLC qualifies under Puerto Rico "Act 20". To get the better tax rate, you have to be sure that the revenue qualifies for Act 20.
In this scenario, you pay yourself a typical salary (which is taxed at the usual PR tax brackets and US social security/medicare taxes), and the excess income can be immediately "dividended out" to you as tax free dividends - tax free in PR, tax free from the IRS.
You can imagine if your PR LLC bills out $200,000 from software consulting, pays 4% of $100k and pays you a salary of $100k, with PR taxes of around $30k, then your effective total tax rate is about 15%, and as your revenues increase while your salary is fixed, your tax rate goes down from there. Local wages are 30-50% lower than the mainland too, for determining the "wage" portion of overall business income. This configuration is similar to another post regarding owning an S-corp or LLC in Delaware or Nevada and paying yourself a salary. The difference is that the tax rates are simply lower at the corporate level.
(0% personal capital gains rate) If you make money from investments or trading, then those activities are taxed at 0% if you apply and receive a personal "Act 22" tax designation and live in PR. Previous investments brought to PR and with capital gains or interest will still owe cap-gain taxes to the IRS for gains that occurred before the move, but new investments and gains after moving to PR will be taxed at 0%. No catches, basically triple tax exempt - no state, no federal, no local taxes on long and short term capital gains.
So if you put in a little bit of effort and have either a) a service export business or b) a capital gains (especially short term) type of income, then you should be able to hit the 0-10% overall, total, net-net tax rate living in PR.
That's pretty incredible for a US citizen - in fact, not remotely possible anywhere else in the world. You'll pay at least federal (20-37% according to your federal tax bracket) no matter where you live and no matter how you pass money through an LLC (same fed rate) or Corp. (double taxed, works out to the same or more than LLC). Non PR US investors still pay at least the dividend/capital gains rate of 20-23%.
This drastic improvement in taxation is why tens of crypto billionaires and millionaire entrepreneurs have moved to PR after hurricane Maria - they found all this out and that crypto gains would be tax free for them (for the gains that accumulate after their move). These low tax rates apply to future gains from their investments and projects, note. It is also 80-95 degrees and sunny.
These laws have been around since winter 2012. Word has filtered out slowly, but with crypto, word is getting out a bit more. Remember, Puerto Rico Act 22 is accidentally tailor-made to help an investor grow their wealth while reducing capital gains taxes better than any other framework in the world.
One more catch. The Act 20 and Act 22 contracts between your business and the government of Puerto Rico are supposed to last 10-20 years, until 2035. (And have survived hurricane Maria! This shows something about their robustness to political change.) But remember, governments sometimes get into trouble and unilaterally break their promises and contracts. The United States federal government abrogated settled bankruptcy law when it elevated union claims and lowered the priority of bond holders in the GM bankruptcy, among thousands of other examples of a government treating contract as malleable. Nothing is guaranteed in life.
Lots of resources describing the details of Act 20 and Act 22.
The "tax reduction" schemes mentioned are nonsensical.
Of course, naturally, people who contract remotely should surely think of living in a really really cheap area - moving away from an incredibly expensive area (with high taxes on top).
Indeed, the entire raison d'etre of the whole Toffleresque societal move to do that, is to slash your costs (both living and tax).
Why would you possibly live in London if you can live in Dorset; why would you possibly live in the hellhole that is NY if you can go live in paradise wherever floats your boat (for ski-ing, boating, sun, hipster Austin-like cities, or whatever it is you're in to).
The simple answer to your question is yes, you have to move to stop the taxes you ask about. No, you can not get around them any other way.
That's the answer to your basic question.
Note that the comment by @Tom in the first comments, is totally correct.
"Tax evasion is designed to be available only to large corporations, not to individuals. The basic assumption of your question, that this is a path open to you, is wrong."
Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged united-states taxes income-tax state-income-tax form-1099 or ask your own question. | 2019-04-20T14:58:06Z | https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/93618/i-hate-the-high-taxes-in-nyc-should-i-incorporate-in-or-move-to-another-state |
Before founding Crewe Capital, Mr. Bennett held senior positions with three different investment banking firms. Mr. Bennett provides capital solutions to middle market companies and alternative investment solutions to institutions and family offices. Mr. Bennett has completed over 80 different investment banking transactions and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for clients. Expertise includes fund-raising, mergers, acquisitions, corporate finance, strategic advisory, real estate, private equity and hedge funds. Mr. Bennett has experience advising companies across a variety of industries, including technology, healthcare, industrials, consumer retail, restaurant, and real estate. Mr. Bennett is actively involved in his community and participates in various organizations with a charitable focus. He is a member of the board of directors of CharityVision, a non-profit organization focused on restoring curable sight impairment in people of developing nations and founded Crewe Kids, a component fund of a 501(c)(3), nonpartisan, nonsectarian public charity dedicated as a grant making organization to increase philanthropy. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University and the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. Mr. Bennett is fluent in Portuguese.
Mr. King has held leadership positions at several U.S. and European investment banks. He has spent 28 years providing strategic, M&A, and valuation advice to companies of all sizes. Mr. King is a member of The Economic Club of New York, New York Society of Security Analysts, CFA Institute, and Mid Atlantic Bio Angels. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Applied Cardiac Systems, Inc., Cynvec LLC, FLOHE CRA S.A., and ServeHAITI, Inc. He spent several years as a member of the Society of Jesus (the “Jesuits”) studying for the Roman Catholic priesthood. He holds a BA in Biology from the University of California; a BA in Spanish from Creighton University, where he was a Jesuit Humanities Scholar; an MA in Economics from the University of San Francisco, where he was a lecturer in Economics, Finance, and Statistics; and completed PhD coursework in International Economics at the University of California.
Previously, Mr. Cuellar was President of McGladrey Capital Markets, a global investment bank specializing in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, recapitalizations, capital raising, restructurings, and fairness opinions. Under Mr. Cuellar’s tenure, MCM completed more than 300 M&A transactions and generated over $8 billion dollars in liquidity for its clients. Mr. Cuellar is consistently ranked within the top three M&A advisors for deals under $250 million. Mr. Cuellar has more than 30 years of experience in corporate and investment banking, including international M&A, corporate finance, and capital raising. Prior to joining McGladrey Capital Markets, he served as Managing Director at Banc of America Securities and manager of the firm’s Los Angeles office where he oversaw the firm’s global activities in Aerospace & Defense, Engineering, and Construction. Mr. Cuellar received a BA in Accounting from Loyola University in Chicago and an MBA from The J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Mr. Cuellar is fluent in Spanish.
Previously, Mr. Orr gained extensive transactional, strategic, capitalization and communications experience serving in a variety of senior roles at complex and highly active organizations including Ascent Capital Group and Liberty Media Corporation. Mr. Orr has set strategy and led the execution of acquisition and divestiture plans across diverse industries including telecommunications, media, technology, connected home services, and consumer products, successfully completing deals ranging in value from $5 million to $3 billion. These transactions have been strategic in nature and have, among other things, served to broaden product offerings, expand distribution channels, and enhance operational scale. Mr. Orr received a BA in Economics from the University of Colorado and an MBA in Finance from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Mr. Pulley has over 18 years of investment banking experience as a mergers and acquisitions advisor and has worked on both domestic and cross-border transactions. During that time he provided sale and divestiture services to corporate and private equity clients, completed acquisitions of public and private companies, represented special committees of public company boards, rendered fairness opinions, and engaged in strategic alternatives reviews on behalf of public and private clientele. Mr. Pulley previously worked for Phi Capital, an alternative asset investment vehicle focused on international investment opportunities in the global general industrial sector. Prior to Phi Capital, Mr. Pulley was a Vice President in Deutsche Bank’s General Industrial Group, where he headed the flexible packaging coverage in North America and Europe. Before Deutsche Bank, his previous investment banking experience included McGladrey Capital Markets and Banc of America Securities. Mr. Pulley holds a BS in Finance from the University of Utah and an MBA from Columbia Business School.
Previously, Mr. Timbers gained broad operational and strategic experience in a number of senior-level positions (including CFO, SVP, and President) and acquired a diverse background in M&A and corporate development. Mr. Timbers deal experience at Western Union, First Data Corporation, and IHS has been from multiple perspectives and with varied leadership responsibility and involvement (executive sponsor, strategic advisor, and deal manager) on deals ranging from $1 million to $1 billion, including buy and sell sides, tuck-ins, and strategic adjacencies. Mr. Timbers received BA and MA degrees in Economics from Stanford University and holds an MBA from the University of Michigan.
Mr. Oaks began his career in banking at Standard Chartered Bank, Hong Kong. After which he returned to the United States to work in the investment team at Farmers Insurance Group, where he served as a securities analyst, investment strategist, and director of investments overseeing $24 billion in insurance and retirement assets. In 2011 he joined Intermountain Healthcare’s investment group where he oversaw all income-based strategies across the $7.5-billion of investable assets. He also managed all of Intermountain’s community foundations’ investments and currently sits on the investment committee of a large public university’s endowment fund. Since November 2013, Mr. Oaks has been consulting with a variety of companies. He volunteers as the chairman for FIRST Utah Robotics, a series of four progressive programs for children K-12 designed to inspire children to pursue STEM studies and careers. He is a member of the CFA Society of Salt Lake City, the CAIA Association of San Francisco, holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Brigham Young University, and completed an MBA at UCLA Anderson School of Business. Mr. Oaks is proficient in Mandarin and Cantonese.
Mr. Lunt has extensive experience in both public and private investments across a variety of industries. Prior to Crewe Capital, Mr. Lunt formed Bennett Capital with former U.S. Senator Bob Bennett. Mr. Lunt previously oversaw and managed the portfolio at Lunt Capital Management, an investment advisory firm which manages a hedge fund for both private and institutional investors. He worked as a venture partner with Intrepid Equity Partners, a successful middle market private equity firm. In addition, he has participated as both a managing and capital partner in multiple ventures. His background also includes experience with Ford Motor Company, Fidelity Investments, and the Notre Dame Endowment Fund. Mr. Lunt serves as the Board Chair for the Salt Lake County Economic Development Revolving Loan Fund, which provides capital to early stage companies. In 2014 he was honored by Utah Business Magazine as a “Top 40 under 40”. He holds a BS in Finance from Brigham Young University and an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. Mr. Lunt is fluent in Portuguese.
Mr. Wolf has spent his entire career in finance as agent or principal in public and private equity and real estate. His career began with JP Morgan in New York City in 1986 and he has worked in a variety of corporate and entrepreneurial capacities since. Notably from 1994-99, he worked in London for CSFB and then Morgan Stanley. Upon returning to the states, he has focused on active and passive investments in private equity and worked in corporate venture capital. In 2003, he returned to the securities industry and the pursuit of capital for private securities and alternative funds. To date, he has completed or is active in private fund mandates that cover a variety of private equity including; buyout, distressed, venture, real estate and infrastructure as well as hedge strategies including RV, global macro, equity market neutral, European equity long/short, and merger arbitrage. Mr. Wolf and his wife are active philanthropic investors focused on education and health. Mr. Wolf currently chairs Impact 360 which supplements secondary public education with sport and life skill curriculum to assure a pathway to college for lower income students. He is a graduate of University of Iowa with a BS Chemistry/Physics/Biology, as well as the University of Denver with a MBA in Finance. Additionally, he is a Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst.
Mr. Barrett specializes in real estate investment banking and middle market capital solutions including; equity and debt transactions, secondary stock transactions, and alternative investment advisory services. Additionally, Mr. Barrett provides private fund syndications, mergers, acquisitions, and recapitalization support across multiple industries. Previously, Mr. Barrett worked on the commercial real estate investment team for a global real estate firm. Mr. Barrett received a BA from Brigham Young University and an MBA from the Said Business School at the University of Oxford.
Previously, Mr. Reeb served in various senior leadership roles gaining extensive experience in sales and marketing, management consulting, strategy, and corporate finance. Mr. Reeb has worked with and advised public and private companies of all stages including start-ups, rapid growth disruptors, and mature billion dollar enterprises across many industries including healthcare, technology, food and beverage, building materials, and various other service companies and trades. Mr. Reeb received his MS degree in Accounting with a secondary focus in Finance from the University of Colorado and is a licensed CPA in the state of Colorado.
Aaron Britton advises companies on capital raises, mergers, acquisitions and strategic initiatives. Prior to joining Crewe Capital, Mr. Britton gained significant transaction advisory experience at two separate middle market investment banks — serving clients in the Consumer, Manufacturing, Food & Beverage, Agriculture, Industrials and Financial Services industries throughout the United States. Before working as an investment banker, Mr. Britton’s previous employment included making direct equity and debt investments into early-stage companies. Mr. Britton serves clients in a broad range of industries, with an affinity for companies creating positive social impact and sustainability. He earned a BS of Accountancy from Brigham Young University and an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. Mr. Britton is fluent in Spanish.
David Wong specializes in working with financial institutions on their alternative investment allocations. Mr. Wong’s extensive capital markets experience includes the launch, promotion and disposition of assets in over 20 years offering capital introduction services. His expertise includes private equity, real estate, oil, gas, venture capital and hedge funds. Prior to joining Crewe, Mr. Wong held senior positions at issuing firms and advised on approximately $250M for clients in debt and equity programs. Mr. Wong earned a Bachelor of Science from Villanova University, a Masters from the University of Southern California (USC) and fulfilled the CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ requirements from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Mr. Mellies engages on all aspects of the deal cycle, including due diligence, financial analysis, modeling, and developing management presentations. He assists on mergers, acquisitions, capital raises, and alternative investments. He was formerly with Cross Creek Advisors, a late stage venture capital firm, and focused on direct and fund investments in the technology and life sciences industries. Additionally, he has held leadership roles in corporate finance, management consulting, and sales and trading. Mr. Mellies holds a BS in Finance from Brigham Young University and an MS in Finance from the University of Utah. Mr. Mellies is fluent in Romanian and interprets for local courts, hospitals, and conferences.
Mr. Rasmussen provides capital solutions to middle market companies and alternative investment solutions to institutions and family offices; including equity and debt transactions, mergers, acquisitions, and alternative investment advisory services. Previously, Mr. Rasmussen was an investment analyst at Velzy Capital and has experience investing in small cap companies and trading futures using statistical modeling. He received a BA in Psychology from Brigham Young University-Hawaii and an MBA from the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.
Louise Hawkins is an Associate at Crewe Capital, based out of London. Mrs. Hawkins supports senior bankers with mergers, acquisitions, capital raising and cross boarder transactions. Louise has worked in investment banking and corporate development for over 15 years. She was instrumental in setting up the London office of McGladrey Capital Markets (formerly RSM EquiCo Capital Markets) and before this, played a pivotal role working as part of Accenture Plc’s Corporate Development group in London.
Previously, Mr. Bennett held senior positions with three different investment banking firms. Mr. Bennett provides capital solutions to middle market companies and alternative investment solutions to institutions and family offices. Mr. Bennett has completed over 80 different investment banking transactions and has advised on hundreds of millions of dollars invested into alternative investments. Expertise includes mergers, acquisitions, corporate finance, strategic advisory, real estate, private equity, and hedge funds. Mr. Bennett sits on the board of directors of CharityVision. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University and the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. Mr. Bennett is fluent in Portuguese.
Mr. Vowles investment banking expertise is primarily focused in the SaaS, wearables, marketing analytics, automotive, alternative energy, and financial services sectors. He has worked with family offices, institutions, and over 20 alternative investment sponsor clients including hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, and private credit. Previously, Mr. Vowles ran a private credit fund and was an assistant portfolio manager at Russell Investments. He is a CPA and has passed Level I of the CFA exam. Mr. Vowles holds a BS in Accounting from the University of Utah, an MBA from the University of South Carolina, and a post graduate degree in Finance from the University of Oxford. Mr. Vowles is fluent in Hmong.
Mr. Dumke is an experienced financial and legal professional, with an expert understanding of family office investing, impact investing, private equity, and venture capital. Previously, Mr. Dumke founded and managed Reddo Capital Partners, a social impact investment firm and has worked with his own family office. While managing Reddo, he focused on real estate finance, private credit, consumer lending, and private equity. Mr. Dumke served as finance chair for a respected philanthropic foundation for a decade and is backed by a successful career as an attorney specializing in civil litigation and intellectual property, admitted to the Bar in the states of California, Texas, and Utah. Mr. Dumke has lead microfinance projects in Southeast Asia, where he was able to fuse his passion for social impact with his professional expertise. He is the founder and managing editor of Business Law for Managers and Entrepreneurs, in conjunction with the Business Section of the Utah Bar. He currently sits on the boards of the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, SJINC Foundation, the Katherine and Ezekiel Dumke Jr. Foundation, and volunteers as an advisor to other non-profits in the field of venture philanthropy. He holds a BS in Business and Economics from Westminster College, an MBA from Bond University in Australia, and a JD from the University of San Francisco. | 2019-04-24T12:24:48Z | https://crewecapital.com/team/ |
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Wedlund, C. S., Behar, E., Kallio, E., Nilsson, H., Alho, M., Gunell, H., Bodewits, D., Beth, A., Gronoff, G. & Hoekstra, R., 11 Jan 2019, (Accepted/In press) In : Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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The hypersoft state of Cygnus X-3: A key to jet quenching in X-ray binaries?
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Understanding the considerations used in selecting specific clay body components can help pottery producers optimize their own formulations.
A stoneware cup with a matte blue glaze, fired at cone 9 in a reduction atmosphere.
A "perfect clay body" is a subjective term, but the chances of achieving this goal increase when the appropriate ratio of clays, fluxes and fillers are used. When designing a clay body, factors such as the forming method, dry shrinkage, firing temperature, kiln atmosphere, glaze interaction, fired color, fired shrinkage, absorption and raw material availability should all be considered, as outlined in Part 1 of this series, "The Basics" (Ceramic Industry/Pottery Production Practices, June 2005).
The composition of a clay body formula is often a personal choice based on theory, experience and knowledge of materials. It is always advisable to mix a small test batch of any clay body formula and note the results in your kiln. Any new formula-whether purchased pre-mixed or mixed in your own studio-should prove itself over a few different kiln firings.
Several variations of the ZAM Super Body formula have been mass-produced by ceramic suppliers in large volumes over the years with good results. The formula has a dry shrinkage rate of 6% and is designed for throwing and hand building. It matures from cone 6 to cone 10 (c/6-c/10) and yields a medium brown color in reduction atmospheres and a light tan in oxidation atmospheres. It has a total fired shrinkage of 12.0% at c/6 (2,232°F) and 12.5% at c/10 (2,345°F), and an absorption rate of 2.6% at c/6 and 0.50% at c/9 (2,300°F).
A single clay body that functions perfectly for every potter does not exist, but knowing what considerations are made when a formula is developed can help pottery producers identify the source of quality problems and/or optimize their own clay body formulations. Following are the clays, fluxes and fillers used in the ZAM Super Body formula, along with the reasons each material was chosen.
Fireclays are the weakest part of any clay body formula with regard to quality and reliability. In fact, most problems in clay bodies that contain fireclay can usually be traced to this marginal-performance clay. Fireclays can contain excessive silica in small particle sizes, which can cause cooling cracks; a high organic content, which can cause black coring or bloating if the clay if it is not subjected to an oxidation atmosphere at the beginning stages of the firing; lignites (also called brown coal or low-quality-coal) or coal, which can also cause black coring; calcium nodules, which can cause lime pop; and sand, which can impart a gritty quality to the clay. Other impurities that have been found in fireclays include tree branches, metal bolts, paper, rocks and cigarette butts.
With all of these drawbacks, why use fireclay? The coarse or large particle size of the clay makes it ideal for adding "tooth" or "stand-up" ability in throwing and sculpture bodies. Fireclays also lower the dry shrinkage, fired shrinkage and warping potential of a clay body, and their refractory or heat-resistant nature imparts high-temperature-resistance to the fired clay. Unfortunately, potters buy less than 1/10% of all mined clays, so they have very little influence on the quality of the clays that are supplied. As long as fireclays meet or exceed the major user industry's requirements (and they currently do, even with all of their impurities), potters and ceramic supply companies do not have the economic purchasing power to demand a better grade of fireclay from the mines.
Hawthorn Bond fireclay, mined by Christy Minerals, High Hill, Mo., is used in the ZAM Super Body because it is readily available to most potters throughout the U.S.
Using two different fireclays in the formulation can help mitigate the clay's negative aspects, and inspecting the dry clay before the mixing operation can help prevent large and obvious contaminants from entering the clay mix. Some pottery supply companies screen the fireclay, which can significantly improve its quality. The screened clay costs more, but it is usually worth the extra price since it can reduce losses. Many potters choose not to use any fireclay in their clay body formulas because of its poor quality. Each potter must decide if the good qualities of fireclay in the clay body formula are worth the risk.
Fireclays also serve a useful function in their ability to add large particle sizes to the total mix. Some of the best clay bodies have small, medium and large clay platelet sizes, contributed by ball clays, stoneware clays and fireclays, respectively. These platelets mechanically interlock when moist, providing greater contact between the clay surface areas and therefore increased plasticity.
Fireclays also contribute iron and manganese particles that can provide random patterns of brown and black specks in the clay bodies fired in reduction kiln atmospheres. Using no fireclay or low percentages can lower the maturing range of the clay body and cause it to become soft with little grit or tooth when formed on the wheel. Clay bodies with no fireclay component often feel and throw like cream cheese. Alternatively, using excess fireclay will make the fired clay too porous and non-plastic, and will decrease the fired strength of the finished ware. However, the amount of grit or tooth needed in a moist clay body is subjective and must be decided by the individual potter.
Lincoln fireclay, supplied by Laguna Clay Co., City of Industry, Calif., is used as the second fireclay in the ZAM Super Body also because it is readily available to most potters in the U.S.
A stoneware cup with a matte green glaze, fired at cone 9 in a reduction atmosphere.
Goldart stoneware clay, supplied by Resco Products, Inc., Cedar Heights Clay Division, Oak Hill, Ohio, is the backbone of the ZAM Super Body formula. Stoneware clays are relatively clean, with a medium platelet size and, as their name implies, can be fired to stoneware temperatures of c/6 to c/9. As a group of clays, they can almost function as the total clay component in a formula. Although Goldart stoneware contained high concentrations of sulfur at one time, these concentrations have been kept under control for the last 15 years.
Stoneware clays have greater plasticity than fireclays but are not as plastic as ball clays. They make an excellent choice for a clay body formula because of their reliability, particle size and adaptability with other clays in the formulas. Using low percentages of stoneware clay (e.g., < 30%) will allow the other clays in the formula to dictate the clay body's performance, usually with less than optimum results. Conversely, using too high a percentage of stoneware clay (e.g., > 50%) will detract from the qualities of the other clays in the formula. The correct amount of flux, other clays, and fillers must be used to ensure a balanced clay body.
Ball clays such as the Zamek ball clay, supplied by Old Hickory Clay Co., Hickory, Ky., contribute plasticity to the clay body, but they also increase the rate of shrinkage during drying and firing. Using low percentages (e.g., < 10%) of ball clay will produce a clay body that is "short" or cracks easily when bent in the forming process. However, low plasticity and low shrinkage are ideal characteristics for tiles and dry or hydraulically pressed items. Stoneware bodies containing an excessive amount of ball clay (e.g., > 25%) often feel "gummy" when moist and can leave loose slurry on a potter's hands after pulling up a form on the potter's wheel. The clay body can also feel "rubbery" or soft when force is exerted against it during any forming operation. Determining what percentage of ball clay to use is ultimately a matter of finding the right balance between the level of plasticity that is desired and the amount of shrinkage that can be tolerated in the ware.
Adding flint to a clay body decreases warping and shrinkage in the drying stage. However, high percentages of flint can cause a decrease in plasticity. In stoneware throwing bodies, the amount of flint should generally be kept below 14%, while in porcelain clay body formulas, flint can reach 25% levels. Flint also reacts with feldspar during firing to augment the development of glass formation within the clay body. While clays and other materials such as talc, feldspars and frits have a silica component, the amount is usually not enough to achieve the optimum effect in the vitrification or melting stage of the clay body. The presence of flint in the clay body also promotes a better glaze fit and decreases the probability of glaze crazing defects. Both 200x and 325x mesh flint are used; however, the coarser 200x mesh is typically preferred for clay bodies because it reduces the possibility of the moist clay becoming too "gummy," while the finer 325x mesh is frequently used in glaze formulas.
Feldspar is a major flux or glass former in a clay body. However, using too much feldspar in the clay body (e.g., > 25%) can cause the ware to slump or attach to the kiln shelf at the unglazed foot. High levels of feldspar can also cause the body to shrink excessively and warp during firing, and over-fluxing caused by excessive amounts of feldspar can darken the fired clay color if any iron is present in the formula. The fired clay can become brittle, weak, bloated or, in extreme situations, can exhibit a "Chernobyl" effect during firing, becoming a molten ceramic mass on the kiln floor.
Too little feldspar in the clay body will reduce the amount of glass formation within the fired clay, which can lead to improper glaze fit (exhibited by "shivering," in which the fired glaze flakes off the clay like paint chips) and the potential for moisture to seep through the porous fired clay form. A common method of adjusting a clay body that does not hold liquid is to add 5% increments of a flux such as feldspar. Once the correct amount of flux is achieved, the absorption rate will decrease with greater vitrification in the fired clay body. Most functional stoneware pottery should have absorption rates of 3% or lower. A glaze should never be considered as a "sealer" or waterproof coating, as moisture will always seep through small imperfections.
In some instances, potash feldspars, such as Custer (supplied by Pacer Corp., Custer, S.D.) or G-200 (supplied by Zemex Industrial Minerals Co. [Feldspar Corp.], Atlanta, Ga.), are used instead of soda feldspars, such as F-4 (Zemex) and nepheline syenite, because potash feldspars tend to be less soluble. Soda spars can sometimes break down in the moist body, causing the clay to become thixotropic or rubbery in the forming process. The clay can also feel soft and have a "Jell-O" consistency when worked on the potter's wheel or in hand-building operations. As an increasing amount of water is applied to form, the clay becomes very soft and decreases its ability to hold a curve. Eventually the clay cannot support its own weight, and the form slumps or deforms. However, soda spars can be used to increase the fired clay body's melting capability.
As with other body components, the choice of whether to use potash, lithium or sodium based feldspars is in part determined by the other raw materials in the formulation. For example, spodumene, a lithium-based feldspar, can bleach any iron in the clay body and cause a red/brown fired color, while potash or sodium feldspars can cause the fired clay color to become more brown. Some experimentation will likely be needed to determine the effects of different types of feldspars in a specific clay body.
A stoneware cup with a clear glaze, fired at cone 9 in a reduction atmosphere.
Any raw material that can offer more than two or three functions in a clay body should be strongly considered because it can provide a higher degree of integration among the various components. Sheffield Clay, a low-temperature earthenware clay mined by Sheffield Pottery, Inc., Sheffield, Mass., is one example of a material that serves more than one major function in the clay body. The clay has a high iron content, and it can contribute a brown color in reduction and a medium cream color in oxidation atmospheres. It also promotes some fluxing action and adds different platelet sizes to the total clay body, which ensures a greater platelet size distribution. Redart, a low-temperature clay mined by Resco Products, Inc., Cedar Heights Clay Division, can be substituted for Sheffield Clay on a one-for-one basis and also adds color, platelet variation and flux to the clay body.
When a darker color clay body is required, it is always better to incorporate high-iron-bearing clays than to add straight red iron oxide to the clay body formula. Adding metallic coloring oxides to the clay body for color will cause the moist clay to take on water very fast during the throwing or hand building process, resulting in a very soft clay. Additionally, the more water a clay body takes on in the forming operation, the greater the shrinkage, warping and cracking potential during drying and firing. Some metallic oxides can also easily over-flux the clay body during firing, especially in reduction atmospheres. If red iron oxide must be added to the formulation, it should be limited to 2% or less of the overall body components. Low-temperature earthenware clays should not be used in greater than 10% amounts in stoneware bodies, as their fluxing action will negatively react with the clay body and cause possible bloating, warping and excessive fired shrinkage.
The most reliable grog is manufactured from virgin deposits of an alumina/silica refractory material and is calcined or fired to extremely high temperatures (above c/32 [3,073°F]). Grog can also be manufactured from crushed firebrick kiln linings, but these might contain contaminants of iron, manganese, chrome or copper, depending on their point of origin.
Grog is classified by its particle size-the lower the number, the larger the particle size. Grog 8/12 mesh looks like small pebbles, while grog 100 mesh is a fine powder. Grog 48/f ranges from 48 mesh (about the size of beach sand) with varying smaller particles to a powder size, and it was chosen for the ZAM Super Body because of its wide particle size distribution. As a rule, particle size variation is preferred when choosing grog due to the mechanical advantage of interlocking sizes and shapes. Different sized grog particles touch and combine to create a cohesive clay body and grog bond. Large-particle-sized grog (over 20/48x mesh) can cause surface irregularities in ware trimmed on the potter's wheel; however, leather-hard clay can be burnished at the trimming stage to force the grog particles below the clay's surface.
Grog decreases dry and fired shrinkage-every 10% of grog added to a clay body decreases fired shrinkage by approximately 0.75%. However, using too much grog will yield a gritty moist clay that will be "short" or non-plastic in forming operations. In most stoneware throwing bodies, grog amounts of greater than 15% adversely influence the plasticity and handling qualities of the clay. Additions of grog below 100x mesh (powder consistency) can also significantly decrease the plastic qualities of a clay body.
Conversely, little or no grog in the clay body decreases the amount of tooth when the clay is being formed on the potter's wheel. The moist clay has difficulty standing up and will slump during throwing operations.
As with other components in the clay body formula, the appropriate ratio of grog (non-plastic) to plastic particles depends on the required clay body function.
The stoneware clay body formulation listed in this article has been used successfully by numerous pottery producers. However, it is not a universally "perfect" clay body. Part of the fun of producing pottery is learning about the different ceramic materials and experimenting with various options to create unique, high-quality finished products. Understanding the various factors that should be considered when developing a stoneware clay body formulation can give potters the freedom to make adjustments and create their own "perfect body."
Editor's note: All photos are courtesy of Jeff Zamek. This article is part of a three-part series. Part 1 details "The Basics," while Part 3 tackles "Plasticity."
Jeff Zamek received bachelor’s and master’s of fine arts degrees in ceramics from Alfred University, College of Ceramics, Alfred, N.Y. He taught ceramics at Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, Mass., and Keane College in Elizabeth, N.J. In 1980, he started his own ceramics consulting firm and has contributed articles to Ceramics Monthly, Pottery Making Illustrated, Clay Times, Studio Potter and Craft Horizons, in addition to Pottery Production Practices. His books, What Every Pottery Should Know ($31.45) and Safety in the Ceramics Studio ($25.45) are available from Jeff Zamek/Ceramics Consulting Services, 6 Glendale Woods Dr., Southampton, MA 01073. | 2019-04-20T12:17:06Z | https://www.ceramicindustry.com/articles/87496-ppp-stoneware-clay-body-formulas---part-2-the-perfect-body |
A preacher reflects on a local mass shooting.
Editor’s Note: Originally published in 2012, the following is adapted from a sermon preached in response to the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado by author and apologist Lee Strobel on Sunday, July 22, at Cherry Hills Community Church in Highlands Ranch, Colorado.
It's already being called the worst mass shooting in American history: 70 people shot by a gunman, 12 of them killed, while they were watching the midnight showing of a new movie. It all happened just 21 miles from where we're sitting. There are no words to describe the anguish being felt by those who are suffering today; our heart and prayers have, and will, go out to them. There are so many tragic stories, so much pain. And many people are asking the question, "Why? Why did God allow this?"
This has been a heart-rending summer for Colorado. First came the wildfires, which ravaged the houses of hundreds of our neighbors, prompting many of them to ask the same question, "Why?"
And those two tragic events are just added to the everyday pain and suffering being experienced in individual lives. There's illness, abuse, broken relationships, betrayal, sorrow, injuries, disappointment, heartache, crime and death. And perhaps you've been asking the question too. "Why? Why me? Why now?"
That "why" question is not a new one; it goes back thousands of years. It was asked in the Old Testament by Job and the writers of the Psalms, and it was especially relevant during the 20th Century, where we witnessed two World Wars, the Holocaust, genocides in the Soviet Union and China, devastating famines in Africa, the killing fields of Cambodia, the emergence of AIDS, the genocide in Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. And the 21st Century didn't start any better. There was 9/11 and now the Syrian slaughters, and on and on. Why do all of these horrific things happen if there's a loving and powerful God? Why do bad things happen to good people?
Several years ago, I commissioned a national survey and asked people what question they'd ask if they could only ask God one thing. The number one response was: "Why is there suffering in the world?"
Maybe you've never asked why our world is infected with pain and suffering, but my guess is you will when they strike you or a loved one with full force. And Jesus said they are coming. Unlike some other religious leaders who wrote off pain and suffering as mere illusions, Jesus was honest about the inevitability of suffering. In John 16:33 he said, "You will have suffering in this world." He didn't say you might—he said it is going to happen.
But why? If you ask me, "Why did God allow the gunman to spray the Aurora movie theater with gunfire just two days ago?" the only answer I can honestly give consists of four words: "I do not know."
I don't have God's mind; I don't share his perspective. In 1 Corinthians 13:12 we're told, "Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity."
Someday we'll see with clarity, but for now things are foggy. We can't understand everything from our finite perspective. And frankly, the people suffering from the Aurora tragedy don't need a big theological treatise right now; any intellectual response is going to seem trite and inadequate. What they desperately need now is the very real and comforting presence of Jesus Christ in their lives. And I'm so grateful that so many churches and ministries of this community are helping them experience that.
Yet it's still important to grapple with the question of why God allows suffering in our lives. Even though we can't understand everything about it, I believe we can understand some things. Let me give you an analogy.
Once Leslie and I were driving from Chicago to Door County, Wisconsin, which is that thumb-shaped peninsula that juts into Lake Michigan. We were driving up the highway in the dark, when it started raining heavily and we hit dense fog. I could barely see the white stripe on the edge of the road. I couldn't stop because I was afraid someone might come along and rear-end us. It was frightening!
But then a truck appeared in front of us and we could clearly see his taillights through the fog. He apparently had fog lamps in front, because he was traveling at a confident and deliberate pace, and I knew if we could just follow those taillights, we'd be headed in the right direction.
The same is true in understanding why there is tragedy and suffering in our lives. We may not be able to make out all the details of why certain things happen, but there are some key biblical truths that can illuminate some points of light for us. And if we follow those lights, they will lead us toward some conclusions that I believe can help satisfy our hearts and souls.
The first point of light: God is not the creator of evil and suffering.
This answers the question you hear so often: "Why didn't God merely create a world where tragedy and suffering didn't exist?" The answer is: He did! Genesis 1:31 says: "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good."
When my daughter was little, she had a doll with a string in the back, and when you pulled it the doll said, "I love you." Did that doll love my daughter? Of course not. It was programmed to say those words. Real love always involves a choice.
So in order for us to experience love, God bestowed on us free will. But unfortunately, we humans have abused our free will by rejecting God and walking away from him. And that has resulted in the introduction of evil into the world.
Some people ask, "Couldn't God have foreseen all of this?" and no doubt he did. But look at it this way. Many of you are parents. Even before you had children, couldn't you foresee that there was the very real possibility they may suffer disappointment or pain or heartache in life, or that they might even hurt you and walk away from you? Of course—but you still had kids. Why? Because you knew there was also the potential for tremendous joy and deep love and great meaning.
God knew we'd rebel against him, but he also knew many people would choose to follow him and have a relationship with him and spend eternity in heaven with him. And it was all worth it for that, even though it would cost his son great pain and suffering to achieve our redemption. So as we ponder the mystery of pain and evil, we need to be mindful that God did not create them.
The second point of light: Though suffering isn't good, God can use it to accomplish good.
In Romans 8:28 the Bible promises, "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."
Notice the verse doesn't say God causes evil and suffering, just that he promises to cause good to emerge. And notice that the verse doesn't say we all will see immediately or even in this life how God has caused good to emerge from a bad circumstance. Remember, we only see things dimly in this world. And God doesn't make this promise to everyone. He makes the solemn pledge that he will take the bad circumstances that befall us and cause good to emerge if we're committed to following him.
You might say, "No, he can't bring good out of my circumstance. The harm was too great, the damage was too extreme, the depth of my suffering has been too much."
But if you doubt God's promise, listen to what a wise man once said to me: "God took the very worst thing that has ever happened in the history of the universe—deicide, or the death of God on the cross—and turned it into the very best thing that has happened in history of universe: the opening up of heaven to all who follow him." If God can take the very worst circumstance imaginable and turn it into the very best situation possible, can he not take the negative circumstances of your life and create something good from them?
The third point of light: The day is coming when suffering will cease and God will judge evil.
Many people wonder: "If God has the power to eradicate evil and suffering, then why doesn't he do it?"
But there's a flaw built into the question. Just because he hasn't done it yet doesn't mean he won't do it. I wrote my first novel last year. What if someone read only half of it and then slammed it down and said, "Well, Lee did a terrible job with that book. There are too many loose ends with the plot. He didn't resolve all the issues with the characters." I'd say, "Hey! You only read half the book!"
The Bible says that the story of this world isn't over yet. It says the day will come when sickness and pain will be eradicated and people will be held accountable for the evil they've committed. Justice will be served in a perfect way. That day will come, but not yet. In other words, we've only read half the book!
So what's holding God up? One answer is that he's actually delaying the consummation of history in anticipation that more people will put their trust in him and spend eternity in heaven. He's delaying everything out of his love for humanity. Second Peter 3:9 reads: "The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance."
To me, that's evidence of a loving God, that he would care that much for us.
The fourth point of light: Our suffering will pale in comparison to the good things God has in store for his followers.
In Romans 8:18 we read: "I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us."
Remember these words were written by the apostle Paul, who suffered through beatings and stonings and shipwrecks and imprisonments and rejection and hunger and thirst and homelessness—far more pain that most of us will ever have to endure.
I certainly don't want to minimize pain and suffering, but it helps if we take a long-term perspective. Think of it this way. Let's say that on the first day of 2012, you had an awful day. You had an emergency root canal at the dentist—and then ran out of pain-killers. You crashed your car, and had no insurance. Your stock portfolio took a nosedive. Your spouse got sick. A friend betrayed you. From start to finish, it was like the title of that children's book: Alexander & the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
But then every other day of the year was just incredibly terrific. Your relationship with God is close and real and intimate. A friend wins the lottery and gives you $100 million. You get promoted at work to your dream job. Time magazine puts your photo on its cover as "The Person of the Year." You have your first child and he's healthy and strong. Your marriage is idyllic, your health is fabulous, and you have a six-month vacation in Tahiti.
Then next New Year's Day someone asks, "So, how was your 2012?" You'd probably say, "It was great; it was wonderful!" You'd remember that first bad day. You might think, that was a bad day, no denying it. It was difficult at the time. But when I look at the totality of the year, when I put everything in context, it's been a great year. The 364 terrific days far outweigh the one bad day. That day just sort of fades away."
And maybe that's a good analogy for heaven. Listen to me—that is not to deny the reality of your pain in this life. It might be terrible. It might be chronic. My wife Leslie has a medical condition that puts her in pain every single day. Maybe you're suffering from a physical ailment or heartache at this very moment. But in heaven, after 354,484,545 days of pure bliss—and with an infinite more to come—if someone asked, "So, how has your existence been?", you'd instantly react by saying, "It has been absolutely wonderful! Words can't describe the joy and the delight and the fulfillment!"
It's like the story that British church leader Galvin Reid tells about meeting a young man who had fallen down a flight of stairs as a baby and shattered his back. He had been in and out of hospitals his whole life—and yet he made the astounding comment that he thinks God is fair. Reid asked him, "How old are you?" The boy said, "Seventeen." Reid asked, "How many years have you spend in hospitals?" The boy said, "Thirteen years." The pastor said with astonishment, "And you think that is fair?" And the boy replied: "Well, God has all eternity to make it up to me."
And he will. God promises a time when there will be no more crying, no more tears, no more pain and suffering, when we will be reunited with God in perfect harmony, forever. Let the words of 1 Corinthians 2:9 soak into your soul: "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him."
Finally, the fifth point of light: We decide whether to turn bitter or turn to God for peace and courage.
We've all seen examples of how the same suffering that causes one person to turn bitter, to reject God, to become hard and angry and sullen, can cause another person to turn to God, to become more gentle and more loving and more tender, willing to reach out to compassionately help other people who are in pain. Some who lose a child to a drunk driver turn inward in chronic rage and never-ending despair; another turns outward to help others by founding Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.
We make the choice to either run away from God or to run to him. And what happens if we run to him?
Above I quoted part of what Jesus said in John 16:33. Now let me give you the entire verse: "I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace. You will have suffering in this world. But be courageous! I have conquered the world."
In other words, he offers us the two very things we need when we're hurting: peace to deal with our present and courage to deal with our future. How? Because he has conquered the world! Through his own suffering and death, he has deprived this world of its ultimate power over you. Suffering doesn't have the last word anymore. Death doesn't have the last word anymore. God has the last word!
Let me finish the story of Leslie and I driving through the fog in Wisconsin. We were following the taillights of that truck when the fog slowly began to lift, the rain began to let up and we entered a town with some lights. Things were becoming clearer, we could see better, and as we rounded a curve, silhouetted against the night sky, guess what we saw? We saw the steeple of a church and the cross of Christ. After driving through the confusion of the fog for so long, that image struck me with poignancy I'll never forget.
It was through that cross that Jesus conquered the world for us. As a wise man once said to me, "God's ultimate answer to suffering isn't an explanation; it's the incarnation." Suffering is a personal problem; it demands a personal response. And God isn't some distant, detached, and disinterested deity; he entered into our world and personally experienced our pain. Jesus is there in the lowest places of our lives. Are you broken? He was broken, like bread, for us. Are you despised? He was despised and rejected of men. Do you cry out that you can't take any more? He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Did someone betray you? He was sold out. Are your most tender relationships broken? He loved and he was rejected. Did people turn from you? They hid their faces from him as if he were a leper. Does He descend into all of our hells? Yes, he does. From the depths of a Nazi death camp, Corrie ten Boom wrote these words: "No matter how deep our darkness, he is deeper still." Every tear we shed becomes his tear.
God does much more than sympathize with you in your troubles. After all, any close friend can do that. Any close friend can sit beside you and comfort you and empathize with you. No, Jesus is much closer than your closest friend. If you've put your trust in him, then he is in you. And, therefore, your sufferings are his sufferings; your sorrow is his sorrow.
So when tragedy strikes, as it will; when suffering comes, as it will; when you're wrestling with pain, as you will—and when you make the choice to run into his arms, here's what you're going to discover: you'll find peace to deal with the present, you'll find courage to deal with your future, and you'll find the incredible promise of eternal life in heaven. | 2019-04-23T08:36:51Z | https://www.christianitytoday.com/pastors/2012/july-online-only/doesgodallowtragedy.html |
Red-naped Sapsucker - this poor little tree hardly had a square inch without a sap well on it. I'm surprised it looks like a perfectly healthy tree.
Some friends of ours have a family cabin in Round Valley, Idaho. Round Valley is just north of Smiths Ferry and just south of Cascade. I had never been birding in this area before, but it certainly merits the title of an Idaho Birding Hotspot.
Jason Talbot, his wife Colleen, and their seven cute little girls invited my family to spend a long weekend with them with all kinds of side adventures which will be featured on the next couple of posts. Jason was a birder as a kid and hanging around me has reawakened the monster in him. The birding around their cabin was spectacular!
The first night there, we did a little owling by playing a variety of owl calls using Stokes Field Guide to Bird Songs. Within a few minutes, we had a Northern Saw-whet Owl calling back to us. It approached to with 20 feet of the cabin deck, but we never did see it.
Mountain Chickadee - notice the white eyebrow? That is the quickest and easiest way to i.d. this fun chickadee.
My quest was to see my first Pileated Woodpecker which Jason had recently seen in the yard of the cabin. That first morning we heard the infrequent heavy drumming along with the distinct call of the Pileated Woodpecker. We did our best to follow the sound through the woods until we came to the no trespassing sign on property line. We knew we were close. If we could just see through that one clump of trees...then the neighbors two dogs detected us and starting barking up a storm. The barking sent one Pileated Woodpecker flying up out of the trees, offering me my only positive though unsatisfying glimpse at my target bird. We did not hear or see Pileateds the rest of the trip. The other birds were so wonderful that I did not leave disappointed.
Three young Red-naped Sapsuckers in the one little tree.
Saturday morning was very birdy. I added Least Flycatcher to my life list. There were several warblers moving through the area, Lincoln's Sparrows and even Ruffed Grouse. Saturday evening however was very light on bird numbers, but still yielded one of those spectacular birding moments that I'll never forget.
We walked along the dirt road loop that encompassed three properties including the Talbot's cabin. At the far edge of the loop we watched a couple Swainson's Thrushes among the pines and aspens at the lower end of a lush ravine. Suddenly, a bird flew across the dirt road twenty yards ahead of us and perched on a pine bough right at eye level. I put my binoculars on it and stammered out a loud whisper "V - Va - Va - VARIED THRUSH!"
"No way! You're kidding, right? Where is it?" Jason questioned thinking I was just playing a mean joke.
The Varied Thrush was at the top of Jason's list for birds he definitely wanted to see. I had had two previous in-flight sightings of this really awesome bird, but nothing even 1/100th as amazing as what I was now seeing. I really wanted Jason to see it before it flew off. I struggled to find landmarks by which to guide him to it. Those frustrating seconds felt like eternity, but finally Jason located the Varied Thrush in his optics. The bird was very obliging and remained perched for well over a minute. We enjoyed long looks and burned the image into hearts and minds. It was in perfect textbook plumage, just like the cover of the western Sibley guide. I didn't have my camera on me, which I kind of lament, but then again, perhaps the moment was to sacred to photograph anyway (plus the lighting was terrible). A day later, both Jason and I are still enjoying the afterglow of such a great sighting.
Having fun on the huge swing. That first drop makes your stomach come up through your throat.
Me with my youngest Claire.
A male Brewer's Blackbird buffeted by a breeze.
As a Mormon boy, I delighted in the pioneer story of the Miracle of the Gulls. In 1848, not even a full year after the vanguard group of pioneers first arrived in the Salt Lake valley, crickets came in hordes devouring the much depended upon crops. The pioneers used divers methods to kill and discourage the crickets, but the onslaught was so great that they could only put their trust in God to deliver them from this plague. Gulls came in great numbers and began gorging themselves on the crickets. When they had filled themselves, they regurgitated and continued eating until finally eliminating the crickets. Thus the California Gull became the state bird of Utah and those nasty crickets are now known as "Mormon Crickets".
Well, we've been experiencing our own plague of two-striped grasshoppers this year. Would I be witness to another avian miracle?!
On the heels of the grasshoppers have come great flocks of Brewer's Blackbirds gorging themselves on those pesky hoppers. It is really funny to watch the Brewer's flitting about chasing after grasshoppers from their perch on the ground. Their aerial dexterity is impressive, though not always successful and it's comical to watch each attempt at capture. Brewer's Blackbirds are persistent and not too many grasshoppers, once targeted, escape to survive.
Observing the Brewer's Blackbird's method of dispatching a grasshopper is most interesting. I must admit that the torturous episodes vicariously gratify my desire for revenge on these locusts.
Permit me to expound: The grasshopper is snatched in the bill, wounded a bit, then intentionally dropped. It is then grasped in the bill again, but by one of the big powerful hopping legs. At this point it is shaken and flung about until the body detaches from the leg. The fallen hopper is then picked up again by the other large leg and the whipping about is repeated until the hopping appendages are completely removed. At this point the birds will sometimes mash them up a bit more on a rock and then swallow them. You see, getting those large legs off and a little lubrication from spilled guts helps them slide down the gullet without resistance. Awesome!!!
Now if only my miracle had come two weeks earlier my backyard would still have at least a few living plants.
When we first moved back to Idaho three and a half years ago, Eurasian Collared-Doves were just starting to be noticed in the Treasure Valley area of Idaho. I lived in Star, Idaho at the time and about 8 miles west was a reliable spot to see them in Middleton at the Oregon Trail Church. About a year and a half ago, we moved to Avimor, in the foothills north of Eagle and Boise. I've been wondering how soon I'd see Eurasian Collared-Doves at Avimor. Well...they are very close now. For the last couple of months I've been seeing a couple of them on Beacon Light Rd, close to Highway 55. That means they are now only about 5 miles away.
I had previously blogged about Eurasion Collared-Dove expansion in North America, but recent IBLE chatter got me wondering about how they have expanded across Idaho. Here is an animated map that I made using eBird reported sightings.
The animated map below is focusing only the the Treasure Valley area of Idaho, specifically Canyon and Ada Counties. Watch for my E. Collared-Dove sighting north of Eagle to pop up on the 2010 map.
Some of this data may be slightly skewed due to increased numbers of eBird users in the last few years, but based on anecdotal evidence, the expansion of Eurasian-collared Doves pretty well matches what the animated maps are showing us.
Many birders, and even old-time farmers, express hatred and frustration at these new birds to our area. I'm not sure why they hate them? From what I can tell they aren't displacing any other species of birds, as do European Starlings. Perhaps they can be a nuisance like Rock Pigeons, but they seem to act more like Mourning Doves. If the reason for disliking them is that 'they shouldn't be here', well, neither should all the really cool vagrants that we get so excited about. Looks like we probably have more Eurasian Collared-Doves and more European Starlings than Europe does. Maybe its time to drop the geography from their names on the official bird lists in North America.
For what its worth...I think Collared-Doves are neat looking. They are larger than Mourning Doves, lighter in color. They also have the big white tail feathers which are fan-shaped in flight rather than wedge shaped. That black partial collar also distinguishes them from other dove species.
Anyway...we still may have a few more months or years before they are present across the whole Treasure Valley. I expect that they'll be at Avimor by next Spring.
Idaho Camera Birding Photo Competition - This November!
I just wanted to give a quick notice to all you Idaho bird photographers, including guests to Idaho, that round two of the Idaho Camera Birding Photo Competition begins soon. I invite you to take the next couple of months to get out there across scenic Idaho to enjoy nature and take pictures of birds! Also, I am seeking out nice prizes for the runner's up, so hopefully more incentive to share your bird photography with us.
Please check out the Photo Competition Page of this website for the details and to see last May's results and judges comments to help you capture a winning image.
A small change from the last round is a limit two photos per entrant, rather than three. Photos will be due on the Friday, November 26th, 2010 - the day after Thanksgiving.
We had a late snow that caused all kinds of lethargy among Lazuli Buntings and Western Tanagers making this a very lucky close-up. The poor little guy was so cold!
Rufous Hummingbird (male) chillin' in the shade earlier this Spring in my backyard.
About a week ago I posted about the Hummingbird Banding in Pearl, Idaho. One of the hummers captured was a recapture, a bird that had been previously banded! Recapturing is the whole point of banding, right? Scientists can learn a lot by recapturing banded birds...like changes in plumage, weight, fat stores, migration routes, etc.
Fred Bassett informs me that the recaptured hummer was an adult female Black-chinned Hummingbird that was originally banded in October 2009 in Slidell, Louisiana. I didn't even know they had BC's in the south, but Fred says he averages 30 or so BC Hummers in the Southern states during the winter and eBird reports confirm it.
If the hummer followed the most direct route on the highways, which they don't, that would have been over 2,200 miles. Now think about this...this little lady BC Hummer was probably migrating south from somewhere north of Idaho, so it had probably traveled much further. How cool is that!?
Fred Bassett sharing his knowledge of hummingbirds with loads of curious adults and kids.
Another exciting recent recapture story has been making the circuit of birder's email inboxes...A sub-bander of Fred Bassett, Fred Dietrich, banded a female Rufous Hummingbird in Tallahassee, Florida on 13 January 2010. It was recaptured by Kate McLaughlin on 28 June 2010 in Chenega Bay, Alaska! That is a migration of at least 3,500 miles and now holds the record for the longest documented hummingbird migration. Amazing! To see pictures of this record holder, check out Fred D's photo site here.
Growing up here in Idaho we always just called these "hummingbird moths" as they zip around from flower to flower with rapid wing beats like a hummingbird. The above shot is completely unedited, not even cropped. I like how the wild roses pass through the picture framing the bottom left and upper right corners with the Sphinx Moth right in the middle.
Two-stripped Grasshopper on Wooly Mullein plant.
These grasshoppers are the bane of my existence right now as they have destroyed my yard.
Great Black Wasp and some other little fly.
While I was taking an evening walk with my kids, a pair of Barn Swallows hunted flying insects nearby and posed for a few photos.
Lark Sparrows eating grasshoppers - Yay! I watched as they scratched the grasshoppers against the brush, I assume to take off the strong and tough hind legs.
Spotted Sandpiper without any spots. This is the non-breeding plumage. Check out this previous blog post for a comparison.
Young Cedar Waxwing - this was the first time I have noticed them. They looked kind of funky-cool through my binoculars, but were too far for a great photo. At least you get the idea that they are different.
This is a young American Robin whipping a caterpillar up in the air to eat it. It was fun to watch. It seemed to mash up the caterpiller on the branch, or at least rub off some of the spiny hairs. I wished the photo would have turned out better...it was such a cool looking tree snag and what was happening was really fascinating.
- Poison Hemlock is a very invasive noxious weed that we battle each year in the riparian areas...we just need our neighbors up and down stream from us to battle them with our same vigor.
Banded Garden Spider - I love these cool looking spiders, especially because they are catching loads of grasshoppers. We are having the peak year in the seven-year grasshopper cycle. They have killed almost all my landscaping, even having devoured two of my three evergreen trees. I didn't even know they ate those!
I'm not sure which moth or butterfly this caterpillar turns into, but it sure was freaky-cool! If you know what it is, please tell me!
This image gives my wife the willies. Again, I don't know what kind of spider it is and my searches in books and online have left me wondering still. It reminds me of Aragog, the giant creepy Harry Potter spider. This guy was only the size of a dime and so I used my macro settings for this close-up. What made it worse for my wife...while watching me edit these scary spider photos, we heard noises in the air supply vents in our ceiling. Turns out that a deer mouse had gotten into our air ducts and we could see it squirming around up there trying to get out. It was a long and dreadful night of little sleep as it made noises all night. I'm not sure that I want to inject poison into the air supply of the whole house and I am also afraid that mouse droppings/urine will infect us all with the hauntavirus. The air vent over our bed is still closed, and probably forever will be!
Here is a pair of those dang Two-stripped Grasshoppers, just making more of those plant-devastating pests. "I hope that Garden Spider or a bird eats the both of ya before ya have any more kids!"
Western Yellow-jackets doing what they do best, making their paper mache nests in the least convenient to humans places as possible. This is on the stone ledge of the gazebo overlooking my neighborhood ponds. Several neighborhood kids have already been attacked by them.
Small alpine lakes near Crimson Lake as seen looking down from the high mountain ridge. These lakes are on the opposite side of the ridge from Knapp Lakes where we had our base camp.
See that blue lake with snow and ice still on it? I jumped in and quickly out of it...twice! This previously unnamed lake is now affectionately identified on Google Maps as Double-dip Lake. A spectacular waterfall runs from this lake down to Crimson Lake, which I dubbed "Reeve's Falls" for Mike Reeves who also took the polar bear plunge into Double-dip Lake.
I'm one of the adult leaders for a group of Varsity Scouts based in Eagle, Idaho. Each year we plan an event called "High Adventure" with the goal of doing something challenging in the outdoors for a few days. This year in mid-July we did a backpacking trip to Knapp Lakes, a cluster of several alpine lakes about 20 miles west of Stanley, Idaho in the Challis National Forest. It required an eight-mile hike in, with several more miles of hiking to other area lakes. It was literally a "high" adventure.
Jason Talbot, the president of our youngmen's group, gets all the credit for these photos. I left my camera at home. I'm a big enough guy as it is and couldn't convince myself to pack in the weight of my nice new camera and risk ruining it.
View of the mountains from the trail. At this point we had to go cross-country as no official trails lead to Knapp Lakes. We just knew from the map that Knapp Lakes were somewhere out there in those trees at the base of those mountains.
Below is the lake where we set up base camp at about 8000 feet above sea level. Spotted Sandpipers serenaded us from all around the lake's edge. Olive-sided Flycatchers and Swainson's Thrushes joined the evening chorus. After a few hours on the trail, a few of us were reinvigorated by a plunge into the chilly waters (but significantly warmer than the lake I'd jump in the next day). An Osprey kept watch from an old pine snag.
The fishing at this lake was a lot of fun for the guys. Rainbow Trout and Cut-bows (hybrids with Cuthroat) were caught in large numbers. We ate a lot of delicious fish each day.
We awoke to a beautiful morning mist over the still waters. A Clark's Nutcracker called nearby.
On the second day we summited the mountains above our camp "to see what we could see". Here is a view from the rocky ridge line overlooking some sister lakes. Traversing that rock on such a steep pitch was one of the scariest things I have ever done.
Here's me on the ridge above Double-dip Lake with my trusty binoculars strapped to my chest at all times. Notice where the ice berg is? Now go back to the picture at the top of the post and see where it was when I swam in it. Kind of cool that we documented it moving around. It must have been about a meter thick and mostly below water.
The view from Crimson Lake back at the ridge we had just come over. That was a hard climb; about 1000-1500 ft of altitude change.
Here is a view from the top of the ridge down on those sister lakes pictured earlier. You can see a third lake in the back left. We climbed down through the trees here rather than risk life and limb on the rocky face again.
Here's me...the caboose...along with X-man, Xavier Powell, hiking through a mountain meadow on the way back. We were the two biggest guys and therefore the slowest of the bunch. Though Jason easily is the best and fastest hiker in our group, he often hung back with us to see the birds with me. We called ourselves the "nature appreciation group". It was fun to unexpectedly run into fellow birders Rob and Karyn Miller as they tandem mountain biked into Knapp Lakes as part of their yearly tradition celebrating their anniversary.
Jason Talbot, a birder as a kid, who by association with me is a born-again birder, also an avid hiker, and fly-fisherman. He has gained the reputation for taking scouts on rigorous character-building adventures known among us as "Talbot death marches".
So, we saw some spectacular scenery that not too many have beheld in person. I got eaten alive by skeeters. There were some cool birds along the way too. Most importantly, I didn't die and only had some moderate soreness. I already can't wait for next year's High Adventure! | 2019-04-21T18:41:00Z | http://www.birdingisfun.com/2010/08/ |
Here are some of the most frequently asked questions (FAQs) we receive about making an application to Birkbeck as an international student.
If you can't find the answer to your question here, then please contact us.
Can I submit an application if I do not meet the entry requirements? You can find the entry requirements for all of our courses on our online prospectus. If you are unsure if you meet the entry requirements for your course, please submit an application online, via the Apply Now button on your chosen course, and include all details of your qualifications and any supporting documents.
I have overseas qualifications, can I study in the UK? Yes, Birkbeck considers all applications and we accept many overseas qualifications. Submit your application and we will assess your qualification. Please remember to include the title of the qualification in the original language, any certificates and transcripts you have, as well as a certified translation into English, if necessary.
Can you assess my qualifications without an application? No, we can only assess your qualifications via your application and supporting documents, so please apply first.
Can I study a part-time degree or take a Short Course? If you require a Tier 4 visa to study in the UK then you cannot undertake a part-time course, as Tier 4 visas are only available for full-time students. If you don't require a Tier 4 visa to study in the UK and you have leave to remain, then you can take a part-time course at Birkbeck.
I have not taken an IELTS examination yet, will this affect my application? No, you can apply to Birkbeck before taking your IELTS examination, but if you are offered a place, it may be conditional on achieving the required IELTS score for your course. IELTS scores are specified on each course page within our online prospectus.
Do I require an Academic Technology Approval Scheme (ATAS) certificate? UK, EU and EEA students do not require an ATAS certificate. If you do require ATAS clearance, this will be specified in your offer letter from Birkbeck. You can apply for a certificate online, via the UK government.
I am in the process of renewing my passport or visa, can I still submit an application? Yes, you can still make your application. You should submit a copy of your previous passport or visa with your application and then please email us a copy of your renewed passport or visa once you have received it.
I have not received my academic documents from my previous institution, can I still submit my application? Yes, you can apply to Birkbeck without documentation, but please include as much information as possible, including your final grade, on your application. You must provide copies of your transcript and certificate as a condition of your offer to study at Birkbeck.
Which documents do I need to submit with my application? Here is a comprehensive list of the documents you need to provide in support of your application. You may not need to submit all of the documents listed here, but we suggest you submit all documents listed here that are relevant to your application. We will contact you if you need to submit anything further.
Your full residential address including zip/postcode.
A copy of your passport, which must be current and valid.
A copy of your current UK visa.
A valid IELTS test report form (if applicable).
A-level certificates (if you are under 21 and have not applied for a full-time programme via UCAS).
A transcript of credit obtained at another institution, if applying for entry with credit.
A copy of your original language Bachelor’s degree final certificate and transcript that clearly shows: your name; the name of the academic institution; your course title; and confirmation of the award. A certified English translation must be included if the document is not in English.
A copy of your original language Master’s degree final certificate and transcript that clearly shows: your name; the name of the academic institution; your course title; and confirmation of the award. A certified English translation must be included if the document is not in English.
A copy of your Bachelor’s degree interim transcript which clearly shows: your name; the title of the qualification; and the institution. A certified English translation must also be provided if the document is not in English.
How long will it take to receive a decision on my application? Around four to six weeks. You will usually receive a confirmation email, with your applicant reference number, within 48 hours of submitting your application. International Student Administration will initially process your application and then forward it to the academic department for a final decision.
I haven’t received log-in information and/or a confirmation email after submitting my application. Please contact IT services if you are having technical difficulties. Check the status of your application online and, if necessary, find your department and then use the Contact Us page to email or phone them, or use the Contact Us link on your course page online.
How do I request feedback if my application is rejected? Please contact the academic department directly. Find your department and then use the Contact Us page to email or phone them, or you can use the Contact Us link on your course page online.
Can I submit more than one application? Yes, but you can only enrol on one programme of study.
I would like to change the course I have applied for. You will need to withdraw your application and then submit a new application for the course you are interested in.
I have missed information/supporting documents from my application. Please log in to your application and upload the missing information and/or documents.
I would like to start my course in January or April. All of our full-time undergraduate courses start in October only. Some of our Master's and MPhil/PhD courses offer entry in January and/or April - check the course page online for start dates. If your course offers January and/or April start dates then you should contact the academic department directly. Find your department and then use the Contact Us page to email or phone them, or you can use the Contact Us link on the relevant course page online.
My name is incorrect on my application and/or correspondence from Birkbeck. If you think your name has been misspelt, then please email us. Your name must match the name on your identification documents (such as your passport). If you have legally changed your name, we can accept the following as proof: Change of Name Deed Poll; passport; or a Marriage Certificate. If you haven't legally changed your name, or you cannot supply one of the documents named here, then we are unable to change your name in our records.
I now live in the UK, so do I need to provide an overseas address? Yes, for visa purposes you must provide a full overseas address.
How do I update my home address and/or email? Please log in to your application to amend these details. We correspond frequently by email, so amend your email address as soon as possible, to avoid missing any important messages from us.
How do I accept my offer? Master's and MPhil/PhD applicants should log in to your application to accept your offer.
How long can I take before I respond to your offer? If we don't hear from you within six weeks, we may withdraw your offer. It is better to respond to your offer as soon as possible, letting us know about anything that is delaying your decision (for example, you are waiting to receive an offer from another department at Birkbeck).
I would like to defer starting my course. You can defer starting your course for one year. Master's and MPhil/PhD applicants should log in to your application and select 'Accept and defer'. If you have already accepted your offer, please email us.
How long do I have to meet the conditions specified in a conditional offer? To ensure your visa is processed in time, we recommend you fulfil your conditions as soon as possible.
What's the difference between academic and non-academic conditions? Your offer may include academic and/or non-academic conditions, which you must meet before you can enrol at Birkbeck. Academic conditions are set by the department that runs your course and are usually related to achieving a certain academic standard before you can begin your course (eg obtain a particular grade for the undergraduate course you are just finishing). Non-academic conditions are other conditions that you must meet before you can be issued with a Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies (CAS) number (eg provide a copy of your current passport).
I speak English, so why have I been asked to provide an IELTS score? The UK government requires us to ensure that students from certain non-English speaking countries hold a valid IELTS certificate.
The department gave me a verbal offer, so what next? An offer from Birkbeck can only be officially confirmed via a formal offer email from Registry Services.
Can I pay my fees via bank transfer? Yes, you can. Please contact us to arrange this.
Can I pay my fees in instalments? Yes, you can if you hold a UK bank account. Please contact us to arrange this.
Why has my fee status been set as Overseas? We thoroughly assess every application to determine the applicant's fee status. Overseas fee status is not only a matter of nationality and immigration status - there are other determining factors set by the UK government.
I would like to challenge my Overseas fee status. Please consult the UK government's information on fee status and determine the category you think you should be assigned. You should then contact us to request a reassessment.
My immigration status has changed, so will this affect my fee status? Residency status can affect your fee status, so you should consult the UK government's information on fee status and determine the category you think you should be assigned. You should then contact us if you think your fee status category has changed.
Are there any sources of funding I can apply for? You can find information about scholarships for international students on the international section of our website. Some of our postgraduate and MPhil/PhD courses also offer specific scholarships and bursaries - check the individual course online. Our Student Advice Service can also refer you to specialist advice and support.
Do I need a Tier 4 visa in order to study at Birkbeck? If you are not a citizen of an EU/EEA country and you are staying in the UK for longer than six months then yes, you will need a Tier 4 Visa. If you are staying for less than six months, you may need a Short-Term Study Visa. You can find more information on the international section of our website.
When should I apply for my visa? Once you have met all of the conditions specified in your offer then we will issue you with a Tier 4 Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies (CAS) Statement - you can then apply for your Visa. We cannot issue a CAS Statement more than three months before your course starts. You should not attempt to apply for your visa before you receive your CAS Statement from us.
When will I receive my CAS Statement? No more than three months before the start of your course. We will send you a draft CAS Statement and you should respond to all of the questions and provide all relevant information. If, at any stage of the process of issuing your CAS Statement, you find an error in the documentation, please contact us. Issuing a CAS statement can take up to five working days, so please wait before contacting us.
My offer is unconditional, so why haven't I received my CAS Statement yet? If you are sure that you have met all of the conditions of your offer - and you should check your offer letter carefully - then please contact us.
My immigration status has changed, so do I still need a Tier 4 Visa? You no longer need a Tier 4 Visa if you have obtained an EU/EEA passport or an alternative visa. If your immigration status changes, please contact us, with supporting documents, so that we can reassess your application.
There is an error on my CAS Statement. If, at any stage of the process of issuing your CAS Statement, you find an error in the documentation, then please contact us.
What is enrolment? Enrolment involves confirming your personal details online and paying your fees. It is different from Registration (see below). Read more about enrolling at Birkbeck.
When do I enrol? You will be invited to enrol at Birkbeck once you have your CAS. You should enrol before you start attending class - this is very important for visa purposes.
Can I change my course before enrolling? If you have been issued a CAS in order to get a Tier 4 Visa, you will have to wait until you are in the UK and you have registered your Tier 4 Visa before you can change course. If you have not received your CAS, you can submit a new application for the course you would like to change to.
I am having trouble logging in to enrol. If you have forgotten your password, or you have been invited to enrol but not issued with a password, you should visit My Birkbeck, where you can change your password or set one up.
Can I change my details during enrolment? If you request a change, the enrolment process will be put on hold. We will email you when you are able to log in and complete enrolment.
Can I cancel during enrolment? Undergraduates: please email us if you wish to reject your place and enter into UCAS Clearing. Master's and MPhil/PhD students: if you no longer wish to take up your place at Birkbeck, you should cancel your application online.
My enrolment is on hold while I arrange fee payment in person. Please contact the Fees Team and they can arrange your fee payment and open up enrolment to you again.
I am having difficulties choosing modules. Please contact the department that runs your course, via the Contact Us information on each department homepage, with any queries about modules.
What is registration? Registration involves bringing your original documents (passport, visa and academic records) for checking before you start your course. It is different from Enrolment (see above). You will be allocated a specific date/time for registering.
I have not received any information about registration. Please check the junk mail folder on your email, in case our email to you has been flagged as junk mail. Otherwise, please email us.
I missed my registration slot. If you miss your allocated registration session, please arrange another one via the link in the email invitation sent to you. You must register before the latest arrival date specified on your CAS Statement, otherwise your student status will be affected.
I don't have all of the documents I need for registration. Please attend your allocated registration session and a member of our team can advise you.
Do I have to register with the police? International students from particular countries are required to register with the police within seven days of arriving in the UK. If this requirement applies to you, it will be written in your visa sticker in your passport or decision letter. It is also necessary to inform the police within seven days of changing your UK address or if you extend your visa.
Students living in Greater London: you must register at the Overseas Visitors Records Office (OVRO). Birkbeck is able to help students living in Greater London register during September and October, thanks to an agreement with the Metropolitan Police. You will be given a letter confirming the registration process has begun and an appointment to visit the OVRO to pay for and collect your Police Registration Certificate. If you would like this help, contact the Birkbeck Liaison Officer (International).
Students living outside London: please contact your local police station to find out where to go.
If you are taking part in the Interim Process, you will be deemed as having satisfied your visa requirements - you will not receive any penalties for late registration.
After registration: The police will give you a Police Registration Certificate. Keep this safe and carry it with you when you travel and need to re-enter the UK or apply to renew your visa. Any changes in your circumstances must be reported within a specific time period.
If your passport expires while you are in the UK: you do not need to apply for a new visa. You will need to carry both passports when travelling if your visa is in the form of a sticker in your passport.
Report to your local police station in the UK, or complete an online crime/incident report.
You will get a Crime Reference Number, which is an important document.
Apply for a new passport at your embassy.
If your student visa was in the form of a sticker in your passport, you need to apply to transfer your visa in your previous passport to a Biometric Residence Permit (BRP) using a Transfer of Conditions (TOC) form.
Report your passport and/or BRP lost or stolen to the local police and obtain a police report.
Contact your embassy to obtain a temporary passport to return to the UK.
If your student visa was in the form of a sticker in your passport, you can apply to transfer your visa to your new passport by completing an online application form with the full fee. You do not need to provide a Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies (CAS) or evidence of funds and qualifications.
you will need to report this to the Home Office as soon as possible and then apply for a replacement using an Application for a Replacement Biometric Residence Permit form (BRP (RC)), within three months of the incident.
Let us know that you have reported the loss of your BRP. Our Visa Advice Service can assist you with making an application for a replacement.
If you do not apply for a replacement permit in time, you may be fined up to £1000 or have your permission to stay removed.
You will need to report this to the Home Office as soon as possible.
Please let us know as soon as possible that you have reported this loss to the Home Office. Our Visa Advice Service can assist you with this process.
You will then need to apply for a replacement BRP visa, in order to re-enter the UK. You do not need to provide a Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies (CAS) or evidence of funds and qualifications. However, you may need a confirmation of your student status.
When you return to the UK, you will then need to apply for a replacement of BRP using an Application for a Replacement Biometric Residence Permit form (BRP (RC)).
If you find the error before travelling to the UK, contact your visa application centre. Our Visa Advice Service can assist you with this process.
If you are in the UK, contact our Visa Advice Service for help with this process.
You can find term dates online.
The department that runs your course can provide all of the information you need about where and when your classes will be held and Moodle, our online learning environment. | 2019-04-26T16:16:03Z | http://www.bbk.ac.uk/international/international-faqs |
1. The Renault F1 ultimate test drive competition (the “Promotion”) is only open to UK residents (excluding Northern Ireland) who are minimum of 22 and maximum of 65 years old, must speak and understand English or French to a high level, must hold a full current and valid driving licence with no more than 6 points, must be between 1.55 metres and 1.80 metres in height, cannot weigh more than 14 stone 14lbs (95 kgs). The ‘Promotion’ excludes employees of Renault UK Ltd, their relatives, their agents and its dealer network, and anyone professionally connected with the competition. Proof of age and eligibility may be required. Contestants will be deemed to have accepted and agreed to be bound by these terms and conditions when entering the Promotion. Contestants will also be deemed to have accepted and agreed to be bound by the terms and conditions agreed by Renault UK LTD. and Renault Sport Racing Limited (RSR) found in appendix 1.
3. The Promotion will run from 11/07/2017 12:00 (GMT) (the “Opening Date”) to 30/09/2017 00:00 (GMT) (the “Closing Date”). To enter this Promotion, Contestants must visit a Renault UK dealer showroom and take a test drive in a Renault during the promotional period set-out above. Contestants will be able to enter this Competition via renault.co.uk/ultimatetestdrive. Once entered and a test drive booked, Contestants must take the test drive at their local Renault UK dealer (participating dealers only). The dealer will then mark the customer eligible and then enter them into the competition. Walk-in Contestants must take a test drive and then the dealer must enter the Contestant into the competition in order to be eligible. All entries to be received by the Closing Date. Any entries received after this date will be rejected.
4. The Promoter and/or its agents does not accept any responsibility whatsoever for any technical failure, regardless of cause, including, for example, equipment failure, network, server, computer hardware or software failure of any kind; which may restrict, delay or prevent the sending or receipt of your entry. Entries may not be sent in through agents or third parties. Incomplete entries will be disqualified and will not be counted.
5. If the Promoter has grounds to suspect any Contestant or third party of cheating, deception or fraudulent or unsportsmanlike-like conduct of any kind (including, without limitation, manipulating the promotion or any entry) the Promoter reserves the right (in its sole discretion) to disqualify any entrant, entry or person it reasonably believes to be responsible for, or associated with, such activity.
7. There will be 25 entries selected at random (by an independent 3rd party) from which 10 Contestants will be chosen by a judge (appointed by the Promoter) as to which Contestants have entered the best review of their test drive in a Renault (and which must be the original work of the Contestant and not infringe the rights of a third party). The 10 winning Contestants will win the Prize to experience a test drive in a Renault Sport Team Formula One™ Team car. As a condition of entry, the Contestants agree to assign the copyright in their review, and do all acts and execute all documents to vest the ownership in Work to the Promoter.
8. The Prize cannot be transferred, refunded or exchanged for a cash alternative. The Promoter reserves the right to substitute the Prize (or any part of it) for a prize or prizes of equivalent or greater monetary value if this is necessary for reasons beyond its control.
9. The Prize does not include personal travel insurance. This must be arranged by each winning Contestant. Any other costs incurred on top of what is included to those set out above and that are incidental to the fulfilment of the Prize are the responsibility of the winner.
11. The Promoter reserves the right to withdraw or amend the details of the Promotion in the event of unforeseen circumstances outside its reasonable control without liability to the Contestant, or if a winning Contestant is disqualified from the Prize for a breach in the terms and conditions of the Promotion.
12. There will be 10 winners plus 1 observatory guest each who will be randomly selected from all complete and eligible entries received by the Closing Date by an independent third party adjudicator within 1 working day of the Promotion Closing Date.
13. The decision of the Promoter is final and binding in all respects on all Contestants, and no correspondence will be entered into.
14. The winner will be notified within 3 working days of the Promotion Closing Date via an email message to the winner’s email address provided. If no reply is received within 72 hours a new winner will be chosen in accordance with the principle set out in Condition 7. No further compensation will be provided to the previous winner.
16. These Terms and Conditions shall be governed by the laws of England & Wales and the courts of England shall have exclusive jurisdiction to settle any dispute or claim that arises out of or in connection with the Promotion.
18. The Promoter will send the name and county of the winner to anyone who writes within one month after the Closing Date of the competition. To request the name and county of the winner, please send a stamped addressed envelope to: Renault UK Ltd, The Rivers Office Park, Denham Way, Maple Cross, Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, WD3 9YS.
Promoter and Data Controller: Renault UK Limited. Registered office: The Rivers Office Park, Denham Way, Maple Cross, Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire WD3 9YS.
The following terms and conditions will apply without exception to all bookings made by RSR’s commercial partners (“Partners”), whether as a draw-down against a contractual entitlement under a sponsorship rights package or as a purchase, at preferential partner rate (“Partner Rate”) of places (or of additional places over and above a contractual entitlement) on any Renault Sport Racing Driving Experience event organised by Renault Sport Racing Limited (“RSR”) during the 2017 Formula One Championship season (an “Event”). Please note that these terms and conditions shall also apply to each participant booked by a Partner (except for provisions relating to payment and/cancellation, which solely apply to the Partner making the booking with RSR).
Please note that RSR may appoint third parties to assist with the organisation, logistics and running of all on-track activities during the day. Such third parties shall act as representatives of RSR and shall have authority, on behalf of RSR, to make all necessary decisions in operating and managing any and all aspects of the Event.
provides a copy of his/her driving licence and returns the signed ‘Release/Waiver and Assumption of Risk’ Form (“Release Form”) by post or email to RSR no later than 14 days prior to Event.
1.2 Participation in some or all of the on-track activities will be refused to Participants who have failed to submit a copy of their driving licence, a signed Release Form and a duly completed medical questionnaire as required in paragraph 1.1. No refund or compensation will be available.
2.2 Expectant mothers will be required to submit a Doctor’s Certificate.
2.3 If it becomes apparent at any point before or during the Event that a Participant does not meet any one of these criteria, RSR reserves the right to refuse his/her participation in all or part of the on-track activities scheduled for the day. No refund or compensation will be available.
3.1 Each Event package includes accommodation in a local hotel for one night, an evening meal on the night of arrival, breakfast at the hotel on the morning of the Event, lunch at the circuit and, subject to paragraph 4.1, all local transfers from airport-hotel-track and back to the airport. Under no circumstances shall RSR be liable for any personal expenses or ancillary costs incurred (e.g. mini-bar, use of hotel facilities etc.) or for any damage caused to the hotel by any Participant or guests during their stay. Any such expenses must be settled by Participants or guests when checking-out. All return flights or other travel costs to and from France shall also be the responsibility of Participants or that of the Partner making the booking (as appropriate).
4.1 All travel arrangements and costs (including visas if required) shall be the responsibility of Renault UK. Participants/guests are requested to arrive at Marseille airport the day before the Event they are booked on between 4pm and 6pm to benefit from the local transfer services offered by RSR as part of the package. Participants/guests with flights scheduled for earlier or later arrivals shall make their own way at their own cost to the hotel.
4.2 No refund and/or compensation will be made in respect of any Participant’s or guest’s inability to attend any part or all of the Event booked due to transport/travel issues.
5.1 Each Participant agree and acknowledge that all on-track elements of the Event shall be high risk and inherently dangerous.
5.2 In order to ensure the Participants’ safety and well-being at all times, Participants must adhere to all health and safety instructions and/or regulations at the circuit, attend all briefings and comply with all instructions given by driving instructors and briefing staff engaged by RSR.
5.3 For safety reasons, RSR will provide all protective clothing and equipment required for the Event. Participants must wear this at all times as required by RSR. For the avoidance of doubt, Participants will not be permitted to wear any protective clothing or use any equipment other than that provided by RSR.
5.4 If at any time RSR deems that a Participant is: (a) unable to adhere to or has not adhered to instructions or health and safety rules; (b) unable to remain in full control of his/her car; (c) behaving in an inappropriate or unacceptable manner; (d) under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs; or (e) if he/she makes contact with another car or is involved in an accident, RSR reserves the right to curtail the relevant on-track session the Participant is taking part in and/or refuse, for safety reasons, to allow him/her to drive the high speed F1 single-seater.
RSR will provide all passes and accreditation required to give Participants/guests access to the circuit. Participants/guests must comply with the terms and conditions of each and every pass and accreditation issued, failing which he/she may be removed from the circuit. No refund and/or compensation will be available should a Participant not be able to participate in the scheduled Event activities as a result.
7.1 Guests attend the Event as spectators at the circuit and do so entirely at their own risk.
7.2 All accompanying guests will have access to the circuit but will not be allowed to participate in any on-track and briefing activities during the Event.
7.3 Renault UK and Participants must ensure that their guests comply with all health and safety requirements at the circuit, the terms and conditions of the accreditation supplied to them and any other instructions given to them by RSR.
7.4 The guest package includes an invitation to the cocktail reception and evening meal on the night of arrival, breakfast at the hotel on the morning of the Event, lunch at the circuit and, subject to paragraph 4.1, all local transfers from airport-hotel-track and back to the airport.
8.1 RSR reserves the right to cancel any Event if there are insufficient Participants, in which event notice of not less than 14 days will be given and the affected Partners will be given priority booking for a future event.
9.1 RSR will not be liable for any failure or delay in performance of an Event arising from or attributable to acts, events, omissions or accidents beyond its reasonable control. This includes but is not limited to acts of god, fire, explosion, natural disaster, ash cloud, flood, war, terrorist attack, threats of terrorism, any government act, interruption or failure in the power supply or labour dispute.
9.2 Should any of the above occur RSR reserves the right to cancel any Event, in which event Partners will be given priority booking for a future event.
Whilst RSR takes every care to ensure that the Event will follow the scheduled programme, the nature of the programme means that it may be subject to change. RSR reserves the right to make amendments to any part of the schedule and/or services provided as considered reasonably necessary whether for safety reasons or otherwise. In particular, RSR reserves the right to make changes to the Event running schedule if weather conditions affect the safe conduct of any of the scheduled on-track activities.
11.1 Renault UK acknowledge and accept (and hereby procure that each of their Participants acknowledge and accept) that Participants may be filmed or photographed at the circuit. Videos or photos of Participants may be used by RSR or the owner of the circuit for commercial and promotional purposes and each Participant hereby consents to be filmed and/or photographed for these purposes without entitlement to any payment or other form of compensation.
11.2 RSR will have an official photographer on site throughout the Event. Any such photos taken will be made available for each Participant to download free of charge for a limited period of time and for their private use only.
11.3 Participants and guests are allowed to film, photograph and/or record their participation in the Event on the condition that any such images or recordings are used only for private and non-commercial purposes.
12.1 RSR (including third parties appointed by RSR to assist in the running and organisation of the Event and/or any professional driver of the Formula 1 two-seater car) will not be liable for any personal injury, death or other loss or damage caused to or suffered by Partners or Participants or their property save to the extent required by law.
(b) RSR shall have no liability to Renault UK or their Participants / guests for loss of business opportunity, use, profit, anticipated profit, contracts, revenues, goodwill or anticipated savings, consequential, special or indirect loss or damage.
12.3 Partners shall be liable for any damage caused to any persons, property, hotel accommodation, cars or equipment as a result of their Participants’ reckless or negligent behaviour or that of their guests.
13.1 RSR maintains third party liability insurance for its Driving Experiences programme under which all Participants are covered. Please be aware that RSR does NOT maintain any insurance policies that cover injury or loss sustained by Participants as a result of the actions of another participant.
13.2 All cars used in the Event are valuable high performance vehicles. Accordingly, each Partner on behalf of its Participants shall be liable for any damage caused to a car (or any ancillary equipment) as a result of his/her negligence, recklessness or failure to comply with instructions and briefings received on the day. In such circumstances, RSR shall be entitled to invoice the Partner for all necessary repair costs.
13.3 Each Participant shall be responsible for taking out his/her own personal travel insurance.
14.1 Any personal information that Participants provide to RSR will only be used and recorded in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998 (as amended). RSR will only use personal information to fulfil a booking for an Event.
14.2 All medical information will be kept confidential and only used by RSR as evidence provided by each Participant of his/her ability to take part in an Event.
15.1 The Booking Form, these Terms and Conditions and the Release Form represent the entire agreement between RSR and the Partner (and where applicable the Participant) with respect to the Event. Partners must ensure that all relevant provisions which apply to their Participants /guests are communicated to them beforehand.
15.2 Any part of these Terms and Conditions which is found to be invalid or unenforceable shall be deemed replaced with such provision which is as near to the intent of the original provision as possible but which is not invalid or unenforceable.
15.3 Any variation to these Terms and Conditions shall only be valid if agreed by an authorised representative of RSR in writing.
15.4 These Terms and Conditions shall be governed by English law and the parties agree to submit any dispute to arise out of them or the Release Form to the exclusive jurisdiction of the English courts. | 2019-04-24T10:38:40Z | https://www.renault.co.uk/rs-elite-terms.html |
Labnet – Labnet Biopette 8-channel, Multi-Channel Pipette 5-50uL - Precision designed tip cones provide leak-proof tip fit. Four volume ranges are available as both 8 and 12 channel models. The biopette plus multichannel pipettes offer reduced pipetting forces. Each channel has an independent, precision piston assembly to ensure accuracy and reproducibility from one pipetting series to the next as well as between channels. The biopette plus multichannel pipettes are fully autoclavable. An individual piston suspension system allows even sealing of tips across all channels without rocking the pipette. Volume setting can also be accomplished by turning the push-button. The curved ejector design pushes the tips off in steps, thus requiring minimal force to operate. Each pipette is individually tested and supplied with a certificate of quality and a calibration key. The ergonomic handle fits comfortably in either the right or left hand and has a slightly recessed volume adjustment wheel with volume lock to prevent accidental change. The manifold rotates 360º for comfortable pipetting in any direction. Four overlapping volume ranges are available to precisely meet liquid handling requirements from 1 μl to 300 μl. Ideal for all standard 96 well formats, the biopette plus multichannel pipettes stand up to the wear and tear of constant use while maintaining excellent accuracy and reproducibility. Continuously adjustable volume selection with thumbwheel or push-button curved ejector bar reduces ejection force fully autoclavable.
Labnet D1117 Aluminum Dry Bath Block for AccuBlock Digital Dry Bath, Holds 12 x 17mm Tube - 2 ml to 50 ml as well as microplates and slides. A solid block is also available for custom machining. Designed for use with the accublock digital dry baths on the previous page, these blocks are supplied in a variety of different formats to accept tubes from 0.
Labnet Mini Incubator for Life Science Labs, Temp. Range: Ambient +5C to 60C, Max. Capacity: 9.2 liters - In addition, the mini incubator has a port in the rear of the chamber which allows for an electrical cord to be routed out the back. The heating elements in labnet’s mini incubator are incorporated into the bottom and sides of the housing. This provides better temperature stability and uniformity than other incubators in its class. The housing is all metal, as is the door frame. Labnet’s mini labroller is a perfect fit and can be used in the incubator with any of the available rotisseries. Labnet’s mini incubator is compact and economically priced, yet offers features not typically found in a basic incubator. One shelf is included, and can be adjusted to three different levels, additional shelves can be purchased to increase storage capacity. A grommet hole in the top of the unit can hold a thermometer for accurate temperature setting. A plexiglass window in the door offers full visibility to the interior. A combo package is available which includes the mini incubator and labroller, along with the accessory rotisseries.
Labnet S0200 Model VX-200 Vortex Mixer with CombiCup Head, 120V - Combicup head accepts one or more tubes in a variety of sizes. Can be operated by touch or in continuous mode. Vortex mixer (shaker) with variable speed of 0 to 3,400rpm for gentle shaking to rapid vortexing of samples. Counterbalance system minimizes vibration, and rubber feet provide added stability. Circular orbit achieves vortexing at lower speeds than the elliptical orbit typically found on a vortex mixer.
Labnet D1112 Aluminum Dry Bath Block for AccuBlock Digital Dry Bath, Holds 20 x 12mm Tube - Designed for use with the accublock digital dry baths on the previous page, these blocks are supplied in a variety of different formats to accept tubes from 0. A solid block is also available for custom machining. 2 ml to 50 ml as well as microplates and slides.
Labnet Spectrafuge C2400 24D Digital Microcentrifuge, 120/230V, Standard Gray Accent - 5 ml rotor is supplied with the spectrafuge 24d. The newest member of the spectrafuge family, the 24d, features precise digital microprocessor control. The spectrafuge 24d is available in five accent colors. A newly designed, easy-access 24 x 1. The controls are simple, consisting of only two knobs. The last run settings remain in memory allowing for repetitive centrifuging without resetting of parameters. This innovative rotor places the tubes on a plateau, where the user can easily grip their tops. Turning the timer knob sets the time parameter, while pushing it starts and stops operation of the unit. The speed knob is used to set the speed in either rpm or g-force. This centrifuge is loaded with features, yet has a list price low enough to make it the most economical high performance microcentrifuge on the market. The powerful brushless motor quickly accelerates the rotor to a maximum speed of 13,300rpm/16,000 x g. Pressing the knob toggles the display between rpm and rcf. Extremely quiet and cool running, this unit maintains a small footprint.
Labnet D1105A Aluminum Dry Bath Block for AccuBlock Digital Dry Bath, Holds 24 x 1.5ml Tube - A solid block is also available for custom machining. Designed for use with the accublock digital dry baths on the previous page, these blocks are supplied in a variety of different formats to accept tubes from 0. 2 ml to 50 ml as well as microplates and slides.
Labnet D1101 Aluminum Solid Dry Bath Block for AccuBlock Digital Dry Bath, No Holes - A solid block is also available for custom machining. Designed for use with the accublock digital dry baths on the previous page, these blocks are supplied in a variety of different formats to accept tubes from 0. 2 ml to 50 ml as well as microplates and slides.
Labnet C0100-A Z100A Economical Compact Research/Clinical Centrifuge, 11″ Width x 10-1/5″ Height x 13-3/4″ Depth, 120V, 60 Hz - The labnet economical compact research/clinical centrifuge z100a allows for variable speed settings. Its rugged abs housing is easy to clean and is durable. Other adapters are available. It offers a clear lid with a safety lock feature. It accepts 10 ml or 15 ml tubes directly.
Labnet Spectrafuge C0060 6C Compact Research Centrifuge with 6 x 10/15ml Rotor, 120V - The company, founded in 1984, is headquartered in edison, nj. The labnet spectrafuge 6c centrifuge runs at speeds up to 6,500 rpm. Dimensions18 x 21 x 24cm/7 x 8. The removable rotor holds six 15ml blood draw tubes for producing platelet poor plasma (ppp) and platelet rich plasma (prp) separations. Labnet international, inc. The unit has digital control of speed in 100 rpm increments, and operation can be timed from 30 seconds to 30 minutes. What’s in the boxlabnet spectrafuge 6c centrifuge15ml tube rotorpower cordinstructions. , Manufactures plastic labware and laboratory equipment for liquid handling, molecular biology, and bioresearch applications. Standard 5ml and 7ml tubes are accepted using adapters (sold separately). The centrifuge is non-refrigerated and does not have temperature control features. Centrifuges are used in medical, industrial, and research laboratories, as well as academic and clinical settings. 5lb. 25 x 9. A centrifuge is used to spin fluids of different densities to separate various parts, commonly blood and dna samples. Tubes of cellular material suspended in liquid are inserted into the rotor and spun at various speeds to separate components. This low-speed centrifuge is suitable for applications in biotechnology and life science research. Specificationsmaximum speed6,500 revolutions per minute (rpm)maximum relative centrifugal force (rcf)4,000 x gpower120v 60hz or 230v 50hzweight4kg/8. Centrifuges are composed of the main body or housing and a spinning rotor. 5 inches (h x w x d)maximum capacity6 x 15ml tubesh is height, the vertical distance from the lowest to highest point w is width, the horizontal distance from left to right d is depth, the horizontal distance from front to back.
Labnet H5500-50 Rotisserie for 6 x 50ml Tubes - Microplates can be used on the rotisserie. Tube capacity h5500-50, 6 x 50ml conical tubes. Can be inserted in rotator vertically or horizontally, to produce a wide range of motions. Rotisserie can be used as a rocking platform.
Labnet Prism C2500-230V Air Cooled Microcentrifuge with 24 place Rotor, 230V - The updated control panel with a single large control knob and easy to read liquid crystal display provides an intuitive interface for operation. Speed (in rpm or g-force) and run time can be quickly and accurately set and actual speed and time remaining are displayed during a run. We summarized this feedback and put our design and development teams to work to create an easy-to-use, high performance centrifuge in a modern and attractive form. Development of the prism started with feedback from our thousands of life science customers worldwide. Our new friction fit lid latching system combines reliability and safety with easy operation.
Labnet MPS 1000 Compact PCR / Microtiter Plate Centrifuge, 2500 rpm, 220VAC - Unit accepts two skirted, non-skirted, or standard pcr plates in a vertical orientation to maximize your lab space. This unique centrifuge is less than 25% of the size of a standard plate centrifuge and weighs just 6 pounds. Quickly and efficiently improve your pcr yield accommodates two pcr plates. Easy operation, just load plates and push button to operate. Spins down drops and condensation into sample. When used before and after thermal cycling, yields are increased.
LABNET INT’L P3000 Labpette R Repeating Pipette, 1 µL to 5000 µL Volume Range - Labnet liquid handling labpette r repeating pipette for volumes 1µl to 5000µl, ln.
Labnet International D0420 Labnet AccuPlate Hotplate Stirrer, 5″ x 7″ Ceramic Top, 120V, US Cord - Every unit is built for consistent performance and long term reliability. Labnet’s accuplate digital hot plates and stirrers are versatile, powerful and easy to use. This provides optimal heat transfer to the plate and sample while minimizing heat transfer to the electronics and housing. Each accuplate is equipped with a pyroceram ceramic top plate that is extremely durable, easy to clean and is highly resistant to chemical attack. The durable cast aluminum housing and angled faceplate protect the electronics in the event of an accidental spill. The stirrer and hotplate stirrer utilize a powerful motor drive system paired with strong permanent magnets to ensure a consistent connection to the stir bar. In addition, the ceramic plates can reach higher temperatures (rated to 550°c) than metal topped units and the white color makes it easy to view color changes in applications such as titrations. The control software is designed to minimize stir bar decoupling by regulating the acceleration rate of the motor. The hotplate and hotplate stirrer models also feature a bright red “hot top” indicator to alert users that the ceramic top is too hot to touch – even if the heater is off, the light will remain on until the top has cooled to a safe temperature. The accuplate hotplate and hotplate stirrer models incorporate a powerful heating element positioned directly beneath the ceramic top plate. With three models to choose from, there is an accurate hot plate and stirrer to meet your lab’s needs.
Labnet BioPette P3940-1000 Plus Autoclavable Pipette, 100-1000µl Volume, +/-0.9 to 0.6 percent Accuracy - Eight models cover the volume range from 0. The biopette plus pipettes are fully autoclavable. For convenience, volume can also be adjusted by turning the push-button. The continuously adjustable, digital micrometer is slightly recessed with a volume lock to prevent unintentional change while pipetting. Pipettes are individually tested and supplied with a certificate of quality. These precision pipettes are designed with a finger hook for exceptional comfort and easy single-hand operation. Chemically resistant, maintenance-free seals and finely polished pistons provide unsurpassed accuracy sample after sample. The stainless steel tip ejector is adjustable to accommodate various styles of tips and removable for pipetting into narrow tubes. Lightweight and well balanced, the biopette plus pipettes fit comfortably in either the right or left hand and offer very low plunger forces. A calibration tool is included with each unit for easy in-lab recalibration. Biopette plus pipettes have a universal shaft that will accept most pipette tips. Ergonomically positioned, the tip ejector reduces fatigue during prolonged use. 1 µl to 10,000 µl.
Labnet C1000230V MPS 1000 Mini Plate Spinner Centrifuge, 230V - Holds two standard microplates, half plates, 8- or 12-tube pcr strips, or individual pcr tubes. Spins down droplets or condensation in 20 seconds. Opening the lid brakes the rotor to a stop. Fixed-speed centrifuge with a speed of 2,500 rpm. Use before and after thermal cycling to increase pcr yield.
Labnet – AccuBlock Digital Dry Baths – Dual block - - Although the price of these dry baths is comparable to analog models, they feature microprocessor control and digital setting and display of internal temperature. Blocks are sold separately, please refer to the product accessory page here, to complete your purchase. The exact desired temperature is easily set using the arrow keys on the angled control panel while values are shown on the large digital display. 4 x 4. (21 x 29 x 12 cm) a broad temperature range, to 150°c, makes labnet’s digital dry baths useful for a variety of applications in molecular biology, histology, clinical, environmental and industrial laboratories. The interior chamber is fully sealed which allows the user to remove the block(s) and convert into a small water bath. New slimmer dimensions are 8. A microprocessor regulates the high wattage heaters in these dry baths to provide precise, accurate control. 7 in. 3 x 12. The user calibration feature allows for easy calibration to in house standards when required. A data-logging software package is available to link the dry bath unit to any work or personal computer offering great versatility for any work environment. Newly designed dry baths by labnet come loaded with exciting features and a streamlined look that will make your bench stand out. Now featuring a lid for more uniform heating. Additionally, there is an rs232 port for recording block temperature activity. No checking of a thermometer and readjusting temperature is necessary, providing better efficiency and productivity. The lid attaches with a simple magnetic system so the user can remove for easy access or prop open when extracting tubes.
