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Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images
A similar discrepancy happened in the vote for Congressional representatives. The Republicans control the House of Representatives, where they have 54% of the seats. But if you add up all the votes for those seats, the Democrats come out slightly ahead (by about 500,000 votes). More votes but fewer seats.
That discrepancy arises from the distribution of Democrats and Republicans in a state’s Congressional districts. Take a hypothetical state with four districts, each with 200 people. The popular vote splits evenly – 400 Democrats, 400 Republicans. Here are the election results:
The Democratic district snaking down through the middle of the state is the 4th, which contains “the Triangle” to the north, but now has that tail stretching down. Democrats carried the district by 170,000 votes. Surrounding it is the 2nd (in pink), which Republicans carried by only 45,000 votes.
Similar differences crop up in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The popular vote is close, and in two of these states it goes to the Democrats. But Republicans get most of the seats. Republicans win their seats by less than half the margin of Democratic winners. Here is a graph of the actual returns from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. (The Ohio total does not include the vote from the two uncontested districts, one Democrat, one Republican. For the maps and election results, check out Politico.)
I don’t know enough about the demography and geography of these states, but I do wonder why the districts are drawn this way. A paper by Chen and Rodd (here) that uses 2000 election data argues that what looks like gerrymandering is in fact the result of “human geography.” It’s not the legislatures that pack Democrats together, it’s the Democrats themselves. They cluster in cities. As for Democrats outside of cities,
many rural, small-town, and suburban precincts that lean Democratic are often subsumed into moderately Republican districts. . . . There are isolated pockets of support for Democrats in African-American enclaves in the suburbs of big cities and in smaller towns with a history of railroad industrialization or universities. However, these Democratic pockets are generally surrounded by Republican majorities, thus wasting these Democratic votes. As a result, the Democrats are poorly situated to win districts outside of the urban core.Regardless of intent, the effect is to keep Democratic votes concentrated in the 4th. If that blue tail of the NC-04 were subsumed into the pink NC-02, both districts might be blue.
In any case, Democrats have not always been on the wrong side of the seat/vote discrepancy. John Sides at The Monkey Cage posted this graph showing the ratio for the last twenty-six elections.
Sides quotes Matthew Green on the general trends:
- the winning party usually gets a “boost” in the number of seats
- that boost used to be much larger
UPDATE (Nov. 15): John Sides at The Monkey Cage has more data on the vote/seat discrepancy. He calculates seats expected given the popular vote and compares that to the actual outcome. Even in states where districts were drawn by a bi-partisan agency or the courts, the Democrats fell 7% below the expected number of seats. In states where legislatures did the redistricting the differences were starker.
Republicans gained benefits across the board from controlling the redistricting process. By contrast, Democrats exceeded their expected seat share only slightly in the three states where they controlled the process | <urn:uuid:1c5d9555-7176-4639-bfb3-26fe7b819e82> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://montclairsoci.blogspot.com/2012/11/less-is-more.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397695.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00022-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951394 | 727 | 3.171875 | 3 |
In the late 19th century Meiji Era, a newly reopened Japan rushed to modernize and catch up to the West. One often-overlooked field which Japan had dominated since the 18th century was the creation and presentation to the paying public of unusually realistic, carved wood models of pregnant women and fetuses.
Misemono [mee-seh-mow-no] were traveling sideshow carnivals that presented various scientific and educational findings in an entertaining way. For example: pregnancy dolls with their removable bellies and multiple interchangeable fetuses. Or a set of seven detailed uterus carvings, which depict the various stages of fetal growth. I mean, who wouldn't pay to see that?
19th century pregnant dolls [pinktentacle.com via, uh..] | <urn:uuid:4860ec27-862c-47d1-a75f-70c80e7b780e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://daddytypes.com/2009/05/14/misemono_meiji-era_sideshow_pregnancy_dolls.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399385.17/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00055-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966216 | 164 | 2.578125 | 3 |
(Properly, JEAN-BAPTISTE POQUELIN, the name by which he became known to fame having been assumed when he went on the stage, to avoid embarrassing his family ).
French comic poet; b. at Paris, 15 Jan., 1622; d. there 17 Feb., 1673. He was the son a Paris furniture dealer who was also a valet-de-chambre to the king, and succeeded his father in the latter of these two capacities. After making his studies with the Jesuits at the Collège de Clermont, he seems to have studied law in some provincial town — perhaps Orléans. It is not known, however, if he ever took his licentiate. The stage very soon attracted him and absorbed him. At twenty-one he entered the theatrical company, organized under the name of "L'Illustre Théâtre", in which were Madeleine Béjart and her brothers. The troupe engaged a band of four musicians at the cost of one livre per day, and a dancer, who was to receive thirty-five sols per day and five sols extra for every day when there was a performance. The business started with a deficit, and Molière, who appears to have been chosen president by his associates, was arrested for debt. He was imprisoned in the Châtelet, but released on his own recognizances.