LABNET INTERNATIONAL C1801 Prism Mini Centrifuge, 120 V - Reliable and easy-to-use, the prism mini centrifuge is compact and economical, allowing each workstation to be equipped with a “personal” mini centrifuge. The prism mini can be used for a wide range of molecular biology separations and quick spins. It includes 2 quick release interchangeable rotors, which spin up to 6000 rpm’s. The new prism mini centrifuge enhances labnet’s personal centrifuge product line by offering updated features and benefits to the well-known spectrafuge mini. The centrifuge was designed to be extremely compact with an exceptionally small footprint. The electronic brake and self opening lid allow for quick deceleration to reduce handling time. The prism mini’s maintenance-free drive is remarkably quiet and the unique design allows for excellent air-flow, to protect temperature-sensitive samples.
Labnet P2023 PTFE Autoclavable Filter, 0.2µm Pore Size, (Pack of 5) - Adjustable and removable stainless steel tip ejector. Superior accuracy and reproducibility in accordance with en iso 8655. Continuously adjustable volume selection with volume lock. Low plunger forces. 10µl tip volume.
P3942-100, Labnet Biopette Plus 10-100 µl, Autoclavable, BNW - 200 µl volume. Body and finger rest mark. Made of high impact plastic.
Labnet C0232-8B Adapter for 10/15ml Conical and Round Bottom Tubes (Pack of 6) - Opening the lid brakes the rotor to a stop in seconds. Fixed-speed centrifuge with a speed of 2,500 rpm. Use for microfiltration and quick spin-downs of condensation. Small footprint saves bench space. Labnet, adapter- 15ml conical in 50ml rotor , pk6.
Labnet Excel P3612L-20 12 Channel Electronic Pipette with Charger, 2-20µl Volume, 0.1µl Graduation, +/-5.0 to 1.0 percent Accuracy, 230V - 5 µl to 1,200 µl. A high precision stepping motor controls piston action resulting in exceptional accuracy and precision and minimal pipetting forces. Both models are available in four overlapping volume ranges, from 0. Each pipette is self calibrating. Complete with shelf clip, lithium-ion battery and battery charger, the pipette comes ready for use. The lower portion is easily removed for autoclaving. By selecting the “md” mode for multi-dispensing the user can quickly fill an entire 96 well plate without having to refill the tips. Unusually light for an electronic pipette, the excel fits comfortably in either the right or left hand. Available in both eight and twelve channels, the excel multichannel electronic pipettes are ideal for efficiently working in a 96 well format. Angled away from the user, the large lcd and simple interface allows users to easily toggle between the six pipetting modes. | 2019-04-22T10:48:06Z | https://www.bestoflabequipment.com/23-most-wanted-labnets/ |
There once was a time when only newspapers and word of mouth would help you advertise your business or sell your unwanted items. In this modern age, however, we now have the help of the internet, which reaches a worldwide audience at a much quicker speed. Classified pages in the newspapers have now become classified sites, and you can start using them too.
The following classified sites will allow you to sell your items or spread your company’s name better than any newspaper can, and I have included only the best websites for you to choose from.
Although not all of us may have actually used eBay before, we all certainly know what it is. The influence of eBay has left an indelible mark on the world of online trading and advertisement – for the better. It is currently one of the leading classified sites throughout the world, and it can certainly help anybody seeking to sell or buy.
With eBay, it only takes a few minutes to set up a free account, which, after completion, allows you to post an ad online for free. With your advertisement, you can give a range of information, such as a description, a price range, a selection of images, and other features. After completion, your item will be categorized accordingly, and you can also select how long you would like your advertisement to stay on the site.
Please be aware that, although it is free to post an ad if you do happen to sell your item, eBay charges 10% on service fees. For example, if you sell a TV for £100, eBay will lawfully claim £10 of that. Having said that, eBay can also help you to ship your sold item, offering the help of mail services and their subsequent charges, so there are many positives about using it, despite the small fees.
Also in the race for the best-classified site is the American-owned ad-giant, Craigslist. This classified site has spread its work throughout the globe, with millions of people in dozens of countries using it on a daily basis to advertise, well – pretty much anything. Here’s why Craigslist is one of the best-classified sites.
As I mentioned, Craigslist advertises, or at least tries to advertise, everything and anything – “for jobs, housing, for sale, personals, services, local community, and events”. As you can see, Craigslist not only helps you sell items, but it is also a great platform in which to publicise. You can even place dating ads and job postings on Craigslist. One of the best things about Craigslist is the locality which it brings to each user – the website will automatically try to narrow your search by tracking which country/area you are in.
Ultimately, with Craigslist, you can advertise or sell pretty much anything. It is undoubtedly one of the largest online advertising platforms on the internet, and one of the best-classified sites on this list.
Quikr is an India-based online advertising website, founded in 2008 and now one of the largest and best-classified sites on the net. It’s free to post an ad with Quickr and the process is simple. You can advertise a range of items, from computer gadgets to jobs and homes – you can even advertise for flatmates with Quickr. You can also download the Quickr app for your phone.
Quickr is perhaps the largest classified site in India, and it’s easy to see why due to its fantastic features and the simplicity at which you can both browse the site and post an ad for sale.
Olx has many thousands of users within their buy-and-sell ‘community’. From a glance at the homepage, there are in total 42 countries which are available to browse through with Olx, from the United States to more obscure countries like Kenya and Mozambique. After finding your community/the country in which you are from or selling or buying from, you will be directed to the Olx site specific to that country. Here, you can post your ad for free or browse the thousands of available items on sale.
(Please note: the UK is connected with the USA on this site, so if you are a user from the UK, click on the USA option at the homepage and begin posting or browsing). Use the search bar at the top of the site to search for your item, or alternatively type in the zip/postcode to search for an area specific to you. Olx also has an app available for you to download onto your phone. Furthermore, you can take a picture of your item for sale with the let go app, advocated by Olx, which posts your item for sale after photographing.
In the race for the number 1 spot for the best-classified site, along with the above mentioned, eBay, is another classified giant, Gumtree. There are many people who will place ads on both eBay and Gumtree in order to increase their chances of a sale, and it often works in their favor.
Like eBay, it is free to post an ad on Gumtree, and the process is very straightforward. Sign up for a free account (you won’t be able to advertise without one) and begin selling your item right away. One of the best things I like about this site is how they categorize your ad. There is certainly a category for every item on sale, and this makes the advertising process much easier. Once you have your ad completed with all the right information included, your item will be sent out to the website’s online market where it will stay for a month. You can, however, add an urgency option with your advert – for an extra £3.99, you can alert people that you want to sell your item as soon as possible. You can also select to have your ad placed near the top of the search page for a certain amount of time at an additional cost. There is also the ‘spotlight’ option, which will place your ad on Gumtree’s homepage, at £19.99 per week on the homepage.
All things considered, Gumtree is without a doubt one of the best options in regards to classified sites, and there’s no mystery as to why millions of people use it to advertise their items.
The motto of the Vendanything website is “buy, sell, or trade anything for free!”, and it certainly stands up to this assertion. To post an ad, you must first create a free account, then place your item within its category, followed by the entering of details, and finished by uploading photos of your item – simple!
One of the great things about this site is how you can narrow down your search. On the homepage and specifically in the search bar, you can choose how close you would like your item to be to you. For example, you can select your item to be within a walking distance of a zip code selected by you or within 5 to 500 miles. This makes it very easy to find your item within a realistic distance to you, and the results are accurate. You can also narrow your search further by choosing ads from either: the past 24 hours, the past week, 2 weeks ago, or 3 weeks ago and longer. Not many classified sites have such features, which puts Vendanything in good favor with me. Give it a try and use the excellent search features to narrow down your search.
Here’s a classified site specifically for the United States. You can search for items using the interactive map on the homepage (or alternatively select ‘all states’ and include the entire country in your search). To post an ad, you must, like many other sites, first create a free seller account. To post an ad, however, is not free. It costs 3 dollars to post an ad for 60 days. If you would like to make your ad top of the search result list for a week, the cost is 5 dollars. With these features, and if you are a seller in the USA, this website could be quite useful for you.
The categories for items for sale on this website are broken into 5 main categories: Leisure time & hobbies, household, electronics, real estate, vehicles. It may be a classified site available for use only the USA, but it’s still one of the best-classified sites, regardless.
With Worldstuffer, you can post an ad for free without registration. With registration, on the other hand, which is free, you will be given full control over your ad. With an account, you can also trace ads and view other buyer’s and seller’s profiles. You can buy and sell a wide range of stuff, from art to tools (and other, for those items which don’t quite fit into any conventional category). You can also search for services such as childcare, find apartments for sale, browse community events and activities, and view job postings. There are also forums available on the homepage for you to take a look at art, music, beauty, jobs, garden forums and much more.
Overall, worldstuffer offers more things than many other classified sites out there – more than just buying and selling, so check it out and see what it can do for you.
This website is designed specifically for employment – for those seeking to hire and for people seeking work. Millions of people across the world use Indeed when searching for a new job, making it without a doubt one of the world’s leading classified sites in job hiring.
When searching for a desired job, all you have to do is search the job title and the postcode or area. One of the useful features about Indeed is that you can upload your CV onto their online platform for employers to have a look at. All in all, if you are seeking a website to help you on your job hunt, Indeed is one of the first websites you should try.
Xoocal is one of the most basic of classified sites, which can be seen as either pro or con. On the homepage, there are two main things to glance at – the website’s search bar, and the latest listings. Other than that, you can sign in, create an account or post a free ad. To post an ad is quite easy and should only take a few minutes, but there are, however, no special urgency features, like those offered in Gumtree.
One of the best things about this site is that you can subscribe to a search. By subscribing to a search, (for example games) you will be updated on any new posts regarding your search. It’s quite easy to contact the seller, simply use the ‘contact publisher’ box on the right-hand side of the page – you can leave your email address and your phone number, followed by your phone number. Another great thing I found on this site is the useful information, one in particular which warns users of paying with PayPal or using the Western Union. (As a user of classified sites/an online seller myself, I have in the past been almost scammed through a false buyer who suggested PayPal and Western Union).
This website is one of the most basic classified sites of the lot – don’t be put off by the lack of display features, for it works just as well as any other classified site. Created in 2011, this classified site draws in items from across the globe. (You can find out all about the website and its owner on the ‘About’ page.
To post an ad with Outlived is free (you must create a free account), and the categories are wide – from real estate to jobs, pets to lost and found, clothing to boats. You can also check out services: classes and tuition (educational, musical, etc.), auto, astrology, career, childcare. With each item for sale, you can see where the item is located on a map (provided by Google Maps). It’s easy to contact a seller, all you have to do is send a message by using the message box on the item for sale page.
Loot is an upcoming classified website specifically for buyers and sellers within the United Kingdom. It’s free to post an ad with Loot – first sign up for a free account and begin entering the information on your item for sale. From the headings, you can see a splice of what is on sale: motors, jobs, property, pets & livestock, home & garden, electrical, travel, leisure & lifestyle. From the ‘what’s on’ heading, you can also view tickets for sale, as well as gigs, trade shows and exhibitions, pubs & clubs and car boot sales. The list of things on sale is neatly arranged and including all useful information, ensuring a safe and simple search for your item of desire.
Here’s a classified site for Canadian buyers and sellers. Owned by eBay and ranking popular with Alexa – Kijiji is currently ranked as the 594th most popular website in the world – Kijiji is one of the most prominent classified sites in the world. I have searched the Canadian branch of Kijiji and found thousands of great things on sale online. The categories are extensive and, importantly, it’s free to post an ad on their site and free to create an account.
Like Loot, this site is specifically for UK users only, and it’s free to post an ad on their online platform. As well as searching for items for sale, you can also browse through local services such as childcare, mechanics, and other services within your selected location. When searching for an item or service, simply enter the title and select a location – you can also narrow or broaden your item location by selecting how many miles away you wish it to be (0 miles away – 100+ miles away).
Overall, though not as well known as classified giants such as eBay and Gumtree, Locanto is one of the best free classified sites for users in the UK.
Mozge is a global classified site which deals with the buying and selling of thousands of items, ranging from common to more obscure items. You can browse art, boats, jobs and even stamps, animals and pottery with Mozge. As for posting an ad, it’s free and you can create a free account.
Mozge is one of the most basic of classified sites, and although not well known, it could harbor some quality items for sale.
At a first glance, this classified site is not very well laid out. Locations are arranged in lists according to continent or country. It does, however, offer a wide range of listings. Not only are there thousands of things on sale, but there are also services to browse, jobs, car rentals, and dating services.
It’s free to post an add, and you must choose from one of the following categories in which to place your item for sale or service on offer: automotive, buy/sell/trade, community, dating, jobs, local places, musician, real estate for sale, rentals, services, and adult entertainment. All in all, Backpage offers one of the widest range of options for selling, and its simplistic nature makes for a quick and easy buy or sell.
This classified site is available for use in India only – “non-registration classified site India”. With Adpress, you can find anything from wedding services to education and things on sale. There is certainly a wide selection of things being sold, and when it comes to posting a free ad, you have the alternative option of posting an ‘image ad’. You can narrow your search by place by using the box on the right-hand side of the site, which includes areas and cities from all over India. Adpress is essentially one of India’s leading classified sites, so if you are a buyer or seller situated in India, give it a try.
Another classified site native to India, Apnaindia deals with not only buying and selling but also movies, news, and entertainment. Staying within the classified section, however, I have found that this site has much to offer. It’s free to post an ad, and you can find things on sales, such as vehicles, places for rent, real estate, jobs, roommates, electronics, jewelry, and more. You can also narrow your search by choosing a specific city in which you want to browse for your specific item. You can also search the US classifieds section, which offers pretty much the same as the Indian section of the site.
Postwanga is a site available only to UK users, and it offers many items on sale through a most simple process of buying and selling. It’s free to post an ad online to Postwanga, and when it comes to buying, you can contact a seller and find their location. When reading the fine print on this site, Postwanga asks for a small donation of £1 when using their services. In other words, it may not be a free classified website to be exact, but it’s only a small donation to make.
A lesser-known classified site, Beatyourprice offers items under the following categories: services, for sale, jobs, housing, cars & vehicles, personals. It’s free to post an ad, and you also have the option to promote your ad. You can choose to have your ad placed at the top of search lists for 30 days for 3 dollars, or have it displayed on the homepage for 30 days for 5 dollars.
Try social media sites! Posting your ad or creating a page for your independent company is free and it will reach your immediate friends and perhaps thousands more through sharing. You can also find pages which are specifically for people selling items in your area.
Please be aware of online scams when either buying or selling an item. When selling an item through a classified site, do not accept offers outside of the classified site. For example, if a person contacts you by email or by text message rather than through the site, you have every right to be suspicious and to ask for further details or clarification of their person. Also, as I have mentioned, do not accept PayPal transactions – there are fraudulent ways in which people can set up false payments, or create an image of a false payment to show to you as ‘evidence’ of a payment. Finally, do not accept people who use the Western Union as a courier service. Many scams have been carried out through the use of Western Union.
In addition, some of the key warning signs regarding a scam are over-payment and pre-payment. In other words, if a person claims to pay you before you have sent your item, or, pay you more for doing so, do not place your trust in them – this is simply a lure. You will never actually receive this money, and if you carry out their wishes and ship your item to them via the Western Union before receiving payment, you are effectively paying a courier service to give your item away for free. Ultimately, be careful, stay within these guidelines and stay within these classified sites and their rules and regulations. | 2019-04-18T18:26:14Z | https://filmbizasia.org/top-sites/classified-sites/ |
More public sector IT-related failures for which nobody will be accountable – a solution?
Criminal trials were delayed, jurors unable to enrol and witness statements inaccessible.
Quoting a tweet by the authoritative @BarristerSecret, the BBC said the “entire digital infrastructure” of courts was “broken for days”.
“Major disruption that affected multiple Ministry of Justice IT systems last week continues to cause chaos.
“Lawyers on the front line have told the Gazette that trials have been delayed, jurors have been unable to enrol and practitioners have been prevented from confirming attendance that will enable them to get paid.
A criminal barrister who spent the day in Leicester Crown Court said none of the court’s computer systems was operational, jurors could not be enrolled, and no advocates could sign into the Ministry of Justice’s XHIBIT system, an online service that logs lawyers’ attendance so they can get paid.
A lawyer at Lincoln Crown Court said the XHIBIT system was down again. The Crown Court Digital Case System, on which all cases are accessed, was also down.
A criminal defence solicitor arrived at Highbury Magistrates’ Court in London at 9.15am, where there were several clients in the cells. But jailers did not know which courts the cases would be heard in and because there was no wi-fi in the building magistrates had no access to any papers on their ipads before the hearings.
“The Gazette was told that several people attended Scarborough Magistrates’ Court last week to make statutory declarations in respect of driving matters. ‘Most of these people had come suited and booted, with all the anxiety that marks ordinary members of the public out as different from the frequent flyers who regularly come before the courts.
The Guardian reported yesterday (28 January 2019) that the Ministry of Justice knew its court computer systems were “obsolete” and “out of support” long before the network went into meltdown, internal documents have revealed.
It referred to a database used by 16 employment tribunal administrative offices in which the “scale of outage” accounted for 33% of incidents over the previous six months. Users were unable to access systems for a “significant number of hours”.
She said there had been an “infrastructure failure in our supplier’s data centre”.
“The Prison Service has not been affected and—to correct inaccurate reporting—criminals have not gone free as a result of the problem. We have been working closely with our suppliers, Atos and Microsoft, to get our systems working again, and yesterday we had restored services to 180 court sites, including the largest ones.
“Today (23 January 2019), 90% of staff have working computer systems. Work continues to restore services and we expect the remainder of the court sites to be fully operational by the time they open tomorrow morning. We are very disappointed that our suppliers have not yet been able to resolve the network problems in full.
Frazer later said the problem related to a “server” which raised questions about how the failure of a single server, or servers, could cause widespread chaos in the courts.
Labour’s Steve McCabe said the server problem was not a single or unusual event.
“… her Department has been receiving reports of failures in the criminal justice secure email service for at least six months now”.
The BBC reported last week that problems with a police IT system were causing some criminals to escape justice.
Nine forces in England and Wales use Athena from Northgate Public Services. They are Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Norfolk, Suffolk, Warwickshire and West Mercia. The system is designed to help speed up the detection of crimes.
But officers told the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme that it crashes regularly and is overly complicated, meaning some cases are not built in time or dropped.
Developers Northgate Public Services apologised for problems “in small areas”, which it said it was fixing.
A joint response from nine police forces said Athena – which has cost £35m over the past 10 years – had been “resilient and stable, although no system is perfect”.
The system was introduced following a government directive for forces to share intelligence after the Soham murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, in 2002.
Officers said the intelligence-sharing function works well but problems arise when they use the system to build cases for the Crown Prosecution Service.
The delays it causes means officers can struggle to get the information together in time to charge suspects or the cases are not up to a high-enough standard and are dropped.
Serving officers at Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Essex told the programme the process could now take up to twice as long.
The nine forces – which also include those in Cambridgeshire, Kent, Norfolk, Suffolk, Warwickshire and West Mercia – said in a joint statement that they had been working with the supplier to identify and correct issues as they arose.
Northgate Public Services, which created Athena, said 40,000 officers accessed the system and benefited from improved criminal intelligence.
It said it was working to make improvements to the “complex system”.
“We recognise there are a small number of areas of the solution where improvements can be made and we apologise for any difficulties this has caused.
In central and local government, accountability means suppliers sometimes have to pay small penalties. Outsourcing supplier Capita last year paid Barnet Council about £4.2m in compensation for poor performance.
It was a fraction of the hundreds of millions Capita has received from Barnet Council.
Sometimes the opposite happens and it is the supplier that wins money from the government after a failure.
The Home Office sacked Raytheon over problems on an e-borders IT systems and ended up paying Raytheon £224m in compensation.
The Department of Heath ended up paying Fujitsu hundreds of millions of pounds after the supplier’s contract to deliver systems under the National Programme for IT [NPfIT] was ended.
A major failure in one area of the public sector will not stop or deter officials from awarding the same supplier a major contract in the same or another part of the public sector.
Were a major failure or legal dispute to preclude a supplier from bidding for further UK public sector work, most if not all major suppliers would today have little UK government business.
There is an effective way to encourage IT suppliers and the public sector to avoid public service failures. But the senior civil service isn’t interested.
That solution would be to publish – after every major public services failure – a full, independent third-party report into what went wrong and why.
Some senior officials seem unruffled by public criticism or even contempt after a services failure. But particularly in some of the major departments, there is a high-level fear of the full truth emerging after an administrative disaster. Departments would do almost anything to avoid IT-related failures if reports on the causes were routinely published.
But unless there is a Parliamentary or public clamour for such internal analyses to be published, they will remain hidden or uncommissioned.
When the National Audit Office publishes a report on a departmental failure, the report has usually been agreed and signed off by the department; and it is usually a one-off report.
When public services descend into chaos, as happened in the court service last week, immense pressure falls on the IT teams to restore normal services urgently. But without the routine publication of reports on major IT-related public service failures, where is the motivation for senior officials to avoid chaos in the first place?
Thank you to Celina Bledowska for her tweet alerting me to the criminal justice IT problems.
Do IDS and Universal Credit deserve such good publicity?
One of the unwritten conventions in journalism is that is you don’t give bad publicity to a minister who gives you an exclusive interview.
problems that were imposing artificially low limits on the number and type of claimants – such as incorrect calculations of payments – confined to history?
At one point you could not claim UC as a single person or a couple if you received Jobseeker’s Allowance, Employment and Support Allowance, Income Support, Incapacity Benefit, Severe Disablement Allowance, Disability Living Allowance or Personal Independence Payment.
You could not claim if you owned, or partly owned, your home, were homeless, or in supported or temporary accommodation. You could not claim if you worked but earned more than £330 a month. You could not claim if pregnant, had disabled, adopted or fostered children.
So are the brakes off now?
That sounds a lot. A record indeed. But a close analysis of the numbers successfully claiming UC shows that since a national roll-out of UC began in February 2015 – amid much good publicity – the increase has been small.
It appears that the UC programme’s costly IT – an investment of £344m by 31 October 2014 (Appendix f) – is still limiting the number of claimants.
This raises the question of whether the DWP’s publicity machine, with IDS at the helm, has such an influence on the media that it is able to successfully propagate its own message in the face of inconvenient facts.
The Sunday Times declared that Universal Credit “is working”. The Telegraph also said that UC is working.
The DWP’s plan is for 7 million people to claim UC but the latest figures show that the total number of claimants who had made a successful claim up to 14 May 2015 was 74,120.
This is about 1% of those potentially eligible to claim UC – 25 months after the scheme was launched in April 2013.
Has the number of claimants increased substantially since the national roll-out began in February 2015?
Before the start of the national roll-out about 35,000 people had successfully made a UC claim up to 8 January 2015. There had been an average of 2,325 new claims per week at 96 Jobcentre Plus offices.
Three months after the start of the national roll-out about 74,120 people had successfully claimed UC up to 14 May 2015. There were an average of 3,550 new claims per week at 278 Jobcentre Plus offices.
“Since national roll-out the rate of claims has been increasing at a rapid pace”.
But is this the case?
The number of successful UC claimants has more than doubled since the national roll-out began but the number of Jobcentre Plus offices where UC has launched have nearly tripled in the same period, from 96 in January 2015 to 278 by 14 May 2015.
And the total number of successful claimants remains tiny relative to the potential number of claimants although the DWP says it has expanded eligibility to claim UC from single people to couples and families.
According to the National Audit Office in November 2014, the DWP estimated that around 500,000 claimants would receive Universal Credit by mid‑2016. This target will not be hit at the present rate of successful claimant applications.
IDS welcomes record numbers of UC applications says the Huffington Post headline. But almost every week there will be record numbers claiming UC.
That is the nature of a national roll-out: numbers increase – even by small amounts. The number of applications will continually break records while the roll-out continues during 2015 and 2016.
No doubt IDS and the DWP will continue to seek a succession of media articles on the record number of UC applications. Only this week the DWP announced that UC is rolling out to 10 more jobcentres across England, Scotland and Wales.
Will the media always react complaisantly?
If it does it will be a pity – because MPs may stop asking questions about value for money in the context of the tens, indeed hundreds, of millions being spent on UC technology with the usual major suppliers.
And if the IT and business change challenges continue to limit the number and type of applications, the total numbers of successful claimants at the end of the national roll-out could be embarrassingly tiny relative to the 7 million potential claimants – not that the DWP’s publicity machine will mind.
The machine will find a new way to sail around the facts. That’s what the DWP’s senior officials seem to believe that government PR staff exist to do.
Does Barnet know if it’s saving money with Capita?
Are council outsourcing contracts becoming so unfathomably complex that officials and leading councillors have no real idea whether they’re saving money?
A Somerset County Council report on the lessons learnt from its troubled outsourcing/joint venture deal with IBM emphasized the importance of “not making contracts overly complicated”.
For years there have been arguments in Somerset over whether the council has saved or spent more as a result of the relationship with IBM. The absence of audited figures means nobody knows for certain.
It seems to be the same at Barnet. An absence of audited figures – the council does not have to produce them for an outsourcing contract – means that nobody knows for certain if Capita is costing or saving money.
It’s likely that councillors who supported the outsourcing to Capita, and critics of the deal, will never agree on whether local residents are better or worse off.
Now a Barnet resident and respected blogger Mr Reasonable, who studies the accounts of the local council as part of his efforts to be more open and accountable, has offered £250 to charity if the Tory leader Richard Cornelius provides evidence of how Capita is making savings as promised.
“If you want to see the world of outsourcing at its most illogical, spend a bit of time with detail-hunters like Mr Reasonable.
“He tells me about phoning his local library to see if a children’s book was in stock. The call was of course routed to a Capita call centre in Coventry, where staff spent ages unable to help before connecting him back to the librarians just down the road. By his calculations, for that wasted call Capita would charge Barnet £8.
“Outsourcing is full of these invented costs, which is how the privateers make their billions.
Mr Reasonable says all the commercially sensitive elements of Barnet’s contracts with Capita are redacted and there are “numerous clauses relating to incentives and penalties which would have made publishing a single payments schedule almost impossible”.
It’s also impossible he says to know what Capita has billed for or not.
“If Barnet Council is serious about openness then why not host an open day where they go through the contract in detail so that we can understand exactly what we are paying for?
“I would have thought it would have made sense for Capita to get involved with this, to work through the contract with interested citizens and to demonstrate clearly how much money they are saving.
“So I hereby throw down a challenge to the Chief Executive Mr Travers, to Richard Cornelius and to Capita – host an open day, bring bloggers and critics in and show them what you are doing, how the contract is working in reality what money is being paid to whom and how much is really being saved – evidence is essential.
“Indeed a few Conservative councillors might want to come along as well seeing as they voted for this contract. I know some of them privately had serious concerns about the contract but were worried about making those views public.
Outsourcing deals should be signed on the basis of pure pragmatism, never because of an ideology.
Barnet’s deal with Capita (and Somerset’s) was signed for largely ideological reasons. Somerset wanted to “go beyond excellence” and Barnet’s ruling councillors want to be immortalised by establishing a new frontier for local government – a “commissioning council” whereby all services are bought in.
It might have been cheaper for Barnet’s residents if the council had given its ruling councillors immortality by building statutes of them in the council’s grounds.
Will council officers have enough time or understanding of the nuances of the contract, with its maze of incentives and penalties, to know whether they are saving money or not?
In any case how accurate were the pre-outsourcing baseline figures and assumptions on which to make a comparison between what services were costing then, and what they are costing now?
There is no equivalent in local government of the National Audit Office, no organisation that will audit a local government outsourcing deal and publish the results.
This means councillors can say what they like in public about the success of a deal without fear of authoritative contradiction. Their critics can only speculate on what is really happening while they try to shine a light at the dense fog that is commercial confidentiality.
It appears that more and more councils are seriously considering large-scale outsourcing, perhaps on the basis that they can promise guaranteed savings without anyone being able to hold them to account on whether genuine savings materialise.
The first we’ll know anything is awry is when a council report, years into a contract, reveals some of the difficulties and says a resolution is being discussed with the supplier; and it’s another year or two before the contract is terminated at considerable extra cost to the council – and nobody is in post from the time of the original contract to be held accountable.
Is this really the shape of local government outsourcing to come?
I heard your interview on BBC’s World at One today Tony. You were saying there may be potential for fleet-of-foot small IT firms to access government contracts. It was music to my ears.
You referred to the NHS and Universal Credit IT disasters and the way contracting has been dominated by a few big beasts and multi-nationals. You killed the myth that “big is beautiful” and praised “new rules” to break up projects into smaller units.
Small can be perfectly formed and powerful. Businesses like ours are quick-reflex mice stuck behind the elephants blocking the doors. Why don’t they just sit out of the way, in the room, like other elephants?
We are an SME in IT. We have great pedigree, an innovative product, a presence in education and are ready to break into the business world and government work more generally. But without the bulk and buying power to advertise, lobby and bid for the current huge projects we have not been able to do much, if anything. We are encountering elephant in the door syndrome.
So we continue doing what we do, scurrying like mad, working unreasonable but happily given hours. It is not in the country’s interest for us to be tired, blocked and trapped. We fear being swallowed up, of losing our identity. I suppose it might be quicker than being slowly squashed under an elephant’s backside.
Dan O’Brien, my business partner, is young, creative, dynamic and rushed off his feet. I am three of those and old. He has run a small successful software company for 15 years. I had a successful senior career in education and in business as consultant, evaluator, writer and publisher. I created a deceptively simple, improvement model for individual, team and organisation. So, Dan and I created an on-line version.
We launched “The iAbacus” in 2012 and were finalists in the BETT2014Awards [hosted by Jo Brand] on 22 January 2014. There were lots of mice competing with us and the usual elephants. But before we announce the winner let’s have a look at the iAbacus focusing on school governance.
We dream of developing this and moving into business generally. We see a huge potential for this “empowering personnel” approach applied to NHS and civil service personnel. Up to now the elephants have blocked the way, or grinned through the windows while they ate ice buns. Can elephants grin?
We didn’t win the Bett2014 Big Cheese but it was a great show – it makes people like us feel good. Yes, coming back to the office was disappointing but we are nibbling away, on-line, working in education but, even in this field I know so well, customers can be sniffy too – “small is ugly and simple is simplistic; let’s go for the big suppliers”.
Will the Cabinet Office’s new rules work?
Or, are there friendly elephants out there who could help us, encourage and include us? Could the regulations persuade them? How about a clause like the one when planning new houses? Every housing project has to include a percentage of affordable homes. How about every IT contract having to include a percentage of SMEs?
I want to one of them. I want to be a Trojan Mouse!
John Pearce is a freelance consultant, working across education, business and community. After a successful career in teaching and headship, he became Deputy Chief Inspector for Nottinghamshire County Council. He was a BETT2014 finalist for The iAbacus which he created with Dan O’Brien.
BBC’s World at One focus on government IT.
A mega-outsourcing plan in Cornwall beset by naive fanaticism?
An inner circle of councillors at Cornwall council is rushing plans to sign a big outsourcing deal despite a council vote against it. The aims of the deal include an IT-based transformation of services, the creation of “up to” 500 new jobs and tens of millions of pounds in savings – all too good to be true?
The warning signs are there. The council’s remarkable naivety, a hurried enthusiasm for signing a deal, and a confident waving aside of internal and external concerns, may be early indications of a possible disaster. An internal report warns of a potential “catastrophe” over service delivery.
If all turns sour could accusations of maladministration follow? Is there still time for the full council to stop the inner circle from pressing ahead with a contract signing?
Major IT suppliers have some exceptional salespeople. They don’t merely sell hardware, software and services. They inspire. They rouse to action. Their promises are believable because they believe them with a conviction that can be contagious.
Joe Galloway might have been a one-off. He was managing director of a part of one of the world’s largest IT companies EDS (now HP). He helped to strike a CRM [Customer Relationship Management] deal with BSkyB in 2000. The contract ended in a £709m legal dispute in which Galloway was a main witness for HP. The judge in the case of BSkyB v HP found that some of Galloway’s evidence was untrue.
He demonstrated an “astounding ability to be dishonest, making up a whole story about being in St John [part of the Virgin Islands], working there and studying at Concordia College. EDS properly distance themselves from his evidence and realistically accept that his evidence should be treated with caution,” said the judge.
During the High Court hearing, when HP discovered Galloway’s dishonesty, it sacked him.
He had held a senior position at EDS and the company’s customer BSkyB believed what he had said. The case cost HP £318m plus tens of millions of pounds in legal fees – and the dispute lasted more than seven years. HP, it could be said, became a victim of some of the statements made by one of its executives.
The point about mentioning the case is that supplier promises, even if made with the best of intentions, may in the end come to nothing – or worse, a costly and prolonged legal dispute. Good intentions were behind the setting up of a joint venture between IBM and Somerset County Council – Southwest One – in 2007. The two sides are now immersed in a legal dispute that looks like going to court. Other councils have gone into joint ventures with major IT suppliers only to be disappointed.
So why do councils still want to sign mega outsourcing deals?
But how do potential suppliers explain failing contracts?
In talks with potential customers IT companies correct or clarify reports in the media about outsourcing deals that have failed or are failing. It is customary during the bidding process for salespeople to take potential clients to reference sites where the representatives will agree that the media reports of a failing partnership were inaccurate or hyperbolic.
Cornwall council says on its website that it has received responses from its two shortlisted suppliers BT and CSC to specific negative press articles. The Council is now untroubled by any of the articles.
“The feedback we received from the references contacted were balanced and gave us no significant causes for concern… We do need to reflect that these are press stories and we know only too well from our own experience that you can find negative reports on most major companies if you look for them.
Cornwall says it continues to monitor press coverage, with the help of BT and CSC. It suggests that articles not yet written may be biased.
“… We actively monitor the press, and both companies [BT and CSC] make sure that they let us know if a negative or positive story is going to break, making sure that we understand the background. It is important to note that these articles do not always present an unbiased view,” says Cornwall.
Does setting up a “critical friend” group give a false assurance?
On the face of it Cornwall deserves praise for setting up an independent panel of “critical friends” to scrutinise the council’s outsourcing plans. It is called the “Support Services Single Issue Panel” which comprises mostly Cornwall councillors. It had help from, among others, council officers, and BT and CSC. The Panel also visited some customers of BT and CSC that the suppliers chose.
But when the Panel later expressed serious concerns about Cornwall’s outsourcing plans the council’s inner circle simply replied that it did not accept those concerns. This may strike some as a naive response to real risks.
Is there a danger the council will use the setting up of the critical friend group to say that it has considered all the risks – even if it has considered then dismissed the most serious of them?
A poor supplier would be in breach of contract – but then what?
To the Panel’s concerns that the joint venture may fail to deliver, or costs escalate, Cornwall responds that if its suppliers do not deliver they will be in breach of contract.
“The contract obliges the strategic partner to deliver. Any initial failure to deliver would be dealt with through a service credit arrangement. Persistent failures would represent a breach of contractual conditions which would lead to breach of contract where the Cornwall Partners would exit the contract.
Is it straightforward to exit a contract after an alleged breach of contract? The Department of Health was in dispute with CSC over alleged breaches of contract on the National Programme for IT, NPfIT. CSC made it clear in its statements to US regulators that the DH was unable to exit the NPfIT contracts without large payments. CSC and the Department ended up accusing each other of breaches of contract which made negotiations for a settlement long and costly.
Heading for claims of maladministration?
– Customer wishes to exit contract but cannot because of potential costs, counter-claims and need for supplier’s cooperation to maintain existing services.
– Long and costly settlement negotiations – which is good for lawyers – while service delivery remains in the “hold” position, unresponsive to changes that may need to be made or remedial action that may need to be taken.
International IT companies are experts in the legal side of contracts and dealing with disputes. Do Cornwall’s ruling councillors believe that the council’s expertise and legal advice would trump the supplier’s in the event of an alleged breach of contract?
Unforeseen change is endemic in the public sector: governments change, policies change, legislation changes, organisations change, particularly the NHS which is a potential party to Cornwall’s outsourcing plans.
Is any public authority that signs up to a large and complex outsourcing deal on the basis of ‘no unforeseen change’ leaving itself open to accusations of maladministration?
Has Cornwall’s democratic process broken down?
The most extraordinary single thing about Cornwall’s outsourcing plans is that, at a full council meeting on 4 September, a majority of councillors voted against a deal but the inner circle is going ahead anyway.
“All the concerns which have been raised today have already been considered by the Cabinet… This is a very complex proposal and unfortunately the decision by Members not to move into private session meant that we were unable to share the detailed confidential information they needed to make an informed decision”.
Should the Council rush to sign a deal?
The council’s inner circle concedes that its timescales are “tight but achievable”.
When outsourcing plans have taken up much time and money there is always a danger a contract will have to be signed to justify the effort. But would the signing of a mega deal at Cornwall be a triumph of ideology over objective reasoning?
One has to wonder how a mega outsourcing deal can improve services, provide a good profit margin for an international IT company, save the council money and create hundreds of jobs. Doesn’t something have to give? Is there so much inefficiency, and so much money floating around the council and its potential NHS partners, that a major supplier can cut tens of millions of pounds, spend to transform services, and make money?
In evidence to MPs last year SOCITM, which represents ICT professionals in councils, said of outsourcing ICT that it “carries many risks for local authorities and can come at a heavy price”.
– There is every sign that the inner circle’s plans are motivated are by the best of intentions: to save money, improve services, protect existing jobs and create more.
– Although some criticise the council’s lack of openness, the inner circle is not hiding all of its papers and discussions in a blanket of secrecy. It has published the report of the “critical friend” Panel and the council’s responses. There is much information – and links – on the planned deal on the council’s website. This doesn’t always happen in the run-up to a large public sector outsourcing contract.
But good intentions do not make up for naivety and a wish for outsourcing that may border on fanaticism – the pursuit of a Cause whatever the dangers.
If a majority of councillors at a full council meeting cannot stop the signing of a mega-deal can anyone?
It appears that a tiny group within the council will make the final decision – although it is arguably the most momentous decision in the council’s history.
The final decision is due next month. If Cornwall enters a deal in which it relies on the contract to protect services and the council’s reputation is it being naive? Could it end up facing accusations of maladministration, particularly after side-lining a council vote against the deal?
Thank you to Dave Orr and a journalist in Cornwall for your emails on Cornwall’s outsourcing plans.
Local MP’s website on Southwest One.
There are some insightful comments from Co-operatives UK’s secretary general Ed Mayo and the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham’s Andy Rennison on mutuals in this piece by People Management.
He highlights taxation and procurement as the areas in most need of attention, and would ultimately like to see public sector mutuals given the same special dispensation as they have in Italy.
Rennison, Hammersmith & Fulham’s mutual lead, provides an interesting description of a well-attended bidders’ day held where 28 private organisations expressed an interest in being backers of the tri-borough’s (Westminster City Council and the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea are also involved) schools IT services mutual project.
I just came across an excellent piece by Craig Dearden-Phillips on why nations – and organisations – fail.
In it, he discusses a book, ‘Why Nations Fail’, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.
He writes: “The opener of the book contrasts two halves of a city, Noglales which straddles the Mexico-US border. One sits in the region on Sonala, Mexico, the other in Arizona, US. Here the people, culture, climate and operating conditions are the same. On one side of the border, incomes are many times higher, there are good public services and crime is uncommon. On the other, people are mostly poor, there are few public services and crime is rampant because the state isn’t in real control on the ground.
He continues: “Perhaps what has capitivated me most, though, is the read-across to why certain types of public services fail, despite wonderful resources and high levels of native talent. Analogous to the extractive and exclusive institutions described at state level in this book could be placed the large public sector monopolies which still dominate much of public service in Europe and certainly in the UK.
“Here, power is often monopolised and change, even ‘good change’ does run against the interests of many of those involved. Initiative is often powerfully suppressed. It is hard, frequently impossible, to set up in business against these monopolies and there are often few political processes which can be used to break these systems down.
“What am I thinking of here? Well, if you haven’t guessed, I am alluding to many of the organisations from which spin-outs do or don’t emerge.
“The truth of the matter, and I see this every day, is that setting up a new business to deliver public services feels like it probably does to set up any ordinary business in parts of the developing world. You need the buy-in of a variety of power-brokers, all of whom need to see their interests satisfied. You need to go through all sorts of bureaucratic processes to show you’re not a risk and are ‘worthy’ of delivering services.
“From there, you need to make all sorts of promises to the system that its interests will not be threatened and create opportunities for the system to have it’s say even when the business is up and running.
Dearden-Phillips makes some excellent points and the whole piece is worth reading.
The Government has detailed how it is developing and implementing Rights to Provide to “empower front line staff across the public sector to take over the services they deliver,” possibly through the creation of new mutuals.
The Government said it has identified local authorities’ services, fire services, probation and adult social care as some of the areas for developing new mutuals. This it says, will be backed by enhanced support available to staff through the Mutuals Information Service and the Mutuals Support Programme.
In announcing an updated discussion paper David Cameron said increasing parental choice in schools, extending personal budgets so people can choose how they spend money on services and increasing the transparency of public service performance and user satisfaction are all part of the next steps to improve public services by opening them up. The paper updates the Open Public Service (OPS) White Paper published last summer.
“Alongside the focus on digital delivery, and as a core part of work to reform the Civil Service, Government Commercial Teams are working with individual departments to identify where new commercial models would accelerate reform and improve services. In some cases, this may involve high-quality in-house delivery; in other cases outsourcing may offer best value.
“We are particularly interested in the potential offered by mutual models, including mutual joint ventures, that give employees much greater say in the way their organisation is run, for example the model being considered for MyCSP.
“To ensure that the benefits of mutualisation are available across the wider public sector, we are giving public sector staff new Rights to Provide – empowering employees to form public service mutuals to bid or request to take over the services they deliver. This will empower millions of public sector staff to become their own boss,freeing up untapped entrepreneurial and innovative drive.
“Public service mutuals are now well established in community healthcare, with thousands of public servants working in new mutuals with contracts worth almost £1 billion. We have extended these rights to new areas, including adult social care and NHS trusts, and we are looking to go further, in areas such as youth services, probation services, children’s centres, and fire and rescue services.
The Government said all its departments will put in place a Right to Provide to empower employees in public services for which they are responsible to s pin out to create new public service mutuals. Public sector workers who want to formmutuals or co-operatives to deliver public services will be given a Right to Provide.
The Government will look to reflect these commitments in departmental business plans where appropriate.
Information from the Mutuals Information Service will inform departmental policy development, the new paper says.
It points out that “the Department of Health’s Right to Request is near completion, with 40 services now operating as independent social enterprises and further projects to go live by April 2012. The Right to Provide has generated interest across NHS trusts, foundation trusts and adult social care.
• Department for Education Children’s Centres – not yet started.
It’s not often that the prospects for mutuals – or John Lewis, for that matter – make it into The Sun. But this story takes the mutuals bandwagon into areas it hasn’t been previously.
It also quotes Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude saying, “We are opening up public services to get more bang for the taxpayers’ buck.
However, an article on Public Finance makes the point that the ‘mutual option’ was always a non-starter for public audit.
Mutuals: a novel means of driving down demand for public services?
A recent piece in the Guardian local government network has come up with the intriguing idea that mutuals can help drive down demand for public services.
The article, by Ross Griffiths, a partner at law firm Cobbetts, suggests that if as a service user, you are dealing with a provider that is your mutual, you are more likely to think twice about the demands you are making on it, and the effect that might have on the service and other users. It argues that this is the ‘Holy Grail’ of the mutual project – allowing providers to deliver services more cheaply not by making cuts, but by reducing demand. | 2019-04-24T02:13:40Z | https://ukcampaign4change.com/tag/public-services/ |
2. The man of sin will sit in the temple showing himself as God.
The Apostasy is already underway by major religions endorsing Inclusiveness (all religions are equal).
"be ye separate" 2 Corinthians 6: 17 and "come out of her My people" Revelation 18:4.
We are to be unaffiliated and unattached to "churches" joined with URI, United Religions Initiative, or any other inclusive philosophy. ( universalism , syncretism etc.). Even some "evangelistic" ministries are ecumenical, disregarding doctrine.
And what communion hath light with darkness ?"
"And what concord hath Christ with Belial?
Or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel (unbeliever).
the Wheat and the Tares ( weeds ). Matthew 13.
Now the only sign remaining for the grand exodus [ Rapture] of the true Church is for the man of sin to sit in the Temple showing himself as God.
so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God."
This is soon to take place, as world events hover over Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.
SHOWS himself as God....that there is a demonstrative action on his part that is a blasphemous action. Possibly, that action could be his sitting on the newly discovered Ark of the Covenant (the Mercy Seat) which could be preserved below the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
That is why Our Lord tells us over and over again in the Gospels to "WATCH".
Now since one of the signs (of 2 Thessalonians Chapter 2 ) is already here ( Apostasy) and the other sign is shortly to follow, we realize that the Lord's return is SOON. How then should we prepare ourselves ?
What steps of spiritual preparation are in order ?
Well, here are a few suggestions. The Holy Spirit will give more whenever a person asks.
Let go of all relationships, friendships, grudges, bitterness, affiliations, organizations, distractions etc. that come between you and your relationship with the Lord.
These people have " a form of godliness, but deny the Power thereof: from such turn away"
That is a commandment--- to turn away from those who sound good, but don't walk the walk.
May we hear the voice of Common Sense.
We must keep in mind that forgiveness is not necessarily fellowship.
Forgiveness is not harboring resentment, hatred or bitterness. Forgiveness is not seeking revenge.
And still, in many cases forgiveness still requires one to practice total avoidance.
"Ye must be separate." 2 Corinthians 6: 17 .
What communion hath light with darkness? 2 Corinthians 6:14.
Forgiveness means praying for our enemies and not carrying a grudge. But even so, forgiveness does not take away discernment, common sense or discretion. If the offending party is not Born Again, there is little in common.
It's hard to end quarrels, and best not to let any start, especially in your own home.
We must pray to the Holy Ghost for guidance in this area. Everything is not always black and white, so great discernment is necessary.
In Acts 27: 18 and 19, Paul and the crew on the ship threw everything overboard, in order that they themselves could be spared.
"But those things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.
Yea, doubtless, and I count ALL things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of ALL things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ."
Philippians 3: 7, 8 .
Letting go is not easy, but in many cases it is necessary.
hopetotheend.com/ntl.html -- Got a Concordance ?
If we don't have time, then let us MAKE TIME. That may mean getting up earlier, staying up later, or taking time on our lunch hour etc. , but we ought to do Something to impress the WORD of God upon our hearts.
Since television programming is deteriorating so rapidly, we now have more time to read the Word each evening.
1 Thessalonians 5:14-22... having patience, thanksgiving, being open to the Spirit, and more.
Neither accuse any falsely, and be content with your wages."
being rigorously honest. We are to be a persons of integrity.
The whole Book of James is an excellent reality-check.
Chapter 1:19-27 restraining our mouths; compassionate to widows, no worldliness.
Ch. 4- no friendship with the world. Submit to God. Resist the devil. Practice humility.
Ch. 5-put no trust in accumulated goods. Anoint the sick. Confess your faults.
Pray for each other. And so much more.
2 Timothy 4-- read ALL...Paul's Swan-Song....final farewell to the Church before martyrdom.
All of Philippians 4 ; be reasonable "let your moderation be known to all men"
3 :14...love the brethren (fellow practicing believers): courtesy, kindness, care.
1 Corinthians 13-- practice charity (Godly care). Charity begins at home.
This is a good one to read every day.
Those are just a few passages. There are so many more.
"Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way ? by taking heed thereto according to thy word."
The voice of the Holy Spirit speaks to us through the WORD of God. That voice takes precedence over any one else's voice.
"If you abide in Me and My WORDS abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will and it shall be done unto you."
"Thy WORD is truth" John 17:17. Let it be our daily compass.
Now is the time for us to be living lives of rigorous honesty and integrity.
Hearing from God. Let us take time in the morning to hear God's voice. If we are patient enough , and wait upon the Lord, His still small voice will speak to us. We must have a willing heart to hear and then the resolve to obey.
Let us search the Scriptures for ourselves, instead of relying on another's interpretation.
Also, this might be a good time for us to purchase a Concordance, since that helps us to locate Scripture verses readily. Leaving a Concordance for those left behind is also a good idea.
We must watch to keep abreast of current events as they relate to Bible Prophecy. Let us keep our eyes on what's happening in the Mid-East...in Israel and especially in regards to JERUSALEM. May we watch the political maneuverings in the European Union.
Let us watch the military deployments of the West.
This is "church" in the last days. "Wherever two or more are gathered together." Matthew 18: 19, 20.
A church (Assembly ) of one, plus Jesus .
Jesus Christ has promised the Laodicean Church , the Church right now, that He Himself will be that second Person with you. And we are to assemble--with Him alone, if need be---all the more as we see the day approaching.
That verse of Scripture, by the way, was written to Christians who were assembling exclusively in their own homes. There were no church buildings until the third century under Constantine.
means responding to the needs given within each day. Each time the news-casts come on TV, we ought to pray over the prophetic outcome of world events, and for the suffering people around the world.
"Watch thou in all things" 2 Timothy 4:5. We are to especially watch and listen for the phrase "Peace and Safety" (Security) ....for then sudden destruction shall come". 1 Thessalonians . 5:3....and we shall depart.
If the news is "too much to take" (so filled with violence), then you may want to get your news through a secondary source....where the demoralization is filtered out and the main points are contained.
Being sober first of all implies that many are inebriate (drunk with wine, beer, hard liquor, drugs and over-medicated) in these last days. Since the Thessalonians letters are addressed to Christians, that means there are Christians over-indulging, or even indulging at all.
If there are food items that are compulsive for us, then we don't buy them. If they're on our shelf at home, it would be better to throw them out. Let's be honest with ourselves.
We CAN fast...if not totally from food for a day , then partially....from sweets, snacks, in-between meals etc....certain food items. That's just common-sense eating.
Maybe we could trade fast-foods for salads and vegetables instead.
We can eat and drink too much, talk too much, be idle too much, watch TV or surf the net too much, buy too much ( especially on credit and get into perilous debt ) ....we can do anything to excess. The Lord tells us here to put a lid on it. Don't let it overtake us. Best to mortify the flesh and abstain from all alcohol.
( See Jeremiah 35...."the Rekebites"). We ought to restrain from anything that is a stumblingblock.
Being sober minded means not only abstaining from alcohol and drugs (over-medication), but it also means to have mental sobriety. Mental Sobriety is a state of mind always in readiness to receive promptings from the Holy Ghost. We need not be somber or grave, but we do need to touch-base within, connect with God regularly throughout the day, especially when things matter to us. We do not become so carried away with events, frivolities and trivialities that we lose our conscious contact with God.
We keep analyzing our priorities at all times.
Matthew Henry, the great spiritual writer, recounts an episode early in his childhood. He told his mother that he would like to grow up and become a preacher. He would preach the finest sermons ever, and tell people exactly what to do. They would HAVE TO live-out all the words of the Bible. They would HAVE TO live perfect lives of holiness!
To which his mother calmly replied, "And then my son, would you tell them how ?"
and Romans Chapter 8 contains the HOW.
"Not by might, nor by power but by My Spirit, saith the LORD of hosts."
"The things I don't want to do, I do. And the things that I do want to do , I don't.
Only our willingness to cooperate with the Holy Ghost will deliver us. Romans Chapter 8.
"Sweet Holy Spirit, rule over my soul."
The athletes competing in the Olympics, undergo strenuous exercises and rigorous diets. All for a perishable crown. How much more so should we prime ourselves for the spiritual race and incorruptible crowns ?
The prophet Daniel was 10 times wiser than his peers ..."the intellectual elite " of his day. He chose to eat smart, and to practice daily discipline. Daniel Chapter 1.
What does it mean to eat smart? It includes eating a majority of vegetables and proteins ( beans) . Eating less and less sweets and junk food (or none at all). And not snacking all day long.
Now--- more than ever--- we ought to pray for our family members, friends, immediate family, yourself...and for all main concerns.
and pray with our understanding. On that daily commute, why not sing in tongues?
May we MAKE TIME for prayer. Let us have a prayer list and check it off each day.
Maybe we could give up some leisure time and just turn inward to thank and praise the Lord and bring our concerns to Him and plead for nations, peoples and news events.
If one really wants to do that, one will.
And we need to pray for those who question our beliefs and come against us.
"Fire goes out for lack of fuel" Proverbs 26:20.
Also see 2 John 10 -- http://www.blueletter.org.
neither bid him God speed ( no hi's and no good-byes).
The twisters of truth are on the web, and also meandering on message boards.
And also in these Last Days we must pray that our spirit stays ALIVE and responding to the needs of people, despite the demoralization perpetrated in the media and all around us. We must ever be alive to God's voice and His presence. Jesus is coming for those who are ALIVE in Christ. 1 Thessalonians 4:15.
Don't let the light, fervor and zeal go out.
"Be not weary in well doing" 2 Thessalonians 3:13.
In our home, we pray right during the news for healing of victims, justice for perpetrators, etc.
comfort the feebleminded, support the weak, be patient toward all men.
but ever follow that which is good, both among yourselves, and to all men.
Quench not the Spirit. Despise not prophesyings.
Prove all things. Hold fast that which is good.
The Rapture is not a guarantee....it is as the Lord wills.
Some Christians tout it as a declaration of spiritual Rights. Please see Matthew 22.
Do Born-again Believers commit sins ? Yes.
The PROBLEM is the human heart. Jeremiah 17: 9.
"If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His Word is not in us".
When we fail, (we ALL fail) we must pick ourselves up and begin again, and again, and again. We are to fall-forward ( as Greg Laurie says ), and press on.
Psalm 51 helps us to seek repentance. Psalm 32 reminds us of God's mercy and forgiveness, after we have confessed our sins.
The Lord searches the reins and hearts. He searches our priorities, and tests our motives.
Rev. 2:23 "I AM He which searcheth the reins and hearts "
Jeremiah 17:10..... "I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins".
"A man consulted a doctor.
"And you want something that will strengthen your will power ? " asked the doctor.
"Well no, said the fellow. I was thinking of something that would weaken my conscience."
and FAITH (Prayer and Trust).
and the Word of God to keep us sound.
We are to realize that the adversary, the devil, knows that his time is very short. Revelation 12:12.
He is doing all he can to upset us, to wear us down and to have us give up.
"Brethren, be sober and watch well. The devil who is your enemy goes about roaring like a lion, seeking whom he may devour.
Let us stay connected to the Power Grid---Jesus Christ, through His Holy Spirit.
Let the WORD be our Generator.
Satan and his demons never let up.
There will be distractions, harassments, set backs, hardships, possibly a death or serious illness in the family, financial setbacks and possibly great financial losses.
We must "endure afflictions" 2 Timothy 4:5.
Time is short. We must bed-down with unlimited patience.
Are we prepared to sustain ourselves during these hours of pitch-darkness, before the Rapture ?
Is Jesus Christ our LIGHT ?
Are we so totally secure in Him that the world can't fill us with its' insecurity ?
Spiritual light is more than sufficient for the need. May we already be walking in that light even now.
Our Light is Jesus Christ; the oil is our Spirit-filled walk.
6. Witness. "be instant in season and out of season" 2 Timothy 4:2.
"Do the work of an evangelist" 2 Timothy 4:5 . Be approachable for people to ask you Godly questions.
Yet we do not persist where our message is not being received.
" Preach the Gospel at all times-- if necessary, use words."
"Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there remembereth that thy brother hath ought against thee: Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift."
Paying off our debts soothes the nerves and brings a good night's sleep.
If we stop buying beyond our means, the problem ceases to exist.
share, give away, toss out...LET GO. Let go. Let go.
Whatever chores and projects must be done to simplify our lives, now is that time.
Let's keep it simple, no matter what it is. K.I.S.S. ....Keep It Simple Sojourner.
The less we have, the less we have to worry about and maintain.
Less is more.....more tranquility, inner peace and serenity.
Cleanliness IS next to Godliness. Dusting, sweeping, cleaning, scrubbing are all necessary to maintaining our well-being and hygiene. Tidiness puts a soothing atmosphere into the home, where love, serenity and inner peace can reign.
healing quality of a well kept home.
The inner rewards are worth it. We are better able to think, meditate, pray and read in an uncluttered place.
turning omissions into commissions. May we not procrastinate or hesitate any longer.
Today, Visit, call or write those that have been put off until "tomorrow".
Tomorrow is always a day away.
10. Let people notice our calm in the midst of the storm.
"We have the mind of Jesus Christ" ( 1 Corinthians 2:16 ) Let's put it on.
(quotas, bucks and entertaining talents) instead of upon Jesus.
We can learn from other's mistakes. We don't have to repeat them.
If we ask the Holy Ghost to help us, He will.
We are into the last lap now...the home-stretch. We need to set our faces like flint and endure the loneliness of the long distance runner.
We count them happy who endure to the end.
In these closing days may we ardently seek time with the Lord. Let us zealously guard that time.
and let no man take our crown from us. Rev. 3:11.
Let us seek God's face. Psalm 27:8. Let us picture the rapture. Let us sing, and make melody in our hearts.
May we comfort one another with the Blessed Hope of Our Lord's soon return.
how much did we love and praise the Lord Jesus with our lifestyle and with our words?
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you ?
Let's go for all the glory, in Christ Jesus.
He's coming soon. Real soon. Are we ready ?
Even so, Come Lord Jesus !
And, live looking for Jesus." | 2019-04-21T22:46:05Z | https://hopetotheend.com/prepare.html |
Thank you, Melissa. And thank you esteemed members of the faculty, esteemed parents, proud friends and family. Congratulations to all of you. But most importantly, congratulations to the incredibly impressive Holy Child Class of 2018!
I'm sure many of my fellow Class of 2006 classmates in the audience can attest to the personal challenges, bouts of self-reflection and sometimes maybe even a bit of disbelief that has come with reaching the milestone age of 30-years-old this past year. Well I must admit, that being invited to serve as a commencement speaker at my old high school was all that I needed to fully accept the fact that I am indeed 30 years old, and it had been 12 years since I graduated from Holy Child on June 10, 2006. All jokes aside, it is an absolute honor and a privilege to serve as your commencement speaker. I vividly remember sitting in your shoes – wearing the long white gown and holding red roses, sweating because of a mixture of the 90-degree weather and the anxiety that came with this chapter closing and the uncertainty of what college would entail, and feeling immense pride – proud of being a part of this special community and achieving such an important milestone. But when I sat in your shoes, I desperately wished that someone could give me a playbook – a set of advice for me to consider as I enter this next chapter. So today, I will share two pieces of advice with you from my experiences on Wall Street, moving away from home and working in Finance in London, and finally my past two years at Harvard Business School.
The first message I'd like to share with you is: just say yes! Back in 2012, I was working in investment banking as an analyst at Citigroup. During October of that year, I was offered a unique opportunity to move to London to join Goldman Sachs. To many observing from the outside, it was an absolute no brainer. Goldman Sachs is a leading investment bank, I would have international work experience on my resume at the age of 23, who wouldn't take this opportunity? But for me, I was terrified. You see, I had always been afraid of being alone. In fact, my biggest nightmare used to be (and sometimes still is, if I'm being honest!) is walking into a large cafeteria and not being able to find a table with my friends so instead I have to sit and eat alone. So as you can see, moving 3,459 miles away from my family, friends, established work network was absolutely terrifying. But I put my fears aside, and I just said yes. On December 2, 2012, I boarded a plane to London, United Kingdom and little did I know that my four years in London would change my life. My four-year journey abroad taught me more about life, love and fear than any of my experiences to date. Had I said no to the opportunity to work abroad, I would have missed out on travel to over twenty countries across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. I would have missed out on opportunities to interact in diverse settings and challenge my pre-existing beliefs while also defending my viewpoints to others. I would have missed out on the opportunity to sit in on business meetings in Spain, France and Germany that were held outside of my native tongue. Most importantly, I would have missed out on the opportunity to be humbled by my challenges, to be adaptable to new environments, and to always take a global view. So when these awesome opportunities come to you (and they will), I wish that you will just say yes. Don't let fear get to you. Don't think about the what-ifs, just. Say. Yes. There is immense growth that comes from opportunities like these. And even if they do not go according to plan, or even if they turn out to be a failure, there is growth in failing forward. So, just say yes.
The second message I'd like to share is create your own definition of success. I studied Systems and Information Engineering at the University of Virginia, and after two summer internships at Citigroup, I accepted a full-time offer to join the investment bank in 2010. In the beginning, I enjoyed my work. But after a while, if I'm being honest, I only stayed because of what I viewed the external definition of success to be. I thought that working on Wall Street was a stamp of approval – it showed that I was hard working, analytical, and successful. But deep down, I was unhappy. I was working 80-100 hour weeks, had gained a ton of weight and was not leading a healthy lifestyle. A pivotal moment for me, was coming home at 1-2am after work, and noticing a pamphlet that my parents had left on my nightstand on "healthy ways to manage stress". It was then that I knew that not only did I know deep down that I was unhappy, but those closest to me also could tell. And I'm sad to say, that even after that defining moment, I still worked in finance for 4 more years. It was only in 2015, when I mustered the courage to apply to graduate business school programs, and in August 2016, I embarked on my two-year journey at Harvard Business School. With the goal in mind of pivoting careers to one that I was truly passionate about. I'm now really excited to be working at Intel in Silicon Valley on their Virtual Reality, Esports and Gaming team. A complete pivot – but an industry and a technology that I'm truly excited about. And now, success for me is not solely defined by my career. Success is paying it forward and donating my time to organizations I care about. Success is finding true happiness in the relationships that I cultivate. Success is leaving a legacy. But don't conform to my definitions of success. I want you to feel comfortable creating your own definition of success and standing by it. Because only then will you find true fulfillment and happiness.
And now, as a fellow Holy Child alumna, I'd like to be among the first to personally welcome you to the Holy Child Alumnae Network. Change can be frightening I know, but the bonds, stories and relationships that you have with each other do not have to end here. You now have the alumnae network which is thrilled to welcome you and to serve as a resource, but more importantly, you now have a duty to pay it forward and serve as a resource to current students. In closing, as you consider this next step in your journey – remember two things: (1) just say yes! And (2) create your own definition of success. After all, before you know it, you'll be 30 years old, reflecting on your life and career experiences to date, and preparing to give a speech for graduation. So be sure to track your story. I know it'll be a good one.
Ladies, I cannot believe this day is finally here! We have survived four years of high school together, battling through countless assignments, March exams, College Board testing, and much more. Despite these struggles, we have truly lived out these past few years to our fullest enjoyment. From eating lunches with our peer moms to becoming peer moms, cheering on the upperclassmen during Powderpuff to being the one to score the winning touchdown in the game, being rung as Juniors on Ring Day to ringing others as Seniors, bonding on global trips, sports teams, or theatre productions, we have experienced many extraordinary milestones together... and, we survived the college process together, as exemplified by the 57 cakes that resulted...and that I happily ate.
Now, we are here, wearing our lovely white dresses, clutching our bouquet of red roses, and anxiously awaiting the moment our names are called to officially be graduates. Savor this moment. In a matter of minutes, you will receive your diploma, a marker of your hard work and the beginning of your bright future.
In elementary and middle school, I was fortunate enough to be a cheerleader. While competitions and tough practices were certainly memorable, the most significant memory I have of my time as a cheerleader was our unique tradition celebrated on the eve of a competition. The team and coaches would gather in the gym, not to practice, but rather to reflect as we listened to our coaches take turns reading the Dr. Seuss book "Oh, the Places You'll Go!". This tradition helped each cheerleader prepare mentally for the next day's competition, reminding us of the incredible places we have been, are, and will go. While a mere children's book, it inspired each of us to radiate confidence and compete at our best. Today, I want to share that tradition with all of you.
You're on your own. And you know what you know. And you are the girl who'll decide where to go.
Our graduates will go as far as Dublin and as close to home as the Bronx. No matter where you all go, always remember Holy Child - both the people and the place - as your home away from home. But just in case you forget, here is a little token to remember it by. With the help of Ms. Budill, I designed and 3D printed keychains with Holy Child's coordinates on them. Now, you will always carry a part of here with you to all of the places you go.
Hello everyone and welcome to the 2018 School of the Holy Child Graduation Exercises. On behalf of my fellow graduates, I'd like to thank our faculty, family, friends, and everyone who helped make this day possible.
After spending four years here, some of us five, seven, or even eight, Holy Child has become a place very close to my heart, and I will cherish the memories and sisters I have made here forever. My high school experience has been pretty different from those of my friends at other schools. Holy Child students have to answer the same questions frequently: yes, I have ONLY 56 classmates, yes, we received a ring and celebrated for a week, no we don't have final exams - we have March exams, and yes I am going to school dressed as a cow today.
As unique as our school is, there is so much more to our unusual environment. Holy Child is a place where you can feel comfortable enough to play a boy on stage without second guessing it, have dance parties on call anywhere at any time, and make lifelong relationships with both friends and teachers. This strong community has brought out the best in us, shaping us into the women we are today.
Our small class has allowed each of us to get to know each other on deep levels...some of us even know each other too well. I can confidently say that I could name most, if not all, of these girls by just looking at their sneakers or backpacks. Although we may not always be as close as we are right now, I know we will be able to come back and feel like nothing has changed, except one day we will likely have jobs, and maybe a kid or two.
This September, we will start a new chapter, and whether we are close to home or far, we will all experience brand new things. There are some things, however, I am certain will never change – Annie will always be a meme, Sally and Alessia will always be vlogging queens, Desdemona will always be Desdemona, Amelia and Titi will always be equipped with every type of charger, and Julia Tyler will always beat Julia Howe in a dance battle. But the most important thing, that will never change from this moment on, is that we will never truly be alone. We will forever have each other, our memories together, our rings, and this beautiful school supporting us in the many things we go on to do in our lives.
To conclude, I would like to quote the one and only Ms. Carolyn Walters. Girls, we are (points to classmates) FINISHED DONE!!! Thank you girls for an amazing four years, love you all, and congrats!
Caroline and Hannah presented the following reflection at this year's Baccalaureate Mass, in honor of the graduating Class of 2018.
Caroline Beit: The portrait of a graduate is a collection of ideals and virtues that School of the Holy Child seeks to cultivate in each one of its students. Holy Child seeks to develop graduates who are Intellectual, courageous, confident, compassionate and spiritual. Over these past 2, 4, 5, or even 8 years, Holy Child has helped us to grow into women of conscience and action by nurturing these ideals. As our time at Holy Child comes to a close, we thought it most apt to reflect on these ideals and how they have molded us into the young women we are today, who are ready to use these ideals as well as our education to not only achieve our own personal goals, but also to shape our communities and the wider world.
One of Holy Child's main purposes is to nurture our intellectual capabilities. However, while they could simply accomplish this by having us memorize calculus equations and the preambulatory clauses to the Constitution, Holy Child goes a step further. Our school teaches us not what to think, but how and to have a deep seated and profound love for learning. This love of learning is best evidenced for me, by the intellectual debates I have engaged in with my teachers and peers outside of class.
This was especially true for the class Christian Theology and World Religions, which I took my Junior Year. This class focused on exploring the theology of Christianity and other religions. But its primary objective was to answer "What do we believe? Why do we believe? And how do we believe?".
The problem for me, was that there was no absolute, correct answer to these questions that everyone could agree on. It wasn't like in math where 2+2 = 4, but a class where we had to use higher critical thinking skills and think for ourselves and still possibly not arrive at the same conclusion as our peers and teachers. This class helped to open my worldview and expand my desire for intellectual conversations and arguments. Some of my favorite memories from my Junior Year, one of the most academically demanding years of high school, is going to the religious studies office and asking my teachers for their opinions and viewpoints on albeit sometimes random questions marginally pertaining to the study of religion. These conversations, which sometimes morphed into full-out debates, on subjects ranging from the intersectionality of Marxist theory and Catholicism, to the merits of Scientology, and the rights and roles of transgender individuals in Hinduism, has helped me to further realize my love for learning. This intellectualism does not end when we leave this building, but stays with us throughout not only our college career but through our life in general. We are women, who will hold a lifelong love for learning and be ready for the challenging intellectual pursuits to come.
Hannah Cleary: Holy Child inspires its students to be courageous and confident. We have been encouraged to take risks and move out of our comfort zone. We have learned that if we never challenge ourselves, we will never grow.
There are many ways I have been challenged to be courageous and confident, but something that stands out for me is a specific project in Social Justice class. We were asked to find a way that we could do 5 hours of justice work. I was on vacation and went to Mass and saw in the bulletin an offering to join a pen pal prison ministry. I reached out to the women at the Church that was running the ministry explaining I was interested in participating, and she hesitated at my request. She thought I might be too young, was only interested in committing for the duration of the project, and also that I might not be able to connect with a prisoner if I was only doing this to fulfill a requirement for a project. She eventually agreed to let me do this ministry.
Writing to someone who has murdered someone, finding words that would allow us to connect as human beings was hard. Writing my return address on the envelope was an even greater challenge. I had learned in social justice that prisoners are often times marginalized and how each of us are called to see the dignity in every human person. It was this that gave me the courage and thirst to want to connect and validate the dignity of the prisoner I was assigned to. He and I are still pen pals. This is one courageous act that Holy Child has supported me in.
I have also witnessed great courage in many of my classmates. I admired Sally as she sang in a recent morning meeting and the seniors who stood up to share their personal stories at What It's Like to Be Me at SHC." These actions require a large amount of grit. Thankfully, we have the privilege of going to a school with such a nurturing environment in which it is a little easier to reach for the stars. Growing in courage also brings out our confidence. We are women of conscience and action, and all have something very special and unique to offer to the world. Even though we will no longer be in the hallways at Holy Child, we will take the poise and skills we have learned and carry them with us into our next chapter in order to remain the bold gryphons we have become.
Caroline: When I first heard in high school that I would have to complete 25 hours of community service a year, it was originally just another item on my to-do list that I had to check off. But halfway through my first year of high school that changed. I was on a midnight run with my local parish and a couple of friends, when in the midst of serving a homeless man, he pulled out of his shopping cart 3 stuffed animals and gave one to each of us out to show us his gratitude. He had so little to give and here he was giving it to me and my friends. He modeled for me what it means to be grateful and his sharing brewed a true and deep seated compassion for those I was serving.
My service requirement in this moment morphed from an item on my to-do list to a guideline to serve others and feel compassion for all of God's creation. But compassion is not just brewed through community service. I see it everyday when we make shared quizlets for us all to use, or when senior peer-leaders mentor their first year students. This virtue of compassion in the future will help us, as young women of conscience and action, to use our many great gifts and talents for the benefit of not just our communities, schools, and local houses of worship, but our society as a whole.
Hannah: Cornelia Connelly once said, "You must not hide the gifts God has given you, but use them in his service." While there is a service requirement at Holy Child, we have completed many countless hours from the heart, as Caroline mentioned, because of the compassion that service brews, which for me has helped me to become closer to God. Service has allowed me to see God in others while growing closer to Him. Here at Holy Child I have been able to cultivate and nurture my faith through the gifts God has given me. I have served God by teaching children at the Cornelia Connelly Center and raising money for leukemia. I know each member of the class of 2018 has individually nurtured her faith through her service and will continue to do so in the next chapter of her life.
Caroline: We are so blessed to have had this unique Holy Child education. While we are all diverse in our gifts and talents, we are united through these 5 shared values of intellectualism, courage, confidence, compassion, and spirituality. These values as well as our education have prepared us not only for college but, as the class of 2018 and Buzz Lightyear like to say for "Infinity and beyond!"
In Our Own Words shares reflections from members of the Holy Child community, including students, faculty, and alumnae. | 2019-04-23T18:51:06Z | https://www.holychildrye.org/student-life/in-our-own-words |
This tutorial will demonstrate step-by-step how to build a practical geoscience machine learning workflow using Python and scikit-learn. The practice of extracting insights from large datasets has certainly caught mainstream attention in recent years. Software packages are emerging with multivariate statistics and machine learning algorithms built in to workflows. As this trend continues, it is important to understand how these algorithms work, know their strengths and limitations, and avoid treating them as a black box.
Python has become a popular programming language for scientific applications as it is straightforward to learn, has a large community of users and contributors that have created many open (and free) scientific libraries. The scikit-learn library provides a state-of-the-art collection of machine learning tools for Python and contains many tools for data mining and analysis including classification, clustering, and regression algorithms.
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how dimensionality reduction and unsupervised machine learning can be used to analyze X-ray fluorescence measurements of cuttings samples. Dimensionality reduction is the process of reducing the number of random variables under consideration by obtaining a smaller set of features that describe most of the variation within the dataset. Clustering is an unsupervised machine learning technique that learns a grouping from the data itself and doesn’t require training data. The groups consist of samples with similar characteristics, which can be considered as distinct geochemical facies. This will be implemented using Python, the scikit-learn library (Pedregosa et al. 2011), and other popular Python data science tools. These tools are open source and available online. Enthought’s Canopy provides an easy to use interface to install these packages (and many more), as well as an integrated analysis and visualization environment. It is available for free at www.enthought.com/product/canopy/.
The first step is importing the tools we need for this tutorial.
X-ray fluorescence (XRF) is becoming a common wellsite cuttings analysis technique (Carr et al, 2014). Portable XRF provides rapid elemental composition measurements of cuttings as they are drilled. These devices measure the fluorescent x-rays emitted by a sample when illuminated by an energetic X-ray source. Elements in the sample will emit X-rays at specific wavelengths, and the spectrum of the emitted x-rays can be measured and used to quantify the amount of the corresponding elements present in the sample. Trends in element concentration can be used to infer sediment depositional environment, sources, and indicate conditions conducive to the preservation of organic material. XRF data can be used for geologic characterization, optimizing well placement, and providing additional guidance for geosteering.
The data for this tutorial consists of XRF measurements of cuttings from the lateral section of an unconventional well. The measurements were made at approximately 10 m intervals. In this case, the raw data consists of 22 measurements for each sample. Each measurement gives the weight percentage of a chemical component. The data is read from a csv file into a dataframe using the pandas library, which provides many convenient data structures and tools for data science.
A dataframe is a 2-dimensional labeled data structure, where each row represents a different sample, and the columns are measurements on the sample. The contents of the dataframe are shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Partial contents of the dataframe after loading the dataset. The entire dataset consists of 269 cuttings samples and 22 measurements of each sample.
In machine learning, the term feature is used to refer to the attributes of the objects being considered that can be used to describe, cluster, and classify them. In this case, the objects being studied are cuttings samples, and the features are the 22 XRF measurements. We can use feature engineering to augment this dataset. This refers to the process of using domain knowledge to create new features that help machine learning algorithms discriminate the data.
In geochemistry, elements are used as proxies that give hints to the physical, chemical or biological events that were occurring during rock formation. Ratios of certain elements can indicate the relative strength of various effects. We will focus on three ratios: Si/Zr, Si/Al, and Zr/Al. The Si/Zr ratio is used to indicate relative proportions of biogenic silica and terrestrial detrital inputs and the Si/ Al ratio is used as a proxy for biogenic silica to aluminous clay (Croudace and Rothwell, 2015). The Zr/Al ratio is a proxy for terrigenous input; chemical behavior of Zr suggests that this ratio can be used as a proxy for grain size (Calvert and Pederson, 2007).
Not surprisingly, multivariate datasets contain plenty of variables. This richness can be used to explain complex behaviour that can’t be captured with a single observation. Multivariate methods allow us to consider changes in several observations simultaneously. With many observations, it is quite likely that the changes we observe are related to a smaller number of underlying causes. Dimensionality reduction is the process of using the correlations in the observed data to reveal a more parsimonious underlying model that explains the observed variation.
Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) reduces the number of variables by identifying the underlying latent factors present in the dataset. These factors cannot be measured directly; they can be determined only by measuring manifest properties. For example, in the case of our geochemical dataset, a shaliness factor could be associated with high silicon dioxide, calcium and quartz readings. EFA assumes that the observations are a linear combination of the underlying factors, plus some Gaussian noise (Hauck, 2014). A related dimensionality reduction technique is principal component analysis (PCA). PCA determines components that are weighted linear combinations of the observations and makes the assumption that the components themselves account for the all of the observed variance in the data; none of the variance is caused by error (or noise). EFA assumes that there is variance due to error (Rietveld and Van Hout, 1993).
Before applying EFA, the features should be rescaled by standardization. This involves rescaling each feature in the dataset to have zero mean and unit variance. This is necessary for many machine learning algorithms. Consider the case where measurements were made using different scales; one component varies between 10 and 300 [ppm] and another varies between 0.1 and 0.3 [wt%]. The variation in the former seems 1000 times greater than the latter if we don’t account for the scale. This will skew the factor analysis and the weights assigned to each factor. The preprocessing module in the scikit-learn library has tools for rescaling the dataset.
The resulting plot is shown in Figure 1. There are 6 eigenvalues greater than 1.0 (dashed red line), suggesting there are 6 relevant factors to be extracted.
Figure 1. Eigenvalues of covariance matrix.
The scikit-learn library contains a factor analysis module that can be used to extract the 6 factors. This is done by creating a factor analysis model and fitting the model to the data.
The factors can now be examined to interpret the underlying properties they represent. The factor loadings describe the relationship of each measurement to the underlying factor. Each loading score represents the correlation between the factor and the observed variables. The loading scores vary between -1 and 1. A positive value means that a measurement is associated with the presence of an underlying factor. A negative value suggests that a measurement indicates the absence of a factor. The factor loadings can be easily extracted from the factor model and plotted to show the loadings associated with a given factor.
Figure 2 shows the factor loadings associated with the fifth factor. In this case, the factor is associated with high values of plagioclase, illite/smectite/mica, pyrite, and organic material, and the absence of calcite and MgO. We could interpret this factor as the organic-rich clay content. Similar interpretations can be given to the other factors by observing their loading scores.
Figure 2. Factor loadings associated with the 5th factor.
The factor analysis has reduced the initial collection of 25 XRF features to a set of 6 underlying factors. A logical next step would be using these factors to group the cuttings samples by their common geochemical traits. These groups can be interpreted to represent geochemical facies. Cluster analysis is a suitable approach for assigning a common facies label to similar samples. Clustering attempts to group samples so that those in the same group (or cluster) are more similar than those in other clusters. Cluster analysis is one class of techniques that fall under the category of unsupervised machine learning. These approaches are used to infer structure from the data itself, without the use of labeled training data to guide the model.
The K-Means algorithm clusters data by trying to separate samples into k groups of equal variance. The algorithm locates the optimal cluster centroids by minimizing the distance between each point in a cluster and the closest centroid. The algorithm has three steps. It initializes by picking locations for the initial k centroids (often random samples from the dataset). Next, each sample is assigned to one of the k groups according to the nearest centroid. New centroids are then calculated by finding the mean values of each sample in each group. This is repeated until the difference between subsequent centroid positions falls below a given threshold.
Similar to EFA, K-Means requires that the number of clusters is specified before running the algorithm. There are a number of approaches to finding the optimal number of clusters. The goal is to choose the minimum number of clusters that accurately partition the dataset. These range from the relatively simple ‘elbow method’ to more rigorous techniques involving the Bayesian information criterion and optimizing the Gaussian nature of each cluster (Hamerly and Elkan, 2003). The following code demonstrates the ‘elbow method’ applied to this dataset. The sum of the squared distance of each point to the nearest cluster centroid (called inertia in scikit-learn) is plotted for an increasing number of clusters. As the number of clusters is increased and better fit the data, error is decreased. The elbow of the curve represents the point of diminishing returns where increasing the number of clusters does not reduce the error appreciably. Figure 3 suggests that about 6 clusters would be adequate for this dataset.
Figure 3. Mean squared error vs. number of clusters for the XRF dataset.
The K-means algorithm in scikit-learn is used to cluster the reduced dataset. Similar to the factor analysis, this is done by creating a K-means model and fitting the factor dataset.
Each sample in the dataset has now been assigned to one of six clusters. If we are going to interpret these clusters as geochemical facies, it is useful to inspect the geochemical signature of each cluster. Figure 4 contains a series of box plots that show the distribution of a small subset of measurements across each of the 6 clusters. The box plots depict 5 descriptive statistics; the horizontal lines of the colored rectangle show the first quartile, median, and third quartile. The arms show the minimum and maximum. Outliers are shown as black diamonds. This plot is generated using the statistical visualization library seaborn (https://seaborn.pydata.org/).
Figure 4A indicates that Cluster 1 is characterized by a relatively high (and variable) Illite/Smectite/Mica component, and the highest organic content (4B). Cluster 2 has the highest calcite component (4C) and cluster 6 is associated with the highest MgO concentration. Figure 4 only shows the response of 4 of the 25 measurements, but this can be done for each measurement to build up a geologic interpretation of each cluster.
Figure 4. Distribution of illite/smectite/mica (a), organic material (b), calcite (c) and MgO (d) across the clusters.
Now the cuttings sample have been organized into 6 geochemical facies (clusters). We can visualize the classification in a well log style plot to better understand how the facies are ordered vertically in a well. The right column of Figure 5 shows the clusters assigned to each sample using a unique color, indexed by measured depth (MD). The other columns show 4 of the corresponding geochemical measurements. Similar plots could be made for the other wells in the dataset and used to identify common intervals.
Figure 5. Log style plot showing 4 geochemical measurements and cluster assignments.
One application of this analysis is providing data that can be used for geosteering horizontal wells. This is particularly useful in areas that lack a distinctive gamma ray signature. Wellsite classification of cuttings sample could be used to interpret a well’s path through an existing chemo-stratigraphic framework. To build a visualization of this framework, it is helpful to plot the geochemical facies along the well path. Figure 6 shows the trajectory (TVD vs. MD) of the well, with the different facies colored using the same scheme as Figure 5. This can be used to build a pseudo-vertical profile and help identify specific zones as the well porpoises up and down along its length.
Figure 6. Geochemical facies assignments plotted along well trajectory.
This tutorial has demonstrated how dimensionality reduction and unsupervised machine learning can be used to understand and analyze XRF measurements of cuttings to determine geochemical facies. Exploratory factor analysis yields insight into the underlying rock properties that are changing across the reservoir. K-means clustering is used to organize similar samples into a smaller number of groups that can be interpreted as geochemical facies. This can be used to correlate formation tops between wells and provide data necessary for geosteering.
The code shown in this article demonstrates how to perform most of this analysis using Python and some standard data science and machine learning toolboxes. For the full code used to generate these results and visualizations, please see the GitHub repo at https://github.com/brendonhall/clustering_tutorial.
Brendon Hall is the director of the Energy Solutions Group at Enthought, focused on applying machine learning and physics based modeling to create scientific software tools for the oil and gas industry. He has over 10 years of experience using computational techniques to solve problems in geoscience. Brendon has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, a B.Eng. in mechanical engineering and a B.Sc. in computer science from Western University in Canada.
Calvert, S. and Pedersen, T. (2007). Elemental proxies for paleoclimatic and palaeoceanographic variability in marine sediments: interpretation and application. Developments in Marine Geology. 1. 568-644.
Croudace, I. W., and R. G. Rothwell. (2105) Micro-XRF Studies of Sediment Cores. Springer.
Davis, J. C. (1986) Statistics and Data Analysis in Geology. J. Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Hauck, T. (2014) scikit-learn Cookbook. Packt Publishing, Birmingham, UK.
Hamerly, G. and Elkan, C. (2003) Learning the k in k-means. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16, edited by Thrun, S., Saul, L. K. and Schölkopf, B. MIT Press, 281-288.
Pedregosa, F., Varoquaux, G., Gramfort, A., Michel, V., Thirion, B., Grisel, O., Blondel, M, Prettenhofer, P., Weiss, R., Dubourg, V., Vanderplas, J., Passos, A., Cournapeau, D., Brucher, M., Perrot, M. and Duchesnay, É. (2011). Scikitlearn: Machine Learning in Python, Journal of Machine Learning Research, 12, 2825-2830.
Preacher K.J., Zhang G., Kim C. and Mels G. (2013) Choosing the Optimal Number of Factors in Exploratory Factor Analysis: A Model Selection Perspective. Multivariate Behav Res. 48(1).
Rietveld, T. and Van Hout, R. (1993). Statistical Techniques for the Study of Language and Language Behaviour. Berlin – New York: Mouton de Gruyter. | 2019-04-24T14:04:27Z | https://csegrecorder.com/articles/view/geochemical-facies-analysis-using-unsupervised-machine-learning |
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How do resilient floors perform over concrete subfloors used for heat storage?
What is the R-value of resilient floors?
The R-value of vinyl flooring is very low relative to other insulative-type materials. The range of R-value in various vinyl flooring products is affected by product composition, structure, thickness, and the presence of foam in the product. However, that range is very small when compared to the magnitude of R-values of insulative-type materials vs. vinyl floor coverings. The R-values of installed vinyl flooring typically range from 0.05 to 0.17.
Resilience is a property involving the elastic energy in a material, which causes it to regain its original shape after having been indented by a high pressure load.
What types of loads affect resilient flooring?
Impact loads are those momentary indentations like those produced from walking traffic. These impact pressures are high (often as much as several thousand pounds per square inch), and the smaller (or sharper) the impact area, the more damaging the indentation.
Static loads are any load remaining in a stationary position for long periods of time. Static load limit values have been established to aid in the selection and protection of resilient flooring for use under these conditions.
Newly installed floors should not be exposed to routine rolling loads (carts, litters, etc.) for at least 72 hrs. after installation to allow setting and drying of adhesives. The bearing surface area of wheels is deceptively small, resulting in higher compressive forces than may be anticipated. Therefore when moving heavy fixtures or appliances over resilient flooring on casters or dollies, the flooring should be protected with 1/4" or thicker plywood, hardboard or other underlayment panels.
How does the light reflectance of floors affect the room's interior?
Brightness and quality of light play an important role in the illumination of institutional, commercial and industrial facilities. The light reflectivity ratings of resilient floors are important when taking the complete interior environment into consideration.
The Illuminating Engineering Society of North America recommends that floors have a reflectance factor of 20% to 40% for optimal sight in offices.
How can you determine the durability of resilient floors?
To determine the durability of resilient flooring as related to traffic wear, it is necessary to take many factors into consideration. These factors should include: abrasion resistance, resistance to gouging, punctures, cuts, and impacts, as well as, rolling and sliding (dynamic) loads and standing (static) loads. Armstrong commercial resilient flooring is manufactured in a variety of durable, long wearing structures. Each structure offers it's own unique design and performance characteristics.
Are Armstrong's vinyl floors affected by UV (ultraviolet) light?
Armstrong's vinyl floors are formulated for light resistance. However, exposing vinyl floors to high intensity UV light through large windows or doors can cause UV degradation. In these areas, the use of low E-glass, or applying low E-glass coatings or films to the glass are recommended. These low E-glass products filter UVA and UVB light frequencies, and lower the chance of UV degradation.
What does "environmentally friendly" or "environmentally compatible" mean?
These terms are used to describe chemical compounds that do not contain any hazardous substances to both the human and ecological environments. These types of products are designed to not contain any hazardous substances (according to current governmental regulations), to not contain organic solvents that might react in the atmosphere and create smog (non-photochemically reactive), and to be low in odor so they can be used in sensitive installations where indoor air quality is an issue. Armstrong's Next Generationä products are low in VOCs or have no VOCs, nonflammable, ammonia-free, low odor, contain low or no organic solvents, and contain no reportable hazardous substances (per current regulations). | 2019-04-25T00:41:19Z | https://www.armstrongflooring.com/commercial/en-jm/resources/flooring-faqs/performance-criteria-faqs.html |
Stamina and Style? Acer’s latest touchscreen-equipped Ultrabook might seem a bit large for its sake, but its promise of great battery life and strong performance make a compelling argument nonetheless. Is it worthy of consideration?
Acer’s new V-series notebooks span a wide range of prices and specs, starting with the ultra-affordable Aspire V5-121-0452 (just $299) and topping out at the $1,049 Aspire V7-582PG-6421. Both the V5 and V7 classifications (in contrast to the more traditional V3 models) focus on thin-and-light designs meant for a variety of budgets, and the notebooks range in size from 11.6-inch all the way to 15.6-inch. While the top-end V7 features a 1080p IPS touchscreen, dedicated 2GB nVidia GPU, and double the storage space, our review unit—the V7-582P-6673—steps it down to a standard 720p panel with integrated graphics and saves $200 in the process.
Still, it’s no slouch in the context of modern mainstream Ultrabooks. Sporting an Intel Core i5-4200U Haswell CPU, 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, and integrated Intel HD Graphics 4400, it’s hardly a low-end proposition. Plus, battery life (thanks in no small part to the Haswell CPU) promises some surprises. But at $849, how well does the full package stack up against its competitors? Let’s get down to the facts.
The Aspire V7-582P (available in four different colors) is constructed from a combination of brushed aluminum and plastic, though by appearance alone the like-colored materials tend to blend together quite seamlessly. For the most part, the frame of the notebook is plastic, while the display lid and palm rest (including the keyboard surround) are lined with metal. Nevertheless, the notebook initially feels solid and sturdy, with very little flex on the base unit apart from response to heavy pressure in the center. This is in spite of its fairly light 2.22 kg (4.9 lbs) weight, which is good for a 15.6-inch notebook, but still substantial in the world of Ultrabooks. The material on the bottom of the machine, meanwhile, features a soft-touch finish and feels rigid enough to last. Unlike the rest of the silver-colored body, it’s entirely black, and it extends halfway up along the sides of the notebook to meet with the grey plastic trim.
The weakest point is the display lid, which—while sufficiently thick—still feels rather flimsy and fragile. Pressure on the back of the lid produces significant LCD distortions, and hard taps on the screen result in a rippling effect near the left and right edges of the panel. The lid itself seems to provide acceptable torsion resistance, but is a far cry from the much more durable offerings of many high-end Ultrabooks and business models. On a related note, the hinges—while certainly firm enough to hold the angle of the screen constant—can’t prevent the screen from suffering a slight wobble while the touchscreen is in use. It’s a minor problem, but one which afflicts many larger touchscreen notebooks.
Overall, the workmanship is very good; apart from a few niggles, there aren’t many other gripes about the design—though we'll list our last few: any slight amount of pressure on the left palmrest of our review unit resulted in a faint clicking sound as the parts compressed slightly, which was annoying while typing at times. Also, the placement of the power button along the left edge of the notebook hardly seems ideal, and maintenance is a bit inconvenient. As is the case with many Ultrabooks, the battery is internal, meaning that replacement would require removal of the entire bottom of the notebook (and a couple dozen screws). A “battery pull” button is fortunately provided on the bottom of the base unit (recessed into the case).
The V7 features a commendable array of ports for a 15-inch Ultrabook, with two video output options (HDMI and mini-DisplayPort), Gigabit Ethernet, and three total USB ports. Unfortunately, only one of the USB ports is 3.0, which is a bit disappointing. Still, for a consumer-grade 15-inch Ultrabook, this isn’t a bad selection.
What’s not as great is their placement. Most of the ports are banished to the back of the unit, forcing the user to reach around to them to connect devices—or, most likely, to get up and glance at the back of the unit to find the correct port. They’re also crammed together, such that connecting a mini-DisplayPort cable and a larger USB device, for instance, may be a problem. At least it improves upon the Aspire M5-481PT-6644’s situation, however, which saw all of its ports in that location; the V7 features two of its USB 2.0 ports on the sides of its body (one on each side near the back).
The Aspire V7’s Intel Dual Band Wireless-N 7260 2x2 802.11n WLAN adapter provides for speeds up to 300 Mbps (over dual streams), and it performed well in our time with the unit, securing good reception at reasonable distances from the router. Also available is a Realtek Gigabit Ethernet port. The last member of the wireless trio is Bluetooth 4.0, which is integrated into the Intel WLAN card. Finally, an HD webcam rests above the screen, and throughout our brief tests, its video quality seemed adequate.
As with Acer’s other mainstream consumer notebooks, there are no special accessories in sight for the Aspire V7. In the box you’ll find a small power adapter (weighing in at just under 0.35 kg) and nothing else. The notebook ships with a 1-year parts and labor warranty (mail-in or bring-in).
...though key travel could be much improved.
The Acer Aspire V7’s full-sized Chiclet-style keyboard features a stylish, understated appearance. The keys are entirely flat and smooth, with a soft-touch finish that isn’t unlike the one on the bottom of the notebook. They’re spaced comfortably so as to reduce typing errors, and we had few problems finding our bearings while using it. As with many 15.6-inch notebooks, there’s a separate number pad included as well. Most of the keys are also sufficiently-sized.
The typing experience, meanwhile, isn’t quite as flawless. The keys unfortunately feature a short and unsatisfying sense of travel, which renders rapid typing a bit less comfortable. The crisp stop and relative ease of stroke, however, rescue it from what would otherwise be sheer mediocrity.
Lastly, the keyboard is backlit, which is always a plus. While it’s nice, however, there is only one brightness setting, with no supplemental ambient light sensor to help automate its operation.
On the other hand, we have few complaints about the V7’s very good Synaptics clickpad. Not only is it easily large enough to span the breadth of the screen (even on slower pointer speed settings), it also features a comfortable smooth finish that provides for easy finger gliding across the surface—though things do get a bit sticky when any humidity is introduced. The pointer operation is accurate and consistent. Multitouch gestures also went smoothly, with the full gamut of Synaptics options available in the driver software. The only significant complaint we have is a common one: we found that the integrated buttons require a bit too much effort to depress, which renders them much less convenient than simply tapping to click instead.
Seeing as it’s a new requirement of the revised Intel Ultrabook specifications (something which has provoked the ire of many fans of matte notebook screens), the Aspire V7 also features a 10-point multi-touch screen. We’re happy to report that it serves as an excellent accompaniment to the other input methods, with quick response, accurate operation, and good handling of multi-touch gestures. We tested input with all ten fingers simultaneously and encountered no problems.
Acer Aspire V7 models are available in 14-inch and 15.6-inch varieties with either 720p or 1080p display panels, with models featuring the latter higher-resolution panel costing upwards of $1,000. Our review unit was the $849 Acer Aspire V7-582P-6673, which includes a 15.6-inch 720p (1366x768) TN LED glossy display panel. That adds up to just 100.5 PPI, which is thoroughly unimpressive by today’s Ultrabook standards (many modern Ultrabooks post figures above 170 PPI). Likewise, upon first glance, the panel’s brightness, contrast, and color reproduction all appear subjectively unremarkable and flat. The fact that a much better (1080p IPS) panel is available for $200 above the 582P-6673’s MSRP (see the V7-582PG-6421, which also features dedicated graphics and a larger hard drive) leads us to recommend that buyers think seriously about their needs before committing to this 720p panel.
Our measurements of the panel reaffirm our initial impressions. With an average brightness of just 202 cd/m², the V7 doesn’t have a dim panel, but it’s hardly in the same ballpark as most other Ultrabooks. Meanwhile, its unimpressive contrast ratio of 225:1 doesn’t help matters much (many other Ultrabooks, including those we’ve chosen to compare with in this article, easily achieve above 500:1). At least the brightness distribution is relatively consistent at 92%.
Our color reproduction measurements offer little solace. The V7 manages just 56% sRGB coverage, which is makes it completely unsuitable for any sort of professional photo editing, and results in an overall washed-out appearance. This result can’t compete with that of most other Ultrabooks in its class, which generally opt for much higher-quality panels. Fortunately, the 1080p IPS option on the V7 would most likely quell these issues (though we can’t know for certain until we’ve had the chance to assess one for ourselves).
CalMAN 5 piles on with its revelations of significant DeltaE 2000 deviations across nearly all colors. The average pre-calibration dE2000 of 12.36 tells the story: this is not a notebook meant for color accuracy.
Thanks to its poor contrast, middling brightness, and glossy screen, our Aspire V7 review unit struggled to produce a usable picture outdoors. The situation is manageable in shady areas, but it quickly gets out of hand as soon as any bright sources of light are present, with both reflections and rampant fingerprints taking over.
Finally, viewing angles are acceptable on the horizontal axis, sans the aforementioned reflectivity woes. However (as the presence of a budget TN panel might have insinuated), vertical viewing angles are immediately restrictive. As we’ve mentioned multiple times before, if this is a concern for you, you’d once again be much better served with the 1080p IPS panel instead, as that technology provides for very wide viewing angles with very little distortion.
The Acer Aspire V7 models are available with a range of CPUs, starting with the least-expensive Ivy Bridge-based 1.8 GHz – 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5-3337U and topping off with the Haswell-based 1.8GHz – 3.0GHz Core i7-4500U CPU. Our review unit came configured with an Intel Core i5-4200U CPU, which is also a Haswell-based chip built with 22 nm manufacturing technology. It features a base clock rate of 1.6 GHz and, with the help of Turbo Boost, can increase to 2.6 GHz when conditions warrant it. All of the CPUs available in the V7 line, including the i5-4200U in our unit, are ultra-low-voltage processors with a TDP of 15 W. This is 2 W below the TDP of comparable Ivy Bridge predecessors.
In terms of system memory, our V7 review unit featured 8GB DDR3-1600 (PC3-12800) RAM. Of this total, 4 GB is soldered permanently to the system board, while the other 4 GB is a replaceable SODIMM. A grand total of 12 GB is possible if the 4 GB module is replaced with an 8 GB SODIMM.
As compared to other notebooks with the same CPU, the Aspire V7-582P-6673 nearly always comes out on top. Our synthetic benchmarks place it up to 5% above the Vaio Duo 13 SVD1321M2E and Vaio Pro 11 SVP121M2EB.G4 in the Super Pi 32m and wPrime 1024m tests, and 3DMark 06 CPU reinforces those results. Meanwhile, Cinebench R11.5 widens the gap even further, with the Vaio Pro 11 falling 11% behind in the xCPU benchmark (in this same test, however, the Vaio Duo 13 scores nearly identically with the V7).
To check whether or not the Aspire V7 could churn out the same level of performance while operating unplugged, we conducted a second run of 3DMark 11 while running on battery power only. The resulting score of 995 suggests that there is no discernible difference in performance under either power state.
Finally, we ran DPC Latency Checker to evaluate the notebook’s propensity for handling real-time audio and video streaming. As shown in the screenshot, we experienced occasional spikes in latency (at seemingly random intervals between 45 and 60 seconds duration). Disabling wireless and other devices did not resolve the problems. Still, the spikes are so irregular that it is unlikely to manifest itself as a major problem in practice.
The performance of the Intel Core i5-4200U is most comparable to that of the Ivy Bridge Core i5-3317U; that’s in spite of the fact that the 4200U is clocked 100 MHz below the 3317U, and that it features a TDP of 2 W less. The two CPUs nevertheless post nearly-identical results across all benchmarks, which is an encouraging result if you happen to be more interested in battery life than CPU performance gains (which is probably true for most consumers). The bottom line is that the Core i5-4200U should provide more than enough power to satisfy most users while managing power more efficiently than equivalent Ivy Bridge CPUs.
To measure overall system performance, we use PCMark. Since its performance is still bottlenecked by a conventional mechanical hard drive, the V7 can’t be expected to compete in these tests with other Ultrabooks that leverage solid-state storage devices only. However, like many other lower-cost Ultrabooks, in order to meet the requirements of Intel’s specification, it still includes a solid-state drive—but for caching rather than dedicated storage. The end result of this approach is quicker access to and loading of frequently-used data and applications.
We performed each of the system performance benchmarks three times to allow the caching mechanism to do its job before recording our scores. In PCMark 7, our score of 3841 is very good overall, breaching the top third of our database and accompanied by other machines that leverage similar technologies beyond the constraints of mechanical-only storage. The same goes for PCMark Vantage (6361), where the overall position falls to merely the upper half. The two Sony Vaio Ultrabooks (the Duo 13 and the Pro 11) that we referenced earlier come out far ahead in these benchmarks thanks to their wholly solid-state storage configurations. In other words, it’s important to remember that, while caching certainly helps, there is no equal to a purely solid-state approach.
As we touched on above, the V7 leverages a hybrid storage approach that involves a standard mechanical drive supplemented by a solid-state cache drive. The mechanical drive we received in our review unit was a Seagate ST500LT012-9WS142 500 GB 5400 RPM hard drive; this drive was paired with a Kingston SMS151S324G 24 GB SSD (strangely, Acer reports its capacity at 20 GB instead). The Kingston SSD is used to cache frequently-accessed data so that it can be fetched more rapidly upon subsequent retrieval. This caching mechanism is totally transparent to the user.
As for other storage options, not much else is available on the V7 series. The SSD size and function remains the same across all models, whereas the mechanical drive ranges in capacity from 500 GB (such as in our review unit) up to 1 TB—all 5400 RPM models.
Our Aspire V7 came equipped with the standard integrated GPU for Haswell-based ULV CPUs—namely, Intel HD Graphics 4400. Paired with the Core i5-4200U CPU in our unit, this GPU’s clock speed ranges from 200 to 1000 MHz, and it isn’t likely to handle any serious gaming—though hopefully it can at least best scores from equivalent Ivy Bridge-equipped predecessors.
Fortunately, this seems to be the case. The 3DMark 11 overall score of 964 is a triumph for integrated ULV graphics (and even standard voltage IGPs until now), standing alongside such respectable competition as the AMD Radeon HD 7570M (avg: 932) and the GeForce GT 540M (avg: 993). These scores are far beyond that of even the Intel HD Graphics 4000 standard-voltage GPU results (avg: 604), though they can’t hold a candle to the excellent scores managed by the HD Graphics 5000 machines (avg: 1112). Cinebench R11.5’s OpenGL benchmark offers an even more distilled view of the GPU performance, and here, the 4400 manages a shocking 19.68—a performance (until now) unheard of in ULV integrated graphics territory.
Our gaming benchmark results follow suit. While it would certainly be wiser to upgrade to one of the dedicated graphics models if you’re planning on any moderate to heavy gaming, it’s good to know that even the ULV integrated graphics of our review unit should be able to handle Low settings on most modern titles without too much trouble (and some games, such as the two we tested, on Medium).
As it compares to the competition, the Sony Vaio Duo 13 (which, again, shares the same CPU and GPU) falls within a couple percentage points on nearly all relevant benchmarks, while the Vaio Pro 11 is handily crushed, most likely due to some throttling we encountered while testing it. Overall, we’re impressed with the integrated GPU performance of the Aspire V7-582P-6673.
When idle, the Aspire V7 is practically silent, maxing out at 30.9 dB(A) by our measurements. Meanwhile, even load noise levels are not terribly bothersome, with a median recorded value of 36.6 dB(A) and an overall maximum of 45.9 dB(A). Even when the fan reaches this absolute highest RPM, it benefits from a tone that is not disturbing—more whoosh than whistle—and the fact that the vent is rear-mounted helps to direct the noise away from the user as well.
In spite of its relative quietness, the V7 also manages reasonable temperatures, even when under load. The hottest part of the notebook was the underside of the base unit, and it still managed a thoroughly reasonable average temperature of 36 °C. The maximum recorded temperature (44.2 °C) was in the upper-left quadrant of the bottom of the notebook (upper-right while the notebook is sitting upright), and while that’s not comfortable while sitting on the lap, it’s hardly worth getting concerned about.
As part of our rigorous test routine here at Notebookcheck, we subject each and every PC to a stress test to see whether it can handle heavy operation without resorting to throttling. During this test, we monitor the system as it's subjected to heavy load by way of Prime95 (for CPU stress) and FurMark (for GPU stress).
Under our full CPU stress (using Prime95 only), the notebook easily manages full Turbo clock speeds of 2294 MHz consistently. Under full GPU stress (using FurMark only), we found nearly consistent GPU operation (practically solidly locked at the Turbo frequency of 1000 MHz), which was reassuring.
Finally, under full system stress (both CPU and GPU maxed out), the system finally begins to buckle to meet the design constraints of the 15 W TDP. Here, we see the CPU clock locked at its base frequency of 1.6 GHz, while the GPU wavers between 900 and 1000 MHz. Since none of these values fall below the base frequencies (only the Turbo frequencies are missed), however, there is (by definition) no throttling in sight.
It’s important to mention that very few machines can actually handle full system stress and maintain full Turbo frequencies. This isn’t a concern because it’s not likely for such conditions to ever manifest under real-world circumstances. To illustrate this point, we performed yet another run of 3DMark 11 directly after an hour of full system stress—and the result that we received (946) was negligibly different from that of our original GPU benchmarks.
Considering the thin profile of the Aspire V7, we were pleasantly surprised to find that its four speakers (all located on the underside of the base unit) churned out mostly clear sound at uncommonly high volumes. Obviously one cannot expect accurate frequency response across the spectrum from such small drivers, but the overall tone of the sound was better than expected. The inclusion of Dolby-developed post-processing software provides additional granular control over application- and task-specific audio enhancements, which include not only a 10-channel graphic equalizer but also a Volume Leveler, Dialogue Enhancer, and Surround Virtualizer.
Perhaps the most interesting story of Intel’s new Haswell line of CPUs is the improvement in battery life that it brings to mobile systems. Such is the story with the Aspire V7, which manages not only performance which is certainly adequate for most users, but also what can only be considered excellent battery life. For our battery tests, we choose Battery Eater Pro coupled with a variety of configuration templates and scenarios. During all tests, all screen and device timeouts are disabled.
Our first battery test is used to estimate maximum battery life. For this test, we set the notebook to the Power Saver power profile, lower brightness to minimum, disable all wireless radios, and launch the Battery Eater Reader’s Test. Here, our Aspire V7 test unit managed 12 hours and 20 minutes of runtime before shutting down.
Next, we shift to the opposite end of the spectrum with an attempt to measure minimum battery life. Here, we configure the notebook to the High Performance power profile, set brightness to maximum, reenable all wireless radios, and perform the Battery Eater Classic Test. Under these conditions, the notebook managed 2 hours and 4 minutes of runtime.
Finally, for a much more realistic approximation of the notebook’s longevity under normal usage conditions, we configure the power profile to Balanced, set brightness to as close to 150 cd/m² as possible, and launch a preconfigured web surfing script developed here at Notebookcheck. The result here was 5 hours and 32 minutes, which is yet again very good.
On the surface, the Acer Aspire V7-582P-6673 adds up to a solid choice: it features great battery life, an excellent touchscreen, surprisingly strong performance, and a reasonably solid build, all for an respectable price point of $849. If nothing else, it’s evidence that the Haswell microarchitecture really was worth the wait: the sheer fact that a ULV-equipped Ultrabook can handle medium settings in some modern games is amazing enough.
However, it features a few glaring drawbacks that overshadow many of its strengths. For starters, it’s hard to look past its thoroughly mediocre display, which not only is heavily reflective in moderately-lit environments, but which fails to impress in just about every other category as well (contrast, color reproduction, and resolution included). Couple that with its relatively bulky form factor (for an Ultrabook) and you begin to wonder why another model wasn’t made available that fills these gaps.
Well, it was: the Acer Aspire V7-582PG-6421, which (for $200 more) will score you a 1080p screen, dedicated graphics, and double the storage space—additions which help to justify the size premium. If you don’t mind the extra cash, this might be a better option—however, it’s unfortunate that some iterations of the notebook aren’t available with Haswell integrated graphics (for sake of power savings) coupled with the 1080p panel option.
Still, if your mind is made up on a 15.6-inch machine, you’re able to look past a subpar screen, and you can live with the keyboard, the Acer Aspire V7-582P-6673 is worth considering.
...but still quite large in the world of Ultrabooks.
The ULV GPU performance still exceeds the HD Graphics 4000 performance! | 2019-04-19T09:19:22Z | https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Acer-Aspire-V7-582P-6673-Ultrabook.99941.0.html |
Preliminary thoughts on yesterday: In this country, we are told that "we" are represented by the people we select. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We have a number of reports/perspectives on the March for a Clean Energy Revolution in Philadelphia on July 24, the eve of the Democratic National Convention, beginning with an excellent introduction to the March and the whole concept of Clean Energy from Doug Shields, then reports from Desmogblog, Ecowatch, Metro.us and Philadelphia Magazine. Also included are two videos from Delaware Riverkeeper covering the Clean Energy Summit prior to the March, and then the March itself.
On Sept. 28, the PA Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional the remaining parts of Act 13 being challenged by municipalities and environmental groups. Those sections include the "medical gag order," the notification of spills and leaks to public water suppliers but not private water well owners, the use of eminent domain for subsurface storage of natural gas products, and the role of the state Public Utility Commission in reviewing local ordinances and withholding impact-fee payments from municipalities that limit shale gas drilling. Although some critics of the ruling claim that the ruling leaves "gaping holes" in legislative protections related to drilling, health and legal experts say those omissions are not as great as might first appear. (MOB's opinion: a fracking ban is the only foolproof protection from the multiple harms inflicted by shale-gas drilling.) Local reactions from attorneys and a concerned-citizen group in Lawrence County can be read here.
A Right-To-Know request by Pennsylvanians Against Fracking (PAF) reveals that Pennsylvania has every intention of continuing to approve natural gas power plants, which will lead to continued fracking, expansion of pipelines and related infrastructure, combustion, and dangerously high amounts of methane being released into the atmosphere. Loopholes in the soon-to-be rolled out PA Clean Power Plan will enable most of these proposed power plants to be omitted from the Plan and exempt from its regulation.
PAF's Karen Feridun recently published an op-ed piece in the national online publication The Hill about the problem with natural gas: methane emissions. "Methane and carbon dioxide emissions from natural gas are on the rise, making the need for the government to change course and ban fracking all the more urgent."
An affiliate of Royal Dutch Shell Plc started acquiring rights-of-way in August for a 94-mile ethane transport system that would feed the company's proposed multi-billion dollar cracker in Beaver County. The common carrier pipelines would be located in Southwestern Pennsylvania and extend into West Virginia and Ohio. Shell Pipeline Company LP plans to begin construction of the Falcon Ethane Pipeline System in late 2018.
Local officials in Wilmot Twp., Bradford County PA have drafted a resolution to halt production at natural gas wells in the township, not because they're against drilling, but because of landowners' "threats to engage in violence or possibly tamper with gas infrastructure to disrupt production" over royalty payments.
Bradford County's pro-drilling officials are preparing a PR campaign against the Marcellus Shale Coalition for blocking legislative attempts to address royalty payment problems in the state.
Well-known fracktivist Vera Scroggins created this video of fracking truck gridlock in Susquehanna County, PA.
Friends and foes of Sunoco’s Mariner East 2 plan to build two natural gas liquids pipelines across southern Pennsylvania lined up to support or attack the plan in equal measures at a public meeting called by the Department of Environmental Protection in West Chester on Aug. 10.
In an op-ed piece in the Washington PA Observer-Reporter, PAF's Karen Feridun responds to a column written by Energy-in-Depth's PA director Nicole Jacobs, who attempted to discredit a Johns Hopkins University asthma study. Says Feridun: "Public relations spin should never be confused with honest attempts to discuss research or to educate." We couldn't agree more.
PA DEP has green-lighted a proposal to use 3,950 tons of natural gas drilling waste for an experimental road construction project at a Lycoming County hunting club. This approval marks the first time that drill cuttings can be re-purposed as construction material at an area that’s not an industrial site. Drill cuttings are the waste dirt and rock that come up from deep underground in gas development and may contain naturally-occurring radiation and chemicals. Usually the cuttings are disposed of in landfills.
Butler County is getting an enhanced ethane cracker capability. The MarkWest Bluestone 3 de-ethanizer will eventually feed into the Mariner West pipeline to Sarnia, Ontario, Canada.
In Barnesville, OH on Aug. 6, Yale University researchers who have spent the last two months studying the impact of the natural gas industry on Belmont County’s air and drinking water met with residents to discuss their work. The Yale researchers were looking to determine whether people who live close to natural gas wells experience more air and water pollution.
On July 20th the City of Rensselaer NY voted 5:0 to pass the Resolution Opposing Pilgrim Pipelines, becoming the fourth and final city on the proposed oil and petroleum products pipelines’ direct route to oppose permitting or construction of the pipelines. Rensselaer is now the 28th Hudson Valley municipality (including towns, cities and villages but excluding counties) to pass a resolution opposing Pilgrim pipelines due to health, safety, environmental, drinking water, climate and energy policy, and economic concerns.
On Aug. 16, New York City Council voted in favor of a bill which would ban fracking waste from the city.
The EPA’s Science Advisory Board has stepped up its criticism of the Environmental Protection Agency’s controversial report on fracking, calling on the agency to provide evidence for its landmark conclusion that fracking for oil and gas has had “no widespread, systemic impacts” on drinking water.
Whatcom County, Washington, passed an emergency moratorium on new fossil fuel shipments through Cherry Point, a major export hub, citing environmental and safety issues.
The Standing Rock Sioux of North Dakota have launched a campaign against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Thousands of protesters have gathered near the confluence of the Cannon Ball and Missouri Rivers in North Dakota in opposition to the pipeline, which opponents say desecrates their sacred places and presents imminent harm to their drinking water supplies.
An article by the BBC chronicles life in the Standing Rock protest camps.
On Sept. 6 a federal judge granted part of the Standing Rock Sioux's emergency request to halt construction of a section of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The area not covered by the judge's order includes lands that the tribe is particularly concerned about protecting.
A federal judge denied a Native American tribe's request to temporarily block construction of the four-state Dakota Access oil pipeline, but the U.S. Justice Department responded to the ruling by announcing steps to protect — for now — a lake along the construction route.
"What is happening at Standing Rock is a profound action by the people who are still human, taking a stand to protect Mother Earth and end the destruction wrought by a diseased culture. This, the Standing Rock Sioux teach us."
Meanwhile, in Iowa, construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in that state is facing resistance from some local residents who believe it's a gamble with Iowa's environment that could lead to the contamination of Iowa's water supply. And on Sept. 22, protesters in a 60-car caravan demanded that President Barack Obama stop the pipeline in Iowa, as he did in North Dakota.
The state of Victoria in Australia has voted to ban fracking on its territory, further cementing the moratorium first put in place in 2012. It is the first Australian state to impose such a ban.
A green group has reiterated calls for the Scottish Government to ban fracking outright as Ineos’s first shipment of ethane from the US nears the firm’s plant at Grangemouth.
Meet Green Party candidate, and Donald Trump protest arrestee, Michael Bagdes-Canning.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is considering nominating Oklahoma oil and gas mogul Harold Hamm as energy secretary if elected to the White House on Nov. 8, according to four sources close to Trump's campaign. When he addressed the Republican National Convention in July, Hamm called for expanded drilling and said too much environmental regulation threatened to limit U.S. oil and gas production and increase the country's dependence on Middle Eastern oil producers. "Every time we can’t drill a well in America, terrorism is being funded," Hamm told the cheering crowd. "Every onerous regulation puts American lives at risk."
The Clean Energy March was an event that mixed national politics with local opposition to specific energy projects. Some demonstrators called on the Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to step up her support for renewable energy, while others – many of them backers of Clinton’s former rival, Senator Bernie Sanders — vowed never to support Clinton even if that increased the chances of the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, becoming president.
The Oil and Gas Threat Map is an online interactive tool that displays data about the threats communities face from oil and gas industry pollution.
Hundreds of Illinois children spend their days gasping for breath, according to a new report from the Clean Air Task Force. A first-of-its-kind analysis from the environmental advocacy group shows how air pollution from oil and gas facilities can impact the health of communities. In Illinois, the report says the result is more than 27,000 summertime childhood asthma attacks.
Researchers at the University of Missouri released a study that is the first of its kind to link exposure to chemicals released during hydraulic fracturing to adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes in mice. Scientists believe that exposure to these chemicals also could pose a threat to human development.
Living near a natural gas hydraulic fracturing site is associated with increased rates of sinus problems, migraines and fatigue, according to new research. This is the third study released by Hopkins in the past year that connects proximity to fracking sites with adverse health outcomes. Last fall, researchers found an association between fracking and premature births and high-risk pregnancies, and last month, found ties between fracking and asthma.
This article is a detailed discussion of the three aforementioned Johns Hopkins studies by the authors of the studies.
On July 26 the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania dismissed the constitutional climate change lawsuit brought by seven young plaintiffs. The court declined to follow Pennsylvania Supreme Court precedent that determined that Pennsylvania's constitutional Environmental Rights Amendment imposes an affirmative duty on the Commonwealth to "conserve and maintain" Pennsylvania's public natural resources for both present and future generations. The decision will be appealed to the PA Supreme Court.
A court ruling on Aug. 29 cleared the way for Mt. Pleasant Township, Washington County, to act on a conditional use application for the Yonkers well pad. Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future (PennFuture) filed a motion seeking a court injunction to stay any action on gas drilling activity by the township board of supervisors as it seeks a resolution to a separate complaint on the validity of the township’s ordinances allowing gas drilling in all zoned districts. The latter issue will be taken up as part of a hearing before the zoning hearing board Oct. 4. The Mt. Pleasant Township board of supervisors must approve or deny the application for the natural gas drilling site just under a mile from Fort Cherry schools by Oct. 6.
As a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission lawyer in the 1980s, Carolyn Elefant annoyed her co-workers by doling out free advice to landowners. Today, Elefant is a hired gun for landowners battling her former employer and some of the nation's biggest energy companies. The 52-year-old New Jersey native works for small towns, ranchers and farmers fighting pipelines and other infrastructure linked to the nation's natural gas production boom.
A Pennsylvania appeals court has ruled that the Department of Environmental Protection has the authority to consider the impact of gas drilling wells on public and natural resources including, but not limited to, public drinking water supplies, parks, forests, game lands, habitats of rare and endangered species, historic and archeological sites, scenic rivers, and historic landmarks.
Warning that climate change amounts to the "mother of all risks," three of the world's biggest insurance companies this week are demanding that G20 countries stop bankrolling the fossil fuels industry.
An earthquake struck northern Oklahoma early in the morning on Sept. 3, rattling houses and waking residents in the region around Pawnee, about 74 miles north of Oklahoma City. Preliminary measurements show the quake had a magnitude of 5.6 — believed to be one of the strongest in state history. Local officials reported moderate to severe damage and at least one nonlife-threatening injury. Later that day, Oklahoma state officials ordered oil and gas operators to shut down three dozen wastewater disposal wells.
In recent years, energy companies have pumped an unprecedented volume of wastewater deep into underground wells. That process has sparked a wave of earthquakes across the central United States, and is also having a visible effect on the Earth's surface, a new review of satellite images has found.
The Texas Railroad Commission has let the petroleum industry inject oil and gas waste into groundwater for decades without the required federal approval. Officials with Clean Water Action said the failure of oversight on the part of the state and federal governments may have contaminated future drinking water sources. No evidence of contamination has been found, but little documentation is available to prove or disprove negative effects.
According to Bill McKibben: "For years, our leaders chose to ignore the warnings of our best scientists and top military strategists. Carbon and methane now represent the deadliest enemy of all time, the first force fully capable of harrying, scattering, and impoverishing our entire civilization. World War III is well and truly underway. And we are losing. We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII."
Though it may not have seemed possible, climate catastrophe is even closer than previously thought, with new figures released Thursday finding that—when the wells already drilled, pits dug, and pipelines built, are taken under consideration—we are well on our way to going beyond 2°C of warming.
Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe, who serves as the Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, recently told conservative radio host Eric Metaxas that schools are "brainwashing" children about climate change.
A Russian heatwave in late July-early August activated long-dormant anthrax bacteria in Siberia, sickening at least 13 people and killing one boy and more than 2,300 reindeer. A state of emergency was imposed throughout the region in western Siberia, and reindeer herding communities were quarantined.
In August, climate scientists gathered in Geneva to debate whether we’ve "already gone too far" with regard to climate change.
Are we feeling collective grief over climate change? The idea is highly controversial, but at least one psychiatrist is convinced that we are, whether we know it or not.
A leading doctor calls climate change the gravest health threat of the 21st century. "When you cannot feed your children, you will do anything, even if it means going to war. This is the reality of climate change."
Wide-scale disruption from marine heatwaves (which occur in ocean waters, unlike the atmospheric heatwaves we experience on land) is increasingly being seen all around the globe.
The snow-covered Himalaya-Hindu Kush mountains and the Tibetan Plateau, spanning a broad area in Central and East Asia, together contain the largest ice mass on the planet outside of the polar regions. In fact, it’s earned itself the nickname of the “Third Pole.” But as in Greenland and Antarctica, there’s trouble afoot: Glaciers in the Third Pole are also shrinking.
While environmentalists have long advocated an end to coal-fired power for the sake of both the climate and public health, some say that increasing reliance on natural gas is the wrong energy strategy.
When someone tells you, “The climate is always changing,” show them this cartoon.
Another good reason for switching to electric vehicles: more than 250,000 gallons of gasoline have spilled since a major Alabama pipeline exploded. According to David Butler, riverkeeper of the Cahaba Riverkeeper organization, the environmental impacts of the spill have been minimal.
Catholics currently subscribe to seven corporal and seven spiritual “works of mercy” — obligations that include sheltering the homeless, visiting prisoners and burying the dead. On Sept. 1, Pope Francis added care for the environment as an eighth work of mercy.
Boulder, Colorado Mayor Suzanne Jones has announced that the city would commit to being powered by 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030. Boulder now represents the 17th city in the U.S. to commit to be powered by clean, renewable energy like wind and solar, and is the second city in Colorado to make a 100 percent clean energy commitment along with Aspen.
The Iowa Utilities Board has given MidAmerican Energy the green light for the utility's plans for a $3.6 billion wind energy investment, part of the company's goal to reach 100 percent renewable energy for Iowa customers.
A University of Waterloo (Ontario) study says bringing solar and wind energy to Canada's remote Arctic communities is not only possible and environmentally beneficial, but it will also mean big savings.
A new bus from Proterra, the Catalyst E2, is an electric bus intended for long city routes. Its battery holds up to 660 kilowatt hours of charge, which means it could reasonably run 350 miles on a single charge.
Solar rooftops and Tesla Powerwalls will power the new Tesla Town in Melbourne, Australia. The Yarrabend community, a suburb of Melbourne, will utilize solar roofs and Tesla Powerwall to provide and store energy for the homes, businesses, fitness centers, and other buildings in the community.
When a workplace installs a charging station, employees are 20 times as likely to buy an electric vehicle, according to a survey from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The people of Connoquenessing's Woodlands still need you. Please donate what you can to help supply them with fresh water. | 2019-04-19T23:17:21Z | https://www.marcellusoutreachbutler.org/newsletter-2016-10.html |
Has a Masters degree in Islamic Law from Marmara University, Turkey, and a Master of Arts in Middle East Studies and Masters of Philosophy in Islamic Law, both from Columbia University. He is a professor of Islamic Law at Southern Methodist University and a dean of the Islamic Seminary of America.
Later when ancient Greek thought merged with the Christianity of the Church Fathers, a soul-based view of human nature became one of the ruling conceptions of Western belief. In Christendom, the soul was the “knot of the universe,” the unifying link between nature, man, and God, and the single most prized human attribute. By the mid-17th century, however, these same beliefs were seen as a rich source of corruption, unceasing strife, terrorism, and cruelty of vast dimensions. For decades, Christian sects waged war with each other over competing claims regarding the soul and its salvation…While the soul and the psyche were once understood to be synonymous, some thinkers now advanced a radical idea. What if the mind was not so much spirit as it was bodily? What if thinking matter existed within human flesh. An object, this mind would still somehow house human subjectivity. Endowed by God, it still would be material, and therefore sicken and die…Once modernity gave birth to the theory of an embodied mind, the implications were grave. If it wasn’t the soul but rather a fallible mind that made men and women think, choose, and act as they did, then long-standing beliefs were erroneous. Convictions regarding truth and illusion, innocence and guilt, health and illness, the rulers and the ruled and the roles of the individual in society would need to change.
The last sentence is where I want to begin because the Enlightenment’s embodied mind theory not only led to the jettisoning of the soul and the rest of the transcendent world, but also a loss of convictions about truth and everything else. A climate of doubt and uncertainty prevailed and as a result humanity entered into a new era called the Secular Age. Secularism was therefore the first product of modernity and the Enlightenment.
If we carefully understand what the Secular Age is, then I believe we take one step closer to understanding exactly how it is that, although our Muslim predecessors before modernity possessed less knowledge about the material universe and resources than us, they had more conviction about their faith and deen, which enabled them to establish and leave a legacy of a profound civilization; and why, despite our currently having more knowledge and resources, we are plagued with less conviction about ourselves and our faith, and therefore contribute less to our communities and to civilization as a whole.
whereas the political organization of all pre-modern societies was in some way connected to, based on, guaranteed based on some faith in, or adherence to God, or some notion of ultimate reality, the modern Western state is free from this connection…Or taken from another side, as we function within various spheres of activity – economic, political, cultural, educational, professional, recreational – the norms and principles we follow, the deliberations we engage in, generally don’t refer us to God or to any religious beliefs; the considerations we act on are internal to the “rationality” of each sphere – maximum gain within the economy, the greatest benefit to the greatest number in the political arena, and so on.
Spaces and even time become stripped of the sacredness that for millennia had functioned as a reminder of the life to come. Because of this, the Secular Age is one in which humanity no longer searches for fulfillment outside of this world or beyond the human condition. Humanism itself is the locus of the search for meaning and goals. All drive and pleasures are reduced to the Quranic concept of the self and its whims, the nafs and the hawa.
The second component of secularity is an overall decline in belief in God and in religious practice among believers themselves. This phenomenon is a consequence of the first component. Belief itself has become subject to scrutiny in the “rational” sense and as a result it becomes juxtaposed with disbelief not only in theory but in practice. This does not mean that there were no disbelievers in pre-modern Muslim societies. It means simply that disbelief in Muslim societies in the past was not normalized at all. I am using disbelief here to indicate not diversity in faith, but the rejection of the notion of God or a transcendent, ultimate reality. Even in Western Europe, there was no conception of atheism until the 17th century. It was inconceivable in pre-modern Europe that someone would not believe in God. In the Secular Age, belief and disbelief in God not only is equally conceivable but equally acceptable. The mass acceptability in society of unbelief and of uncertainty of belief is normalized now. The Secular Age produces so many viable options for what it means to be human that Muslims themselves have accepted the multiplicity of options rather than questioning the options. Our engagement in a multiplicity of manners of thinking and being have pulled us into doubt. There are so many alternatives that certainty (yaqeen) in belief is no longer a given. We doubt certainty even exists because the majority of people are uncertain and appear perfectly happy living in conditions of doubt. Enter component three of the secular age: new conditions of belief.
This final ingredient is the presence of this doubt coming home to roost. Secularity involves living under conditions where doubt is the norm, and because it is normalized it becomes acceptable and okay. As Muslims, since the migration of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) from Mecca to Medina to just after World War I, we have always been a people who have lived in a society where belief in God was never seriously challenged. Now, there are few places on earth where that is the case. Faith in a higher power has simply become one of many possibilities. This phenomenon has been called the Nova Effect. Because the Secular Age has ushered in the equalization of the polar opposites of orthodoxy and disbelief, a multiplicity of other options have emerged to fill in the gap.
I like to illustrate this with the analogy of going to the grocery store to buy cereal. In the past, there were simply two to three options of cereal. Today, in all grocery stores, there are so many options for cereal that all stores now have entire aisles for cereals. When you walk down the aisle and examine the options, the presence of literally dozens (and hundreds if you add the family sizes and small packs) of options is enough to either keep you dazed and confused for minutes on end, or to turn you off to the point where you walk away. Our predecessors would be horrified to find that the Secular Age has complicated things that used to be insignificant such as what to eat for breakfast. Insignificant matters have become so complicated that we are conditioned to reject simple submission to and acceptance of divine authority. The Nova Effect pushes us to explore new things based on the myriad of alternatives before us and thus the level of certainty behind the correctness of our choices is reduced.
So what does all of this mean for the condition of Muslims living in a Secular Age? First, it means that we live without constant societal reminders of, or references to, God. Second, we live under social conditions where belief and unbelief are considered equal rivals, and this affects not only us, but the next generation. Third, the Nova Effect means that more and more options for alternative lifestyles that claim to provide a fulfilling life for the human being become available. The answer to what it means to be human and how to live accordingly become “all or any of the above” instead of merely “option a, b, or c.” We as Muslims live under different conditions from our predecessors. The difference between pre-modernity and modernity involves differences in not only the questions we ask but how and under what conditions they are asked. We ask moral questions just as our predecessors did, but the kinds of moral questions we ask are different because of the conditions that give rise to the questions push us to cast doubt on the answer even before that answer is produced.
Yet there is a solution to this apparent malaise. The solution is to ignore the options and search for certainty itself. In the first revelation of the Quran, we are informed of the paradigmatic state of the human being as one who learns – a prerequisite to exiting doubt. The Quran says, “He taught man that which he did not know.” The Prophet peace and blessings be upon him said, “Leave that which makes you doubt, for that which does not make you doubt.” Doubt, termed shakk in Arabic, is a stage that is two steps away from certainty in Islam. When one leaves doubt, one then enters into the stage of belief (zann). This is a thorny area because belief may or may not be properly justified. As belief increases in intensity it becomes conviction (ghalabat zann). Conviction is mathematically described by some scholars as being between 75-98% sure about the validity of one’s belief. When one reaches 99%, certainty (yaqeen) is achieved.
Reference to certainty appears in three different ways in the Quran. The first is certainty based upon knowledge and learning. This is termed in the Quran, ilm al-yaqeen. Learning involves accurate conceptualization of and proper judgment about a thing. In order to accomplish this, we need to ensure that we understand and define the relevant constructs properly, a feature that is normally the central facet in any course on Aristotelian logic. The ability to properly conceptualize concepts leads to our ability to precisely define terminology, and this in turn enhances our ability to speak and formulate propositions and thereby reason correctly. This is central to knowing and understanding. We live in an era now in which the Nova Effect has produced so much uncertainty and doubt to the point where many no longer understand and reason. Essentially, we have become a society that no longer “knows” anymore. The Secular Age has conditioned us to think differently. Consequently, achieving certainty becomes a tall order of business.
The second form of certainty is based upon observation and is called in the Quran, ayn al-yaqeen. This level of certainty arises from a high degree of conviction that emerges from witnessing a phenomenon. The overwhelming majority of sensory input is visual. Witnessing phenomena facilitates conviction in their validity or reality. However, if the environment and phenomena that we witness on a daily basis, such as architectural structures, social media, and even art are bereft of sacred references then we reduce ourselves to a certainty in only material phenomena. Furthermore, the problem is that the understanding of reality is actually undermined because in the Secular Age we have now become so skeptical that we scrutinize even our witnessing of things to such an extent that we lose any conviction about having witnessed something in the first place. Therefore, nothing but doubt remains and reigns. This goes back to the damage done by the Secular Age in taking references to God and the transcendent realm out of public spaces. It de-facilitates certainty based upon witnessing spectacular events.
The third form of certainty in Quranic terms is haqq ul-yaqeen. This refers to certainty that arises as a result of personal experience. Our experiences have drastically shifted from those of our predecessors. The Secular Age has altered our reliance on spiritual and in many cases interpersonal and natural experiences. We go to see a horror movie to get scared because we crave the artificiality of a horror film. But people who believe in possession and Jinn don’t need to watch movies about paranormal activity. We struggle and even travel to obtain the simplest experiences that were daily phenomena for our pre-modern predecessors. We are cut off and detached from spiritual experiences and have traded them for rationalized routine. What’s worse is that we have accepted this condition of affairs of depriving ourselves from experiencing what is beyond this temporal life. We are content in living life to the fullest extent materially but not experiencing its spiritual depths. The Secular Age is an age in which self-sufficient humanism, defined by frequently shifting standards, is enough. This means that there has actually been a shift in the object of experience. The Secular Age no longer wants people to engage in spiritual, transcendental, profoundly intellectual experiences. The object of experience now is the human person herself. It’s a radicalized version of individualism. Not only am I concerned with me, but only the trinity of me, myself and I alone can suffice me. It is the ultimate inversion of the Islamic eschatological system: I reward myself and I punish myself. Life is essentially about me ascending into higher degrees of pleasing myself and finding comfort in myself – nothing outside of me matters anymore. Self-sufficing humanism not only is an option in the Secular Age, but it is a widely available and arguably the dominant option. Any goal or objective beyond human flourishing becomes very difficult to conceptualize. This shifts the goal away from certainty to something entirely uncertain, for the self is prone to instability.
We are now living in an age where these three forms of Quranic certainty have been eroded and this begs the following questions: How can we reclaim certainty and its forms, as articulated in the Quran, in the Secular Age? What are the possibilities and impossibilities of certain kinds of experiences in the Secular Age?
Certainty is mentioned twenty-seven times in the Quran. The Prophet Muhammad peace and blessings be upon him, and by extension his followers, are urged in the Quran to “worship your Lord until what is certain (al-yaqeen) comes to you.”What is certain, in this verse, indicates two things, according to scholars of Quranic exegesis. The first indication is death. Death is the ultimate answer for what it means to be human. For no matter what we build and what we do, we must all deal with death in general and individually we will all pass away. Therefore, the initial meaning is to be consistent believers and hold on steadfast to your principles, your practices and your convictions throughout your encounters with the deaths of others and until we ourselves pass away.
The second indication in the verse is certainty itself. This means that the role of constant ritual worship (ibada) in Islam on a daily basis is to facilitate and reinforce certainty in all its forms. First, we must learn how to perform ritual worship, what validates it, what invalidates it, how we may improve upon the quality of our ritual performances, and the like. We must also learn about Who it is we are worshipping and why; what exactly it is that differentiates God from the world, and what the last revelation has to say about all of this. This facilitates certainty at one level. Then we must practice what we learn and witness others practice as well. This will bring about our witnessing a level of our own conviction and that of others that will inspire us as well, thereby facilitating certainty in witnessing spectacular events.
The term secular, from the Latin saeculum, conveys a meaning with a marked dual connotation of time and location; the time referring to the “now” or “present” sense of it, and the location to the “world” or “worldly” sense of it. Thus saeculum means “this age” or “the present time,” and this age or the present time refers to events in this world and it also then means “contemporary events.” Secularization is defined as the deliverance of man first from religious and then from metaphysical control over his reason and his language. Secularization encompasses not only the political and social aspects of life, but also inevitably the cultural, for it denotes the disappearance of religious determination of the symbols of cultural configuration.
This last sentence is important for us to reflect on. The effect of secularism being cultural means that it affects change in values that are constructs that define good and evil; that it affects identity and symbols; and that language itself is affected as well as our understanding of gender roles and now even of gender. Yet in addition to all of these, what is most serious is that consciousness itself is affected. American Muslims have a different notion from our predecessors of what it means to be Muslim. All of this is rooted in the fact that there has been a dramatic shift causing a change in the conditions of belief. Public spaces, a decline in belief and practice, and new conditions governing belief have contributed to our inward turn to humanism in order to navigate the numerous choices that currently exist which have slowly eroded our sense of confidence in faith and religion to determine our values for us.
The principles by which we determine what to believe or do must in the end, so it is often held, be principles of our own making. Once the Enlightenment has undergone the notion that they are imposed on us by a higher-being, and the Scientific Revolution shown that they cannot be read off the fabric of the world, which is now seen to be normatively mute and devoid of directives, the conclusion appears inescapable that we alone must be their sources. The authority of any principle of thought and action is an authority we bestow upon it ourselves. Because we rely on ourselves, we doubt more and certainty becomes more distant.
Certainty is achieved through knowledge acquired from learning, not through sound bites, gossip, and rhetoric. Certainty is enhanced by proper religious practice, not from an idiosyncratic posture of disengaged-inclusion. Certainty reaches its zenith with truly profound, reflective, transcendental experiences, not episodic encounters with others on social media and productions of fiction. These forms of certainty and the pursuit of certainty itself must endure, until our certainty meets what is ultimately certain about our existence – its end.
Makari, George, Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2015, pg. xii-xiii.
Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2007, pg. 1-2.
Nawawi, The Complete 40 Hadith, London, 1998, Hadith 11.
See the two views in Tafsir al-Tabari and al-Bahr al-Madid (Ibn Ajiba).
Ibn Jarir al-Tabari, Al-Jami al-Bayan fi Ta’weel al-Quran, Beirut, Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah, vol. 7, 1971, pg. 554.
Ibn Ajiba, Al-Bahr al-Madid, Beirut, Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah, 2005, vol. 3, pg. 414.
Al-Attas, Syed Muhammad Naquib, Islam and Secularism, IBFIM, Kuala Lumpur, 2014, pg.17. | 2019-04-23T20:48:58Z | https://yaqeeninstitute.org/khalil-abdurrashid/islam-and-the-secular-age-between-certainty-and-uncertainty/ |
The Basque people or culture occupied Europe before the spread of Indo-European languages to Europe. Analysis of Basque genetic patterns has shown that Basque genetic uniqueness predates the arrival of agriculture in the Iberian Peninsula, 7,000 years ago.
The mythology of the ancient Basques largely did not survive the arrival of Christianity in the 4th century AD. Most of what is known about this original belief system is based on legends, the study of place names and scant historical references to pagan rituals practised by the Basques.
The main figure was the female character of Mari. The other main figure was her consort Sugaar. Mari is depicted in many different forms: sometimes as various women, as different red animals, as the black he-goat, etc. Her consort Sugaar, however, appears only as a man or a serpent/dragon.
Mari is said to be served by the sorginak, semi-mythical creatures impossible to differentiate from actual witches or pagan priestesses. The cadre of witches near Zugarramurdi met at Akelarre field and were the target of the Spanish Inquisition’s largest witch hunt at Logroño. As a result, akelarre in Basque and aquelarre in Spanish are today still the local names of the sabbath.
Mari, also called Mari Urraca, Anbotoko Mari (“the lady of Anboto”), and Murumendiko Dama (“lady of Murumendi”) was a goddess—a lamia—of the Basques. She was married to the god Sugaar (also known as Sugoi or Maju). Legends connect her to the weather: when she and Maju travelled together hail would fall, her departures from her cave would be accompanied by storms or droughts, and which cave she lived in at different times would determine dry or wet weather: wet when she was in Anboto; dry when she was elsewhere (the details vary). Other places where she was said to dwell include the chasm of Murumendi, the cave of Gurutzegorri (Ataun), Aizkorri and Aralar, although it is not always possible to be certain which Basque legends should be considered to pertain to the same lamia.
The Basque religious worship, of prehistoric origin and with a matriarchal profile, had many similarities with the one of the Minoan Crete (of prehistoric origin as well) and represented a subterranean deity as a supreme goddess, as opposed to the Indo-European gods that were mostly celestial and with a patriarchal profile. This cult that was progressively enriched by the influence of Iberians and Celts over the centuries, would finally impose on the other Basque gods of Celtic, Roman or Iberian origin during the Frank-Visigoth period (5th century), and even on the Indo-European Ortzi (celestial deity), although this god would not disappear completely: the Codex Calixtinus, written by the Gaul cleric Aumeric Picaud in the 12th century during his pilgrimage to Santiago, shows a passage in which the writer indicated that the Basques he met on his way referred to God as Urcia.
Mari divided the world into two: the world of the people that live during the daylight (egunekoak), and the world of the people that live at night (gauekoak) or spirits and the souls of the dead that were enlightened by the Moon. According to the old beliefs in Heaven the stars move, and when they set in the west, they submerge themselves in the ‘Reddish Seas’ (Itsasgorrieta) to continue across the Underground World. Therefore, the Sun that illuminates the surface of the world during a part of its journey, also enlightens the Underground World during the rest of the voyage. The Sun as well as the Moon are feminine deities and daughters of the Earth (Mari), to whose bosom they return every day after their course across the sky.
The meaning of death was not so dismal for the ancient Basques. When someone died, he just became part of a different existential status. In those times, the following expression was used: ‘Eguna egunekoentzat eta gauga gauekoentzat’ (the day is for those who live during the daylight = the livings, and the night is for those who live at night = the dead). In order to ensure the balance between both worlds, there was the spirit called Gaueko (the Guardian of the Night), who was responsible for the compliance with this rule that was accepted by the ancient Basques. If any person prowled at night, the spirit took him away from the livings and led him to the world of those who live at night (the spirits).
The Basque religion is of a clear prehistoric origin since the cave is considered a peaceful area, a protective and welcoming place. In essence, the best place where one can live eternally. This belief comes from a remote past in which the Proto-Basques had to look for a shelter in the caves during the glaciation to avoid the cold temperatures and in this way, to survive. The fear of prowling in the darkness (the purgatory and the hell) has its origin in the cold glacial nights: if anyone did not find the path to the cave where the tribe lived just before dusk, he was likely to die of cold. The fight for survival was certainly reflected in the Basque religion even though the Basques no longer needed to shelter in caves to survive for thousands of years.
Even though the official religion was the Christian one during the Late Middle Ages and the early modern period, both religions remain coexisting, what led to a mixture process that was similar to what happened in other areas of Europe. Due to this process, the Christian worship was enriched with the local pre-Christian rites.
Basques that remained practising the religion of Mari instead of the Christian faith, as well as hundreds of ‘sorginas‘ were charged with witchcraft and condemned to die at the stake. Since then, ‘sorgina’, which meant ‘midwife’ in ancient Euskara, came to mean ‘witch’.
The only rite of the ancestral religion that still remains today, although greatly influenced by Christianity and the Western traditions, is the celebration of ‘Olentzaro’, also known as ‘Olentzero’. Olentzero was a spirit that was sent by Mari to all the humans to announce the arrival of the solstices of summer and winter. The Basques should make offerings to him so that both seasons were mild for the harvest and hunting. Formerly, the Basques had only two seasons in the calendar: Negua (winter) and Uda (summer). The two remaining seasons, ‘Udazkena’ (autumn) and ‘Udaberria’ (spring) were later included by Indo-European influences. The Basque week (called ‘aste’, that means ‘the lunation beginning’) was also different due to the lunar cycle, so that it had only three days.
The existence of the ancestral religion has been preserved to the present thanks to the oral transmission of parables and tales imbued with the old beliefs from generation to generation, the stories that grandfathers tell their sons and grandchildren.
In recent centuries Basques have been mostly Roman Catholics. In the 19th century, and well into the 20th century, Basques as a group, remained notably devout and churchgoing. The region has been a source of missionaries like Francis Xavier and Michel Garicoïts. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus. California Franciscan Fermín Lasuén was born in Vitoria. Lasuén was the successor to Franciscan Padre Junípero Serra and founded 9 of the 21 surviving California Missions along the coast.
A sprout of Protestantism in the continental Basque Country produced the first translation of the New Testament into Basque by Joanes Leizarraga. After Henry III of Navarre converted to Catholicism to become king of France, Protestantism almost disappeared. Bayonne held a Jewish community composed mainly of Sephardi Jews fleeing from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. There were also important Jewish and Muslim communities in Navarre before the Castilian invasion of 1512-21.
Pre-Christian belief focused on the goddess Mari. A number of place-names contain her name and would suggest these places were related to worship of her such as Anbotoko Mari who appears to have been related to the weather. One of her names, Mari Urraca possibly ties her to an historical Navarrese princess of the 11th and 12th century, with other legends giving her a brother or cousin who was a Roman Catholic priest. So far the discussions about whether the name Mari is original and just happened to coincide closely with the Christian name María or if Mari is an early Basque attempt to give a Christian veneer to pagan worship have remained speculative. At any rate, Mari (Andramari) is one of the oldest worshipped Christian icons in Basque territories. Mari’s consort is Sugaar. This chthonic couple seem to bear superior ethical power and also the power of creation and destruction.
Legends speak of many and abundant genies, like jentilak (equivalent to giants), lamiak (equivalent to nymphs), mairuak (builders of the cromlechs or stone circles, literally Moors), iratxoak (imps), sorginak (witches, priestess of Mari), and so on. Basajaun is a Basque version of the Woodwose. This character is probably an anthropomorphism of the bear. There is a trickster named San Martin Txiki (“St Martin the Lesser”).
It has been shown that some of these stories entered Basque culture as part of Roman superstition. It is unclear whether Neolithic stone structures called dolmens have a religious significance or were built to house animals or resting shepherds. Some of the dolmens and cromlechs are burial sites serving as well as border markers.
The jentilak (‘Giants’), are a legendary people which explains the disappearance of a people of Stone Age culture that used to live in the high lands with no knowledge of iron. Many legends about them tell that they were bigger and taller, with great force, but were displaced by the ferrons, or workers of ironworks foundries, until their total disappearance. They were pagans, but one of them, Olentzero, accepted Christianity and became a sort of Basque Santa Claus. They gave name to several toponyms, as Jentilbaratza.
Genetics is helping trace the migration of the Basque people that originated in East Africa tens of thousands of years ago. By first tracking the female gene back 150,000 years to East Africa, scientists then followed the male Y chromosome to determine human whereabouts. This explains why some Middle Eastern cities have names that could be Basque in origin, like Ur, Uruk, and Mari, the name of a Basque goddess.
Linguists have long suspected such an idea since an old—now dead—language from Central Asia, Burushaski, “looks suspiciously like Basque”. Genetic research is proving the linguists right.
After inhabiting Central Asia for about 10,000 years, Basque ancestors migrated to both the Americas and Western Europe, where they settled—and still live—in France and Spain. The cave paintings in southern France and northern Spain were likely painted by Basque ancestors 10,000 to 30,000 years ago, and “fits perfectly” the timeline of their migration. DNA research has also shown that the Celtic people’s genes are almost identical to the Basque’s; it is believed they may have migrated together to Western Europe 30,000 years ago.
Basque nationalists see Irish nationalism as sharing with them the struggle of national liberation against big states, Spain and Great Britain. There are no religious divisions in the Basque country. The Basques have been fighting to protect their language and culture for thousands of years. They have been occupying their corner of Europe, since well before Roman times.
Throughout history, Basques have developed a reputation as fierce defenders of their territory – against Romans, Vikings, Visigoths, Muslims and others. Many invaders have chosen to by-pass the region. When they have managed to put down roots, the Basques have negotiated and learned from them, but have never mixed too much or risked becoming integrated.
From the Middle Ages onwards, they developed a reputation as formidable fishermen and have built boats which have taken them great distances in search of whales and cod. There is some evidence that Basques landed in North America hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus. It was Basque sailors who made up the bulk of Columbus’s crew.
Gernika is famous for the 1937 bombing when Hitler (allied with Franco) used the marketplace as a practice run for Luftwaffe. Much of the city was reduced to a destructive firebomb. It inspired the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso. According to the official Basque figures, 1,654 civilians were killed in the bombing.
St Mary’s Cathedral (Bayonne): St Mary’s Cathedral is gothic in style and built using locally-sourced white and red stone on the site of a Romanesque cathedral which was destroyed by fire in 1258. Situated in the heart of the historic centre of Bayonne on a mound overlooking the Nive and Adour rivers, the cathedral contains relics of St Leo (St Léon in French), a 9th century Bishop of Bayonne and was listed as a World Heritage Site in 1998 as part of the French Pilgrim Routes of Santiago de Compostela. The adjoining cloister dates back to 1240.
Constructed in stages between the 13th and 16th centuries, it was not until a major operation led by Boeswillwald a pupil of Viollet-Le-Duc that the 85m high spires were completed in the 19th century giving the cathedral the elegant outline it retains today. The chapels are decorated with 14th century style paintings by Steinhel and the stained glass windows are in the style of Chartres Cathedral.
A visit to the Basque city of Bayonne in the southwest of France is not complete without a stop at the Gothic Bayonne Cathedral. Construction of the cathedral began in the early thirteenth century but wasn’t completed until the seventeenth. The cathedral is on a little known route of the Camino de Santiago, la Voie de la Côte, or the Way of the Coast, which joins the Camino del Norte in Irún, Spain.
The Gothic cathedral and cloister are modelled on the northern France cathedrals. A compact but worthwhile Fine Arts Museum (Musée Bonnat) is in Petit Bayonne, with its picturesque narrow streets filled with Basque handicraft shops and some great dining, elegant old whalers’ mansions lining the quais, more chocolate shops that you can imagine (Bayonne’s chocolate making tradition dates from the early 17th century), a chateau and fortifications by Vauban.
Nearby villages of Ascain, Sare, Ainhoa, Itxassou and Espellette are famed for ewe’s milk cheeses, red peppers, black cherries and their distinctive pink pelote basque courts, their whitewash fortress-looking churches, all sporting triple-tiered, polished wooden balconies (men sat in the galleries, “closer to God”, ladies below in the nave guarding the tombs) and adjacent cemeteries filled with lauburu (discoidal) crosses-the lauburu being an ancient Basque symbol.
St. Vincent de Paul was a French Roman Catholic priest who dedicated himself to serving the poor. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion. He was canonized in 1737. He was renowned for his compassion, humility and generosity and is known as the “Great Apostle of Trumpets”. The St. Vincent de Paul Society helps those in need with material, moral, and spiritual support.
The Russian Orthodox Church (Biarritz) was built thanks to the intervention of Czar Alexander III and the dedication of Father Herodium. It was inaugurated in September 1892 in the presence of members of the Russian imperial family. September to November was the Russian season. A classified historical monument, the church is one of the symbols of Biarritz.
The Imperial Chapel (Biarritz): was built in 1865 on demand by Eugénie de Montijo, wife of Napoleon III. This charming chapel is a perfect combination of Romano-Byzantine and Moorish architectural styles. It is dedicated to the black Mexican virgin, Our Lady of Guadalupe. It was classified as a historic monument in 1981.
The Church of Saint Eugénie (Biarritz) is a splendid Roman-Byzantine style edifice dedicated to Sainte Eugenie, patron saint of Eugenie Empress of France. The entrance is through a large carved door and inside you will notice, among other things of interest, the statue of Our Lady of Good Help, patron of the church, and of Saint Martin the patron of Biarritz, as well as the fonts made with sea shells, the white marble altar, the organ (honorary award at the Universal Exhibition of 1900) and the podium with stained glass representing biblical scenes.
St Leon Church (Anglet) is located in Anglet centre in front of the Town Hall Square. The Church is dedicated to St Leon, patron saint of Bayonne. Its interior is typical of the Labourdine churches. Its galleries and balustrades date from the 17th and 18th centuries.
Ste Marie Church (Bidart) dates from the 16th century. It has wooden galleries overlooking the nave, an 18th century altar and a beautiful statue of St Jacques in pilgrim’s costume. The stunning Oriental-style baptismal font was given by Queen Natalie of Serbia, who retired in Bidart during her conversion to Catholicism. The church often hosts choral Basque songs.
The Chapel Saint Joseph (Bidart) overlooks the ocean on the cliff above Parlementia beach. Under the porch is a font that was reserved for bigots, outcasts among outcasts.
Saint Nicolas Church (Guethary) a 17th century Church in Guethary is dedicated to St. Nicolas, patron of fishermen, children and pilgrims. His statue adorns the top of the covered porch. Inside there is a 18th century model sailboat.
Saint Jean Baptiste Church (Saint Jean de Luz) is the biggest in the Basque Country; it is dedicated to Saint Jean Baptiste, patron of the city. Following the signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, it was in this church that celebrated the marriage of Louis XIV and the Infanta Maria Teresa in 1660. The Saint Jean baptiste Church has an extraordinary acoustics and hosts many concerts and other musical performances. | 2019-04-18T20:51:24Z | https://recoveryonthebeach.com/2018/09/01/basque-mythology-ancestral-religion-spirituality-and-modern-religions/ |
As Leaseguard, we first helped the NHS reduce asset-related spend 25 years ago. We had developed unique and innovative strategies to control and minimise leasing costs and quickly became the leading lease advisor to the NHS.
25 years on, we’ve helped more than half of acute trusts deliver more than £150m in savings across almost every aspect of asset-related spend – from maintenance and asset finance to managed services, asset resale and replacement planning.
With 25 years of data to provide insight, we now help Trusts plan every aspect of asset-related spend, ensuring whole-life costs are minimised throughout the lifecycle.
So, we’ve changed our name to something more appropriate. Lifecycle.
And we’re committed to making the next 25 years as successful. As a result, we have restructured the company, bringing in investors GPE Capital and appointing senior figures such as Sir David Nicholson and Keith Bristow to the board.
We’re not a conventional consulting business. We won’t charge a fortune for telling you what to do, then disappear. If we think there are savings, we’ll make them happen. In our business, we believe actions speak louder than words.
We never forget it’s your money, so we always make sure it’s always your decision. Every recommendation we make comes with a detailed online proposal and the ability for all stakeholders to Accept, Reject or Request More Information.
Every client has full access to myOPTIMiSe, our online portal. We use it to make sure everything is recorded, and that things get done on time. For you, it means complete transparency. Every conversation with a supplier or your staff, every quote, every contract is just a click away.
Our Founder and CEO, Peter has overseen the company’s transformation from the UK’s first dedicated leasing consultancy in 1989, to a business of 50 people that has saved the NHS over £150M and which now has ambitious plans to move into new areas and new sectors. A keen and (very) competitive sportsman, Peter still pulls rank to make sure he is selected up-front for the Lifecycle football team. He has recently published a book, ‘Cycling down the Street’, about his various bike rides across Europe, and is keen to tell just about anyone that it is available from Amazon in hard copy and download.
As our Director of Finance and HR, no two days are the same for Erin. As one of our longest standing members of staff, Erin’s wealth of experience ensures both our finances and our team are well looked after. Never far from her HP12C or the employee handbook, Erin is kept very busy. Life at home is no different with two active young sons. When Erin does find a spare moment she can be found running or keeping fit.
Our IT Director, Simon and his team of 7 are responsible for developing and supporting our OPTIMiSe systems, used both to support our clients and to manage our entire business. No pressure there then, Simon! Having spent some of his early career working in Japan, Simon is an avowed Japanophile. Thankfully, however, we are yet to see his kimono.
Neil is our Operations Director and has responsibility for ensuring we deliver an excellent service to our clients. Outside of work he enjoys keeping active by playing five-a-side football, squash and walking in the Oxfordshire countryside. Neil is also an Oxford United supporter, which isn’t as relaxing!
Our Commercial Director, Jon is responsible for service delivery across all our divisions. Having been with the company for more than 15 years, and worked across all of our services, he is perfectly positioned to do this. We asked Jon about hobbies but, with two young boys, Jon has his hands full!
Following years of working for the business as a consultant, including the original launch over 25 years ago, Mike has joined the company as Marketing Director. Outside work, Mike loves reading, playing snooker and eating out. And, since sending him to doggie Boot Camp recently, he also enjoys walking his (almost obedient) dog.
Former Chief Executive of NHS England, Sir David has joined the board as a non-executive director. He brings unparalleled experience of the NHS and advises us on how best to meet the changing needs of the NHS to grow the business into new areas.
James has joined the board to represent GPE Capital Partners, our investors and new partner. A qualified accountant, James has been instrumental in the restructuring the business and is focused on helping us grow into new sectors and new markets.
We were sorry to see James leave in 2008, but thrilled he has re-joined us from one of the Big Four consulting firms having built up ten years’ experience in procurement consultancy. James has a wealth of experience in leading procurement, supply chain and cost reduction initiatives – both internationally and across the UK.
Matt followed his wife to Oxfordshire in 2013 and has been working as a Contract Coordinator ever since, procuring contracts at best value on behalf of our clients. Outside work, he has recently signed up for the local cricket team and is a passionate rugby fan. Matt enjoys travelling and is looking for his next adventure, having recently visited Vietnam and Cambodia.
Andy is one of our Procurement Managers. Working on high-value contracts, Andy’s job is to ensure that he gets the best deals for our clients on their maintenance contracts, often including full tenders. At home, Andy is kept busy renovating his house and spending time with his young family.
Steph is one of our Account Managers responsible for ensuring that our Trusts receive the very best from us. Having spent over four years as a Contract Coordinator with us, she has a wealth of experience . Steph is an excellent baker but this hobby has had to take a back seat for a while as Steph is busy training for a half-marathon.
Sara is our Account Director and works tirelessly to ensure that our Trust clients receive the very best service. Sara grew up in Australia where she started her career working for the Australian government. When she’s not at work, Sara’s a keen photographer, a hobbie she combines with her other favourite pastimes wherever possible – music and socialising.
Sylwia is one of our Service Delivery Coordinators and is responsible for supporting our Procurement Managers and Contract Coordinators. Sylwia is very active; the only way to keep her sitting still is either a good book or a film. Sylwia spends a large amount of time in the gym. She’s also an animal lover and spent over two years working with birds of prey and owls.
With a wealth of experience in contract and procurement management Catherine, as manager of our Service Delivery Support team, is responsible for ensuring the smooth running of our service to clients. When Catherine’s not at work she loves cooking to relax and spending time with her family. Catherine also loves reading, but has recently been banned from bringing any more books home by her husband, so has bought a Kindle instead.
After several years as a key member of our Leasing team, Tom is now our newest recruit in the Account Management team. Tom is responsible for ensuring that our Trusts receive the very best from us. Outside work, Tom has a keen interest in sports, with a passion for on and off-road biking.
Lee is a Contract Coordinator, responsible for procuring and managing maintenance contracts on behalf of our clients. With two young daughters, most of Lee’s spare time is quickly gobbled up. However, his family have recently started collecting board games and so we wish him luck putting hotels on Park Lane!
As one of our Account Managers, Jo is responsible for ensuring our customers receive the very best from us. An avid Liverpool FC supporter, Jo loves going to comedy and music gigs. She’s a seasoned traveller too having visited over 50 countries at the last count. She’s keen to add to this and is looking forward to a chat with Simon Hooper, our IT Director and resident Japanophile, to get some tips on Japan.
Lee is one of our most experienced Contract Coordinators, responsible for procuring and managing maintenance contracts on behalf of our clients. A doting father, Lee loves nothing more than spending time with his two children (Alfie and Ava). Highly creative, Lee has a passion for photography and re-finishing old items of furniture, transforming them into beautiful pieces. In the little time he has left, Lee enjoys playing playing football, swimming and organising charity events.
Angela is our HR & Marketing Projects Manager, and leads a very busy life working with Marketing, HR and Quality Management. Outside work, Angela enjoys nothing more than spending quality time with her young family.
Russell works in our IT team as a Web Developer, so his role is vital to the development of our online systems. Previously Russell worked for a company developing online HR solutions. When not staring into his computer screen, Russell can be found out on the football pitch or embracing new music at gigs and festivals.
Andrew works in our Service Delivery Support team helping to ensure that our customers receive the highest level of support. With a background as an analyst, part of Andrew’s role is to produce reports and manage contract administration. Outside of work he likes to spend time with his children, watching films and playing video games.
Lauren works in our Service Delivery Support team ensuring our customers receive the highest level of support. When she’s not at work, Lauren enjoys listening to rock music. When she’s not at a gig, Lauren can be found spending time with friends and family or watching films. As a self-proclaimed adrenaline junkie, Lauren did her first sky dive last year and also likes the odd bit of zorbing. She’s keen to add to her list so watch this space.
Julie is one of our most experienced Contract Coordinators, responsible for procuring and managing maintenance contracts on behalf of our clients. After relocating to Devon 8 years ago; Julies loves nothing more than a brisk walk on the moors with her husband, two children and their westie dog Poppy. This is usually followed by a visit to one of many Dartmoor pubs to thaw out from the cold!
Lekka is one of our Senior Procurement Managers as well as the longest-standing member of our Procurement team. Lekka has a wealth of Procurement knowledge and experience gained from her years of working in the Procurement team which is put to good use when managing large value tenders and negotiations on behalf of our clients. When Lekka is not at work she is kept busy looking after her little boy and working towards her MCIPS qualification.
Georgia works in our Leasing Team as a Portfolio Manager and is particularly involved with the procurement of new leases on behalf of our clients. In Georgia’s spare time she likes nothing more than spending time with her two beautiful nieces or catching up with friends over a glass of wine or two!
Niki is our Finance Manager, responsible for all the company accounts. She is also in charge of managing the needs of the office from stationery to vital pints of milk for the tea break. With three almost grown-up children, Niki is starting to reclaim her social life and now enjoys swimming, cinema trips and playing for a ladies cricket team, which just happens to be linked to the village pub!
Rob is responsible for OPTIMiSe, our suite of online procurement, compliance and contract management systems. Never happier than when immersed in a project plan, spreadsheet or technical specification, Rob is the very definition of ‘organised’. Relaxation for Rob is spending a sunny evening sitting in his cottage garden with a nice glass of wine.
Charlotte leads our team of Procurement Managers who focus on procuring high-value maintenance contracts. When Charlotte is not at work she is busy juggling the lives of a toddler and a teenager as well as Chair to the local Pre-School committee. Charlotte enjoys baking although it’s not so much a regular occurrence anymore. Charlotte has recently taken up running, although some would call it jogging! At the end of the day Charlotte enjoys nothing more than putting her feet up with a glass of wine.
Jan is one of our Portfolio Managers working in our Leasing team. Having spent four years as a Contract Coordinator in our Contract Lifecycle team, Jan has a wealth of experience in providing excellent service to our clients. Outside of work Jan enjoys spending time with his family, engaging in sports, reading, gardening and lots of other fun activities.
Deb is one of our Service Delivery Coordinators, providing invaluable support to the business. Deb has lived in Oxford for 20 years now and along the way acquired a husband, two cats and a tortoise. She is a member of an enthusiastic, but largely unsuccessful pub quiz team. When not quizzing, Deb can be found DIY’ing and being creative using her trusty sidekick YouTube.
One of the Senior Procurement Managers focused on procuring high-value maintenance contracts, Lesley loves nothing more than meeting new people and developing her skills. Her energy allows her to combine being a mother of her teenage son with her love of healthy living. Whether it be learning about nutrition, getting totally hooked on Crossfit or running and cycling, Lesley is always on the go. Lesley once claimed her 15 minutes of fame, when she appeared on the television in an episode of ‘To Buy or Not to Buy’.
Marina works in our IT team as a Software Tester and her role is to look after the quality of our online systems. Marina came from Latvia where she worked for a large software development company that provided IT solutions and services to financial institutions. When Marina is at home she loves to spend time with her children, and on the odd occasion she has a spare moment she likes reading and going to concerts and the theatre.
One of our Contract Coordinators, Amy is responsible for procuring and managing contracts to achieve the very best value for our clients. Despite hailing from Gateshead, Amy dislikes football and Newcastle Brown so believes she isn’t a very good Geordie! Outside of work, Amy enjoys spending time with her friends and her cat earning her a reputation amongst her friends as a bit of a ‘cat lady’.
Lead developer for the OPTIMiSe systems that drive our whole business, Lee is a valued member of the IT team. Since arriving at Lifecycle many years ago, Lee is now married with two young children. And, like many young men thrust into fatherhood, Lee has suddenly developed a passion for golf. Of course we believe him when he insists it’s just for the fresh air and not an exercise in escapism.
Judy works in our Service Delivery Support team ensuring our customers receive the highest level of support. When she’s not at work, Judy is busy working towards a BA Hons in Criminology and Law. Everyone deserves some down-time though. When Judy does put down the books she enjoys relaxing with friends and family, watching films and spending time with her three Guinea pigs.
As one of our Portfolio Managers in our Leasing team, Alex is responsible for looking after our clients, particularly with the procurement of new leases. When Alex isn’t working he enjoys most things sporty and can often be found socialising (unfortunately not as often as he’d like!).
One of our longest serving employees, Laura is our Head of Leasing Service Delivery and manages tendering, structuring and administration for our lease management service. Keeping almost 35 retained clients happy with our service takes most of her time but Laura made the smart move and married a chef. She also has three lively boys but she doesn’t need to worry about being home in time to cook their tea. How the other half live….
After gaining a wealth of knowledge working in our Procurement team, Michelle has been seconded to the role of Contracts Team Manager to cover maternity leave. Michelle is responsible for overseeing the procurement and management of our clients’ contracts. Michelle enjoys downtime exploring the Oxfordshire countryside with her dog, spending time with her family and friends and watching films. And after visiting Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius, Michelle is looking forward to more travelling. | 2019-04-23T00:00:57Z | https://www.lifecycle.co.uk/about-us/ |
Three years ago when I made the commitment to sketch every day, I had hoped that developing a daily drawing habit would improve my skills, and I think that’s been true over the long haul. Some days I still make sketches that look like I’ve set myself back a couple of years, but then the next day I’m back at my usual place. I’ve been at this sketching thing for more than five years, and I’m progressing at a much slower rate now than I used to. It’s not as exciting as it used to be when I saw regular improvement, which is such a built-in reward. On the other hand, I’m more motivated than ever to keep going because I know I’ve come so far since I began.
I’ve accepted that it’s inevitable to see the most rapid improvements in the beginning, and after that the changes are more gradual and incremental. I’m no longer afraid that I will hit the dreaded plateau of never seeing any improvements ever again. I believe that as long as I continue to make conscious efforts to actively learn from my practice, I will continue to grow, even if growth is not always visible day to day.
Mind you, sketching daily doesn’t make sketching easier. Every sketch has its own challenges, and I’ve never actually made a sketch I could say was “easy.” But with practice it takes less mental muddling and confusion to figure out how to approach a sketch, so at least that part feels less daunting.
Whenever I set out to sketch, I enjoy the whole process: choosing the subject matter, composing the scene, deciding which materials and tools to use, and finally completing the sketch. But one thing that is hardly ever part of my process is getting inspired. (I admit I’m inspired quite a bit when I travel, but at home in familiar territory, it’s much harder.) As you can see from the examples here, nothing is inherently inspiring about a shallot, recycle bins or a lamp post (I was waiting for Greg to return from the men’s room at the mall when I made the latter – my “inspiration” was five minutes to kill). Nothing is special about the subject matter of most of my sketches – yet the act of sketching makes it special to me in that moment. It’s as if the inspiration is retroactive.
Sometimes I hear other sketchers (or would-be sketchers) say that they want to draw, but actually sitting down or going out to do it – making the choice to do it – is the difficult part. There are always other things more urgent in our lives that we are obligated to get on with. Conversely, there are always less important things that call to us more seductively. (Maybe I’ll draw now. . . hey, someone just commented on my Facebook post! I’ll take a quick peek. . . ) And I’m sure that the longer it’s been since the last sketch, the harder it is to make the next one.
Over time, I’ve come to learn that while drawing every day has benefits in terms of generally improving my skills, the far more valuable benefit is this: Every sketch I make makes it easier to make the next sketch. Today’s sketch always makes it easier to make tomorrow’s sketch. And that’s as good a reason as any to sketch every day.
Happy sketching to all of us in 2017!
You know Christmas is over when the large tree in Pioneer Square comes down. Meeting with Urban Sketchers Seattle for the last time of the year, feeling a bit wistful as I always do when I know the holiday season is coming to an end, I sketched the workers cutting off the branches and taking down the shiny ornaments.
On the other hand, I was thrilled to be able to sketch outdoors, however briefly. Although I didn’t paint it into my sketch, a large part of the sky was actually blue this morning!
After 20 minutes in 40 degrees, I retreated to the warmth and pastries of Grand Central Arcade. While I enjoyed sketching a silhouette of the main entrance and its beautiful arched windows, and while the cinnamon roll from Grand Central Bakery was as delicious as ever, I was again struck with some sadness about how the Arcade seemed dark, somber and empty. When I worked downtown decades ago, the Arcade was a favorite lunch break getaway (I already had my nostalgia fest the last time we sketched there), and it was full of interesting shops; its many tables were always crowded with people. Today there were more “for lease” signs than occupied spaces, and the homeless seemed to outnumber the employed (though not the sketchers).
Finally, my third reason for melancholy today was that we had to say good-bye to Ching, who is moving to the Bay Area. She’s been a very regular, enthusiastic urban sketcher the past seven months, and we’re all going to miss her.
We'll miss you, Ching (second from left, front row)!
Here are links to my most memorable sketches of 2015, 2014 and 2013.
March 28, light rail card reader, Capitol Hill Station, Seattle (right): Something about the small, ephemeral form of my first Field Notes Sweet Tooth notebook invited me to make this uninspired sketch and gave me a new attitude about sketching.
May 26, still life (left): This was one of the first still life sketches I made in colored pencil. I hadn’t yet fully embraced my love for colored pencils to the point of removing watercolors from my sketch kit, but I was working up to it.
July 27, Castlefield, Manchester, England (below): The Urban Sketchers Symposium had just begun, and this was my first sketch as a correspondent – a role I had been dreaming of for a long time. Seeing sketchers from all over the world gathered there made me feel like I had come back home to my tribe again.
Aug. 9, River Avon, Bath, England (above): Compared to non-stop sketching in Manchester or the intense crowds and noise of London, Bath was heaven. It was all about rest, relaxation and taking all the time I wanted for a sketch. This one was done through the window of a coffee shop built right into the Pulteney Bridge overlooking the River Avon.
Aug. 20, Washington State History Museum, Tacoma (right): During a record-breaking heatwave, the West Coast Sketchcrawl literally sizzled! Afraid that I’d be baked and roasted by afternoon, I got started early in the day and plunked myself down in the still-comfortable shade.
Aug. 27, Minnesota State Fair, St. Paul (left): After years of wanting to sketch at the Minnesota State Fair, I finally got my opportunity – and joined the Twin Cities Urban Sketchers for their annual sketchout!
Sept. 17, Japanese Garden, Seattle (right): We had missed the event several years in a row, so our anticipation was high – a serene autumn evening in the Japanese Garden, watching the Harvest Moon rise. Alas, it was not to be – heavy clouds that eventually opened up with rain kept the moon from our view.
Oct. 19, televised presidential debate (left): “Prepping” for the following day’s medical procedure, I spent the evening viewing – and sketching – the debate on my laptop in the bathroom. ‘Nuff said.
Oct. 31, InkTober completion (below): The month-long InkTober challenge gave me an opportunity to do something I’d been wanting to do for a long time but couldn’t seem to get started on – making cartoon-like sketches from imagination. Somewhere along the way, Weather Bunny emerged – and still lives on!
Nov. 15, roadrunner, Joshua Tree National Park (below): We saw amazing rock formations and vegetation in the desert, but the most fun I had at Joshua Tree National Park was chasing a roadrunner around the visitor center’s parking lot!
We had a white Christmas in Seattle – but not from snow. All morning the landscape was hidden behind a thick veil of fog. I’m hardly ever inspired to sketch from my front window because the rooftops and trees are so familiar to me, but the fog gave everything a layer of mystery.
Yesterday morning wasn’t quite as foggy, but the overcast sky was gray and foreboding, and the air wrapped around me like a cold wet towel. Coming home after an errand, I drove through the Ravenna neighborhood and spotted these Chinese pinwheel palms that gave me the perception of warmth.
Graphite seems made for this dark and colorless time of year.
The other day an Instagram friend and blog reader asked if my recent use of graphite had tempted me to use an eraser. After all, graphite is the one sketching medium that can be erased easily. I thought it was an interesting question, so after replying to her, I decided to respond here, too.
When I was taking part in InkTober, I had the impression that many InkTober participants used the event to wean themselves of eraser use – a challenge to face the indelibility of ink. Maybe I’m somewhat unusual, but I went straight to ink almost immediately after I began sketching, so I didn’t go through the eraser dependence that many sketchers apparently do. Indeed, even as a stark beginner, I realized that I saved a lot of time (and spared the paper surface that gets degraded from erasing) by skipping the pencil draft and going directly to ink.
Now that I’ve been dabbling in graphite more, I don’t think about the fact that it can be erased. I use a pencil the same way I use ink. When I make a line I regret, I simply restate it, and usually the shading that eventually follows will make the unintended line disappear. If not, it’s just a part of the sketch, just as all my ink lines are.
However – I recently discovered a hidden talent of erasers that had not occurred to me before. (I’m sure this is common knowledge among graphite artists, but I guess I don’t read enough books by them to learn this the easy way!) A few weeks ago I was sketching a Comice pear and realized toward the end that I’d forgotten to save out the highlight. I was doubtful whether an eraser would be able to cleanly delete colored pencil, which is notoriously difficult to erase, but I tried it. To my surprise and delight, the color came out cleanly. I used a white plastic foam eraser (shown in the blue holder in the photo) that had come with a box of Uni Mitsubishi colored pencils, so I’m guessing it’s made by Mitsubishi (though it has no branding information).
Last week when I was using graphite to sketch a dumpling squash, I remembered to save out highlights, but after shading it, I felt like the highlights had gotten lost. I was afraid the corners of the eraser I’d used previously were too worn down to be able to get a sharp erasure in small areas. I needed a smaller, sharper eraser. That’s when I remembered the Tombow Mono Zero Elastomer eraser that I had received as a gift a couple of years ago. It took me a while to find it, but it turned out to be perfect. It has a tiny rectangular erasing surface, so the corners and edges are small enough to put in the highlights easily.
Erasers aren’t just for mistakes; they are, in fact, for intentions!
Weather Bunny and I wish you all a joyous holiday season!
I love getting to this part of the season when all the work is done, and there’s nothing left to do but enjoy the holidays. We took a chilly walk to Maple Leaf Park this morning, where some neighbors had put up a small but festive Christmas tree under a shelter.
It’s the end of December, which means it’s time for the fifth annual roundup of my Top 10 sketching products of 2016! The series is always among my most-read posts every year. It’s also one I look forward to writing annually because it gives me an opportunity to review and assess the materials and tools that have served me best in the past 12 months.
Unlike some product roundups that include only products that were released that year, my criteria are different. My focus is on things I use most often or that best support the way I like to sketch most – on location, often outdoors, often standing, in a limited time. Versatility, convenience and compactness are key considerations.
If you’ve seen my lists from previous years, you’ll note that not much is new; no dark horses this year. A few items in the Top 10 have been there for several years (one has made it onto the list every year), but a few had to drop off to make room for others. Most notable among the drop-offs is my beautiful “Stefano” sketchbook system, which had been on the Top 10 every year prior to this one. You already know how sad I am about that, so I won’t dwell on it again.
A couple of fountain pens dropped off the list – a Pilot Parallel with a modified nib (it’s still fun to use now and then, but it’s more a novelty than a mainstay) and a Pilot fountain pen with Posting nib (which was so fine that it encouraged me to be more fussy and detailed, which I’m trying to avoid).
I was torn about taking ink-filled brush pens off the list, as I still use them regularly when I need a fast swipe of sky or shadow. But instead of trying to use them as a substitute for watercolors as I sometimes used to, I’ve cut way back on the number I carry – I’m down to only one blue and one gray.
1. Canson XL 140-pound watercolor paper in self-made sketchbook signatures. Ever since I began binding my own sketchbooks, I’ve tried a lot of different papers. It’s always about finding a balance between cost and how well the paper’s thickness and surface meet my needs. It’s also a practical issue: I have a very small studio with no appropriate surface for cutting or tearing down large sheets. Despite features I’ve liked about other papers, I keep coming back to Canson XL 140-pound watercolor paper in a very convenient 9-by-12-inch pad. It’s a “student grade” paper, so the surface is probably not ideal for watercolor painters, and yet I’ve found it to be completely adequate for my wet media needs (including some heavy washes; see No. 9 below). And its availability in a 9-by-12-inch pad means all I have to do is pull the sheets out and fold them in half to stitch my signatures. Easy-peasy.
kit so that I can sketch snowmen in my red Field Notes.
2. Sakura Gelly Roll opaque white gel pen. For a long time I used a Uni-ball Signo gel pen when I needed an opaque white marker, and it worked well most of the time. But the past year I’ve been using a Gelly Roll because it pops more vibrantly on red paper (see No. 7 below) and doesn’t seem to clog as much.
4. * Platinum Carbon Black ink. This waterproof ink is the only product that has been on my Top 10 all five years. It dries almost instantly, is completely waterproof and has never clogged a pen. Whenever a new waterproof ink came out, I used to try it, wondering if it could be better. But lately I haven’t even bothered. PCB has never let me down – that’s good enough for me.
a wide variety of line widths in one convenient pen.
5. * Kuretake No. 13 fountain pen style brush pen and other brush pens. The Kuretake No. 13 appeared on my Top 10 last year for the first time, and it remains there now – although I gave myself some leeway by adding “and other brush pens.” That’s because I now regularly carry four brush pens – two with “hairy” brush tips (one with waterproof ink, one with water-soluble ink) and two with “non-hairy” felt tips (again, one waterproof ink, one water-soluble). Each type of brush tip and ink type serves a different sketching purpose. I’ve tried a lot of brush pens (nearly 50!), and although they all perform similarly, I favor both the Kuretake No.13 and the Sailor Profit because they can be refilled with standard fountain pen inks and cartridges. I wish I could find a non-hairy brush pen that could be refilled, but the problem is that felt and formed tips wear out relatively quickly, so they usually don’t last long enough to refill.
lines I can get from a fountain pen.
6. * Sailor Naginata Fude de Mannen. After two years of solid use, I’m happy to say that my gold-nibbed Sailor fude fountain pen is still living up to its grail status. My only regret was that I had just one, because I always like having one pen containing waterproof ink and one containing water-soluble ink. When I heard that Sailor’s specialty nibs, especially the fude, were getting harder and harder to find because the company was so deeply back-ordered, I sprang for a second fude as soon as I found one. The two Sailor fudes are the only fountain pens I use regularly for sketching.
7. Field Notes Sweet Tooth edition. By now I have my choice of several Field Notes Brand notebook editions (they’re such an essential part of my basic sketch kit that I would take one to Gilligan’s Island). But the one that really changed my sketching life was Sweet Tooth, especially the red one. Something about its playful color – dark enough to act as a toned background – invites me to sketch the most uninspired subject matter. The ephemeral nature of Field Notes takes all the pressure off. As I wrote in the blog post in which I revealed my surprise that Sweet Tooth had taken hold, the notebook liberates me from expectations and lowers my standards to nothing.
8. * Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelle colored pencils (and a few other brands thrown in). Although I use a variety of watercolor pencil brands when I need certain colors, the Museum Aquarelle line is by far my favorite. They are still the softest, creamiest water-soluble pencils I’ve used, with or without the addition of water.
tree a quick spritz to activate and intensify the colors.
9. Portable water spritzer. Although I’ve been carrying this little gizmo for years and use it regularly, this is its first appearance on my Top 10, and I feel like I’ve been taking it for granted. When I used watercolors, I moistened the paints before using them with this little sprayer. When I want to put a streak of blue sky in a sketch with an ink-filled waterbrush, I always give the page a spritz of water first to help spread the color more evenly. And now that I’ve been using water-soluble colored pencils as my primary coloring medium, the spritzer is handier than ever. I use it to spray the clean page when I want to use the pencils dry-on-wet. I spray the finished sketch liberally to intensify and disperse the color rapidly. (Incidentally, Canson XL 140-pound paper, item No. 1 above, can stand up to a pretty good dousing.) I’d be lost without it! I couldn’t find one exactly like mine online, but I got it at a local travel store. Intended as a purse-size perfume atomizer, it puts out a fairly fine mist.
The Kutsuwa Dr. Ion organizer keeps all my implements upright in my bag!
This year’s honorable mention goes to Stillman & Birn’s softcover series. If I weren’t still happily binding my own sketchbooks, the softcover version of S&B’s Beta would be my daily-carry sketchbook of choice and definitely on the Top 10. I still use Alpha, Beta and Epsilon editions regularly in my studio, though. Alpha, in particular, is a favorite for those colored pencil still lifes I’ve been doing.
As a new part to my annual Top 10, I’m going to speculate on the changes I might make to my sketch kit by this time next year. Right now I can’t imagine anything that would drop off the list (but I always feel that way). I’m wondering, though, whether a graphite pencil might appear next year – or is it just a temporary novelty during these colorless winter months? I’m also really enjoying using pencil with a Baron Fig notebook – is it Top 10-worthy? Time will tell.
It was noon, but the shadows looked more like 4 p.m. Despite the cold, I was grateful to see shadows at all – it’s been wet, dark and dreary for a while, and rain is back tomorrow.
Happy Solstice! Thankfully, the days can’t get any shorter.
A couple of weeks ago I got the idea to severely limit my colored pencil palette with a still life. That day I used only five pencils – a drastic cut from the 10 to 20 colors I usually chose. Now I’m down to three primary colors. I showed you the apple I sketched last week in my review of the Baron Fig notebook. Here are a couple more of (you guessed it) Comice pears and a carnival squash. In each case I used only three pencils.
When I allow myself to have as many hues as I want, my tactic is to find pencils that come as close as possible to the full range of colors I see – that’s how I end up with as many as 20. When I use a primary palette, I select a red, a yellow and a blue that are somewhat close to the hues I need to blend them into, not necessarily what I see. For example, the carnival squash has streaks of dark green, so I chose malachite for the blue, which has some green already in it. I chose a red-orange for the red, since the squash and the pear both have orange in them. I always make a test scribble on the side so I can see what kinds of grays or browns I can get with the three before I start (at left). Once I commit to the three, that’s all I use.
I’m guessing this is a similar process to what painters use to mix colors, and I think I’ve learned that process from books I’ve read on watercolor painting. Yet somehow I find the process easier with pencils. Maybe it’s just that the hues I see on the pencil points are very close to what I’ll see on paper, which is not always the case with paints, especially after they dry. Also, the unpredictable nature of water added to paints throws a whole other variable into the mix that can dramatically affect the hues that result. In any case, I feel like I’m learning a lot more about color mixing through these small studies in pencil than I ever did trying to use paint.
When thinking of relaxing places to go a week before Christmas, Pacific Place isn’t what springs to mind – unless you’re sketching instead of shopping. Without a shopping list, Pacific Place seemed downright mellow this morning when I met up with Urban Sketchers Seattle.
It wasn’t as heavily decorated as in previous years, which was a disappointment to some, but I had a different goal. I know I said I wasn’t going in for self-competitive Santa sketching this year, but Pacific Place’s St. Nick is a favorite because of the uncommon viewpoint. The retail facility’s open structure makes its multiple levels visible from other floors, so I’ve always had fun sketching Santa from the floor above (you can see my sketches from last year, 2014 and 2012). I was going to continue my own tradition and sketch him again from the same place, but then I spotted a different location – directly overhead. I couldn’t hear what they discussed, but I saw at least one well-prepared boy present Santa with a written list of things he wants.
A little later I walked to the opposite side of the mall to catch the long line of people waiting for Santa. As I sketched, I thought about the tough job of his hard-working helpers. They have to coax and cajole young kids to smile or distract them long enough to snap a photo before they realize they’re sitting in the lap of some bearded stranger. Still, I saw lots of babies and toddlers take their turns bawling.
I was on my way to the sketchbook throw-down when I saw that the lunchtime entertainment was local jazz pianist Deems Tsutakawa, familiar from the many years he has performed at Seattle’s Obon festival. I only had five minutes, but that was all I needed.
After sketching a record-breaking number of Santas last year – four! Count ‘em – four! – I decided not to participate in self-competitive Santa sketching this year. I knew it would be difficult to top my personal best, so it would be better to quit while I was ahead.
That said, with only a week until Christmas and no Santa sketches, I was missing some holiday spirit. Despite knowing that the mall would be mobbed, I hopped into my car yesterday afternoon and headed for Northgate.
Traffic on the streets and in the mall was heavy, but the real crowd was right in front of Santa’s station. A couple of years ago I sketched him on a slow morning, and he didn’t have any customers. Last year he was a little busier, but not like yesterday – he had a line of kids waiting.
By “he,” I mean the same Santa – this was the third year I’ve sketched this truly jolly man at Northgate. At less busy times, I’ve shown him my sketches, so he remembered me, nodding in acknowledgment when he caught my eye.
It’s always a good idea to show Santa I still believe in him – at least while I’m sketching. | 2019-04-23T11:00:49Z | http://tina-koyama.blogspot.com/2016/ |
18The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. 2He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. 3He said, My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant. 4Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. 5Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass onsince you have come to your servant. So they said, Do as you have said. 6And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes. 7Abraham ran to the herd, and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. 8Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.
19The two angels came to Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gateway of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them, and bowed down with his face to the ground. 2He said, Please, my lords, turn aside to your servants house and spend the night, and wash your feet; then you can rise early and go on your way. They said, No; we will spend the night in the square. 3But he urged them strongly; so they turned aside to him and entered his house; and he made them a feast, and baked unleavened bread, and they ate.
4But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house; 5and they called to Lot, Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them. 6Lot went out of the door to the men, shut the door after him, 7and said, I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. 8Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof. 9But they replied, Stand back! And they said, This fellow came here as an alien, and he would play the judge! Now we will deal worse with you than with them. Then they pressed hard against the man Lot, and came near the door to break it down. 10But the men inside reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them, and shut the door. 11And they struck with blindness the men who were at the door of the house, both small and great, so that they were unable to find the door.
12Then the men said to Lot, Have you anyone else here? Sons-in-law, sons, daughters, or anyone you have in the citybring them out of the place. 13For we are about to destroy this place, because the outcry against its people has become great before the Lord, and the Lord has sent us to destroy it. 14So Lot went out and said to his sons-in-law, who were to marry his daughters, Up, get out of this place; for the Lord is about to destroy the city. But he seemed to his sons-in-law to be jesting.
15When morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, Get up, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, or else you will be consumed in the punishment of the city. 16But he lingered; so the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him out and left him outside the city. 17When they had brought them outside, they said, Flee for your life; do not look back or stop anywhere in the Plain; flee to the hills, or else you will be consumed. 18And Lot said to them, Oh, no, my lords; 19your servant has found favor with you, and you have shown me great kindness in saving my life; but I cannot flee to the hills, for fear the disaster will overtake me and I die. 20Look, that city is near enough to flee to, and it is a little one. Let me escape thereis it not a little one? and my life will be saved! 21He said to him, Very well, I grant you this favor too, and will not overthrow the city of which you have spoken. 22Hurry, escape there, for I can do nothing until you arrive there. Therefore the city was called Zoar. 23The sun had risen on the earth when Lot came to Zoar.
26But Lots wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.
27Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the Lord; 28and he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the Plain and saw the smoke of the land going up like the smoke of a furnace. 29So it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the Plain, God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in which Lot had settled.
30Now Lot went up out of Zoar and settled in the hills with his two daughters, for he was afraid to stay in Zoar; so he lived in a cave with his two daughters. 31And the firstborn said to the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man on earth to come in to us after the manner of all the world. 32Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, so that we may preserve offspring through our father. 33So they made their father drink wine that night; and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; he did not know when she lay down or when she rose. 34On the next day, the firstborn said to the younger, Look, I lay last night with my father; let us make him drink wine tonight also; then you go in and lie with him, so that we may preserve offspring through our father. 35So they made their father drink wine that night also; and the younger rose, and lay with him; and he did not know when she lay down or when she rose. 36Thus both the daughters of Lot became pregnant by their father. 37The firstborn bore a son, and named him Moab; he is the ancestor of the Moabites to this day. 38The younger also bore a son and named him Ben-ammi; he is the ancestor of the Ammonites to this day.
19In those days, when there was no king in Israel, a certain Levite, residing in the remote parts of the hill country of Ephraim, took to himself a concubine from Bethlehem in Judah. 2But his concubine became angry with him, and she went away from him to her fathers house at Bethlehem in Judah, and was there some four months. 3Then her husband set out after her, to speak tenderly to her and bring her back. He had with him his servant and a couple of donkeys. When he reached her fathers house, the girls father saw him and came with joy to meet him. 4His father-in-law, the girls father, made him stay, and he remained with him three days; so they ate and drank, and he stayed there. 5On the fourth day they got up early in the morning, and he prepared to go; but the girls father said to his son-in-law, Fortify yourself with a bit of food, and after that you may go. 6So the two men sat and ate and drank together; and the girls father said to the man, Why not spend the night and enjoy yourself? 7When the man got up to go, his father-in-law kept urging him until he spent the night there again. 8On the fifth day he got up early in the morning to leave; and the girls father said, Fortify yourself. So they lingered until the day declined, and the two of them ate and drank. 9When the man with his concubine and his servant got up to leave, his father-in-law, the girls father, said to him, Look, the day has worn on until it is almost evening. Spend the night. See, the day has drawn to a close. Spend the night here and enjoy yourself. Tomorrow you can get up early in the morning for your journey, and go home. 10But the man would not spend the night; he got up and departed, and arrived opposite Jebus (that is, Jerusalem). He had with him a couple of saddled donkeys, and his concubine was with him. 11When they were near Jebus, the day was far spent, and the servant said to his master, Come now, let us turn aside to this city of the Jebusites, and spend the night in it. 12But his master said to him, We will not turn aside into a city of foreigners, who do not belong to the people of Israel; but we will continue on to Gibeah. 13Then he said to his servant, Come, let us try to reach one of these places, and spend the night at Gibeah or at Ramah. 14So they passed on and went their way; and the sun went down on them near Gibeah, which belongs to Benjamin. 15They turned aside there, to go in and spend the night at Gibeah. He went in and sat down in the open square of the city, but no one took them in to spend the night.
16Then at evening there was an old man coming from his work in the field. The man was from the hill country of Ephraim, and he was residing in Gibeah. (The people of the place were Benjaminites.) 17When the old man looked up and saw the wayfarer in the open square of the city, he said, Where are you going and where do you come from? 18He answered him, We are passing from Bethlehem in Judah to the remote parts of the hill country of Ephraim, from which I come. I went to Bethlehem in Judah; and I am going to my home. Nobody has offered to take me in. 19We your servants have straw and fodder for our donkeys, with bread and wine for me and the woman and the young man along with us. We need nothing more. 20The old man said, Peace be to you. I will care for all your wants; only do not spend the night in the square. 21So he brought him into his house, and fed the donkeys; they washed their feet, and ate and drank.
2Hear, O heavens, and listen, O earth; for the Lord has spoken: I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me. 3The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its masters crib; but Israel does not know, my people do not understand. 4Ah, sinful nation, people laden with iniquity, offspring who do evil, children who deal corruptly, who have forsaken the Lord, who have despised the Holy One of Israel, who are utterly estranged! 5Why do you seek further beatings? Why do you continue to rebel? The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. 6From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but bruises and sores and bleeding wounds; they have not been drained, or bound up, or softened with oil. 7Your country lies desolate, your cities are burned with fire; in your very presence aliens devour your land; it is desolate, as overthrown by foreigners. 8And daughter Zion is left like a booth in a vineyard, like a shelter in a cucumber field, like a besieged city. 9If the Lord of hosts had not left us a few survivors, we would have been like Sodom, and become like Gomorrah.
10Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah! 11What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. 12When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; 13bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. 14Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. 15When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.
21How the faithful city has become a whore! She that was full of justice, righteousness lodged in her but now murderers! 22Your silver has become dross, your wine is mixed with water. 23Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the orphan, and the widows cause does not come before them. 24Therefore says the Sovereign, the Lord of hosts, the Mighty One of Israel: Ah, I will pour out my wrath on my enemies, and avenge myself on my foes! 25I will turn my hand against you; I will smelt away your dross as with lye and remove all your alloy. 26And I will restore your judges as at the first, and your counselors as at the beginning. Afterward you shall be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city. 27Zion shall be redeemed by justice, and those in her who repent, by righteousness. 28But rebels and sinners shall be destroyed together, and those who forsake the Lord shall be consumed. 29For you shall be ashamed of the oaks in which you delighted; and you shall blush for the gardens that you have chosen. 30For you shall be like an oak whose leaf withers, and like a garden without water. 31The strong shall become like tinder, and their work like a spark; they and their work shall burn together, with no one to quench them.
23Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. 2Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord. 3Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. 4I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord. 5The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. 6In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: The Lord is our righteousness. 7Therefore, the days are surely coming, says the Lord, when it shall no longer be said, As the Lord lives who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of Egypt, 8but As the Lord lives who brought out and led the offspring of the house of Israel out of the land of the north and out of all the lands where he had driven them. Then they shall live in their own land.
9Concerning the prophets: My heart is crushed within me, all my bones shake; I have become like a drunkard, like one overcome by wine, because of the Lord and because of his holy words. 10For the land is full of adulterers; because of the curse the land mourns, and the pastures of the wilderness are dried up. Their course has been evil, and their might is not right. 11Both prophet and priest are ungodly; even in my house I have found their wickedness, says the Lord. 12Therefore their way shall be to them like slippery paths in the darkness, into which they shall be driven and fall; for I will bring disaster upon them in the year of their punishment, says the Lord. 13In the prophets of Samaria I saw a disgusting thing: they prophesied by Baal and led my people Israel astray. 14But in the prophets of Jerusalem I have seen a more shocking thing: they commit adultery and walk in lies; they strengthen the hands of evildoers, so that no one turns from wickedness; all of them have become like Sodom to me, and its inhabitants like Gomorrah. 15Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts concerning the prophets: I am going to make them eat wormwood, and give them poisoned water to drink; for from the prophets of Jerusalem ungodliness has spread throughout the land. 16Thus says the Lord of hosts: Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you; they are deluding you. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord. 17They keep saying to those who despise the word of the Lord, It shall be well with you; and to all who stubbornly follow their own stubborn hearts, they say, No calamity shall come upon you. 18For who has stood in the council of the Lord so as to see and to hear his word? Who has given heed to his word so as to proclaim it? 19Look, the storm of the Lord! Wrath has gone forth, a whirling tempest; it will burst upon the head of the wicked. 20The anger of the Lord will not turn back until he has executed and accomplished the intents of his mind. In the latter days you will understand it clearly. 21I did not send the prophets, yet they ran; I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied. 22But if they had stood in my council, then they would have proclaimed my words to my people, and they would have turned them from their evil way, and from the evil of their doings. 23Am I a God near by, says the Lord, and not a God far off? 24Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? says the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord. 25I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, I have dreamed, I have dreamed! 26How long? Will the hearts of the prophets ever turn backthose who prophesy lies, and who prophesy the deceit of their own heart? 27They plan to make my people forget my name by their dreams that they tell one another, just as their ancestors forgot my name for Baal. 28Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat? says the Lord. 29Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces? 30See, therefore, I am against the prophets, says the Lord, who steal my words from one another. 31See, I am against the prophets, says the Lord, who use their own tongues and say, Says the Lord. 32See, I am against those who prophesy lying dreams, says the Lord, and who tell them, and who lead my people astray by their lies and their recklessness, when I did not send them or appoint them; so they do not profit this people at all, says the Lord. 33When this people, or a prophet, or a priest asks you, What is the burden of the Lord? you shall say to them, You are the burden, and I will cast you off, says the Lord. 34And as for the prophet, priest, or the people who say, The burden of the Lord, I will punish them and their households. 35Thus shall you say to one another, among yourselves, What has the Lord answered? or What has the Lord spoken? 36But the burden of the Lord you shall mention no more, for the burden is everyones own word, and so you pervert the words of the living God, the Lord of hosts, our God. 37Thus you shall ask the prophet, What has the Lord answered you? or What has the Lord spoken? 38But if you say, the burden of the Lord, thus says the Lord: Because you have said these words, the burden of the Lord, when I sent to you, saying, You shall not say, the burden of the Lord, 39therefore, I will surely lift you up and cast you away from my presence, you and the city that I gave to you and your ancestors. 40And I will bring upon you everlasting disgrace and perpetual shame, which shall not be forgotten.
6I passed by you, and saw you flailing about in your blood. As you lay in your blood, I said to you, Live! 7and grow up like a plant of the field. You grew up and became tall and arrived at full womanhood; your breasts were formed, and your hair had grown; yet you were naked and bare. 8I passed by you again and looked on you; you were at the age for love. I spread the edge of my cloak over you, and covered your nakedness: I pledged myself to you and entered into a covenant with you, says the Lord God, and you became mine. 9Then I bathed you with water and washed off the blood from you, and anointed you with oil. 10I clothed you with embroidered cloth and with sandals of fine leather; I bound you in fine linen and covered you with rich fabric. 11I adorned you with ornaments: I put bracelets on your arms, a chain on your neck, 12a ring on your nose, earrings in your ears, and a beautiful crown upon your head. 13You were adorned with gold and silver, while your clothing was of fine linen, rich fabric, and embroidered cloth. You had choice flour and honey and oil for food. You grew exceedingly beautiful, fit to be a queen. 14Your fame spread among the nations on account of your beauty, for it was perfect because of my splendor that I had bestowed on you, says the Lord God.
15But you trusted in your beauty, and played the whore because of your fame, and lavished your whorings on any passer-by. 16You took some of your garments, and made for yourself colorful shrines, and on them played the whore; nothing like this has ever been or ever shall be. 17You also took your beautiful jewels of my gold and my silver that I had given you, and made for yourself male images, and with them played the whore; 18and you took your embroidered garments to cover them, and set my oil and my incense before them. 19Also my bread that I gave youI fed you with choice flour and oil and honeyyou set it before them as a pleasing odor; and so it was, says the Lord God. 20You took your sons and your daughters, whom you had borne to me, and these you sacrificed to them to be devoured. As if your whorings were not enough! 21You slaughtered my children and delivered them up as an offering to them. 22And in all your abominations and your whorings you did not remember the days of your youth, when you were naked and bare, flailing about in your blood. 23After all your wickedness (woe, woe to you! says the Lord God), 24you built yourself a platform and made yourself a lofty place in every square; 25at the head of every street you built your lofty place and prostituted your beauty, offering yourself to every passer-by, and multiplying your whoring. 26You played the whore with the Egyptians, your lustful neighbors, multiplying your whoring, to provoke me to anger. 27Therefore I stretched out my hand against you, reduced your rations, and gave you up to the will of your enemies, the daughters of the Philistines, who were ashamed of your lewd behavior. 28You played the whore with the Assyrians, because you were insatiable; you played the whore with them, and still you were not satisfied. 29You multiplied your whoring with Chaldea, the land of merchants; and even with this you were not satisfied. 30How sick is your heart, says the Lord God, that you did all these things, the deeds of a brazen whore; 31building your platform at the head of every street, and making your lofty place in every square! Yet you were not like a whore, because you scorned payment. 32Adulterous wife, who receives strangers instead of her husband! 33Gifts are given to all whores; but you gave your gifts to all your lovers, bribing them to come to you from all around for your whorings. 34So you were different from other women in your whorings: no one solicited you to play the whore; and you gave payment, while no payment was given to you; you were different.
35Therefore, O whore, hear the word of the Lord: 36Thus says the Lord God, Because your lust was poured out and your nakedness uncovered in your whoring with your lovers, and because of all your abominable idols, and because of the blood of your children that you gave to them, 37therefore, I will gather all your lovers, with whom you took pleasure, all those you loved and all those you hated; I will gather them against you from all around, and will uncover your nakedness to them, so that they may see all your nakedness. 38I will judge you as women who commit adultery and shed blood are judged, and bring blood upon you in wrath and jealousy. 39I will deliver you into their hands, and they shall throw down your platform and break down your lofty places; they shall strip you of your clothes and take your beautiful objects and leave you naked and bare. 40They shall bring up a mob against you, and they shall stone you and cut you to pieces with their swords. 41They shall burn your houses and execute judgments on you in the sight of many women; I will stop you from playing the whore, and you shall also make no more payments. 42So I will satisfy my fury on you, and my jealousy shall turn away from you; I will be calm, and will be angry no longer. 43Because you have not remembered the days of your youth, but have enraged me with all these things; therefore, I have returned your deeds upon your head, says the Lord God. Have you not committed lewdness beyond all your abominations?
60yet I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish with you an everlasting covenant. 61Then you will remember your ways, and be ashamed when I take your sisters, both your elder and your younger, and give them to you as daughters, but not on account of my covenant with you. 62I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall know that I am the Lord, 63in order that you may remember and be confounded, and never open your mouth again because of your shame, when I forgive you all that you have done, says the Lord God. | 2019-04-21T04:51:53Z | http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=308774383 |
We’re in Columbus Ohio exploring downtown, on Fourth Street we pass a beautiful, old building, No. 16 Engine House; a sign out front informs us it’s the Central Ohio Fire Museum and Learning Center. The exterior of the building is red brick topped with a decorative layer of gold brick, like frosting on a cake, a fancy tower anchors the right side. Firefighters, corporate and community sponsors raised nearly $700,000.00 to authentically restore the 1908 building; it opened as a museum in 2002. Run by area firefighters, the museum teaches fire safety, prevention and life-saving procedures to people of all ages. Over 1500 area firefighters continue to contribute money through payroll deductions to help finance the project.
The 1908 interior is still intact with glazed brick walls, tin ceiling and fire poles. Fire trucks include an 1881 Amoskeag steam fire engine, a 1913 Ford Model T American LaFrance and a 1920 Obenchain Boyer chemical engine. Models vary from a hand-drawn hook and ladder to a horse-drawn model and finally a motorized apparatus. Displays capture the everyday life of firefighters; uniforms, equipment, fire alarms. Black and white photos show firemen in action putting out raging flames, display cases hold speaking trumpets, shields, helmets, wood water mains. There are hoses and fire extinguishers; placards do a good job of explaining what everything is. It’s very kid-friendly, little ones can dress up in firefighter’s clothes, drive the truck, slide down the pole– hey, that sounds like fun!
We cross into the back section, this is originally where the horses were kept, one stall remains as an example of how the space was used. We check out the Safety Kitchen, the exhibit pinpoints where most home fires begin. The Safe Bedroom allows kids to practice escaping from a burning bedroom with real smoke effects. We stop and stare into a full-size children’s bedroom as it appears after a fire, I get chills looking at the melted toys, pictures and damaged furnishings. Volunteers interact with visitors, they’re enthusiastic and share lots of interesting information.
While we’re downtown we decide to have lunch at Grass Skirt, a fun, Tiki-themed restaurant and bar on North Grant Ave. Part of the Columbus Food League family of restaurants Grass Skirt serves up Hawaiian and Asian dishes along with a 4-page, Kahiki-inspired drink menu jam-packed with Rum/Non-Rum cocktails; Mai Tai anyone? Inside lights are low, the custom-made skull chandelier hangs central in the room. Blowfish lights, a waterfall complete with a Sailor Jerry Hula girl, tiki torches, sculptures and a fabulous glowing lava wall make this place kitschy-cool! The S-shaped bar is made from custom-colored concrete inlaid with colored glass and mother-of-pearl. Open shelves hold tiki mugs, pandas and Buddha’s. We wander around looking at the fish floats, pine log tiki carvings, masks and the ship’s rigging–all very Polynesian.
Paging through the menu we finally make our selections, we watch old episodes of Family Affair on the bar’s flat screen TV until the food arrives. The Island Nachos are a platter of won ton chips smothered with black beans, creamy cheese sauce, pineapple salsa, shredded lettuce, guacamole and lime sour cream; every bite is delicious. The teriyaki tofu tacos are really good; marinated tofu, cucumber-mint slaw and avocado-yum! At the end of the meal our server places an upside-down skull on the table, she activates the dry ice and smoke billows out the top and hovers above the table; what a great way to end a dining experience.
We’re just about out of time in Ohio’s capital city. A quick computer check informs us that north of us in Worthington a vintage shop will be open for another hour or so—let’s go! Off the beaten path for sure, in a 2-story office warehouse complex is Dawn of Retro, a resale shop dedicated to Mid-Century Modern and vintage furniture and decor spanning from the 50’s to the 70’s. The space is a maze of dressers, buffets and china cabinets; from blonde to walnut each one acts as a resting place for glassware, serving pieces, ash trays and the like. Puffy, furry couches in wild 1970’s patterns snuggle up to table lamps, retro arc lamps and starburst clocks. Broyhill, Kent Coffey, classics to funky, orange and avocado green. Dawn has it all stuffed into two floors of space. In a cabinet I find a set of glasses I can’t live without…I can’t wait to get home and use them!
Cincinnati: See Ya’ Later !
It’s our last day in Cincinnati, we’re in the Camp Washington neighborhood to check out the American Sign Museum. Tod Swormstedt, former editor and publisher of Signs of the Times magazine has taken his passion for signs and opened a museum in a former parachute factory with 19,000 sq. ft. of exhibit space. Historic signs, books, photos and documents reflecting the art, craft and history of sign-making hang from the ceiling, rest on the floor, fill walls, shelves and display cases. From the days of pictures drawn on cave entrances to colorful signs hanging from shops to the gas-lit illuminated signs of the late 1800’s on to the electrical signs of the early 1900’s, neon and finally plastics, signs have always been a part of the landscape. Signs tell us our location and how to get somewhere, the nature of a building, what brand we should buy, where we should eat, shop, play, stay. The museum highlights the sign industry from the days of goldleaf glass signs through the heyday of neon to the plastic era of the 1950’s.
Driving down Monmouth vintage signs catch our eye; this must be the place. Parking in the lot, signs surround us, the familiar Holiday Inn with its signature green lettering, a giant hammer from a hardware store, a 20′ bowling pin. At first glance it appears a man on a ladder is in the process of painting the exterior brick wall, a closer look reveals it’s a mural depicting the old-fashioned process of painting signs on the side of a building–this one is amazing! The neon El Rancho motel sign is great, with all of this in the parking lot, I can hardly wait to see what’s inside. Crossing the threshold under the gigantic genie, inside we pay our admission then walk as directed toward the giant yellow arrow with its flashing light bulbs. A rainbow of neon welcomes us to the first gallery; a 50’s style sputnik with light bulb letters twirls, large-scale neon signs, illuminated plastic signs and art deco-style pieces compete for our attention. Neon signs in original crates, pop-culture classics such as Gulf, Shell, Greyhound and Col. Sanders fill the room. Ice cream cones, a swinging golfer on a golf ball, and a motel signs are fantastic to look at.
Main Street is lined with pavers, shops on both sides of the street are home to every variety of sign from hand-painted to an authentic Mc Donalds sign featuring Mr. Speedee; the original blueprint sits nearby. Taverns, motels, banks, bars and restaurants are all represented. Shop windows hold displays of the art of sign-painting; brushes, paint and alphabet samples even books teaching the skill. There are glass doors with hand-painted letters and numbers reminding me of the Fisher Building in Detroit, make your own sign kits with decals, neon art deco clocks, enameled metal signs for Goodyear. Hand-lettered showcards from Las Vegas featuring Frank Sinatra and Charo remind us that signs serve many purposes from commerce to culture. We walk up and down Main Street reveling in the colors, kitsch and memories. Cars outlined in neon circle a globe, Howard Johnson’s offers us ice cream in 28 flavors, the Acapulco sign with dual palm trees is fabulous!
Huge signs take up space in the back section; the side of a barn is mounted on the wall, Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco is the message painted in block letters. SEE BEAUTIFUL ROCK CITY atop LOOKOUT MT reads another. Our favorite is the Habig’s sign with the tipping champagne glass, stand close and you can hear the mechanics of the light bulbs flashing off and on, so cool! A working neon shop, Neonworks has their own section where they create and repair neon signs, sometimes you can even watch them work. We finish up our visit, stopping to read placards along the way, the histories and timelines are fascinating. The museum is absolutely delightful, so glad we came.
We’re having lunch on Hamilton Ave in the Northside neighborhood, Melt Eclectic Cafe offers healthy gourmet sandwiches, fresh salads and soups. We order at the counter then sit in the front window section to wait for our food. Our East Village wrap arrives; rosemary goat cheese, pesto, roasted red peppers, smoked turkey and arugula wrapped up tight and a side of curried potato salad–both are delicious. After lunch we stroll down the street, except for one new development Northside looks much the same as it always has; local entrepreneurs fill street level shops in beautiful historic buildings, a lovely selection of housing stock is available. I love the mural with daisies covering a powder blue background. We stop in at Bee Haven which sells a variety of products including honey, beeswax candles and chocolate, we try a few samples, I grab some lip balm and we’re off. Taking our time we wander in and out of Happy Chicks Bakery, a Cluxton Alley coffee shop called Collective Espresso, Shake It Records selling new and used vinyl, CD’s and DVD’s, a vintage shop called Chicken Lays An Egg with racks and racks of funky clothing, shoes and accessories. The neighborhood is home to a diverse population; college students, the creative class, young professionals and GLBTQ all live in the historic district.
We grab a coffee at Sidewinder, hop in the Jeep and start our journey north. It has been a great few days in Cincinnati but it’s time to head home. Kris is taking the scenic route; in West Liberty OH he veers off on State Route 245, it is here you will find the largest of all the cave systems in Ohio at the Ohio Caverns. The caverns were discovered in August 1897 by farm hand Robert Noffsinger, when he informed the landowner of his discovery, William Reams explored the caverns for himself then opened the cave to the public in September 1897. After 25 years of people removing crystals, touching formations and writing their names on walls and ceilings with smoke from oil lamps, the area was destroyed. In 1922 two brothers bought the land and spent 3 1/2 years digging out mud left in the tunnels by the underground river that formed the cavern, they dug out a 1-mile route, strung light bulbs powered by a Fordson tractor on the surface and opened the business as the Ohio Caverns in 1925. Concrete floors were put in in the 1970’s and a lighting professional came in the 1980’s creating concrete sconces and less obstructive lighting. The tour still uses the 1925 route.
We purchase tickets in the gift shop, a tour is just about to start, good timing… We descend the concrete stairway to the cave entrance, though the pathway is narrow it does not feel constricting, water drips from the cave ceiling, it has been raining for days, shallow puddles form on the walkway. Our tour guide is friendly and informative, she shines the beam of her flashlight on significant formations as we go. Artificial light from nearby bulbs has caused moss to grow in a few areas, care is now taken to turn off lights as the group progresses through the cave. The pathway is smooth, the ceiling low, formations are everywhere. Stalactites cling to the ceiling, stalagmites sprout from the floor, soda straws hang from above. Walls vary in patterns, textures and colors. The Crystal Sea is a water retention pool that holds excess water out of the walkway, the ceiling reflects on the surface of the pool, a bevy of crystals clustered together, so pretty. The Natural Bridge holds nearly 20 crystal columns and is the original floor of the tunnel, they left the columns intact when they dug the pathway, digging under the columns, forming the natural bridge.
One section holds more soda straws and helictites than any other area of the cavern, they call it Fantasy Land, yep, I can see that. Our guide shines her light on a formation and asks the group what it looks like, this is Old Town Pump, it really does look like a hand pump. The formations remind me of icicles, carrots, coral. Crystal King is estimated to be over 200,000 years old and was last measured at almost 5′ long. There’s a tranquility in the cave that’s hard to describe, maybe it’s being so far underground. We stop to look at the ‘good luck’ crystal, the top now stained brown from years of being touched by visitors, a no-touch rule has now been established. We enter the Palace of the Gods, rich in color it feels lavish compared to the other areas. The variety of colors on the walls come from iron oxide and manganese dioxide, lavish surfaces of flowstone, calcite formations, columns and dual formations make this section unique. The Jewel Room is the most colorful, the color splits down the middle of the room making one side a rusty iron oxide color, the other a darker color from manganese dioxide deposits. This is the end of the tour. A recording of Beautiful Ohio starts to play, a time-honored tradition since 1928.
This is the end of our tour too. We hope you have enjoyed tagging along with us on our southern Ohio adventure. See you back in Detroit!
Fall has arrived in southeast Michigan; the leaves are changing, the air has turned crisp, darkness comes early. Mother Nature beckons us to spend time outdoors, soak in the warmth of the sun, the aroma of burning logs; we long to walk and hear the swish and crunch of fallen leaves, marvel at the colors that have painted the landscape. Today Kris and I are heading out to Oakland County to do just that! Rochester Rd travels through cities large and small, once you get north of Rochester, the road changes from hectic to relaxing, a scenic rural postcard.
Foglers Orchard and Farm Market sits roadside, in Summer you can purchase a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, this time of year pumpkins and apples take center stage. It’s chilly this morning, roll-up doors encourage the sun to warm the building. White paper Peck bags bulge with freshly picked apples: Empire, Golden Delicious, Gala and Mac’s are just a few of the varieties available, the scent of apples permeates the air. Huge heads of cauliflower, broccoli and brussel sprouts still on the stalk line the counter. A bin overflows with colorful gourds and teeny tiny pumpkins. In the greenhouse area families take on the all-important task of picking just the right pumpkin; out back a tractor takes folks on a hayride around the property.
Back on Rochester Rd. Maples add a splash of color, the street begins to wind as we meander into the countryside. A ways up (near 32 Mile) we make a turn onto Predmore Rd to check out Cranberry Lake Farm Historic District. Oakland Township was one of the original 25 townships when the Territory of Michigan was organized in 1827, this particular property was the farmstead of John Axford, he built the Greek Revival house here in the 1840’s. The farm was purchased by Jacob Kline in 1848, the family continued to operate the farm until 1925. In 1939 Detroiter Howard Coffin, an oil company executive and US congressman (who lived in Detroit’s Sherwood Forest) converted the farm to a country retreat; the house was enlarged, a field stone fireplace added, buildings updated. In 1996 the township purchased the farm, it is now on the National register of Historic Places. There are 10 buildings, a garden and orchard on the 16 acre historic district which sits adjacent to the 233 acre Cranberry Lake Park. Let’s have a look.
We park the Jeep near the beautifully restored Flumerfelt barn, this post and beam structure dates back to 1879. Rusty antique farm equipment is on display, the lush, green grass is sprinkled with leaves. The house is not open, but I can see the fireplace through the windows–very cozy, the buildings are well maintained. In the distance we see a freshly mowed pathway leading away from the farm, how about a walk? Here the trees are already bare, weeds and wildflowers have died off leaving interesting looking seed pods. The sun peeks in and out from the clouds, a strong breeze gives flight to yellow and brown leaves. We are led into the woods, sunlight dapples the dirt trail, low boardwalks keep the feet of hikers dry in rainy periods. The trail takes us in and out of the woods back to the wide grassy trail ending back at the barn. It is here that we spot the Cranberry Lake barn quilt designed by Mary Asmus, it’s quite lovely.
Continuing on Rochester Rd we veer onto Drahner road, Lakeville Cemetery is just a little west, it’s one of those small, quaint, very old cemeteries you find in the country, this one was established in 1843. Following a very narrow dirt road we park near the gazebo, here the Maples are steeped in color, vibrant reds, oranges and yellows, even a little lime green. We walk the hilly terrain reading tombstones dating back to the 1800’s, many are so worn by the elements I can no longer read the inscriptions. At one time it was common to write out the exact age of the deceased–years, months, right down to the number of days. Evergreen and Pines occupy one section, the ground below thick with long brown needles, it is here we discover the headstone belonging to Minoru Yamasaki and his wife Teruko. The man who changed the face of architecture, bringing us buildings such as One Woodward, Mc Gregor Memorial Conference Center on the campus of WSU and of course, most notably, the World Trade Center, is represented here by a simple headstone, a large rock rests adjacent. Tombstones are each unique in design, personal tributes to those who have passed, the grounds here are gorgeous, it’s so peaceful.
Our journey continues taking us into Lakeville, vintage cars out for a drive pass us as they head the opposite direction. We hang a right on Main Street, a few old structures remain, the Mill has been recently restored, painted white with red accents. Back on Rochester Rd the street hooks one direction, then another, it’s hilly here, we twist and turn past attractive homesteads, picturesque barns and splendid Fall scenery. In the northern portion of Addison Township we stop at Watershed Preserve, a 229 acre nature preserve with 4 kettle lakes and inter-connected wetlands within rolling glacial moraine deposits. The purpose of the preserve is to protect and preserve this extremely sensitive watershed and wildlife habitat. The wetlands here form the headwaters for the Belle, Clinton and Flint river systems.
We start out on a grassy trail, referring to the large map of the preserve we choose the orange trail; leaves are just beginning to color, many are still green. The path narrows, we snake our way through the woods to one of the lakes, a dock allows us a closer look at the clear water. The next lake is larger, beavers have built themselves a mansion near the shore, the water is perfectly still, a mirror image of the sky covers the surface of the lake. Kris makes his way to the dock, getting a better look at Loon Lake. The trail changes in elevation as it curls through maturing second-growth forests and meadows, we loop around finding ourselves where we started.
Our roadtrip continues, we turn left on Dryden Rd, a Porche club is out on a fall color tour, I lost count after 40 cars. We are immersed in splendid scenery; silos peek out from dried-up cornstalks, long-standing churches charm us as we pass, Oaks and Maples are showy with color. We stop at High Street Eatery in Metamora for lunch, the taupe and white building resembles a home more than a business. Menu selections are made from scratch, in house, bread and baked goods come from Crust in Fenton. We sit in the front room with a pretty view looking out onto the street.
The special of the day is an open-faced hot turkey sandwich, we order ours on the Saskatoon Prairie Seed bread, the turkey is moist, there’s just enough gravy. A generous portion of mashed potatoes, stuffing and corn also share the plate. Our Michigan salad arrives at the same time, a heap of greens is topped with apples, walnuts dried cherries and a tasty vinaigrette, everything is delicious. It has been a day well-spent in nature enjoying scenic roads that rise and fall, coiling through beautiful countryside. It’s a delightful time of year to get out and enjoy the beauty.
We’re in Cleveland for the weekend; our home base, Stone Gables Bed and Breakfast is nestled in the vibrant, charming, historic Ohio City neighborhood. A group of young entrepreneurs have given new life to the area now known as Hingetown in Ohio City. It’s a familiar story, vacant old buildings are restored and repurposed, new businesses move in and flourish, elevating the quality of life, which in turn attracts new residents and visitors. We’re on 29th Street in the midst of a sun-drenched Saturday, the old Ohio City Firehouse building is buzzing with activity, people sit at picnic tables on the patio drinking cold beverages, dog walkers greet one another as they pass, bicycles whiz by. We step into the air-conditioned space of Urban Orchid, a floral and gift boutique. The place smells amazing, like Gardenia, fresh-cut flowers have been arranged into colorful centerpieces for a reception that will take place later in the evening. Cleveland goods such as t-shirts and cards as well as gift items created by local artists are available for purchase.
Just around the corner of the firehouse is Rising Star Coffee Roasters, this was the first business to take a foothold on the block. Inside the line moves swiftly, the guy in front of me has the highest praise for the coffee and the oatmeal chocolate chip cookie–who am I to argue? Standing at a high-top table we have our cold brew coffee and cookie, both are excellent, never doubt a local. Back outside we cross the street to the Striebinger building with businesses on the street level and apartments on the second level. We wander in and out of each space, long and narrow interiors are accented by exposed brick and Edison bulbs. Glass storefronts allow sunlight to wash in giving shops an open, airy feel. Beet Juice Bar is doing a brisk business selling cold-pressed juice, I love the drop tin ceiling in Cleveland Tea Revival, the lunch crowd has started to arrive at Juke Box. Harness Cycle is a spinning studio that also sells cool work-out gear, pet owners make their way to Ohio City Dog Haven. This little district has the feel of a small village integrated right into the neighborhood, it’s wonderful.
Heading west in the Jeep, we stumble upon the Madison Arts District on, what else, Madison Ave in Lakewood. We both spot the sign at the same time, Kris manages to turn around and park us in front of a quirky, vintage, antique, Mid Century shop called Googie Style. Googie is that modern, futuristic, atomic, car-culturish, bright-colored, starburst, anything goes style found from the 40’s to the 60’s. Inside we meet Margaret, one of the owners, she’s awesome. She points out some of the more unusual pieces, shares stories of great finds as we take in the fun and funky collection of items. Sure there’s the great mid-century design furniture, beautiful glass and copper sculptures, but there’s also a jack-a-lope, masks and a framed painting of parrots. With names of other shops in the area and a school to check out, we’re off.
First the school, Lakewood High School on Franklin is home to Viktor Schreckengost’s 1954 sculpture, Johnny Appleseed. A native of Ohio, Schreckengost attended the Cleveland School of the Arts, designed the Jazz Bowl for Eleanor Roosevelt, taught industrial design and was a bicycle designer for Murray, Sears and others. The sculpture is kitchy-cool and definitely worth a look. Back on Madison we drop in and out of several antique shops. Great 70’s kitchenware, Corning Ware had some far out patterns, mushroom canisters were all the rage, ahhh, the memories… The Good Goat Gallery is a great place to stop and browse, the art ranges from fine to fun. Kris and I wander, we find it all quite attractive, dolls have amazing faces, paintings use bright colors, some of it is humorous, some solemn, much of it puts me in the mind of Latin America. The gallery is gearing up for a big show called Six Degrees of Vincent, Vincent Price’s daughter Victoria will be there for the opening, looks like an awesome show!
We are having lunch at Barrio, Cleveland’s own taco house serving up specialty tacos, tequila and whiskey. We are seated on the patio, pencils and menu pads stand in a metal bin on our table, our server brings us icy cold glasses of water and explains the ordering process. We’re hungry, too hungry to create our own tacos from the vast list of available ingredients, so we go with El Jefe’s Selecciones, we ask our server to bring us the first four on the list. Munching on still-warm chips and flavorful salsa our basket of tacos arrives. We each take two, eat half and switch, thank goodness for the roll of napkins in the basket. The Vegan Stoner is a soft shell with grilled peppers, onions, portobello, corn salsa, pickled veggies and a herb vinaigrette, delicious. El Jefe is a hard shell, wrapped in a soft shell and stuffed with queso, chorizo, chicken, corn salsa, smoked cheddar, lettuce, chipolte honey sauce, wow, a great combo of flavors and textures. El Puerco is the combo soft and hard shell with white cheese, pulled pork, queso fresco, chipolte honey, salsa roja, lettuce and tomato, so good! The Spicy Sapanaro is spicy, but not so hot that it’s hard to eat. Here we have the soft and hard shell, cheese, chorizo, chicken, queso fresco, salsa roja and secret sauce, yum! I can see why Barrio is such a local favorite.
Refreshed and re-energized we drive into downtown Cleveland to check out Heinen’s on 9th and Euclid. This gorgeous building, designed by George B Post, opened in 1908 as the Cleveland Trust Building. The building was occupied by Cleveland Trust, then Ameri Trust and finally Society Corp until the 1990’s. Today Cleveland’s oldest family-owned grocery chain, Heinen’s operates out of this iconic domed structure. The exterior is richly detailed with carvings and columns, one look and you know it was an important building in its day.
Inside, your eyes are immediately drawn to the elaborate, beautiful glass dome. A ring of super-ornate plaster covered in gold leaf caps arches and more columns, illuminated rosettes are magnificent, a stunning railing runs the perimeter of the mezzanine level, hand painted murals peek out between arches, plaster details are heavy. Cafe tables fill the circular ground floor, grab a coffee, something from the bakery or a meal at one of the counters. The mezzanine level offers wine tasting, a huge selection of bottles and beer. From here the overall view is spectacular; above, the murals, dome and all of its details, below, the patterned marble floor, the stairway is pretty snazzy too. Aisles are located in the space beyond the dome for all your grocery needs.
We make one last stop on our way back to our room, there’s a new ice cream shop on Bridge Street we want to check out. Mason’s Creamery is housed in a tiny Mid Century building with a covered patio that looks like it has always been a neighborhood ice cream shop. Folks are gathered along the freezer staring into five-gallon drums of frozen deliciousness; tasting is encouraged and everyone seems to be doing their part. Along with the usual suspects, Mason’s offers flavors like popcorn, Cleveland Whiskey, butterscotch and Paw Paw. Flavors are made in-house in small batches, today there are about a dozen to choose from. I taste and I taste, it’s the dark chocolate I like the best, Kris goes with the Roasted Peanut, they add a drizzle of strawberry for that peanut butter and jelly combo. We eat our dessert sitting at a small table, it’s fun to watch people try the different flavors, the line continually repopulates. It has been a day of fun and new discoveries in a place so familiar to us. There’s still tomorrow………..
We are hitting the road for the next few days, taking advantage of what’s left of warm days and later sunsets. Getting an early start, Kris cannot resist the temptation to drive through Ohio’s Amish country, smooth roads lead us past pretty farms, fresh produce stands, and countless buggies being pulled up and down hilly roads by graceful horses. We pass through quaint towns; Millersburg, Berlin, Charm and Walnut Creek before heading north to our planned destination, Akron. Known affectionately as “Rubber City”, Akron lies about 39 miles south of Lake Erie. Once home to tire giants Goodrich, General Tire, Firestone and Goodyear, today only Goodyear remains. Airships, blimps, dirigibles and Zepplins have been manufactured at the Goodyear airdock since WWII. The city itself covers rolling hills, the Little Cuyahoga River passes through town, the University of Akron campus is in the heart of the city.
We take our initial ride through downtown to get a lay of the land, then take Market Street towards the Highland Square neighborhood. Immediately we spot interesting buildings, a funky looking bar, a cluster of assorted businesses…wait is that vintage furniture in the window? After parking in a nearby lot, we walk down to West Hill Hardware, the sign says ‘established 1930’, I don’t doubt it for a minute. The floor is well-worn, aisles are stocked with new, salvaged and restored goods, some signage appears original such as the “Master” Hardwood Dowels display….sweet. Fluorescent lights hang from chains illuminating pegboards of random items, antique mirrors and an impressive collection of glass globes. Of course you can still buy paint by the gallon, nails by the pound and any other do-dad you’d expect to find at a hardware store, it would just be so much more fun to buy it here. Directly next door is the Land of Plenty, self-described as “beautiful things from every era”, I think that sums it up perfectly! The space is long and narrow, the large front window overlooks W Market Street; vintage furniture, lush plants, contemporary art and even rocks look perfectly at home. There is much to take in, jewelry, glassware, books, paintings and hand-crafted items, Kris spots an awesome leather-bound book of home plans from 1950, super cool, we pay at the counter and head over to Highland Square.
Considered Akron’s hip, artsy neighborhood, Highland Square possesses mature trees, charming homes and vibrant, independent businesses popular with folks in their 20’s and 30’s. Today is “Square Fest” a celebration of music and art featuring local artists. The heat has been building all day, clouds are gathering and becoming dark, fingers crossed it just blows over. Canopy’s are set up on both sides of Market St. selling clothing, handmade jewelry, paintings, baked goods and of course, Akron-centric items; families with babies and dogs on leashes stop to talk to one another. Music appears to be the main focus of the event with several stages set up along the street, large crowds gather, some sing along. We listen to several acts as we wander through the festival area, the historic Highland Theatre has a cool marquis, we pop in and out of shops, pass a great old apartment building, ending up at Mary Coyle Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor. You know where this is going….Walter and Mary Coyle opened their ice cream parlor in 1937, the Coyles moved out to Phoenix in 1951, selling their Highland Square store. The business changed ownership several times, in 1984 Michael Trecaso purchased the store, he closed his Italian restaurant near U of A and combined the two, now serving Italian food and delicious homemade ice cream (16% butterfat). It is said to be one of the oldest restaurants still operating in Akron. The building looks just as it did back in the day; wood paneling covers the walls, tables and chairs wear bright orange, the neon sign still hangs on the wall behind the counter. We take one of the few remaining tables and order a hot fudge chocolate malt, it arrives in it’s signature metal mixing cup along with a glass and two straws–it is delicious!
Tonight we are staying at the O’Neil House Bed and Breakfast, built in 1923 for William O’Neil, the founder of General Tire, the 19 room Tudor mansion is nestled on 6 acres of beautifully landscaped grounds. Pulling in through the long circle drive, we find a space near the front door, brick and stone, the home seems massive. We are greeted by our host Gayle, I remember her from our stay nearly 20 years ago, I love that this is still her home. Leading us up the elegant staircase, turning left, then down a short hall, she opens the door to our room. We step inside, she hands us our keys, gives us a few instructions, then she is off. We are standing in our own private living room, a wood burning fireplace takes up most of the left wall, a couch, loveseat and chair flanked by tables make up the sitting area, a brass chandelier casts a warm glow over the room. To the right is a large wood table and chairs, large windows grace each side of the room, the hardwood floor creaks as we walk across. A short hall leads to a dressing area, to the left is the bathroom, it is magnificent! The floor is black tile, walls are encased in a dark green and black marbled vitrolite, trimmed out in more vitrolite in pale green, a crystal chandelier hangs from the decorative vaulted ceiling, along with the usual amenities; sink, toilet and shower, there is an oversized bath tub and bidet, it’s gorgeous. Finally we make our way to the bedroom, directly across from the door is a 20 ft leaded glass bay window, tucked in the space is yet another sitting area, the room is swathed in luxurious draperies and linens, walls are angled, we are treated to yet another crystal chandelier, this is the Master Suite. I don’t want to leave…. oh wait, it’s dinner time.
Family owned and operated since 1949 Luigi’s is a true Akron landmark. Famous for their pizza, salads and pastas the restaurant has grown from a modest dining room seating 60 to a total of three dining rooms with the capacity to seat 190. We park in a lot on Main St. in front of the restaurant, customers emerge from the front door carrying pizza boxes, inside there’s a buzz of activity. We sit in a wooden booth near the door, a short counter seats customers, a vintage Budweiser globe fixture hangs above. The wall beside us is covered in old photographs of people, sports teams and trophys. Our order is simple, pizza and salad, we get up and walk around while we wait for our food to arrive; walls are hand-painted murals, an eclectic collection of art pieces hang from the ceiling, giving the place a fun vibe. Back at the table our Italian tossed salad arrives covered in a heap of mozzarella cheese-a signature of Luigi’s, the salad is crisp and perfectly dressed. The pizza follows quickly, lifting a piece to the plate, mozzarella stretches the distance. The crust has a nice crunch and thickness, the red sauce is tasty, toppings are generous; since we can’t save any left-overs, we have no choice but to finish it off. It has been a long day, time for some sleep. | 2019-04-22T07:05:17Z | https://detroitdvotion.com/tag/roadtrip/ |
On December 22, 2017, at the end of the eighth round of intra-Syrian talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, which focused on the topic of the ceasefire, the three countries sponsoring the talks – Iran, Russia and Turkey – announced that a national dialogue conference would be convened in Sochi, Russia on January 29-30, 2018, "attended by all parts of Syrian society."
This Russia-led conference is part of this country's efforts to advance a political solution to the Syrian crisis on its own terms, while marginalizing the U.S. and Europe, after it has already managed to assume control of the military talks by leading the Astana process. Some 1,600 Syrian representatives have been invited to attend the Sochi conference, and it is expected to discuss the Syrian constitution and the holding of elections in the country. As part of the effort to lend the conference international legitimacy, Russia also invited Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, Kazakhstan and the UN to send representatives to the conference, as well as the U.S., China, Britain and France.
The Sochi conference is anticipated with reservations and great trepidation by the Syrian opposition, both political and military, which sees Russia not as a neutral party but as a major ally of the Syrian regime. The opposition fears that Russia means to use the conference to impose a new a political framework and new documents for resolving the Syria crisis, which will circumvent or supplant the existing documents, namely the Geneva I Communique of 2012 and UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2254 of 2015.
Reassurances by Russian officials that the Sochi conference is not meant to circumvent or replace the Geneva process, but only to reinforce and advance it, failed to convince the opposition, which also fears that the conference is meant to lend renewed legitimacy to Bashar Al-Assad's regime. These fears were supported by statements from Russian officials who clarified that elements opposed to Assad's remaining in power would not be included in the conference.
It should be noted that the Syrian opposition is in a difficult situation, due to internal rifts, its military defeats in the war against the regime, and the waning political support from its allies, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The latter continues to declare its support for the opposition and its rejection of the Assad regime, but in practice it cooperated with Russia and Iran in leading the Astana talks and is now cooperating with them in the Sochi conference – apparently in return for a green light from Russia and Iran to fight the Kurds in Syria. As for Saudi Arabia, its anti-Assad position seems to be eroding as well, as evident, for example, from its support for the de-confliction agreements brokered by Russia, and from the outcome of the Syrian opposition conference it hosted in Riyadh in November 2016. At this conference it was decided to incorporate opposition groups close to Cairo, which is moderate in its position towards the Syrian regime, as well as groups close to Russia, in the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), the official opposition representative to the Geneva talks.
In these difficult circumstances, the Syrian political and military opposition was faced with the dilemma of whether to participate in the Sochi conference or boycott it. In the weeks leading up to the conference, many opposition elements called to boycott it, on the grounds that participating would only weaken the opposition, lend legitimacy to the Assad regime, and cement what it sees as the Russian occupation of Syria. However, others argued that, if the opposition does not participate, it will be marginalized and rendered irrelevant, and moreover, decisions take in its absence will later be forced on it. Some called to initiate alternatives, such as holding a national dialogue conference, electing a new opposition leadership or launching guerilla warfare.
Eventually, on the day before the conference, following a meeting of the Geneva forum in Vienna, the HNC announced it had decided not to participate in the Sochi conference. Nasser Al-Hariri, head of the HNC delegation to the talks, said that the decision had been taken because the majority of HNC members, as well as a broad range of opposition forces, had been against participating.
This report reviews the positions of Syrian oppositionists on participation in the Sochi conference.
According to official Russian statements, 1,600 invitations have been sent to attend the conference in Sochi, Russia. Russia says that the invitees represent the entire Syrian people, thus implementing UN Security Council Resolution 2254, which states that the opposition's delegation in the negotiations must represent "the broadest possible spectrum of the opposition." At the same time, it should be noted that, as per Turkey's demand, representatives of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) were not invited.
The conference agenda has not been officially released, but many statements by Russian officials, including by President Vladimir Putin, indicate that it will focus on the issues of the constitution and elections in Syria. At the same time, it is not clear whether a new Syrian constitution will be drafted or the current one amended, nor whether a date will be set only for parliamentary elections in the country or also for a presidential election.
Additionally, in statements in recent weeks, Russian officials and other Russian elements have clarified to Syrian opposition elements that there is no room at Sochi for any discussion of the possibility that President Bashar Al-Assad would not remain in office. Thus, in an interview, Russian Special Presidential Envoy to Syria Alexander Lavrentiev told the Russian news agency RIA: "Anyone who wants to use the Sochi arena to present slogans of resistance to Assad's remaining in power does not belong there, since it is clear that such people want to continue the armed conflict."
In the run-up to the conference, a similar statement was posted on the official Facebook page of the Russian Khmeimim airbase in Syria: "Naturally, we aspire to resolve the Syrian crisis in peaceful ways, but as we have said in the past, there is no place in Sochi for anyone who opposes the presence of Syrian President Assad."
Additionally, Russian officials declared that they had pressured the opposition to attend the conference. Russian envoy Lavrentiev warned the opposition that if it refused to do so, "this would mean that it is rejecting the hand outstretched to it for a political solution in Syria, and it will find itself outside the political process."
In light of the emerging pro-Assad character of the Sochi conference, the Syrian regime officially welcomed it and confirmed that it would be attending. However, regime elements sought to clarify that the regime expected the conference to discuss the current constitution, not draw up a new one, and that it would focus only on parliamentary elections, not an early presidential election. In this context, Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Al-Miqdad said: "A Syrian constitution can only be drawn up on Syrian soil, and the current constitution must be honored."
The U.S., in the meanwhile, has not declared its support of the Sochi conference. American officials have declared that the Geneva process is the "gold standard," which "many countries have signed on to," in reaching a political solution in Syria. Another indication of the U.S. reservations regarding Sochi is an informal document of principles it has drafted along with Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and Jordan for resolving the Syrian crisis. Like the Sochi conference, the document, which was published in the Saudi Al-Sharq Al-Awsat daily, focuses on the issues of the constitution and elections, proposing amendments to the Syrian constitution and measures to ensure the holding of free elections under UN oversight.
As stated, on the day before the opening of the Sochi conference, the HNC decided to boycott it. Most of the opposition factions fighting on the ground likewise decided not to attend. The decision was preceded by a debate between various parts of the opposition on whether to participate in the conference or not, with most writers calling not to, on the grounds that attending will strengthen the Assad regime, and many others warning against the consequences of boycotting the conference.
In light of the Russian statements about the Sochi conference, and as it becomes clear that the conference contradicts the Syrian opposition's vision of a political solution, 40 Syrian fighting factions, among them those that participated in the Astana talks, released a communique stating that that Russia was an aggressive state that had carried out war crimes against the Syrians, and completely rejecting its attempts to circumvent the Geneva process and the international resolutions that were confirmed by the UNSC and that Russia itself had signed – attempts conducted especially by means of the Sochi conference, that sets preconditions for invitees.
Free Syrian Army In Southern Syria: "Anyone Attending The Conference Will Be Regarded As An Enemy"
Similarly, the alliance of the Free Syrian Army factions in southern Syria, known as the Southern Front, condemned the Sochi conference, and stated: "Anyone who participates in it, whether in an individual capacity or in the capacity of their status in the revolutionary organizations, will be considered our enemy, the enemy of the free Syrian people, and the enemy of the revolution, and will be a partner of the criminal regime and the forces of darkness: Iran, Hizbullah, and the criminal militias."
National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces: "Russia Is Not A Neutral Party In The Syria Crisis"
Additionally, the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (henceforth the National Coalition), the political body that claims to represent the Syrian opposition, announced its rejection of the Sochi conference. Ahmad Ramadan, director of the Coalition's media and public relations office, said that if Russia wants to support the political process, "it must pressure the Assad regime to participate in the Geneva [talks], to commit to the UNSC resolutions, and to enter into direct and serious negotiations." He noted the difficulty in participating in a conference sponsored by Russia, calling it "a side that is not neutral on the Syrian issue, but rather is biased towards the Assad regime" that it defends both militarily and politically. Another National Coalition member, 'Abd Al-Basit Sida, clarified that Sochi was more of a carnival than a conference, and pointed out that Russia's aim in holding it was to earn points for future negotiations with the U.S. and Europe. He stressed that the opposition's attending the conference would "very much weaken its position."
Syrian Muslim Brotherhood: "The Conference Will Consolidate The Russian Occupation"
The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria also criticized the conference, stressing in a communique that it rejected both it and its results, and calling for boycotting it. The conference, it said, meant the "consolidation of the Russian occupation and the disregard of the political solution cemented in the Geneva resolutions."
Furthermore, over 3,500 oppositionists signed a statement rejecting the conference, stating that it sought "to impose a false constitution that will guarantee that Bashar Al-Assad and the foreign occupations that are sponsoring him will remain."
In a number of articles, Syrian oppositionists underlined why it was important to reject the Sochi conference. Syrian journalist 'Amar Dayoub, who writes a column for the Qatari London-based daily Al-Arabi Al-Jadid, expressed fear that the opposition would be forced into making many concessions at Sochi, and argued that "its consent [to the conference's taking place], and the hinting by several top [opposition] officials that they would attend it, is an absolutely mistaken position... Ending the Geneva [track] and moving several of its topics to [the] Sochi [platform], which has no international legitimacy, will clarify that all the international resolutions on Syria are valueless or unimportant, and that they can be relinquished if the opposition, or many Syrian opposition elements, consent to do so. By attending the Sochi [conference], they are boosting the conference's value and legitimacy, and the resolutions that will come out of it will become a national paper... The appropriate position is to boycott Sochi, to examine the Geneva track, and to maneuver within its framework in order to implement the international resolutions. As a first step, there must be action to remove the foreign forces from Syria so that its citizens can truly determine its fate.
Recently resigned National Coalition member 'Abd Al-Basit Sida wrote in the UAE daily Al-Hayat that attending the Sochi conference "is not only an admission of defeat, but also recognition of the legality of the [Syrian] regime and the assignment of blame for what happened [in Syria] to those who rose up against this regime... The proposed and expected conference at Sochi will in no way confuse the Syrians who reject any role [in Syria] by the existing regime, since they have already decided not to attend, and this decision will revive their unity and restore authentic enthusiasm for their cause."
Other opposition elements, headed by the HNC, expressed apprehensions about the Sochi conference, but nonetheless refrained from announcing their final position on it until the day before its opening, apparently trying to stall, on various pretexts. It seems that these elements were concerned about the possible ramifications of not attending the conference – that it will make them irrelevant to resolving the Syria crisis, and that any decisions and agreements made there would later be forced on them.
"That leaves the third option, of attending the Sochi conference, which might lend it the legitimacy that Russia craves. But that risks losing the opposition's popular support."
Others expressed apprehension regarding the possible reaction of Russia and Turkey to an opposition boycott of the Sochi conference. Hussein Al-Zu'bi, a columnist for the Syrian opposition website Zamanalwsl.net, wrote that such a move may anger Turkey, an important ally of the opposition, while provoking brutal military attacks by Russia. He wrote: "If these forces [i.e., the Syrian opposition] manage to sabotage the Sochi conference [by refusing to participate in it], it will be a slap in the face of Russia, and this may anger Turkey, which supports the conference... In that case, both parts of the opposition [political and military] will find themselves in an especially grave conflict: with an indispensable ally [Turkey], and with an enemy [Russia] who is striving to reach a settlement that will reflect what it sees as [its] victory in the Syrian arena, [a victory] that Russia will no doubt be reluctant to relinquish. After all, Russia created the Astana track after leveling the opposition-held neighborhoods in Aleppo, and also pressured [the opposition into participating in] all eight rounds of the Astana [talks] by means of massacres or [forced] population transfer agreements, as happened in the Al-Waer [area of] Homs and in Wadi Barada in Rif Damascus. It is not impossible that [Russia] will push [the opposition] towards Sochi by means of additional massacres..."
Given the problematic situation of the opposition vis-à-vis the Sochi conference, some called to launch alternative initiatives in order to "save the Syrian revolution," for instance to elect a new, united leadership for the opposition, convene a national dialogue conference, conduct long-term popular resistance or even launch a guerilla war.
'Abd Al-Halim Hajj Bakri, a columnist for the opposition website zamanalwsl.net, called to convene a popular conference that would elect a new opposition leadership and formulate a plan of action, before the Sochi conference imposes its own plan. He wrote: "Several popular campaigns conducted by Syrians on social media attracted Western attention due to the wide popular participation in them. So what will happen if one or several prominent Syrian forces convene a popular conference that will elect a leadership and outline a solution [for the Syria crisis], as well as a plan of action for the near future? This will no doubt bring the Syrian issue back into the spotlight and achieve everything that has not been achieved by the opposition elements that crowned themselves sponsors of the revolution. [The opposition] must act before Russia imposes its own plan for resolving the Syria [crisis] at the Sochi conference in late January, which will blow up the Geneva process... The Syrians no doubt realize that they have no allies, for everyone has abandoned them, defeated and struggling, to be slaughtered by the regime, Russia, Iran and the sectarian militias. They must act without hesitation to launch a purely Syrian initiative that will lay down foundations for a [reality] different from the one their enemies want."
Syrian writer 'Amr Kush also recommended convening a national dialogue conference while also carrying out long-term popular protest: "The only option available to the vital Syrian forces is to unite their efforts so as to step up their action towards launching long-term popular resistance that has political aims... To this end we must contact people in the field, as well as countries that can help with this, in order to thwart the Russian leadership's plans. Also notable in this context is the call by Dr. Burhan Ghalioun to convene a national dialogue conference involving all sectors of the Syrian people, with the assistance and under the sponsorship of the UN... The Syrians can form a broad [coalition] that will formulate a unified Syrian resistance plan to sabotage the Sochi [conference]. It's not enough to say that we are not going to Sochi. We must act to create an alternative... in order to prevent the Syrian leadership from imposing its will on the Syrians in terms of the participants [in the conference] and its recommendations and decisions..."
Among those who called for armed action were Yaman Dabqi, a columnist for the London-based daily Al-Arabi Al-Jadid, who wrote: "After an overwhelming majority of Syrians and over 40 [Syrian] factions opposed the Sochi [conference], we expect the honorable leaders of the opposition to [decide] a final position, [and] not just one of boycott and condemnation. Like all Syrians, we expect [to see] a countermeasure on the ground that will put an end to the Sochi [conference] and those behind it. Perhaps ending the de-confliction agreement and waging guerilla warfare is the last option available to the Syrians..."
* H. Varulkar is Director of Research at MEMRI; O. Peri is a research fellow at MEMRI.
Al-Watan (Syria), December 24, 2018.
The Russians originally meant to convene a "Syrian Peoples' Conference" at the Khmeimim airbase in Syria. But, failing to recruit broad support for this, including from the Syrian regime – which regarded the name of the conference as indicating that there is more than one people in Syria – this conference was postponed several times, and eventually canceled in favor of the upcoming conference in Sochi.
On this, see MEMRI Inquiry & Analysis No. 1214, UN Security Council Resolution 2254 On Syria: International Community Softens Its Position On Assad Regime, December 28, 2015.
Al-Watan (Syria), September 11, 2017. The de-confliction agreements defined four zones in Syria where hostilities would cease between "moderate" opposition factions and the regime and its allies. It should be note that these agreements freed the Syrian regime to fight in other arenas and regain more territories.
The Riyadh conference was fraught with tension from the start, owing to assessments that it would deviate from what had been defined as "the basic principles of the Syrian revolution." A short while before it convened, several HNC members and officials, including the committee's general coordinator, Riyad Hijab, announced their resignation. Following the conference there were many complaints against the "new" HNC, and claims that it no longer represented the opposition.
In this context it should be noted that Kurds from the autonomous region in northeastern Syria expressed a desire to attend the conference, apparently out of awareness that Russia is likely to play a central role in any political settlement in Syria, and in a bid to secure their status in case the U.S. stops supporting them. However, they were not invited to attend, due to Turkish opposition.
Aljazeera.net, January 27, 2017. Before it announced it would not be attending the conference, the HNC repeatedly stated that it lacked sufficient information about the conference, including its goals and the identity of the participants in it, but did not rule out that it would attend. Al-Hayat (UAE), January 10, 2018.
Un.org/press/en/2015/sc12171.doc.htm , December 18, 2015.
SANA news agency (Syria), January 11, 2018.
Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (London), January 26, 2018.
Al-Arabi Al-Jadid (London), November 2, 2017.
On January 22, 2018, Sida announced his resignation from the Coalition, citing its poor performance. Zamanalwsl.net, December 22, 2017.
Al-Arabi Al-Jadid (London), December 22, 2017.
Al-Hayat (UAE), January 10, 2018.
On this resolution, see MEMRI Inquiry & Analysis No. 1214, UN Security Council Resolution 2254 On Syria: International Community Softens Its Position On Assad Regime, December 28, 2015.
Al-Hayat (UAE), December 15, 2017.
Al-Arabi Al-Jadid (London), December 29, 2017.
Al-Arabi Al-Jadid (Syria), December 29, 2018. | 2019-04-18T22:52:08Z | https://www.memri.org/reports/syrian-opposition-divided-ahead-of-sochi-conference |
The sky’s the limit for Rep. Ralph Abraham.
The Louisiana Republican is a pilot, a physician, a veterinarian, and a farmer. He also helps out with the Coast Guard and wants to climb Mount Everest next year.
Abraham, 62, got his pilot’s license after he graduated from vet school in the 1980s. He uses his plane to give back to his constituents in a unique way.
He’s been a member of Pilots for Patients for years. In his large 5th District, which covers much of northeastern and central Louisiana, cancer patients often have to travel long distances to receive treatment, and the nonprofit organization works to get them there quickly at no cost.
The two-term congressman helps transport patients to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and the St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.
With his congressional schedule, Abraham doesn’t get to fly patients as often as he would like, but his plane is available in Louisiana for the organization.
He also tries to get airborne a couple of days a month to fly missions for Green Flag, a Civil Air Patrol program that uses manned planes to simulate unmanned drones and shoot real-time video for crew training in Fort Polk, Louisiana.
And, it doesn’t stop there.
Just this month, he got another opportunity to volunteer: this time helping out the Coast Guard.
“I got a call at daylight from the Coast Guard in Memphis, and they said that an aircraft had gone down in or around the Mississippi River and wanted me to go up because I am stationed close to that particular area,” he recalled.
Abraham and his co-pilot assisted sheriff’s deputies with the search.
The pilot was found and “I heard was he was doing good,” the congressman reported.
As for climbing Everest, Abraham has already been in touch with people with whom he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in January 2012, and they’re getting things lined up for next year.
“We are past, I think, the talking stage,” he said.
At a young age, Matt Berkebile became fascinated with airplanes. Now he uses his passion for flight to help West Texans access medical care.
Berkebile coordinates local efforts for Angel Flight South Central, a nonprofit that offers patients free flights to medical centers.
Since he first volunteered nearly two years ago, Berkebile has completed about a dozen flights. He said some patients turn to Angel Flight after exhausting money on medical treatments.
Angel Flight is based in Dallas and helps patients in Texas and its neighboring states. Midland is in the southwest region, which spans from Abilene to El Paso.
Justin Burris, a local volunteer pilot, said the organization has helped people living in small West Texas towns.
Volunteer pilots for Angel Flight donate their time and travel expenses. The pilots use small aircraft, such as the Mooney Ovation plane Berkebile rents from Floris Flight Services at Midland Airpark. The size of the airplanes allows pilots to reach county airports that are close to people seeking medical transportation, Berkebile said.
Shireen Pitassi, missions director for Angel Flight, speaks with patients to arrange flights with volunteers in their regions. She said an increasing number of patients have shown interest in the organization since she became an employee in 2001.
Berkebile said he has made a difference for people who need medical care not available locally. He became a licensed pilot seven years ago and hopes others who enjoy flying will consider volunteering with Angel Flight.
On February 28, 2017, about 1302 eastern standard time, an experimental, amateur-built Sonex, N315AL, was substantially damaged when it collided with a building in Methuen, Massachusetts, during final approach for landing at Lawrence Municipal Airport (LWM), Lawrence, Massachusetts. The sport pilot was fatally injured. The airplane was owned by the pilot who was operating it under the provisions of Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed near the accident site at the time of the accident, and no flight plan was filed for the local personal flight.
An acquaintance of the pilot reported that the pilot had experienced fuel leaks in the cockpit due to a cross-threaded connector. He stated that the pilot spent most of his time doing maintenance inside the cockpit. In an e-mail sent to his Experimental Aviation Association (EAA) chapter on February 25, the pilot reported that the last time he flew the airplane was on October 8, 2016. He had removed and reinstalled the fuel tank twice due to a cross-threaded outlet fitting that was causing a fuel leak at the fuel outlet connection near the fuel shutoff valve in the cockpit. He stated that the issue was fixed and that he would fly the following Tuesday (the day of the accident), during which he would remain in the airport traffic pattern and "do a bunch of touch-and-goes to make sure everything is working correctly."
On the day of the accident, the pilot purchased 12 gallons of fuel about 1245. The pilot then informed the tower controller that he would be remaining in the traffic pattern to practice takeoffs and landings. The controller issued a takeoff clearance and instructed the pilot to make a left closed traffic pattern and to report mid-field downwind. The pilot acknowledged and departed runway 14; he then reported mid-field at an altitude of 1,400 ft above ground level (agl). The pilot was subsequently cleared to land, but he never acknowledged the clearance.
The controller reported that, as the airplane turned onto the final leg of the traffic pattern about 500 ft agl, another airplane was "over the numbers" getting ready to land. He stated that, although spacing did not appear to be an issue, he observed the accident airplane make a shallow s-turn maneuver to the left, then back to the right before it suddenly nosed over in a right turn and disappeared out of view.
Several witnesses on the nearby highway saw the airplane approach from the north, then make a sudden dive before disappearing behind trees. One witness stated that the belly of the airplane was "engulfed in flames." He described the flames as "very bright red" and stated that the airplane looked like a "meteor." He stated that flames also appeared to be behind the propeller, which was turning, and "under where the pilot would sit." Additional witnesses called 911, reporting that they saw a plane go down, that it was "on fire," and that the airplane "burst into flame."
According to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) airman records, the pilot received his sport pilot certificate on May 21, 2014. Review of his logbook revealed 128.5 total hours of flight experience and 28 hours in the accident airplane make model as of his last logged flight about four months before the accident. The pilot did not hold an FAA medical certificate, nor was he required to as a sport pilot.
The pilot/owner purchased the airplane in January 2015 from the manufacturer in kit form. The pilot/owner completed the build and it was issued a special airworthiness certificate for experimental airplane on May 4, 2016. It was a two-seat, single-engine, low-wing, tailwheel-equipped airplane that was equipped with a Jabiru 3300L six cylinder, 120-horsepower reciprocating engine. Airframe maintenance records indicated that the airplane had accumulated 28.4 hours total time as of the last recorded entry on October 8, 2016; on this day, the pilot flew 1.4 hours. The engine logbook had one entry dated May 1, 2016 that reported, "ground run no leaks." No additional engine maintenance was documented.
The 1254 automated weather observation at LWM included variable wind at 4 knots, 10 miles visibility, scattered clouds at 9,000 ft, temperature 13°C, dew point -2°C, and an altimeter setting of 30.35 inches of mercury.
LWM was located 2 miles east of Methuen, Massachusetts, at an elevation of 147 ft mean sea level. It was equipped with two runways oriented 05/23 and 14/32. Runway 14/32 was 3,900 ft long and 100 ft wide. The surface was made of asphalt and was in good condition.
All components of the airplane were accounted for at the accident site and there was evidence of both pre- and postimpact fire. The airplane struck the roof of a three-story condominium building located about 1,800 ft from the approach end of runway 14. The airplane was found in the attic and upper bedrooms in a nose-low attitude on a heading about 208°. The empennage partially protruded from the roof. Both wings remained attached to the fuselage at their respective wing roots and were bent aft about 45°. The bedroom where the airplane came to rest caught fire, but was quickly extinguished by the building's fire suppression system. Fire damage was limited to the rooms in the immediate vicinity of the airplane.
The engine separated from the firewall and came to rest upright against a wall about 5 ft forward of the fuselage. The engine exhibited fire damage on the left side. The two-blade fixed P-Tip propeller blades separated about 12 inches from the propeller hub. The 17-gallon polymer fuel tank remained intact and secured behind the firewall and directly forward of the instrument panel. It contained about 7 gallons of 100 low lead aviation fuel. Fuel lines leading from the fuel tank were severed during impact and were leaking when the fire department arrived on scene. The fuel shutoff valve, which was installed at the lower side of the tank above the pilot's feet, was separated and found loose in the wreckage and was heavily fire damaged; its preimpact position could not be determined. The aluminum plumbing between the valve and the gascolator was consumed by fire; however, the fittings remained intact. The firewall-mounted gascolator contained residual fuel that resembled 100 low lead aviation fuel. The filter contained no contaminants and was not damaged.
The throttle body separated from the engine but remained attached by the control cable and was slightly damaged by impact forces. It displayed exterior discoloration and sooting, but no evidence of internal damage. The fuel regulator component remained attached to the throttle body; however, the fuel line into the regulator from the fuel supply had no torque and was easily spun by hand where it was threaded into the regulator. The throttle body was opened and displayed some discoloration that appeared like soot inside the air intake. The fuel regulator showed some soot deposits. Both intake and outflow lines and their respective connection nuts and couplers were undamaged at the unit and did not show any signs of heat damage, but areas under and to the left of the unit showed evidence of fire.
The spark plugs were removed; the electrodes exhibited normal wear and color when compared to a Champion inspection chart. Examination of the magnetos revealed no anomalies. The engine crankshaft was turned manually; internal engine continuity was confirmed. Compression and suction were observed on all cylinders and valve action was correct.
Flight control continuity was confirmed by operating the push/pull rods to their respective locations on each flight control surface. All connections remained intact. The aileron connections were traced visually to the dual stick flight controls but could not be operated due to impact damage. Rudder control continuity was visually confirmed, but the controls could not be operated due to impact damage.
The engine sustained fire and heat damage, with the heaviest concentration of heat damage to the lower left side of the engine. Thermal damage propagated aft past the intake and exhaust manifolds through the rear of the engine. The oil filter was fused to the engine and could not be removed. The lower oil line that connected to the oil filter was not secured. The blue aluminum connection nut was loose. There was oil spray on the lower left side of the engine. The leading edge of the intact manifold expansion gaskets were heavily damaged by fire. All intake and exhaust manifolds on the left side of the engine showed evidence of external heat signatures. There was no evidence of heat damage to the right side of the engine. The engine cowl showed interior heat damage to the bottom side with the heaviest concentrations on the bottom left and aft.
Soot, discoloration, and heat signatures were on the bottom of the fuselage and on the leading edge of the radio antennae, which exhibited blistering. Soot was also on the inboard portion of the right wing, and a soot pattern was along the right side of the fuselage that originated from an area near the front of the airplane and extended out under the right wing toward the tail.
The instrument panel was impact- and heat-damaged. It contained an Xtreme-EFIS that can display primary flight display information, navigation information, and, optionally, engine information. The unit could not be separated from the instrument panel in the field, so the entire instrument panel was removed from the wreckage and sent to the NTSB Vehicle Recorder Division for additional examination and download. The SD card was successfully read using the manufacturer's software. Only one file, from February 5, 2016, was recovered, and this file was consistent with ground-only operation. No data pertinent to the investigation was recovered.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Boston, Massachusetts, performed an autopsy of the pilot. The cause of death was multiple blunt force and thermal injuries.
Severe coronary artery disease with a previously placed stent was found in the left anterior descending coronary artery. In the area of the stent, there was 90% stenosis, and in the more distal portion of the artery, there was 80% stenosis. In the circumflex artery, there was 80% stenosis in the area of a previous stent and 40% focal narrowing elsewhere. The right coronary artery had up to 40% stenosis from atherosclerosis. There was no gross evidence of a previous heart attack, but microscopy demonstrated interstitial fibrosis, hypertrophic cardiomyocytes, and hypertensive changes of the vasculature.
The FAA's Bioaeronautical Sciences Research Laboratory, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, performed toxicology testing on specimens of the pilot. Testing identified rosuvastatin in blood and urine. Rosuvastatin is a cholesterol lowering medication often marketed with the name Crestor and is not considered impairing.
On February 28, 2017, about 1302 eastern standard time, an experimental-amateur-built Sonex, N315AL, collided with a building in Methuen, Massachusetts, while on approach for landing at Lawrence Municipal Airport (LWM), Lawrence, Massachusetts. The sport pilot/owner/operator was fatally injured. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed and no flight plan was filed for the local, personal flight that was conducted under the provisions of 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91.
The pilot purchased 12 gallons of fuel about 1245 and departed in the airplane from runway 14, about 10 minutes later. The pilot informed the LWM air traffic control (ATC) tower that he would be remaining in the traffic pattern to practice takeoffs and landings. The pilot was subsequently cleared to make a "left-closed" traffic pattern and to report "mid-field downwind." The pilot acknowledged and reported the airplane's position when he was mid-field at an altitude of 1,400 feet above ground level (agl).
At 1302, the airplane was cleared to land, but the pilot never acknowledged the clearance. According to LWM ATC tower personnel, immediately after turning left onto the final approach leg of the traffic pattern the airplane, which was about 500 feet agl made a shallow s-turn maneuver to the left, then back to the right before it suddenly nosed over in a right turn and disappeared out of view.
Several witnesses driving on the nearby highway saw the airplane approach from the north, then make a sudden nose down "dive" before disappearing behind trees. Additional witnesses reported that they saw the belly of the airplane "engulfed in flames" and described the flames as "very bright red." In addition, one witness reported that fire was coming out near the propeller as the airplane descended.
Initial examination of the wreckage revealed that the airplane struck the roof of the three story condominium complex located approximately 1,600 feet from the approach end of runway 14. The airplane entered the attic and upper bedrooms of a residence in a nose-low attitude with the empennage partially protruding from the roof. Both wings remained attached and were bent aft approximately 45°. The engine separated and was found upright, 5 feet forward and to the left of the fuselage. It exhibited fire damage on its left side. The two-blade fixed P-Tip wood propeller blades separated 12 inches outboard from the propeller hub. The 17 gallon fuel tank was intact and mounted in its normal position aft of the firewall. It contained approximately 7 gallons of fuel. Fuel lines leading from the fuel tank were severed during the collision and were leaking when the fire department arrived on scene. The buildings fire suppression system activated.
The two-seat, single-engine, low-wing, tailwheel airplane was issued a special airworthiness certificate in the experimental category on May 4, 2016. It was equipped with a Jabiru 3300L, six cylinder 120 horsepower reciprocating engine.
According to pilot logbook records, the pilot received his sport pilot certificate on May 21, 2014. He had logged a total of 28.4 hours as of October 8, 2016. Various maintenance was performed on the airplane during the months prior to the accident flight. In an email 2 days prior to the accident, the pilot reported that he completed maintenance and started the airplane with no issues, but elected not to fly because of the winds.
The weather conditions reported at LWM, at 1254, included: wind variable at 4 knots, 10 statute miles visibility, scattered clouds at 9,000 feet, temperature 13° C, dew point -2° C, and an altimeter setting of 30.35 inches of mercury.
The airplane was recovered and retained for further examination.
Alan Peabody Lavender, age 73, longtime Newburyport resident, died unexpectedly Tuesday, February 28, 2017, in Methuen. He was the devoted husband of forty-six years of Elizabeth “Betty” Lavender.
Born in Rockland, Maine on March 15, 1943, son of the late Stephen Lavender and Anna (Locke) Lavender, he received a Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Rhode Island, followed by a Masters in Business Administration from Boston University.
Al, as he was known by many, loved politics, and had served three terms on the Newburyport City Council and one term as Mayor of Newburyport. Al remained actively involved in his community, serving on the Board of the Friends of the Public Library for 27 years and was the co-editor and founder of their newsletter, as well as a longtime member of Central Congregational Church of Newburyport.
Al enjoyed many years as a member of the Masons, with membership in the Corinthian Lodge of Masons in Millvale, Pa.; St. Mark’s Lodge and St. John’s Lodge of Newburyport, was a Past High Priest of St. Andrews Chapter of York Rite Masons in Boston, which is the oldest Chapter in the U.S., Past High Priest of King Cyrus Chapter of York Rite Masons of Newburyport, which is the second oldest Chapter in the US, and was awarded the Benjamin Hurd Junior Medal, Past Illustrious Master of Boston Council, where he was awarded the Blake Bayley Medal; Boston Commandery #2; and President of the Masonic Temple Association of Newburyport.
As an avid sailor, he was a lifetime member of the American Yacht Club and sailing remained a big part of his life. He also had a passion for flying and was a member of the EAA, Experimental Aircraft Association. He built his own Sonex airplane and received his pilot’s license in 2014.
Throughout his life he followed his dreams with a gusto that never subsided. At the heart of everything he did, was his love of family, love of friends, love of community, and needless to say, Love of Life.
In addition to his loving wife, “Betty” Lavender, he leaves behind a son, Roy Lavender and wife Marian of Tewksbury; two daughters, Nadine Lavender of Chicopee and Sharyn Conners and husband, Dan of Australia; two brothers, John Lavender and wife, Margaret of Westport and Thomas Lavender and wife, Gina of Delaware, along with several nieces, nephews, extended family members and many dear friends. He was predeceased by a brother, Peter Lavender and a sister, Stephanie Parke.
Funeral Services will be held Wednesday, March 8, 2017 at 11 a.m. at Central Congregational Church, 14 Titcomb Street, Newburyport. Burial will be private. Visiting hours at Elliott, Woodworth & Rogers Family Funeral Home, 35 Green Street, Newburyport, will be Tuesday, March 7, 2017 from 4 to 8 p.m. with Masonic Services conducted by St. John’s Lodge of Newburyport at 3:30 p.m. just prior to the start of the visiting hours. Donations in his memory may be made to the Friends of the Library, 94 State Street, Newburyport, MA 01950.
METHUEN — Emergency 911 calls released by the Methuen Police Department on Wednesday afternoon suggest the plane that crashed into a condominium Tuesday had caught fire in the air.
A woman driving on nearby Interstate 495 called 911 and said she saw the plane go down in flames.
Caller: I'm on (Interstate) 495 near Exit 46.
Dispatch: OK what's going on there?
Caller: We, um, we're on 495 and we just saw a plane crash on the side of the road, very close to the road.
Dispatch: OK, let me transfer you right over to the — do you know what town it crashed in?
Caller: Lawrence. It was heading toward the small airport that's down here.
Dispatch: OK, let me transfer you to Lawrence, don't hang up.
A Lawrence dispatcher picked up the line, and the caller restated her location.
Caller: We just saw a plane crash. It's a small plane headed toward the smaller airport, and it started catching on fire ... "
The recording released by police ends in the middle of the woman's sentence.
Another 911 caller on I-495 North also said he saw the plane in flames as it flew through the air.
Caller: I just saw a plane go down. It was on fire. It crashed what looked like right next to the Merrimack River.
Dispatch: By the Merrimack River?
Dispatch: OK, hang on I'm going to transfer you. Is it closer to the Lawrence line do you think?
Caller: I mean it looked like they were heading for the Lawrence airport.
Dispatch: OK, stay on the line. I'm going to transfer you over to Lawrence.
The dispatcher in Lawrence picked up, and the caller restated his location.
Caller: I was on the highway, I saw a plane go down near the Merrimack River, a small red plane, I was just south of exit 46 on 495 North.
Dispatch: It was a red plane?
Caller: Yes, a red plane, in the air, on fire, and it went down right near the Merrimack River. It looked like it was heading to the Lawrence airport.
Dispatch: OK, is it in the water or on the side?
Again, the recording of the call ends mid-sentence.
Inside the Prides Crossing condominium complex, a caller believed an explosion had occurred rather than a plane crash.
Dispatch: 911 where is your emergency?
Dispatch: OK, hold on. Methuen's coming right on the line, sir. Do not hang up. Is everybody out of the building safe?
Caller: I can't tell that. I'm from another building.
A dispatcher from Methuen picked up and asked what the emergency is.
Dispatcher: I have everyone started that way, sir. Are you injured?
Caller: No, I'm from another building, but now I can see flames coming from the roof.
Some chatter between the two dispatchers can be heard and the tape ends.
No one on the ground at the crash scene was injured. The pilot, former Newburyport Mayor Alan Lavender, 73, was killed.
An investigation into the crash is being conducted by National Transportation Safety Board officials, who are looking into "the pilot, the aircraft and the environment" to piece together what happened.
Air safety investigator Aaron McCarter said he and the NTSB were going through a process of corroborating witness statements about the crash. He added that the NTSB has not yet been able to determine if there were any electronic devices aboard the experimental Sonex aircraft that could help identify the cause of the crash.
McCarter said the NTSB is “very interested in what witnesses have to say” and is asking for any witnesses or anyone who has photos or video of the crash to email [email protected].
METHUEN -- A preliminary investigation into what caused a home-built plane to crash into a Methuen condominium complex is underway, with National Transportation Safety Board officials looking into the pilot, the aircraft and the environment to piece together what happened.
Representatives from the NTSB arrived at the scene around 7:30 a.m. Wednesday and have been in and out of the building, part of the Prides Crossing development in Methuen, ever since.
Around 1:20 p.m. Tuesday, a single-engine, two-seater experimental Sonex aircraft was on approach to runway 14 at Lawrence Municipal Airport, about a half-mile from the crash site. In addition to referring to unproven designs, the term "experimental" in aviation is used as a designation for home-built aircraft, even those based on well established designs.
“Witnesses reported that the airplane took a steep descent and disappeared behind the trees and subsequently crashed into this building through the third floor and the roof,” McCarter said.
That includes the pilot, former Newburyport mayor Al Lavender, who was killed in the crash, his training, qualifications and experience in the aircraft.
The NTSB will also examine the aircraft itself, the engineering of the plane – it has an Australian-made engine, for instance – and the environment, including air traffic control and the geography of the area.
“How all those three things fit together is part of a much larger, holistic process that’s going to take place after we leave here in three to four days,” McCarter said.
Most of the NTSB investigation will take place at its headquarters, far from the crash site, he said.
The NTSB is “very interested in what witnesses have to say” and is asking for any witnesses or anyone who has photos or video of the crash to email [email protected].
McCarter said he expects to be at the scene for up to four days. Part of that will include removing the plane from the building, where it remained Wednesday morning covered with a tarp and concealed behind a boarded-up window.
McCarter said a salvage company had been contacted and was expected to arrive Wednesday to do an assessment.
Resident Diane Klein-Peyser was able to return to her apartment Wednesday morning to grab more of her belongings. Wheeling a suitcase outside, she still appeared shaken by the incident.
Klein-Peyser said she spent Tuesday night with her sister in Marlborough following the plane crash, and was only able to get inside the building briefly that afternoon to grab a few belongings.
“It was get in, get out,” she said.
She had a bit more time in the building today.
“They told us to pack for a few days and we’ll see,” she said, unsure of when she would be allowed back into her home.
Klein-Peyser said she and her neighbors would come together to help those whose condos were directly hit by the plane.
METHUEN — A former Newburyport mayor died when his plane plunged into the roof of a Methuen housing development during an attempted landing Tuesday at Lawrence Municipal Airport.
A small fire broke out after the private plane crashed into two condos in the Prides Crossing complex around 1 p.m. Nobody was home at the time, and all other residents of the Riverside Boulevard building were able to get out safely, Methuen officials said.
The victim was former Newburyport Mayor Alan Lavender, 73, according to a Newburyport city councilor and an official briefed on the case.
City Councilman Robert J. Cronin described Lavender as “an avid outdoorsman” who was interested in experimental aircraft and planes from World War II. “He had a wealth of information about flying. He just enjoyed it,” Cronin said.
Lavender was elected mayor in 2001, and he had “a high moral compass,” Cronin said.
The Federal Aviation Administration said the private plane was a Sonex aircraft making its final approach for a landing on Runway 14 at Lawrence Municipal Airport.
It was about a mile out from the airport, which is located in North Andover, when it crashed shortly after 1 p.m. The crash will be investigated by the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board, officials said.
At the complex, the tail of a plane could be seen protruding from the roof of a multi-unit structure.
In airport radio traffic recorded by liveatc.net, the pilot could be heard talking calmly with the airport tower shortly after 1 p.m. as he headed toward the runway.
The plane hit a 12-unit building, and the 34 people who live there will not be able to return home Tuesday, according to Methuen officials.
Mark Holden, a Red Cross supervisor, arrived to see the plane sticking out of the roof and still smoking. By 3 p.m., he had talked to about 10 families who lived in the building, and he expected more to rush down to the complex as word spread.
Nancy Downey was on the first floor of the building when the plane crashed. She said she heard a loud boom, heard the smoke alarms going off, and stepped outside.
“It was raining insulation,” she said.
Vanessa Barone was home with her infant son, Enzo, when a loud noise startled her and woke the five-month-old from a nap.
She came outside soon after to see the first emergency vehicles arriving, and the tail of the plane sticking out of the roof of a building across the complex.
A seven-year resident of the complex, she said she had often joked nervously about the noise and sight of low-flying planes.
It’s not the first time that a plane has crashed at the complex. In January 1999, four people were injured when a small, single-engine plane crashed after taking off from the airport across the river.
The plane flipped in midair, hit the ground, and skidded to a stop just three feet short of Prides Crossing, according to reports from the time.
A similar incident happened at the complex in 1991, Methuen Mayor Stephen N. Zanni said.
Methuen officials said one emergency caller reported that the plane might have been trying to land in a nearby pond, while another reported that the aircraft was headed straight down, potentially releasing fuel, Zanni said.
Methuen Fire Chief Tim Sheehy said at the scene that sprinklers in the building helped control the fire, limiting the damage as firefighters rushed into heavy smoke to douse the blaze.
“If somebody was home, it would have been a lot worse, obviously,” he said.
Zanni said the city would be looking into safety at the airport, citing the previous incidents. He noted that it had been many years since there had been such a crash.
Methuen Police Captain Randy Haggar spoke to the press.
METHUEN, Mass. -- A pilot was killed Tuesday afternoon after a small plane crashed into an apartment building.
CBS Boston reports the crash happened just before 1:30 p.m. in the city of Methuen, about 30 miles northwest of Boston. There are no reports of any other casualties or injuries.
Methuen Mayor Stephen Zanni did not identify the pilot, but said he was a former city councilor in Newburyport. CBS Boston later confirmed his name is Al Lavender, who served one term as mayor of Newburyport.
In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration said the pilot was attempting to land the plane when it went down.
The building was on fire following the crash, police said. All residents were able to safely escape the 12-unit building. No one was home in the apartment where the plane came to a rest.
One woman on the first floor said parts of her ceiling came crashing down on her when the plane hit the building.
The tail of the plane could be seen sticking out of the roof of the three-story complex.
Rich Ward was driving on Interstate 495 South when he saw the plane in flames in the air.
“I’ve never witnessed anything like that in my life. I can’t get it out of my head,” Ward told CBS Boston.
Keith Lontine lives less than a mile from the apartment building. He told CBS Boston he did not see flames coming from the plane before it crashed.
“I watched it fall out of the sky,” said Lontine.
Lotine said he regularly watches aircraft landing at Lawrence Municipal Airport.
Vincent Aprea, an experienced pilot who flies in the area, said the Sonex aircraft is known to have problems with the engine overheating.
The plane was described as an “experimental” aircraft.
In 1999, a plane with four people on board lost power after takeoff and crashed in the same apartment complex. The plane came to a rest against the building and no one was seriously injured.
METHUEN (CBS) – The pilot killed when he crashed into a Methuen condominium has been identified as the former city councilor and mayor of Newburyport.
Al Lavender was killed in a Tuesday afternoon crash on Riverview Blvd. in Methuen.
Lavender previously served as a Newburyport city councilor and was also mayor from 2000-2003.
“He was a kind, gentle person,” said current Newburyport Mayor Donna Holaday.
Holaday said she was surprised to learn following the crash that Lavender was a pilot. Holaday added that Lavender was an avid boater in Newburyport.
Lavender was attempting to land at Lawrence Municipal Airport Tuesday around 1:30 p.m. when he crashed into the roof of Pride’s Crossing Condo Complex.
“Our community has suffered a tremendous loss today and our thoughts and prayers are with the Lavender family,” Holaday said.
Authorities are investigating after a small plane crashed into a multi-condo building in Methuen, Massachusetts, killing the pilot, a former mayor of Newburyport.
It happened on Riverview Boulevard, across the Merrimack River from the Lawrence Municipal Airport, around 1 p.m. Tuesday.
Methuen police and FAA officials say the 60-year-old male pilot was the only person on board the single-engine Sonex aircraft, which originated from Lawrence Municipal Airport, at the time of the crash and died at the scene.
The plane was on a one-mile final approach to Lawrence Municipal Airport when it crashed into a condo at Prides Crossing on Riverview Boulevard, the FAA added.
Although the name of the deceased pilot has not been officially released by investigators pending next-of-kin notification, Newburyport Mayor Donna Holaday said Alan "Al" Lavender, who served as Newburyport's mayor from 2002 to 2003 and as a city councilor for eight years before that, was killed in Tuesday's crash.
Holaday called Lavender's death "a big loss for our city."
"He was such a caring and giving person," she said, adding that he encouraged her to first run for city council and eventually for the mayor's job.
The condo complex was the site of another small aircraft crash in 1999.
No residents were injured in the crash, which was contained to the building's attic, according to Methuen Mayor Stephen Zanni.
The FAA will investigate and the NTSB will determine a likely cause for the crash, according to officials.
Skies were partly cloudy with calm winds and a 10-mile visibility at the time of the crash, meteorologist Michael Page said. | 2019-04-22T22:37:29Z | http://www.kathrynsreport.com/2017/02/ |
The regular meeting of the Board of Supervisors of the Coral Springs Improvement District was held on Monday, February 28, 2005 at 4:05 p.m. at the District Office, 10300 NW 11th Manor, Coral Springs, Florida.
Mr. Fennell stated that each Board member received a copy of the minutes of the January 24, 2004 meeting and requested any additions, corrections or deletions.
Mr. Eissler stated these minutes are not verbatim.
Mr. Hanks asked do you have any corrections?
Mr. Eissler responded you will have to go through the minutes; they are minor, and it may be insignificant.
Mr. Hanks stated we need a comfort level and the essence of what we said is accurate.
On MOTION by Mr. Hanks seconded by Mr. Eissler with all in favor the minutes of the January 24, 2005 meeting were approved.
Mr. McKune stated this is for the design process for the solid process handling system to conform to federal and state regulations, upgrade pump station #1, upgrade the electrical system on the wastewater plant side which is 15 to 20 years old. This is for the plans and specifications as outlined in the work authorization.
Mr. Fennell stated you estimate the work to be $250,000. First you are going to prepare the plans and then go out for bid.
Mr. Moyer asked what is the estimated construction cost of the project?
Mr. McKune responded $6 million, and is money that is on hand.
Mr. Fennell asked is there any discussion from management about what we are doing and where we are going?
Mr. Goscicki responded STS has been working with the engineer on your capital improvement program, the phasing of the projects and the cost of the projects. We agree these two projects are critical to the facilities. As we move forward, we will come with a fiscal plan to correspond with the capital plan and bring that back to the Board over the next several months [i.e., here is the program as recommended by the engineer, the options to phase the program given your resources, the risk in doing so, and the impact financially]. We are working cooperatively with the engineer.
Mr. Fennell stated we have engineering services by several different groups [CH2M-Hill and STS]. I do not have a problem with different recommendations. It is not necessary they all be resolved. I prefer diversity of opinion and we are capable of making these decisions. In some cases the Board has hired a different firm to review what we are doing to make sure we do not have a monochromatic viewpoint of things.
Mr. Eissler stated the $238,000 is your estimate for the scope of services and for things that will be charged accordingly. I have a problem with an open-ended agreement. I don’t know how many hours this will take.
Mr. Hanks asked who sees the hourly back-up supporting documents?
Mr. McKune responded STS reviews the invoices.
Mr. Goscicki stated the 5% they have is a reasonable estimate for design costs.
Mr. Hanks asked can we request this be a not-to-exceed amount?
Mr. Lyles responded yes. If you want to provide this as a not-to-exceed, you are within your powers as Board members to do that.
Mr. Fennell asked is the $238,000 proportional to the $6 million?
Mr. Goscicki responded the $238,000 will be spent to design the documents for the $6 million project.
Mr. Hanks asked how long will it take to complete the project?
Mr. McKune responded approximately 120 working days from the award date except for delays.
Mr. Eissler stated I would like to approve the work authorization amended to not to exceed $238,000.
Mr. Hanks asked who owns the documents after completion?
On MOTION by Mr. Eissler seconded by Mr. Hanks with all in favor CH2M-Hill Work Authorization 25 in an amount not to exceed $238,000 was approved.
Mr. McKune stated we have one 24” injection well that is 3,000’ deep, and a requirement is to have a separate monitoring well to monitor any migration of injection fluids if that were to occur. After construction was completed, we had to dig a deeper hole to get it below the salt water and it was a retrofit to the existing well. It has lasted about 9 years and during the monitoring sequence we discovered there was a fracture and we have negotiated with DEP for 6 months to come up with a method of monitoring the well. This is the cheapest method. It requires grounding and abandoning of the deep zone monitoring well, and install a new free standing well. We need to go through permitting with the state and federal governments.
Mr. Fennell asked how much is it going to cost us for that monitoring well?
Mr. McKune responded $350,000 to $600,000 for the well through a competitive bid. Unfortunately there are only a few companies who do this type of work.
Mr. Fennell asked how many wells do we have?
Mr. McKune responded two. [12” and 24”] Both wells were monitored during the mechanical intergrity testing process when it was discovered.
Mr. Hanks asked what percentage is the design phase?
Mr. McKune responded 10% design drawings/ 80% bidding/ 10% permitting.
Mr. Fennell asked can you put in one monitoring well to monitor two wells?
Mr. McKune responded the way they are spaced, no.
Mr. Eissler asked how much do we put down a well?
Mr. McKune responded 5 million gallons a day.
Mr. Fennell stated it bothers me if we lose that well. There may be a need for another well. Can we position it where it may save us some money in the future? Is that possible?
Mr. McKune responded you will need multiple zones, and we can project it to a site where we may put another well in.
Mr. Moyer asked are you running the risk if you use one well that has some incursion that they will shut both the wells down? I would not want to have a common well.
Mr. Fennell responded it is a bet that we will put it in the right spot to save us money later on.
Mr. Hanks asked how much is this injection well?
Mr. McKune responded $4.5 million.
Mr. Hanks asked does that include monitoring?
Mr. McKune responded as of 18 months ago it included monitoring.
Mr. Hanks stated if you have one well and there is a violation, is there any way to determine which well has the problem, or do you have to shut them both down?
Mr. McKune responded you can test each well and use one as 100% backup.
Mr. Goscicki stated with monitoring wells and deep injection wells, is it a well failure or a formation failure? If the formation is lost, they will shut down all the wells. You do not want to build another deep injection well.
Mr. Fennell asked what is the lifetime of the wells?
Mr. McKune responded 50 years.
Mr. Hanks asked do the design documents become the property of CSID?
On MOTION by Mr. Eissler seconded by Mr. Hanks with all in favor CH2M-Hill Work Authorization 25 in an amount not to exceed $65,000 was approved.
Mr. Fennell asked if we don’t approve these, are they paid?
Mr. Moyer responded you are ratifying the invoices. The checks are already processed.
Mr. Lyles stated these checks are cut and sent to various services, such as electric, phone, etc. The practice over the years has been to ratify the invoices. If there are any questions, staff can present clarification and in some cases get a refund.
On MOTION by Mr. Eissler seconded by Mr. Hanks with all in favor the February Invoices were approved.
Mr. Lyles stated on the transition issues is the requested breakdown on historical costs and Mr. Moyer has informed me to take that up with Mr. Keller and we will get that information to Lake Coral Springs in order to bring back an agreement to be approved by them and obtain your signature.
The monthly charts are made part of the public record and attached hereto.
This item was deferred until next meeting.
Mr. Fennell stated the District has gone through a lot of changes since I have been on the Board. It has gone from a paternalistic arm of the developer, and one of the things we do is buy services. Since my tenure on the Board we have changed our lawyer, our engineering firms, the management firm and the Board members every three years. CH2M-Hill was bought out even though they picked up the same people, and the same thing happened with the management firm. We have changed a lot and are continuing to change. There was a grand old structure long before this with the people who originally started the group. From now on, as a business, our management services may change at our consent or be changed, and that can happen with any of the types of services we do. We need to come up with a more structured way of evaluating the services we go after in an organized way. All the changes were not initiated by us, they sort of happened.
We have a sizable number of people who report directly to the Board, CSID employees. Going forward, we need to look at how we project that. It is important for us to have long service and there are issues of whom in effect they really work for. Do they work for us, STS, the engineering firm? Who do they work for and what are the procedures to handle any kind of problems? I did see a personnel manual a while back because there was an issue of terminating an employee. We do have some other general problems, and one of the things we have to understand is that we will probably end up changing services again and we should be reviewing them on a normal basis every few years rather than having continuing contracts that get automatically renewed to make a conscious decision.
As we know, there has been turnover in personnel in the management group, various issues of hurt feelings, and I propose that at this point no employee be terminated from CSID or transferred without direct approval of the Board. I want to make sure there are no problems with anyone coming forward and speaking their mind about what is going on.
Mr. Hanks asked who has the hiring and firing authority for District personnel?
Mr. Lyles responded the agreement you have with Gary L. Moyer, P.A., that was assigned to STS with the Board’s approval, provides that the management company is responsible for appointment, supervision, and removal of all District personnel. While the ultimate authority rests with the Board as the legally constituted Board elected for that purpose, you have contractually given that responsibility to your District manager. While you can make a change in that, it will require a revision to the management contract in place.
Mr. Fennell stated that is one of my proposals. The second, it is convenient from a management standpoint to have employees “at will”, it is poor management and personnel policy. We need an open door policy where people can bring forward their issues, either up through management or if necessary up to the Board. Even thought we have employee “at will” issues, we need to define the offenses within the organization such as theft. Most organizations have Class I, II or III offenses that are written out. Mr. Jan Zilmer needs to come to the Board and make proposals for handling those things.
Mr. Eissler stated I believe this is in the personnel manual.
Mr. Moyer stated we have a comprehensive personnel manual that Mr. Zilmer put together and under those requirements of the contract STS has followed those requirements. We seldom, if ever, are at conflict with our employees. It is fine what you are suggesting, but I take some exception to the discussion of changing this employment “at will” issue because there is a legal ramification.
Mr. Fennell stated we will leave that there, and we will talk about normal procedures for talking to people. Given the conditions we are in, I don’t want someone who is talking to the Board about problems feel that they will be fired for doing that. Is that understood?
Mr. Goscicki responded yes, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Fennell stated we are a big enough organization where we can discuss where things are going. There are certain offenses that are an obvious result in termination and unpaid suspensions. We need to be clear on what those are. In an organization like we have, it is important people can freely come forward with their concerns and issues, even if it is about another group within it.
Mr. Eissler asked do CSID employees report directly to the Board or the management company?
Mr. Moyer responded traditionally in this type of a management structure, the Board sits as the policy makers and management in whatever form it takes, be it contractor or you hire your own manager who is charged with the duties of implementing those policies you set. Mr. Fennell suggests because of the changes I do not disagree with for a period of time to give access to our employees, but truly the manager should have ultimate control over the productivity and personnel policies of the employees that STS or the manager will be managing. We are in a period of time where there is some discomfort. I recognize your concerns. I am hopeful that is not an issue in the long run.
Mr. Eissler stated there are a number of things such as the benefit package. CSID has their benefit package and STS has their benefit package. We are hiring a management company to manage this on a daily basis, which we are not going to do. We either have faith in our management company, as Mr. Moyer is saying, that we are paying to run the whole operation, but we have a dilemma that we have gone through a lot of resignations which always indicates a problem. Some of us have investigated the problem to get one side of the story. How do we do this?
Mr. Hanks responded by the simple statement the Board is open to other opinions.
Mr. Moyer stated I look back at where we have been and we have been blessed with having a group of people who have worked together their entire career. There are people in this organization, Mr. Daly, Mr. Zilmer and others, who have been together for a long time; and some of us have chosen different career paths. The reality is at some point will you be faced with the situation regardless of whether it is STS, another management company or another manager and employees who have been here do not like the management style of the new manager. That is the reality of where we sit today. We need to recognize those concerns of the employees, work with it, and if you are the court of last resort that is fine for a period of time; but ultimately that power needs to be left under the contract of whomever you hire as the manager.
Mr. Fennell stated I have to disagree. We can have other managers come in. It worked for you because you are a powerful individual, with good leadership skills. The fact is Mr. Moyer left; we had another manager, then another, and now another. I need to have our employees know that if necessary that is a last court of resort all the time no matter who is in charge; and that is not unusual for any kind of group of management anywhere today. It is unusual for a management group, by themselves, be the last court of resort.
Mr. Moyer stated the power was there, but we always tried to work with employees. Sometimes we did fire people.
Mr. Fennell stated that can still happen. We probably need to be more formal and is why I want to get our personnel manager involved. We need formal reviews of people. We need a way to tell people what kind of job they are doing, how to improve, put people on notice when they are not, and a way to say they don’t agree and go up to the next level. I don’t want a situation where the manager uses his power not for the good of the corporation, but for his own standings or his own viewpoints. That is the problem with absolute power. You need a court of resort.
Mr. Eissler stated we are entering into a $17 million expansion program. Stability is key, certainly with personnel and engineering. Our engineer is a STS employee [Mr. Roger Moore]. Mr. McKune is a consultant that works out fine now and may for 20 years; however, when you go into a $17 million project I have to convince myself that stability is going to be here. I realize anyone can leave for whatever reason. If our engineer is with the management company, they can change the engineer and put someone else in. With a $17 million project it is too big a deal to chance that.
Mr. Goscicki stated one of the benefits you have is hiring CH2M-Hill as your engineer. One of the benefits of hiring a company is to bring those resources to the table. If you have one engineer on staff, and that one engineer decided to leave, you lose the entire institutional memory. When you invest in a company, whether it be engineering, legal or management, you have the institutional framework within the company to continue. STS is a good example. We had a turnover in managers, but we keep the organization moving forward and meeting our obligations. There are plusses and minuses to both scenarios.
Mr. Eissler stated from a personnel standpoint on the plant site, we do not have the talent in house so we hired a consultant which worked out very well. For the second plant site, it was a nightmare. There are plusses and minuses to both. We probably cannot afford our own engineer, that is why we draw from STS. This is something we should think about before decisions are made. We are spending the citizens of Coral Springs money and I want to spend it well. Stability is prime. You cannot have employees nervous about losing their jobs. There are a lot of things to think about and I don’t believe we need to decide these issues today. I want to put them on the table. Mr. Moyer makes a good point. You may not want to do some of these things. They sound good on the surface and if you think about the long range it may not be the best thing to do. I want to come up with some kind of plan.
Mr. Hanks stated institutional memory is good if it is in tack. To compliment your record, there should be a full set of records at the District. If STS or CH2M-Hill decides to leave, we need to make sure we have enough records for the incoming services.
Mr. Moyer stated all of the records are yours. They are all public records.
Mr. Eissler stated we do our own billing, but we don’t own the software for the billing.
Mr. Moyer stated you have the license for the software, and so does North Springs Improvement District.
Mr. Fennell stated we do not own the machine.
Mr. Eissler asked who signs the checks? We lost a few people who used to sign the checks.
Mr. Goscicki responded Ms. Karen Ellis is our accounting manager and resides down the street.
Mr. Eissler asked who is the second signatory?
Mr. Moyer responded the checks are signed by a check-writing machine with two signatures. The use of the machine and the protocol has been reviewed by the District’s auditors and they do that every year to make sure there are sufficient controls on that. I don’t want to you think I am signing 4,000 checks.
Mr. Moyer stated that is the exposure STS has. They bear the risk.
Mr. Eissler stated we have auditors that do this every year.
Mr. Moyer stated yes sir.
Mr. Fennell stated as Mr. Hanks mentioned, I hope we have all the prints somewhere from an engineering standpoint.
Mr. Lyles stated it should not be just documents produced by CH2M-Hill, or STS. It should be documents we approve.
Mr. Goscicki stated we maintain a complete set of records for you and those are your records.
Mr. Fennell asked where are those kept?
Ms. Rugg responded they are across the street, and at offices down the street.
Mr. Moyer stated they are also stored in an off-site warehouse because we have 30 years of records.
Mr. Hanks asked as a Board do we want to get into hiring and firing decisions, or do we want to focus on the big picture and the direction for the Improvement District?
Mr. Fennell responded it has to be both. I have had customers at these meetings complaining about various different problems. We are the court of last resort for our customers. If we get involved with every hiring and firing decision, I know where the problems are. We have a management system that cannot deal with consensus and leadership. I don’t expect to see very many, but I want the employees to know if they have an issue they can come to us. We delegate our tasks, but in reality I have to sign the agreements. We have a responsibility that when services come and go we have enough of the core system in our group that we can take a change over in management, engineering, accounting or legal. We also need to do a formal evaluation every two years of each group. In some cases, we should be opening it up to bids to confirm to ourselves we have the right people here. STS may be the best group for us, and there is nothing wrong with them having some competition. We may have a new District manager where we did not have a choice or a selection of candidates, or maybe we want to do something else. We need to think along those lines.
Mr. Eissler asked don’t we have to agree on the manager?
Mr. Lyles responded that is in your contract. They cannot submit someone to do the primary duties as District Manager without your approval.
Mr. Eissler stated right now, we are absent a District Manager.
Mr. Goscicki stated let me start by saying STS has no plans or designs to start firing any employees of ours, the districts, or shared employees. I know you received some information, and we have seen the information; unfortunately, some of the information is erroneous but there is no value in us going through point by point on those types of things; there is no value to us to fire employees. Our goal, as manager, is to look at how we can provide services efficiently, effectively, and your needs are met through District employees, our employees and shared employees. As I go through the presentation the allocation of resources has been scrambled over the last 8 to 9 years, and this is the opportunity to tell you who works for who and how the structure is set up.
I will talk about STS, the resources we have locally and nationally, the issues you asked us to discuss and how to move forward together.
CSID’s primary role is as a water utility and drainage service provider. You are operating a water and wastewater system, a drainage system for over 9,500 utility customers, 85 miles of canals, 65 employees of which 44 are CSID, 12 are shared employees, lift stations, pipes, force mains, hydrants. You have a lot of infrastructure because you are a utility and drainage district.
We talked to some of the Board about STS's core value and we hold this in high regard, and I bring this out due to concerns of staff and the Boards. “We value high performance, hard work, honesty and teamwork. We hold ourselves accountable to the highest standards of ethics, trust and quality. We respect and always strive to do what is right for our customers, our employees, suppliers and community.” We take this very seriously.
STS is the company you are contracted with and it is a US company based in Texas, with our headquarters in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania outside of Philadelphia. We have 5,000 employees nationwide. We are owned by Severn Trent PLC, which is a British company, which owns Biffa, Severn Trent Water, Severn Trent Labs, Severn Trent Systems for IT and utility billing. Severn Trent PLC has stayed close to our knitting. We manufacture water and wastewater equipment, filtration equipment and metering equipment. Contract operations manage water and wastewater facilities around the world and we have 600 facilities. We have a pipeline services company for utility pipelines, and management services which is the company you are contracted with. I oversee contract operations and management services in Florida. We also have a technical services group for environmental health specialist, personnel specialist, planning and process control, transition, etc. Mr. Scott Jones, who is with us today, is part of the technical services group and worked with Mr. Moore on process efficiencies here. Our largest operations are in Florida, Texas and the Northeast.
On management issues you asked us to discuss, we have two contracts with CSID; one is from 1996 for management services and fiscal management services. In 1996 management was a $135,000 contract and fiscal services was $86,000 for a total of $212,000. The scope of services include general consultation, coordination, policy implementation, manage and attend meetings, budget preparation and analysis, negotiation of contracts and administration of contracts, consultation on operations and maintenance, staff supervision and records management on the management services side. On the fiscal side, accounting, budgeting, risk management and insurance, special assessment rolls maintenance and methodology, utility billing [was part of our contract initially] and human resources management.
The STS personnel actively involved in this District is Mr. Gary L. Moyer, Mr. George Keller of 1 year with STS however has 27 years experience, myself for 3 years, Mr. Roger Moore for 10 years, Ms. Jean Rugg in records management for 8 years, Ms. Karen Ellis in accounting for 8 years, Mr. Michael Szymonowicz in fiscal analysis, assessment methodology and rolls, and budget analysis and review for 8 years, Mr. Luis Hernandez, Ms. Reesa Weaver and Ms. Luvina LaCap in assessment roll work, Ms. Scott Jones and Mr. Mike DeCosta in technical support, and Mr. Mike Murphy for 15 years.
The District is managed through contract services with STS employees, CSID employees and employees shared with other districts. You have an attorney, Mr. Lyles, and your engineer, CH2M-Hill. Your shared employees are not just CSID employees. They get a paycheck from CSID, North Springs Improvement District [NSID], some from Turtle Run, Pinetree, Sunshine and STS. This is one of the challenges this District and we, as your manager, are facing. These employees cross over multiple lines. These employees include field technicians, maintenance, field supervisors, utility billing, and human resources for a total of 12. On the CSID team of the 56 employees 44 are sole employees, 12 are shared and from the contract employees [STS, your attorney, CH2M-Hill] 18 to 20 individuals are actively involved. From 1996 to today some of these responsibilities have shifted between STS and CSID. We have taken on some responsibilities and lost others which evolved over time. In 1996 we handled everything except operations. As we move forward, accounting is a shared responsibility; utility billing was a shared responsibility and Mr. Daly moved in 1998 from STS to CSID/NSID/other employee; human resources, Mr. Zilmer, moved from STS to CSID/NSID/other employee. Records management is still STS, the physical operations is CSID and we provide operational consulting advice; budget fiscal management is STS responsibility.
Mr. Fennell asked who is the Director of Operations?
Mr. Goscicki responded Mr. Roger Moore with STS. The sharing of employees has blurred some of the responsibilities and reduced efficiency, and is one of the areas we want to work on. We need to clarify these responsibilities and what is raising some of the anxieties in terms of goals and roles because they are serving multiple masters [multiple districts and STS is contributing funds for use of these employees on other projects]. It is not necessarily bad, but we need to clarify the roles so everyone understands what those roles are. STS’s fee structure from 1996 to today has remained flat. Our fee was $221,000 and today is $242,000 and we rebate back $20,000 for shared resources.
Mr. Eissler asked is it also true that the $221,000 does not include Mr. Moore? We get billed directly for Mr. Moore’s salary.
Mr. Goscicki responded that includes his salary.
Mr. Fennell stated we have two positions that are key, District Manager and Operations Manager, and accounting.
Mr. Hanks stated Mr. Moore is also involved in NSID and Sunshine.
Mr. Fennell stated there is roughly $221,000 in management fees; how much is accounting?
Mr. Goscicki responded that is the sum total for all management. Our fee has remained flat. The increase in cost and services has been picked up by the District by taking these employees on and moving forward that way. We need to look at reconciling the services being provided to the District by shared employees and by STS. I am not sure the fees reflect the services you are expecting from us, what we are doing, and if the fee is appropriate.
Mr. Fennell stated we asked what percentage of time people worked for us. It was 10% for the District Manager. That can be an issue if we are paying half of his salary. Obviously, that varies from time to time.
Mr. Goscicki stated it does and that is why I listed the individuals you do not see that are spending time and effort on District projects on a regular basis. This is the behind the scenes work you hire a management company to do for you.
Mr. Fennell stated we can cooperate with other districts around us, but we cannot become the super district.
Mr. Lyles stated you can enter into Interlocal Agreements to jointly exercise power and discharge responsibilities with other government entities such as other improvement districts. As part and parcel of that there could be a donor relationship to a smaller district that does not have the ability to meet you half way to borrow or purchase some of your services.
Mr. Fennell stated I am not sure from a legal standpoint how much we can take on. Mr. Zilmer is working as the personnel manager here, but also for NSID and could be for someone else in the middle of the state. I do not know if I have exceeded by mandate from the state. I did exceed where I want his loyalties to lie, which is CSID as opposed to other areas.
Mr. Lyles stated as I look at your newly adopted special act [2004-469] it uses another word besides Interlocal Agreement or contract, it also says to cooperate with. As long as you stay within the four corners of the duties you have to own and operate drainage systems and water management, you can cooperate with or contract with other government agencies to jointly discharge some of those responsibilities.
Mr. Hanks stated NSID provides water, we can work something out with NSID to share operators to cut back expenses and overtime, etc.
Mr. Moyer stated the mode of operation for the initial three districts in Coral Springs was to recognize where we can provide those types of efficiencies, and gauge the amount of time available to the employee to serve each of the entities without overburdening the employee.
Mr. Hanks stated balancing that with the broad range of experience for the particular job at hand.
Mr. Goscicki stated as Mr. Fennell pointed out, these employees are shared among a number of districts and who is looking out for which district. These employees are multiple District employees and I am sure is some of the confusion that is out there.
Mr. Hanks stated STS contract reads that you are responsible for the hiring, firing and supervising of these employees. We write the checks and you tell them what to do.
Mr. Fennell stated we could also be in competition with you because CSID can contract to manage other groups if we wanted to. We have other people doing jobs for other districts. The path of the money is a little mysterious.
Mr. Goscicki stated they are doing it on your behalf. They are not working as CSID employees on behalf of NSID. They are working as NSID employees. They get three paychecks.
Mr. Eissler asked how do I get a job like that?
Mr. Goscicki responded now you see our apprehension is trying to bring some understanding to the issue to make sure we have an understanding of the roles and responsibilities.
Mr. Fennell stated I want them to be loyal to CSID.
Mr. Moyer stated as it relates to the field operations, generally if you ask any of the employees who they work for, they will tell you they get three paychecks, but they work for the districts in Coral Springs. If there is a problem in CSID, we will pull who we need to from NSID or Sunshine to solve the problem, and vice-versa. They are interchangeable and we have been able to leverage a lot of expertise without hiring redundant staff in three districts.
Mr. Hanks stated it is a pot of employees and STS is operating as management.
Mr. Goscicki stated STS as management, was the facilitator of that to make sure the allocations were there. Mr. Moyer moved to Orlando a number of years ago, Ms. Archer moved to Tennessee two years ago, and we had a couple of other employees leave recently. You are seeing new faces and getting nervous. The common denominator that linked them together is the management company and they are seeing these changes. We understand that and appreciate the anxiety. We think it is a valid goal for the Board and STS to go through this process to get clarification to make this work affectively where everyone understands the level of service they are getting and what our roll is in making that happen for you. The shared employees are Ms. Susan Walker, accounting; Mr. Dan Daly, utility billing and 1 shared and the meter readers; Mr. Jan Zilmer, human resources.
Mr. Fennell stated I understand the viewpoint we had before and even more how we got here. What kind of agreements do we have with NSID? Do we have any? Are we just cooperating? Is anything written down?
Mr. Lyles responded there are no specific agreements with NSID.
Mr. Fennell stated this is more confusing than I knew we were getting into.
Mr. Lyles stated the reason you do not have any agreements with NSID is because you have your employees and some of them are only working part of their time for CSID and they get paid on a prorate basis by CSID for what they do, and NSID pays them for what they do for NSID. If they were your full time employees and you leased them on an intermittent basis to NSID there would be a necessity for an agreement between the two districts. That is not the breakdown or situation you currently have.
Mr. Fennell asked does Mr. Zilmer get three paychecks?
Mr. Goscicki responded at least two.
Mr. Fennell asked who does he think he works for and how do you fund such things as retirement and benefits? Does his paycheck vary from week to week?
Mr. Goscicki responded he is on salary.
Mr. Daly stated if an employee is making $70,000, has been here for 20 years and works for one District that is $70,000; if he works for two it is $35,000 for each District.
Mr. Fennell asked where does he know where is job is each week?
Mr. Daly responded it depends on how muddy the water is.
Mr. Goscicki stated that shows you the challenge on the management side.
Mr. Eissler stated salary and benefits are all allocated between the districts.
Mr. Moyer stated the budget will give you those figures.
Mr. Eissler stated if you look at the budget, you say, “This doesn’t make sense.” I am sure STS would like to change all that.
Mr. Goscicki stated we want to make sure the Board understands and the employees understand and we understand the expectations. NSID can change their retirement plan, benefit plan, etc. Right now they are the same, same personnel policies, benefit package, etc. You can change; they can change. Are these full time employees, or two sets of part time employees? Do they get full time benefits or part time benefits from both districts? There are human resource management issues that need to be put to rest and resolved.
Mr. Fennell stated it can get more complicated if they are working for STS, the districts or jumping back and forth.
Mr. Goscicki stated STS is not giving the shared employees a paycheck, but we pay the District $20,000 for a little of Mr. Daly’s time and Mr. Zilmer’s time.
Mr. Fennell stated STS also pays us rent for use in this building. We are also in a service business to ourselves and other groups. This is a question we need to think about. How much do we want to be in the service business for other groups?
Mr. Lyles stated you are not in the management service business. There are a pool of employees here and you are getting part of their services and paying for part of their total employment costs and other districts are paying their part on a pro-rate service incurred basis, but you are not paying anyone to work in some other district. That is my understanding of how the accounting has been, how the employees are set up and whom they are working for. You are not in the management business.
Mr. Fennell stated this comes down to what business are we in and the issue of the need to share what employees.
Mr. Eissler stated you cannot afford to have all full time employees in this operation. It will be too expensive. This is where the management service comes in and what it does for us.
Mr. Goscicki stated we need to come back with some structured options as to how to clarify this. These are all good options. What you are doing now, there is nothing wrong with it. We need to tidy it up and make sure we all have the same understanding. We also can present to you other options.
Mr. Eissler stated I think we have 25 miles of canals, not 85 miles. Can you check that? I would be curious.
Mr. Fennell stated we pay roughly $240,000 a year and you will re-evaluate how you bill us. Engineering bills us on an hourly basis. I don’t know how I am getting billed here.
Mr. Goscicki stated it is a lump sum basis 1/12th each month. I am proposing to look at the $240,000. We need to come to an understanding of the shared employees, how they work, and what our role is? I have concerns as your manager where you have a full time accountant and we still have fiscal management responsibilities. I would like to clarify that because I don’t want to be responsible for what your accountant does unless I can devote enough of our management time to oversee and manage that employee. If that is not the desire of the District we can reduce our fee and provide general oversight and budget preparations.
Mr. Fennell asked who is deciding who shares an employee? It has mostly been management services.
Mr. Moyer responded that is correct. The evolution of shared employees has reduced over the years. At one time CSID had 2,000 people and NSID had 500 people, that type of talent build you could not afford. CSID has some charged employees, but is it half of what it used to be. As each District grew we were able to add those individuals. Those shared employees are skilled positions than operating positions.
Mr. Hanks asked are we trying to identify the key services and key positions? Are we looking to identify areas of cost savings? Are we looking at all of the above?
Mr. Fennell responded we are reviewing the services for a couple of different reasons. How policies affect our employees? Also understand the old guard is gone.
Mr. Eissler stated when Mr. Moyer was here, I was comfortable and what he said was fine with me. Now we are going through a change. Mr. Moyer is not with us full time. Some employees are upset. Are we doing the right things? Can we do something else? Prior to this, I don’t think it would have ever come up.
Mr. Fennell stated we just grandfathered everything in.
Mr. Moyer stated I request the Board, as you go through this analysis, to keep it in the perspective of reality, and identify the options [is it STS or another manager]. A lot of the issues you will wrestle with are the same. I frankly think STS because of the extensive utility background is a nice fit for a utility operation. They may not be the greatest from a District management perspective, but they do have that expertise. They brought on Mr. Keller who has a more impressive background than I have. You need to give Mr. Keller the opportunity to tell you what his credentials are and marry those credentials, his governmental service credentials, with STS utility operating credentials. I think it is a pretty good team, but that doesn’t mean you cannot look at other options. All those options come through the front door with the same type of problems or opportunities. That is where you are at where I see it.
Mr. Fennell stated we had a management change, and we have to re-evaluate it periodically. We want to look at what we get from STS. How much are they costing us? Where are those funds? Is there someone else better? Will we be better off doing it ourselves? Should we hire our own District Manager? Hire our own operations manager? Should we have an agreement with NSID sharing certain positions and we will pay half the salaries? We need to formally have that to move forward. We need to have viability. We need to have another management group come in. You brought up a good idea about the finances. We need to know what those services are going to be. In the corporate sector we did our own finances, but every six months someone came in from headquarters and did an internal audit, and there was an external audit beyond that. We need to structure those things. We need to decide how we want to move forward. There are other issues, such as engineering records being on hand. As a Board, our job is to hire and review management.
Mr. Eissler stated STS might be the best company we can have. We need to go through the exercise to be sure.
Mr. Goscicki stated we suggested holding a workshop with the Board. One of the things you are grappling with is, “Who do I have to manage the District, and qualify and quantify what that management means.” As your current management company we can facilitate the definition of what the management of the District entails, what you want to do internally, what through consultants, what through contract management, internal staff, shared staff. That is an important first step so you are comfortable with moving forward. Once the map is drawn and you want to test the waters, we are happy to compete with anyone. We think we are the best.
Mr. Fennell stated you may well be. I would like to see us have an open contest every two to three years. There is also a strong case to hire two employees with NSID and we are done. If we are getting these other kinds of resources that a large company brings, we need to see that a little bit more.
Mr. Goscicki stated that is part of the conversation we want to have with you. As Mr. Moyer mentioned, one of the strengths we bring is utility management and operating expertise. Our contract was written in 1996 with Gary Moyer, PA and there is one line about oversight of operations. We would like to talk about how we can help on the oversight of the utility side of the operation, and formally bring these services to light. There is nothing in our contract that says we have this technical service support group and we will bring them in to do evaluations. We do it because we have that level of expertise. Those are the things through a workshop we would like to bring forth. What are you looking for in a manager? If you are looking for a management firm to bring utility expertise to the table that is an important differentia.
Mr. Fennell stated we need the workshop to decide what we want to do. We need to reconfigure where we are going with management services and how we review all our contract services. We also have an employee issue and we need more feed back from them. We need to understand their concerns. Mr. Eissler has been doing that. What have you found out?
Mr. Eissler responded there are concerns. Anytime you go through a transition people have to know whom they work for. It is very hard to serve two masters. They get nervous. In the middle of your career the thought of not having employment is scary, whether it is real or imagined it doesn’t matter. I am concerned about that. I am concerned about people and without people you have zip. Before we do any changes in our contracts, we should have a workshop, as you suggested, and go over these issues. I believe it will iron itself out and things will be fine. We need a better understanding of who does what, how we want to move forward and what STS would like to do. Maybe there is more you can do for us. Maybe the price is right.
Mr. Fennell stated at the workshop I would like to have some of our basic CSID employees.
Mr. Goscicki stated the senior decision makers of CSID, Mr. Zilmer, Mr. Daly, etc. It is appropriate and in a workshop format you want to bring all these ideas to the table.
Mr. Fennell stated they should be a part of the concept of how we want to move forward or if we stay the same. In the end, those are the people I am counting on to turn the pump on at the right time, and they need the feeling they are working for a good organization.
Mr. Daly stated it is a good idea. In the past we knew whom we were working for and the integrity of people. With the changes, there is no foundation for integrity, trust, etc. Between Mr. Moyer and Ms. Archer we knew where we stood and what was expected and how to get there.
Mr. Fennell stated you are working for an organization where management could change. We need to look into that and probably have more of an institutional structure as opposed to charismatic.
Mr. Goscicki stated we would like to bring in a facilitator who does this professionally. We can poll the Board individually to see what dates work.
Mr. Fennell stated I have spring break the middle of March. Who is going to set this up?
Mr. Goscicki responded we will. I’ll have Mr. Keller get with each of you to come up with a date that works for everyone. I’ll get with the facilitator and we will get it scheduled as soon as possible.
Mr. Fennell stated this will be a good four hours or longer.
Mr. Eissler stated I would like to have counsel present.
Mr. Lyles stated my pleasure.
Mr. Hanks asked will you be able to get back to us by the end of the week with a date?
On MOTION by Mr. Eissler seconded by Mr. Hanks with all in favor the meeting was adjourned at 6:03 p.m. | 2019-04-21T16:35:29Z | http://www.csidfl.org/csid/minutes/2005/2005-02.htm |
Scientists interested in how modern climate change will impact the stability of polar ice sheets may take several approaches in their research. The first is to use climate model simulations of the response of ice sheets and glaciers under elevated greenhouse gas levels. The second is to look to the past and infer from the geological record the fate of the Earth’s polar ice sheets when levels of warming were similar to what is expected in the next few decades to centuries. The interdisciplinary PLIOMAX project took the latter approach and has profoundly deepened our understanding of the geophysical processes that obscure the signal of ancient ice volumes embedded within the geological record of sea level change.
The aim of the PLIOMAX project, a five-year research project funded by the US National Science Foundation, was to deliver more accurate sea level and ice volume data for the Pliocene, a period 3 million years ago when atmospheric CO2 was at ~400 ppmv, a benchmark that was recently surpassed. The mid-Pliocene warm period thus provides a natural analogue for a warmer, higher CO2 world that can be used as a testing ground for the climate and ice sheet models that are being used to predict the future response of Earth’s climate to increasing levels of greenhouse gases. We have shown that existing Pliocene sea level estimates have large errors (±15 m) due to previously unaccounted for solid earth effects (such as glacial isostatic adjustment and mantle dynamic topography), precluding firm estimates of sea level at that time. More accurate estimates of Pliocene peak sea level will require improved modeling of solid earth deformation effects, including better constraints on mantle viscosity, as well as additional field studies of Pliocene and Pleistocene sedimentary sequences around the globe. We are continuing these efforts with our EEMAX initiative which focuses on understanding sea level rise in the Eemian.
(1) The first paper showing how to correct ancient shorelines for glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA; Raymo et al., 2011) and identifying this process as one of the reasons for the Pliocene sea level paradox—namely the different elevations of Pliocene shorelines around the globe. The techniques we outline in this paper can be used to correct all shorelines from deep time for GIA and are not restricted to Pliocene shorelines. We also conclude that the remaining disagreement between Pliocene shorelines around the world, after correcting for GIA, is likely due to dynamic topography effects due to mantle convection (see #4 below).
(2) A paper showing that the unusually long duration of the MIS11 interglacial must be taken into account when making GIA shoreline corrections (Raymo & Mitrovica, 2012). We show that the extremely high estimated sea level for this time is actually much lower, closer to 10 m. This paper clearly laid out the fact that knowing when in an interglacial a shoreline feature formed is essential for making accurate GIA corrections. A follow-up paper by Chen et al. 2014 further developed these ideas and now the critical importance of accurate ages within interglacials as well as the comparative reference frame to today is widely appreciated.
(3) O’Leary et al., 2013 published a detailed MIS 5e (Eemian) sea level history from a large database of new and existing field data in Western Australia supporting the hypothesis that a late rapid rise in eustatic sea level occurred at the end of the Eemian. This idea remains controversial and is driving current research both within our group as well as in other research groups, focusing on both data and modeling. Understanding the timing of sea level events within MIS5e will lead to a better understanding of Antarctic ice sheet dynamics and its response to local insolation with direct implications for future sea level change.
(4) A series of papers based on our field work on four continents show that Pliocene shorelines can be used to set constraints on the magnitude of dynamic topography (DT) over millions of years (Rowley et al., 2013; Rovere et al., 2014, 2015, 2016; Raymo et al., in prep.; Hearty et al., in prep). Post-doc Alessio Rovere showed that dynamic topography uplift rates of 10-20 m/Ma are supported by field evidence from around the globe. This further implies that even much younger Eemian shoreline features have the possibility of being biased by DT by 1-2 meters (e.g., Austermann et al., 2017) and thus are likely overestimated. Lastly, building on the insight of Gomez et al. (2012, 2013), graduate student Jacky Austermann (Austermann et al., 2015) demonstrated that modeling of mid-Pliocene ice sheets must take into account long-term changes in sub-ice bedrock topography due to dynamic topography. In particular, the Wilkes Sub-Glacial Basin was several hundred meters lower during mid-Pliocene than had been recognized in previous work--incorporating this insight into an ice sheet model led to a significant retreat of ice cover over this region, reconciling model results with geological observations that suggest a dynamically evolving ice sheet in this area during the mid-Pliocene.
(5) During the Eemian, giant boulders weighing many tons appear to have been emplaced onto coastal clifftops in the Bahamas. Some studies suggest they were put there by “super storms” far more powerful than anything seen in recorded human time–generated by a climate warmer than that of today. Rovere et al. (2017) shows that storms typical of today, combined with a few meters increase in sea level during this warm time, would have been sufficient to move boulders of this size. Current projections say that sea level will rise about a meter by the end of this century, but some models put it much higher. This study shows that even if the intensity of storms does not increase, sea-level rise alone will dramatically increase the power of waves against hard barriers such as cliffs and walls.
(6) Natalya Gomez, while a graduate student, developed the first ice sheet model coupled to a gravitationally self-consistent ice age sea level model (Gomez et al., 2012, 2013). The new model demonstrated that the drop in sea level at the margin of a rapidly melting ice sheet acted as a stabilizing influence on the grounding line of marine-based ice sheets such as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Prior to this work it had been assumed that melting of an ice sheet led to a globally uniform sea level rise plus a simplified viscous uplift of the crust in the zone of melting. These earlier analyses supported the so-called Marine Ice Sheet Instability Hypothesis, which holds that a grounded, marine-based ice sheet lying on a bed that tilts down toward the center of the ice sheet will experience runaway collapse as the ice sheet melts. The simulations in Gomez et al. (2012, 2013) showed that this hypothesis is not universally correct. The sea-level feedback will act to slow the collapse of a marine-based ice sheet and, in cases where the bedrock tilt is moderate, may even lead to the cessation of the collapse. This work – and the Gomez effect – is now universally understood as a fundamentally important ingredient in ice sheet modeling in response to global warming.
(7) The inference of Earth’s viscosity based on ice age data sets is a classic problem in geophysics, but despite a half-century of study there remain significant (order of magnitude) differences in published estimates. Graduate student Harriet Lau, using a Bayesian inversion methodology, resolved this contentious issue by demonstrating that these differences originate from varying treatments of ice age effects on the Earth’s gravity field (Lau et al., 2016). By accounting for contamination of the gravity signal associated with modern global change processes (i.e., glacier melting), the paper demonstrated that mantle viscosity increases by two orders of magnitude from the base of tectonic plates to the core-mantle-boundary. In future work, our group will build on this study to infer the lateral variation on mantle viscosity in addition to the depth variation – i.e., build a 3-D map of mantle viscosity.
(8) Pliomax graduate student Ed Gasson demonstrated, using isotope-enable ice sheet models, how changes in ice-sheet geometry can impact sea level estimates based on the marine oxygen isotope record (Gasson et al., 2016). Work by Raymo et al. (2017) and Evans et al. (2016) further explore the numerous factors that contribute to uncertainty in Pliocene sea level estimates derived from marine geochemical proxies such as d18O and Mg/Ca ratios.
(9) Pliocene atmospheric modeling that considers the impacts of a smaller Antarctic ice sheet on regional winds supports the notion that marine diatoms found in the Pliocene Sirius Formation (Antarctica) were wind blown, and sourced from deglaciated sub-glacial basins (exposed to weathering after rebound). This paper provides a fresh perspective on a long-standing geological debate (Scherer et al., 2016).
(10) For the first time, paleo sea-level estimates (Pliocene and Last Interglacial) were used to tune ice-sheet model physics using large ensemble techniques. The calibrated models were then used to simulate the future response of the Antarctic ice sheet to greenhouse-gas forcing, following the RCP scenarios. The simulations implied higher and faster possible rates of ice sheet retreat than previously published estimates (DeConto and Pollard, 2016) though the results are highly dependent on the paleo sea-level estimates which still have large uncertainties.
(11) New ice-sheet model physics representing processes not previously considered at the ice-sheet scale (hydrofracturing of ice shelves, and ice cliff collapse), produce much higher model-derived estimates of Pliocene sea-level than in any of our previous modeling (Pollard et al., 2015). Model advances included: a novel inverse method to deduce basal sliding coefficients under currently grounded ice by fitting to modern observed ice elevations and iterating in forward runs (Pollard and DeConto, 2012a), more sophisticated parameterizations of calving, including simple damage advection (Pollard and DeConto, 2012b; Pollard et al., 2015), and more physical and robust parameterization of oceanic melting under floating ice shelves (Pollard and DeConto, 2012b).
(12) Large ensembles of Antarctic runs were conducted, both for the past deglacial period over the last 40 kyrs, and for the future using RCP climate scenarios (as in DeConto and Pollard, 2016), with the coupled ice-Earth model (Gomez et al., 2013) and looking in detail at the effects of different Earth rheological profiles. In particular, the potential negative feedbacks on ice retreat with a weak upper mantle and thin lithosphere, appropriate for West Antarctica, were highlighted. A full-length paper was produced describing the results (Pollard et al., 2017), following on from Gomez et al. (2015). The main findings were that most Earth profiles gave similar results to the simpler ELRA (Elastic Lithosphere Rebounding Asthenosphere) bedrock model, but with the weak-upper-mantle thin-lithosphere profile representative of areas of West Antarctica, significant negative feedbacks occur in the future scenarios that limit ice retreat.
(13) The Penn State ice sheet model was coupled with LOVECLIM, the Earth Model of Intermediate Complexity (EMIC) maintained by the U. Hawaii group. This EMIC requires much less CPU time than the global and regional climate models (GCM, RCM) used in the work above, and offers the capability of fully coupled and time-continuous ice-climate simulations through glacial cycles, and orbital cycles during the Pliocene. D. Pollard also significantly improved the surface ice-snow mass balance scheme in the ice model (which was based on Positive Degree Days). It was converted into a surface energy balance scheme, including solar insolation variations on diurnal, seasonal and orbital scales, with more physical treatment of snow water content and refreezing. Extensive modern calibration for modern Greenland led to a new reference model that continues to be refined.
(14) A pair of companion papers (data and modeling) show that the Antarctic Ice Sheet had the potential to contribute >25m of sea-level variability in the Miocene. This work has substantially reduced the longstanding “hysteresis problem”, because this much orbitally-paced sea-level variability had been difficult to explain without invoking pre-Pliocene Northern Hemispheric ice sheets (Gasson et al., 2016; Levy et al., 2016). The model advance comes from the addition of new ice sheet dynamical processes and coupling between atmospheric and ice-sheet models. A combination of ice sheet and GIA modeling, integrated with marine isotope records hints at a causal relationship between late Miocene Antarctic Ice-Sheet variability and the Messinian Salinity Crisis (dessication of the Mediterranean Basin) (Ohnheiser et al., 2015).
(15) Finally, we have made numerous contributions to the wider sea level research community including participation in the publication of three review papers (Dutton et al., 2015, more than 250 citations; Kemp et al., 2015; and Miller et al., in press).
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Austermann, J., Pollard, D., Mitrovica, J. X., Moucha, R., Forte, A. M., DeConto, R. M., ... & Raymo, M. E. (2015). The impact of dynamic topography change on Antarctic ice sheet stability during the mid-Pliocene warm period. Geology, 43(10), 927-930.
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Hearty et al., in prep., Plio-Pleistocene stratigraphy and sea level estimates, Republic of South Africa.
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As Election Day approaches, more people seek news and information about politics. To understand the habits of news audiences in the run-up to the election, we analyzed what was being covered in reporting about down-ballot, non-presidential races for U.S. Congress, governor, and local offices in the lead-up to the 2016 general election. The results shared in this white paper suggest a tough spot for news organizations. Issue coverage is often heralded for helping to inform the public, yet the results show that the more issues covered in a news article, the lower the page views and social referrals. Issue coverage also declined in volume as the election approached, right when many prospective voters tuned in. The results do provide some insight into when issue coverage worked, however. Articles discussing social issues and corruption – two highly salient issues during the campaign – saw increased traffic.
This report, prepared as a collaboration between the Center for Media Engagement and the American Press Institute (API) and funded by the Democracy Fund, looks at local news coverage of the 2016 general election and what kinds of campaign coverage may have encouraged engagement with election news. We examined local news coverage by nine newspapers across six states.
The Center for Media Engagement categorized 705 general election-related newspaper stories that referenced a non-presidential campaign from the websites of the nine news outlets, tracking mentions of issues, campaign strategy, and fact-checking, among other campaign coverage characteristics. Where applicable, we compare these findings to an analysis of 435 primary election-related stories from an earlier report.
We correlated attributes of election news coverage with data from API’s Metrics for News (www.metricsfornews.com), an analytics tool that measures engagement in new ways and provides unique data-driven insights for publishers. The results offer an illustration of how people engage with various types of election news content.
A third of local news stories about down-ballot campaigns referenced social issues.
Economic topics like jobs and trade were not prominent on the local news agenda, despite their role in animating many of the voters who supported Donald Trump in the presidential election.
The amount of issue coverage in local news declined as Election Day approached, a potential concern for undecided and late-deciding voters searching for candidate issue information.
Coverage that focused on issues and strategy tended to receive fewer page views and social referrals than news articles that did not mention these aspects of the campaign.
State and local campaign coverage drew audiences. A news article referencing a state or local political campaign garnered 46% more predicted page views and 87% more predicted social referrals than a news article not covering a state or local race.
A non-traditional, clickbait headline on a local news story can reduce the predicted page views by 30% and predicted social referrals by 45%.
News articles mentioning corruption earned more page views and social referrals.
Fact-checking was rare in the local election news we analyzed.
We evaluated whether each of the 705 election-related local news articles included any of 14 different issues. Almost three-quarters of the news stories (73%) mentioned at least one issue. Across the news articles examined, 33% mentioned three or more issues.
National survey data released just prior to the election showed that the economy topped the public’s list of the most important problem facing the country.[i] Across the newspapers that we examined, economic issues were covered less frequently than social and public safety issues. This could indicate that other issues were atop voters’ minds in down-ballot races. Alternatively, it could signal a disconnect between coverage and the electorate’s issue priorities.
As seen in the chart below, the top issue referenced was social matters (35% of news stories), which included mentions of abortion and rights for women, LGBTQ individuals, and other historically marginalized groups. The next most frequently mentioned issue was public safety (32%), including gun control, crime, and emergency response. Taxes and budgetary issues were the next most emphasized issue (23%). Trade was the least frequently discussed issue (5%).
Examining the coverage, local news outlets’ coverage of social issues seemed to be influenced by what occurred at the top of the ballot with the presidential race. Coverage of then-candidate Donald Trump’s treatment of women—including the disclosure of the Access Hollywood tape—became an issue for Republican candidates down the ballot. News articles mentioning U.S. House and Senate races discussed how candidates for these offices were responding to the Trump tape and their positions on issues of women’s rights and sexual harassment. The national conversation became a prominent topic of debate down the ballot.
The average local news article contained just over two issue mentions, though that number declined as the general election approached. On average, a news story published 20 to 32 days prior to the election had 2.5 issue mentions compared to 1.8 issue mentions in news stories published zero to nine days before Election Day. This change over time is statistically significant.[i] A similar trend was found in coverage of the 2016 primary election by these news outlets.
As the number of issue mentions in an article increased, the predicted number of page views declined. An article containing three issue mentions had approximately 1,300 fewer page views compared to a local news story with no issue mentions.
A similar pattern describes the relationship between the number of issue mentions and predicted social referrals. As more issues were mentioned in a news story, the predicted number of social referrals to the article decreased. A news story with no issue mentions had approximately 200 more predicted social referrals compared to a news article with three issue mentions.
Articles referencing social issues garnered significantly more page views and social referrals. One potential driver for this effect could have been the discussion of Donald Trump and the Access Hollywood tape during the time period we analyzed.
News stories mentioning public safety matters garnered significantly fewer page views and social referrals.
More than half (53%) of the local news articles about non-presidential campaigns mentioned a state and/or local political campaign.
Non-federal campaign coverage is a draw for audiences.[i] News articles mentioning state and local campaigns significantly increased the number of page views and social referrals associated with the story. A news article referencing a state or local political campaign garnered 1,800 more predicted page views and almost 300 more predicted social referrals compared to not referencing a state or local campaign.
Local news stories regarding the 2016 general election focused heavily on the elements of campaign strategy, including references to public opinion polls, campaign fundraising or spending, or the horserace diagnostic of who is winning. Two-thirds of the articles examined (66%) contained at least one mention of campaign strategy. On average, each election news story contained one strategy mention.
The horserace depiction of a campaign—which candidate is the “frontrunner” or “underdog”—was found in more than half of the news stories (54%). References to campaign fundraising and/or spending appeared in a third of news stories (34%) while public opinion polling information was referenced in almost a quarter (23%) of articles.
The amount of strategy coverage—polling, fundraising, and horserace mentions—corresponds with news article engagement.[i] As strategy coverage increases, the predicted number of page views and social referrals decline.
A local news story containing all three strategy components has 2,800 fewer predicted page views compared to election content containing no strategy mentions. Strategy coverage has a similar effect on the social referrals a local news article received.
The inclusion of an additional strategy mention in an article reduces the predicted social referrals to that article by approximately 100 referrals.
Clickbait headlines reduced the number of predicted page views a news story received. We found a negative influence of these non-traditional headlines on social referrals as well. A clickbait-style headline reduced the predicted page views by 2,000 and predicted social referrals by more than than 250.
These findings for both the 2016 primary and general elections show that clickbait-oriented headlines can backfire in some contexts. Designed to increase reader engagement, clickbait can accomplish the opposite according to findings across 2016 local election news coverage.
Scandal and corruption were features of news coverage of non-presidential races. 22% of articles focused on accusations, investigations, or criminal charges leveled against non-presidential candidates for federal, state, or local office.
News articles mentioning corruption earned more page views and social referrals than articles not referencing scandal.[i] A news article mentioning campaign or governmental corruption could expect to see 2,000 more predicted page views compared to an article not referencing corruption. Similarly, a news story referencing corruption earned double the social referrals (1,115) than a story not mentioning corruption did (574).
This report offers a glimpse of how nine local news outlets covered the last month of the 2016 election, and how audiences engaged with this content. We found that the national issues most important to the public during this time were not reflected in the issues covered in the local news. The number of issues news outlets covered declined as the election approached, a potential concern for undecided voters and those individuals arriving at decisions late in the process. Of the overall issue coverage that did exist, we find that more mentions led to fewer page views and social referrals. The news content that did engage voters, including mentions of state and/or local campaigns, social issues, and corruption, suggests that highly salient, local issues and campaigns can resonate at times with news consumers.
We examined 705 news stories from the websites of nine local newspapers across six states (California, Florida, Idaho, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington). Only news articles focusing on 2016 non-presidential election campaigns, including federal (U.S. Senate, U.S. House), statewide (e.g. gubernatorial, Attorney General, Supreme Court, etc.), and local races (e.g. mayor, council, supervisors, school board, etc.), were analyzed as part of this project. We excluded articles on ballot and referenda campaigns, and articles about the presidential election. For each news outlet, we examined articles that were published in the month prior to the general election. The unit of analysis was each article.
Relevance: We coded whether news stories flagged as “political” by each newsroom in the Metrics for News platform were relevant to the purposes of this project by mentioning down-ballot political campaigns. Of 3,240 total stories that had anything to do with government or officials, 705 were relevant to non-presidential elections (22%) and used for further analysis.
Campaign type: We coded whether the article referenced a federal (54%) and/or state and local (53%) non-presidential campaign.
Headline: We coded whether the article had a more traditional, summary headline (88.5%) or a clickbait-oriented headline (11.5%).
Fact-check: We coded whether the news article was structured as a fact-check, including offering campaign claims with a subsequent journalist evaluation of the claims (2%).
Corruption: We coded the extent to which a news article discussed government or campaign-related corruption, including scandal, criminal charges or accusations, or investigations (22%).
Strategy coverage: We next examined the political strategy-related content in the news article, including whether public opinion/polling information (23%), fundraising or campaign spending information (34%), or horserace references (e.g. “favorite,” “frontrunner,” “underdog,” “sure loser,” “too close to call;” 54%) were present. For some of the analyses described, we combined these references into one additive measure for political strategy (M = 1.10, SD = 0.97, Range = 0 to 3).
Issue mentions: We coded for mentions of budgetary matters (23%), the economy in general (12%), education (17%), energy (5%), the environment (16%), health care (17%), immigration (11%), income inequality and wages (9%), infrastructure and transportation (18%), international trade (5%), jobs and unemployment (11%), national security (9%), public safety (32%), and social issues including abortion, LGBTQ rights, women’s issues, and drugs (35%). For some of the analyses described, we combined these mentions into one additive measure for issue mentions (M = 2.18, SD = 2.21, Range = 0 to 11).
Before coding, we conducted a reliability analysis on a sample of at least 10% of the total news stories to ensure that the team of four coders was correctly identifying campaign news features. We used Krippendorff’s alpha as a measure of reliability, where scores above 0.67 are considered acceptable. Results of our analysis can be found below.
[i] The number of issues mentioned differed significantly over time, F(2,702)=6.48, p<.01. A Games-Howell post hoc comparison reveals that the average number of issues mentioned zero to nine days (M=1.80) and 10 to 19 days prior to the election (M=2.36) differed significantly (p<.05). The average number of issues mentioned zero to nine days (M=1.80) and 20 to 32 days (M=2.45) prior to the election differed significantly (p<.01). There were no significant differences between issue mentions 10 to 19 days and 20 to 32 days prior to the election (p=.96). These results are affirmed when the number of issue mentions are regressed in two negative binomial regression models with controls for the news outlet, article word count, type of article, campaign race type, strategy mentions, and a continuous or ordinal-level (1, 2, 3) treatment of the time variable.
[i] In three separate regression models predicting the number of page views, average time on page with a news story, and social referrals (with controls for the news outlet, article word count, type of article, campaign race type, headline type, and strategy mentions), the number of issue mentions significantly reduces the number of page views (B=-.07 SE=.03; p<.01) and social referrals (B=-.11 SE=.04; p<.01). Issue references in local news articles do not influence average read time (B=1.89 SE=1.52; p=.22). The dependent variables – page views and social referrals – were modeled using negative binomial regression. Average read time was modeled using OLS regression.
[i] In three separate regression models predicting the number of page views, average time on page with a news story, and social referrals (with controls for the news outlet, article word count, type of article, campaign race type, headline type, and strategy mentions), mentions of social issues significantly increase the number of page views (B=.50 SE=.13; p<.01) and social referrals (B=.73 SE=.18; p<.01). Conversely, references to public safety matters significantly reduce the number of page views (B=-.47 SE=.13; p<.01) and social referrals (B=-.58 SE=.18; p<.01). Coverage of infrastructure has a marginally significant influence on reducing page views (B=-.29 SE=.15; p=.06) and social referrals (B=-.38 SE=.22; p=.08). None of the top issues referenced in the local news articles influenced average read time. The dependent variables – page views and social referrals – were modeled using negative binomial regression. Average read time was modeled using OLS regression.
[i] In three separate regression models predicting the number of page views, average time on page with a news story, and social referrals (with controls for the news outlet, article word count, type of article, headline type, issue references, and strategy mentions), mentions of state and local political campaigns increase page views (B=.38 SE=.13; p<.01) and social referrals (B=.63 SE=.18; p<.01). Mentions of state and local campaigns have no effect on average read time for an article (B=7.13, SE=5.50; p=.20). The dependent variables – page views and social referrals – were modeled using negative binomial regression. Average read time was modeled using OLS regression.
[i] In three separate regression models predicting the number of page views, average time on page with a news story, and social referrals (with controls for the news outlet, article word count, type of article, campaign race type, headline type, and issue mentions), strategy mentions significantly reduce the number of page views (B=-.17 SE=.07; p=.01) and social referrals (B=-.20 SE=.10; p<.05). Strategy references did not influence average read time (B=-2.21 SE=3.39; p=.52). The dependent variables – page views and social referrals – were modeled using negative binomial regression. Average read time was modeled using OLS regression.
[i] In three separate regression models predicting the number of page views, average time on page with a news story, and social referrals (with controls for the news outlet, article word count, type of article, campaign race type, strategy and issue mentions), non-traditional headlines significantly reduce the number of page views (B=-.36 SE=.17; p<.05) and social referrals (B=-.59 SE=.24; p<.05). The type of headline did not influence average read time (B=2.36 SE=9.23; p=.80). The dependent variables – page views and social referrals – were modeled using negative binomial regression. Average read time was modeled using OLS regression.
[i] In three separate regression models predicting the number of page views, average time on page with a news story, and social referrals (with controls for the news outlet, article word count, type of article, campaign race type, headline type, strategy and issue mentions), mentions of corruption significantly increase the number of page views (B=.35 SE=.16; p<.05) and social referrals (B=.66 SE=.22; p<.01). We note that when corruption is added to the model, campaign strategy mentions have only a marginally significant effect on social referrals (B=-.16 SE=.09; p<.10). Corruption references did not influence average read time. The dependent variables – page views and social referrals – were modeled using negative binomial regression. Average read time was modeled using OLS regression.
[i] In three separate regression models predicting the number of page views, average time on page with a news story, and social referrals (with controls for the news outlet, article word count, type of article, campaign race type, headline type, strategy and issue mentions), fact-check structured articles had no influence on the number of page views (B=-.32 SE=.43; p=.46), social referrals (B=-.49 SE=.59; p=.40), or read time (B=.53 SE=21.46; p=.98). The dependent variables – page views and social referrals – were modeled using negative binomial regression. Average read time was modeled using OLS regression.
[i] We include the type of news article as a control in our regression analyses of story page views, average time on page, and social referrals. In no instance is the type of article a statistically significant factor for article engagement. | 2019-04-21T07:08:39Z | https://mediaengagement.org/research/general-election-news-coverage-what-engages-audiences-down-the-ballot/ |
We are now beginning the Countdown to the World meeting of Families and the arrival of Pope Francis to our shores. It’s undoubtedly a pivotal moment for our Church, for many reasons. It is, therefore, opportune, in preparing for this great coming that we take time to review where we’ve been and take all we can from it, bad and good, as ingredients for the future.
Before that, however, Pope Francis is the 266th Pope in history and only the second ever to visit Ireland. While the Pope is certainly a world celebrity and hugely popular – it’s enough to think that over 2000 journalists are registered to cover his visit to Ireland – for Catholics he is an instrument in the hands of God. Of course, he is a human being like all of us, a “sinner” as he defines himself, and yet he is a special person linked particularly to the Holy Spirit, a unique representative of Jesus Christ coming among us to be a healing presence, speaking words of wisdom and offering new horizons. As Catherine of Siena, one of the great women saints of the Church put it, the Pope is the gentle Christ on earth.
So it is important for us to prepare for his coming. People at many levels, both church and state, have already done a lot practically to get everything ready. I want to express the gratitude of our Diocese to them. But as we now draw near the big days, it is important that as a Diocese we open our hearts and minds to welcome the Pope spiritually.
That’s why I’m happy we have come here today to this place linked with another great woman, this time of our Irish Tradition, St. Ita. She lived in this lovely place in the sixth century, forming a community and became a spiritual mother to many, not least St. Brendan the future Navigator saint. We know that centuries later this place also became a point for the community to gather at this Mass rock where generations prayed in circumstances that were far from easy.
So here we now are, young and old, families and single people, a representative group of the family of our Diocese preparing to welcome Pope Francis. We’re here on the Feast of the Assumption when we remember how open Mary was to God and how fulfilled she became in following God’s plan for her. Symbolically, we are declaring we want to adjust our spiritual antennae to pick up the signals God will be sending into our hearts and minds in the days of the World Meeting of Families and Pope Francis’ visit. If we know how to grasp the moment, the Pope’s visit can be a pivotal moment for our church and for our society.
To help us I would take the image of standing at a crossroads. In Ireland, if we want, the Pope’s visit will be a crossroads. I want to suggest that as we stand at this crossroads, there are three directions we need to look.
First, we need to look back and re-read where we’ve come from and acknowledge our past, good and bad. Recently, a friend from America visited so I brought him around to see some of the sites of Ireland. It struck me powerfully yet again just how imbued our history has been with Christianity – from literature such as the Book of Kells to artistic works such as the Ardagh chalice, from architecture such as the ancient monasteries and abbeys such as those in Adare or Askeaton to community rituals in almost every local parish of Ireland like here in Kileedy where you celebrate an annual Mass at this Mass rock and in January celebrate St. Ita’s Feast Day. In explaining something of how Ireland works to my visitor, I was able to point to the initiatives established by pioneering Catholic men and women of the 19th century – schools, hospitals and works of outreach to people in need. It is good for us in these days to recall with a grateful heart just how much the Church, made up of ordinary women and men like you and me, did to contribute to Irish society. Without gratitude we grow cynical. We can and should be proud of the living commitment in faith and hope of those of previous generations. We can draw inspiration from it and express our thanks to them.
But, then, we need to acknowledge the dark aspects of our Church’s history that have come to light especially in recent decades – a clericalism that ended up confusing power and ministry, the sexual abuse of minors by clergy and religious that did untold life-long damage to victims, the violent and repressive treatment by church representatives of young people sent to the State’s reformatory institutions, the dark experience of vulnerable women in places meant to be residences of refuge. Sadly, as has been highlighted, cover-up, wilful or otherwise, and mismanagement compounded the damage, adding to our shame.
We know that not every bishop or priest or sister or brother or lay person engaged in church circles was bad. And we know that not everyone was good. Those of us of a certain age, however, know many, many who were very kind, caring and helpful. But to acknowledge with gratitude the good can never eclipse recognition of sin, criminality and evil. In some way, everyone in the church bears the shame of these darks aspects of our history. Few of us can throw stones as if we ourselves were not somehow associated.
And so we need to prepare spiritually for the Pope’s coming with an act of reparation, that is, a desire to want to “repair” the Church first of all by seeking forgiveness for the sins of the past. At Mass we say “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us”. Each of us can decide to see the sins of the Church not simply someone else’s fault, but actually see them also as my story and so, on behalf of my sisters and brothers, past and present, I can say, we can say together, “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us”. “Brothers and sisters in Christ who have been wounded by my deeds, have mercy on me”.
Even though the Catholic Church in Ireland now has a range of services in place and very active training programmes in safeguarding, we need to know how to stay with an awareness of the pervasiveness of abuse and those dark parts of our human nature that tend to exploit weakness and vulnerability. Abuse has a devastating effect on victims and their families. It can impact on all dimensions of their lives and there are no quick or simple solutions to what are sometimes their lifelong struggles. As well as needing to pray for those who have been wounded we need to keep listening and to learn from them how to clarify and repair our church.
A second suggestion as we stand at a crossroads with the coming of Pope Francis. Look around us where we are now and be pro-active in repairing the Church today. It really is better to light a candle than curse the darkness. I recall some years ago a woman I know went to Rome and attended the weekly audience with the Pope. As she sat there, she found herself thinking the Pope is not a young man and must need a lot of help in his role as Pope. Suddenly she began to think: “He needs my help”. It was like a flash of lightning that changed her way of seeing things. Until then she had somehow thought of the Pope as a CEO of some big multinational company. But that isn’t the Church. The Church isn’t just the Pope or bishops or priests or nuns. The Church is a people, it’s you and me who continue, despite (or, indeed, in and through) all our limits, to be Jesus Christ in this world. The woman said it marked a turning point for her. She realised, “I am the Church wherever I am at home, at work, in the neighbourhood”.
What’s most important in the Church is not this or that issue or this or that structure. What matters most is love. Each of us builds the Church through putting into practice the art of loving the Gospel teaches. Sometimes love is seen only as sentiment or in terms of morality. But love is at the heart of the Church. Indeed, one of the definitions of the Church is “love for one another”. Love is what gives life to our institutions. We are talking about the art of loving that Jesus teaches in the Gospel: be the first to love, love everyone, love our neighbour as ourselves, love our enemy and, above all, love one another. It’s what Pope Francis so often repeats: go outside ourselves, reach out especially to the peripheries, wherever they might be around us.
And this is why the family is so important. It’s the place where we first learn the ways of love. True, there’s no such thing as a perfect family. Each family is on a journey but it is the special place of love given, love received, love shared and experienced.
A third suggestion. We need to look to the future with hope, watching for the signposts that show the way. I like a phrase Pope Francis often repeats: “do not let yourselves be robbed of hope”. Catholics can be downbeat today because it is painful to acknowledge in our family story that we have wounded people. It isn’t easy, not least for those who are proud of their Church and the good work that it does and they do in it, to hear our own Catholic identity pilloried daily in one way or another. The group think that says to be Catholic is out of date seems sometimes overwhelming. But let’s remember, if Jesus had spent his time worrying about what people were saying about him or seeing how the numbers following him were declining (and the numbers following Jesus declined dramatically in his life time!), he would have achieved little. Instead, he kept going forward in hope. Likewise, for us. We need to move forward, attentive to what the Spirit is saying to us.
As we look around us at this crossroads moment in Ireland, we need to be both faithful to our heritage and creative in expressing Christian faith and love today. It would be such a shame were we to lose the memory of our Christian heritage. But equally, love makes us creative of new ways. Creative fidelity calls us to be open to new ways.
The Church of tomorrow will be very different. We are going to have to learn more deeply how to be Christians travelling together with the Risen Jesus among us. The Gospel story of the Disciples on the Road to Emmaus is a signpost for us. They were downcast but in sharing their story of pain, allowing the Risen Jesus enlighten them with his Word and Sacrament, they experienced him among them offering new hope and direction. From the depths of suffering they became witnesses to Good News.
To be Catholic isn’t simply about Mass on Sunday or certain moral rules or pious practices. Unfortunately, too often, and perhaps we ourselves are partly to blame, our Catholic faith has been reduced to this caricature. Catholic faith is something much more alive and dynamic. It is about discovering the true freedom that comes from following Jesus who makes us really free. It is about following, day by day, God the Father’s unique plan for each one of us and for our world in our small and big decisions. It is listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit who enables us individually and then together to be one heart and one soul, working to build a world that is more united, more fraternal, more peaceful, more equitable in the sharing of resources, more sensitive to the environmental care of our common home, more attentive to the vulnerable and promotion to the integrity of life at all levels.
Catholics believe true fulfilment comes in an encounter with a Person that sets us free and in a community that is authentic. As we move into the future, we will need to discover more radically what it means to say we go to God together. We will need to strengthen the fabric of our own Christian communities as real Spirit-filled places of sharing and belonging in Jesus Christ. And then, too, our communities will need to recognise how to be open and be in relationship with others – with those of our faith, those of other faiths, those of other views, religious or otherwise.
One of the developments in the Church in recent decades has been the emergence of various new groups and associations, movement and communities in the Church: bible groups, spiritual groups, prayer groups, youth groups, social action groups. They want to come together in this more participative lively way. This is surely a pointer from the Holy Spirit.
The challenge, of course, is to re-connect faith and the search for meaning and direction that so many of our contemporaries experience. Just as faith and culture managed to connect so powerfully in our history, might it not be possible to imagine a new creative meeting of the Christian life and today’s new cultures?
It can seem at times in Ireland that religion has to be relegated to the private domain alone. We also seem to be saying to ourselves we want to go beyond a moral compass of the past. I acknowledge a Catholicism that spoke to a previous era might seem too confining to people today. There is a desire to break out, open new horizons, be in dialogue with world horizons, go beyond frontiers. But this is the very change the Catholic Church itself knows it needs. The Catholic Church too feels compelled to break into a new way of being Church in our world. Pope Francis exemplifies this.
But in searching for the new, let’s be careful not to discard too easily what is valuable and noble and deep in our Irish Christian heritage. To throw away what seems no longer fit for purpose shouldn’t mean we end up eclipsing the huge resources of insight and wisdom, intellectual research and enlightenment within the Christian parameters that speak of human fulfilment and freedom.
When we consider the social ills of isolation and individualism that have so easily taken hold of us in Irish society, the Church today needs to offer in new ways oases of community life can be a real contribution to helping people because people are searching.
Young people seek out like-minded friends on social media because they want to find clusters of meaning and belonging. Too often they are presented with counterfeits of meaning and love. They can be peddled the fake news that happiness is found in the “likes” on social media or the “image” of brands. Deep down, however, they know there are problematic issues. I am always struck when talking to young people how often they mention their friends who suffer mental ill health or stress or inner emptiness.
And this is where we need to appeal to young people. There are many, many very fine young people today, with great values of respect and toleration and inclusiveness. Though not directly linked to Church, many of them will recognise the Church as part of them in some way. Their difficulty with finding a connection with the Church isn’t their fault. We need young people to help Church-attending members to find the way forward on how to reconnect youth cultures and Church.
Might this visit of Pope Francis be a moment when young people might look again at what the Church really has to offer. The risk is that with years of religious education at school we might think we know Christianity, but perhaps we don’t. It’s not enough to know a few facts and figures about Church. We need to experience it deeply in ways that are new. For that to happen, we have to be open to it. And that’s an invitation I’d like to extend to young adults. We need you because you are part of our access to what God is saying to the Church today. We need you to help us find the ways towards the future that God has marked out for us all. I am grateful to the young people in groups and initiatives that bring so much life to our Church – the groups that travel to Lourdes helping out, the young people taking part in summer camps, the young people who go to youth retreats and gatherings, the young people volunteering in church initiatives.
I conclude by thanking you all for coming. We’re here in a region associated with St. Ita. the great woman saint who built the Church community in her day. And today, Feast of the Assumption, we think of Mary, the mother of Jesus, our mother. She did the most important thing in history – she brought Jesus into the world and so transformed it. Now it’s our turn to do our part. Pope Francis’ visit is like an appointment with history for us. Let’s not miss it. | 2019-04-26T10:27:40Z | http://www.limerickdiocese.org/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=363&cntnt01origid=196&cntnt01returnid=166 |
Establishing financial goals is the first step toward reaching your financial aspirations for your life. Without goals, no one would ever be able to set a path toward achievement.
Of course, all financial goals will be deeply personal to you and your family. There are, however, a set of goals that we’ve organized here to offer some guidance of the sorts of goals you may want to be working toward once you’re in your thirties. By this age, you are likely earning a higher salary and able to put more toward your future. By this age, you are also very likely dealing with a few life changes and perhaps even one or two additions to your family. Securing your finances for today and tomorrow can suddenly become very important, seemingly overnight.
Maxing out your retirement contributions is an important goal you should be striving for in your thirties. Ideally 15% of your income is going into retirement savings.
Try to get out from any and all debts – credit cards, loans, everything. Living debt free means that you don’t owe anyone any money. With the exception of a mortgage, try to get out debt as soon as possible and then stay that way.
This means that you spend what you have today, not what you will have tomorrow or think you can afford. Even if you use credit cards, operate like you’re on a cash system alone so that you only purchase what you can literally afford.
Good credit is important so that you can borrow at a lower interest rate. You can use credit cards just fine and enjoy the perks of their rewards programs by paying off your balance every month. Having good credit will enable you to secure a mortgage at a lower interest rate, which can wind up saving you tens of thousands of dollars.
Life is full of change and uncertainty. You need to have an emergency fund and it should be able to cover your fixed expenses for at least six months. No ifs, ands or buts about it.
Direct your money to what is most important to you. There is no reason to spend money in ways that doesn’t help you reach your financial goals or bring you joy. Sure, we all have expenses we can’t avoid, but try as best you can to put the rest where you want it to go.
It’s good to have a system to organize your money so that you can easily manage your finances. Bills, credit cards, checking accounts, savings accounts: consider linking them so you can access everything in one place.
Rather than charging a purchase, especially a large one, and thinking about it later, plan for a large purchase, save for it, and then purchase it when you can pay it off in full.
Are you paying too much in taxes? Find out and stop overpaying in taxes if you are. There are tax incentives out there that you very likely qualify for. Consult with a CPA and your financial advisor to see ways you can minimize your tax exposure and keep more of your money.
By getting out of debt and increasing your income and assets, your net worth will grow.
Generosity is a great financial goal to have. When you have enough money that you are able to share it with causes and charities that you believe in and support, that is powerful.
Don’t waste money on unnecessary expenses and fee. Double check your credit card statements and make sure you cancel any recurring charges that you no longer need. Even the small fees add up over time.
At this point, work with your eye toward your future. Retirement isn’t as far off as it once was. Make financial decisions through a lens of financial stability and security.
As you round your thirties, what will your career and income potential look like for the next twenty five years? If you are able to set a career path that maximizes your income potential and helps you reach your financial goals, as well as your career aspirations – all the better!
A financial plan can help you in all of these areas of your life and can work with you to establish specific financial goals for you and your family. Start making your financial dreams come true.
Aaron Hatch, CFP® is the Co-Founder and CEO of Woven Capital, a fee-only financial planning and investment management firm that serves clients nationwide.
Based in the far Northern California city of Redding, Woven Capital specializes in helping small business owners, entrepreneurs and physicians navigate their biggest financial hurdles to make smarter decisions with their money.
Aaron and I became friends after meeting at a financial planning conference geared toward Gen X & Gen Y advisors and I asked him to write some thoughts as a guest topic for this site.
What does financial planning actually entail? The question is more complex than it seems.
How you define financial planning may have a lot to do with what you want out of it. In fact, there are as many outcomes from financial planning as there are financial profiles. Consisting of a full spectrum of financial tools and expertise, it's an approach to personal finance that you can hardly do without.
Think of it this way: in the same way your life needs a plan, so does your financial life. It's how you get where you want to be. If you feel as if you're drifting and simply working to pay the bills, financial planning might help you aim higher and set some goals so you get more out of your money.
Whether you make a little or a lot, you can benefit from financial planning. Likewise, whether you take a DIY approach or you call in a professional to give you additional expertise, the simple act of taking a "big-picture" view of your finances is going to help immensely.
Everyone can benefit because everyone has goals, whether they realize it or not. Maybe you want to save for retirement, or maybe you need to whittle down your credit card debt. Want to buy a home? Maybe you simply want to build up your cash reserves or perhaps figure out where all your money is going. Capturing all the financial information in your life in a snapshot is the first step towards achieving those goals. Only by seeing everything can you or your financial advisor begin to map out a plan.
But taking a step back and viewing your financial life from a larger perspective is only the beginning. Below, you'll see what types of activities and outcomes you can expect when you hire a financial planner to help you out.
An appointment with a financial planner begins with a consultation, but what comes out of that initial meeting is by no means conclusive. In other words, you won't walk away with a set plan for life.
You will, however, come away with a deeper understanding of where you lie with your finances. Are you saving enough? Can you realistically expect to buy a new car this year? Should you buy life insurance?
Through sessions with a financial planner you'll learn that budgeting, goal-setting, and money management are all part of the blueprint your advisor sets for you.
You'll soon have a workable blueprint for how to manage your money towards your end goals. Then, after time has passed, it will be time to take an assessment on how well you're doing in following the plan your advisor has set out for you.
According to how well you're doing on those plans, and what sort of life changes you've experienced in the meantime, adjustments can be made. In this way, financial planning is a process, not a one-time consultation.
The beauty of financial planning is that it's fluid, changing to keep up with the natural chaos that life brings and the financial milestones you encounter along the way. New phases in life may call for new goals or new strategies.
Finally, financial planning is to help you reach your goals in life. They aren't always monetary goals, either. State your goals, and the financial planning process works itself around serving those goals. Whether it's going back to school, spending more time with your family, retiring comfortably or growing your wealth, financial planning helps you get there.
Chris Hardy, CFP®, EA, ChFC®, CLU®, NTPI Fellow® is the Director of Planning and Investments at Paramount Investment Advisors, Inc., a fee-only wealth management firm located in the metro Atlanta suburb of Suwanee, Georgia. Chris specializes in providing clarity to his client’s financial vision through comprehensive and strategic wealth planning.
Chris and I became friends after meeting at an industry conference and I asked him to write a guest article for this site.
Life insurance costs vary for myriad reasons. First, all insurance companies use an analysis of mortality statistics to determine the level of risk they will incur when insuring customers. Beyond that, there are numerous factors pertaining to us as individuals that act as the variables in the formula to set our premiums.
Let’s break it down and examine how premiums are determined for the two main types of insurance, term and whole life.
The length of the term you choose for a term policy will impact the cost of the insurance. The longer the term, the more expensive the premium. The insurance company may be more likely to pay a death benefit if you chooses a term that will last until you are older. Thus, they charge more to cover costs.
Your age at the start of any policy helps determine premium cost. The younger you are, the cheaper the premium.
Smoker vs. non-smoker is a huge factor when insurance companies set their prices. For obvious reasons, a smoker will always pay a higher premium.
Whether or not you opt to have a medical exam effects policy costs. If you allow the insurance company to review the findings of a medical exam and you are healthy, congratulations! Your premiums will be lower. Unfortunately, the opposite is true if you are not as healthy. Negative findings equal higher costs.
Gender plays a role in the formula. Female rates are always lower the male rates.
The state of your health makes a difference when determining costs. If you are currently battling cancer, an insurance company will charge you much more. Maybe you battle chronic pain due to disc issues in your spine. You may be charged more as well. It doesn’t always have to be a debilitating disease that ups your premiums.
Your medical history is also a contributing factor. If high blood pressure runs in your family, and three people in your genetic line have suffered strokes, you are more likely to have increased premiums.
Your job or career can have a direct impact too. If you are a pilot or a roofer an insurance company may see you as a greater risk.
Lifestyle and recreation play a part as well. Someone who races motorcycles every weekend is a greater risk than someone who spends their free time working in a backyard vegetable garden.
The size of the death benefit you choose directly effects the cost of your premiums as well.
Now you know how an insurance company is analyzing you to determine premium costs. Take some time to be introspective. You can begin to decide how to ensure that the life insurance you choose will meet your financial goals and your family’s needs. And if you ever have any questions, know that a financial advisor can help you think through and consider your life insurance options.
Corey Purkat, CFP®, AIF® is the Founder & CEO of Northwoods Fiduciary Advisors, a ee-only RIA hat specializes in working with small business 401(k) plans and is located in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Corey and I became friends after connecting through the XY Planning Network, and I asked him to write some thoughts as a guest topic for this site.
Saving money for when you retire is pretty much essential for a comfortable lifestyle during your Golden Years.
It's no longer wise to rely 100% on Social Security (was it ever?), so the sooner you get to know the different types of retirement accounts, the better. Here's your mini-guide to the different types of retirement plans.
1.Defined Benefit Plans. These are the real dinosaurs- where you work for a company, then receive a pre-determined amount of pension money each month. That amount is based on your salary history and how long you worked at the company. That defined benefit was pretty much guaranteed- in other words, wonderfully reliable and secure.
2.Defined Contribution Plan. Now, if there's an employer-sponsored benefit plan, it's most likely this type. The contributions are defined: the worker puts in a pre-determined amount from each paycheck. What he or she gets out of that during retirement is anybody's guess, and totally up to the market. In other words, this type of plan offers no guaranteed returns.
If you're not lucky enough to have an employer-sponsored retirement plan (very few people are these days), then you'll probably want to set up some type of individual retirement account, or IRA.
The Roth IRA is an investment account where you contribute after-tax money (up to a certain limit) and your withdrawals during retirement are tax-free. The limits are at present $5,500 per individual per year. If you are over 50 you may contribute $1000 more, in what's called "catch-up" contributions.
The Traditional IRA is the mirror image of the Roth IRA. Your contributions are tax deductible (pre-tax contributions, in other words), but your withdrawals will be taxed. The philosophy here is that you will save money on your tax bill because during retirement you will presumably be in a lower tax bracket so your tax rate will be lower.
Each person is different, so think carefully about your own situation before choosing between an Roth and a Traditional IRA. A financial advisor can help you with that discussion if you need some guidance or more information.
The 401(k) is the next-best thing if your company doesn't offer a pension program. The reason for this is because of "matching contributions". First, the 401(k) is a good idea because it's a good way to save for retirement. Secondly, the matching contributions are essentially "free money" from your employer.
You set up an automatic contribution schedule with your employer (usually through Human Resources). That keeps you saving regularly. Another benefit is that those contributions aren't taxed until you withdraw the money during retirement.
Sign up for matching contributions for a third benefit, and you're really saving putting a multiplier effect on your savings efforts. Many employers will match your contributions up to a limit, and usually around 50% of what you put in.
The Thrift Savings Plan has traditionally been for federal workers only, but some politicians want to open the system up to more workers. It's like any other investment retirement plan, only the management fees are much lower. They're lower because of the limited choices in how to invest your money.
A Simplified Employee Pension Plan is a Traditional IRA (see above) that's set up by an employer for an employee. The employer may make the contributions and so may the employee.
See anything you like? Get to know these retirement vehicles, because chances are someday one of them will be among your best friends.
PJ Wallin is the founder of Atlas Financial, a fee-only financial planning, investment management, and tax services firm located in Richmond, Virginia. Atlas uses an all-inclusive approach provides a clear overview of your financial potential and gives you the comprehensive support necessary for peak success.
PJ and I became friends after meeting at an industry conference, and I asked him to write some thoughts as a guest topic for this site.
What are you risking when you choose to work with a robo advisor exclusively?
Your personal finances are what you might expect: personal. And each of us comes from different money situations and has a different set of goals as it relates to personal finances. While one person may be focused on getting out of debt, the other person may be focused on saving up for a vacation or starting a 529 plan for their children’s education.
The thing with robo advisors is that even though it is an investment tool, it can’t set financial goals for you or tell you how you can make necessary changes in your life to be able to reach your goals.
A robo-advisor is an online wealth management service that provides automated, algorithm-based portfolio management advice without the use of human financial planners.
So, if you put all your money into a robo-advised investing account, you will miss out on some pretty serious financial advice that would otherwise help to inform an appropriate investment strategy for you. With a robo advisor, you will also miss out on having important money conversations around your goals and what you’re trying to accomplish – something that should very much be at the center of your investment decisions.
The strength of robo advisors lies in the automation of a single part of your overall financial plan. Whereas the strength of a financial advisor lies in the personalization and proper implementation of a financial strategy that is uniquely designed to serve your financial best interest. Without a financial advisor, it’s on you to make the appropriate financial decisions and actions to reach your financial goals.
Remember, a robo advisor can’t tell you the best way you should invest. It offers recommendations based only on the inputs you provide, regardless of your goals.
Money is a means to help you achieve what you seek to achieve and to get where you want to go in life. But if all you do is work, spend, and invest the rest with a robo-advisor, you may not be fulfilling your goals as effectively as you could.
That's where financial planning comes in with a trained and experienced financial advisor. A good plan will take into account your earning potential, your education, your goals, your personal situation, your family, and your future. A financial advisor can take whatever your dreams are turn them into financial goals, complete with a plan to get there.
Don’t risk your future with tools. Leverage tools and the expertise of a financial advisor to help you achieve all that you want from your financial life.
Charles Donalies is the founder of Donalies Financial Planning, a fee-only financial planning firm located in Washington, D.C.
Charles and I became friends after meeting at an industry conference, and I asked him to write some thoughts as a guest topic for this site.
How Do You Know Your Financial Advisor Isn't Taking Too Many Risks With Your Money?
People pay their financial advisors to manage their money, write up blueprints for their financial plans, and generally dole out wise advice to help them achieve their goals. What they don't want is for them to take risks they're not comfortable with.
Not everyone has the deep fascination with finance that drives most financial professionals to choose their careers. The finer complexities of the financial world are above and beyond what most people have time to master, and the intricacies of investing for the long haul amidst a changing market are well beyond what most of people's stress levels can handle.
But that's why people pay financial advisors to help them. They rely on financial advisors of all types - financial planners, investment advisors, money managers, retirement specialists and more - to advise them and guide them to make the right decisions. Or, they simply trust the advisors to handle everything ... even the decisions.
For people who rely on a professional to invest their money for them, risk is a huge concern.
What About Investments That Are Too Risky For Your Liking?
You may love the feeling of leaving everything up to your financial advisor, but what if he or she is investing in products most people (including yourself) would find incredibly risky?
You could ask, of course, but "risky" is a relative term. Anyone could argue that any investment is relatively safe, if they compared it to the most obviously risky investment on earth. Or anyone could argue that "all investments are risky, silly!"
But there is actually a standard of risk that's deemed acceptable, and only a fiduciary will stay within the bounds of that standard.
A fiduciary, who by definition has taken an oath to put your own interests above her own, is obligated to tell you about any unusual risk involved in your financial plan, investments, or strategies.
Financial advisors who are also fiduciaries are bound to serve your best interests. And warning you about unusual risk definitely falls into that category.
"Registered Investment Advisors" (RIA) are fiduciaries who are bound by The Investment Advisers Act of 1940. This stipulates not only that they must act in your best financial interests, but that they must also be totally transparent about the amount of risk they're taking with your money.
Any RIA who manages more than $25 million for their total number of clients must register with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) (hence the term "registered" in their professional titles).
They are also required to file paperwork with the SEC regarding their investment choices for their clients. This includes information on unusual risk.
So, if the amount of risk in your portfolio has you up at night with worry, you might want to switch over to a financial professional who holds to the fiduciary standard. And keep in mind, an RIA is registered with the SEC and must make disclosures about just the thing that keeps you up at night: unusual risk. If you're now considering searching for a new financial advisor, these are the facts that could help you make the right choice.
Christopher Girbés-Pierce CFP® is the Founder of Enlightened Wealth Management, a fee-only wealth management firm located in Santa Monica, CA. EWM specializes in providing comprehensive financial life planning services for clients who wish to align their financial resources with their goals and values.
Christopher and I became friends after meeting at an industry conference, and I asked him to write some thoughts as a guest topic for this site.
There was a large security breach at Equifax, one of the 3 major US credit bureaus. The Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and addresses of up to 143 million people were been breached between May and July 2017.
For perspective, that would be roughly 44% of the US population.
A smaller number of people also had their credit card numbers, driver’s license numbers, and/or dispute records (from correcting mistakes on the credit report) accessed as well.
You may not have been but it seems like the safest course at this point is to assume that you were. And if you later find out that you weren’t then that will just be a pleasant surprise.
You can go to https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/ and check using your last name and the last 6 digits of your SSN.
1. It will say nothing stronger than that you “may” have been affected, so it’s whether or not you were affected will remain somewhat unclear. Also, I assume that the site will tell some people clearly that they were not affected, but I haven’t actually found any direct confirmation of that yet.
3. There are conflicting reports suggesting that the terms and conditions of that service forces you to agree to arbitration and could possibly prevent you from participating in and ultimately being compensated by the inevitably soon-to-be-forthcoming class action lawsuit. It’s not clear either way at this time and I believe that we will have more clarity in a few days.
Should I avoid taking the free year of Experian credit monitoring?
It’s up to you, but I would wait at least for a few days till we know more.
I will try to update this as we learn more.
You can pull your free credit reports from http://www.annualcreditreport.com/ and review them for any unauthorized accounts. You can pull 1 free credit report from each of the major credit bureaus each year.
The 3 major bureaus tend to mostly overlap, but sometimes one report will contain accounts that the others don’t.
You could stagger them throughout the year (every 4 months) knowing that you might miss something for a few months or pull all of them at once for a complete picture right now but then have no more free access for a year.
Option 2. Put a total freeze on your credit reports. This will cost you a small fee (typically $5 in MN, though it varies by state) each time you freeze or unfreeze at each of the bureaus. This prevents lender access to your credit report so you will need to unfreeze it each time you apply for anything where they may pull credit.
IMPORTANT NOTE: You will need to keep the PIN # they give you or will not be able to “un-freeze” your credit info later on.
Option 3. Put a fraud alert on your credit reports. This is less drastic than a freeze but it will only last 3 months.
It will not prevent your credit reports from being accessed, it will just caution lenders to be careful about verifying your identity. This will be for only 3 months (Initial Fraud Alert). A 7 year (Extended Fraud Alert) exists but it is only available if you are already a victim of fraud/identity theft.
Option 4. Review your bank and credit card statements for unusual activity.
Option 5. You could sign up for a credit monitoring service. These monitor your accounts and send you an email when they notice new accounts or other changes. They really don’t prevent anything but they may help you find out about it sooner.
There are free ones (they will email you offers for credit cards, etc. though) and paid ones. Most of the free ones only follow 1 credit bureau. Monitoring all 3 would be better but will can also cost form $180/year to more than $300.
Experian is offering their 3-bureau monitoring service free for a year but you may start being billed automatically once your year is up and, as mentioned above, there is a mandatory arbitration agreement in the terms and conditions that you may want to wait for further clarity regarding.
Please be aware that Wallethub is probably neither fully independent from their advertisers nor completely unbiased so take any reviews on that site with a grain of salt. In any event, this list could be a place to start if you want to look into some of the (many) options out there.
What do you recommend for an average person?
I’m torn between what is ideal in an abstract sense and what people will actually get done in the real world amongst other demands and priorities.
If you have the time and energy, doing option 2, followed by options 1 and 4 would be ideal.
If you don’t have that time and/or energy, I think doing option 3 is a good (free) start and/or option 5 is perhaps one of the easier things you can do, if potentially expensive.
Ever wonder how a financial advisor is compensated? You’re not alone.
Whether you currently have a financial advisor or are thinking about hiring one, asking how your financial advisor is compensated is an important conversation to have. You see, how a financial advisor is compensated can tell you a lot about whether or not he or she has your best interests in mind.
Know if your financial advisor is held to a fiduciary standard.
This means that under federal law, financial advisors who are sworn to a fiduciary standard must provide unbiased financial services to their clients. CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERTM professionals take this oath.
Knowing whether or not your financial advisor is held to the fiduciary standard will immediately signal any potential conflicts of interest in the financial services your financial advisor recommends. This important question will not only help you better understand the value a financial advisor can offer, but it’s also a filter by which you can choose the right financial advisor that must care for your best interests.
So, how are financial advisors compensated?
A commission-based financial advisor is paid for the financial products he sells.
This is a compensation model very plainly means that a financial advisor is only paid when they sell "commissionable" products to you. There is a conflict of interest and these financial professionals are typically not your more traditional financial advisor professionals. Commission-based advisors tend to be investment advisors who work for major broker firms.
Fee-only financial advisors are independent of the major broker firms and, in theory, should provide you conflict-free advice because they are paid in fees, not commission.
Fee-only advisors charge a flat hourly rate for services, a flat fee for a service – like financial planning, or tiered fees that adjust depending on how much assets you have him or her manage. This type of compensation means that a financial advisor will be able to provide more objective financial advice and look at all possible financial solutions that can meet your specific financial needs without being motivated or persuaded by compensation.
Knowing how a financial advisor is compensated at least allows you to better understand what type of financial service you will receive and what may be influencing financial recommendations.
Kenneth Klabunde, MS, CFP® is the principal at Precedent Asset Management, a fee-only wealth management firm located in Indianapolis, Indiana. Kenneth specializes in providing comprehensive planning and investment services for clients looking to build, manage and preserve their wealth.
Kenneth and I became friends after meeting at a conference and I asked him to share some thoughts as a guest for this site.
Marriage, a family, starting a business... these milestones in life might signal the need for a financial advisor, but turning points aren't the only signs you might need help. Sometimes it's the little events in life that add up, prompting the need to call in an expert who can assess your finances and help you make decisions.
It can be hard to tell if you need help from a professional, but here are six important signs that you might benefit from the advice of a personal financial advisor.
1. You're not sure if you have enough for retirement.
While this should be a concern all your working life, it's most often what pushes many people in their 50s to seek help from a financial advisor. Aside from knowing whether you have enough set aside, it's even hard to know how much you'll need to get by. When you're dealing with a short time frame for preparing to retire, it's nice to get help from a professional who may help you get there faster.
2. You're ready to start investing.
Maybe you've been glued Bloomberg TV, or perhaps you've watched a friend get excited over her investments. Whatever the source of your inspiration, you're now motivated to invest. There's real estate, stocks, mutual funds, annuities, ETFs, and more. A financial advisor can look at your lifestyle, your income, your goals, and your tolerance for risk to help guide you towards investments that are right for you.
3. You have a big goal in mind.
We all have goals, but reaching them sometimes requires a little professional advice. Not sure how you'll come up with the down-payment for a house? Not sure how much you can even afford, or should afford? Any sizable investment will have a huge impact on your finances plus your lifestyle. Make sure you're making wise choices with such long-term decisions.
4. You get a tax refund every year.
Sure, it feels nice to get that fat check every April, but you're really not doing yourself a favor by letting Uncle Sam hold your hard-earned money for you, interest free. If this doesn't make sense to you, then you need a financial advisor... pronto.
5. You tied the knot.
Bringing two lives together means all kinds of changes, not the least of which is what in the world to do with your finances. Should you combine accounts or stay separate? What happens to each spouse's debt? What's the most advantageous way to file your income taxes?
6. You started a new business.
Without guidance of a professional, new business owners could get reamed when it comes to tax time. But that's not the only reason you'll want help: budgeting, capital sources, and allocation of your resources are important issues to weigh.
Will Kaplan, CFP® is the principal at Halcyon Financial Planning, a fee-only wealth management firm located in Portland, Oregon. Halcyon specializes in a goals-based approach that combines your aspirations and resources with a forward focused, proactive style of planning.
Will and I became friends after meeting at a conference and I asked him to write some thoughts as a guest topic for this site.
Financial designations are confusing enough just looking at the laundry list of them that exist in the financial services today. Good thing we are only going to cover six of the most common financial designations you likely encounter on a day to day basis.
As you are shopping around for your next financial professional, make a list of the level of expertise that is important to you. While many of the sources you can use to search for financial advisors don’t allow you to filter based on designation, you can at least know what to look for when you use sites like NAPFA and the CFP Board.
CFP®. Certified Financial Planner. These financial advisors create financial plans and can help you manage just about every aspect of your financial life. They look at the big picture and help you plan for your financial life accordingly.
CFA. Chartered Financial Analyst. Financial advisors with this designation do a lot of portfolio management and investment analysis. They are considered among the elite in the financial services industry and truly understand how investments work and how to structure them within client portfolios.
ChFC. Chartered Financial Consultant. Like the CFP® designation, this one signifies advanced knowledge in financial planning. That means a broad range of knowledge: taxes, estate planning, investing, and insurance.
CPA. Certified Public Accountant. Known for its rigorous exam, this profession deals mainly in taxes and accounting rather than financial planning, but that doesn't mean they don't know anything about other areas. They mainly stick to accounting and taxes, though.
CFS. Chartered Fund Specialist. Need specific financial advice about mutual funds? Here's your specialist. Got questions about REITs or ETFs? This is your guy.
CIMA. Certified Investment Management Analyst. Not for planning, but more for managing your investments, the CIMA is trained in due diligence, risk management, and asset allocation.
At the end of the day, the most important thing is that you find a financial professional that you trust. Designations go a long way to confirm a financial professional’s authority and credibility in a particular area of finance, but it isn’t everything.
If you visit the FINRA website, you can also look to see how much time and energy goes into a financial professional earning a certain designation. Not all letters are equal when it comes to the amount of effort it takes to earn. To become a CFA, for instance, takes as much time and (if not more) as earning a bachelor’s degree. While others only take a 10 hour course and passing one exam.
Scott Frank is the founder of Stone Steps Financial, a fee-only financial planning firm located in Encinitas, California. Scott started Stone Steps to help young professionals and families understand their financial lives and position themselves to reach their fullest potential.
Scott and I became friends after meeting at a conference and I asked him to write some thoughts a guest topic for this site.
There are many financial advisors to choose from, so how do you find the one that's right for you?
Between the different types of financial advisors and financial disciplines to choose from, finding the right financial advisor for your specific needs is no easy task. Not to mention the interpersonal considerations of personality, experience, and client service that are just as important to factor into your decision making process.
Don’t rush it. Remember that selecting a financial advisor is a long-term decision (or at least we hope it is) and so it’s important that you choose someone who you believe can deliver what you need.
Here are a few things to look for when selecting a financial advisor.
That he or she comes recommended.
This is not a 100% guarantee that you will like the financial advisor or that he or she is best suited for you, but someone you know really enjoys working with them so you may be willing to give it a chance. Asking your network of friends, family and colleagues who they recommend for the financial services you are looking for is a great starting place.
They have a positive online presence.
What happens when you Google the name and firm of the financial advisor you are thinking of working with? Does anything come up? Are there complaints? Do they offer information you can look into to get a better sense of what they are like or how they work?
In today’s connected world, it’s perfectly acceptable to do a little research on the person you are considering to have manage your money before you actually sign on the dotted line.
You can also reference the Financial Planning Association to learn what credentials they have, their specialties, and whether they're paid by commission, fee, or both, although some don't offer a complete profile in the directory. The National Association of Personal Financial Advisors also maintains a directory, which is searchable by name or location. The advisors in this directory are all fee-only financial advisors, which do not earn commissions and who are bound to a fiduciary standard that requires that they put your financial needs above their own.
They possess designations that align with your needs.
It's important to look at the credentials your potential financial advisor has and make sure you understand what they mean. Certified Financial Planners (CFP) as an example have demonstrated competency in every single area of financial planning (there are over 100 subject areas they have to study!). They know about stocks, taxes, estate planning and many other facets of finance that allows them to draw from an impressive level of expertise to draw up your financial plan.
It feels easy and comfortable.
Credentials matter, but so does rapport. A 2013 survey revealed that how well the advisor-investor relationship goes is a huge factor for people working with financial professionals. Of course how well your plan is helping you reach your goals is the major determining factor, but the relationship matters, too.
When communication is open and easy, your advisor won't have any problem telling you what you need to know, even though you may not want to hear it. They won't be afraid to tell you things like “you spend too much on eating out” or “you need to save more toward your retirement!”.
Make sure you feel comfortable with your advisor, and he or she communicates with you in a way that works for your personality and your life. With the right credentials, the right experience and a winning style of communication, your financial advisor can help you achieve your goals.
John Wenzel is the Co-founder of Archvest Wealth Advisors, a Fee-Only financial planning firm located in the East Bay of San Francisco. Their offices are in the city of Walnut Creek, California. At Archvest, John works with high net worth individuals, executives and small business owners focusing on their planning needs around insurance matters, tax strategies, estate planning and investment management.
John and I became friends through the XY Planning Network and I asked him to write some thoughts as a guest for this site.
A financial advisor does much more than just manage your money; she helps you manage life. The reason for this is because your money is so intimately tied to areas of your life that you value most. Money in and of itself may not be the most important thing to you, but the life, people, and dreams it can support is.
Whether your life is going great at the moment or you’re in a bit of a slump, there is a certain level of care and accountability that a financial advisor can offer you that can lead to a better life.
Whether you are an organized person or not, being financially organized makes everyone sleep a little better at night. A financial advisor will help you sort through your financial life – literally – no matter how chaotic it is and help you implement a system by which you and others in your family more easily and effectively operate.
A financial advisor is your accountability partner. She holds you accountable to making smarter financial decisions, and your relationship holds her accountable to helping you reach your financial goals and managing your financial progress. Let’s face it, we all do a little better with a little push and accountability from someone else who is invested in our success.
Unlike general jargon-drive financial information that clutters the internet, your financial advisor provides you relevant financial education as it pertains to you and your specific situation. With more financial knowledge comes better decision-making that ultimately helps you to avoid financial mistakes that could take you off course.
The financial advisors who can help you automate your financial life deserve a gold star. If your financial life is set up in a way that it automatically is saving for retirement, saving for that vacation, paying fixed expenses, anticipating fluctuating costs like groceries, and even allotting monthly cash allowances for everyone in the family to spend on whatever they want…I’d say life already sounds better to me.
This may not sound fun, but it certainly is necessary to help you achieve the proverbial peace of mind so many people want when it comes to their life, and especially their financial situation. From in-depth risk analysis for your investment portfolios to insurance reviews, a financial advisor makes sure that you don’t take on more risk than you can handle and that you are adequately covered when the unexpected happens.
Your advisor can discuss your professional ambitions and empower you with information to negotiate a higher salary if you’re switching positions or companies. Knowing your value and then aligning your career aspirations with the life you want to live can be exactly what you need to have these courageous conversations with employers and potential employers.
I’m reminded of that great Walt Disney quote, “If you can dream it, you can do it,” and think that financial advisors function on their client’s behalf in much the same spirit. Ultimately, a financial advisor allows you to see what’s possible when your wealth is strategically aligned with your values – and what’s possible may be much more soul-stirring than you would expect.
At the end of the day, it’s a good financial advisor’s resolve to work tirelessly in your best interest throughout your life. A good financial advisor’s mission isn’t purely analytical. Rather, it’s to help you live a better life by using all the tools, skills and technology available.
Tyler Landes is the founder of Tandem Financial Guidance, a fee-only financial planning firm in Kansas City, Missouri. Tyler and I became friends after meeting through the XY Planning Network and I asked him to write some thoughts on ways a financial planner can make your life better as a guest topic for this site.
Interested in finding a trusted individual to help you with your finances? The first thing you'll want to do is cut through some basic jargon. Do you know the difference between a financial advisor and a financial planner?
Did you know there are over 100 different certifications that financial advisors might have*? That's what the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors says, anyway.
If you've spent any time at all looking into hiring one for yourself, you won't doubt that tiny fact for a moment. You've probably already seen quite a few yourself. If not, just type "financial advisor" into Bing and what comes back is a sea of acronyms... CFA, CPA, ChFC are a few of the common ones.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. There's some basic jargon that's confusing, too, namely: the difference between a financial advisor and a financial planner.
Tooling along through your own self-educating journey in personal finance, you may have noticed there are two phrases thrown around a lot. They're not interchangeable, even though at first glance it's hard to imagine how they could be different.
Financial Advisor: This is the broad category of people who make a living helping people manage their money. It includes stock brokers, financial planners, insurance agents, and even bankers.
Financial Planner: These individuals are also financial advisors. Their chief aim is to help people plan out their financial lives in order to meet long-term goals. They can have specialties and they can hold multiple designations.
Still feeling a little cloudy on the difference? That's because both are very broad categories. Neither is an officially-designated term. One may be a "Certified Financial Planner" or a "Behavioral Financial Advisor", for example, but the phrases on their own mean very little.
In short, anyone can call him or herself a financial advisor or a financial planner. You'll have to look for letters after their name to find out if they're officially qualified to call themselves anything. And that's where those 100+ financial designations come in!
With your personal finances, you're always going to be better off if you put in a little effort with self-education. By figuring out how to cut expenses and budget your money, you're investing in lifelong skills that will see you through many of life's challenges.
Even if you can't figure out everything yourself and you want to hire a financial advisor/planner, the more you know going in the better.
Beyond being frugal and curbing your unnecessary spending, you'll eventually need to make bigger, more involved financial decisions about your assets. That's where the professionals can truly be of help.
Weed out those who charge based on commission. They have several motivations, one of which is to earn a commission by selling you certain financial products. Fee only planners and advisors are not permitted to take any compensation outside of what their client pays them which reduces conflicts of interest.
Look for a fiduciary oath. Financial professionals who are also fiduciaries are sworn by professional and ethical guidelines to put your best interest in mind when giving you advice.
Set up some interviews. Your rapport is crucial to a good outcome with financial planning. Even if you aren't an expert on personal finance yourself, you can tell a lot from a face-to-face meeting.
Anjali Jariwala is the founder of Financial Investment Tax Advisors, a fee-only financial planning firm serving clients across the United States. Young professionals who are ready to build wealth are often met with obstacles from the very industry that should be helping them. FIT Advisors is a trustworthy alternative to the status quo. We serve physicians and business owners in the wealth accumulation stage as their financial life coach.
Anjali and I became friends after meeting at a conference I asked her to write some thoughts as a guest topic for this site. | 2019-04-19T10:13:41Z | https://www.thoughtfulfinancialplanning.com/blog/ |
Are you a terrorist? Are you a drug dealer? Perhaps a criminal of some other variety? The fact that you are reading this makes any of those possibilities quite unlikely. And yet, our culture now assumes the worst of nearly everyone. In an airport, we’re all treated like potential terrorists. Hand the clerk in a grocery store a hundred dollar bill and she checks it to see if it’s counterfeit. Anyone needing pseudoephedrine to breathe normally is treated like as if she may be running a crystal meth lab in her garage. That’s ridiculous. I don’t have a crystal meth lab in my garage. It’s in the attic. These days, too many people can’t recognize humor, much less reality.
Needing to fly somewhere does not make someone a terrorist. Wanting to pay cash for groceries does not make someone a counterfeiter. Trying to breathe more easily does not make someone a meth dealer. Hoping for some pain relief does not make someone an addict. As a society, we are making some very misguided judgments. I recall that seven years ago I sought help from another internist when a long list of autoimmune diseases began spiraling out of control. The “medical assistant” asked me what my main complaint was. When I explained I had increasingly severe pain in my hands and feet, she quipped, “We don’t do pain management.” I had to restrain myself. I was there for a diagnosis, not a prescription.
Pain is the single most common symptom of most malignancies, autoimmune diseases, vascular diseases, and serious infections. Renal disease, neurological disorders, metabolic diseases, and any inflammatory process can cause agonizing pain. And we haven’t even touched on trauma. Most patients who complain of pain are totally genuine and honest. Some people exaggerate, some are manipulative. Some, but not most.
Today, we have many veterans suffering constant pain from multiple amputations and other terrible conditions. In many cases, they cannot obtain a month’s supply of pain meds. They are forced to endure preposterous “policies” and “protocols” created by sanctimonious idiots.
The whole point of health care is to relieve pain and suffering. Perhaps we all need a little reminder.
Do you take care of patients? Are you in a position to teach students or other caregivers? These days, everyone in healthcare is simmering in a sea of policies, protocols, rules, regulations, and algorithms. Some of them are reasonable. A few even make good sense. Unfortunately, however, many of them are downright dumb. Often, by the time someone reaches the lofty position of creating assorted rules and policies, she has lost touch with her sector of the real world. The results are not good.
In recent years I’ve been sidelined with a growing list of autoimmune diseases. I used to joke with audiences that with red hair, green eyes, and see-through skin, I was a walking collection of recessive genes. It’s not a joke anymore. Being in constant pain and steadily losing functional ability is not fun. However, in my new role as “patient,” I have learned a few things that are not taught in most training programs.
Sunshine is our friend. Over the years, I’ve spent far too little time outdoors. I was a sickly little kid and a natural-born bookworm. From the mid-1980s on, I was afraid of “skin damage.” Swell. Now I have decent-looking skin but my musculoskeletal system is so badly compromised I struggle to get in or out of a chair. Please encourage patients to get some fresh air and sunshine on a regular basis — especially if these patients suffer from any chronic illness. Vitamin D supplements are fine, but they can’t undo the damage of decades of deficiency.
Small comforts matter. The point of health care is to relieve pain and suffering. Many of our colleagues have apparently forgotten that. Computers can provide information. They cannot provide comfort and consolation. There is a true art to easing another person’s misery, and it usually involves small, simple measures. “Hugging” a king-size pillow while lying on your side can ease pressure and strain on shoulders, elbows, and knees. Massaging a nicely-fragranced body butter into hands, arms, legs, and feet before bed can help ease the achiness that accompanies chronic illness. It’s not a substitute for proper medication, but these measures can provide a few moments of respite.
Change pillow cases every 12–24 hours. I did this for patients when I was a nurse’s aide 45 years ago. I do it for myself now. If feels nice.
Step up oral and dental care after meals and before bed. This feels nice, too. And, there are discernible medical benefits.
Try a shower in the morning and a warm bath at night (as long as it’s safe). Baby wipes, facial wipes, and dry shampoo are essential for travel and chronic illness.
Never wake a sleeping patient for vital signs. I can hear nursing instructors screaming right now. However, if a patient is sound asleep, her vital signs are probably fine. Despite all of our impressive technology and sophisticated medications, we have found nothing more restorative than good, deep sleep.
If policies and protocols eased misery, everyone would feel fine by now. Sometimes what we need is a bit of common sense.
Do you know what “Mitochondrial Deficiency Syndrome” is? Most people don’t. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop them from weighing in on the case of little Charlie Gard. Charlie is an 11-month old baby with a rare and devastating genetic disorder that precludes normal functioning of mitochondria. Mitochondria are intracellular organelles that generate ATP (adenosine triphosphate). In essence, ATP represents energy at the cellular level. Without ATP, cells, especially brain and muscle cells, cannot function. The most sensitive and vulnerable cells in the body are those of the cerebral cortex. Little Charlie cannot see or hear or move or swallow or vocalize or think. No one can know with absolute certainty, but he probably cannot “feel” anything at this point. The word tragic is utterly inadequate.
Embrace humility. Never be afraid to say “I don’t know enough about this situation to have a well-informed opinion.” That would be refreshing.
Exercise the intellectual discipline to learn the facts involved. In medicine, every patient is unique. Arguments for or against life support or experimental treatments are pointless absent actual knowledge.
Resist the temptation to become emotional. Unbridled emotions cause far more problems than they solve. Try to be the voice of reason.
Try not to confuse or conflate the issues. People in nearly every media outlet have tried to make the case about socialized medicine, cost control, parental rights, the British court system, the European Union, or theology. The case of Charles Gard is about medical ethics.
Focus on principles, not personalities. There is a colossal difference between saving life and prolonging death. Remember, there is never a moral imperative to render futile care.
Primum non nocere. (First, do no harm.) There’s a reason that Solomon prayed for wisdom.
There are more than 100 different types of arthritis, and, therefore, no single diet will work for every person with arthritis. However, studies have found that green tea, green leafy vegetables, dried plums, and kiwi fruit are all vitamin-rich and have powerful antioxidant properties. Diets which include large quantities of fruits and cruciferous vegetables have been shown to have a beneficial effect on preventing the development of rheumatoid arthritis. In addition, it is clear that carrying extra weight can put significant stress on the joints, and even a small reduction in weight can have an effect on the severity of arthritis symptoms. Studies have shown that losing weight can significantly ameliorate the effects of osteoarthritis. Significant weight gain prior to age 35 — as well as excessive alcohol consumption — has been linked to the development of gout.
Other contributing factors are certain foods and nutritional supplements (vitamins, minerals, and omega-3 fatty acids) which may play a role in preventing and reducing symptoms in some types of arthritis, such as gout, osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and reactive arthritis. Fish oil, particularly when ingested in conjunction with a diet low in arachidonic acid, reduces inflammation in some patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Regular intake of fish has been shown to have a beneficial effect. Consumption of excessive dietary fat, however, appears to exacerbate arthritis symptoms.
Weight loss for overweight arthritis patients is very important for several reasons. First, as mentioned previously, loss of even a few pounds can significantly reduce stress on weight-bearing joints. Research demonstrates that exercise and combined weight loss — as well as exercise regimens — result in decreased pain and disability and increased performance levels in patients with osteoarthritis. Biomechanical data suggest that exercise in combination with diet may also result in improved gait when compared with exercise alone. Secondly, patients of all ages who have arthritis are much healthier, have an improved sense of well-being, and are less likely to suffer arthritis-related depression when they follow a nutritious, well-balanced diet. The Arthritis Foundation recommends following a balanced diet that includes plenty of fruit, vegetables, and whole-grain products, while limiting consumption of sugar, salt, and saturated fat (i.e., a diet low in fat, high in fiber, and low in sugar).
Almost everyone has experienced neck pain of some sort during his or her lifetime — and for good reason. One of the most common causes of such pain is poor posture. Simple activities such as reading, especially in bed — or sleeping on a pillow that may either be too low or too high — can cause neck pain. Other activities that can cause neck pain include bending over a desk for hours, maintaining poor posture while watching TV, and positioning a computer monitor either too high or too low. The key is always to maintain the neck as close to a neutral position as possible.
The best medical care, however, begins with a crucial question: What is the most serious problem this could be? Neck pain can be referred from multiple anatomical structures as a result of developmental processes in the embryonic stage. Serious cardiovascular, neurologic, infectious, or neoplastic etiologies must be considered before attention is focused on common musculoskeletal disorders.
Chronic neck pain is prevalent in Western societies, with about 15 percent of women and 10 percent of men suffering from it at any given time. People with physically demanding jobs requiring neck flexion and awkward lifting are at high risk of developing chronic neck pain. It is also common among health care professionals, particularly affecting nurses who are constantly involved in handling tasks that involve reaching, lifting, and pulling. Dental professionals who work long hours bending over their patients also suffer from neck pain because of postural demands.
The pain is often muscular or ligamentous in origin and is usually self-limited although the pain can be persistent. Pain is transmitted through nerve endings in the various ligaments and muscles of the neck, vertebral joints, and the outer layer of the intervertebral discs. When these structures are irritated, strained, or inflamed, pain is felt in the back of the neck, may spread toward the shoulders, and is commonly felt between the shoulder blades.
The natural healing processes result in improvement in almost all cases. In fact, the pain from serious neck injuries such as fractures, dislocations, and most cervical spine surgeries often resolves after a few weeks or months. There is usually little if any correlation between neck pain and the degenerative changes that are commonly seen on X-rays.
Neck strain or sprain is the most common type of injury to motor vehicle occupants treated in U.S. hospital emergency departments. Whiplash injuries can be serious in certain situations. Severe damage to the spinal cord can be fatal.
Sports and athletics are also common sources of injury to the neck region and should be a particular concern for the younger adult population.
Another common offender is carrying unbalanced loads, such as a heavy briefcase, luggage, or a shopping bag. A careful history is often required to identify such factors as playing a role in neck and shoulder pain.
Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an autoimmune disease that can cause damage to the heart, lungs, kidneys, joints, skin, brain, and blood vessels. It is characterized by flare-ups, and symptoms, ranging from mild to severe, including extreme fatigue, chest pain, anemia, swelling in legs and near the eyes, painful joints, fever, skin rashes, hair loss, and kidney problems.
At least 1.5 million Americans suffer from lupus. The ratio of female to male is 9:1 according to the Lupus Foundation of America. African-American women are far more likely to be affected than are Caucasian women. Recent research points to a strong genetic role, but environmental and hormonal factors seem to be involved in lupus as well.
Diagnosis can be difficult and may be delayed because the onset of symptoms is hard for patients to pinpoint and because the wide variety of symptoms overlap with many other conditions. To diagnose lupus, the clinician takes a careful history, performs a physical exam, and orders anti-nuclear antibodies and other laboratory tests.
Although lupus can be life-threatening, some 80 to 90 percent of sufferers can expect to live a normal lifespan if they are carefully monitored and treated.
Anti-malarials such as hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil®) to prevent flare-ups.
Corticosteroids such as prednisone (Deltasone®), hydrocortisone, methylprednisolone (Medrol®), and dexamethasone (Decadron®, Hexadrol®) to reduce inflammation.
Immunosuppressive agents such as cyclophosphamide (Cytoxan®) and mycophenolate mofetil (CellCept®) to inhibit an overactive immune system. Belimumab (Benlysta®) is a B-lymphocyte stimulator protein inhibitor that was approved by FDA 2011 for patients with lupus who are receiving other standard therapies. It may reduce the number of abnormal B cells thought to be a problem in lupus.
Methotrexate (Folex®, Mexate®, Rheumatrex®), a disease-modifying antirheumatic drug, may be used to help control the disease in some patients.
Other treatments may include hormonal therapies such as dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) and intravenous immunoglobulin, which may be useful for controlling lupus when other treatments haven’t worked.
A variety of self-care and complementary approaches can be useful, including exercise, diet, the avoidance of sun exposure, and skin protection. Patients are advised to recognize early signs of a flare-up and get immediate medical attention.
Findings from prospective human studies have strengthened the evidence of a connection between lupus and vitamin D status. There is evidence that increased vitamin D levels (via supplementation) may help reduce inflammation. A reasonable dose would be 2000 IU of vitamin D3 on a daily basis. Vitamin D levels are easily checked.
Early humans explained the mystery of pain by associating it with evil, magic, and demons. Relief was the responsibility of sorcerers, shamans, priests, and priestesses, who treated their clients with herbs and rituals.
On stone tablets, ancient civilizations recorded accounts of pain and the treatments used, including pressure, heat, water, and sun. The Greeks and Romans were the first to advance a theory of sensation, the idea that the brain and nervous system were involved in the perception of pain. During the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, evidence began to accumulate supporting these theories. Leonardo da Vinci and his contemporaries came to see the brain as the central organ responsible for sensation, with the spinal cord transmitting sensations to the brain.
In the 19th century, pain came to dwell under a new domain—science—which paved the way for advances in pain therapy. Physician-scientists discovered that opium, morphine, codeine, and cocaine could be used to treat pain. In the late 1800s, research led to the development of aspirin, to this day the most commonly-used pain reliever. Before long, anesthesia—both general and regional—was refined and applied during surgery.
Pain is defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage. There are two basic categories of pain, acute and chronic, and they differ greatly.
Acute pain usually results from disease, inflammation, or injury to tissues. This type of pain generally comes on suddenly—for example, after trauma or surgery—and may be accompanied by anxiety or emotional distress. The cause of acute pain can generally be diagnosed and treated, and the pain is self-limiting—confined to a given period of time and severity. In some instances, it can become chronic.
Chronic pain is widely believed to represent a disease in and of itself. It persists over a longer period of time than acute pain and is resistant to most medical treatments. Chronic pain often persists longer than three months, or longer than expected for normal healing. It can be made much worse by environmental and psychological factors. It can—and often does—cause severe problems for patients, as pain signals keep firing in the nervous system for weeks, months, or years. There may have been an initial mishap such as a sprained back or serious infection, or there may be an ongoing cause of pain such as arthritis, cancer, or infection. However, some people suffer chronic pain in the absence of any past injury or evidence of illness.
It’s odd to think about mosquitoes in the middle of winter. However, in Brazil, it’s not the middle of winter. The Zika virus, a potentially devastating illness, has captured medical headlines around the world. Carried by mosquitoes, the Zika virus has been documented in Central and South America, the Caribbean and several southern states. Apart from causing miserable flu- like symptoms, this unusual and worrisome virus can cause catastrophic birth defects. In fact, as of January 31, 2016, the Brazilian government has traced over 3,000 birth defects to Zika virus exposure in utero.
Patients with Zika infection may experience high fevers, severe musculo-skeletal pain and profound malaise. Symptoms are often similar to those caused by another warm weather mosquito-borne culprit, Chikungunya virus. The word, “Chikungunya,” is a tribal word describing the acute, contorted, bent-over posture of people doubled-over with pain, as the illness strikes. An intense, maculo-papular rash on the trunk and extremities is often present early on. Encephalitis, myocarditis, and hepatitis can develop. The most recent outbreak of Chikungunya virus flared up in October, 2013 on the island of St. Martin.
Researchers believe the current outbreak of Zika virus can be traced to large crowds and warm weather at the most recent World Cup events. The illness has now been confirmed in 24 countries. Nearly 40 cases are being evaluated in the United States, however, all of these cases are apparently related to exposure while traveling.
Women who are pregnant or may become pregnant should avoid travel to endemic areas of infection.
Be careful around upcoming Mardi Gras and Carnivale celebrations.
If travel is essential to these areas, avoid camping, “jungle expeditions,” dense tropical vegetation, standing water, or other obvious exposures to mosquitoes.
Minimize outdoor exposures at dawn and dusk.
Keep arms and legs covered and use insect repellants properly.
If symptoms develop, seek medical attention promptly and give a precise travel history.
For now, staying informed and exercising common sense and good judgment is everyone’s best bet.
Despite the many advantages of today’s technological progress, chronic stress persists as a major problem. Stress is not only uncomfortable, it can cause major damage to the circulatory and immune systems, leading to hypertension, arrhythmias, increased coagulation, and atherosclerosis.
Stress also exacerbates coronary heart disease (CHD), myocardial infarction (MI), and heart failure. Various stressors have been found to raise the risk of heart disease and even increased mortality due to heart disease—especially chronic work-related stress, marital strain, bereavement, and social isolation. Acute emotional stress may trigger myocardial infarction and a phenomenon known as stress myocarditis.
Stress, by virtue of its effects on adrenaline release, triggers myocardial ischemia, promotes arrhythmogenesis, stimulates platelet function, and increases blood viscosity. In some individuals, the intrinsic effects of stress include exaggerated heart rates and blood pressure responses. Emotions that often come with stress, namely anger, hostility, anxiety, and depression, bring a heightened risk of cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, and cardiac events, and — in those with heart disease — poor prognosis.
Depression is related to greater risk for developing coronary heart disease (CHD), poor prognosis in CHD, and higher mortality in those with CHD. It is also associated with arrhythmias, higher risk of acute coronary syndrome, and poor prognosis after myocardial infarction.
Those who are depressed are less likely to make lifestyle changes important for heart health. Mood disorders such as depression and anxiety may also affect lipid metabolism. Twenty percent of individuals who have cardiovascular disease or a previous history of MI have been found to have major depressive disorder (MDD). Psychosocial stressors can be both a cause and a consequence of cardiovascular disease events. Stress management might reduce future cardiac events in patients with cardiovascular disease.
meditating for one or two 20- to 30-minute sessions a day. Studies show meditation can have lasting effects on blood pressure and heart rate.
taking a vacation or a long weekend off.
participating in a support group.
regularly doing deep breathing exercises.
using progressive muscle relaxation, which reduces muscle tension by relaxing individual muscle groups.
practicing yoga, tai chi, or qi gong, all forms of exercise and meditation that are effective in reducing stress.
disconnecting from electronics and social media.
listening to soothing music or silence.
engaging in creative endeavors or hobbies. | 2019-04-18T20:50:27Z | http://blog.inrseminars.com/category/pain/ |
This study investigates the effect of temperature on removal of sub-micron particles from metal surfaces for various frequencies. The frequency used for this study was 25 kHz, 40 kHz, 58 kHz, 58/132 kHz, 132 kHz, 360 kHz, 470 kHz and 1 MHz. The temperature studied ranging from 30 οC - 70 οC. The parts are washed with various frequencies and temperatures and then the parts are subjected to Liquid Particle Counter (LPC) analysis. The size of the particles reported for this study was >0.2 um counts. The result shows that the particle count decreases with increase of temperature hence higher cleaning efficiency until 50 -60 οC and then the particle count start increases. The removal efficiency for various frequencies increases with increase of temperature until 50 -60 οC and then it start decreases. The effect of temperature on cavitation intensity for various frequencies (measured by ppb probe) was also carried out. The aluminium foil test was also carried out to see the effect of temperature for various frequencies. The result shows that the cavitation intensity decreases with increase of frequency and temperature. The aluminium foil study shows that the erosion rate is high for 30 οC compared to 70 οC. The erosion rate decreases with increase of temperature and also found more uniform dents on the aluminium foil for higher temperature. The result also shows that the erosion rate is high for 25 kHz compared to other frequencies tested. This is due the fact that the energy released during bubble implosion is significantly more for low frequencies compared to higher frequencies.
Cleanliness requirements for precision cleaning industries such as hard disk drive, medical, aerospace and other associated industries are getting more and more stringent [1-3]. In order to achieve higher cleanliness optimization of ultrasonic cleaning process is so important. There are several parameters affects the performance of ultrasonic cleaning process which includes frequency, sonication power, basket orientation, basket material, temperature, re-circulation rate and so on. So, for every material, it is necessary to find the optimum parameters to achieve higher cleanliness. Among all the parameters, temperature is the most important single parameter to be considered in maximizing cleaning performance. This is because so many liquid properties affecting cavitation intensity are related to temperature. The changes in temperature result in changes in viscosity, the solubility of gas in the liquid, the diffusion rate of dissolved gasses in the liquid, and vapor pressure, all of which affect cavitation intensity [4-5].
A moderate increase in the temperature of a liquid brings it closer to its vapor pressure, meaning that vaporous cavitation is more easily achieved. Vaporous cavitation, in which the cavitation bubbles are filled with the vapor of the cavitating liquid, is the most effective form of cavitation. As the boiling temperature is approached, however, the cavitation intensity is reduced as the liquid starts to boil at the cavitation sites [6-8]. Traditional ultrasonic theory suggests that the best temperature for use in an ultrasonic cleaning system is typically 65% of the boiling point of the solution . Although this formula has been used as a general guideline to determine optimum temperatures for decades, in reality it rarely plays a role in determining optimum temperatures for any given application. Temperatures are usually related more to the effectiveness of the cleaning agent in use rather than the effectiveness of the ultrasonic cleaning system. Each cleaning fluid may have an optimum temperature at which it performs best. In this paper, the effect of temperature and frequency on particle removal was studied. The cavitation intensity and aluminium foil test was also carried out for various temperatures and frequencies.
The experiments are conducted using Crest standard tanks and Crest Console systems with various frequencies. All experiments were performed in a Class 100 Cleanroom of the Advanced Ceramics Lab, Malaysia. The cavitation intensity for various frequencies was measured by using ppb ™ cavitation meter. The frequency used for this study was 25 kHz, 40 kHz, 58 kHz, 68 kHz, 132 kHz, 58/132 kHz (Patented Technology), 360 kHz (Megasonic Sweep Technology), 470 kHz (Megasonic Sweep Technology) and 1 MHz (Megasonic Sweep Technology). The ranges of temperature studied for each frequency was 30 - 75 οC. The parts used for this study was E-Coated DSP. This is one of the hard disk drive components. The parts were washed with different frequencies, temperatures and then subjected to LPC extraction to find the residual particles in the parts. The component used for this study was come from the same batch of material so that the initial cleanliness was approximately the same. It is also important to note that these parts had been pre-cleaned at their respective vendors. For each frequency the experiments were repeated three times and the average of this value was taken to plot the temperature vs particle counts.
The frequency used for final extraction was 132 kHz with 60 watts/gallon. The ultrasonic extraction method utilizes ultrasonic energy to extract particles from a part and the particle concentration in the extraction solution was measured using liquid particle counter (LPC). The particle counter used for this study was particle measuring system (PMSTM) and LiQuilaz SO2. This counter can measure the particle sizes from 0.2 um to 2 um. The size of the particles reported for this study was >0.2 um.
Aluminium foil test was also carried out to find the effect of temperature and frequencies on removal of material. In this study, a strip of thin aluminium foil with 15 x 22 cm was suspended in the water and subjects to sonic for 5 min. The material loss due to various frequencies and temperature was measured.
The effectiveness of various temperatures at final rinse in removing submicron and nano-dimensional particles from disk drive component E-coated DSP was studied. After washing and rinsing with various temperatures, the parts were subjected to 132 kHz extraction and the particles in the extracted solution were measured using liquid particle counter. The experimental flow used for this study was as shown below.
The surfactant used for this study was 1% CC 2000x. The cleaning efficiency is quantified and presented in terms of its dependence on acoustic frequency for particle size >0.2 um.
The effect of temperature on cavitation intensity for various frequencies is shown in Fig. 1. From Fig.1, it can be observed that the cavitation intensity decreases with increase of temperature for various frequencies. The cavitation intensity also decreases with increase of frequency. The cavitation intensity is inversely related to ultrasonic frequency. As the ultrasonic frequency increases, the cavitation intensity decreases because of the smaller size of the cavitation bubbles and their resultant less violent implosion. Increasing temperature can causes a reduction in the intensity of ultrasound required for the formation of cavitation bubbles. This is probably due to reduction in surface tension and/or viscosity of the liquid, either of which would lead to a reduction in the cohesive forces within the fluid and the energy required to tear it apart. However, near a liquidâÂÂs boiling point, the high temperature causes a significant increase of vapor pressure. The presence of liquid vapor within the bubble leads to a cushioning of the implosion during the compression cycle. So, the cavitation implosion becomes less intense at higher temperature.
The effect of temperature on cavitation intensity for various megasonic frequencies is shown in Fig. 2. From Fig. 2, it can be observed that the cavitation intensity decreases almost linearly with increase of temperature.
The cavitation pattern obtained for various temperatures is shown in Fig.3. From Fig.3, it can be observed that the increase in fluid temperature will improve the distribution of ultrasonic cleaning action in the tank. As the temperature increases around 50 οC, the scrubbing action of ultrasonic is more evenly distributed and less powerful than at lower temperature. As the temperature increases, sonic takes longer time to make holes in the aluminum foil. However, the foil appears to be more evenly attacked by the ultrasonic and also large holes in the foil are replaced by smaller more evenly distributed holes.
The effect of temperature on erosion rate obtained for various frequencies is shown in Fig.4. The result shows that the erosion rate decreases with increase of temperature and frequency. The erosion rate is significantly low for 58/132 kHz (Crest patented technology) compared to other frequencies tested.
Fig.5 shows the effect of frequency on erosion rate. The erosion rate decreases with increase of frequency. As the frequency increases the number of cavitation bubbles increases but the size of the cavitation bubbles decreases . Hence, higher cavitation intensity (low frequency) makes bubble implosions more violent as compared to lower cavitation intensity (high frequency).
The parts are cleaned with different frequencies and various temperatures and then it was subjected to 132 kHz LPC extraction. The particle count obtained for various frequencies with different temperature is shown in Fig. 6. From Fig. 6, it can be observed that the particle count decreases with increase of temperature until 60 οC (Maximum cleaning efficiency) and then it starts increases (cleaning efficiency drops). This is due to the fact that the temperature around 50 – 60 οC the adhesion force mainly due to Van der Waals force between the particles and the substrate weakens and therefore the particles attached to the surface can easily be removed. Once the temperature reaches 60 οC the particle count starts increases (drops in cleaning efficiency). This is due to the fact that the high temperature causes a significant increase of vapor pressure. So, whilst high temperature favors the nucleation of cavities and the presence of liquid vapor within the bubble leads to a cushioning of the implosion during the compression cycle. Hence stable cavitation is favored and the impact of ultrasound is reduced, as the shock wave released on cavity implosion becomes less intense. So, the particle removal efficiency is also reduced for temperature above 60 οC. Increase in temperature makes it easier to go below the point of vaporization so the cavitation initiate with less energy. The number of cavitation events will increase as the temperature is increased but the energy being stored in the cavitation bubble will decrease. As the temperature increases the cavitation intensity steadily diminishes and cease or becomes ineffective for most cleaning applications at the boiling point of the liquid. So, the balancing of temperature and cavitation is important to achieve higher cleaning efficiency.
The cleaning efficiency obtained for various frequencies is shown in Fig.7.
Where, Ncb is the number of particles in the extracted solution before cleaning and Nca is the number of particles in the extracted solution after cleaning. For any particular operating condition, three experiments were run, three removal efficiency values were measured, and their average was calculated. From Fig.7, it can be observed that the particle removal efficiency increases with increase of temperature until 60 οC and then it start decreases with increase of temperature. The particle removal efficiency is maximum at 50 – 60 οC. The variation of cleaning efficiency for different frequencies is higher at 30 οC and the variation is getting lower when the temperature reaches 50 οC. The particle removal efficiency is high for 58 kHz compared to all other frequencies tested.
Fig. 8-9 shows the effect of temperature on removal efficiency for various frequencies and particle sizes. The removal efficiency is high for 1 um particles compared to 0.2 um particles. The removal efficiency drops more significantly after 60 οC for 0.2, 0.3 um particle counts compared to 0.5 and 1 um particle counts.
From Fig.9, it can be observed that the removal efficiency increases linearly with increase of temperature until 65 οC and then it become constant with increase of temperature. The trend obtained for 470 kHz frequency is also same [Fig.1]. In megasonic cleaning the cleaning mechanism is mainly by acoustic streaming compared to acoustic cavitation. So, the increase in temperature would leads to increase in acoustic streaming velocity. The increase in streaming velocity increases the removal efficiency of particles and also avoids the re-deposition of particles.
The parts are washed with 58 kHz and rinsed with various temperatures and then the parts are subjected to 132 kHz LPC extraction with the watt density of 60 W/gallon. The results obtained are shown in Fig. 10. It can be observed that maintaining 50 οC at final rinsing gives lower particle counts hence higher cleaning efficiency than 30 οC and 70 οC. The reason for this was explained already. The run to run variation is also high for 70 οC compared to 50 οC and 30 οC.
The cavitation intensity decreases with increase of frequency and temperature. The erosion rate also decreases with increase of temperature and frequency. The particle removal efficiency increases with increase of temperature until 60 οC and then it start decreases with increase of temperature for all ultrasonic frequencies tested. In case of megasonic frequencies such as 360 kHz and 470 kHz, the particle removal efficiency increases with increase of temperature until 65 deg C and then it become constant. We also observed that the sonic energy is more uniformly distributed for the temperature around 50 – 60 οC. At higher temperatures around 70 οC the particle removal is not so consistent compared to particle removal at 30 οC and 50 οC. The optimum temperature obtained for cleaning of e-coated DSP was around 50 to 55 οC. So, the best ultrasonic performance should be roughly 60% of the boiling point of the liquid for effective removal of particles for most of the components. The temperature above 60% of the boiling point will decrease scrubbing force of the system thereby decrease the removal of particles. Overall, the balancing of cavitation and temperature is so important to achieve higher cleanliness for various components. In future, the experiments will be carried out for various conditions such as heating the parts and maintaining the washing liquid at room temperature, heating the washing liquid and maintaining the parts at room temperature and heating the parts and heating the washing liquid.
We wish to thank Tjung (Managing Director), Beng Hooi (Manager Sales Dept), and Research and Development team (ACT, Penang) for their kind support for this project.
Vetrimurugan, R., and Beng Hooi, N.G., “Study of ultrasonic parameters on removal of contamination from slider surface by using various cleaning chemistry”, International Journal of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Vol. 3, pp. 392-396, 2012.
Nagarajan, R, and Welker, R.W, Size distributions of particles extracted from disk drive parts: comparison with the MIL-STD-1246 distribution, Journal of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Vol. 43, 4, pp. 25-31, 2000.
Vetrimurugan et al., “Experimental Investigation of Ultrasonic and Megasonic Frequency on Cleaning of Various Disk Drive Components”, International Journal of Chemical Engineering and Applications”, Vol.4, No.4, pp. 174-177, 2013.
Nagarajan, R, Cavitation erosion of substrates in disk drive component cleaning: an exploratory study, Wear, Vol. 152, pp. 75-89, 1992.
Gouk. R, „Optimizing ultrasonic cleaning for disk drive componentsâÂÂ, Ultrasonic Cleaning, pp. 13-17, 1997.
Nagarajan, R, Welker, R.W, and Weaver, R.L., “Evaluation of aqueous cleaning techniques for disk drive parts”, Microcontamination Conference Proceedings, San Jose, CA, Oct. 16-18, 1991, pp. 312-326.
Goodson, J.M., and Nagarajan, R., “Megasonic Sweeping and Silicon Wafer Cleaning”, Solid State Phenomena, Vol. 145-156, pp. 27-30, 2009.
Durkee, J., “Management of Industrial Cleaning Technology and Processes”, 1st ed. Elsevier, UK, ch.1, pp. 1-41, 2006. | 2019-04-26T00:08:04Z | http://www.rroij.com/open-access/effect-of-temperature-and-frequency-onremoval-of-nanodimensional-contaminants-.php?aid=45959 |
The great English poet William Wordsworth was born just outside the northern rim of the English Lake District, in Cockermouth, Cumberland on 7 April, 1770. His sister Dorothy was born there the following year. William attended Hawkeshead Grammar School, near Windermere – meeting Mary Hutchinson there, his future wife. In 1787 Wordsworth entered St. John’s College in Cambridge University. After he gained a B.A. degree and did some extensive travelling in France, Italy and Switzerland, William and Dorothy rented a house together in Alfoxton House, Somerset in 1797. His friend and fellow-poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived nearby in Nether Stowey.
In 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge produced a book of poetry together called Lyrical Ballads. In the 1802 edition of the book, Wordsworth wrote an influential Preface that served as a manifesto for the new kind of poetry that he and his friend were writing. Wordsworth became a seminal figure in English Romantic poetry, a major influence on the younger generation that followed (Keats, Shelley and Byron) – all of whom, surprisingly, he outlived.
In the autumn of 1798 William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge made an extended visit to Germany. When they returned to England, the Wordsworths decided to move back to the Lake District. They moved into Dove Cottage in December, 1799. William married Mary Hutchinson in 1802. They had several children.
As the family grew, and the Wordsworth household expanded (Dorothy continued to live with William and Mary; Mary’s sister Sara joined them; and the Wordsworths often had friends and family staying with them for lengthy periods), it became necessary for them to move several times into larger lodgings. But they stayed close to the location of their first home, Dove Cottage. So Wordsworth remained in the Lake District for the rest of his life. He became known as the figure-head of the so-called “Lake poets” – a group of like-minded writers who moved into the area to be near him.
On a recent two-week trip to England (primarily to attend a school reunion), I made a pilgrimage to the Lake District on July 12 with my good friend Tony, in order to visit houses and sites associated with William Wordsworth. What follows, in this photo essay, is a photographic record of our visits to Dove Cottage, Allan Bank, Rydal Mount and St. Oswald’s Churchyard - Wordsworth's Lake District Homes.
Dove Cottage is in the village of Grasmere, about four miles north-west of Ambleside, which is itself about the same distance north-west of Windermere. William first saw the house on a walking tour of the Lake District with Coleridge in 1799. When he and Dorothy wanted to establish a permanent home in the Lakes, he remembered the place. Dove Cottage had been empty for a while. They moved in on December 20, 1799 – paying £5 per year in rent to John Benson of Grasmere.
Dove Cottage, like most houses of its vintage is built of local stone. The external walls are coated with a limewash. And the roof tiles are made of slate. It was built in the early 1600s.
Unfortunately (for me), photography is not allowed inside Dove Cottage. So I could only capture images of the outside. But I did find a few pictures of the inside posted to the internet. The picture above is from a 1907 postcard which shows the main reception room. It’s the first room you see upon entering the house. It was called the “houseplace” or “kitchen-parlour”. It was used for the main daily meal. This woud have been one of the main drinking rooms when the building was used as a pub. It retains the oak panels and slate floors that are typical of well-built Lakeland houses of the period.
The photograph above (not mine, since photography inside Dove Cottage is not permitted) shows the room on the upper floor (above the “houseplace”) which Wordsworth used as his study. It was also used as a second parlour for light meals and entertaining. In the Wordsworths’ time there were no buildings on the opposite side of the lane, so they enjoyed an uninterrupted view from the window in this room over the meadows to Grasmere Water. The other three rooms on the upper floor were used as bedrooms. The smallest bedroom (above the "buttery") became the nursery for William amd Mary's children. Without a fireplace, the room was cold in the winter; so Dorothy covered the nursery walls with varnished newspapers in 1800 as an attempt to insulate the room. This newspaper wall-covering was later removed, but the museum added copies of those nineteenth-century papers in the 1970s.
The photo above (again, not one of mine) shows a bedroom at the back of the cottage on the upper floor. It was used as the guest bedroom. The window provides a good view of the garden. The Wordsworths' many guests would have slept in this room, including Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles and Mary Lamb, Robert Southey, and Thomas De Quincey. When not being used as a bedroom, it was often used for storage. Dorothy refers to it in her Journal as “a sort of lumber room”.
There was no running water inside Dove Cottage during Wordsworth’s residence there. And the toilet was in a small outhouse. William and Dorothy took a special joy in the garden and orchard they established behind the house: “the work of our own hands”, Wordsworth proudly wrote. They arranged it in an informal “wild” state. Later, of course, this became the familiar style of the English country-cottage garden. They called it their “little nook of mountain-ground”.
During his time here at Dove Cottage, Wordsworth wrote much of his most famous poetry: “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, “Ode to Duty”, “My Heart Leaps Up”, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” and some parts of his epic autobiographical poem The Prelude. His sister Dorothy kept a fascinating journal during their long residence in this house. It was eventually published in 1897 as The Grasmere Journal. It showed that William must have read it on a regular basis, or Dorothy might have often read it aloud to him. He clearly borrowed ideas and sentiments from her Journal: an entry in 1802, for example, describes a glorious field of daffodils they came across near Ullswater. Almost two years later, William composed his famous daffodil poem: “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”.
William and Mary’s first three children were born in Dove Cottage within four years. Eventually the place became too small to hold the growing family and its permanent guests. So they moved to Allan Bank in May 1808. Wordsworth’s literary friend Thomas De Quincey (author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater - 1822) moved into Dove Cottage and lived there from 1809-1820. The house was eventually acquired by the Wordsworth Trust for £650 in 1890. The following year it was opened to the public. It now receives about 70,000 visitors each year. The Wordsworth Museum was opened next-door in 1943 and then moved to a nearby coach-house in 1981. Finally, a new building was opened in 2005, called the Jerwood Centre – it houses the large collection of Wordsworth memorabilia collected over the years by the Wordsworth Trust.
For details about admission prices, opening hours throughout the year, and directions to Dove Cottage, visit the Wordsworth Trust's Dove Cottage website.
The Wordsworth family moved into Allan Bank in May, 1808. It was an ironic move, because Wordsworth had condemned the house as an “eyesore” when it was first built. Allan Bank is a large Georgian villa built by a Liverpudlian attorney called John Gregory Crump between 1805 and 1806. The house has a prominent position overlooking Easedale Valley, near the southern face of Helm Crag. Wordsworth didn’t like the fact that Crump was a newcomer to the Lake District; and he was building a large mansion that obstructed his view north from Dove Cottage – “belching” smoke from its poorly constructed chimneys. He called it a “temple of abomination”.
Wordsworth’s reference to Allan Bank “belching” smoke proved prophetic. When he, Mary, Dorothy, and the rest of the Wordsworth tribe were ensconced in their new home, they suffered endless problems with smoking chimneys during their first winter in the place. Smoke often filled rooms in the house and, because of a persistent down-draught, also hung about the garden and grounds. On top of that, the house had incurably damp walls.
Changes have been made to the house over the years. The Wordsworths had a beautiful bow window added to the front of the house in 1809. When Thomas Dawson bought the house in 1834 for £4,100, he significantly extended and altered it. Not only did he remodel the main house; he also built a lodge nearby on the Easedale Road.
The major problems the Wordsworths encountered with Allan Bank – the fireplaces, the damp walls, and the falling-out they’d had with their landlord – pushed them into abandoning the place in 1813 and setting up home for a while at The Rectory in Grasmere. They had been in Allan Bank for a couple of years and William and Mary had two more children. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey had spent long periods living with them.
After Wordsworth left Allan Bank, it went through other ownership before being bought by Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley in 1915. This interesting man was a clergyman. He was also a literary man: he wrote many hymns and was constantly writing sonnets. He wrote them as poetry; he also wrote letters to the newspapers in the form of sonnets. In the course of his life he wrote 30,000 sonnets! Obsessed, or what? Rawnsley also helped form the association that became known as The National Trust. After he moved into the house in 1917, he became active locally in defending properties from inappropriate development. He became incensed when the island in the centre of Grasmere Water was sold to an individual who then restricted access to the public. At his death in 1920, Rawnsley bequeathed Allan Bank to The National Trust.
Allan Bank has been owned by The National Trust for many years, but has also been rented out regularly to residents. There have been two serious fires in the house - one in the fifties, and the other quite recently, back in March of last year. This recent fire was thought to be caused by electrical failure. The National Trust took back control of the house. Major restoration was done to ceilings and walls. But a lot of comprehensive decorative work has been delayed whilst the Trust decides on what the house will be used for. In the early stages after the fire, school groups, special visitors, and the general public have been given access into the house and encouraged to suggest different roles that the house might play. Various rooms have been set aside for different themes – reading, art work, history, etc.
So Allan Bank is now a work in progress. It will be interesting to see what evolves there. To read details about the current situation at the house and what is being considered for the future, visit The National Trust’s Allan Bank web page. There is also an Allan Bank Facebook page that you van visit.
The Wordsworth family moved into Rydal Mount in 1813. The house is located half way between Grasmere and Ambleside, just off the A 591 and close to Rydal Water. Wordsworth rented his new home from Lady Le Fleming of nearby Rydal Hall for 46 years – until his wife’s death in 1859 (William died in 1850).
In Rydal Mount, the Wordsworths had a large house that could hold the extended tribe of family and friends that now clustered around the famous poet. True, it wasn’t as big as Allan Bank, but that made it cosier and warmer. And in their current conditions, the lived-in atmosphere of this more modest house is a really attractive sight after the run-down, hollowed-out condition of the fire-damaged mansion at Allan Bank.
One of the quirky facts about the three Wordsworth homes that I am featuring here is that they are all controlled by different organisations: Dove Cottage is operated by the Wordsworth Trust (established in 1890 specifically to preserve the cottage); Allan Bank is run by The National Trust; and Rydal Mount is owned and operated as a tourist site by descendants of the Wordsworth family. Mary Henderson (neé Wordsworth) re-acquired Rydal Mount for the family in 1969. She is William Wordsworth’s great, great granddaughter. The house was opened to the public in 1970.
Rydal Mount is a house built in different periods. The dining room is part of the old Tudor cottage, with the original flagstone floors and oak beams. The impressive drawing room and library were added in 1750. They are now decorated in a comfy 60s/70s style, with lots of contemporary Wordsworth family photographs.
William Wordsworth was a keen landscape gardener. Soon after moving in, he set about designing the four acres of grounds which surround the house. The gardens today remain pretty much as he set them up back in the early eighteenth century. In season, the garden’s various blooms – bluebells, daffodils, rhododendrons – produce a spectacular display of colour.
Wordsworth often said that the gardens of Rydal Mount were his real office, not the office/study he set up in the attic of the house. In fact, he eventually built a small “writing hut” in a secluded spot of the garden, with just a bench and roof to keep away the rain. He did most of his serious writing there.
Close to Rydal Mount - on the lane leading up to the house – sits St. Mary’s Church. Beside the churchyard is a substantial field - the Rash field - which Wordsworth bought with the intention of building a house there for his daughter Dora. The project was never completed. When Dora died in 1847, William, Mary, Dorothy and the gardener planted hundreds of daffodils as a memorial on that land. This plot became known as Dora’s Field, and it now belongs to The National Trust. In the spring the area is completely covered with daffodil blooms. You can't help thinking of William's famous daffodil poem inspired by Dorothy's journal entry in 1802.
To see a full-screen version of this image, click on this link.
William Wordsworth caught a bad cold during a walk in the country, re-aggravating a case of pleurisy he had recently suffered. He died on April 23 – St. George’s Day – in 1850, aged 80.
He was buried in the village of Grasmere, near Dove Cottage, in St. Oswald’s Church. St. Oswald, a seventh-century Christian king in Northumberland is said to have preached on the site of the church. This is the parish church for Grasmere, Rydal and Langdale.
Inside St. Oswald’s Church, the thirteenth-century nave contains several memorials to the Le Fleming family – it was Lady Le Fleming who had originally rented Rydal Mount to Wordsworth back in 1813.
But most visitors inside the church gravitate to the two Wordsworth memorials. There is a glass case set up next to the organ which contains Wordsworth’s own prayer book. And on the wall of the nave shown to the left is a formal memorial of William Wordsworth carved in marble.
Wordsworth himself planted eight of the yew trees growing in St. Oswald’s churchyard. One of them sits beside the grave of William and his wife Mary. Nearby lie the graves of many other family members – including those of his sister Dorothy, his children Dora, William, Thomas and Catherine, and Sara Hutchinson, Mary’s sister.
Here’s my friend Tony Grant sitting behind St. Oswald’s Church. Just behind the stone wall are the Wordsworth family graves. In front of Tony are individual little paving stones with the names carved of those who have donated money for the upkeep of the Wordsworth park and memorials here.
Tony accompanied me throughout this long day of pilgrimage to the homes of William Wordsworth in the area of Grasmere and Ambleside. He did all the driving, too. Thanks, Tony!
No wonder Tony looks knackered!
We had a great couple of days in The Lakes before driving south to Liverpool. I thoroughly enjoyed our trip together.
Michael, a few beers later and all was well..
Thank you so much for the wonderful Wordsworth tribute, information, and photos! Indeed, the Lake District seems to be a gorgeous area. | 2019-04-25T06:14:42Z | http://clive-w.blogspot.com/2012/09/photo-essay-wordsworths-lake-district.html |
It is said that a concert pianist has fine motor-control skills with a degree of coordination which exceeds that of a brain surgeon during operations. To perform of piece of music which demands that each finger, each joint of that finger and each muscle in the hand, arm and body cooperates and contributes to the end result and that this end result is experienced as harmoniously, melodically and rhythmically complete is really somewhat of a physiological and neurological miracle.
Perhaps the reason why most of us still don’t reflect on this when great art is presented to us is because one of the hallmarks of great art is that it is perceived as “effortless”. We sense the coordination, the seamless conversations within the body of the practitioner, how everything just seems to “flow”, yet a part of our mind is aware of the enormous amount of coordination happening and realises that there is no way we can consciously control all of these minuite operations.
It is like the joke about the centipede who one day suddenly started pondering which leg to move first and from then on were unable to move ever again. Our brain grasps that there must be some sort of overall awareness coordinating everything so that it just happens “naturally”.
“Naturally” is, however, a nice fluffy term for something which we instinctively recognise without really understanding what it is or how it works. Musicians are very often taught to be looking for a “natural technique” although much of this training tends to focus more on how it is supposed to feel, us supposed to what needs to happen for it to feel like this; to get to the place where everything “clicks”, where the audience as well as we ourselves experience what is happening as “effortless”.
But what is the physiological reality behind the term “natural technique”?
Most of us are unaware of how many of our seemingly ordinary daily activities which really are similar miracles, both neurologically and physiologically. Our very ability to move at all is based on a complex cooperation between our brain, our nervous system and our muscles; a cooperation which enables us to do anything from tying our shoelaces to playing a piano concert, and of which most of us are totally oblivious to.
There are, however, some situations in which most people become aware of the degree of magic happening inside their body and it is usually, ironically, when things start to not work as they should.
Proprioception is the name of the sense which makes our brain aware of where each part of our body is located in space at any given time. This enables our brain to send coordinated signals in the form of motor programs to different parts of our body which then enables us to perform everyday movements. Some of these motor programs start to form from the moment we are born, such as when we learn how to crawl, turn over or walk.
These programs are so embedded in us that we don’t pay them any attention, which is, from the brain’s perspective, the whole idea: if we needed to consciously be aware of every detail of a motor program we would spend far too much energy on performing it. Therefore it is almost impossible for us to recognize the amount of coordination happening behind the smallest of our activities.
The best way to understand how our proprioception actually functions is perhaps to show what life is like for someone who has to live without it.
19-year-old Ian Waterman at first thought he had caught merely a common cold or virus infection. The sturdy young man was working as an apprentice in a butcher shop and was used to hard labour and physically demanding work. He had previously gotten a small cut in his finger and most likely the cut had developed into an infection. What started out as a common cold would prove to be something much worse. As the doctors in vain tried to understand what was happening Ian gradually lost control over his limbs and ended up lying in bed without conscious control over any part of his body from his neck down.
What confused his doctors and neurologists was that the condition didn’t read like a normal paralysis: Ian wasn’t paralysed, his muscles still worked and his brain was receiving signals from his body conveying sensations such as pain and differences in temperature. But the brain seemed to have lost the notion of where the different parts that it was supposed to move were located. The medical sentence was harsh: a life in a wheelchair.
Ian’s condition is an efficient reminder of how complex and specialized our nervous system is. We often think of a nerve in the same way that we think of some sort of electric cable conveying a signal between body and brain. The reality is much more complex.
If you cut through a nerve and look at the cross-section you will see that the nerve includes several smaller parts, nerve fascicle’s. Inside of these fascicle’s we find individual nerve fibres.
A nerve fibre can be either a sensory fibre or motor fibre. The motor fibres sends signals to our muscle fibres telling them to contract. The sensory fibres starts either in the skin or in the muscle and come in different sizes. The largest ones convey information concerning touch, muscle sensitivity or sense of movement, while the smallest ones convey information concerning muscle fatigue, temperature and certain forms of pain.
In Ian’s case the motor fibres were intact but the large sensory fibres (and with them also the access to very specific functions of the nervous system) were damaged, probably as a result of the infection. These nerve fibres were responsible for receiving all of the sensory information that had to do with the positioning of Ian’s joints and the activity in his muscles. They were also responsible for conveying all of this information onward to his brain.
The condition, which can occur in different degrees, were eventually given the name sensory neuropathy, damaged sensory nerves.
Ian had one advantage in his extreme situation: he was still young when he became ill. After the initial shock and despair at the prospect of a life in a wheelchair the young Englishman decided that he would not settle for the doctor’s prognosis. Even though the original neurological connection between brain and body were severed, might it not be possible to build another one? Since the nerves which should have provided Ian’s brain with the information necessary to move his body were destroyed it was necessary to create a new connection between brain and body. The answer, at least half of it, lay in visualisation.
Ian discovered, after a painful period of hard mental work, that if he had a very concrete picture in his mind of which movement to perform and then used his eyes as control and feedback channel to tell his brain where the parts it were supposed to move were located, he was able, after years of gruelling discipline and training, to slowly re-gain control over his body.
What Ian was actually doing is something that all of us has experienced partly each time we learn and train a new motor program. When we learn to move as children we first go through an initial phase of large, unrefined movements which then gradually become more and more refined and coordinated and then eventually transformed into automatic patterns -motor programs. In this way we don’t have to think of every little detail involved in the movement and can have our mind elsewhere while bicycling, walking, skiing or performing any other movement pattern.
But the fact that we are not aware of the coordination happening when buttoning a button doesn’t mean that our body isn’t executing it. One of the prerequisites for such motor programs to work is that your brain knows where the parts which are supposed to contribute in the coordination are located. It needs to have a point of reference from which to work. Without this knowledge the brain is in the dark so do speak: it’s not easy to move something when you can’t locate it.
In Ian’s case it was as if every motor program that he had ever learned were suddenly cancelled out; and every coordination from that moment on until his death had to be done 100% consciously.
Do you have a personal problem with gravity?
The automatic motor programs which most of us uses every day are also based on a subconscious understanding of certain physical laws, such as gravity and how it affects our bodies. We all make use of this subconscious understanding every day, for instance each time we are lifting something up. A short example: the size of your base, if you’re standing broad legged or with your feet together, decides whether you’re going to tip over or not when extending something heavy out from your body.
Here is a visual example of what happens if you don’t take this fact into account.
Ian´s body, who is bereft of his automatic motor programs, and therefore also from this subconscious knowledge, needs to be constantly aware of these physical laws: each time he is picking something up he needs to calculate how much the weight of the object will affect the balance in the rest of his body and then consciously adjust the angle of his arms and legs and the degree of tension in the muscles of his arms and legs based on this knowledge. Picking up a mango or lifting a chair demands different degrees of tension.
Most of us are rarely aware of the physical laws surrounding and affecting us each day. It is no accident that “biomechanics” is still a relatively unfamiliar term for most people. The knowledge of how biological material (what your body is made of) is affected by physical laws (gravity for instance) is not something we go around and ponder. Yet we all live under these laws, we just happen to be so lucky as not to need to relate to them except on those occasions where our proprioception is a tad weaker than usual, for instance when we have been drinking or early in the morning when we have just got out of bed and seem to constantly bump into our doorframes.
For someone like Ian who is cut off from his proprioception the relationship with gravity becomes very close indeed. For one thing his ability to move is completely dependent on his eyes and his visual faculties: as long as he can use his eyes to give his brain feedback on where his body is located Ian is able to control his body in a way that (for now) is unique in all of the world. However, if this feedback channel disappears, for instance if the light is switched off in the room, he immediately loses every control of his body and collapses like a rag doll, – the result of the brain’s lack of ability to adjust the body according to gravity.
When we see small babies moving slowly and seemingly uncoordinated we are actually witnessing a meticulous training of coordination and motor patterns which will later on become the foundation for every movement during a long life. Although we might find such intense concentration when reaching for a toy as “cute” what is actually happening should rather trigger our admiration: brain scans of Ian’s brain when he is performing his conscious coordinated movements shows activity in parts of the brain that are usually used only in activities demanding the most sophisticated form of intense concentration, activities such as juggling with multiple balls.
It goes without saying that this activity demands much more energy than movements which have been transformed into automatic motor programs.
There is also another price Ian is constantly paying which those of us with an active proprioception don’t need to worry about. Our brain is dependent on its contact with the body. When this contact is missing or decreased the brain instinctively senses this as a threat. A consequence of Ian’s condition is therefore that his nervous system is in a constant state of tension, where the feedback that his eyes provide is the only thing staving off the panic.
Just think about the sensation of missing a step when walking down the stair or stepping off a ledge that you didn’t expect was there, and where your body suddenly flops down. The sudden jolt we experience when the expected contact with the ground disappears for a second is actually your brain shouting for feedback from the body, – feedback which didn’t come as expected and which, in Ian’s case, will never come. Imaging having that shouting as a continuous companion in your life..
Ian’s example shows us how much of our life and our activities which are based on movement patterns. Most of us take these patterns for granted and are even mostly unaware of them happening at all. Only in situations when we are witnessing these patterns at their utmost, might it suddenly dawn on us the immense complexity and possibilities stored in our incredible bodies. For instance in a concert, when a performer makes something incredibly complex appear as effortless.
Neurologically speaking, for something to be without effort does not mean that there is no effort involved but rather that we are witnessing something functioning at its utmost. And maybe that is exactly what holds our fascination: we are reminded of the endless possibilities and miracles residing inside these amazing structures which we choose to call our “bodies”.
Hopefully this experience might eventually make us treat our bodies with the attention and reverence they deserve, both during living and during playing, but more on that in a later blog.
If you want to know more check out the BBC Horizon documentary “The Man Who Lost His Body” which tells the whole story of Ian Waterman.
Det sies at konsertpianister benytter en finmotorikk med en koordineringsgrad som ligger over den en hjernekirurg benytter ved operasjoner. Det å formidle et musikkstykke som krever at hver finger, hvert ledd i den fingeren og hver muskel i hånd, arm og kropp samarbeider og bidrar til at det samlede resultatet fremstår som en helhet harmonisk, melodisk og rytmisk er egentlig et aldri så lite fysiologisk og nevrologisk mirakel.
Kanskje grunnen til at det likevel ikke oppfattes slik er at når kunst på et høyt nivå fremføres er gjerne et av kjennetegnene at det virker ”uanstrengt”. Og kan hende er det grunnen til at så mange musikere og kunstnere innen fag som krever en nitid kroppskontroll er på leting etter en “naturlig teknikk”? Men hva ligger egentlig bak begrepet “naturlig teknikk”?
Det ikke så mange tenker over er hvor mange av våre tilsynelatende dagligdagse handlinger som er liknende mirakler, nevrologisk og fysiologisk sett.
Grunnlaget for at vi i det hele tatt er i stand til å bevege oss er samarbeidet som eksisterer mellom hjernen vår, nervesystemet vårt og musklene våre, et samarbeid som kan gjøre oss i stand til alt fra å knytte skolissene til å spille en pianokonsert.
Ikke alle har behov for å spille en pianokonsert eller utføre en hjerteoperasjon, men uavhengig av bruksbehovet vårt så vil de fleste av oss gå gjennom livet mer eller mindre uvitende om de tusenvis av detaljerte mirakuløse prosesser som gjør oss i stand til å utføre de fleste dagligdagse gjøremål. Og en ting gjelder oss alle: det er først når ting ikke lenger fungerer som de skal at vi begynner å ane hvor omfattende dette usynlige samarbeidet mellom hjerne, muskler og nerver virkelig er.
Propriosepsjon er navnet på den sansen som gjør hjernen vår i stand til å vite hvor hver del av kroppen vår til enhver tid befinner seg og som dermed gjør det mulig for hjernen å sende koordinerte signaler i form av motor programmer til kroppen vår – en evne vi tar så for gitt at det omtrent er umulig for oss å forstå hva denne sansen egentlig består i. Så den beste måten å gi et godt bilde av denne sansen på er kanskje å vise hvordan livet til en som må leve uten den arter seg.
Da 19 år gamle Ian Waterman først ble dårlig trodde han det bare dreide seg om en vanlig forkjølelse eller virusinfeksjon. Den kraftige unggutten jobbet som lærling hos en slakter og var vant til å kjøre seg hardt i en utfordrende og fysisk krevende jobb. Han hadde tidligere fått et lite kutt i den ene fingeren og kuttet utviklet seg sannsynligvis til en infeksjon. Det som startet som en vanlig forkjølelse skulle vise seg å være noe mye verre. Mens legene forgjeves forsøkte å forstå hva som foregikk mistet Ian gradvis kontrollen over lemmene sine og endte opp liggende i en seng uten å kunne styre noen del av kroppen sin fra halsen og ned.
Det som forvirret leger og nevrologer var at tilstanden ikke artet seg som noen alminnelig lammelse: Ian var ikke paralysert, musklene og leddene fungerte fortsatt men hjernens tilgang til dem var blokkert: Ian kunne ikke lenger styre dem til å gjøre det han ville fordi hjernen ikke visste hvor delene befant seg. Samtidig mottok hjernen hans fortsatt visse signaler fra kroppen, bl.a var han i stand til å føle smerte og temperaturforskjeller.
Dommen fra nevrologene var brutal: resten av livet i en rullestol.
Ians tilstand er en effektiv påminnelse om hvor komplekst og spesialisert nervesystemet vårt er. Vi tenker gjerne på en nerve som en slags kabel som formidler signaler mellom kropp og hjerne. Men virkeligheten er litt mer sammensatt.
Hvis du skjærer gjennom en nerve og tar en titt på tverrsnittet så vil du se at denne nerven inneholder flere mindre deler, nervefasicler, og inne i hver av disse igjen finner vi individuelle nervefibre.
En nervefiber kan være sensorisk eller motorisk. De motoriske fibrene sender signaler til muskelfibrene om at de skal trekke seg sammen. De Sensoriske fibrene starter enten i huden eller i muskelen og har forskjellig størrelse: de største formidler informasjon om berøring, muskelfølelse og bevegelsesfølelse mens de minste formidler informasjon om muskeltretthet, temperatur og visse former for smerte.
Hos Ian var de motoriske fibrene inntakt men de store sensoriske fibrene (og dermed også tilgangen til helt spesifikke deler av nervesystemets funksjoner) var skadet, nervefibre som var ansvarlige for å ta inn alle de sensoriske nerveimpulsene som fortalte om leddstillinger og muskelaktivitet og for å mate denne informasjonen videre til hjernen.
Tilstanden, som kan forekomme i ulike grader, fikk etter hvert navnet Sensory Neuropathy: Skadede sensoriske nerver.
Ian hadde et avgjørende fortrinn i all uflaksen: han var fortsatt ung da han ble syk. Etter det første sjokket og fortvilelsen over rullestol-dommen fant den unge engelskmannen ut at han ikke ville slå seg til ro med legenes prognoser. Siden de nervene som skulle ha sørget for at hjernen fikk informasjon nødvendig for å bevege kroppen var ødelagte var det nødvendig å skape en ny forbindelse mellom hjerne og kropp. Løsningen, i alle fall halvparten av den, lå i visualisering.
Ian fant ut at hvis han hadde et helt konkret bilde i hodet sitt av hvilken bevegelse han skulle utføre og deretter benyttet øynene sine som kontroll og feedbackkanal for å fortelle hjernen hvor de delene han skulle bevege befant seg var han i stand til, etter beinhard, årelang opptrening og disiplin, å langsomt og omstendelig kunne styre kroppen sin igjen.
Når vi lærer å bevege oss som barn er dette først gjennom grove, store bevegelser som deretter gradvis blir mer og mer fin-koordinert og satt sammen i automatiske mønstre – motor programmer. Dette gjør at vi etter hvert slipper å tenke over alle de små detaljer ved bevegelsen og vi kan frigjøre energi til å tenke på noen annet mens vi sykler, går eller utfører andre koordinerte bevegelsesmønstre. Men det at vi ikke lenger bevisst tenker over hvilken koordinasjonen som må til for å kneppe en knapp betyr ikke at kroppen vår ikke utfører den og en av forutsetningene for slike motor programmer er at hjernen vet hvor delene som skal delta i koordinasjonen befinner seg – at den har et utgangspunkt å jobbe fra.
Uten denne kunnskapen vil hjernen famle i mørke så og si. Ian som etter sykdommen levde i en kropp hvor hjernen ikke lenger kunne benytte noen av de tidligere automatiske bevegelsesmønstrene var nå på et vis tvunget til å gjøre alt ut i fra et nullpunkt: alle koordinasjoner måtte nå gjøres 100% bevisst.
Ian, som ikke lenger har tilgang til sine automatiske motor program må dermed hele tiden forholde seg bevisst til disse generelle lovene: hver gang han skal løfte noe må han beregne hvor mye vekten av gjenstanden vil påvirke balansen i resten av kroppen og deretter justere stillingen på armer og ben og spennings-graden i musklene i dem basert på dette.
Vi tenker sjelden over de fysiske lovene som omgir oss og påvirker oss hver dag. Det er ikke tilfeldig at biomekanikk fortsatt er et relativt ukjent begrep for de fleste. Kunnskapen om hvordan biologisk materiale (les: det som kroppen vår er bygget opp av) påvirkes av fysiske krefter (for eksempel tyngdekraften) er ganske enkelt ikke noe de fleste går rundt og tenker på. Likevel lever vi alle under disse lovene, vi er bare så heldige at vi sjelden trenger å forholde oss bevisst til dem, unntatt ved de anledningene hvor propriosepsjonen vår er en anelse mer svekket enn til vanlig, for eksempel ved beruselse.
For en som Ian som er absolutt avskåret fra denne sansen blir dét å forholde seg bevisst til tyngdekraften en meget bevisst handling. Bl.a blir ansvaret som hviler på øynene og synet altomfattende: så lenge han kan bruke synet til å gi hjernen tilbakemelding om hvor kroppen hans befinner seg er Ian i stand til å styre kroppen sin med en kontroll som han (foreløpig) er alene om i verden. Hvis denne feedbackkanalen forsvinner, for eksempel ved at lyset slås av, mister han øyeblikkelig kontroll over kroppen og faller sammen som en filledukke, et resultat av hjernens mangel på feedback fra kroppen og dermed dens evne til å justere kroppen i forhold til tyngdekraften.
Når vi ser små babyer bevege seg langsomt, omstendelig og målbevisst er vi vitne til en omhyggelig opptrening av koordinasjon og motor mønstre som senere skal danne grunnlaget for alle bevegelsene som følger gjennom et langt liv. Det fokuset som barn i denne fasen har når de beveger seg er dypt konsentrert og vi kan fortrylles av hvor “søtt” denne konsentrasjonen rundt handlinger som å kneppe en knapp eller gripe rundt en gjenstand er. Men det som foregår i hjernen under en slik opptreninger er i virkeligheten noe som snarere burde påkalle vår beundring: Skanninger av hjernen til Ian når han utfører sine bevisst koordinerte bevegelser påviser en aktivitet i deler av hjernen som vanligvis kun brukes ved den mest sofistikerte form for intens konsentrasjon, områder som reserveres for handlinger som sjonglering.
I tillegg er det en annen pris som Ian hele tiden betaler men som vi med propriosepsjonen vår i behold slipper å forholde oss til: hjernen vår krever og er avhengig av kontakt med kroppen. Når denne kontakten ikke er der opplever hjernen det som en instinktiv trussel. Å ha denne tilstanden vil altså si at du hele tiden går rundt med et nervesystem mer eller mindre i helspenn og at du konstant er nødt til å gi hjernen visuell feedback for å holde panikken stagget.
Tenk selv hvordan du opplever det å bomme på et trappetrinn når du går ned en trapp. Det hugget som går gjennom oss i dét det forventede støtet fra underlaget ikke kommer er hjernen som roper etter feedback fra kroppen, en feedback som i denne anledningen ikke kom som forventet og som i Ians tilfelle aldri vil komme.
De fleste handlinger som krever en spesielt sofistikert form for kroppskoordinasjon som musikkutøving, dans eller toppidrett fordrer at vi trener opp og bevisstgjør deler av kroppen gjennom øvelser og stadige bevisste repetisjoner. Gjennom dette arbeidet får vi en mer detaljert kontroll over kroppen vår. Vi kan si at denne kontrollen ligger latent i de fleste av oss som en mulighet, selvfølgelig også influert av ting som arv og miljø. Men uansett hvor detaljert og rigorøst vi tror vi styrer kroppen vår: vi kontrollerer bevisst likevel bare en brøkdel av alle de signalene som trengs for å utfør den handlingen vi gjør, konsert, dans eller offpist. Resten av signalene er bygget opp av de uhyre komplekse motor mønstrene som hjernen vår har designet over tid og som vi alle er avhengige av (Ian Waterman er et eksempel på nøyaktig hvor avhengige).
En vidtflyvende tanke: vår innebygde fascinasjon for ytre mønstre speiles av at vi selv er fysiologisk og nevrologisk mønster-baserte skapninger.
Det at vi tar disse mønstrene for gitt er kanskje det beste beviset på hvor utrolig sømløst og fininnstilt dette systemet er. Bare når vi er vitne til dette mønstret på sitt ypperste som på en konsert, en ballett forestilling eller et sportsarrangement kan vi bli slått av dets kompleksitet og imponerende muligheter: når en utøver på toppnivå får noe som er så grunnleggende komplekst til å se ”uanstrengt” ut.
En tilsynelatende uanstrengt teknikk betyr altså ikke, nevrologisk sett, at noe er ”uten anstrengelse” men heller at noe er velfungerende, samkjørt, velkoordinert til det ytterste. Og det er dette som ligger til grunn for en såkalt ”naturlig spilleteknikk”: ikke en kroppskontroll som kommer av seg selv uten innsats bare vi slapper nok av, men en sofistikert kompleks koordinasjon som gjennom sitt uanstrengte uttrykk viser oss hva vi bærer i oss av muligheter.
∗ En takk til Brynhild Winther for bruken av en av hennes tekster som en overskrift i denne bloggen. Anbefaler alle å ta en titt på kunsten hennes her! | 2019-04-25T10:25:21Z | https://thelisteningexperience.blog/tag/ian-waterman/ |
Hagiography (sacred icon painting) as sacred art.
A certain contemporary hagiographer dedicated his book, "To the kind Wisdom of God that created beauty". Truly, God graced man with the capability to imprint on lifeless surfaces different compositions, faces, places, to express feelings, to create some sort of life. Who doesn't feel awe in front of unique masterpieces of great paint artists who served this art through the centuries? However, despite the artistic value and beauty of their works, they haven't ceased nor cease to be works that relate to man. For this the beneficial providence of the Triune God did not stop here.
The All Holy Spirit inspired godly souls and endowed them with artistic and spiritual sensitivity so that they may present and finally succeed in rendering with colours and lines not just a type of life but life itself, our God-Man and Saviour Jesus Christ, the Son of God, "the beautiful beauty above all men".
That the achievement of the Christian hagiographers is divinely inspired one can easily confirm having as a guide the Holy Bible. In the book of Exodus, the following is mentioned: "And the Lord spoke unto Moses saying: See I have called by name Bezaleel, the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah. And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom and in understanding and in knowledge and in all manner of workmanship. To devise cunning works, to work in gold and silver and in brass. And in cutting of the stones, to set them, and in carving timber to work in all manner of workmanship" (Ex 31:1-5). If therefore during the time of the Old Testament for the construction of the tent of Martyrdom, God gave to Bezaleel, "spirit of divine wisdom", how much wisdom and inspiration would He give to the masters of the New Testament that they may portray the archetype beauty of the Lord's appearance?
This way therefore, Orthodox hagiography made its appearance and it evolved to what is also called Orthodox painting. In our time, a general wave of return to the sources of Orthodox tradition is observed. In this effort the revival in our days of the Byzantine hagiography is included. Many Greek and foreign theologians and various specialists in the area of art, Orthodox or non, have perceived that hagiography is not some type of art that has served only her time. They discovered in fact that what they believed was incomplete and lacking, has some secret, spiritual and theological depth. Here exactly is the key to understanding the Orthodox icon. Like a hidden treasure, its purpose is explored and the value of iconography is finally discovered.
The icon doesn't simply help the memory to recreate early events or faces, but it creates a feeling of presence. It brings the faithful to a personal relationship and contact with the hypostasis of the drawn saint. Therefore, the icon is not a simple work of art or religious picture but as emphatically stressed by L. Uspenski and F. Kontoglou, it is a holy liturgical utensil that sanctifies man. It was appropriately named Holy Bible for the simple and illiterate people and a visual theology for the scrutinizers and experts. The sacred icons "speak" to the hearts of men and every soul that gazes these divine forms and depictions succeeds in communicating with God and His saints.
Ecclesiastic tradition mentions that the first icon, with the essence of representation, was made by the Lord Himself and in fact without hands. The story of this icon briefly is as follows: The king of Edessa of Mesopotamia, Augarus, suffered from leprosy. He wrote therefore to the Lord a letter, in which he implored Him to visit Edessa and heal him. His servant Ananias brought the letter to Palestine. He tried to draw the Lord but did not succeed. The Lord having noticed the effort of Ananias, asked for water to wash His face which He then dried with a handkerchief. The holy face of the Lord was miraculously imprinted on the handkerchief. This is known as the "Holy Mandelion" (handkerchief).
Augarus, as mark of his gratitude for his healing which happened through the grace of the icon and completed later with his baptism, raised the icon of the Holy Mandelion at the entrance of the City's gate, having first written on a plank underneath it, the phrase: "Christ God, whoever hopes in You never fails". The icon of the Lord made with no hands, after quite a few centuries in Edessa, was brought in 994AD to Constantinople, during the empire of Romanus Lekapinus.
Tradition also mentions as the first hagiographer, the Evangelist Luke. The Evangelist was the first to draw three icons- using wax, gum and colours - of the All Holy Theotokos, holding in her bosom our Lord Jesus Christ and offered them to her, wishing to know if they were pleasing to her. The Mother of the Lord accepted them saying, "The grace of the one who drew me goes through me to them". Of these three icons, one is in Peloponnesus, in the Monastery of the Great Cave which is made with wax and gum. The second it is said to be in little Russia, in a town called Vilina which was given as a gift by the byzantine emperors to the Russians, so that they may be their allies. The third icon according to the assurance of the golden sealed decree of John Gregory Giga Boeboda, ruler of Hungarovlachia, is in Cyprus at the Monastery of Kykku. Moreover according to tradition the Evangelist Luke drew some icons of the Holy Pre-eminent Apostles and some others and since then the art of drawing of the Holy Icons was passed on to good and pious people.
The history of the Byzantine Iconography was divided by historians to various periods.
A) In the proto-Christianity (until the time of Great Constantine).
2. The time of the Iconamachy (724-843AD).
3. The time of the Macedonians and Comnenus (867-1204AD).
4. The Paleologian Renaissance (1204-1453AD) or the final byzantine period.
In the first centuries of Christianity, the proto-Christian period, was what was known as the archaic iconography, which had a symbolic characteristic also known as the art of the catacombs. The art structure of the catacomb depictions was liberal. It started with motifs received from idolatric art, such as Orpheus. The purpose of this art was plainly educational. Symbols such as a ship, fish, olive, anchor, vine etc, were used. The wall paintings of this period were basically non artistic. They had more religious than artistic significance.
In the early Christian period, following the cessation of persecutions, they started to use drawing depictions of holy persons and situations from the Old and New Testament. In this period we have use of mosaics. There are some important wall paintings that were worked with the art of Fresco. Important art works of this period are: at the Basilica of Saint Demetrius in Thessaloniki (5th Century), of Saint Appolinarius in Ravenna (Italy), the fresco of Castelserpio near Milan (6th century) etc. Of the portable icons of this period (6th century) is the magnificent burning art of the Sinai Monastery.
The commotion of iconomachy ended decisively with the endemic Synod of 843AD in Constantinople during the reign of Saint Theodora. The Synod decided to restore the holy icons and decreed the Sunday of Orthodoxy.
In the period of the Macedonians and the Comnenus we have the renaissance of Orthodox Hagiography. The victory over the iconomachs brought about substantial change in painting as well as to the whole byzantine art. The decoration of churches is forbidden on liturgical and dogmatic reasons. A hierarchal order is decreed as a result on iconographic topics. This order is decreed by the Church which at present under the decision of the 7th Ecumenical Synod, has assumed the direction of hagiography. Thus are three iconographic groups formed: the dogmatic, the liturgical and the historic (festive). The topic relates to a dedicated place in the Church to which it will turn out into a canon of byzantine hagiography.
The Paleologian period is considered the golden age of hagiography. Whatever the art of the previous centuries offered came back with renewed life. The renaissance of the Paleologus' should be considered as a consequent natural progression of the previous years and not as a phenomenon that appeared suddenly. It should be explained as a re-enlivening (by the ideas and the climate of the paleologian years) of the brilliant art of the Macedonians and of the Comnenus'. The 14th century is an anthropocentric century. The characteristic therefore of this renaissance is the deep humanism. There is a turn towards the humanistic, hagiography becoming more narrative, with the art intending to cause emotion, to touch the feelings. Mainly, the French specialist G. Millet divided the paleologian art into two "schools", the "Macedonian" and the "Cretan". Of course the term "schools" which have since held, is not correct. Rather it concerns two different currents, two different ways of approach of the paleologian hagiography.
The "Macedonian School" was born in Constantinople and bloomed mainly in Macedonia, centered in Thessaloniki and passed on to Serbia. The School is characterized by its realism and freedom. It has intensity, movement and rich colours. The face and clothes are broadly illuminated, for this they call it "broad style". It was viewed - without being of course absolute - that this art was most inclined to the learned, the educated classes and the courtiers. Its main proponents were Manuel Panselinus (who drew the Chapel of Saint Euthymius of Thessaloniki and the church of the "Protatou") Michael Astrapas and his brother Eutyhius who practiced in Serbia, George Kalliergis etc. In the same period belongs the unrivalled in craftsmanship and beauty monument of the Monastery of the Country in Constantinople.
From the reigning city (Constantinople) the art passed on to Mystra during the end of the 14th century. There it assumed a close character and produced the "Cretan School". This School remains more faithful to the byzantine idealism. It is a conservative art, with its characteristic conservative motions, the simplicity, the nobility of the faces and generally its attachment to the byzantine traditions. The light in the close style is scant and feels like it emanates from some depth, an element that brings the faithful to profound devoutness. It was considered as an art of monastic circles. The genuine Cretan School was first formed in Crete from which it derived its name- after the historically significant event of the fall of Byzantium in the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century. The main representative was Theophan the Cretan, who was an hagiographer at Meteora and at the Holy Mountain. Well known for the drawing depictions on the Catholicon (nave) of the Monastery of Dionysius is also Zorzis (1547AD). During this period Francis Catelanus and his brother George were hagiographers who however began to accept foreign and western elements.
Finally, in the 16th century and all of the 17th a great peak is noted in the portable cretan style, represented mainly by : Michael Damascene, Ganee, Lambardo, Victor, Poulaki, Mosko etc, who however make use by a large degree of elements from the prevailing western art.
On the 18th and 19th century the lay art bloomed, characterized by the expression of the spirit of the era, namely the desire of liberation from the Turkish yoke. The main contributors were Theophilus, George Markus, Zographus etc. The faces are expressed with simple forms, the colours are darker and generally the quality is inferior to the previous centuries. The byzantine art had to large extent disappeared and the western art took hold until the second half of the 20th century. Dionysius from Fourna tried during his time (around the 18th century AD) to bring back the byzantine art but his effort was not fruitful for the flow thus far led to the West. Even at the Holy Mountain they used Western art. Not until 1940-1950 the great Fotis Contoglou after superhuman struggles managed to bring back to light the art of byzantine hagiography and to cultivate a climate of revival of the painting tradition. During our times, the blooming of the byzantine studies, the researches for the byzantine art, the meeting sessions, all created a favourable atmosphere. Contemporary artists having finally gained the necessary knowledge, can and should as an obligation become guardians and undertake the creative continuation of the long tradition that is called the Orthodox hagiography.
The Church, being conscious of the spiritual value and importance of the holy icons as a means of sanctification and communion of the faithful with the depicted archtypes, had them always in high regard, piety and respect. They are regarded and are a significant visual means of teaching a conjectural language of the Church, as the Great Basil said, "the word of history is represented through hearing, while those graphically silent are shown through imitation. In fact the 7th Ecumenical Synod placed the holy icons in the same level as the Bible and the Holy Cross. The topic of the holy icons has occupied the theologians and researchers for centuries, especially in the twentieth century. Truly it is significant to show the importance of the icon and its value to man as a member of the Church. Within this framework let us feel with the tips of the fingers - since the present effort does not constitute a systematic search on the topic - the dogmatic teaching of the Church on the icon, as it is safeguarded in the writings of the Holy Fathers and in the practices of the 7th Ecumenical Synod.
The word "icon" (εικονα) etymologically derives from the verb "ico" (εικω) or "eica" (εοικα) which means "likeness" (or image), namely an imprint of the characteristics of the prototype. This means that an icon does not have its own hypostasis (being) but its value exists in the likeness with the prototype. "For what is imprinted is different from that which is being imprinted" says Saint John Damascene. The icon therefore is the perceptible means between the faithful and the prototype which is invisible to them. Great Basil refers to a distinction between a "natural" and "artificial" icon. Both types of icons have a common known, the likeness of the prototype that they depict. They differ though in this: The likeness of the natural icon to the prototype refers to the essence of the depicted prototype, maintaining the difference in its hypostasis. A characteristic example of a natural icon is the Son and Word of God in relation to God the Father. The Apostle Paul says that "Christ is the icon of the invisible God" (Col 1:15). Namely, the Son is "the identical icon of the Being" as Saint John Damascene mentions, and referred to God the Father as being identical in essence. What makes the Son different to the Father is His hypostasis and specifically the characteristic of being born. On the other side, the artificial icon likens the depicted person in his appearance but differs as of his essence. Since the artificial icon refers only to the appearance of the one depicted, therefore what is depicted is not his nature but the hypostasis of the prototype as mentioned by Saint Theodore Studite: "What is depicted on an icon is not its nature but its hypostasis". This likeness between the icon and the one depicted constitutes the condition of existence of the artificial picture. That is why the Orthodox icons are not a product of the fantasy of every artist but the prototypes (the Lord, the Theotokos, the Saints) are historic personalities with their own individual characteristics. Clearly the Fathers of the 7th Ecumenical Synod observe, "Having seen the Lord, as they saw, so they depicted Him, and having seen James, the brother of the Lord, as they saw him, so they depicted him".
At this point we can refer to how to differentiate an icon from an idol. Two basic points preclude the identity of icon-idol. The first one is the historical existence of the persons depicted and secondly the likeness of the icon with their archtypes. According to Saint Nicephore "the idol is a creation of things that do not exist and have no being". In other words the archtype of an idol is an imaginary being while that of an icon is an existing being. Whatever effort of rendering an icon of the Lord before His incarnation would have been false since there was no prototype. However, after the incarnation of the Word of God we do not speak of an idol since the Lord took on a recognizable human form.
Here the iconomachs (icon resisters, 726- 843AD) erred because they maintained that the icon must be of the same nature as the prototype, otherwise it is an idol. That is why they believed only the Holy Bread and Wine of the Divine Eucharist was an icon of the Lord. For the Orthodox however as L. Uspensky characteristically says, "The Holy Gifts cannot be recognized as an icon of Christ exactly because they are at the same time with Him that is their Prototype". A great influence in the formation of the iconoclastic conscience was based on the creed of Judaism and Mohammedanism with their distinguishing iconless teaching. They even accused the Christians as idolaters and superstitious. Generally the problem of the iconomachs was that they could not understand the world salvific event of the Divine Economy. God became man "so that man become god". Since the icon is a spectacular proof of the Incarnation of the Word of God, therefore the denial of the icon by extension means rejection of the taking of human form through the Holy Spirit by the second member of the Holy Trinity. Jesus Christ put on flesh and blood for our salvation. He gives us the right to draw Him based on His actual human appearance without this meaning that we separate His flesh from His divinity. It follows that if we do not draw the Lord then it is like we deny His human appearance. As mentioned above, the holy Theodore Studite solved this theological problem that the icon depicts not the nature but the hypostasis (being) of the person drawn.
A still significant point for the correct understanding of the Orthodox icon is also the significance provided by the Church to the prototypes of her icons. These prototypes can only be the same historical persons that are drawn and never other unrelated persons as happened in the Western iconography. For those painters who have no rules and boundaries, their work may look like an icon, but it could approach the boundary of blaspheme.
The Great Basil declares that "the veneration of the icon goes to the prototype". Of course here the Saint refers to the relationship of the Son to God the Father, and this position was used also by the 7th Ecumenical Synod that the veneration of the icons is relative and honourable where as the worshipful submission is reserved only to God. Thus in conclusion we agree that the honour of the icon of a saint passes on to the prototype and through the depicted saint it passes on to God.
At this point it is worth mentioning that a possible clumsiness of the hagiograph to accurately produce the characteristics of the depicted person, does not detract from the litugicality of the icon because the veneration of the icon does not refer to the existing imperfections but in the relationship to the depicted person. In other words we are interested with the connection the icon has with its prototype.
A very significant parameter in the topic of the holy icons is the presence of the Holy Spirit in them. Saint John Damascene notes: "the saints and the living were full of the Holy Spirit to their end, the grace of the Holy Spirit undeniably in them in their souls and bodies in their graves and their character and in their holy depictions". Thanks therefore to the presence of the Holy Spirit in their depictions of the prototypes and the Church icons are "Full of the Holy Spirit". Therefore, we should note that the icons are not simple articles of art but they express a spiritual reality, they stress the purpose of a Christian life which is the possession of the Holy Spirit. Of course the existence of the Holy Spirit on the icons is not in essence but charismatic. However, the grace is partaken by the faithful and sanctifies them. When viewing the depicted persons "the sanctification that emanates from the icons happens unawares by the faithful but of course not in a mechanical way. Basic prerequisite for the fruition of sanctity is faith and inner purity with which the faithful approach the depicted saints. The 7th Ecumenical Synod declares: "As I accept and kiss and embrace the holy icons is like an engagement to my salvation". We note therefore that the icons constitute an engagement of the salvation of the faithful due to the participation of sanctification of the faithful through the veneration of the icons.
For this the iconomachs due to their negative position against the icons become God fighters, thus depriving the faithful from a basic possibility for their spiritual perfection.
Roman Catholicism rejecting the distinction between uncreated grace which is untouchable and unapproachable and the uncreated grace of God, which is approachable by the people, left in the sidelines the charismatic presence of God in the icons and consequently the sanctifying character of the icons. This is one of the reasons that the western painters use in their work prototypes unrelated to the depicted ones and in fact many times ethically corrupt ones. Professor D. Tselegidiscorrectly notes that the western art does not constitute the decline of the initiative of the artist but a decline of western theology which reflects the false expression of its ecclesiastic life.
Finally let us also address the spiritual character of the holy icons of the Orthodox Hagiography. This topic becomes more understood if we turn our attention to the purpose of the Orthodox paintings. The Orthodox icon describes the existence of the depicted person eschatologically , expresses the blessedness of the restored in Christ person. When the ever memorable F. Kontoglou was asked why the Byzantine art is not natural, he answered thus: "it is not natural because its intention is not to describe just the natural but also the supernatural".
The Church wishing therefore to bring us into the Kingdom of God, she set aside the physical reality from the holy icons, the depiction of the natural man and tried to teach us the reality and necessity of sanctity. Man is created in the likeness of God. The fallen man dimmed his knowledge of God. However, within the bosom of the Orthodox Church sinful man once again succeeds in his return to the world of blessedness of the restored man, in the restoration according to the icon. These, true flag bearers of the in Christ theosis are the Saints, who succeeded in sanctity to the highest level possible. Orthodox hagiography wishing therefore to render to the primordial beauty, transforms reality, depicts in icon form- as humanly possible- the restored one in the icon as if in a way depicting the Word of God, which is the physical depiction of God the Father. For the above reasons and means of expressing hagiography they followed the Holy Spirit. The physical proportions are not natural - usually the bodies are oblong- we visibly perceive the element of total formation process, the eyes are big, displaying a deep spirituality, being only two dimensional as a basic anti-natural element, use simplicity in the composition, in the forms, as a consequence of ascetic dispositions but also for the central topic to dominate the icon and many more elements which in its fullness expresses the state of its divine grace, the sanctity of the person.
Unfortunately, many contemporary Christians have misunderstood the Orthodox icons as unnatural and ugly. Clearly influenced by the religious paintings of the West, they have difficulty in perceiving the spiritual meaning of the Orthodox art. They avoid the fact that the depicted persons now live in a heavenly and incorruptible place and not in this ephemeral and corrupt place, and they do not consider the word of our Lord who said "What is of the flesh is flesh" while "what is of the spirit is spirit".
Let us conclude this topic by the well aimed theological observations of Fr. Basil Iberite: "The icon comes from far away and it guides us far, to the transcendence of the icon, in the condition beyond the visible and understood, beyond the symbols and depictions. If the icon closed us within the same icon, the scheme, the colour, the esthetic, the history, the created world, it would be an idol and not have been worth all the blood spilled for its restoration. This did not happen. The liturgical icon is the consequence and fruit of the incarnation of the Divine Word and a confession and guide of man's theosis.
In point of fact, the two large branches, the eastern and the Hellenistic are the main factors that acted as catalyst in the creation of this art. In greater detail, Great Alexander and his successors succeeded in the creative union of the ancient Greek art with the already existing eastern one. The fruit of the union is the Hellenistic art. The arrival of Christianity influenced the Hellenistic and in this way brought on the Orthodox painting. Of course the character of the art achieved its full potential in the Byzantium, when Constantinople became the centre of the Byzantine Empire. There happened the selection of the artistic elements of the two worlds (eastern and Hellenistic) and provided the final character to the painting art.
Occasion where we can observe the influence which was incorporated by the byzantine art, are the following.
• - Again in the catacombs the display of seasons, the different personifications (of the sun, sea ) etc are elements of the Hellenistic branch.
• - The Good Shepherd of Ravenna, the monastery of the Nation in Constantinople and a great number of monuments are characteristic examples of Hellenistic influence.
Of course we should mention that apart from the eastern influence much more intense was the influence of the Greek art, of the Greek spirit. Finally we should not omit to mention in a very significant finding in our century, the portraits in the Fagium area. They were discovered in Egypt, west of the Nile and samples exist in our Benakio Museum in Athens. It concerns family portraits and are dated from the 1st to 4rd century AD. They were drawn by Greek artists and has been proved that they formed the coupling link between the ancient Greek art and the byzantine. All these elements and the technical methods we mentioned, Orthodoxy took hold of them, improved them, modified them imparting them a spiritual characteristic so as to enable the expression of the lofty truths of our faith.
These icons are usually drawn on wood and the colours are dissolved in egg yoke. Of course, an icon can be painted on some other surface, such as ceramic, old wood, textile, plaster etc, save the selection of materials be such as not be disdainful to the depicted persons. In the Christian icons we encounter the "burning technique" which was mainly developed in the 6th century AD. In this technique we have mixing of the colours with wax and heating of the surface with a hot iron. When the hot iron is not used but the coloured wax is spread on the wood we have what is called "wax - poured icons".
The "enamel technique" was outstanding in Byzantium. The icon was made on a metallic substrate. With slim wires they drew the outline of the forms (faces etc) and between the wires they poured enamel colours. To this, so called enclosed enamels, are included icons, manuals, holy chalices, relic holders, and other items of fine and detailed work.
In this wall painting category we have two techniques. The first one is the damp drawing or "fresco". In this technique the hagiographer draws on a freshly plastered wall. Only as long as the plaster is still damp the work could succeed because once the plaster is dried no correction can be made. A second technique is the "xerography" (dry drawing). Here we have the mixing of the colours with a sticky substance and the drawing is on a dry wall.
In the mosaics instead of colours, small pieces of marble, stones, ivory, stained glass shards are used. They are called mosaic because the walls of caves dedicated to the Muses were decorated with mosaics. While it is not possible to achieve a soft and gradual transition of colours that are used in painting with mosaics, yet the brightness and liveliness of the mosaics instill in the faithful the feeling of transcendence to a different, more spiritual dimension. The works at Saint Luke in Lebadia, in the New Monastery of Chios, in the Monastery of the Nation etc, are considered classics.
Micrography or miniature is used mainly for decoration of the manuscripts. The detail and perfection of the features in these works is impressive. The manuscript usually is made of parchment and is called illustrated manuscript.
The Greek Hagiographers from Constantinople: They painted during the 11thcentury, following a miracle, the Church of the Dormition of the Theotokos in the famous Monastery of the Cave in Kiev, where they became monks, after the completion of their hagiographic work.
Monk Theophan the Cretan: Top hagiographer of the 16th century and the most significant representative of the Cretan School. Monk Theophan Strelitzas known as Bathas, must have been born in Heraklio in the last fifteen years of the 15thcentury and followed the family profession of painting. At an appropriate age he got married and had two children, Symeon and Nifo-neophytos. Then for some reason- perhaps due to the death of his wife- he became a monk. The first mention of hagiographer Theophan is found in the inscription in the catholicon of the Monastery of Saint Nicholas of Anapafsa at Meteora in 1527. In 1535 he painted the catholicon of the Holy Monastery of Great Lavra at the Holy Mountain, where he settled with his two sons. In 1545, with co-worker his son Symeon, he wall painted the catholicon of the Holy Monastery of Stavronikita. Having lived for quite a few years at the Holy Mountain, he returned to his country Crete where he reposed on the 24th February 1559, the day he prepared his testament. His two sons continued his work.
Photis Kondoglou, faithful child of the Orthodox Church, accomplished hagiographer himself, cause for the rebirth and father of contemporary hagiography, with the following reasons, on one hand, he demonstrates the sanctity of hagiography and on the other he instigates a pious approach to this liturgical art.
"The agiographer is not simply an artist that creates a picture depicting some religious themes, but has a spiritual worthiness and spiritual diaconate which he performs in the church as does the priest and the preacher".
"These early hagiographers would fast while working ....... and while working they would chant, so that their work be done with devout concentration and their mind not wander in the worldly".
"When you decide to start an icon, at first, pray to the Lord to enlighten you in your work, doing the sign of the cross".
In turn we suggest certain prayers we found in some books, to help the contemporary angiographers, through prayer to receive from God the divine enlightenment which is so necessary in their sacred work.
The priest blessing after the "Heavenly King" etc, the Megalynarion (glorification chant) of the Theotokos, the "Alala the lips" and the troparion of the Transfiguration, sealing his head, he says loudly "We supplicate the Lord". And immediately follows with the prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ our God, the indescribable being of Divine nature and for the salvation of man from Your recent inexpressible incarnation from the Virgin and Mother of God Mary, enabling the description of the holy nature of Your immaculate face be imprinted on a handkerchief and with it You healed the disease of the area ruler Augarus and enlightened his soul to the knowledge of our true God and through Your Holy Spirit You described to Your holy Apostle and evangelist Luke the appearance of Your immaculate Mother who carried You as a baby in her bosom and the "The grace granted me was given to them through me" was said. Him, Despota, God of all, enlighten, imbue the soul, the heart, the intellect of Your servant and his hands direct to the irreproachable and perfect outline, the type of Your manifestation and of Your immaculate Mother and all of Your Saints, to Your glory and cheerfulness and beautification of your holy Church and the forgiveness of sins, of those worshiping them and with piety kiss them, attributing the honour to the prototype. Set him free from all diabolical experience and make him diligent to all Your commandments, through the intercessions of Your Immaculate Mother, of the glorious holy apostle and evangelist Luke and of all the Saints. Amen.
Hieromonk Athanasios from Simonopertra Monastery.
Prayer cited by an Hagiograph intending to create an icon.
Despota, Lord Jesus Christ, only Son and Word of God, identical icon of the invisible Father, who created us according to Your image, and for our salvation, philanthropically became incarnate of Your Immaculate Mother and our Lady Theotokos, the most beautiful of all sons of man, and the source of all beauty, both visible and invisible, deigned to make us temples of the Holy Spirit, You who sanctified matter through Your divine economy, who gave to Your immaculate bride, the Church the chromaturgical theology (use of colours in divinity), for the remembrance of Your inexplicable condescension the shoring and sanctifying of Your faithful people, prostrating I pray to You and I beg You to grant me the sinner and unworthy servant, the grace of iconographic diaconate, cleanse my heart of all sinful pollution and write untouchably in her Your All Holy Will, strengthen me from every sickness of the will of my mind and enlighten with the power of Your All Holy Spirit, leading my weak and vile hands in God pleasing completion of the illustration of this Your sacred icon (or of the saint......), so that those who worship and kiss it, do so to You, the prototype beauty, lifting their hearts and minds, gracing and sanctifying them completely, and in joy succeed in the likeness and glorify with all Your pleasing Saints from old, You, the Incarnate Son and Word with Your without beginning Father and the worshipful Spirit, of one essence, indivisible and life giving Trinity. Amen.
Lord Jesus Christ, our God ...... enlighten , make the soul, heart and mind of Your servant and direct his hands to perfectly draw the irreproachable type of your countenance and Your All Immaculate Mother and all Your Saints, to Your glory and to the cheerfulness and beautification of Your Holy Church and the forgiveness of sins of the one who worships them with piety and attributes honour to the prototype shown, set him free of all diabolical experience, and make him diligent in all Your commandments through the intercessions of Your Immaculate Mother, of the Holy glorious evangelist Luke and of all the Saints. Amen. | 2019-04-24T21:52:45Z | http://www.byzarticon.gr/en/theology-of-icon/320-2013-03-18-06-28-39.html |
On our Peru Treks the center piece is the most famous trek of them all, the legendary Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. With our Trek Peru package live your dream adventure in Peru and in the heart of the ancient Inca Empire. Exploring our Peru Machu Picchu trek you will connect with five thousand years of living history on our Peru Adventures tours. Follow the Peru Trail and explore one of the 10 mega diverse countries in the whole world. As you Trek Peru you discover innumerable natural riches, with hundreds of endemic species of fauna and flora.
First of all on your Peru Adventure, we will meet you in Lima as you begin to explore the enchantment of the City of Kings. Now Lima is one of the most premier tourist destination in all South America. On the South Adventure Peru tours your next stop will be Tambopata National Reserve which is, without a doubt, is one of the best places to discover the Amazon. Jungle Trek Peru offers you the opportunity to witness one of the highest levels of biological diversity in the world.
After you experience the wonder of the Amazon, you will hike the epic Peru Inka Trail which is best known worldwide for its history and it connection with Machu Picchu. At the heart of the Andes, Peru has some of the greatest hiking on the continent. Included on our Peru Inca Trail tours is the most famous trail in the world.
If the heart tells you to come to Peru, dare to visit us. With the Travel 1 luxury program you will discover the best of Peru; Lima, Tambopata National Reserve, Cusco, the Inca Trail, Machu Picchu and the sapphire blue Lake Titicaca.
Travel style: Geographic travel, Cultural, Hiking, History and Eco-tourism.
Tambopata National Reserve: Small group service tours.
Airfare within Peru. (Lima–Puerto Maldonado, Puerto Maldonado–Cusco, Juliaca–Lima).
Private transportation from the airports to your hotels (In Lima, Puerto Maldonado, Cusco, & Puno).
Exclusive private transportation service from the train station in Ollantaytambo, Poroy KM 82 and Cusco.
1 tent for every 2 hikers.
Porters of exclusive selection to carry: tents (kitchen, dining room, bathroom), food, tableware, kitchens, tents; and to carry your personal belongings (up to 7 kg per pax).
Round trip Consettur bus in Machu Picchu. Round trip train ticket on Vistadome by Perurail from Ollantaytambo to Aguas Calientes to Urubamba.
Lodging at 4 star hotels for 12 nights at your specified destinations. Buffet breakfast is included.
29 meals: 12 hotel breakfasts, 04 Lunches in Inkaterra, 03 Dinners in Inkaterra, 03 lunches on the Inca Trail, 03 suppers on the Inca Trail, 03 buffet lunches, and 01 a la carte lunch at Cafe Inkaterra on Day 10.
Much of the tours are done in areas of high altitude, so we recommend you be in a healthy physical state. We also recommend that children you travel with be over 11 years of age. Minors under 18 should always travel accompanied by an adult.
Once your flight lands in the city of Lima, our team will give you the most cordial welcome to Peru and will accompany you to the Wyndham Costa Del Sol hotel at the Lima airport.
As most flights from North America & Europe arrive late at night, and your next flight to the heart of the Amazon (Puerto Maldonado – Tambopata National Reserve), departs the next morning, it is much better to stay at the airport. The hotel has anti-noise walls and windows, so that the bustle of cars and planes does not disturb your rest. In this way, you can sleep well and wake up rested and ready to explore the best of Peru on Day 2.
Begin to experience the enchantment of the rainforest as you take a 45-minute boat ride along the Madre de Dios River, to arrive at IRA lodge. After a short briefing, settle into your beautiful cabaña and enjoy your lunch in the dining room. Take a siesta, share a refreshing tea time and get ready for the afternoon excursion.
birds of the daytime give way to species specially adapted to the night. As you enjoy their paradise, you will learn about their habits, while you search for nightjars, owls, capybaras and up to three different caiman species.
that is home to the endangered giant river otter, as well as red howler monkeys, red-bellied macaws, anacondas, side-neck turtles and black caimans. Return to the Inkaterra Reserva Amazonica for lunch.
the sunset from one of the towers. Once at the lodge, enjoy the daily nature presentation in the Eco Center and the Happy Hour.
The free hours of this day, we can also take advantage, to do adventure sports in the jungle, such as: zip line, river rafting and hiking. At the same time, we can also visit our primate friends in the area who are usually happy to have human visitors, as long as we bring them something to eat. Dinner starts at 7:30 p.m.
If you are in the Tambopata National Reserve, it is usual to wake up to the sound of howler monkeys at dawn, as well as birds and parakeets. Enjoy a trip to Gamitana Creek, located 25 minutes by boat from the lodge. For one and a half hours, explore the rainforest along the banks of a winding, dark-water creek that is home to many piranha, caiman, turtles and birds, until the Sanipanga landing point. Navigate your way back downstream, observing the abundant flora and fauna along the way. You will return to Gamitana Farm to do a short guided tour to see how local farmers grow fruits and vegetables. Return to the lodge for lunch.
After lunch, enjoy the Hacienda Concepcion excursion, with over 200 different plant species, and learn about the uses and benefits of local flora. This is followed by a 30 minute canoe trip to look for turtles, sun grebes, nightjars and exotic herons. Return to the lodge for dinner.
After having a truly Amazonian breakfast, we will have free time. Then we will leave, in a boat, downstream towards the city of Puerto Maldonado. On the way we will have the opportunity to take the last pictures of the exuberant jungle. A 45 minute return trip by boat on the Madre de Dios River takes you to Puerto Maldonado, where you will visit the Butterfly House. Peru boasts the greatest variety of butterflies in the world, with 3,700 known species. Many of these can be seen at the Butterfly House, a showcase for the variety, beauty and adaptability of these fascinating insects. After visiting the Butterfly House, we will go directly to the airport, where our suitcases will be waiting for us with a representative of Travel 1. Then we will embark for the city of Cusco.
From Puerto Maldonado, we fly over the Andes to the heart of a thousand-year-old town, the Inca city of Cusco. Your welcome in this land of the Incas will be as warm as the tropical climate of our jungles. Upon arrival you will be assisted by our team to your hotel in the Sacred Valley; The journey to the Sacred Valley is characterized by crossing colorful villages such as the living museum of Awanacancha, Pisaq, Lamay & Urubamba. Finally we arrive at the hotel in the heart of the Sacred Valley, after making the respective check in, you can settle down and take a well-deserved rest after a long trip.
This is a very special day, this is a day off from any schedule or itinerary. You can enjoy the magic of the Sacred Valley in your own style. You can have breakfast any time you want. You can relax in the hotel or explore the vast Ollantaytambo Fortress & the colorful local market of Pisaq. Both places are located in the Sacred Valley and not to far from your hotel.
Very early in the morning, we will pick you up at your hotel and take you to Kilometer 82. Upon arrival at KM 82, you will have breakfast and start your journey on the Inca Trail to Wilkaraqay where we will appreciate the archeological site of Patallacta. This first leg will be relatively easy and will not take more than two hours.
In the morning, before breakfast, our team will serve you a cup of coffee or coca tea.
After breakfast you start walking. The hike this day will be longer. So we’ll start the hike very early. First we will climb of 4 hours to the highest point of our journey: Warmiwañusca (4,215 meters). Then we will descend to the Pacaymayu Valley where we will have lunch. On the route we will appreciate impressive landscapes and the abundant biodiversity of the area.
After lunch we will ascend towards Runcuraccay. Then towards Sayacmarca where we will make a brief stop to observe the magnificent sunset. And finally we will arrive at Chaquicocha, our second campsite.
On this day we will hike the most spectacular stretch of the Inca Trail. First we will walk for two hours towards Phuyupatamarca (3,680 masl) from where we will can see the incredible panoramic beauty of the Vilcabamba Mountain Range. There will be fantastic views of the Urubamba River, and our very first view of Machu Picchu Mountain. Then we will continue our walk towards Wiñay Wayna. At both in Phuyupatamarca and Wiñay Wayna we will have guided tours.
In the evening we will enjoy dinner. After that we will have a farewell ceremony with our porters, because the following day they will leave us very early.
The day we have been waiting for has arrived. This will be the long awaited day when we visit the Incan jewel, Machu Picchu. We will wake up and have breakfast very early. Then we will hike along the last leg of the Inca Trail. After an hour and a half we will reach the Gateway of the Sun, Inti Punku. From here we can look down into the magnificent Sanctuary of Machu Picchu and watch the sun rise over the ruins. It is a 40 minute walk from here down into the Incan citadel itself.
At Machu Picchu we will have a 3 hour private guided tour. Then there will be free time to explore on your own, and to take some fantastic photos. Later we will ride the bus down to Aguas Calientes where we will have lunch. After lunch we can catch the train to Ollantaytambo or Urubamba. From there we will ride in our private van back to our hotel in the Sacred Valley. In your hotel you can rest up after your 4 exciting days of trekking the Inca Trail.
The tour begins in the Sacred Valley. The first place we will visit is Moray, an impressive agricultural center that demonstrates the knowledge of the ancient Inca regarding the adaptation of plants. Here you will see a large complex of circular terraces which historians believe were used to study climatic conditions and to adapt the different types of crops from the jungle and high Andean areas.
As each terrace descends, the surrounding temperature rises noticeably, little by little. The Incas had an extraordinary knowledge of climates and microclimates. During the tour you will have the opportunity to see local farmers and herders working on their farms and cultivating their native products of the area.
After the tour in Moray you will return to Maras and stop momentarily to see the beautiful houses with the coats-of-arms of noble Incas. These town was inhabited by the noble Cusqueños after the Conquest.
Next we travel to the salt mines of Salineras. This is an impressive salt mining complex made up of 3000 small wells which were already producing salt during Inca times and continue producing up until the present.
After the tour in Salineras we will visit the traditional town of Chinchero where you can observe the best weavers of textiles in South America. Then we will visit the archeological site of Chinchero and its colonial church. Once the tour is finished and you have taken some photos, we will continue our tour and return to the capital of the ancient Tahuantinsuyo, Cusco. Upon your arrival you can relax and walk the pre-Columbian streets at night.
The City Tour of Cusco begins with the impressive Colonial Cathedral. This iconic place contains more than 400 paintings from the School of Fine Arts of Cusco, as well as an impressive collection of colonial art. Then we will continue on to visit the Temple of the Sun, the Coricancha. According to the historians, the Incas could only enter this temple barefoot, fasting and with a big load on the back as a sign of humility.
After the tour we will go to the outskirts of the city where we will visit the immense Sacsayhuaman fortress. This is located on the north slope of Cusco. This impressive fortress, consisting of individual stones weighing more than 100 tons, took more than seven decades to complete and is an excellent example of Inca military architecture. Its huge stone walls fascinate all visitors who come to contemplate them.
Then we will go to Quenco amphitheater, a mysterious limestone formation decorated with intricately carved representations of mythical entities. We can also visit the Tambomachay, the baths of the Inca. Before returning to the city of Cusco, we can stop by some local craft markets. This tour lasts approximately 5 hours.
Day 13:Cusco to Puno. "The Route of the Sun Tour"
In the morning, you will have a good breakfast at your hotel. Then you will travel through the Andean highlands a long the route of the sun. The first tourist attraction on the route will be the Temple of Andahuaylillas.
There we will have a guided tour in the church of Saint Peter the Apostle. The walls and ceilings of this churchs are decorated with frescos and paintings coated in gold foil. The next stop will be Raqchi, an important archaeological site. This is where you will see the Temple of Wiracocha. This is a large rectangular structure that measures 92 meters long by 25.5 wide and approximately 9.80m high. During the tour you will not only be able to appreciate the fantastic Incan site, but, at the same time, you will be able to enjoy the tranquility of the picturesque Andean countryside.
Upon your arrival in Sicuani you will have lunch. Then you will continue with your tour and visit the impressive pass of the Raya (4335 masl). This is the highest point of our journey between the Cusco and Puno. The last tourist attraction we visit on this tour is the museum of Pukara. This was an important ceremonial center of the Altiplano. Here, through its sculptures and ceramics we can discover the origin of the Pre-Inca cultures. We will arrive in Puno at about 5:00 pm and will take you to your hotel.
Day 14:Tour to the Floating Islands. "Island of the Uros, Amantani & Taquile"
Enjoy a boat trip on Lake Titicaca, visiting the Floating Islands of the Uros, Amantani and Taquile.
We will start the tour very early. We will come by and pick you up at your hotel. We will head over to the port, board our motor launch, and ride out to the Island of Taquile. We will enjoy a 2 and a half tour of this island which has been ranked as the fourth most beautiful island in the world. Here we will visit the isolated weavers of this ancient community. According to pre-Columbian legend, the Incas actually learned how to weave from the artisans of this island. They are very very skilled. Taquile has been declared to be part of the Cultural Heritage of the World by UNESCO.
We are going to return along the traditional route. We will leave Taquile at around noon and head in the direction of the Chucuito Peninsula. This is the Aymara region of the Lake and represents the communal identity of the Peruvian – Bolivian Altiplano. We will eat a wonderful buffet lunch right there in the community of Luquina Chico.
After breakfast you will have free time to see a little more of the city of Puno. Then we will take you to the Inca Manco Capac international airport of Julaica where you will catch your return flight to the city of Lima. On the way to the airport you can explore the amazing Tombs of Sillustani.
From Juliaca you will fly over the Andes and the Pacific Ocean on your return to Lima. Upon your arrival you will be greeted by our team. Then you will be driven to the most exclusive area in Lima: Miraflores. This will be your last day in Peru. Therefore, we invite you to celebrate it with the local cuisine accompanied by a free Pisco sour.
If you are not ready to go home yet, our team will help you extend your stay in this magical land and in this way you can visit other tourist attractions that you did not get to explore such as: The Nazca Lines , Paracas, Iquitos and the Moche route.
According to the time of your flight, our team will take you to the Jorge Chavez International Airport in the city of Lima. This is where everything starts again: a new adventure, full of many memories, illusions, dreams fulfilled and above all positive energy to continue exploring the best of the world.
Inka Trail, to see the alligators out in the jungle, and to puzzle over the mysteries of Machu Picchu. It was all so affordable too. I couldn´t be happier. | 2019-04-23T02:39:41Z | https://travel1tours.com/en/tour/peru-treks/ |
Get an extra 10% discount by entering the code BCITYPREMIUM and discover the secrets of a unique city.
Valid for bookings and stays until 30/06/2019 in superior category rooms. Not applicable for Flash Sale, Happy Days, Happy Weekends, Happy Nights or last rooms offers.
The Barceló Málaga**** has established itself as one of the best and most modern business hotels in Spain, thanks to its avant-garde design, high-quality services and its excellent location in the city of Malaga. It has direct access to the high-speed AVE train station, enjoys good links to the airport and is just a short walk from the city's main tourist attractions.
Its 221 large, modern rooms are designed in line with the new B-Room concept that ensures that every stay is a unique experience. This hotel has an exclusive and avant-garde design, and boasts one of the most spectacular receptions in the country due to its unique EDHA (Sliding Structure for Daring Humans), an enormous steel slide that directly connects the first floor to the B-Lounge.
In the El Anden restaurant, guests can savour dishes prepared with fresh local produce.
Located on the 8th floor of the hotel and with views of the Malaga skyline is the B-Heaven Relax&Ambience space, where you can relax in the solarium area and pool while enjoying our snacks, soft drinks, salads, cocktails and mixed drinks.
What's more, the hotel was recognised by the magazine Wallpaper as one of the top 50 business hotels in the world, thanks to its 1,500 m2 of conference rooms.
The Barceló Málaga will impress even the most discerning guest, whether with its unbeatable location, its sophisticated design or its magnificent modern facilities. All this ensures an exclusive experience in an avant-garde hotel.
Central location, unbeatable links to the airport and direct access to the María Zambrano train station.
The 1,500 m2 conference centre is split between 16 event rooms and is just 2 km from the Malaga Trade Fair and Congress Centre.
Wallpaper, the famous British architecture and design magazine, has ranked it as one of the top 50 business hotels in the world.
Located on the 8th floor of the hotel with views of the Malaga skyline. During the day you can relax in the solarium are and pool.
The hotel offers free Internet connection throughout its facilities.
CNN chose it as one of the 11 most fun business hotels in the world, thanks to its light-hearted design. Business and pleasure can go hand in hand.
All guests staying at the hotel can make use of the sauna and the state-of-the-art fitness studio, at no additional cost.
Discovering the new and original Barceló B-room concept is just one of the great reasons to stay in one of this hotel's 221 rooms. They are avant-garde, ultra-modern and comfortable spaces, with state-of-the-art equipment.
They are decorated with photos of the city, to give an urban touch to the bedrooms and so that guests can get to know Malaga. They also boast large windows that give an extensive view of the city.
These rooms have an area of 20.80 m2, are spacious, bright and are fully equipped in terms of comfort and technology. They are avant-garde spaces that offer the best facilities to guarantee the best possible level of rest, whether for a holiday or business trip.
They have an attractive desk where you can work comfortably, a sofa and a hydromassage shower or bathtub, all designed to please our guests.
Comfortable and modern rooms with more than 20 m2 of space, perfectly equipped in all regards, with technological features and providing extra comfort. They are triple rooms with a desk, armchair, shower with hydromassage column or hot tub and are designed for families or groups of friends.
They can be connected to another room. The perfect accommodation when visiting the beautiful city of Malaga, thanks to its central location.
3 people (possible combinations: 3 adults; 2 adults and 1 child up to the age of 11).
They consist of 2 adjacent and connecting modern rooms with a total area of 41.60 m2. They are decorated with modern designer furniture and offer a high level of comfort, ensuring the best rest and relaxation for all guests.
The Barceló B-Room concept offers a large space, equipped with first-rate exclusive features to make every stay an unforgettable experience. It is the ideal option for families who do not want to be restricted, or for groups of friends or colleagues on a business trip.
5 people (possible combinations: 2 adults and 3 children up to the age of 11).
Intoxicating luxury in an avant-garde setting is what you will find in these 5 exclusive 35 m2 rooms. Rooms with a separate work area, as well as a hot tub and rain effect shower.
They offer a pillow menu and the tranquillity and quality that Barceló always guarantees. They are rooms where everything has been carefully considered down to the last detail, to make your stay an unforgettable experience.
Please note: this room has a king size bed (twin beds are not possible).
Maximum comfort, designer furniture and high-quality equipment is offered by these rooms with an area of more than 30 m2. Decorated with large images of the city, they have an urban and very contemporary style. They can be connected to other rooms.
These suites provide a unique space where wardrobes, desks and screens separate the different areas of the room, creating different environments in each area. Luxurious rooms for family holidays or business trips.
4 people (possible combinations: 3 adults; 2 adults and 2 children up to the age of 11).
These 5 wonderful, modern rooms are exquisitely decorated in an elegant and avant-garde style. They have a separate living room, complimentary toiletries, a bathroom with a double shower and a hot tub, all in a total area of 42 m2.
A perfect place to stay, close to the beach and a stroll from the centre of Malaga and its many tourist attractions. They are exclusive rooms designed to satisfy the most discerning guests, perfect for business trips or holidays.
Superior with extra bed : Would you like to find out more?
A journey through the kitchens of history.
An adventurous, travelling and international cuisine.
We invite you to take a break.
Feel the heartbeat of the city.
Share it and enjoy its excitement.
The Barceló Málaga offers a new service provided by local guides for travellers seeking to integrate with the culture, fashion, art and gastronomy of Málaga.
For more information visit [email protected] or call +34 952 047 494.
Anyone staying at Barceló Málaga hotel can experience the city like a local.
We introduce them the best guides in Málaga, who in turn share their plans and top VIP experiences with our guests. Fashion, music, dining, art and much more, together with our B-Locals.
With five languages under her belt, her heart is made up of trips and unique recipes that combine traditional Málaga cuisine with the latest international culinary trends. Discovering Málaga’s food scene tastes even better with her.
1. Málaga from terrace to terrace.
Visit the spots with the best views of the city.
2. Sunsets by the sea.
Two places that will take anyone’s breath away as the sun goes down are El Balneario restaurant and its terrace, and Gibralfaro, the highest point in the city.
3. Dive into Málaga's Arab roots.
Stroll along Calle San Agustín, which boasts countless traditional tea parlours, and make your way to the Picasso Museum.
4. Start the day off like one of the city’s residents.
Anyone visiting Málaga should try traditional porras fritters for breakfast at Café Central, churros fritters and chocolate at Casa Aranda, or molletes antequeranos pastries at Café Madrid.
5. The king of all kings, Málaga’s espetos (aka, skewered sardines).
Enjoy this traditional local delicacy at the best chiringuito beach bars on Playa El Palo or Playa de Pedregalejo.
6. Ensaladilla rusa potato salad tasting.
The queen of all tapas is served at Óleo in CAC Málaga Contemporary Art Centre, La Deriva, Taberna La Cosmopolita, Refectorium and Taberna W.
7. Bike tour of Málaga.
Explore the city by starting at the cathedral’s Patio de los Naranjos, make your way through the stately homes and end at Calle Larios for a delicious ice cream at Casa Mira.
Traditional establishments with a historic air that serve the city’s traditional fish and seafood creations accompanied by local wines. The most popular spots are La Casa del Guardia and El Pimpi.
Order fried octopus or battered vegetables at one of the bars in the market. The Antonio y Salomé stall has the widest variety.
10. Art in the Cofradías.
Be sure to catch La Expiración, La Esperanza, Mena and Los Estudiantes to gain a thorough understanding of Easter in Málaga.
The most exciting flavours in Málaga.
Meet up with Loleta to visit some of her favourite restaurants and learn about the flavours, ingredients and cuisine the city has to offer in the form of half portions and local wines. A truly unique experience.
Visiting the lesser-known cultural centres in Málaga accompanied by the inspiration, creativity and art of one of the city’s most acclaimed multidisciplinary creators is a treat only available to our guests.
1. CAC Málaga Contemporany Centre.
Focused on today’s art, this dynamic and innovative museum contains all types of vanguard creations from around the world.
2. Matraca Gallery & Concept Store.
A meeting place created for and by people who love art, design and independent culture. Here, designers share their vision and lifestyle.
A journey through 20th and 21st century art thanks to almost 90 artworks created by distinguished artists such as Francis Bacon, Frida Kahlo and Alberto Giacometti.
4. The Place Soho - Disaster Soho & Art Shampop & Aborigem Tattoo.
A multidisciplinary space for new urban trends that features clothing, footwear, a skate shop, a tattoo parlour, an art gallery and a hair salon for the latest styles and cuts.
Casa Lola tavern serves delicious home-made tapas at reasonable prices, right in the heart of Málaga and in a traditional Spanish atmosphere.
A space where, in addition to displaying and selling paintings, sculptures, comics and prints, visitors can enjoy short films, documentaries, performances and micro-theatre.
Made up of artists, curators and cultural ambassadors, it has areas for courses and workshops, a shop and an art gallery.
Located only a few metres from the Cervantes Theatre, this restaurant combines Japanese and Korean cuisine in a welcoming atmosphere.
Art, design and visual health go hand in hand at this optician’s shop. In this unique and innovative space, eyewear and the latest trends are the main focus.
As a cultural reference on a national level, this cultural centre is filled with exhibitions, concerts and advanced courses taught by Spanish as well as international artists.
The essence of Málaga’s art for our guests.
Leo Peralta creates exclusive digital collages for our guests. Each piece is printed on a high-quality A3 format with the artist’s signature, and the content is based on the guest’s stay in Málaga to create an artistic souvenir of the time spent in the city.
The author of the blog Paradise Closet offers an updated and authentic perspective of Málaga’s tailoring profession in the form of exclusive shops and boutiques, combined with relaxing beauty treatments.
Visit the store-workshop of the designer Yurena Dorta, who creates exclusive tiaras, headpieces, accessories and appliqués for dresses.
2. Automobile and Fashion Museum.
With more than 90 vehicles on display, the Automobile and Fashion Museum also features seven stunning haute couture exhibitions that every fashionista should visit.
Enjoying these face and body treatments in a relaxing atmosphere is the ultimate luxury for the senses.
This charming space focused on women’s fashion showcases Spanish brands and designers. The shop’s originality and pleasant service are its identifying symbols.
One of the best shoe stores in Málaga. The careful designs and amazing quality of these shoes and handbags make this a required stop for people who love sophistication.
Every day brings something new. This is what the multiple showrooms and pop-up stores that are periodically set up in this space have to offer.
A lovely establishment with the best Spanish handicrafts and a special corner where shoppers can treat their taste buds to traditional local products.
This café boasts a healthy menu based on local ingredients as well as vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free alternatives. There is also a bicycle rental service.
The secret of this small tavern lies in its ability to make visitors feel at home. Wines, vermouth and tapas are surrounded by 60s music and a folkloric decor.
Sip on a drink at this terrace overlooking the sea or enjoy sunsets by the Bay of Málaga whilst making your way through the menu of this restaurant.
Go shopping with the personalised advice of Rocío. The experience includes traditional as well as modern brands so guests may find the style that best defines them. All of this, of course, whilst enjoying the best establishments and restaurants in the city.
Autora del blog Travel The Life, Nadia les guiará por los secretos mejor guardados de Málaga a través de sus paseos. De su mano descubrirán las curiosidades y anécdotas de la ciudad, los restaurantes imprescindibles y las actividades que nadie debe perderse cuando se deje caer por la ciudad.
This is the place to experience the true essence of Málaga thanks to the personal cuisine and style of the renowned chef Carlos Caballero.
2. Muelle de Levante Pier.
Take a unique stroll along the Muelle de Levante Pier to La Marina Lounge for a refreshing cocktail and the best views of the city.
Founded in 1942, this shop is without a doubt the place to go for the best souvenirs, traditional products and handicrafts from the province of Málaga and Andalusia.
The perfect spot for relaxation in the heart of Málaga. Enjoy the authentic Hammam Andalusian Arab Baths that will take guests back to the era of Al-Andalus.
Gaze at the historic district from a height of 50 metres and discover the domes along the roof of the manquita, the endearing nickname given to the cathedral by locals.
6. Los Baños del Carmen Spa.
Eastern Málaga is home to the historic Baños del Carmen Spa, which has maintained its special traditional style that dates back to 1918.
7. Subida a la Coracha Gardens.
Walk along the ramps leading to the top of La Coracha and enjoy the amazing gardens as well as one of the city’s most emblematic views.
8. Peñón del Cuervo and La Araña Beaches.
Travel from one beach to the other by foot or on a bike. This unique route includes a number of places for relaxing with a mojito in hand or feasting on a traditional dinner with modern touches.
9. Ventas de Montes de Málaga Inns.
Without leaving the city, you can find inns that serve the traditional Plato de los Montes dish, which consists of fried eggs, chorizo and morcilla sausages, fried potatoes, peppers and seasoned pork.
Located near the top of the Cerrado de Calderón neighbourhood, this restaurant boasts some of the best views of the bay.
The most all-terrain Local. From a fashion show or a stall at the Feria, to a VIP party on Calle Larios or a hidden tavern surrounded by all of Málaga’s glamour. Discovering the city’s best events by his side is an unforgettable experience.
Explore the traditional fisherman’s neighbourhood with its characteristic scent of the sea, eat skewered sardines or enjoy a cocktail at one of the countless terraces in this district.
2. Antigua Casa de Guardia.
Founded in 1840, this emblematic tavern and wine shop is the best place to start off the evening with an order of steamed mussels and a good wine.
This 19th century palace has been transformed into one of the most famous pubs-nightclubs where dancing until dawn is practically a required activity.
Recover from a night on the town with delicious churros and chocolate at one of the best churro fritter shops in Málaga.
Traditional Málaga ajoblanco, Ronda callos tripe stew or fresh Huelva shrimp are some of the specialities served at this tavern that is bursting with Andalusian charm.
From bars like Malafama and La Biblioteca, to nightclubs such as Theatro and Sala Gold, this area is home to countless alternatives for experiencing Málaga’s nightlife scene.
7. Guadalmar and Los Alamos Beaches.
Have fun on the beach and at the liveliest beach clubs west of Málaga. Playa Summer Club and Nuevo & Sur Beach Club are two of the most popular.
The best cocktails at a new bar-restaurant concept in Málaga, featuring a menu inspired by Asian and South American street food creations with traditional touches.
9. Chiringuito Beach Bars in La Malagueta.
Some of the most popular are El Tropicana, El Cachalote, El Caleta Playa, Oasis and El Mami Beach.
This picturesque square deserves at least one visit in order to have a drink on a terrace with views of the Málaga Cathedral.
What happens in the evening stays in the evening.
The goal is to experience Málaga’s nightlife and party scene like a true VIP. Tour the trendiest spots, with VIP access to private areas, drinks included. With first-hand access to special events such as the Feria (Fair), Málaga Film Festival or La Noche en Blanco (White Night), this concept focuses on the top spots for each function.
B-Locals Barceló Málaga Would you like to find out more?
Lola Bernabé – Your Gastro Host Would you like to find out more?
Leo Peralta - Your Art Host Would you like to find out more?
Rocío López - Your Fashion Host Would you like to find out more?
Nadia Gamez - Your Lifestyle Host Would you like to find out more?
Javier Cubo - Your Nightlife Host Would you like to find out more?
La Santa María is an exciting and captivating venue that will be sure to have Malaga buzzing.
This Gastrobar provides an opportunity sit around the table and journey through the kitchens of history. Enjoy an adventurous, globetrotting and international cuisine. Join us on a culinary journey across an ocean of sensations, enjoying typical Malaga recipes with a touch of the New World.
We invite you to take a break, enjoy the excitement and feel the beat of the city.
Located on the 8th floor of the hotel with views of the Malaga skyline.
During the day, you can relax in the solarium area and the pool, while also enjoying our menu of snacks, soft drinks, cocktails and mixed drinks.
B-LikEat is a new healthy, delicious, high-quality experience.
Our buffet is designed to kick-start a healthy, inspirational lifestyle where creative, carefully-planned dishes are prepared using natural, organic products. This breakfast will awaken your most positive emotions.
B-LikEat is the new buffet breakfast created by the Barceló Hotel Group for guests to enjoy a nutritious and healthy meal.
La Santa María Gastrobar Would you like to find out more?
B-Heaven Relax & Ambience Would you like to find out more?
B-LikEat Would you like to find out more?
The hotel has been awarded the TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence 2018 for the sixth consecutive year. A prestigious accolade based on the opinions of its users, who rate our hotel through their reviews.
The Loved by Guests awards from Hotels.com are based on real guest reviews and experiences, awarding and congratulating all those establishments that receive a score higher than four (out of five) from guests. Congratulations for offering exceptional services in 2017!
Once again, the Barceló Málaga hotel has received an award from Booking.com. This award is given to tourist establishments that achieved a rating of more than 8 in 2017. The hotel surpassed this rating with 8.7.
The hotel has recently received the "Recommended on HolidayCheck 2018" award, with a score of 5.6 out of a maximum of 6 based on the comments from guests on this website.
According to Trivago, the online hotel price comparison website, the Barceló Málaga is among the top 10 designer hotels in Spain.
The hotel was recognised with the HolidayCheck Quality Selection Award in 2012. This recognition is especially important, because it is based on the opinions of users who made our hotel stand out through their reviews.
Chosen as one of the 101 most fashionable hotels in the world, according to prestigious magazine Condé Nast Traveller, in 2011.
Hotel was clean and had a nice atmosphere and decor. It is located near to city centre shops, restaurants and bars as well as all the major transport links. The staff were friendly and polite. Breakfast had a good selection and the restaurant was pleasant to dine in. Lovely rooftop bar area to sit at.
We have just returned from 4 night stay in Barcelo Malaga for our 10th wedding anniversary. Hotel staff were very welcoming and we loved the surprise champagne and strawberries that we were given in our room. The hotel is modern with some interesting decor, including the slide down into the bar. We stayed on the top floor and our junior suite was smaller than expected but very clean and comfortable with jacuzzi and a large shower in the bathroom. We did not eat in the hotel but I heard good reports about the breakfast. The roof area is lovely and my husband made good use of the pool and the gym. It is a bit of a walk into the old town or port areas but not too bad, although there are plenty of taxis available which were not expensive. You can also purchase a 24 hour ticket for the hop on hop off tour bus at the main entrance to the train station next door. This costs 20 euro but was a great way to get about the city and I definitely recommend getting off at the castle simply for the views which were amazing. Overall we had a fabulous stay and hope to return again.
Stayed here 3 nights with friends. Room was comfortable though our friends had to be moved when air conditioning didn't work but that was sorted for them after the first night. Breakfast was delicious, though at times they ran out of hot food such as the bacon or the eggs, but lots of fresh fruit, pastries, smoothies, cold meats and cheeses etc. The hotel is 20mins walk from old city centre, but a taxi from station forecourt right next door was just 7 euros. The city centre is beautiful, lots of great places to eat, highly recommended. I would be happy to stay here again.
Excellent service. Rooms are spacious and clean. Great slide in the lobby. Fantastic smoothies at the bar!! The position of the hotel right next to the train station was great. An easy walk into the centre of Malaga. | 2019-04-19T00:54:49Z | https://www.barcelo.com/en-gb/barcelo-hotels/hotels/spain/andalusia/malaga/barcelo-malaga/ |
(Petros Vasiliadis, published in L. Padovese [ed.], Atti del VI Simposio di Efeso su S. Giovani Apostolo, Roma 1966, pp. 39-52).
Concerning the teaching of the Church, whether publicly proclaimed or reserved to members of the household of faith, we have received some from written sources, while others through the apostolic tradition have been given to us in mystery (έν μυστηρίω). With these words St. Basil the Great in his treatise "On the Holy Spirit" has perfectly defined the foundations of our christian faith: Holy Scripture and Worship, apostolic tradition and liturgical experience of the christian self-consciousness, Gospel and Liturgy, in other words Word and Sacrament. Given the great emphasis given in modern times to the eucharistic ecclesiology, especially within the Ecumenical movement, as well as the fact that the traditional Churches (especially the Orthodox and the Catholic) underline the significance of the Sacrament, more precisely of the Eucharist, sometimes over and above the importance for the christian faith of the Word of God, I believe it is necessary and urgent to re-examine in depth the meaning of Eucharist.
The proper understanding of Eucharist has always been a stumbling block in christian theology and life; not only at the start of the christian community when the Church had to struggle against a multitude of mystery cults, but also much later when scholastic theology (mostly in the West) has systematized a latent "sacramentalistic" view of the Holy Mysteries of our Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. In vain distinguished theologians of the East (most notably in the case of Cabassilas) attempted to redefine the christian sacramental theology on the basis of the trinitarian theology. Seen from a modern theological perspective, this was a desperate attempt to reject certain tendencies which overemphasized the importance of Christology at the expense and to the detriment of the importance of the role of the Holy Spirit. The controversy between East and West on the issues of the filioque, the epiclesis etc. are well known, though their consequences to the sacramental theology of the Church have yet to be fully and systematically examined. The tragic consequences of those tendencies were in fact felt a few generations after the final Schism between East and West with the further division of Western Christianity. One of the main focuses during the Reformation, and rightly so, was the "sacramentalistic" understanding of the eucharist in the Western Church, which resulted, among other things, in the departure of the mainstream protestant theology from the early christian sacramental theology. The dialectic opposition between "sacramentantalism" on the one hand, and "the complete rejection of sacraments" on the other, was the main reason of the tragic secularization of our society and the transformation of the Church into a religion, in some cases a cultic, and in other cases a merely proclaiming/ confessing, religion.
In order to figure out the meaning, as well as the real nature and character of the christian sacrament, it is my firm conviction that we should first turn to the Bible. And for our purpose there is no other text more suitable than the Gospel of John. This canonical book of the Bible, at least in its present and completed form, is the first serious attempt at a theological understanding of the meaning of the christian sacrament. Along with the pauline interpretation of Baptism in terms of sharing Christ's death on the cross, the strange and peculiar johannine expression of "eating the flesh of the Son of Man and drinking his blood" (6:54), has become the basis of all subsequent sacramental understanding of the Eucharist in both East and West.
In other words we have only to search for the interpretation and understanding of the Eucharist by the Fourth Evangelist; after all the Eucharist is the "fullness of the mysteries" (Symeon of Thessaloniki); it is also the very expression of the Church, the Sacrament of the Church, which according to N.Cavassilas εν τοις μυστηρίοις σημαίνεται (is designated in the mysteries); but above all in the Gospel of John the Eucharist is presented as a Mystery, and in a mysterious way as the life giving sacrament. The section of the Fourth Gospel which extensively deals with this subject is chapter 6.
Before we speak about this chapter, we need first say a few words concerning the way one can determine the theology of the Fourth Gospel. Today it is unanimously accepted that the Fourth Evangelist approaches the enduring problems of history, of human destiny, death and the salvation of the humankind starting not from anthropology but rather from Christology. Christology in the Fourth Gospel, however, cannot to be understood apart from its Pneumatology, since "the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit" (Jn 14:26), according to the characteristic terminology of John, can be easily defined as the "alter ego" of Christ ("and I will ask my father and he will give you another Paraclete so that he might remain with you always", Jn 14:16) This other Paraclete who "will teach you all things" (Jn. 14:26) is "the Spirit of truth" (Jn 14:17; 15:26; 16:13); and in the final analysis the one that will "guide you into all the truth" (Jn 16:12). Consequently human beings are in communion with "the way, the truth and the life", who is Christ, only through the Holy Spirit, whom he bestows upon the world as a gift of God the Father.
The crucial question, of course, is how and on what condition can one become bearer of the Spirit, according to johannine theology, i.e. how he can be saved. To answer this question modern exegetes are dramatically divided. Conservative scholars insist that according to the johannine theology this can only happen within the Church through the sacraments, whereas liberal critics argue that it is in keeping the word of God and being in communion with Christ that salvation can be accomplished. Both views converge in presenting the johannine ecclesiology just as in the pre-johannine tradition, i.e as an eschatological reality; the only difference perhaps being that in the Fourth Gospel the members of the Christian community (i.e. the Church) are not designated by the current early Christian predicates (Israel of God, saints, a royal priesthood etc., and even Church); the real members of the Church are only those who keep the word of Jesus. In this respect John develops even further the ecumenical character of the Church first expounded by St. Paul (in his Epistle to the Romans [ch. 11]). For this reason the faithful are simply called disciples (Jn 13:35; 15:8 etc.) friends (15:13ff), and are said to be united with Christ just as vine branches are to the vine. (15.1ff). In other words the Church, as in the early Christian tradition, is not perceived as a mere organization with a specific order, but rather as a communion with Christ. The faithful are in communion with Christ, just as Christ is in communion (or to be more exact in unity) with the Father (10:30; 17.21f) when they keep his word, and believe in him who had sent him. They are of the truth when they hear his voice, just as the sheep hear the voice of the good shepherd (10:1ff). All these happen, when they change their lives i.e. when they are born from above (3:3), by the Spirit (3:5f), something which is experienced as an eschatological act and gift of God. This birth by the Spirit, unlike natural birth, is the work of God which no one can control just as so happens to the wind. "The Spirit blows where it wills (and here the evangelist moves from the meaning of the Spirit to that of the wind, since the Greek πνευμα can have both meanings) and you hear its sound but you do not know from where it comes or where it goes. Thus it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit" (3:8). For this reason the proper worship of the community has to be a worship "in spirit and in truth" (4:24).
This extremely charismatic ecclesiological view, which the Fourth Evangelist seems to exhibit, is completed altered in a number of seemingly strong sacramental references (as e.g. vv. 3:5f, with the reference to the rebirth of water and of the Spirit; or v. 19:34, the reference to the flow of blood and water from the pierced side of the crucified Jesus; and above all in the so-called "sacramental" section (vv. 6:51b-58) of the "eucharistic" or "Bread-of-Life" discourse (vv. 30ff), and in fact in the entire sixth chapter).
St. John the Evangelist, although he omits the words of institution of the Eucharist is rightly considered the sacramental theologian par excellence. One can only read carefully the reference to the new commandment of love (13:34-35), and will immediately recall the institution narrative, since the εντολή καινή (new commandment) sounds very similar to the καινή διαθήκη (the new testament) of the synoptic tradition. Furthermore the symbolism of the vine and the branches in the "Farewell Discourse" (ch. 15), the washing of the disciples feet (ch. 13), which actually replaces the synoptic account of the Institution of the Eucharist, the aforementioned flow of blood and water from the pierced side of the crucified Jesus (19:34) and above all Chapter 6 with its "Eucharistic Discourse" (especially 6:51b-58); they all make the sacramental, or rather eucharistic, character of the Fourth Gospel more than inescapable. Not to mention, of course, the miraculous change of the water into wine at the Wedding in Cana (2:1-11) at the outset of Jesus' earthly ministry, as well as many other cases. The issue at stake, however, is whether this sacramental dimension, and more precisely the johannine understanding of the Holy Mysteries of initiation, is at all related to the "sacramentalistic" views of the ancient, contemporary to the early Church, Hellenistic Mystery Cults.
Coming back to the narratives in the sixth chapter we must note that the entire section consists of corresponding smaller units, which are linked together through their sacramental/eucharistic point of reference. Only the passage of the walking of Jesus on the lake of Genesaret (6:16-21) seems to be outside this scheme. This is probably due to the fact that this very unit was preserved in the earlier synoptic tradition (Mk 6:30-52 = Mt 14:13-27) coupled with the account of the multiplication of loaves. At any rate, the entire eucharistic discourse on the "bread of life" (6:22ff) is actually a continuation of, and a commentary on, the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand (which by the way had already in the synoptic tradition been given an accented eucharistic dimension [Mk. 6:41]).
Reading carefully through the entire johannine eucharistic discourse (6:22-71) we are struck by the dramatic change of vocabulary and content in vv. 52-58, the transition point being v.51b, where a more direct and clear sacramental symbolism appears. Whereas the eucharistic motifs previously played only a secondary role, from 6:51b onward they become the predominant and eventually the exclusive subject. Faith in Christ is no longer spoken of as a basic presupposition for eternal life ("he who believes in me has eternal life. I am the bread of life 6.47-48; see also 6.35); eternal life now is linked with the sacramental eating of the flesh and the drinking of the blood of Christ (truly truly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you will not have life in yourselves. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life....he who eats me, shall live by me" 6:54f, 57; cf. also 6:56). I do not propose to proceed to an enumeration of similar quite sound arguments, evidenced in the text itself, which lent support to the hypothesis of an editor/redactor of the Fourth Gospel.
(a) The allegorical interpretation, which holds that Jesus was exclusively speaking about faith in his person, and that verses 51b-58 refer to this faith without alluding in any way to the eucharist.
(b) The realistic interpretation, which asserts that Jesus was solely speaking about the eucharist. This is clearly foreshadowed in the account of the multiplication of loaves and the feeding of the five thousand. The sacramental part of the eucharistic discourse in verses 51b-58 is nothing but the confirmation of this foreshadowing.
(c) Since both the above theories no doubt oversimplify the problem of the sixth chapter's philological unity, another theory has been suggested, which gained wide support, at least in Europe, that of the editor/redactor. According to this theory vv. 51-58 are an interpolation by a later ecclesiastical redactor in order to harmonize the johannine teaching to the ignatian eucharistic understanding. For Bultmann the original author of the Fourth Gospel, while not manifesting any anti-sacramental polemic, nevertheless, certainly maintains a critical and at the very least a cautious stand regarding the sacraments.
(d) As a reaction to this theory a number of scholars suggested the theory of successive teachings of Jesus on faith and on eucharist, the former, however, being given such prominence that almost eliminated the latter. But this theory, too, cannot be accepted, even by conservative exegetes. M.-J. Lagrange e.g. felt it necessary to speak of different subject matter to different audiences; whereas J.Jeremias has advanced the hypothesis of a pre-johannine discourse in verses 51b-58, which the evangelist incorporated into his main "bread of life" eucharistic discourse (6:30-50).
(e) Some scholars have pointed to the strong incarnational motifs of the Fourth Gospel and suggested that the author of the Gospel understood the eucharist as a testimony to the reality of Jesus' human nature. One finds this same idea in the account of the washing of the disciples' feet at the Last Supper. Whereas the Synoptic Evangelists describe the eucharistic words of Christ in this context, the Fourth Evangelist sets forth the example of Christ's extreme humility. In this way he is attempting to emphasize the theological meaning which must be present in the eucharistic-liturgical praxis of the church.
(f) Another group of scholars desperately attempted to harmonize all those divergent views by maintaining that in the sixth chapter John is treating neither just one only of the Church's perennial teachings, i.e. faith or the eucharist, nor both of them in a successive manner; he rather speaks on both of them simultaneously in terms of mutual causality of faith and sacrament. A. Feuillet e.g. mainly based his argument on the results of the important study of P.Borgen, who in his book Bread from Heaven argued that the entire sixth chapter of John, including the sacramental section, can be explained as a word-by-word midrashic exegesis of the Feeding-of-the-5.000 miracle on the basis of Psalm 78 (77 LXX). Feuillet pointed out that the essence of Jesus' teaching in the sixth chapter indeed originates in the historical Jesus and was actually based on the Old Testament typological references (manna, messianic banquet, and the sophiological meal); but it was John who embellished this historical account with interpretative observations and comments, which he believed necessary, given the liturgical/eucharistic practice of his community. H.Schurmann, on the other hand, who subjected the entire chapter to a strict critical analysis, came to the conclusion that the final unit of the chapter (vv. 60-71), where the crisis which erupted in the community is described, is connected to the teaching on the bread of life in vv. 26-51. The intermediate discourse (vv 51b-58), i.e. the sacramental part of the eucharistic discourse, which is in between, is not a later interpolation, but was purposely supplied by the author as a "parenthesis" in order to elucidate the deeper significance of the Eucharist. The mystery of the eucharistic praxis of the Church, Schurmann argued, is not exclusively an extension of the saving event of the incarnation. It sustains, of course, the faith of the "here and now" of the incarnation, yet it is also something more: it is the communion of love, sacrifice, offering and thanksgiving as well as the representation of the salvation event. Thus, faith is not suppressed by sacrament; it is its presupposition, and the latter is essentially an act of faith.
(g) Finally quite recently J.M.Perry has advanced yet another theory on "The Evolution of the Johannine Eucharist", as he entitled his article. He believes that the apparent discrepancies in ch.6 can be satisfactorily solved if we accept a legitimate development in the history of the johannine community from a non sacramental to a sacramental understanding of Eucharist. At the beginning, as it is evident in the miracle of the multiplication of loaves (6:1-15), the Eucharist was perceived in terms of the manna typology as an exclusively eschatological celebration of joy. The Bread-of-Life discourse (6:21-51a) was added at a later stage to equip the community with a theological response of a midrashic/polemic kind underlining the significance of the Eucharistic bread as a sign of the life giving word of God mediated definitely through the Risen Lord. This resurrection-oriented understanding of the Eucharist, acquired (after interaction with the pauline communities) also cross and passion sacramental elements, evident in vv.51b-58, a process which "altered but did not eliminate the original eschatological character of (the community's) Eucharist". It was this re-orientation of the eucharistic understanding, Dr Perry argues, that caused the crisis in the community (cf. 6:60-66; also 10:16).
All these scholarly attempts to solve the problems of the literary unity of Jn ch. 6 have certainly shed some light to the theological understanding of johannine Eucharist and of the johannine Sacrament in general. No doubt, it is worth undergoing any kind of critical scrutiny for a biblical passage such as Jn 6, which in view of its unquestionable canonicity is the first serious attempt to approach the eucharistic experience of the Early Church from a theological perspective. If the Synoptic gospels and the epistles of Paul have preserved the details of the liturgical praxis of the Church in a soteriological/sacramental way, it is John who answers the question of this liturgical praxis' nature, its profound meaning and the consequences of participating in it.
However, from the above short and fragmentary presentation of modern research on the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, one cannot escape the impression that the old problematic of the scholastic period, as well as that of the subsequent reformation, concerning the nature of the Eucharist and of the sacraments in general, is more than evident. The great change in sacramental theology and the understanding of the Eucharist that has taken place in Western Christianity especially since the twelfth century, is still there. That is why a widely accepted scholarly view on the issue, from all christian quarters (orthodox, catholic and protestant alike), has yet to be reached. According to the distinguished British scholar C.K.Barrett, specialist in the johannine literature, "what John means by eating and drinking the Son of Man's flesh and blood is a question that still has to be answered". Without arguing that similar sacramentalistic phenomena did not appear in the East, we can say with a fair amount of objectivity that they never had a catalytic effect on Eastern theology. In the remaining time we shall examine this alleged sacramentalistic interpolation, that seemingly destroys the extreme charismatic ecclesiology of the Gospel of John, without the above preoccupations.
In my view the entire section can be reduced to the well known and oft repeated v. 6:56: He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him, a verse which in fact summarizes the entire sacramental part of the johannine eucharistic discourse, and is widely used in both eastern and western liturgical life. The most crucial point for critical understanding of this passage - which calls to mind the words of institution of the earlier pauline (I Cor 11:23-26) and synoptic traditions (Mk 14:22-25=Mt 26:26-29=Lk 22:14-20) - is not merely the fact that the terminology used, especially the expression referring to the eating of flesh, is according to the Old Testament standard beliefs (Ps 26:2) an enemy action. We have now learned that this expression in the syriac/aramaic tradition eventually came to refer to the devil himself. The most crucial point is the replacement by the author of the 4th Gospel of the traditional eucharistic term "body" (a term with specific ecclesiological connotations expressed in the pauline image of the Church as the "body of Christ"), with the expression "eating the flesh", an expression with heavy and intense mystery (magical) connotation. The explanation, which some scholars tried to give in the past, i.e. that no hebrew or aramaic word exists to render the term "body" as understood in the New Testament, proved inadequate. In other words, the suggestion that Jesus used at the Last Supper the expression "take eat this is my flesh is most unlikely. In addition, the term "flesh" in all other christological usages in John is always associated with the incarnation (cf. e.g. "and the word became flesh and dwelt among us" Jn 1:14). In the Gospel of John we find a more direct correlation of the Sacrament of the Church (the community's eucharistic fellowship) with the "mystery" of the incarnation, than in the earlier christian tradition. After all the johannine tradition has admittedly an anti-docetic character.
Therefore, if we are to offer a sound explanation, we have to search elsewhere. First of all it is quite evident that in John we have a life-oriented understanding of the Eucharist, which without loosing its connection with Jesus' death (see 19:34), it is essentially distanced from death and associated rather with life (the bread that I will give is my flesh which I will give for the life of the world , 6:51 see also 6:33,58). The antithesis between bread and manna illustrates perfectly this fact; for whereas the Jews who had eaten the manna in the desert died, those who partake of the true bread will have life eternal (6:58,33).
Of course phrases, such as "he who hears my word and believes the one who sent me has eternal life (5:24), which recur many times in John (cf.3:36; 11:25; 8:12) would definitely lead to the conclusion that the original johannine understanding of the Eucharist is beyond the sacramentalistic (magical in the final analysis) and the mystical (syncretistic) conceptions, which underlay the hellenistic mystery rites. Without denying a sacramental nuance in the verse under consideration, we can argue that what makes it (and by extension the entire sacramental section 51b-58) also incompatible with similar views, is in fact its immediate context. And first the accompanying phrase: "he will abide in me and I in him" (Jn. 6:56). With this phrase, which denotes an unbroken relationship, communion and abiding presence of God, the author of the Fourth Gospel surpasses both the hellenistic concept of "ecstasy", and at the same time the classical conception of judaic prophecy; for he transforms the eschatological expectation from a future event to a present reality. But at the same time he avoids any trace of pantheism, since there is no hint to the idea of "identification" of the initiate with the deity, which was the principal teaching of all current mystery cults. In addition, if one connects this fundamental eucharistic logion of John with the next verse (6:57), one will easily come to the conclusion that in John we have the beginnings of what has become axiomatic in Christian (especially Orthodox) theology: To have eternal life - in other words to live in a true and authentic way and not just live a conventional life - one has to be in communion with Christ. Communion with Christ, however, means participation in the perfect communion, which exists within the Holy Trinity between the Father and the Son ("Just as the living Father sent me, and I live through the Father, he who eats me will live through me 6:57). What we have here in John, is in fact a parallel expression to the classic statement of II Peter "θείας φύσεως κοινωνοί" (partakers of the divine nature, 1:4), which has become in later patristic literature the biblical foundation of the doctrine of divinization (θέωσις). In the case of the Gospel of John, however, this idea is expressed in a more descriptive and less abstract way that in II Peter. If we now take this argument a little further, we can say that johannine theology more fully develops the earlier interpretation of the Eucharist as the continually repeated act of sealing the "new covenant" of God with his new people. This interpretation is evidenced in the synoptic and pauline tradition, although there the covenantal interpretation of Jesus' death in the phrase "this is my blood of the covenant" (Mk 14:24 par and I Cor 11:25), is somewhat hidden by the soteriological formula "which is shed for you" (ibid.).
What comes out of this understanding of the Eucharist by John with its more direct emphasis on the idea of the covenant and of the communion, is the transformation of Jeremiah's vision - which was at the same time also a promise - from a marginal to a central feature. Just as in the book of Jeremiah, so also in John it is the ideas of a new covenant, of communion, and of the Church as a people , that are most strongly emphasized. Listen to what the prophet was saying: "and I will make a covenant. . . a new covenant", 38:31; and "I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord....and they shall be unto me a people", 24:7).
This covenantal dimension of Eucharist, however, is not the only feature emphasized in the Gospel of John. The pericope of the Washing of the Disciples Feet (13:1-20) reveals yet another dimension. The incident in question, which is preserved only by the St. John, is placed in the context of the Last Supper, and in direct connection with Judas betrayal; in other words, exactly in the place the Synoptic Gospels have recorded the so-called dominical sayings of the institution of the Eucharist (Mark 14: 22-25 par). Given John s almost certain knowledge of the synoptic tradition, one can fairly argue that he has actually replaced the account of the Institution of the Eucharist by the symbolic act of Jesus washing his disciples feet. If so, the Eucharist is understood by the 4th Evagelist, also as an act of diakonia, humility and sharing with radical social implications; in other words an act of social diakonia. Cultural anthropology has shown that in Jesus contemporary society the washing of a disciples feet was not merely the ultimate act of humble and kenotic diakonia, but a act of social behaviour. In fact, as A.Destro-M.Pesce have argued, In the 4th Gospel the incident is a rite of inversion of roles within the society.
If any conclusion is to be drawn from the above analysis of the johannine eucharistic understanding, this is an affirmation of the ecclesial and diaconal dimension of the christian Sacraments and of the Eucharist as a communion event and not an act of personal devotion; an expression of the Church as the people (laos) and household (oikos) of God and as the Body of Christ mystically united with its head and a proleptic manifestation of the Kingdom to come, and not a mere cultic and/or witnessing institution; an act of social diakonia and sharing, and not a sacramentalistic quasi-maginal rite. More precisely, the eucharistic theology of the Gospel of John is beyond any notion related to sacramental practices of the ancient Mystery cults. The Eucharist as the unique and primary Sacrament of the Church cannot be related to "sacramentalism"; it is rather an expression of the communion of the people of God, that radically transcends (and transforms) the conventional social values, roles and structures, which in turn is a reflection of the communion that exists between the persons of the Holy Trinity. Just as Paul in his epistle to the Romans (see Rom 6:3-11) contends with the magical/sacramentalistic understanding of baptism, and for that reason he stresses the moral obligations of the believer and exhorts them to "walk in newness of life", 6:4 and "no longer be enslaved to sin 6:6), in a similar way the Fourth Evangelist goes beyond a analogous magical/sacramentalistic conception of the Eucharist, the other major sacrament of christian initiation.
St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit 27, PG vol 32, cl 188. Cf. also J.Petrou, The Unity and the Breaking of the Communion of Faithful according to S.Basil , Thessaloniki 1983 (in Greek).
It is worth noting that most of the responses from the Orthodox Churches to the Lima document (BEM) underline the need for further examination of the significance of the christian understanding of the sacrament. See also Th.FitzGerald, "Faith, Sacraments, and the Unity of the Church: The Text and a Response," GOTR 34 (1989) 151-166.
Cf. my "Orthodox Theology Facing the 21st Century," GOTR 34 (1990) 139-150; also my "Orthodoxy and the West," Orthodoxy at the Crossroad, 1992, 91-126.
Unfortunately, this mounting sacramentalism of medieval Catholicism has also influenced Eastern Christianity, if not in theology at least certainly in piety and liturgical practice. (More on this in my "Orthodoxy and Liturgical Renewal," Lex Orandi. Studies of Liturgical Theology, 1994, 57-68).
See the interesting article by M.E.Brikman, "Creation and Sacrament,"Exchange 19 (1990) 208-216, where a suggestion is made that the Orthodox understanding of Mysteries, if properly applied to all aspects of life, may lead us out of the dead locks and dillemas of the western sacramental theology, and the shortcomings of the conventional creation theology.
According to C.H.Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, 1953, the hypothesis of two divergent views, one sacramentalistic and the other mystical, does not help to grasp the theology of the text as we have it today (p.342 n.3).
Bultmann's presentation of the johannine theology on the basis of an existential interpretation of the N.T. (i.e. presenting theology as anthropology), has not been widely accepted by contemporary biblical scholarship; contrary to the impact which this prominent New Testament scholar made through his formulation of the pauline theology.
E.Lohse, Grundrisse der neutestamentlichen Theologie, 1974 (all references here are from the Greek tr, 1980, pp. 184ff. Cf. however the interesting essay of C.K.Barrett, "Christocentric or Theocentric? Observations on the Theological Method of the Fourth Gospel,"Essays on John, 1982 pp. 1-18.
In later patristic theology the neutral εν εσμεν was taken to mean unity in essence (ουσία) but not in substance (υπόστασις).
I. de la Potterie has brought to my attention, on the basis mainly of the very early patristic tradition in both East and West, the possibility of interpreting the entire verse pneumatologically, i.e. without reference to at all to the wind (cf. also his Nascere dall aqua e nascere dallo Spirito. Il teato battesimale di Giovanni 3,5 in I. de la Potterie-S.Lyonnet, La vita secondo lo Spirito. Condizione del cristiano, ³1992 [revised edition translated from the original French book La vie selon l Esprit, condition du chrétien, 1965], pp. 35-74).
Cf. O.Cullmann, Les Sacraments dans l'Evangile Johannique 1951, incorporated in his Early Christian Worship, 1953. The rediscovery of the sacramental characteristics in St. John's Gospel has in fact a long history in modern biblical scholarship: cf. S.Smalley, Liturgy and Sacrament in the Fourth Gospel, EvQ 29 (1957) 159-170; C.T.Craig, Sacramental Interest in the Fourth Gospel, JBL 58 (1939) 31-41; also J.M.Creed, Sacraments in the Fourth Gospel,The Modern Churchman 16 (1926) 363-372.
More on this in A.Dalbesio, La concezione giovannea di comandamento quale anima della morale christiana, in this volume.
For a connection between the new commendment and the Eucharist cf. D.Cancian, Nuovo commandamento, nuova alleanza, eucaristia. Nell interpretazione del capitolo 13 del Vangelo di Giovanni, 1978, pp. 168-250.
S.Agouridis, Why was Christ Crucified? Interpretations of Christ's Death by the N.T. Authors, 1990 (in Greek), p.56.
According to R.E.Brown, "The Eucharist and Baptism in St. John," Proceedings of the Society of Catholic College Teachers of Sacred Doctrine 8 (1962) 14-37, the correct understanding of the johannine mysteriology very much depends on the proper understanding of ch. 6 (and ch.3).
For a different view on this issue see among others E.D.Johnston, "The Johannine Version of the Feeding of the Five Thousand - an Independent Tradition?" NTS 8 (1962) 151-154.
Cf. however G.H.Boobyer, "The Eucharistic Interpretation of the Miracles of the Loaves in Mark's Gospel," JTS n.s. 3 (1952) 161-171, who suggested that Mark understood the miracle symbolically, but not eucharistically.
L.Goppelt, "τρώγω" TDNT vol VIII, pp.236f.
R.Bultmann's school is the main proponent of this view (cf. his commentary, The Gospel of John, p.218ff; G.Bornkamm, "Die eucharistische Rede im Johannes-Evangelium," ZNW 47 161-169, and others; more on this theory below). E.Ruckstuhl, Die literarische Einheit des Johannes-Evangeliums, 1951, pp. 220-271, has argued against this theory on literary grounds; cf. also J.Racette, "L'unité du discours sur le pain de vie (Jean VI),"SciencEccl 9 (1957) 82-85.
More on this in J.Z.Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religion of Late Antiquity, 1990.
K.Lake, Modern Churchman 11 (1921-22), p.237; also his, The Earlier Epistles of S. Paul: The Motive and Origin, 1911; idem, Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity, 1920. Cf. H.A.A. Kennedy, St. Paul and the Mystery Religions, 1913.
J.A.Faulkner, "Did Mystery Religions Influence the Apostolic Christianity," MethQuartRev 73 (1924) 387-403, p. 397; and idem, "Did Ancient Christianity Borrow from the Mystery Religions," ibid., 266-278, p. 274.
A similar classification of current scholarly views has been suggested by X.Léon Dufour, "Le mystère du Pain de Vie (Jean VI)," RechSciRel 46 (1958) 481-523. For a history of interpretation see also C.R.Koester, "John Six and the Lord's Supper," Lutheran Quarterly n.s. 4 (1990) 419-437.
Cf. among others H.Odeberg,The Fourth Gospel in its Relation to the Contemporaneous Currents in Palestine and the Hellenistic-Oriental World, 19292; A. Schlatter, Der Evangelist Johannes. Wie er spricht, denkt und glaubt, 19302; H. Strathmann, Das Evangelium nach Johannes, 1955.
The main proponents of this theory are O.Cullmann, Urchristentum und Gottesdienst, 1944 and its translation into English The Early Christian Worship; and J.Bonsirven, "Hoc est corpus meum," Biblica 29 (1948) 205-219.
Cf. among others J.Wellhausen, Das Evangelium Johannis 1908; R. Bultmann, The Gospel of John, p.218ff; G.Bornkamm, "Die eucharistische Rede..,"; and E.Lohse, "Wort und Sacrament im Johannesevangelium," NTS 7 (1961) 110-125.
R.Bultmann, Theology II, p. 59.
Among others E.Schweizer, "Das johanneische Zeugnis vom Herrenmahl," Neotestamentica1963, pp. 371-373; idem, EGO EIMI. Die religionsgeschichtliche Herrkunft und theologische Bedeutung der johanneischen Bildreden, 1939; P.-H. Menoud, "Les études johanniques de Bultmann `a Barrett," L' Evangile de Jean, 1958, pp. 11-40; D. Mollat, "Le Chapitre VIe de Saint Jean," LumVie 31 (1957) 107-119.
Evangile selon St. Jean, 19273, ad loc..
J.Jeremias, "Joh 6,51c-58 - redaktionell?" ZNW 44 (1953) 256ff.
R.E.Brown, The Gospel According to John, vol.I, 1966, ad loc, who nevertheless believes, as another Roman Catholic also does (R.Schnackenburg, The Gospel According to St. John, vol.II, engl. tr., 1980, ad loc) that vv. 52-58 were added later by the final redactor; G.H.C.MacGregor, "The Eucharist in the Fourth Gospel," NTS 9 (1963) 111-119; O.S.Brooks, "The Johannine Eucharist. Another Interpretation, JBL 82 (1963) 293-300.
According to MacGregor (see previous n.) e.g.in order to fully understand the unique approach of John to the "mystery" we need take in to account the peculiar characteristics of his theology (incarnation, "the word became flesh", eternal life acquired through faith and sacraments, emphasis on life instead of death, hence the phrase "for the life of the world" [6:51] and the preference to symbolisms and references to life), as well as the pressing issues of his community when he wrote his Gospel (rejection of the Eucharist by the Jews and the danger of the infiltration of sacramentalistic/magical ideas into the christian rite). John's views are presented in some details to address these problems. Cf. also his Eucharistic Origins, 1928.
X. Léon-Dufour, "Le Mystère du Pain..,"; A Feuillet, "Les thémes bibliques majeurs du discours sur le pain de vie (jn 6). Contribution a l' étude de la pansée johannique," NRT 82 (1960), pp. 803ff; H. Schürmann, "Die Eucharistie als Repräsentation und Application des Heilsgeschehens nach Joh 6. 53-58," TrThZeit 68 (1959) 108-118.
According to P.Borgen, Bread from Heaven, 1965 (cf. also his article "Unity of the Discourse in John 6," ZNW 50 277-78), the entire unit 6:49-58 is to be read as a midrashic interpretation to v. 6:31 "he gave them bread from heaven to eat" (Ps 78:24). | 2019-04-24T14:17:52Z | http://www.apostoliki-diakonia.gr/bible/bible.asp?contents=new_testament/contents_kainodiathikika.asp&main=kainodiathikika&file=5.1.htm |
The Board of Directors met in Alleghany yesterday for its fall meeting, from noon to 4:30 pm. The financial and mine status were reviewed. We have about 100 tons of gold concentrates stored in 55 gallon drums. Assays are not exact because just like the mine, the mill produces gold cons according to the grade of the head ore. In mining this can be referred to as the nuggeting affect. Occasionally unscrupulous companies will announce assay figures ignoring to mention potential uncertainties of projecting the amount of gold based on assay results. We see it all the time in publications announcing drill results. Any real high-grade gold mine knows that its ore or concentrates are difficult to place dollar amounts with confidence. Having said this, we estimate the cons may contain $150,000. Barrack’s operation in Nevada will process the material, so the cost of transportation plus refining will reduce the net amount to the company. Mike plans to arrange shipping once the concentrates have been moved from the mill site to the county road.
The board accepted Steve Wilson’s resignation. Scott, Dan and Mike discussed what experience and skills would best serve the company in the future. Steve brought solid stock market talent to the company and helped us design the OAU X mart.
Years ago one of the houses in town was built over the boundary on company property. Also the mining family had expanded its yard beyond its property line. The heirs are selling the house and asked for a way to solve the problem. They and their agent presented a proposal, which we agree will solve the problem and create a very nice parcel. The amount of compensation will depend on the square footage but is not significant.
1. Open an heretofore-inaccessible area for exploration.
3. Place Company on one or more Public Markets.
4. Build a new Gold Detector.
5. Working capital including preparation of a Public Offering.
Before further stock offering are approved, the results of mining in the inaccessible area must be evaluated. We are cautiously optimistic that these veins contain scattered high-grade pockets, which will be detected by modern technology currently utilized at the mine.
The directors held a lengthy discussion about the damages the Company suffered because of the reckless activities of the California District Attorney Association. Several attorneys have reviewed the issues and presented a convincing argument both legal and factual as to the process. No decision was made to proceed with a suit for damages or to abandon this heading. The contemplated lawsuit is similar to the mining of high-grade pockets at the Sixteen To One mine.
The gold collection is back in Grass Valley. The Ketchum display was limited to about half of the pieces in the collection. We have yet to put the entire collection on display. It will be a fun project to show all 116 pieces in one location. Any ideas on a good site?
So far no action from PG&E. Rather than repair the electric compressor we are putting our old diesel compressor back online.
We also have a diesel generator that will be adequate for running the pumps. One of our main objectives is to keep the lower levels of the mine dry.
David and Larry Cates (father and son) continue to break rock. We all know that one good pocket (doesn't have to be big by this mine's standards) of grade A quartz and gold slab material will go a long ways towards reducing our debt. The demand (for slab) is much higher than the supply. The tenacity of those who work here is what has kept this operation going. It is always easy for bystanders to judge other's decisions, but we all do the best we can under the circumstances. Our hats go off to the men who have labored hard looking for that elusive pocket! None of them doubt that it is there.
Roy will be busy building new ladders for the 49 winze for the next couple weeks. The new ladders will be metal, which lasts much longer than wood.
A meeting of the Board of Directors is scheduled for tomorrow.
It sounds to me that we are sinking deeper into the abyss with the passing of time.
It is becoming clearer every day that the Company's choices will utimately be assigned to its creditors thus relieving the indecision by the Board from making their painful but responsible decisions.
Our electricity provider, P.G.&E, notified us today it would turn off our power due to the outstanding bill. This has been its option for some time. We got behind for several reasons: the increase in kilowatt hour charges, the high cost for use between noon and late afternoon, our inefficient pumping system, and the decline in production of gold.
We hope P.G.&E. will realize that mining created the revenue and usage for its initial foundation, and the Sixteen To One mine has used its power for almost a century without reneging on any amount of money owed to the electrical provider. We hope someone in the company extends a little more time for us to work ourselves free from the financial hard times we have endured. The bill is $79,000. During P.G.& E’s bankruptcy, a lawyer who provided three months of advice sent the bankruptcy court a $300,000 bill.
The Sierra County Historical Society has an event at the mine site this Sunday. Rae and Mike will volunteer their time to show them around.
Friday the motor on the air compressor burned up. Roy and Ian are figuring out our best option for fixing it.
A good time was had in Alleghany yesterday into the night. Approx. 400 people showed up for Old Alleghany Days. Mark your calendar for Sat. Aug. 14th for next year's event. (We are going to try and stick to the second Saturday in August for this annual event) If you want to be added to the mailing list send an e-mail using the feed-back form on this site stating that you want to be added with your name and address.
We were sad to hear of Johnny Cash's death this morning.
The steam cleaner at the mine-site has been broken for some time. Joe managed to get it fixed yesterday, turned out to be the wiring.
Following are the introduction and conclusion of the post hearing brief. (77 pages of explanation in-between not included).
On November 6, 2000, a miner died. As a result of this tragedy both State and Federal agencies ran amuck by casting blame on his friends and fellow workers. This company and its miners reflect the true intent of the United States Congress, when it ratified The Act of 1977, which requires the responsibility of the operator and its miners to create and maintain a safe work environment. The corporation is merely the means to unite the components of labor, property and capital. A dear friend was lost, a son, a brother and a good soul. Let’s put this in perspective. What is this all about? Is it fixing problems at the Sixteen to One mine or is it work for MSHA and other agencies of the Federal government? Perhaps it is about money or individual growth and promotion by individuals working in a bankrupt system of bureaucracy.
I apologize for the length of this brief. It is necessarily long because of the serious misstatements by the prosecutor in charge of the case. There are also serious misrepresentations of the law and the facts in this painful subject. In order for the Court to reach an equitable resolution to the allegations of illegal behavior by Original Sixteen To One Mine, Inc., I felt the Court would appreciate the testimony and supporting references rather than merely a conclusion of the testimony. I have taken exact excerpts from the transcript. .
My anguish over the dismal misstatements by the Secretary have affected my confidence that her emissaries in the field are actually looking after the health and safety of America’s most precious resource, its miners. Have the participants in this investigation followed the laws, regulations, customs and mores of health and safety in the mining industry? It has become a possibility that other forces drove this investigation and subsequent administrative hearing. Therefore, I also reviewed the Secretary’s brief, checking statements with the cited transcript reference. Time and time again the reference had nothing to do with the opinions of the statements. This has been a new experience for me to address. Is it sloppy or is it intentionally misleading?
Mining is inherently a dangerous business, much like automobile racing is inherently dangerous or professional football or space travel. Miners at the Sixteen To One mine are keenly aware of this. They are provided all the tools to minimize the dangers. It is a small mine with a very connected crew. Everyone interviewed by the investigators was properly trained. Written procedures and policies are in place. Safety meetings are regularly held weekly. Equipment is kept in proper working order. Spare parts and supplies for performing mining were on the mine site. Management has stressed the need to stay focused on mining once the crew enters the property. After work it was not uncommon for the miners to get together where the topics of conversation would expand. It usually came back to mining because these miners love their work. At the work place it is all business.
So, the day Mark drove his locomotive into a stationary chute and died was special. It had never happened before to anyone associated with the company. For people who never met Mark to refer to him as a victim is inaccurate. For Steven Cain to concoct a story as he did from no evidence and continue propagating its veracity is an injustice to Mark and all the miners at the Sixteen To One mine and elsewhere throughout America. It may even be a crime.
There is no legitimacy to the two violations alleged by the Secretary. All of us who knew Mark Fussell, know the mine and are associated with the mining industry want this record to accurately reflect the events of November 6, 2000. For Mark, we have pursued the truth. We hope his death will help make the mines of America a safer place to work. A momentary loss of attention caused this accident. There was no defective equipment and the company and its partners in safety, its miners, are not negligent and guilty of violating any federal regulations. This was a tragic accident that must be recognized, if all of us at the Sixteen To One mine and throughout the industry wish to avoid a repeat in the future. It was an error in human judgment. Only until we recognize it for what it was can we take the educational steps necessary to reduce the potential for it happening again. This will be Mark Fussell’s legacy.
Federal law requires a mining company to conduct an investigation of a fatal accident. My investigation was very thorough and very lengthy. It included hugging Mark’s father. We both shared an unwanted bond, the accidental death of our sons. My investigation included attending Mark’s funeral, where so many of his friends gave testimony about his free spirit of life. Charles Schultz briefly addressed this during the hearing.
Mark Fussell died in a tragic accident, underground at the Sixteen To One mine. The two citations later issued by the Secretary of Labor, Mine Safety and Health Administration attempt to lay blame where none exists. They deserve to be dismissed.
This is nice to read..
I love the news SCOOP.
Mike has been swamped working on the Respondent's post hearing brief for the Administrative Hearing which is due. The finished document is 80 pages long.
Rae is very involved in the Community of Alleghany and has been busy getting ready for "Old Alleghany Days".
The hoist rope inspection is due and the person who x-rays it for us will be up next week.
The pumps are going. Production is not.
Something is better than nothing right?
Yesterday the Sierra Economic Development District Board met at Casey's Place for the second time within two months. Two members of the Board of Supervisors of Sierra County sit on this Board. President Betty Riley said the reason they were back was "because of the energy she saw at the previous meeting in Alleghany." Hopefully some positive projects will manifest as a result of these interactions.
Joe got the loader fixed and is busy screening rock again.
Two small gold bars were shipped to the refinery on Wednesday. It takes up to three weeks from the time the refinery recieves the bullion for it be refined.
We are all impressed with the Gold Price these days. The P.M. London fix today is $375.80(You can check the daily gold market at Kitco.com) Will it make it to $400 per oz this year?
Previous employee Steve Shappert came by the office yesterday. Steve was our hoistman and safety officer for many years. He is a volunteer for the Camptonville Fire Department. It's always good to see Steve.
A customer from Nevada is in Gold Sales bright and early this morning looking to buy a specimen.
Love to hear about the everyday activities at the mine. Lets keep those Clips from Allegany coming.
Over a year ago a French television crew came to Alleghany to make a short documentary about California gold mining. Everyone cooperated with them, including a gathering of musicians at the Red Star Café. In return the French crew promised to send us a copy. We gave up on them but were surprised when a video arrived at the post office. If anyone wants one, send the company $15 or $20 and we’ll get one to you.
One of the transmission mounts on the loader broke Monday. It was taken out of service and a new one arrived today. It should be back in good working order tomorrow.
A brief rain and lightning storm hit today. Joe found a tiny quartz and gold rock in the screened the waste rock. You can never get it all, but even though we hope for a nice chunk, the miners’ confidence is reinforced when little gold is found in the waste rock. Decades ago the Company used to mill all the quartz. The mill was the equivalent of a giant assay system that helped the supervisors selecting where to look for high grade. Good gold detectors and skilled miners make this old practice unnecessary today.
August was the last month for one of the contract miners. Money is scarce and he had to take a regular paying job to get by. The price of gold for calculating production distribution is the last day of the month, which was $375.60 per ounce.
Today is a regular work day for all at the mine: a round was mucked, drilled and blasted underground, some high-grade was cut for jewelry sales, mike completed the first draft of our MSHA brief, and Melissa continued typing.
The Private Placement Memorandum is ready to circulate to qualified and interested parties. The Company offers one million shares of its treasury stock for working capital to perform specific projects.
Many of the pieces in the Company’s gold collection are on display in Ketchum Idaho at Barry Peterson’s Jewelry store. Ketchum holds an annual Wagon Day event on Labor Day weekend. The town is packed. A shareholder whose grandfather was a director of the company in the 1920’s telephoned our office this morning from the store. She lives part time in Ketchum and was thrilled to see the gold specimens. She was very impressed saying, “It is a spectacular display.” This is the first time the collection has left California. The display goes to September 14, 2003. Stop by, if you are in the area.
Our ATF # finally came in yesterday's mail.
Mike is making a trip to Orocal today to sell slab.
Our PG& E usage for the mine was down this month from 63,200 KWH for July to 22,400 KWH for August. Part of this has to do with the pumps being out for a few days. It is also a reflection of conservation efforts being made including a unit that was recently installed on the electric compressor to help it idle more efficiently.
We've been screening our piles of waste rock for sales of road rock and landcape rock. The large piles of ore near the mine-site office will be screened and metal detected last.
Hope everybody has a safe,relaxing holiday weekend.
Thanks for these posts Scoop! I really enjoy reading the details of what is going on up there.
The miners are sacking high-grade out of the footwall on the 1075 level. Hopefully it continues. This is Larry Cates heading. He is putting in 5 foot slab rounds and 6 foot bench rounds.
Today Melissa Cates is weighing the self-rescuers for their three month inspection.
The pump situation has improved with the repaired pump in-place.
Cover plate on the 110 water heater has been replaced.
Records of hoist exams have been updated.
Hoist operators Ian Haley and Roy Stai have been trained on the BG-174 Draeger Unit.
With such a small crew the miners wear many hats. Ian is the leader of the Accredited Miners Association (the group leasing the mine). Roy is versatile as an electrician, computer technician and metal detector operator among other things.
The water-usage reports were filed timely.
We have been having e-mail troubles due to the "sobigworm" virus. Hopefully it will be resolved soon.
Here is a summary of our income statement for the six months ended June 30, 2003. These are unaudited financials.
It rained again this morning. The firefighters in Alleghany were up in the middle of the night responding to a false alarm at a remote Pacific Bell relay station.
Two of the 16 to 1 miners, Bob Hale and Roy Stai are volunteer fire fighters. Bob Hale is the Fire Chief.
We had a little flury of activity on the OAU x-mart today.
Today we had a visit from two Grandchildren of W.I. Smart one of the original partners who incorporated the 16 to 1 in 1911.
They said they have some photos that they will donate to the museum. We will include them in the photo album on this page as well.
The usage reports for our Water Rights are due this week as are the annual assesment work notices on all the mining claims.
Our General Liability Insurance comes up for renewal in October. Rae is filling out the application.
The financials for March and June are completed (with the exception of the managements discussion and analysis). Rae tried posting them to the forum but the formatting did not stay intact.
We finally had to bite the bullet and purchase two new computers. One is for the Corporate Office and is used primarily for accounting, the other replaces the five year-old computer at the mine-site office which contains all the Auto Cad data on the mine.
Luckily one of our miners, Roy Stai is multi-talented and built the computers for us, greatly reducing our cost. Thank you Roy!
This August has been very unusual for Alleghany in that it has rained twice. We had an all-day rain storm at the beginning of the month and a two-day rain storm Thursday and Friday of this week. Our power was out for five hours on Friday. | 2019-04-25T06:24:00Z | http://origsix.com/forum2.asp?topicid=108&p=32 |
Sediment control is the practice of controlling eroded soil in disturbed areas by deploying best management practices (BMPs) to capture and retain the eroded material before it leaves the project site. It is MoDOT’s intention to establish final stabilization practices as soon as possible, but sediment control BMPs must still be deployed to provide sediment control until vegetative cover or final building materials have been established to prevent sediments from leaving MoDOT project sites.
Sediment basins are constructed to trap and store water and sediment that may not be caught by upgrade erosion and sediment control measures. The basins consist of an excavation with defined side slopes and rock riprap placed in inlet and outlet areas.
A temporary sediment basin is an excavated or dammed storage area that is used for short-term erosion and sediment control purposes. They are constructed with available grading equipment at locations shown on the contract plans to control sediment discharge until more permanent BMPs are installed and the site is stabilized. In some cases a temporary sediment basin can be placed in a location that enables it to continue to be used as a permanent sediment and drainage control basin.
If the sediment basin is to be permanent, its slopes shall be stabilized with rock riprap or equivalent.
The location of sediment basins will be shown on the plans. Each basin will be of sufficient size to contain a volume of a local 2-year, 24-hour storm event as determined by using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service Atlas 14. Sediment basins are required (unless infeasible due to site constraints) when large disturbed areas (>10 acres) concentrate flow to one discharge point, but they should be considered for any disturbed area, 5 acres or larger, which drains to one discharge point.
Where the use of a sediment basin of sufficient size as described above is impractical, other similarly effective BMPs that will provide equal water quality protection shall be provided, such as sediment traps, must be employed to minimize sediment loss from MoDOT right of way.
Sediment basins should be installed at the time of clearing and grubbing, and will normally remain in service until all disturbed areas draining into the structure have been satisfactorily stabilized.The area where a sediment basin is to be constructed shall be cleared of vegetation to enable removal of sediment. The inlets of these sediment basins shall be constructed with a wide cross section and minimum grade to prevent turbulence and allow deposition of the soil particles. Sediment basins shall always have stabilized outlets to discharge water from the surface of the basin. The stabilized outlets typically consist of one, or a combination of the following: rock, a riser pipe, or a surface skimmer (e.g., Faircloth Skimmer®). As a general rule, basins should be designed and constructed twice (minimum) as long as wide in order to maximize time of concentration within the structure. To add additional sediment removal capability to basins, baffles can be designed within the basin to slow storm water flow and increase treatment time within the basin. Basically, the longer the water takes to get from the inlet of the basin to its outlet, the more effective the treatment and the better the water quality at the outfall. Sediment basins shall normally remain in service until all disturbed areas draining into the structure have been satisfactorily stabilized. When use of temporary sediment basins is to be discontinued, all excavations are to be backfilled and properly compacted, fill material removed, and the existing ground restored to its natural or intended condition.
Where the use of a sediment basin of sufficient size as described above is impractical it should be documented in the SWPPP and other similarly effective BMPs must be employed to minimize sediment loss from MoDOT right of way. These similarly effective BMPs or BMP systems could include, but are not limited to sediment traps, ditch checks, Type C berms, etc., and the use of appropriate erosion control items to cover up exposed soil. An explanation for selecting these similarly effective BMPs instead of a basin will be documented in the project SWPPP.
When the depth of sediment reaches 1/2 of the depth of the structure in any part of the pool, all accumulation shall be removed. Discharges from the basin shall not cause scouring of the receiving area. Removed accumulated sediment and excavated material removed during construction of the sediment basin shall be disposed of in locations where sediment will not again erode into the construction areas or into natural waterways.
A sediment trap is a temporary sediment collection structure constructed of rock or other non-earthen material used to detain runoff so that sediments are allowed to drop out. The trap may also be excavated in lieu of rock construction.
The location of sediment traps will be shown on the plans. The length and height of the sediment trap depends on the volume of water that flows through the drainage structure and the width of the drainage channel. Sediment traps will be utilized at every outfall and may be used downgrade of drainage structures to control sediment. Sediment traps are not appropriate where impounded sediment and gravel could accumulate inside of the culvert. Estimated quantities for each trap located on the project will be shown to the nearest cubic yard. See Standard Plan 806.10 for sediment trap details.
Sediment traps need to be in place prior to clearing and grubbing operations and will remain in place until the site has achieved final stabilization.
Sediment traps will be constructed of rock or other non-erodible material sufficient to impound water in accordance with Standard Plan 806.10 and Standard Specification 806.60. Estimated quantities for each trap located on the project will be shown to the nearest cubic yard. Sediment traps may be dewatered through a single riser pipe, over a stabilized spillway (rock-lined, lined with erosion control blanket or turf reinforcement matting, vegetated), or, where applicable, allowed to filter through the interstices of a constructed rock barrier.
Maintenance of the trap must be completed once the sediment deposits accumulate to ½ the height of the trap. In situations where long-term maintenance issues are absent, and permanent vegetation has established, sediment traps may be left in place as a permanent structure as long as there is no threat to the natural or human environment.
Ditch checks are temporary obstructions placed in a drainage way used to control erosion and sedimentation by reducing storm water velocities. Sediment deposits will be captured by the checks during low flow conditions.
There are two types of ditch checks that can be used: rock and alternate.
Rock ditch checks are the predominant ditch check to be used. Because of their size, rock checks are to be placed outside the clear zone. They are specified for larger drainage areas and ditch slopes 10 percent or less and where expected ditch flow volumes and velocities are high, or in locations where the project is in proximity to streams or other sensitive areas.
Alternate ditch checks include, but are not limited to, triangular silt checks, filter socks/logs (but not straw wattles), and sandbags. Alternate ditch checks have a minimum effective height of 9 inches, as measured in the field.
Alternate ditch checks are specified where drainage areas are fairly small (3 acres or less), ditch slopes are 4 percent or less and expected ditch flow volumes and velocities are small. For scenarios that exceed the criteria established above, a combination of rock ditch checks and erosion control blankets are utilized.
Standard Plan 806.10 (Sheet 3 of 7) shows the spacing for ditch checks. The estimate of the required number of ditch checks is based on an effective height of 9 or 18 inches.
If the total number of alternate ditch checks needed on a project is minimal, it is advisable to just specify all ditch checks as rock for simplicity of contract administration. The last two ditch checks, in any ditch check system should be one rock ditch check followed by a sediment trap.
Ditch checks shall be placed and constructed according to the contract plans. As soon as practical, once a ditch/conveyance is capable of conveying water, ditch checks should be constructed to provide sufficient protection until the conveyance is complete and the remaining BMPs can be installed. Once disturbance activities have ceased on any part of the project and will not resume for a period of 14 days ditch checks shall be constructed to provide interim stabilization. Once interim stabilization efforts begin they shall be completed within 14 days. Ditch checks shall remain in place until final stabilization is achieved.
Rock checks are to be constructed of 4 in to 12 in size rock, full ditch width wide, and 18” min. effective height over the middle of the ditch. The standard design of a rock ditch is a 4 ft. wide base, with 2:1 side slopes, and 2 ft. tall with the middle 6 in. lower than the sides (18 in effective height over the middle). Dimensions may be modified based on individual project needs for higher flow rates. In areas of clay soils, where additional filtration may be needed, the upgrade face of the check can be capped with smaller stone, filter fabric or another approved filtering media. In some cases, it may also be necessary to place a section of ECB or geotextile beneath the rock ditch check and extending downgrade of the structure to prevent the rock from settling into the soil beneath and/or protect from downstream scour within the ditch line.
Alternate ditch checks have an effective height of at least 9 in. as measured in the field and should be installed in accordance with the manufacturer’s recommendations. The SWPPP has a list of acceptable alternate ditch checks or others can be approved by the engineer. Each type of ditch check (particularly the tubular/cylindrical/triangular products) will have specific directions for installation. In all cases care shall be exercised so as to install the device according to manufacturer specifications. Effectiveness may be compromised if not installed correctly.
Ditch checks shall be checked for condition and sediment accumulation after each runoff event. Accumulated sediment shall be removed from the check when the sediment height is no more than half that of the check. Sediment removal will include removal and disposition in a location where it will not erode into construction areas or watercourses. Inspections shall be made to ensure that the center of the check is lower than the edges.
Ditch checks shall remain in place until final stabilization has been achieved. Upon removal, the contractor should be directed to remove and dispose of any excess sit accumulations, grade and dress the area, and stabilize all bare areas to the satisfaction of the engineer. As a general rule for rock ditch checks, once the area has reached final stabilization, any collected sediment should be removed and rock ditch checks can be graded out within the ditch line, serving a similar purpose as a liner. In rare cases, rock ditch checks may remain in place permanently, and resultant accumulated sediment shall be allowed to develop vegetative cover as a permanent feature of the right of way. Similarly, biodegradable structures and their accumulated sediment may be allowed to remain in place if the engineer determines that removal will destabilize the ditch. In cases of compost, mulch, etc. filled checks, the wooden stakes should be pulled and the biodegradable netting cut to encourage more rapid degradation. If the netting is non-biodegradable, the netting shall be cut and removed along with the stakes, but the biodegradable filling may be left to decompose.
Silt fence is a temporary sediment control measure used to capture suspended particles from sheet flow along the edge of the right of way where runoff attempts to leave the project onto an adjacent property or into an adjacent body of water or wetland. Silt fence must never be used in concentrated flow to cross a ditch, stream or drainage channel; and in no case installed downgrade from a pipe or used as a culvert protection.
Silt fence is to be provided as a perimeter control on all land disturbance projects. The plans shall include silt fence in areas where runoff will exit the right of way or along the toe of fill slopes where sediment could enter and adjacent body of water or wetland. Silt fence is not limited to a linear installation. Silt fence should be designed to be installed on the contour when possible, perpendicular to sheet flow, to prevent overtopping or overloading at single points. If silt fence is run down a grade, not perpendicular to sheet flow, J-hooks should be designed to be installed into the silt fence system to dissipate energy and capture runoff so as not to undermine the fence or overwhelm the system at a low point. J-hooks should be installed toe to top, similar to ditch checks, with the tail of the downgrade J-hook terminating behind the leading edge of the previous (see Standard Plan 806.10).
There are several construction requirements for silt fences. Fence construction shall be adequate to handle the stress from hydraulic and sediment loading. Where possible, silt fencing should be installed in existing vegetation, outside of, or at the edge of project clearing limits, so that a buffer of undisturbed soil and vegetation remains on both sides of the fence. Fence construction shall be adequate to handle the stress from hydraulic and sediment loading. Geotextile at the bottom of the fence shall be entrenched. The trench shall be backfilled and the soil compacted over the geotextile. When two sections of geotextile silt fence come together or if a new run must be started, the fence shall be overlapped as indicated on the standard drawings.
Post spacing shall not exceed 5 feet. Posts shall be driven a minimum of 24 inches into the ground. Where rock is encountered, posts shall be installed in a manner approved by the engineer. Closer spacing, greater embedment depth and/or wider posts shall be used as necessary in low areas and soft or swampy ground to ensure adequate resistance to applied loads.
The integrity of silt fences must be maintained until disturbed areas have achieved final stabilization. Regular inspections shall be done to insure silt fence is in proper working order. Fence should be inspected for broken of loose stakes, holes in the geotextile fencing, and any undermining or scouring of the system. Where construction activities have changed the natural contour and drainage runoff, silt fence must be inspected for proper location and effectiveness. Where deficiencies exist, additional silt fences shall be installed.
Sediment deposits shall be removed and disposed of when the deposit approaches one-half the height of the fence or sooner. If required by heavy sediment loading, a second silt fence shall be installed. Secondary fence installations do not relieve the obligation to maintain the first installation. Any BMP installed must be maintained in good working order.
The silt fence shall remain in place until final stabilization has been achieved. Upon removal, the contractor shall be directed to remove and dispose of any excess silt accumulations, grade and dress the area, and establish vegetation on all bare areas.
At the time of installation, silt fencing is to be installed in permanent grass, outside of the clearing limits so that a buffer of undisturbed soil remains on both sides of the fence. Perimeter silt fence is not installed across a drainage ditch, stream or water channel.
Rock/mesh sediment control fences are used in high sheet flow volume runoff areas where traditional silt fence will not function as designed. Wire mesh, T-posts, and grade 4 or grade 5 rock for drainage, in accordance with Sec 1009, comprise the system to impound runoff and allow solids to drop out.
Rock/mesh sediment control fence provides a superior level of protection when areas of higher storm water velocity flows are present along a sites perimeter. Use this device in lieu of other silt fence applications at the toe of fill sections, especially along streams and wetlands and in other areas where there is insufficient right of way to construct better impoundment devices, such as sediment basins or sediment traps. As with silt fence applications, the sediment control fence should be placed perpendicular to storm water flow, allowing the water to pass either over or through the rock/mesh sediment control fence, never around it.
The sediment control fence should be placed perpendicular to storm water flow, allowing the water to pass either over or through the rock/mesh sediment control fence, never around it.
Rock/mesh sediment control fences shall be inspected for structural damage, undercutting, sediment buildup, or lack of drainage due to sediment clogged stone. Sediment deposits shall be removed and disposed of when the deposit approaches 1/2 the height of the fence or sooner. Accumulated sediment removed from the fence shall be disposed of in locations where sediment will not erode into construction areas or into waters of the state. If the filter stone (aggregate for drainage) becomes sediment-clogged and no longer serves as a filter, it may be appropriate to replace it with new stone.
The rock/mesh sediment control fence shall remain in place until areas that drain to the fencing are stabilized. Upon removal, the contractor shall be directed to remove and dispose of any excess sediment accumulations, grade and dress the area, and establish vegetation on all bare areas. If the engineer determines that sediment control fence shall remain in place for a period of time after the job is closed out, arrangements will be made for the contractor or MoDOT Maintenance personnel to remove the fence once the area is sufficiently stabilized.
Storm drain (culvert, drop or curb) inlet protection measures prevent soil and debris from entering storm drain inlets.
Inlet protection shall be provided for all existing and new inlets where land disturbance operations are planned. Vegetative buffers and/or sediment control BMPs such as silt fence or waddles/socks should be utilized behind curb sections to prevent sediment from overtopping the curb and entering the inlet.
Temporary inlet protection shall be implemented at existing inlets prior to land disturbance, and new inlets are to be protected as they are put into service. As phases of the project change, inlet controls may need to be modified to ensure proper sediment filtration.
Geotextile silt fence shall not be used as an approved inlet protection. Geotextile may be used as a cover for a constructed wood or steel frame. It recommended for additional support and protection, the frame is wrapped with wire reinforcement prior to applying the geotextile material.
See EPG 806.8.6.4.6 Inlet Controls for general considerations for inlet protection devices. Devices shall be installed in accordance with Standard Plan 806.10 or the manufactures specifications.
During construction, elevated curb inlets and median inlets, as well as excavations around inlets, may serve as "riser pipes" as long as they are sufficiently higher (approximately 9 in. or more) than the existing grade. Sediment that accumulates at the base of the riser pipe following storm water events shall be removed when it reaches 1/2 of the original height of the riser pipe. Once the desired grade has been achieved and the inlet becomes flush to that grade, subsequent inlet protection is required.
Mulch berms may be used for perimeter protection and are an acceptable alternative for geotextile and other silt fence applications.
There is currently not a bid item for mulch berms. The reuse of cleared trees and brush as a mulch berm are at the request of the contractor and as approved by the engineer. Where large amounts of clearing and grubbing exist, notes should be added to encourage the use of mulch berms.
When constructed, mulch berms shall be piled to a height of at least two feet, preferably installed in existing vegetation, outside of, or at the edge of project clearing limits, so that a buffer of undisturbed soil and vegetation remains on both sides of the berm. Mulch berms should be installed at the time of clearing and grubbing, and must be maintained for as long as necessary to contain sediment from runoff. Mulch berms should be installed on the contour when possible to prevent overtopping or overloading at single points.
Mulch berms shall be inspected as part of the storm water routine inspection. It is also recommended that casual daily inspections be made during periods of prolonged rainfall. Where deficiencies exist, additional mulch, or another appropriate BMP shall be installed.
A Type C berm is a rock barrier used to provide sediment control protection between the bridge end spill fill slopes and the stream bank.
Type C berms are specified at the toes of spill slopes around bridge construction operations. It is important that the contract plans show the general presence of a Type C berm so contractors may bid accordingly. However, the actual precise location of the structure will be determined at the time of installation.
Type C berms shall be placed at the toes of spill slopes around bridge construction operations and will be constructed to the specified dimension (see Standard Plan 806.10). While contract plans may show the general location of the Type C berm, the precise location of the structure can only be determined at the time of installation and shall be field fit to provide maximum stream protection, yet enable the installation of piers, bents and accommodate movement of equipment.
Installation of the berm should be coordinated with other perimeter control BMPs to insure total protection of the area. Gaps between the Type C berm and silt fence, and other BMPs, may allow sediment laden runoff to escape unrestricted. Type C berms must be installed above the regulatory "ordinary high water mark". Type C berms are typically temporary, but may be permanent depending on the ultimate desired use of the right of way beneath the bridge.
The Type C berm must be evaluated as phases of the project change to be sure it is functioning as intended. Modifications may be required if field conditions make the original berm installation ineffective. Type C berms shall be checked for sediment accumulation after each runoff event. Sediment shall be removed when it reaches 1/2 of the original height or before. Sediment removal will include removal and disposition in a location where it will not erode into construction areas or waters of the state.
Straw bales are an acceptable practice used to control diamond grinding residue that is discharged onto MoDOT right of way due solely to the short duration of the discharge. See EPG 806.8.6.4.11 Straw Bales.
This page was last modified on 28 September 2018, at 09:30. | 2019-04-22T14:03:15Z | http://epg.modot.org/index.php/806.2_Sediment_Control_Measures |
The Title Insurance Industry can be tough but does not have to be. Part of the home buying process is to understand what it is all about and how it will affect you.
You have decided to make your dream of owning a home into a reality. As your journey towards a prized goal, you may encounter problems along the way. Title365 is here to help you leap the hurdles, navigate the obstacles or smooth the snags that might impede your journey for opening the door to your new home.
How much can you reasonably afford on your next home?
Monthly housing expenses — mortgage payment, property taxes, insurance, etc. These expenses should total no more than 28 percent of your monthly gross income.
Monthly living expenses and any long-term debts — utilities, car and school loan, child support, health and car insurance, etc. These expenses should be no more than 36 percent of your monthly gross income.
Credit Unions make up close to one-third of all first-mortgage loans, but you must be a member.
Banks are active in residential lending and are also a major supplier of loans for mobile-home buyers.
An employer may subsidize the interest or even act as a lender. Unions are another possibility. The AFL-CIO "Union Privilege." Unions that sign on can make first-time home loans available to eligible members for as little as three percent down.
These mortgage companies make up just over half of all home mortgages, including most VA-guaranteed and FHA-insured loans.
Brokers act as intermediaries and keep tabs on the mortgage market through ties to local, regional and national lenders. They can refer a prospective borrower to a mortgage banker, savings institution or a commercial bank. Brokers don't lend money and can't approve loans.
Savings and loan associations and savings banks originate close to a quarter of home mortgages. Most are conventional loans (those not guaranteed by the VA or FmHA, or insured by the FHA).
The following list contains the mortgages you are most likely to see. Do your research and ask questions to understand which type of loan will best fit with your financial profile. Knowing how much you can afford and getting pre-qualified for a loan will help you find the right mortgage.
This is the standard mortgage model. It is the oldest and most easily understood type of mortgage. The main benefit is that the interest rate and the amount of payment remain fixed for the life of the loan, typically either 15 or 30 years. However, if rates fall, the holder cannot benefit from the new, lower rate unless they refinance.
With this type of mortgage, the interest rate you pay rises and falls along with other rates charged throughout the economy. Therefore, you, the borrower, assume the risk of rising rates, and you stand to benefit should rates fall.
An essential question to ask about an ARM is whether there are limits on how much your rate can be raised, both at each review and over the term of the loan. Without rate caps, you'll have no way to predict how much your monthly payments might change.
VA loans have most of the advantages of FHA loans, but they also have eligibility restrictions. They are available only to veterans of the armed services, those currently in the service and their spouses. VA loans are typically half a percent or more below market rates and they can be obtained with without putting money down.
Under this arrangement, the buyer starts out with an ARM, but has the option of converting to an FRM at specified points during the loan term. You may want to ask the lender these questions: When can you convert? Are there any up-front fees involved? Will you have to pay more for an ARM with the conversion feature than for an ARM without it? Are there additional fees due if and when you decide to convert? Also be sure to find out the lender's conversion rate.
This option is designed for borrowers whose main goal is to pay off their mortgage as soon as possible. Therefore, the interest rate remains fixed, but the amount of the monthly payment increases according to a prearranged schedule, with the higher payments going to reduce the principal balance. This mortgage can be appealing to someone who is expecting regular income growth and wants to build equity quickly.
Like the GEM, the fifteen-year mortgage enables borrowers to repay their loan quickly, which means they build equity faster and pay less interest over the life of the mortgage.
FHA, also known as the Federal Housing Administration, operates under the control of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and has the primary responsibility for administering the government home loan insurance program. This program allows buyers who might otherwise not qualify for a home loan to obtain one because FHA removes the risk from the lender.
FHA is the only government agency that operates entirely from its self-generated income and costs the taxpayers nothing. The proceeds from the mortgage insurance paid by the homeowners are captured in an account that is used to operate the program entirely.
Do not be afraid to ask questions. Your real estate agent will be very happy to provide you with as much information as possible. Be aware that this is a financial investment and to be as impassive as possible when viewing homes. Remember, this is potentially the largest purchase you will ever make — ask questions until you are satisfied with the answers.
Research the surrounding area. Distance to shops, hospitals, schools. Ask about the community and the crime rates in the area.
Be mindful of the surrounding homes and make note of their condition and if the yards are well kept.
Don’t commit to the first few homes you see. New listings are added to the market all the time. The more homes you view the more you can learn about the type of home that will fit your needs.
Take your time and be thorough. Open cabinets, turn on faucets, look in attics. Look for signs of distress or watermarks for signs of any hidden problems.
Don’t be distracted by the interior staging of the home. Be focused on the structure of the home and its surroundings.
Stay within your price range. Viewing homes well above your budget may set unrealistic expectations.
Don’t ever be pushed into making a decision before you are ready.
Once you, your real estate agent and the owner have come to an agreement on the sale price of the house, make sure you get the agreed price documented.
You are ready to make an offer. With the help of your real estate agent, offer the seller a written contract setting out the commitments and promises that you and the seller need to agree on and fulfill in order to make the sale. A well-drawn contract should protect all parties.
Negotiation gives you — the buyer — incredible power in making a favorable transaction. As in any negotiation, be prepared to do some give and take. Let your real estate agent help you and work with you and the seller to come to the best possible terms for everyone.
You are getting ready to sell your property and need guidance on how to get the most from your long-term investment. Where do you even begin?
Here are a few tips on how to set the right price on your property by combining an objective evaluation of your property with a realistic assessment of market conditions.
Be cautious of either overpricing or underpricing. The goal is to aim for full market value. Learn the offering and selling prices of similar properties and find out how long each took to sell. Compare your home to others close in age, style, size, condition and location. Timing is also important. If market demand is high, you should be able to increase the price.
A sales contract is signed by the buyer and seller and delivered to the closing agent. The escrow agent starts the closing process by opening a title order. Tax information, loan payoffs, survey (if necessary), homeowner/maintenance fees, inspections/reports, and hazard and other insurances as well as legal papers are ordered. A title search is ordered.
A search made of the public records. Records searched include deeds, mortgages, paving assessments, liens, wills, divorce settlements and other documents affecting title to the property. Title examination is the examination of the documents found during the title search that affect the title to the property. This is when verification of the legal owner is made and the debts owed against the property are determined. Upon completion of the search and examination, a title commitment/preliminary report is prepared and reviewed and sent out to interested parties.
The closing agent reviews the new lender’s instructions/requirements, reviews instructions from other parties to the transaction, reviews legal and loan documents, assembles charges and prepares closing statements and schedules the closing.
Title insurance protects a property owner from certain defects in title. Unlike casualty insurance (which insures against future events like car accidents), title insurance eliminates risk or loss caused by past events like liens or judgments or fraud. Title insurance provides owners and lenders coverage for title problems and insures against loss if the title is not as reported.
What is a title search and examination?
Issuing a title policy is an extensive and exacting process. Title365 works to eliminate risks by performing a painstaking search of the public records to determine the current recorded ownership, any recorded liens or encumbrances, or other matters of public record which could affect title to the property. Once a title search is complete, Title365 issues a preliminary report detailing the current status of title.
Why are title searches important?
What does title insurance protect me against?
What is a preliminary report (or commitment)?
The preliminary report contains vital information which includes ownership of the subject property, the manner in which the current owners hold title, matters of record which specifically affect the subject property or the owners of the property as well as a legal description of the property and an informational plat map.
The owner's policy assures a buyer that the title to the property is vested in that buyer and that it is free from all defects, liens and encumbrances except those listed as exceptions in the policy or are excluded from the scope of the policy's coverage. It also covers losses and damages suffered if the title is unmarketable. The policy also provides coverage for loss if there is no right of access to the land. Although these are the basic coverage's, expanded forms of residential owner's policies exist that cover additional items of loss. It insures you are the owner of the property, you against losses from prior liens or judgments on the property, you have legal access to your property, and a subsequent buyer does not reject your title because it is unmarketable due to a title defect or lien. It does not protect you from losses caused by problems you created or losses not directly related to resolving or paying the claim. It also does not cover losses listed under your policy's exclusions or exceptions.
The lender's policy, sometimes called a loan policy, protects your lender against any loss that might occur due to unknown title defects. It also guarantees the lender to have a valid first lien against the property.
What are the ways to hold title?
Individuals, either in Sole Ownership or in Co-Ownership, may hold title to real property. Co-Ownership of real property occurs when two or more persons hold title. There are several variations as to how title may be held in each type of ownership. The following brief summaries reference seven of the more common examples of Sole Ownership and Co-Ownership.
Example: John Doe, a single man, as to an undivided 3/4th interest, and George Smith, a single man as to an undivided 1/4th interest, as tenants in common.
The preceding summaries are a few of the more common ways to take title to real property are provided for informational purposes only. There are significant tax and legal consequences on how you hold title. It is suggested that you contact an attorney and/or CPA for specific advice on how you should actually vest your title.
Endorsements amend and typically broaden the coverage given under a basic policy of title insurance.
Some states do not regulate the premiums (cost) for title insurance. However, the vast majority of state governments do individually regulate the insurance premiums charged for properties located in the state. The regulation runs from requiring the filing of rates by the insurers (and requiring their use while they are in effect) to promulgating the rates that will be used by all title insurers within the states. In most states, there is an approval requirement. This varies from rates being deemed approved if no complaints are filed within a specified period of time after filing, to the requirement of approval by the state's insurance regulator before use of the rates is allowed. The rates may include discounts if title insurance is ordered within a specified time after the last policy issued or if the mortgage being insured is a refinance of an earlier mortgage. In the states employing any of these regulations, it is illegal for title insurance companies to charge a higher or lower rate than the regulated rate. It's a good idea to compare prices as well as service when shopping for title insurance. Each company's loss experience, expenses, and rates will differ.
How often are premiums paid?
Forever, theoretically. If you are planning to resell the property within a couple years, ask about "binder" coverage. A binder is good for two years, often can be extended beyond that time, and the fee charged for the new buyer's policy will be the difference between what you bought the property for and the price at which it sold. In other words, you will get a credit for the amount of coverage you purchased under your own Owner's Title policy.
How do I make a claim on your policy?
First, only you, the policy owner, can make a claim on your policy. And second, the process to submit a claim is strictly governed by the terms of your policy. If you are the policy owner, please call 1-877-365-9365 to speak to our claims department.
Escrow is a service whereby a neutral third party handles legal documents and monies on behalf of the buyer and seller of real property pending the closure of the transaction.
The process of escrow assures that no funds or property will change hands until all of the transaction instructions have been faithfully followed and completed. Acting as an unbiased and impartial third party, the escrow agent protects all funds and documents and distributes each only after all escrow conditions are achieved.
Escrow instructions are detailed instructions provided to an escrow agent, typically an escrow officer or attorney. Escrow instructions include all the terms and conditions that must be met by each party before a property can change hands.
By law, the escrow agent cannot do anything beyond the scope of the instructions. This is done to protect all parties in the transaction, but it means that the instructions must be very precise and must account for eventualities so that escrow isn't held up because the escrow agent is unable to act.
Escrow instructions identify the parties in the deal, along with the escrow agent. They tell the agent what must be done to complete the deal. This includes describing the terms of the agreement, how funds should be held, when funds can be disbursed, how pro-rating should be handled if it comes up, and so forth. Escrow instructions also typically identify the time period of the escrow and provide any other information, which may be relevant.
The buyer, seller, lender, borrower, the principals, will create escrow instructions, generally in writing, to be signed and delivered to the escrow officer. Normally, if a broker is involved, she/he will provide the escrow officer all necessary information for the creation of your escrow instructions and documents. At that point, the escrow officer processes the escrow according to the prepared instructions. Upon completion, and only when all required escrow conditions have been met, the escrow will be closed.
During escrow, what's my role as a buyer, seller or borrower?
First, be sure to read and understand your escrow instructions so you know what to expect. Direct any questions regarding your instructions to your escrow officer. The officer is chartered to follow the instructions set forth by the principals to the escrow. To ensure the timely close of your transaction, always try to respond to requests and correspondence promptly. Procedures differ, but you will be required to deliver funds into the escrow in the form required by your escrow officer. If you have any immediate or special need on the day of closing, such as checks, title issuance, policies, wires or statements, proactively advise your escrow officer.
How does my loan work with escrow?
Your escrow officer provides your lender with the escrow instructions, the preliminary report and any requested documents. The escrow holder is required to comply with the lender's instructions when processing your closing. With a new loan, many lenders forward loan documents to escrow to facilitate signing of lender documents. Because these are lender documents, your escrow officer cannot interpret or explain them. Therefore, you can request that a lender representative be present at your signing to clarify any questions you have pertaining to the loan arrangements or documents.
What is a settlement statement, also referred to as a HUD-1?
The closing statement is a straightforward, written financial record compiled at the close of escrow that lists itemized charges and credits to your account. When you receive your closing paperwork, examine the closing statement carefully and direct any questions you may have to your Escrow Officer.
Title insurance is not as well understood as other types of home insurance, but it is just as important. You see, when purchasing a home, instead of purchasing the actual building or land, you are really purchasing the title to the property – the right to occupy and use the space. That title may be limited by rights and claims asserted by others, which may limit your use and enjoyment of the property and even bring financial loss. Title insurance protects against these types of title hazards. Other types of insurance that protect your home focus on possible future events and charge an annual premium. On the other hand, title insurance protects against loss from hazards and defects that already exist in the title and is purchased with a one-time premium.
Title insurance offers financial protection against these and other covered title hazards. The title insurer will pay for defending against an attack on title as insured, and will either perfect the title or pay valid claims, all for a one-time charge at closing. Your home is your most important investment. Before you go to closing, ask about your title insurance protection, and be sure to protect your home with an owner’s title insurance policy.
In today’s competitive market, professionals need the support of a team that provides not only best in class title and escrow services, but is also a resource for products and services that can give you a competitive advantage and help you thrive. Below are some help resources for you and your customers.
Changes go into effect October 3rd, make sure you are aware of how this effects your next real estate transaction.
We have local offices across Arizona, California and Texas and National offices throughout the US.
Title365 offers services ranging from title insurance and settlement services to loss mitigation and REO asset management. Our network of local Title365 Company offices, independent title agencies and our national lender services company are ready to assist you with specialized real estate services delivered by the most dedicated professionals in the industry.
A title guarantee issued at the start of foreclosure, it contributes to the foreclosing beneficiary and trustee by delivering the information needed to ensure compliance with state foreclosure statutes. The TSG rates are filed with the state Department of Insurance as a graduated fee schedule based on liability amounts. The TSG confirms the following criteria to execute a valid foreclosure: Current owner of record vesting, judgments, liens and encumbrances, priority of foreclosing mortgage, bankruptcy case information, property tax information, parties required by law to be notified of foreclosure, property address verification and newspaper entities for publication.
Designed for issuance to an attorney representing the plaintiff in an action affecting land, typical litigation includes actions to quiet title, foreclosure of liens, condemnation and declaratory relief. A decree in any such action is binding only of the parties named as defendants.
Comprehensive property and ownership information for non-insured title reports are ideal for closings of equity and home improvement loans, early stage delinquency and loan due diligence.
Today's real estate environment is complex and constantly evolving with new legislation and increased regulatory oversight. Title365 provides proven, cost-effective support with a comprehensive suite of fully compliant loss mitigation solutions. We assist both the borrower and the investor in resolving the delinquency in a manner leading to a resolution that is affordable for the borrower, and palatable to the investor. Below are the types of options to stabilize the risk of loss you are in danger of realizing.
This program is designed to help financially struggling homeowners avoid foreclosure by modifying loans to a level that is affordable for borrowers now and sustainable over the long term. The program provides clear and consistent loan modification guidelines that the entire mortgage industry can use. HAMP includes incentives for borrowers, servicers and investors.
Lenders can accept a payoff amount that is less than the principal balance of the homeowner's mortgage, in order to allow homeowners to sell the home for the actual market value of the home. This specifically applies to homeowners that owe more on their mortgage than the property is worth. Without such a principal reduction the homeowner would not be able to sell the home.
A lender can reduce the principal balance of a homeowner's mortgage, so that the homeowner can refinance with a new lender. The reduction in principal is designed to meet the Loan-to-value guidelines of the new lender (which makes refinancing possible).
Foreclosure is a disposition option in which a mortgagor voluntarily deeds collateral property in exchange for a release from all obligations under the mortgage. A DIL of foreclosure may not be accepted from mortgagors who can financially make their mortgage payments.
Allows the lender to pay the homeowner/tenant to vacate the foreclosed home in a timely manor without destroying the property. The lender does this to avoid incurring additional expenses involving eviction of homeowners/tenants.
A mortgagee will advance funds on behalf of a mortgagor in an amount to reinstate a delinquent loan. The mortgagor will execute a promissory note and subordinate mortgage payable to US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Currently, these promissory or "Partial Claim" notes assess no interest and are not due and payable until the mortgagor either pays off the first mortgage or no longer owns the property.
When an asset progresses to REO status, Title365 can quickly provide the title commitments and prelims, property reports, underwriting assistance and recording services needed. Nationwide, clients depend upon Title365 to review collateral documents, ensure a correct chain of title, research missing assignments, and efficiently search for recording information, all while meeting the strict service requirement demands by investors.
After a title commitment or preliminary report is produced, our team reviews the document for items that are currently clouding title or could potentially delay or prevent a closing. Our grading system designates a letter grade and outlines curative items to determine if a property is clear to close or if it needs further remediation with curative services.
Our experienced title resolution team can cure even the most complex issues and is backed by a strong network of local attorneys and the power and flexibility of national underwriters. Our team begins the process upon referral instead of at contract stage to proactively resolve defects and prevent issues that cause costly and time-intensive delays.
Title365 offers full escrow services directly in 22 states and in all other states with a closing management model. Our escrow teams specialize in REO transactions and have the expert local knowledge and work hand-in-hand with our title curative specialists to resolve roadblocks and ensure a timely closing.
Title365 offers closing management services featuring nationwide control with the local presence and expertise through our direct operations in Maitland, FL. Our team expertly manages the entire closing process with strict adherence to client guidelines and protocols from contract to final proceeds.
REO Analytics Title365 offers REO data and analytics solutions from Xome Labs.
Title365 enables mortgage servicers to avoid duplicative title expenses with end-to-end solutions from origination through loss mitigation, foreclosure, and REO. We provide continuity of product scope and pricing with the flexibility of multiple national underwriters. By leveraging prior work, Title365 reduces search and exam expenses and offers discounted title premiums at REO. | 2019-04-19T22:21:06Z | https://title365.com/resourceCenter/learningcenter |
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt): It is a pleasure to be back, Mr Speaker. By 2020, we will increase the primary and community care workforce by at least 10,000, including an estimated 5,000 doctors working in general practice, as well as more practice nurses, district nurses and pharmacists.
Suella Fernandes: Fareham community hospital is an example of Labour’s expensive PFI gone wrong. At a cost of £28 million, it remains underused, half-built and subject to complex governance structures. What will my right hon. Friend do to enable better use of this facility to allow provision for minor injuries, a GP practice and more primary care?
Mr Hunt: My hon. Friend is right, regrettably, that the PFI projects under the previous Labour Government created a lot of unsustainable debt. I know her local clinical commissioning group is meeting GP practices and working with community health partnerships to see if they can progress the idea she is campaigning for. I hope to visit her in the near future to discuss it myself.
Mike Wood: Will my right hon. Friend join me in welcoming the £2.7 million in vanguard funding given to Dudley to provide primary care services out in the community? This will not only improve the level of clinical and social services provided to people in Dudley South, but relieve pressures on Russells Hall hospital.
about their exciting plans. What really struck me was how they are talking to different bits of the health and social care system in a way that has never happened before. It is really exciting and I think it really will be in the vanguard of what can happen in the NHS.
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab): Many people in my constituency are struggling to see a GP from Monday to Friday. Warrington has fewer GPs than it had in 2010, despite a rise in population. The number of unfilled GP vacancies quadrupled under the previous Government. How does the Secretary of State expect to produce a seven-day service when he cannot properly staff the service from Monday to Friday?
Mr Hunt: I shall tell the hon. Lady how I expect to do it. We are, in fact, making very good progress. By March next year, a third of the country will be able to access routine GP appointments at evenings and weekends. We do need more GPs. I agree with her that it takes too long to get a GP appointment, but we are doing something about it. That is why we have announced plans to recruit an estimated 5,000 more GPs. That will be a 15% increase in the number of GPs, the biggest increase in the history of the NHS.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab): It is widely known that there is a serious lack of doctors who want to go into general practice. At the same time, the Secretary of State is guilty of an abject failure to engage with the British Medical Association in negotiations on junior doctors’ practices. On that basis, how the hell can he promise to increase general practice?
Mr Hunt: Just look at our track record in the previous Parliament: we increased the number of GPs by 1,700—a 5% increase. We are, on the back of a strong economy, putting in funding that will make it possible to increase that number even more. The hon. Gentleman talks about the BMA. I simply say that the people refusing to negotiate are not the Government, but the BMA.
Mr Speaker: Order. May I just gently advise the hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) that he should not stand at this point? He has Question 3. It will be very easily reached, so he should not stand before then. There is no merit in doing that at all.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con): Unfortunately, every time I open a page of my local newspaper these days I am met with the beaming face of yet another general practitioner in his mid-50s who has decided to throw in his hand after many, many years of serving his community. These doctors are best placed to manage patients in primary care and ensure that they do not have to go to secondary care or A&E. What analysis has my right hon. Friend made of the reasons these experienced professionals are leaving the profession prematurely, and what will his reforms do to stem the tide?
form-filling, which means that doctors do not spend enough time with patients, and a sense that successive Governments have not invested in general practice and primary care. That is exactly what we seek to turn around with the “Five Year Forward View”.
Ms Margaret Ritchie (South Down) (SDLP): What discussions have taken place with the devolved Administrations regarding the introduction of the new GP contract, particularly the junior doctor contract, given the exodus of junior doctors to Australia?
Mr Hunt: We also have Australian paramedics working in the UK, particularly London, so that traffic goes both ways, but, as the hon. Lady will know, health is a devolved matter, and people follow their own paths. For England, we are determined to eliminate the weekend effect. Every year, there are 11,000 excess deaths as a result of inadequate cover at weekends, and we do not want that to continue.
The Minister for Community and Social Care (Alistair Burt): We are investing an additional £173 million this year, which includes £30 million specifically for eating disorders. We are taking a targeted and phased approach to the additional investment to develop capacity and capability across health, education and children’s services, from prevention and resilience building to supporting the most vulnerable.
Ruth Cadbury: The Government explicitly promised £250 million for children’s mental health in 2015-16, yet the Department of Health has admitted it will be spending only £143 million by next April. Is this £170 million shortfall not further evidence that while Ministers might talk a good talk on mental health, we should judge them by their actions?
Alistair Burt: No. I take the hon. Lady’s point, but we are committed to spending £1.25 billion over the Parliament. We will not be able to spend the £250 million this year, but it will be included in future years. The reason is that we have to make sure it is effectively and properly spent and it is a phased programme. She will be delighted to know that in her constituency there will be an extra £536,000 for children’s mental health services.
moment 40,000 young people are being refused mental health treatment. What guarantees can the Minister give that the money promised by the Chancellor recently will actually be made available and that trusts will not continue to cut mental health budgets?
Alistair Burt: The hon. Lady makes a fair point. While we invest money nationally in services, people complain that locally clinical commissioning groups have not been funnelling the money down. Two things should help: first, for the first time the national access and working time targets, which the Government have introduced, will provide a means of monitoring what CCGs are doing; and, secondly, the new scorecard for CCGs will look explicitly to ensure that a proportion of the increase to a CCG goes into mental health services. The hon. Lady will also be pleased to know that in her own CCG area there will be an extra £521,000 for children’s mental health services.
Bill Esterson: Some 23% of the adult prison population were in care as children and many of them have poor mental health. Will the Minister ensure that mental health services are in place for children in care to make the greatest contribution possible to improving their life chances, and not least to ensure we reduce the numbers ending up in prison?
Alistair Burt: Yes, the hon. Gentleman makes a point made by successive Governments: care outcomes are terrible and the earlier the intervention the better. We are encouraging the engagement of early prevention therapies, including for those in care, and for the first time the Government have appointed a dedicated mental health Minister, in the Department for Education, further to promote resilience and work more closely with young children, including those in care.
Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con): Infection control in the community is a great way to reduce preventable illness. In November, I will launch a handwashing campaign in Parliament that I hope will have cross-party support. Will the Minister inform the House what his Department is doing to promote infection control outside the hospital setting?
Mr Speaker: Order. I listened carefully because I wished to hear the development of the question, but it did not appear to relate to mental health services.
Andrea Jenkyns: I am sorry.
Mr Speaker: Never mind. These things can always be recycled on subsequent occasions. I have been there and I have done it, and the hon. Lady should fear not.
Norman Lamb (North Norfolk) (LD): The Minister referred to the additional money for eating disorders in the autumn statement last year, the purpose of which was to introduce a maximum waiting times standard from next April. We all know that early intervention is critical. It is a condition that kills too many people. Will he confirm that he remains committed to introducing a maximum waiting times standard for eating disorders from next April?
Alistair Burt: I believe we are. I will check to be certain, as I know the right hon. Gentleman knows a great deal about this, but I believe we are. We have £150 million for eating disorders, and £30 million is being spent this year, with additional beds allocated. I will check that the waiting target times remain because they have made a significant difference. The right hon. Gentleman’s work has been of powerful import in what we do.
Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op): Yesterday, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children revealed that one in five children in need of mental health treatment are being turned away. Is it not appalling that young people are being denied help, only for them to become more seriously ill later on, and that the number of children turning up at A&E because of mental illness has doubled in recent years? Does the Minister accept that children’s mental health needs more money now—this year, as he promised? I can point to many different organisations across the country that would gladly receive that support now. How is he going to put his broken promise right?
Alistair Burt: May I welcome the hon. Lady to her position, not least her Cabinet position—he said carefully—and welcome the prominence that mental health now has among all parties? Let me say rather gently in response to the tirade that I have just received that under this Government we have for the first time introduced parity of esteem for mental health on waiting times and national access targets. We are spending more money—£1.25 billion over the next five years. We have the highest number of beds for young people in emergency situations; we have the first dedicated education Minister for young people’s health; we have £75 million for perinatal health; and in her own constituency, the hon. Lady will be pleased to welcome from her shadow Cabinet position an extra £1.1 million going to Liverpool for mental health treatment for children and young people. I think that is a significant response.
Mr Speaker: I do not know who writes a lot of this screed, but sometimes a blue pencil needs to be taken to it. The Minister is immensely capable and experienced, but a distillation or an abridged version rather than a “War and Peace” version would be appreciated.
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt): Eighteen million patients will benefit from seven-day GP appointments by March next year, and seven-day hospital services will reach a quarter of the country by then.
of State confirm whether any additional funding is available from central Government to facilitate this seven-day-a-week service?
Mr Hunt: Yes, I can. I should have said that seven-day hospital services will be available to a quarter of the country by March 2017. We are putting an extra £10 billion into the NHS in the course of this Parliament, which will help in the roll-out of seven-day services—I hope in Croydon, as well. I commend my hon. Friend for his efforts in that respect.
Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab): I met a large group of junior doctors in my constituency on Friday, and we talked a lot about seven-day working. They asked me to put two things straight with the Health Secretary: first, the vast majority of junior doctors are already working seven days a week; and, secondly, on their contract, it was not terms and conditions that they were worried about, as I thought they were, but safety. In respect of those new contracts for junior doctors, what assessment has the Secretary of State’s Government made about patient safety?
Mr Hunt: I am very happy to do that, and to correct some of the misleading impressions given by the BMA about what the changes are. The changes are about patient safety. They are about the fact that someone is 15% more likely to die if admitted on a Sunday than on a Wednesday because we do not have as many doctors in our hospitals at the weekends as we have mid-week. I want to give better support to the doctors who work weekends by making sure that they have more of their colleagues and more consultants there, as well as proper safeguards, which I do not believe we have at the moment. I will be getting that message out, and I hope that the hon. Lady will, too, when she next meets her junior doctors.
Sir Simon Burns (Chelmsford) (Con): I urge my right hon. Friend to continue on his drive to improve patient safety and to reduce avoidable harm in our NHS because that is crucial for patients and the professions.
Mr Hunt: I thank my right hon. Friend for his question, and for the interest that he showed in these issues when he was a Minister.
The reality is that about we have about 200 avoidable deaths every week in our hospitals. It is the same in other countries—this is not just an NHS issue—but it is a global scandal in healthcare, and I want England and our NHS to be the first to put it right. I think that that is consistent with NHS values, and consistent with what doctors and nurses all want.
Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab): It is good of the Secretary of State to join us today. If he had been here yesterday to discuss the small issue of the £2 billion NHS deficit, he would have heard me say that I hoped we could have a mature and constructive relationship.
Can he now guarantee that no junior doctor will be paid less as a result of his proposed new contract? Yes or no?
Mr Hunt: I welcome the hon. Lady to her post. I hope that, just occasionally, we might agree on some things, although I suspect that today may not be one of those occasions.
Let me be absolutely clear about the commitment that we have made to junior doctors. We will not cut the junior doctor pay bill, but what we do need to change are the excessive overtime rates that are paid at weekends. They give hospitals a disincentive to roster as many doctors as they need at weekends, and that leads to those 11,000 excessive deaths. Let me gently say that that was a change to the doctors’ contracts made in 2003, so for members of the Labour party to say that this is nothing to do with them is not accurate, and they should help us to sort out the problem.
Heidi Alexander: I think it is fair to say that junior doctors will make up their own minds about that response.
“This delayed her operation, put her life in danger and ultimately will have cost the NHS more”.
Does the Secretary of State feel any responsibility for that?
Mr Hunt: Let me give the hon. Lady the facts. According to an independent study conducted by The BMJ, there are 11,000 excess deaths because we do not staff our hospitals properly at weekends. I think it is my job, and the Government’s job, to deal with that, and to stand up for patients.
The hon. Lady talked about being constructive. There is something constructive that she can do, which is to join the Royal College of Surgeons, the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Nursing, and urge members of the British Medical Association not to strike but to negotiate, which is the sensible, constructive thing to do. Will the hon. Lady tell them to do that?
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con): The question is about the seven-day NHS, but there is no point in our having a seven-day NHS if it is not an NHS across the country. I have a constituent with advanced prostate cancer who, as his oncologist says, needs docetaxel chemotherapy. In fact, all east midlands oncologists say that it is needed, but it is not provided by the NHS in my constituency, although it is provided in Birmingham. If we are to have a seven-day NHS, we need treatment across the board. Will the Secretary of State step in and do something about this?
my hon. Friend’s constituents, and other people with cancer, is not just about consultants and junior doctors working at the weekends; it is about seven-day diagnostic tests, which will enable us to get the answers back much more quickly and catch cancers earlier.
The Minister for Community and Social Care (Alistair Burt): We have introduced primary legislation and consulted on draft regulations to introduce the care cap. Following the decision to delay implementation until April 2020, we will use the additional time to improve the policy in the light of feedback from stakeholders.
Catherine West: Let me first declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.
May I ask what assistance the Department is offering local authorities which are currently cash-strapped so that they can implement new minimum wage regulation, which is very welcome, in order to provide first-class social care?
Alistair Burt: It is not possible for me to talk about what may emerge from the spending round and settlement, but I can say to the hon. Lady that local authorities were given extra finance to implement the Care Act 2014. Some £5.3 billion is available to local authorities to work through the new integrated social care and NHS budget. So we are very conscious of the pressures on local authorities, which need the resources to provide the social care we all expect.
Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD): The coalition Government agreed a policy of a cap on care costs, and the Conservative manifesto in May said that no one would have to sell their homes to pay for care. Some £100 million has been wasted on this delay, which has betrayed our older people and has simply ducked one of the biggest crises facing this country. Will the Minister and the Department now apologise?
Alistair Burt: There was a consultation on the coalition proposals, which began at the beginning of this year and ran through the election period. The consultation included a very strong representation from the Local Government Association, which said that it did not want to implement the care cap now and wanted extra time. Therefore, the decision has been taken not to cancel, but to delay. It is of course a change from the position we set out. I fully accept that, but we listened to stakeholders and we are now going to use the extra time, at the request of the LGA and others, to find a way through to implement the policy and to use the time for extra financial products.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Ben Gummer): I am pleased to refer my hon. Friend to the recent appointments of Ruth Carnall to the role of programme chair and Judith Dean to the role of programme director for the success regime in Northern, Eastern and Western Devon. Together, they will lead an intensive diagnostic exercise within the local health economy, which will develop options for change to be implemented in the new year.
Johnny Mercer: Given the news last week that the Northern, Eastern and Western Devon clinical commissioning group that covers my constituency has appointed a special team to ensure the projected £430 million funding shortfall does not become a reality, what can my hon. Friend do to assure my constituents that an already challenged constituency can retain confidence in its health care provision?
Ben Gummer: My hon. Friend rightly points out that there are specific challenges in Northern, Eastern and Western Devon and that is precisely why NHS England has instituted the success regime and why it has moved quickly to appoint a programme director and team. I hope that with the engagement that I know he will lead with his colleagues they will come to a resolution that will ensure that the challenges cease.
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt): Some £400 million in resilience money has been invested in the NHS for this winter. Learning from previous years, we have put this money into the NHS baseline for 2015-16 so that the NHS can plan effectively at an earlier stage.
Liz McInnes: I thank the Secretary of State for his response. In my constituency we have an excellent and much-used facility—a walk-in centre in Middleton town centre—which is now threatened with closure. Will he support our campaign to keep it open? Does he agree that its closure would create more A&E attendances and increase winter pressures on our acute services?
Mr Hunt: I welcome the question and understand the hon. Lady’s concerns about the changes. She will understand that we do not direct these changes centrally and they are decided locally. One of the things we have to try to do is deal with the confusion a lot of people have at a local level as to what they should do when they have, for instance, a child with fever at the weekends and whether they require a GP, an urgent care centre or an A&E department. I would ask all CCGs to be very careful to make sure they sort out that confusion so NHS patients know exactly what they should do.
Tulip Siddiq: The Royal Free hospital in my constituency is at the cutting edge of medical research and is currently treating Ebola patient Pauline Cafferkey. I am sure the Secretary of State will join me in wishing her a speedy recovery, yet the hospital faced considerable winter pressures last year. Will the Secretary of State work with the fantastic nurses and doctors at the Royal Free to ensure these winter pressures do not happen again this year?
Mr Hunt: I thank the hon. Lady for her excellent question. I know that the whole House is thinking of Pauline Cafferkey and her family and that it is proud that, under Dr Mike Jacobs and his team, she is getting the most outstanding care that it is possible to get anywhere in the world. We all wish her a speedy recovery. With respect to winter pressures, I know that the Royal Free had a difficult winter but I also know that it has a very good management team and made heroic efforts. I know that the whole team of doctors and nurses will do an excellent job, and we will want to support them in any way we can.
David Tredinnick (Bosworth) (Con): As part of my right hon. Friend’s plans for dealing with winter pressures, will he look at making greater use of the 63,000 practitioners on the Professional Standards Authority’s 17 accredited registers covering 25 occupations? Has he found time yet to read the authority’s report, “Accredited Registers—Ensuring that health and care practitioners are competent and safe”?
Mr Hunt: I must confess that I have not yet read that report, but my hon. Friend has reminded me of how important it is that I should do so. I will read it carefully while thinking about whether it could help us to get through the winter pressures this year.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con): Kettering general hospital, the local clinical commissioning group and the Government are all agreed that the best way to help the NHS in north Northamptonshire to cope with pressures all year round, including in the winter, would be to develop a £30 million urgent care hub at Kettering general hospital. That project is with Monitor. What can the Secretary of State do to encourage Monitor to speed up its deliberations?
Mr Hunt: Once again, I thank my hon. Friend for his persistent campaigning on behalf of Kettering general hospital. It is a very busy hospital under a great deal of pressure, and I know that people work very hard there. The Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer), who has responsibility for hospitals, met campaigners from Kettering recently to discuss this issue, and I will bring the matter up with Monitor as well.
the outsourcing and fragmentation of the NHS, which involves spending money on shareholder profits and tendering bureaucracy, rather than on patients?
Mr Hunt: I do not. That Act meant that we reduced the number of managers and administrators in the NHS in England by 19,000, saving the NHS £1.5 billion a year. The reason for the deficits that the hon. Lady talks about is that, around the same time, we had the Francis report on Mid Staffs, and hospitals in England were absolutely determined to end the scandal of short-staffing. However, agency staffing is not a sustainable way of doing that, which is why we are taking measures today to change that.
Dr Whitford: The Francis report recognised the problems of nursing levels. As hospitals will not be able to use agency staff or immigrant staff, how does the Secretary of State suggest they tackle the nursing ratios in hospitals?
Mr Hunt: If the hon. Lady looks at what has happened with permanent full-time nursing staff, she will see that the numbers have gone up in our hospitals by 8,000 over the past two years, so there are alternatives. We need to do more to help the NHS in this respect, and I will be announcing something about that shortly.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Life Sciences (George Freeman): Medical exemption certificates excluding patients with long-term conditions have been in place since the 1960s. The requirement to renew the certificate every five years has been in place since at least 2002 and we have no plans to review it.
Paul Maynard: The Minister will be aware that, over the summer, there has been media coverage of patients with ongoing and exempt conditions being penalised for not having an up-to-date exemption certificate. Because the renewal period is five years long, the NHS Business Services Authority’s address database gets out of date very quickly and many people have been penalised for inadvertently not renewing their certificate because the database held an out-of-date address for them. What more can be done to assist the authority and the patients, perhaps by introducing a shorter renewal period, and to ensure that this stops occurring?
patients who require frequent prescriptions can enrol for a pre-payment certificate, which costs no more than £100 a year.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab): There are 3.3 million diabetics in this country, including myself, who are entitled to these certificates. This is not special pleading, but the issue is that when they come to renew they do need help. As the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) has said, it is difficult for them to fill in some of these forms. Will the Minister ensure that local GP practices are able to help people if they need assistance in filling in these forms?
George Freeman: I will happily look into that specific issue, discuss it with the right hon. Gentleman and see whether there is anything we need to do.
The Minister for Community and Social Care (Alistair Burt): I am not quite sure what the situation is in Wales, but in England I do not think that carers’ invaluable contribution to society has ever been better recognised. We are working very hard to see the implementation of the improved rights for carers enshrined in the Care Act 2014. I am also responsible for developing a new national carers strategy to see what more we can do to support existing and new carers in England.
Christina Rees: There are more than 6.5 million unpaid carers in the UK, with nearly 11,000 in my constituency. In total, they save the state more than £119 billion each year, which is more than this Government spend on the NHS . Research by Carers UK has found that nearly 50% of carers are struggling to make ends meet, and that is seriously affecting their health. What plans does the Minister have to work with the Department for Work and Pensions and the Treasury, and across government, to ensure that the improvement of carers’ finances will be a key part of the Government’s care strategy?
Alistair Burt: The work I am doing on developing the new strategy involves other Departments, and it will look at not only the economics, but what is happening internationally and where we can take the whole concept of caring for a different society in the future. The economics is certainly important; we could not do without the contribution that carers make, but it would be impossible to replace it with total Government finance.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op): Yesterday, the Public Accounts Committee heard from officials at the Department of Health about the implementation of the Care Act, which is a bold piece of legislation. They admitted that they were very concerned about the unidentified carers, who need to be found in order to be supported. What is the Minister planning to do to make sure that they are identified and supported?
more people to come forward and that the greater work of carer support organisations, such as the one I preside over in Bedfordshire, Carers in Bedfordshire, will be able to identify more carers. We want more young people to come forward because, as the hon. Lady says, people are caring and they do not realise they are. We need a concerted effort all round to try to reveal them, so that more can be done.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab): I am surprised that the Minister believes he is supporting carers in any way acceptably well. The recent personal social services survey found that 38% of adult carers now care for more than 100 hours a week but only one in five of those carers is getting support to take a break from caring. Government cuts have caused a funding gap in social care, which, it is estimated, will be £4 billion by 2020, piling additional pressure on those family carers, and the better care fund and integration will not, in themselves, fix that gap. When will Health Ministers admit that they have got this wrong and argue for more funding for social care, so that carers can get the support and respite breaks they should get?
Alistair Burt: Between 2010 and 2015, £400 million extra was found in order to provide respite for those who are caring for others. Any support that goes into local government, or indeed the NHS, is predicated on a decent economy and decent economic principles in order to fund it—I believe from what happened last night that that has been abandoned by the Labour party. We have to have the resources in the first place. That is what we are seeking to ensure and that is what the work is being done for.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Ben Gummer): Last month, the Department approved a £4 million capital improvement loan for the expansion of the A&E department at Worcestershire Royal hospital and the development of a dedicated discharge lounge. Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust and the local health system will also receive practical support via the emergency care improvement programme to help the trust to address the challenges it has faced in meeting the four-hour A&E waiting time standard.
Mr Walker: I thank the Minister for his reply. I warmly welcome his recent decision to approve the £4 million interim investment in A&E capacity and a new discharge suite at the Worcestershire Royal. As he knows, demand remains very high, and the number of patients being admitted to hospital is close to record levels. May I urge him and his colleagues to look very carefully and urgently at plans for further upgrades, which could deliver much-needed capacity over the coming years?
other reviews of the west midlands health service. There are challenges, and we will fix the problems only if there are locally sourced solutions, which we will then seek to support.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Ben Gummer): The number of available nurse training places in England in 2015-16 is consistent with those filled in 2010-11. There are 20,033 nurse training places available in England in 2015-16, compared with 20,092 in 2010-11.
Drew Hendry: Simon Stevens, the head of the NHS in England, has already highlighted the devastating impact that new immigration earnings thresholds will have on nursing numbers—it is estimated that up to 29,755 nurses will be affected, and that the recruitment cost will be more than £178.5 million by 2020. What representations will the Minister be making to the Home Secretary to put a stop to this irresponsible and illogical change in policy that defines ballet dancers but not nurses as a shortage occupation?
Ben Gummer: The hon. Gentleman will be reassured to know that there are continuing and cordial relations between the Department of Health and the Home Office. Trusts have had three years to prepare for this moment. There is a bigger issue at play here, which is that there are five applicants for every nursing place in the United Kingdom; that is the position for people wishing to train as a nurse. Our first responsibility is to ensure that we are getting as many people who want to be nurses in this country into a nurse training place.
Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab): The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, which covers the Wakefield constituency, has been forced to recruit nurses from both Spain and India. Following on from the previous question, what representations has the Minister made to the Home Office, because these changes could affect nurses who have come to Britain, bought mortgages here and plan to make their lives here? Will they be affected?
Ben Gummer: The hon. Lady knows that the Immigration Advisory Committee is independent and it makes its recommendations on that basis. There are trusts—I have visited some myself—that had previously relied on agency and migrant labour that have now managed to change the way they are hiring staff so that they can better source sustainable staffing from the domestic staffing pool.
Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab): In December 2009, Lord Lansley, as the then shadow Health Secretary, described the amount spent by the NHS on agency staff as “unforgiveable”. Since he made that statement, agency spending has spiralled out of control, rising by 83% in the past three years. Ministers are in denial about the root causes of that increase.
The cuts to nursing training places have created a shortage of nurses and forced hospitals to spend vast amounts on expensive agency staff. Will the Minister now come clean and admit that it was the Government’s mismanagement that caused this financial crisis?
Ben Gummer: The hon. Gentleman should know that the unforgiveable thing was the dereliction of care by a Department of Health under a previous regime. It contributed to short staffing—a significant part of the scandal at Mid Staffs—that we needed to put right in short order. That required an emergency response and agency labour to be employed. We are now putting staffing on a sustainable basis; we were left with short staffing in 2010.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Life Sciences (George Freeman): The mandate for NHS England sets out our national ambitions for the health service across England. NHS England and the clinical commissioning groups are responsible for working with local providers. To ensure quality and consistency, the Care Quality Commission has developed a set of fundamental standards. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence also provides a range of guidance and quality standards, and the Department of Health has established the MyNHS website to highlight regional variations and use transparency to drive improvement across the system.
Tom Pursglove: I thank the Minister for that answer, but earlier this year figures published by Public Health England showed that more people under the age of 75 die from cancer in Corby than anywhere else in England. What steps are Ministers taking to help to improve those rates? They are stubbornly high, and we need to stop the higher prevalence of cancer in our area.
George Freeman: My hon. Friend makes an important point. The Government are absolutely committed to world-class cancer care, which is why we put £1 billion into the cancer drugs fund. We have seen a huge 71% increase in cancer referrals, with 40,000 more patients treated, and a new cancer strategy has just been set out. It is true that the incidence of cancer in my hon. Friend’s constituency is regrettably high, and Corby CCG has significantly worse cancer outcomes. That has been recognised and the 2015-16 commissioning plan puts in place a series of measures on cancer, including improving earlier diagnosis, providing treatment within 62-day referral targets and implementing the national cancer survivorship programme.
Secretary of State got his job under the coalition. If Ministers want some consistency throughout the land, they should give that deprived ex-pit village a new health service: knock some heads together and get it done.
George Freeman: It is a pleasure to take my first question from the hon. Gentleman. I thought I needed my ears cleaning, but I clearly do not. I will happily talk to him about the issue in his constituency, but the truth is that local CCGs are responsible for commissioning local services. I will happily, as a Health Minister, talk to him about what needs to be done.
Mr Skinner: Get it done now.
Mr Speaker: I think the thrust of the hon. Gentleman’s view is very clear, and he has expressed it with unmistakable force.
Mr Skinner: And Mr Speaker’s on my side, too.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Jane Ellison): Organ donation rates have increased by about 60% since 2008. The Government give about £60 million a year to NHS Blood and Transplant to support organ donation. NHSBT has a strategy, which it launched in 2013, to take us up to 2020 and increase that figure even further.
Glyn Davies: Does the Minister agree that one of the most effective ways of increasing organ donation is to ensure that the next of kin of every potential donor is offered a meeting with a specialist nurse in organ donation, irrespective of whether the potential donor carries a card?
Jane Ellison: My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight one of the principal difficulties we face, which is people not having a conversation about donation. Even if people are on the organ donor register, their wishes are sometimes overtaken by those of their families at that very difficult moment. He is right to highlight the brilliant work done by SNODs, as well as initiatives such as the one that will happen this Saturday, when the Daily Mail, together with the organ donor register, will produce a publication that will, we hope, stimulate thousands of conversations across the land. Having a conversation about consent is one of the ways we will crack this problem.
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt): Last year I launched My NHS, where patients can see how safe their local hospital is and many other things. From next May, there will be overall information on the quality of mental health and cancer care.
Chris Skidmore: Does the Secretary of State share my view that driving up standards in the NHS is better achieved through a culture whereby providers can learn from their peers? For example the excellent maternity department at my local Cossham hospital recently received an outstanding rating from the Care Quality Commission. That is better than the old ways of doing things through targets driven by Whitehall.
Mr Hunt: I agree, and I congratulate the doctors and nurses working in the Cossham maternity unit. Southmead hospital in Bristol has some of the best maternity survival rates in Europe, so there is a lot of very good practice. The way to get the word out is through transparency of outcomes, not endless new targets, so my hon. Friend is absolutely right.
T2. Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury) (Lab): If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt): I would like to make a statement on measures the Government are taking to help NHS organisations tackle the deficits by reducing the cost of agency staff. Building on previously announced controls, from the end of November we will introduce maximum shift rates for all clinical staff employed through agencies, which will gradually decrease over time as the measures take effect and demand for agency staff reduces. In addition, we will work with each trust to limit or reduce the overall agency spend. Exceptional breaches of the limits will require advance agreement. Taken together, these measures are expected to improve patient care and reduce NHS agency staff spend by £1 billion over three years. The chief inspector of hospitals has confirmed that he believes this is the right thing to do.
Paula Sherriff: Like many Members across this House, I have been inundated with letters and emails from junior doctors who feel completely undervalued and undermined by the actions of this Government, so much so that thousands of them are leaving the UK. This weekend over 2,000 medics and students wrote to the Secretary of State, condemning him for his proposed unfair and unsafe changes to the junior doctors contract. What further evidence does he need to see that he has lost the confidence of the future leaders of the NHS, and does he think he can win it back?
Mr Hunt: Yes, I do. Let us be clear: this is about patient safety, about which every single doctor and nurse in the NHS is passionate. The problem is that the doctors whom the hon. Lady has met have been misled by their own union. This is not about cutting the pay bill for junior doctors, as the BMA has suggested. This is about safer care at weekends, reducing unsafe hours and doing the right thing for patients, and that is the right thing for doctors as well.
who fear it may affect decisions on their care. Will Ministers look into this scheme and either offer some reassurance or instruct the CCG to reconsider?
The Minister for Community and Social Care (Alistair Burt): The north Lincolnshire scheme is designed to try to encourage doctors to make sure that there are no inappropriate referrals to secondary care; it is not designed to prevent appropriate ones. Over the past five years we have seen an increase of 600,000 in urgent referrals for cancer care, for example. We want to see that continue. It will not be helped if there are inappropriate referrals, and that is what the scheme is about.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab): Last week senior officials at Monitor reported being leaned on by the Department of Health to suppress the publication of financial figures ahead of the Conservative party conference. This week the Health Secretary has been accused of vetoing the release of impartial independent reports on measures that could reduce our consumption of sugar. Does he not understand that leadership on transparency must come from the very top? Will he now commit to practising what he preaches on NHS transparency and release this report immediately?
Mr Jeremy Hunt: I will take no lessons on transparency from the Opposition. Professor Sir Brian Jarman said that the Department of Health under Labour was a “denial machine” when it came to the problems of Mid Staffs. We have made the NHS more transparent than ever before, and we will continue to practise transparency.
T6. Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con): What progress has been made towards the implementation of the Keogh review of urgent and emergency care?
Mr Hunt: We are making good progress and we expect to make a substantive announcement on that before the end of the year. That will be about improving the standard and the quality of care in A and E departments, which I know my hon. Friend has a great interest in, and removing the confusion that people feel about what precisely the NHS offer is in their area. It is looking good and I hope to have something to announce to the House before too long.
T3. Teresa Pearce (Erith and Thamesmead) (Lab): A recent whistleblower revealed that the 111 helpline is in meltdown and at least two babies have died after staff failed to recommend treatment that may have saved them. Two weeks ago my own three-week-old premature granddaughter was very ill. Her parents called 111 and were promised that the duty doctor would call. He did not. They waited the whole long night and the next morning took her to A and E, and she was diagnosed with meningitis. What exactly is the Minister doing to fix the crisis in the 111 service?
are referred to a clinician, but it is clearly not perfect, given the hon. Lady’s story, so I will look into the case that she raised.
T9. David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con): Patients in England wait 18 weeks for an operation, but in Wales, where Labour has run the NHS for the past 16 years, they wait 26 weeks. Does that not prove that only the Conservative party can be trusted to run the national health service?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Ben Gummer): My hon. Friend is right. A further cause of distress for the people of Wales is the fact they do not have the funding that the NHS requires in their country, just as England would not had a Labour Government been elected in 2015, because we would not have the funding that this Conservative Government have promised to ensure top care for patients.
T5. Ian C. Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab): The all- party spinal cord injury group, which I chair, recently reported that very vulnerable patients are being prejudiced by delayed discharges, taking up lots of public money in hospital expenses that should be used to treat more patients. Will the Secretary of State carry out an urgent service review to address this real problem in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland?
Alistair Burt: Delayed discharge has been a problem across the system for many years. An awful lot of work is going on to ensure that more preventive work is done so that people do not go into hospital, and to ensure that if they do go in they leave quickly. I visited Salford Royal only a couple of months ago and saw the process it has for dealing with discharges more effectively. Learning is going on throughout the system, and more money is in the system for winter in order to cover the problem.
Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con): To continue on the same theme—hopefully I am coming in at the right time, Mr Speaker—I chair the all-party group on patient safety, in collaboration with the Patients Association. We are about to look into hospital infections, and in Parliament in November I will launch a hand washing campaign. What is the Department of Health doing to promote infection control outside hospital settings?
Mr Jeremy Hunt: I thank my hon. Friend for her great interest in this issue and for the campaigning she did before entering Parliament, which I know stemmed from personal tragedy. This is an incredibly important issue. We face a crisis in global healthcare as a result of anti-microbial resistance, which means the current generation of antibiotics is no longer as effective as it needs to be. Proper hygiene in hospitals is therefore vital, and we have a lot of plans that I will be happy to share with her.
T7. Owen Thompson (Midlothian) (SNP): What measures is the Secretary of State putting in place to recruit and retain GPs? Given that he has indicated recruiting 5,000, where does he plan to find them?
recruit more, but to retain them and to bring back those who have left general practice but want to return. Health Education England is working with the Department on all these plans and proposals. The hon. Gentleman is right to identify that as a key source of those who will come into the service in future.
Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con): Delayed publication of evidence is as damaging as non-publication, which is why we rightly expect clinicians, researchers and managers to publish their evidence and data in a timely and transparent manner. It is a matter of great regret to the Health Committee that we started our inquiry today without access to the detailed and impartial review of the evidence that we need to make a contribution to this inquiry. Will the Secretary of State please set out when he will publish it?
Mr Jeremy Hunt: I agree with my hon. Friend about the importance of transparency and publishing in a timely manner. I will look again at the planned publication date for the report she wants to see, which will be published so that Parliament can debate it properly. The normal practice is for advice to Ministers to be published at the same time as policy decisions are made, as happened with the Chantler review and the Francis report.
T8. Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab): The Royal College of Nursing reports that it is becoming clear that for the first time since the early 2000s there is a critical shortage of registered nurses in the UK. Both the UK and global nursing labour markets are changing, and our increasing reliance on alternative sources is not sustainable. In 2014, 37,645 students across the UK were turned away from nursing courses. Is it not time the Minister admitted that the situation is not good enough and that the Government need drastically to scale up those places to reduce dependency on overseas nursing staff?
Ben Gummer: The thrust of the right hon. Lady’s question is correct. That is why we have near-record numbers of nurses in training and a record number of nurses in practice, and we will continue to see growth over the next five years.
David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con): Last year the NHS paid £300 million to claimants’ lawyers. Indeed, for small and medium claims, the lawyers made two to three times as much as the claimants themselves. Is there more we can do to stop this abusive behaviour?
Mr Jeremy Hunt: There certainly is. We spend £1.3 billion every year on litigation claims—money that could be used to look after patients on the front line. The way to avoid spending that money is to have safer care, and that is why it is so important that we have a seven-day service.
T10. Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP): As the Secretary of State will know, the Scottish Government are once again in the vanguard in introducing crucial legislation—the Smoking Prohibition (Children in Motor Vehicles) (Scotland) Bill, which will eradicate more than 60,000 journeys per week where children are exposed to dangerous second-hand smoke. Will he advise on what plans are in place for the rest of the UK to follow Scotland’s example?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Jane Ellison): I have to tell the hon. Lady that the law for England and Wales changed on 1 October, so in fact we are in the vanguard, not Scotland.
Mims Davies (Eastleigh) (Con): Given this Government’s continued excellent commitment to investing in our NHS and reducing preventable mortality, does the Minister agree that keeping healthcare provision as local as possible is very important for Moorgreen hospital in my constituency?
Ben Gummer: The core purpose of the Vanguard programme is to ensure that we get local solutions to local healthcare problems. Only by making sure that we release the potential of local healthcare staff and providers, doctors and nurses, do we get the solutions we require rather than things being determined from Whitehall, as was the wont of previous Administrations that we will not follow.
Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab): I can think of few things more frightening than being in labour and being turned away from a maternity unit that someone has visited, become familiar with, and got to know the staff. Over a third of units closed their doors to women in labour last year. What is the Minister going to do about this, and why does he think it has been happening?
Mr Jeremy Hunt: The hon. Lady is absolutely right; we need more midwives. We recruited more midwives in the previous Parliament, and we do need to expand maternity provision as we have a growing birth rate. I am happy to look at the problems in her area. However, we also have a maternity review coming up early next year, led by Baroness Cumberlege, that will help us to address this problem sustainably.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con): What health problems are caused by first-cousin marriages, and how much does dealing with those problems cost the NHS each year?
Jane Ellison: I cannot give my hon. Friend a specific answer, but I would be very happy to get back to him because I know there has been some local discussion about this in the city that he represents. I know of the issues to which he refers.
Mr Speaker: Order. As in the health service under any Government, demand on these occasions always tends to outstrip supply. I apologise to colleagues who did not get in, but we must now move on.
Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op) (Urgent Question:) To ask the Secretary of State for a statement on the closure announced yesterday of Redcar coke ovens, leading to the direct loss of 2,200 jobs and many thousands more in the supply chain in the local community.
The Minister for Small Business, Industry and Enterprise (Anna Soubry): Let me begin by saying that the significance of yesterday’s announcement is not lost on me or any member of this Government, because we know and understand the profound implications it will have for Teesside. The hon. Member for Redcar (Anna Turley) and I will not agree on this matter, but I pay tribute to her for fighting for her constituents, as every good MP should do. I also pay tribute to the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop), who I suspect will also fall out with me today, for the work that he has done on behalf of his constituents.
I say that the significance was not lost on me because it was an honour to go up to Redcar the other week to meet a number of people. We knew that SSI was in huge difficulty. To put the situation in context, it never made a profit, notwithstanding the undoubtedly outstanding workforce and a lot of good will, and the coke ovens were losing, on average, £2 million a month.
The official receiver was accordingly brought in that Friday, and in his capacity as liquidator of SSI he announced, following discussions with potential buyers, that he had received no viable offers for the coke ovens or the blast furnace and that he would therefore begin closing those facilities. The terminology is that this is a “hard closure”—it is a tough closure as well. This is not mothballing, so we have to be realistic about the implications.
This is hugely regrettable news for SSI workers, their families and the local economy more broadly. Only this morning I spoke to the chief executive of the local council, Amanda Skelton, who informed me that at least 50% of the people employed at the ovens and blast furnace live in Redcar, so we are under no illusions as to the significance of the situation for the town.
The Government remain absolutely focused on supporting those people who find themselves out of work as a result of SSI’s liquidation. Through a package of up to £80 million, we will continue to invest in them and the future of the Tees valley economy.
Safety, as Members might imagine, is a top priority. We will continue to ensure that the official receiver has all the funding and support necessary to deliver a safe and orderly closure of these assets, working with the Health and Safety Executive and Environment Agency. I thank the official receiver for what he has done. He was able, with Government assistance, to keep the coke ovens going until yesterday’s announcement, which is no mean achievement.
not of the local management, which struggled under the most difficult of conditions, but, unfortunately, of the Thai owners, notwithstanding the welcome they properly received when they bought the plant and the great hope invested in them by the local community.
I place on record my thanks to everybody—including the Community trade union, which I had the great pleasure to meet, representatives from the local authorities, local Members of Parliament and other stakeholders—who has helped to operate SSI’s facilities safely during this particularly difficult period. They have done so much to try to ensure that there is a future for steel making in Redcar, but unfortunately all that good work has come to nothing.
Anna Turley: This Government have overseen a tragedy for the people of my constituency and the region. This is an act of industrial vandalism for British manufacturing. We are talking about potentially as many as 6,000 jobs in the local area, but this is about more than jobs and livelihoods: this is about people’s identity, their pride, their dignity and their respect in work, and it is about the heritage and the history of our local community, where people have been involved in steel making for generations. That has been torn away.
This is about more than our past: it is about our future. Fifty apprentices were due to start with SSI on the day it paused production. Steel underpins the entirety of the Teesside economy. The Government have turned their back on my constituents and on steel making in Teesside, and they have dealt a hammer blow to the UK industry.
Why did the Government refuse to intervene on environmental grounds to secure the site? Why have they hidden behind state aid rules when other countries in Europe have stepped in to protect national assets? Why are they claiming that money would go to the Thai banks when the official receiver works on behalf of the Crown and has a responsibility to maximise the value of an asset, not to close it down? How can the Government say, in just a few days, that there were no viable options or buyers, when I understand that there were at least 11 interested parties? Why did they pull the plug before they had properly explored the options for developing foundry coke for emerging markets in western Europe? Why have they included—this is absolutely disgraceful—statutory redundancy payments in the £80 million support package? The payments could be as much as £20 million to £30 million of that sum. They are misleading people and cheating them of the support promised to them. Finally, why have they allowed 170 years of great British steel making, which built the world from Sydney harbour bridge to Canary Wharf, just to fade away without so much as a whimper from this Government?
Anna Soubry: As I said, the hon. Lady and I are bound to fall out on these things. Let me just make this absolutely clear: this is not a decision that the Government have taken; this is a decision that the official receiver has taken. The official receiver is independent. It is his decision and, as I said, he has made it after more than a week of trying to forge an agreement with potential buyers, notably of the coke ovens. I do not believe that anybody has come forward to buy the blast furnace.
levels; in fact, we are 25% short. The price of slab made in Redcar has almost halved in 12 months. That is why the site has never turned a profit. That is why, unfortunately, it has made losses year on year. As I said, the coke ovens were making a loss of some £2 million a month. We have done everything we can.
In relation to the environment, we disagree. We are working with the Health and Safety Executive and the Environment Agency. The truth is that those discussions had been happening for some considerable time before the company went into liquidation, because such an outcome was always the fear, faced with the harsh reality of where we are with our steel industry not only in this country but across the whole world.
Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab): Be braver.
Anna Soubry: Oh, I don’t have a problem with being brave. I can tell the right hon. Lady that if we look at the action that Italy has taken, even in the peculiar and exceptional circumstances of a group of directors facing allegations that they were poisoning the land and causing cancer, the Commission is now investigating the situation because it is concerned that there has been a breach of the state aid rules. Such is the nature of the rules, which are very onerous.
Finally, on the £80 million package we have put in, the hon. Member for Redcar makes the point that about £20 million—I think it is nearer £30 million—of that is by way of redundancy payments. Let me make it clear that that was always my understanding, and I thought that we had made that clear when we were up in Redcar. In any event, let me also make it very clear that I am not closing the door on the £80 million, because one of the things of which we are very aware is the implications for the many thousands of other people through the supply chain. Many of them have not been paid for some considerable time, such was the contractors’ and subcontractors’ loyalty to SSI, so the effects through the supply chain will be considerable. I certainly want to be in a position to be able to help everybody, not just the 2,100 people who have unfortunately been affected by the announcement.
David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con): Our steel industry pays the most expensive electricity prices in the EU and, indeed, in the world, and it is impossible to compete at the margin with such costs. Does the Minister agree that whenever we discuss the balance between environmental taxes and lower energy costs, the Labour party always wants to go further, faster and more unilaterally, and that has had an effect in Redcar?
energy prices for industry are lower, but those for ordinary consumers are considerably higher. Such is the Commission’s concern that it is now looking at and investigating whether such a balance is a breach of state aid rules. There is a lot of strength in what my hon. Friend says, but we again have some mythology. Sorting it out and getting to the facts is one reason why we are having a steel summit on Friday.
Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab): If someone were to build a steelworks today, they would build it at Redcar because of the port, the quality of the steel, its location in relation to the European market, the skills of the people and the fact that the largest blast furnace in Britain is located there. Coke will still be pushed till Wednesday, and possibly even Saturday. I could ask many questions of the Minister, but the main one that I want answered now is why, when the Insolvency Service is under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of State, allowing him to steer and guide it, did it recommend closure of the entire site yesterday, prior to the steel summit on Friday? We thought that we would be talking about Redcar and Britain’s largest blast furnace. If Britain’s largest blast furnace is not part of a steel summit and a steel strategy for Britain, what is the point of the summit?
Anna Soubry: There are many points to discuss at the summit, one of which is the reality of the steel industry across the world. Let me make it absolutely clear that the official receiver is independent and free of interference from Government, and rightly so. That should never change. I would have hoped that the hon. Gentleman understood that. We have to be absolutely clear on this. The coking ovens were losing £2 million a month. It is a tribute to—[Interruption.] Honestly, I would take another question, but heckling will not help the hon. Gentleman.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab): That’s your speciality.
Anna Soubry: It is, I know. That was the pot calling the kettle black, but this is a serious matter.
As the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop) knows, the official receiver ensured that there was enough coal to put into the coking ovens. That went over and above what we all thought would happen on that Friday, when there was not even enough money to buy the sulphur to keep the power station going, as the hon. Gentleman knows. Notwithstanding his efforts, those of the hon. Member for Redcar and the meeting that I had with the group of people based locally who had expressed an interest, the harsh reality is that nobody has come forward with an offer to buy the coke ovens. Are Members honestly surprised when they were losing £2 million a month?
Mr Speaker: Order. The Minister’s self-knowledge is a blessed thing and I genuinely thank her for it, but there is a balance to be struck. She is trying to respond comprehensively, which is to be respected. Equally, I want to get everybody in if possible. We will try to strike the right balance.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con): My hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (David Mowat) is right about the irony of the Labour party complaining about steel plants closing when it imposed the Climate Change Act 2008 on the UK, which unilaterally put huge costs on energy that other countries did not face. Will the Minister confirm that the Government have learned the lesson and will not unilaterally impose huge energy costs and carbon emission targets on British businesses? If the Government do not make that commitment, many other manufacturing jobs will follow. We are merely exporting jobs to other countries around the world.
Anna Soubry: My hon. Friend makes a good point. However, even if we had the sort of energy prices that I would like, it would not solve the problem for our steel making industry, which is that the price of steel has almost halved because of over-production and under-consumption.
Kevin Brennan: I note that the Minister said that she and her colleagues understand the significance of this situation. That statement would have had more resonance with the House had the Secretary of State come along today.
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Anna Turley) and all my hon. Friends from Teesside, who have worked tirelessly on behalf of their constituents. In contrast, we now see the practical consequences of having a Conservative Business Secretary who is so ideologically opposed to the notion of Governments acting to protect our strategic economic assets in difficult times that he will not even use the words “economic strategy”, preferring the phrase “industrial approach”. I am afraid that “industrial indifference” would be a more accurate description of what we are seeing.
This is not just about the 2,100 jobs that will be directly affected at Redcar, although each one represents a tragedy for those families; this is about a long-term strategic vision for Britain’s economic and industrial future. I am afraid that for all the rhetoric about northern powerhouses and the march of the makers, at the first big test of whether this Government have any long-term strategic economic vision, the march of the makers has come to a stuttering halt.
Why have the Government been so passive about working to save the steel industry in this country when it is so strategically important? What options did they explore for mothballing to save the assets? Why do they believe it acceptable that the £80 million support package also contains statutory entitlements to redundancy pay? I was interested to hear that the Minister might not stop at £80 million, so perhaps she will tell the House a little more about how much she has in mind. Will she confirm how much it will cost the taxpayer to clean up the site safely?
What assessment has the Minister made of the economic impact of the closure on the local community and the supply chain? Did she raise the issue of Chinese dumping during her recent visit to China, or does the UK’s relationship with China now simply consist of kowtowing to the Chinese Government in a way that will mean that they have more financial interest in Britain’s strategic assets than our own British Government?
Anna Soubry: It does nobody any good—especially those who have been made redundant—when people engage in scoring cheap political points, and I think it is absolutely pathetic. The Secretary of State and I have worked together tirelessly to consider every single option for how we could assist. That consumed the time of both of us, and we did that work together. One example of that is the fact that, apparently, during all the goings on in the past about saving Redcar, no Minister ever went there. We were the first—it got both of us—and that reflected our dedication and was our attempt to ensure that we did everything we could. That is what we have done, but we must be realistic. The price of slab has almost halved due to over-production and under-consumption. Yes, I did talk about Chinese dumping and many other things related to the steel industry when I went to China, and unfortunately the account that one gets back is not good. This is a worldwide problem, and it will not be solved overnight. This is a tough time—possibly the toughest time ever—for steel industries across the world.
Mrs Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con): Does the Minister agree that if Labour Members want more freedom for the UK Government to determine Government subsidy for important businesses such as the steel industry, they should vote to support the “leave” campaign?
Anna Soubry: My view is that we should stay within a reformed Europe, but those are exactly the sorts of conversations we need to have. We must speak to countries such as Germany and get the facts out there. The idea that only the British steel industry is suffering is not true. This problem affects all steel industries, not just in Europe but in Turkey, Brazil, and around the world. This is a real crisis throughout the world.
Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP): I make no apology for repeating in my short contribution some of what has already been said. My constituents know only too well the terrible cost of plant closures. That has happened twice in Redcar, and my heartfelt sympathies go to each and every person involved. I know how hard the hon. Member for Redcar (Anna Turley) and other Members from Teesside have worked.
Industrial vandalism does not even begin to describe what has happened, and is happening, to steel plants in this country. Ravenscraig—I have said the name, but it now means very little. They are still cleaning up in Ravenscraig. They have tried to contain all the terrible heavy metals and industrial material. Most of it has gone, but people are finding it hard to redevelop that site simply because of what was there before. Will the Minister please pledge in Rotherham on Friday to give positive help to the UK steel industry? We must have positive help to survive the recession for all the reasons that have already been mentioned, such as high electricity costs, high rates and so on.
more talking; we need action and more than £80 million to try, somehow, to replace all those well-paid jobs. My constituents know how that feels. Many people, including a previous Member for my constituency, went to university on the back of a training course that they received at that time. He was lucky because not everyone was able to do that, but that still did not produce the type of well-paid jobs that there used to be in that area. That is what will happen in Redcar—we all know that.
We talk about state aid, and other countries in Europe seem able to provide that. Conservative Members seem to use Europe as a battering ram. It is one thing for one side, and something else for another, and they change their minds all the time. State aid is possible; it has been done by other countries. Please consider it.
Mr Speaker: Order. We are extremely grateful to the hon. Lady and I thank her for what she said.
Anna Soubry: I am more than happy to meet the hon. Lady to explain to her the state aid rules and to bust some myths. She must be assured that the problem is one of over-consumption across the world. These are harsh economic realities, and although I wish I had a magic wand, no Government can set the price of steel. The price of slab has almost halved in 12 months. Hardly anybody is making a profit, and no Government can solve that. She can be assured that the Government are doing everything they can to support the steel industry in this country. Where we cannot support it—as we have unfortunately found in Redcar—we support those workers into new jobs.
Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con): The Minister referred several times to the global steel market, and we know that the dumping of certain Chinese steel products has played a part in the situation at Redcar and set a worrying precedent for all other manufacturing industries, including high-tech. Will she confirm that the Government will look to use anti-dumping measures in other situations, just as they have supported their use in this instance?
Anna Soubry: It was, I think, a first when a clear ministerial direction was given that we should vote in favour of anti-dumping measures in the European Commission, and we did that. Last week we abstained from another vote, and I am more than happy to explain to my hon. Friend in more detail why we did that—Mr Speaker, quite rightly, wants me to keep my remarks short. There was a good reason for that abstention, because by doing so we were actually voting in favour of supporting the British steel industry.
to spend £1.1 billion to clean the place up. It is an absolute utter disaster, and the Government should be ashamed of themselves.
Anna Soubry: The hon. Gentleman was at the meeting—he wanted to come to it and I said he was more than welcome to attend—and he knows that nobody put up a white flag. He is not stupid, and he knows the reality—[Interruption.] I am not patronising; I am reminding the hon. Gentleman, because he is intelligent and he knows, that the price of steel has almost halved. We are not hiding behind state aid rules. I challenge him to tell me what we could do that is within the state aid rules, and I will have a look at that. We have explored everything.
David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con): I recognise that the closure will have a real impact on the community. Redcar is a great part of the world and has a really skilled workforce, and the Government have taken pragmatic steps to try to assist in a difficult situation. Does my right hon. Friend agree that there are benefits to undertaking more proactive reviews of large sites in industries that are going through transformational change—including diversification initiatives, and considering alternative uses for sites—just as the Minister for Life Sciences is initiating in the pharmaceutical sector?
Anna Soubry: I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for his comments and for his question. I very much agree with him. We have to take an honest and realistic approach to all these matters, looking at conditions and at events we actually have no control over. There are, however, many things we can do. To say that we do not have a strategy is just ludicrous, because we absolutely do have one.
Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab): With regard to the £80 million in support funding, apart from the disgraceful issue of statutory redundancies being paid out of it, when will people actually get some real money in their hands? People have not been paid for up to eight weeks now. Apart from retraining, what they need is money to buy food and pay bills before this tragedy turns into an utter disaster for those families.
Anna Soubry: Unfortunately, the hon. Lady is right when she talks about the people in the supply chain who have not been paid because of their absolute determination to try to support SSI. One of the things we absolutely looked at was whether there was anything we could do to help them. At the moment, we cannot find any way to help people along the supply chain who have not been, but who should have been, paid. It was known that the redundancies were part of the package of £80 million, but we will have to agree to disagree on that. [Interruption.] Well, I certainly said it in the media, so perhaps they did not listen to the local television. In any event and most importantly, we are determined to make sure that it is not just the workforce at SSI Redcar who benefit from the package, but that it goes through the supply chain. We know there are many thousands more who suffer because of this liquidation.
best wishes. Has the Minister received representations from any other sites that perhaps find themselves in a similarly perilous position? Will she promise to continue to engage with the industry and do everything she can to help?
Anna Soubry: It is not a secret that we have a really serious crisis in the British steel industry. We identified that when we had our very good Back-Bench debate a few weeks ago. We are holding the steel summit precisely for the reasons my hon. Friend has given. We are very keen to talk to everybody, to explore all options and to do everything we can. As the Prime Minister said, steel is a vital industry. We are determined to continue to do everything we can to support it.
Mr Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab): The SSI closure is a tragedy for Redcar, but yesterday’s announcement has repercussions far beyond the boundaries of that town. The snuffing out of the blast furnace and coke works puts a pillow over and suffocates the entire UK steel industry and a large part of the manufacturing supply chain. It will no doubt contribute to that sector’s death. What is the Minister doing not just to retrain staff but to maintain and preserve this efficient industrial asset, maintaining and preserving that capability and knowledge to ensure that competitiveness throughout our manufacturing and supply chain sector is not lost forever?
Anna Soubry: I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I absolutely know and recognise the importance of the manufacturing sector. I have already used the words the Prime Minister used in recognition of the vital part that steel plays in our manufacturing, and indeed in the country’s, whole industrial base. We absolutely want to support it. That is one of the reasons why we are having the summit on Friday. It is absolutely understood and accepted that it would be wrong to lose steel—the manufacturing, rolling, pressing and everything else of steel in this country—but we are where we are. At the moment, we have gross overcapacity. That is the tragedy, as prices continue to fall.
Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con): Clearly, what has happened in Redcar is a terrible blow to its local economy. In northern Lincolnshire, our economy is very dependent on the future of the Scunthorpe works. It is clearly important that we maintain steel manufacturing capacity in the country. Will the Minister give an assurance that the Government will redouble their efforts to ensure that the Scunthorpe works continues?
Anna Soubry: Let me make it clear: I will continue to do everything we can to keep the steel industry going in this country. I am looking forward to meeting my hon. Friend later and I am going to Rotherham on Monday to meet people there. I will continue to meet, go around and visit. That is part of our determination to do everything we can to support this vital industry.
lost their jobs on Teesside last week. How many more jobs have to be lost before the Government change their policy and start to address these issues?
Anna Soubry: I think we fall out when we say it is “our” policy. We have all been agreed that we want a cleaner, greener world, but it comes at a price. As I said before, electricity prices and the cost of energy were not the reason. They did not help, but this is about the worldwide problem of over-production, under-consumption and a fall in the price of steel by up to a half of what it was 12 months ago.
Andrew Stephenson (Pendle) (Con): This is deeply regrettable and will have profound implications for the whole economy. I welcome the announcement of a steel summit to discuss the broader impacts on industry. Will the Minister say more about the organisations that will be involved?
Anna Soubry: Off the top of my head, those attending will be—as you might imagine, Mr Speaker—steel owners, manufacturers, the steel trade industry itself, trade unions, local Members of Parliament and Ministers from relevant Departments. I cannot remember now, but I think we have a couple of other people coming along to provide an independent assessment of the future of the steel industry. I do not want the summit to be too big; otherwise it will just turn into a grand talking shop. That is the one thing we do not want. I hope we will have all the key people there.
Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab): My words could never convey to the Minister the sense of abandonment that is felt in communities throughout the Tees Valley. She stands there as if she has had no choices to make. Why can we not mothball this site? It would cost £30 million. Last time Redcar was in this position it took three years to find a solution. This Government are giving it only days. Why?
Anna Soubry: Because the official receiver has come to the conclusion—[Interruption.] No, we cannot hide behind the fact that the official receiver is in charge. The official receiver has said he cannot find a buyer. The hon. Lady says it is a mere £30 million. I am sorry, but is that for six months, 12 months or 18 months? How would she justify that to her constituents? It is not Government money, but her constituents’ money. Let me make it very clear: if we do it for Redcar, then do we not do it for every other industry or business in our country that, unfortunately, cannot find a buyer for its products?
Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab): May I, on behalf of the Scunthorpe steel community, express solidarity and support for the Teesside steel community at this very difficult time? When Jaguar Land Rover was in significant difficulty and very challenged, the then Labour Government stepped in and intervened. Jaguar Land Rover is now a byword for success. When will the Conservative Government step in and intervene so that steel can be the byword for success in the future that it has been in the past?
happy to go through them with the hon. Gentleman to see whether he can find me a way of doing what he says he wants us to do.
Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op): We have to be frank today that the Redcar tragedy casts a dark pall over the steel summit on Friday. Will the Minister say to the stakeholders, and to others in the industry who will be attending and who are struggling with very difficult times, what she will come up with that is new so that it will not be just a talking shop? Does she, crucially, have the backing of the Chancellor, the Prime Minister and her own Secretary of State to take the actions that matter?
Anna Soubry: Let me deal with the last point first. I repeat what the Prime Minister said: this is a vital industry that we will continue to support. So yes is the short answer to that question. The hon. Gentleman knows that the state aid rules are the state aid rules. This idea or myth that other countries are doing magic things in breach of the state aid rules without any comeback is just that—an absolute myth.
The hon. Gentleman also forgets—I have to repeat it—that the price of slab has almost halved in the last 12 months. We have over-production and under-consumption across the world, and we are 25% short of where we were before 2009. If we had a magic wand, we perhaps would all want to do these things, but in the harsh reality of the world we are in, we cannot give £1 billion of taxpayers’ money a year, which is what we estimated it would cost, to keep the steel industry where it is today. He cannot justify that to his constituents. That is the reality.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab): May I place on the record the sympathy of the people of south Yorkshire for the people of Redcar? Of course, people in south Yorkshire know what it is like to see thousands of jobs go at a stroke.
The UK steel industry faces volatile times. The Minister has said today she understands that manufacturing as a whole will be damaged if the UK steel industry goes under, and it is under serious threat. At the steel summit on Friday—in Rotherham, by the way, not Sheffield—will she please bring forward firm proposals for UK Government support for the steel industry? Otherwise it will just be a talking shop. She needs to take responsibility and bring forward firm proposals that we can all talk seriously about on Friday.
Anna Soubry: I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s comments, but I can assure her that I take full responsibility for the importance of this sector and will do everything I can to make sure we support it.
other places. We are witnessing today the true face of Toryism. It has only taken them three months to appear as they really are. This was the day when Osborne’s northern powerhouse strategy died its death.
Mr Skinner: I’ve seen it all.
Anna Soubry: So have I. [Interruption.] You know what, that is so out of order. [Interruption.] Well, I do. I find it offensive and sexist, and the hon. Gentleman should know better. I know he has a bigger majority than me, but in Broxtowe more people voted for me than for him in Bolsover. He needs to understand that there is under-consumption of steel in the world. The price of steel has almost halved. Fine words are not enough. Realism and action are required. We have to live in the real world, not the fantasy world of the ’60s.
Mr Speaker: It has been suggested that improper words were used. I say to the Minister and the House that I can respond only to what I hear, and I did not hear anything. A Minister on the Treasury Bench suggested that something improper was said, but I have to deal with the here and now. The Minister has had her say, and we will now continue with questions.
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab): The Back-Bench debate secured by my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Anna Turley) was held shortly before the trip to China, which took place amid much fanfare. The Minister pledged to go to China and lobby strongly against the massive dumping of Chinese steel in our market. May we have a detailed response about what was secured as a result of those discussions?
Anna Soubry: I had a number of discussions, and I raised with the Chinese the fact that there is now a growing demand for protectionism, especially in the EU, because of these various allegations—not just on steel—of Chinese dumping. I also had discussions about the future of the Chinese economy, including its steel economy, and whether any change in their policy was expected. We were informed that things would not change, which I am sure the hon. Gentleman will agree was unfortunate, and that they would continue to produce steel in this way. That economy, although growing, is not growing as much as it could, so I am afraid that there is not much hope there. However, we continue to make the case.
Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (SNP): I echo Members across the Chamber in saying that my heart dropped when I heard what had happened in Redcar and Teesside during the recess. The hon. Member for Redcar (Anna Turley) has dealt with the matter very well, against all the odds. Having listened to the mealy-mouthed excuses from the Government Front Bench, I would like to remind the Minister that while her Government should have been acting to protect British industry, Mr Chancellor was off wooing the Chinese. What representations did her Government make to Chinese steel over the upcoming HS2 contracts?
Anna Soubry: These things are all in the future. I can assure the hon. Lady that everybody in the Government wants to make sure that, when the day comes and we look to buy the rails, it is British steel that is bought. I also remind her, following our debate on this, that it would be helpful if the Scottish Government made sure that in their projects they bought Scottish steel.
Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD): My father and many others in my family are proud Teessiders, so I know exactly the devastation that this will cause to local jobs, the local economy and the UK steel industry. I also want to pay tribute to the former MP for Redcar, Ian Swales, who did a wonderful job in the last Parliament. The Liberal Democrats fully support the cross-party campaign. Will the Minister listen to the Liberal Democrat leader and immediately commission a cross-departmental ministerial committee to talk about this matter? This must happen straightaway, before these flames die out and the plant is killed forever, which must not happen. Over the next few days, she must do everything she can and look at all the possible options to save this plant.
Mr Speaker: Order. The hon. Member for Blyth Valley (Mr Campbell) must calm himself. I am sure he wishes to hear his colleague, Mr Wes Streeting.
Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab): The fate of the Redcar steel industry and the effect on communities on Teesside demonstrate the consequences of a hands-off economic policy and the lack of an industrial strategy. May I press the Minister on the consequences for people on Teesside? She has been asked again and again by colleagues about the statutory redundancy payments they will receive. The hand-to-mouth existence of the plant she describes is nothing next to the hands-to-mouth existence that those people now face. Will she give an assurance that she will consider what more the Government can do to make sure that people receive more than the statutory redundancy package?
Mr Speaker: I thank the Minister and colleagues for taking part in this exchange.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab) (Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State if he will withdraw from the contract for training needs analysis with the Saudi penal system in the light of recent concerns, particularly the cases of Mohammed al-Nimr, Raif Badawi and Karl Andree?
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Michael Gove): I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. It is important that the resources of the Ministry of Justice are targeted at our programme of domestic public service reform, so, as has previously been announced, we have wound up the work that Just Solutions International, the commercial arm of the National Offender Management Service, has been engaged in. This is in line with our ambition to ensure that the Department’s resources are firmly focused on our domestic priorities. On the commercial work that Just Solutions International had been engaged in with Saudi Arabia, as the House is aware, the final bid was submitted this April, but discussions have been going on since then. We have now reviewed the issue further and decided to withdraw our bid.
Andy Slaughter: The power of the urgent question. What a pity, though, that once again a Secretary of State has to be dragged before the House and that what he said was not volunteered by way of ministerial statement. The Secretary of State is trying to establish a reputation as a prison reformer, and now perhaps as a champion of human rights as well. That would be highly commendable and would be better if our prisons were not in a downward spiral of violence, idleness and despair and if the right hon. Gentleman were not intent on repealing the Human Rights Act.
On 25 September, the Leader of the Opposition wrote to the Prime Minister, raising the case of Mohammed al-Nimr. The Secretary of State will be aware that Mr al-Nimr was 17 when he was arrested for peaceful protest and sentenced to death by beheading and then crucifixion. Three weeks later, the Leader of the Opposition is yet to receive a response. That letter also asked for the ending of the contract, so perhaps that response could now be forthcoming. More importantly, Mr al-Nimr remains in solitary confinement, awaiting execution.
Will the Secretary of State therefore go further—welcome though his comments were—and explain why the Government ever contemplated entering such a contract; why the reasons for continuing the contract were initially given as “commercial considerations”, subsequently corrected to the “wider interests” of Her Majesty’s Government; why the Prime Minister has not responded to the letter from the Leader of the Opposition; and what is being done in each of the three specific cases I have raised?
Amnesty International says that at least 175 people have been executed in the last year. It is simply not good enough that human rights get no regard. Of course this is a balancing act, but in the end, the Secretary of State has to take responsibility and he needs to answer the further questions I have put to him today.
Michael Gove: I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising these serious issues and for the appropriately sombre and serious way in which he couched his questions. First, this Government take very seriously questions of human rights, and in particular the obligation to protect the human rights of British citizens abroad. That is why the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), who has responsibility for the middle east, has been talking to Mr Andree’s family, and it is also why the Government have been interceding at the highest level in all three of the cases that the hon. Gentleman raises.
It is important that that sensitive and diplomatic work is carried on in circumstances that ensure that we can influence not just the Saudi Government, but other Governments, in a way that allows them to make progress in a manner consistent with ensuring that our case can be made effectively. That is why I believe that the actions of the Minister for the middle east—and indeed those of the Foreign Secretary and the diplomatic service—in ensuring that human rights considerations can be carried forward have been right and wise.
It is also important to bear in mind that there is security co-operation between Britain and Saudi Arabia, which has, as the Prime Minister and others have pointed out, saved British lives in the past. We would never compromise our commitment to human rights, but we must also recognise that it is in the interests of the most important human right of all—the right to live in safety and security—that we should continue with necessary security co-operation with the Saudi and other Governments.
concerns that he understandably raised in his party conference speech and in correspondence. More broadly, I want to assure the hon. Gentleman and the House that the whole focus of the Ministry of Justice will be on maintaining the rule of law, upholding human rights and making sure that our citizens are protected effectively with a justice system in which all can take pride and have confidence.
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con): The Lord Chancellor is to be congratulated on his decision. I and fellow members of the Justice Committee welcome it warmly. It reinforces Britain’s status on justice and human rights matters. It also proportionately and sensibly continues the necessary work that we need to do on security matters with Saudi Arabia. My right hon. Friend has got the balance right, which some Opposition Members did not do when they were in office.
Michael Gove: I am grateful to the Chairman of the Select Committee for making that point. Governments always have to balance the vital importance of upholding human rights with necessary security considerations, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the confidence he places in the Government’s decision in this case.
Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP): The power of the urgent question indeed. This is a victory, if we believe press reports, for the Secretary of State himself, but also for the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, which has been vociferous in challenging the decision.
“a steaming pile of nonsense”?
I welcome today’s move, but this cannot be the end of our examination of our relationship with Saudi Arabia. One thing the Justice Secretary could do would be to place all papers relating to this deal in the public domain, so that Parliament can examine them retrospectively.
Michael Gove: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his detailed questions. Some, of course, strayed into diplomatic matters, which are not the responsibility of the Ministry of Justice, but I can confirm that whenever any monarch of any country dies, the flag is flown at half-mast. It is a long-standing convention—one that has been honoured in the past and continues to be honoured.
The hon. Gentleman’s broader point about the administration of justice within Saudi Arabia was well made. We have profound concerns about the respect accorded to human rights within Saudi Arabia, but it is also the case—I must stress this—that the most effective way of ensuring that human rights progress can be made in Saudi Arabia, both for its citizens and for others, is to allow the Foreign Office to continue its diplomatic work, which balances the strong relationships built up over time with an absolute insistence that in all countries and at all times, we oppose the death penalty. We will never resile from that.
Sir Alan Duncan (Rutland and Melton) (Con): Deny it though he might, many are left with the impression that this decision has been guided more by my right hon. Friend’s rather caustic personal view of Saudi Arabia than by any legitimate concerns of his Department’s policy on justice. Is it not the case that when we look at a country’s judicial system of which we do not in many respects approve, engagement is far better than disengagement, and that disengagement may be a comfortable moral position, but can lead to no progress whatsoever?
Michael Gove: I take my right hon. Friend’s comments very seriously. He is absolutely right to say that constructive engagement with Governments like Saudi Arabia’s is always the wisest course. However, it is also the case that there is always a balance to be struck in the nature of the engagement that we make. The decision was made across Government that the Just Solutions International branch of the National Offender Management Service should be wound up, and this decision is consequent on that cross-Government decision.
As I have said before at the Dispatch Box, it is vital that we support the Foreign Office, its skilled diplomats and its excellent Ministers in the work that they continue to do to influence not just the Saudi Government, but other Governments who are considering how they can improve their own domestic human rights record and, indeed, promote the rule of law.
Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab): Is it not almost farcical that the Saudi ambassador to the United Nations is actually chairing a panel that selects officials to decide on human rights violations? I am not aware that the United Kingdom has protested about that; it was probably a party to the appointment.
Is it not also the case that the Saudi Government do not take too seriously the various disapprovals expressed occasionally by Ministers, because they know that Britain will continue to sell arms on a substantial scale to a country where executions occur, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter)? Britain’s dealings with that state do not present a very pretty picture.
pressure and influence to bear on them to meet higher standards when it comes to the rule of law and human rights. That is an ongoing process; it is a dialogue.
In the same spirit, I should also stress that there are, of course, individual British companies that do business in Saudi Arabia, and there are shared security interests as well. Any responsible Government will always want to balance those interests with standing up for and making the case for progress in the realm of human rights, and that has been the consistent policy of this Government.
Damian Green (Ashford) (Con): I congratulate my right hon. Friend on being an example of a Secretary of State who has made a decision because, quite simply, it was the right thing to do. Can he reassure the House that in future, when that difficult balance is being struck between our legitimate security and foreign policy considerations and the needs of human rights, those human rights needs may be placed slightly higher in the mix than they have been in the past under Governments of all colours?
Michael Gove: My right hon. Friend has made a characteristically wise point, and I absolutely agree with him. It is important that we put the interests of advancing human rights at the heart of everything that the Government do, and that is one of the reasons why I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab), is the Minister responsible for civil liberties, has revised the way in which the Ministry of Justice engages internationally in order to ensure that human rights enjoy greater prominence.
Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD): The Secretary of State has made exactly the right decision today. He has done the right thing, and I think it important for him, in particular, to be given credit for having done it. In order better to inform the debate about the very difficult balancing act that he has had to perform—along with his ministerial colleagues—will he now consider publishing the documents behind this deal? In particular, will he publish the memorandum of understanding that was signed by his Ministry and the Home Office with Saudi authorities in March this year?
Michael Gove: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his generous words, but I must stress that this is a cross-Government decision. It was reached after discussion across Government, and it is a shared, collective decision of the whole Government. It is, of course, in that spirit that I entirely understand why the right hon. Gentleman would like further and better particulars. However, I must also respect the nature of diplomatic engagement. It is necessarily the case, and understandable, that when we are seeking to influence countries to act in a way which we believe to be in their interests but which may ultimately involve a change of policy at any given point, we wish to maintain confidence in the nature of that relationship, and that means that such conversations must sometimes remain confidential.
power”, partly owing to an acceptance across the world that we are not willing to be complicit in, or tacitly support, egregious abuses of human rights, including those perpetrated by the Wahhabi-dominated Saudi regime. Will my right hon. Friend confirm that we will keep under review all actions to signal our disapproval of its conduct, including the most robust actions in the future?
Michael Gove: Let me absolutely emphasise that the Minister for the middle east and the Foreign Secretary make representations regularly not just to the Saudi Government, but to other Governments whose behaviour gives us cause for concern in respect of human rights matters. However, as my hon. Friend acknowledged in his question, there is always a balance to be struck by the Government between—quite rightly—standing up for human rights, and recognising our broader security and other relationships which help to keep British citizens safe.
Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab): When answering questions put by the Foreign Affairs Committee the other week, the permanent secretary to the Foreign Office said that human rights were fairly low down in the list of priorities, or certainly not as far up as the Secretary of State suggests. The UK’s College of Policing provides training courses for Saudi police. What training is being given, and at what price?
Michael Gove: The right hon. Lady’s record of commitment in advancing human rights globally is second to none in this place. I should stress that I am not a Foreign Office Minister, but it is clear to me from all my dealings with the Foreign Office that it places advancing the cause of human rights and protecting fundamental freedoms at the heart of British diplomacy. We are guided by our values first. However, when we are co-operating with countries across the world, it is important for us to recognise—even as we argue first and foremost for respect for human rights—that there are shared security concerns. I think that the particular work that is undertaken in relation to policing, although another Government Department is responsible for it, falls fairly and squarely into that category.
Dr Phillip Lee (Bracknell) (Con): I am sure that everyone in the Chamber would agree that the Saudi penal system needs reform. Having made his decision, will the Secretary of State outline what he thinks the Government’s future strategy should be in relation to improving that penal system, and, indeed, other similar systems around the world?
Michael Gove: I think it important that we continue to work diplomatically to encourage countries not only to improve their penal systems, but to improve their respect for the rule of law. One of the activities in which the Foreign Office is most energetic is ensuring that the strong relationships that have been nurtured over years by our diplomats and Ministers are used to reinforce and encourage progress and reform in all the countries with which we have relationships. | 2019-04-20T10:11:54Z | https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmhansrd/cm151013/debtext/151013-0001.htm |
If you have been in Assembly or came to the Wellbeing workshop, you will have no doubt come across the children discussing the concept of 'kaizen' in terms of goal setting. It can also be located in plenty of Blog posts and no doubt some Seesaw entries!
When we look at our school over time , we can see many examples of this incremental and ongoing improvement. I came across this example of kaizen being discussed recently by a company who design beautiful kitchen tools of all things!
"Do you feel your knife designs are always evolving?
The concept of ‘Kaizen’, continuous improvement, influences everything we do. Our goal is to make each knife as the best knife that we can make. In this way, we are constantly refining our knives and constantly evolving.
I don’t ever want to get to a place where I am perfectly happy with what we do, it will mean that I’ve lost the ability to push this craft to the next level."
I relayed this example to the staff as, although our 'craft' is most decidedly very different, we too are constantly refining our practices and constantly evolving.
The Transition Programme in Term 4 is a great example of this. If I look back a few years, this process was fairly quick and minimal. Teachers discussed children in detail with the following year's teachers, but the conversations were more hard data based - not necessarily focussed on the whole child.
We moved onto transition days, then weekly transition sessions which were mainly observing the social and emotional side - now it's very much focussed on the 'whole' and, this year, also including parents who are able to come and connect as well.
Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher of the late 6th century BC, of Ephesus (one of my favourite places!) said, "You cannot step into the same river, for fresh waters are flowing in upon you".
I love this, as this is exactly the way we need to respond to our learners' needs, fresh waters are definitely flowing as they grow and develop across their time with us.
We had a Board member a few years ago who enjoyed using the word 'nimble' - I think of her every time I now say it - and agree - for this is what our children need the adults in their lives to be, especially as they transition into new spaces - agile, flexible and quick thinking!
The Silent Auction at the Fair was a great success - thanks to organisations who donated and bidders who bid online and on the day. With over 67 Lots this year, not all Lots were bid on, so we now have 6 Lots available to bid on.
So, click on this link, start bidding, share the link with family, friends and colleagues. Online bidding closes at 9pm on Monday 27 November.
Want to Join the Enviro Group?
You may be aware that we are now an Enviroschool. This is very exciting because it pulls together many of the threads around Sustainability we have been working on for the last 5 years or so. Our Student Council is largely involved with environmental projects, trapping, gardening, planting and growing trees to name a few of the initiatives. This is a great example of what is known as student agency; kids being active, doing the things they think are important and often leading those things. It is not surprising when you consider what the world looks like today and how our kids perceive their future; they want to act to make the future a brighter one.
Sustainability also encompasses culture and communities and, for this reason, we are reaching out to interested parties so that we can take joint ownership of the Enviroschools' Kaupapa. If you are interested in joining a group to help plan, plant, make, coordinate with community groups or just muck in and participate in a school centred community initiative, please join us in the staffroom for a 30 minute meeting at 3.15pm on Tuesday 5 December.
Check out the Enviroschools' website.
Our online ordering of students’ stationery has been very successful, so we have teamed up with OfficeMax MySchool again for 2018! During 2017 we were rewarded with over $1000 because of your support ordering stationery through OfficeMax. These rewards went towards resources and art materials the students used to create amazing pieces of art displayed in our 2017 WBS Arts Celebration.
Free delivery on orders over $46.00.
So, for 2018, you can order online at www.myschool.co.nz/worserbay using your credit card. Simply select your child's Year Group and follow the instructions on the website. Website orders over $46.00 qualify for free delivery.
To order by mail order and/or pay by cheque, all you have to do is go to www.myschool.co.nz and, when you get to the checkout, click on the Mail Order Form button. This will build a customised mail order form for you to print. Stationery lists will be online by Monday 11 December, and everything on the list is a must for 2018 .
There are additional products available, that’s up to you. If your child already has a book bag and pencil case, this does not require purchasing again. Your child may have a few books left over that you can also remove from the list. If your child is Year 4, 5 or 6 and already has a pair of headphones at home that they can bring to use at school, there is no need to purchase those.
Orders can be placed from Monday 11 December.
Orders must be received by Office Max prior to Wednesday 10 January to guarantee delivery before school starts.
This year our stationery drop off time is Tuesday 30 January from 9.00am - 10.00am, so you can pop in, if you would like to, say “hi”, catch up on holidays and get the books in the right place. Teachers will be in a meeting from 10.00am, so please stick tightly to this timeframe.
We never have staffing concrete or inflexible as teachers needs, like student needs, can change as the year progresses. We also like to work as a whole, of interconnected parts..... which means we can be more responsive. To this end, please find our starting point for next year below.
Gillian Menaker, Shona Fort, Scott McGregor, Susie Keenan, Ximena Aitken and Carl Pynenburg full time from Term 2.
Gillian will be leading the team in Autahi and Ximena in Tautoru.
John McDougall, Anna James, Gabrielle Meech and Nicola Stevenson.
John leads the Senior team.
Suzanne Kershaw, continues as the Additional Support Coordinator, Chief organisation guru, Reading Recovery teacher, Student Achievement analyser..... and that's just the start of her role description. Basically, Suz works small miracles across all areas!
Carl will be working part time across the school over Term 1, along with Hayley. I'm sure we will still see plenty of Chris, Sherwin and Neil as well in this capacity - still being worked through!
Cloe and Tori will continue with providing extra support in classrooms, along with Christine in the Library and our darling Office staff - Carolyn and Steph!
Better mention that I'm here too - Jude.
Kia Ora to all of you in the Worser Bay community. Firstly, I'd like to thank Jude and the Board of Trustees for offering me the opportunity to join such an awesome whānau. I am originally from Auckland where I have been teaching for the past 3 years at Balmoral School. I am hugely passionate about the performing arts and have been involved in stand-up and improv comedy over the last 10 years. I enjoy sharing my passion for reading and digital technology as well in the classroom. You can often find me playing football or netball during the week and relaxing with a good movie in the weekends. I look forward to starting a new chapter of my life in the capital with you all in the new year.
Now that Summer is here, students will need adequate sun protection when playing outside.
For more information, please refer to our Sun Protection Policy on SchoolDocs.
Please do not use the bottom of the school driveway as a drop off zone. The yellow lines are there for a reason. We have had a couple of reports of near misses on the crossing due to cars pulling in and stopping there. Please help keep our children safe.
Thank you to everyone who collected Yummy Stickers this year. Thanks to your help, we have just received $390 worth of Sports Gear for our school. Please keep collecting those stickers.
If you are a parent, staff member or member of the school community and draw down a new ASB home loan of $250,000 or more, ASB will donate to your chosen participating school $500. Visit www.asb.co.nz/schoolbanking for more information.
Your new home loan application must be received, approved and then documented in a facility agreement, along with the completed school voucher, before 30 June 2018. This home loan offer is only available on loans secured by an owner-occupied residential property provided to ASB, with a minimum of 20% equity.
Terms and conditions apply, see voucher. Promotion ends 30 June 2018.
Eva, Olive, Vera, Violet, Evie, Greta, Nye and Pyrenees.
Kaia, Kirsty, Thomas and Yasmin.
During Discovery time, children work on their own mini projects or play. During this time, they are being critical and creative thinkers as they tackle projects and social dynamics. You can see our learner attributes of being a thinker, being powerful, being connected and being a goal setter coming through in our play. We have been very busy thinking like builders, planners and designers this week. Have a look to see what we’ve been up to.
We’ve been reading the book Hands Are Not For Hitting and have been thinking about what our hands are good for. We have come up with some fantastic ideas about how our hands can be kind and helpful. Have a look at our Blog to see our ideas about what helpful hands can do! Many hands make light work! We have helping hands in Autahi!
It has been fun to work in our new space and collaborating with different people!
Scott and Wanwan’s Literacy groups have been learning about alliteration. They spent the week recrafting and editing their pieces of writing ready for publishing.
Ben bought blue boots, Benjamin’s baby’s blue boots.
Benjamin’s blue boots blast because Benjamin’s blue boots are blasting boots.
Ben’s boots bring beautiful bees.
Little Lillian’s lizard Lenny loved life like Luke’s lizard Lax.
Lenny and Lax like lawns and licking little lollipops .
In Tautoru we have just finished our latest inquiry into Hyrdo, Wind, and Solar power.
Did you know that wind travels around the world in many different directions?
Did you know that the biggest dam in the world is in China? It produces more than 30,000 megawatts a day!
Did you know that photons from the sun split when they hit your solar panels? They then turn from light photons to electrons.
This team of tender, thoughtful Tautoru thinkers (aka the Service Team) have ONE more week to collect as many toys, books, personal items and clothing as they can to package up and donate to the City Mission, in our joint effort to put smiles on faces this Christmas. They have done an amazing job of writing to businesses in our community for help and donating many items themselves. If you would like to join us in our crusade, we would LOVE one last big drive to help us collect as much as we can for a worthy cause. Please drop any donations off in Tautoru.
In Weeks 8 and 9, we have planned some exciting EOTC activities for the children. We hope some of you will have time to join us for the fun, as we will be needing parent help for all of these activities. Please let your child’s base group teacher know if you can help out on any or “all” of the trips. Many thanks for your support.
On Monday 4 December, we will have our annual Teddy Bear’s Picnic at Miramar Park. We will leave school and walk to the park (9.30am), have a day of activities and games and a picnic lunch (all parents invited) and then head back to school at 1.40pm. Bring your teddy bear, lunch, morning tea, drink bottle and plenty of clothes for all weather.
On Wednesday 6 and Thursday 7 December, we will be visiting a dairy farm at 845 State Highway 1, Te Horo. We have the opportunity to see the cows being milked, watching the tanker take the milk away and feeding some calves. We are very likely to get dirty during this experience, so will need gumboots and old clothes (as well as a jacket and a hat). If we do not have gumboots, we are are not allowed to go near the milking shed.
We will also need morning tea, lunch and a drink bottle. We will go to Te Horo school for lunch and a play, before returning on the bus to school.
Please give permission and make payment of $14.50 via Online Payments.
On Tuesday 12 December, we have booked the Splash pool at the Aquatic Centre, for the children to have a swim. We will be leaving school at 9.30am, will have a swim and a short play at Kilbirnie Park, and then return to school at 12.30pm.
Please give permission and make payment of $5.50 via Online Payments.
On Thursday 14 December, we will be having some Athletics activities and a free play at Worser Bay beach. We will be leaving school at 9.15am and returning at 12.30pm. Please ensure that your child has a sun hat and suitable shoes and clothes for a day at the beach.
We’ve been having a lot of fun exploring different ways to create dramatic plays and working with different people to prepare ourselves for our Extravaganza of Creativity Evening next Thursday 30 November at 6.30pm.
The ICT Student Council Group have been helping teachers to organise the "Hour of Code" event this year. They have been trialling the "Gumball Play Lab" so that we can become experts and teach others.
Students in Mahutonga/Matariki have new login details that they have already received or will receive shortly.
First we discovered all the things that it could be. Some people thought it looked like a flower and others thought it looked like a Minecraft flower. At first I thought it looked like a stamp that looked like a plus.
Then we organised our thinking into a chart. We found out that each time the pattern grew it added five. It added one to the top and one on the four sides.
We drew the next two in the sequence so we could check if it was right. We thought that we would find the tenth in the sequence. We did this by adding five. From there we did trial and improvement to find a formula.
BEDMAS is to help us with order of operations. It helps us make the formula.
We have had heaps of fun in our Languages programme this year - a huge thank you to Cloe, Maria, Sarka, John and Wanwan.
We have been exploring patterns in Maths using visual prompts. There have been some great questions to help explore the ideas.
This is an example of some of the thinking which Alexander, Rico and Jan have been doing. Exciting stuff.
You can respond on the Padlet on our Blog.
We want to end child poverty in New Zealand. We did an Inquiry about this and realised that there are thousands of kids living in poverty in New Zealand. We wanted to do something to help so we organised this event.
Year 4, 5 and 6 will be taking part in this event. You can sponsor us on this Give a Little page. All donations will go directly to KidsCan!
On Wednesday 29th November, we are going to Otari-Wilton’s Bush for a solid half day of tramping, taking in the sights while testing our fitness and reviewing our knowledge of native flora and fauna.
We will be meeting Rewi at the information centre at 9:45am for a brief introductory chat, then heading off for a good walk. The students will be able to choose between a 2+ hour tramp or a 1 hour option depending on their level of enthusiasm. We will be keeping our eyes and ears open as we walk, identifying trees and birds and making observations about the success of the reforestation in that area; asking how is Tane’s Cloak looking?
The group who walk the shorter distance will do a nature treasure hunt in the areas close to the Otari entrance. We will meet for lunch in the picnic area and then spend some time playing games.
Students will need to bring morning tea, lunch, sun hat, water bottle, as well as a raincoat and warm gear. (The longer tramp gets up onto the skyline and is quite exposed; cold on a cold day).
There is a cost of $6 per child to cover the cost of the bus. Please give permission and make payment via Online Payments under "Fees and Donations" by Monday 27 November, if you haven't already.
We have already had some kind parents offering to help but could do with a few more. Please let Nicola know if you are able to help on the day.
Our Inquiry focus is around the Power of the Body and we will be exploring the provocation; Healthy Body Healthy Mind? This is going to involve quite a lot of activity and time outside of the classroom.
As a kind of tying together of one of the Inquiry strands, children in New Zealand who experience hardship and our Health focus, we have organised a Duathlon fundraising event with KidsCan, involving running and swimming on 6th December. This will also fit into our beach based programme which takes place over the last two full weeks of the term, from 4th to 15th December. This will include sailing, kayaking, water safety, swimming and many other events. We have done this over the last 5 years and it just keeps getting better. We are already praying to the weather gods; take it easy on us, Tawhirimatea!
Special events for Year 6 students to put in the diary are the Year 6 Dinner on Tuesday 12th December and the annual swimming pool trip to H2O Extream on Monday 18th December. And, don’t forget The Wrap on Thursday 14th December. Wow! We are going to be busy people!
We will be taking Year 6 students to H20 Xtream on Monday 18th December for an end of year fun day out. Please let Nicola know if you are able to help with this trip (drivers and people who can stay for the day to help supervise).
There is no cost to attend apart from a gift per family.
The Rock Academy holiday programme gives young singers and musicians the chance to bond with fellow creatives. Confidence building activities such as busking, audition simulation and song writing are a great way to build self-esteem. It’s lots of fun and very educational. Their musicianship level can go through the roof with consecutive days of playing, singing and learning. They go busking every day at around 12.30pm outside Unichem Pharmacy, Bay Road, Kilbirnie.
Time: Starts at 9:00am and finishes at 3:00pm. Drop off 8:45am.
For more information or to book, please email Geoff or visit the website.
Dates: Dec 18th 2017 – Jan 26th 2018 from 7.00am-7pm daily.
; Weekly: $238 per cub/week or $448 for two or more siblings/week.
Discounts Available: Wild Card (15%).
Interactive Activities and Morning Tea, Lunch and Afternoon Tea provided.
One-on-One Care: Provide for cub(s) if needed for extra support.
Contact: 0800 PRIDE 4 U or register online. | 2019-04-24T00:42:59Z | http://www.worserbay.school.nz/home/newsletter/archive/2017-term-4/week-6---24-november-2017 |
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