In the course of the subsequent wanderings through different parts of France, Molière composed some small comic pieces of no importance, of which two have been preserved — "La Jalousie de Barbouill" — and "Le Médecin Volant". Afterwards, about 1653 or 1655, he staged, at Lyons, "L'Etourdi". In this he began to use the language of fine comedy which Corneille had created ten or twelve years before. "Le Dépit Amoureux", produced at Béziers in 1656, should also be mentioned here. Before long the "Illustre Théâtre" regained confidence to face the Parisian public; we find it in Paris in 1658. Next year the troupe, now authorized to call itself "Troupe de Monsieur, Frère du Roi" performed "Les Précieuses Ridicules". In this comedy Molière declared war against the spirit of refined humbuggery ( l'esprit précieux ), and he never ceased to be its enemy, as witness "Les Femmes Savantes" (1672), one of his last pieces. The last twelve years of his life saw the production of his most famous works. "L'Ecole des Maris" (1661) shows the beauty of a confiding and gentle character in a man; "Les Fâcheux" (also 1661) was written in fifteen days; "L'Ecole des Femmes" (1662) gives another lesson to husbands — which was very creditable to the playwright, for he himself, at the age of forty, had just married a girl of twenty, Madeleine Béjart's sister, the volatile Armande who was to give him so much trouble. The "Critique de L'Ecole des Femmes" and the "Impromptu de Versailles" (1663) are two little prose pieces in which the writer defends his comedy of the preceding year and attacks his critics. "Tartuffe" (1664), the famous comedy, at first in three acts, afterwards in five, deals trenchant blows at hypocrisy, unfortunately, however, often striking true virtue at the same time. After its first production the public performance of this piece was forbidden, and the ban was not removed for five years.
In the interval Molière wrote: "Don Juan" (or "Le Festin de Pierre") (1665), apparently intended as a revenge for the suppression of "Tartufe"; "Le Misanthrope" (1669) a great comedy of character ; "Amphitryon" (1668), three acts in verse of various measures, where Jupiter assumes the form of the Theban general, Amphitryon, in order to betray his wife, Alemena; lastly, "L'Avare" (1668). Excepting "Les Femmes Savantes", already mentioned, the comedies of his last four years exhibit a great deal of gaiety, but not so much breadth — "Monsieur de Pourceaugnac" and "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme", in 1669, "Les Fourberies de Scapin", in 1671 and "Le Malade Imaginaire" (1673). While on stage playing in "Le Malade Imaginaire", the author was seized with a violent hæmorrhage; he was carried home, and died.
In him France lost the greatest of the comic writers whom her history has produced. Judging Molière exclusively from a literary point of view, it must be admitted that he does not owe his reputation to the quantity of dramatic entanglement in his plays; he owes it above all to the truth of his portraiture. His friend Boileau called him "the looker-on" ( le contemplateur ). He knew how to look at the world, to note its vices and its failings, and his genius had the power of combining what he saw, melting all his observations together, adding to them, and thus creating beings who are no longer particular individuals, but are recognizable as men of their whole period — often of all periods of humanity. Moreover, the characters are his chief concern: with him, as with Racine, the characters carry the whole piece, they are its soul. His art may at times fail in other points — as in his dénouements , which are often ill contrived — but in that one respect he is always admirable. His plays, then, present a portrait of the heart of a man, but a profile portrait drawn by a satirist, whose business is to see only the defective side of it, and a dramatic writer, who is obliged by the laws of stage optics to emphasize certain lines. This verisimilitude — or, as his friend La Fontaine expressed it, carefulness "not to go one step away from nature " — is found in all Molière's works. It is particularly visible in his style. Good critics, it is true, have found fault with Molière's style, particularly in his verse; Boileau, Fénelon, and La Bruyère did so in the seventeenth century; Vauvenargues, in the eighteenth; Théophile Gautier and others, in the nineteenth. On the other hand, a whole school has arisen in the last fifty years to extol this writer: for the Molièrists, as they have been called, Molière is above all criticism; they preach a sort of cultus of Molière. To be more judicious, we must be more moderate. Admitting that the language of comedy, which is that of familiar conversation, permits him certain liberties, which he cannot be fairly blamed for using, still, making all due allowance for the nature of his medium, there is no denying that his style suffers from real carelessness — useless repetitions, incoherent metaphors, heavy and entangled phrases. Molière was obliged to write quickly; he was an improviser, but a genius of improvisation. For his style, in spite of its faults, is still, as Boileau said to Louis XIV, a "rare" style. Frank and natural, he excels in making reason and good sense talk. It is the style of a poet, too warm, highly coloured, brilliant. Lastly, one finds in him striking words and striking touches, which come spontaneously, and add to his charm.
As for morality, it owes Molière much less than literature does. Although he gave out, in his prefaces, that it was his wish and duty as a dramatic poet, to be of service to morality, he has been severely censured in this regard, from Bossuet to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. While he never put on the stage — as is so often done in these days — a woman guilty of violating her marriage vows, or about to violate them, yet he has been reproached with the presentation of other dangerous pictures. Furthermore, he is always on the side of the young people, who surely need no encouragement in their evil propensities. All his sermons, all his satires, are for parents ; all the unpleasant failings depicted by his comedies reside in the fathers and the old people; the laugh is always at their expense, except when their egoism excites horror. It must be confessed that, while the passions of the young king, Louis XIV, had only too much reason to be pleased with the author of "Amphitryon", religion has no cause to approve the author of "Tartufe". Molière's Christianity was not as profound as that of Corneille, Racine, Boileau, and nearly all the illustrious writers of his time. And yet, when there was question of his being given Christian burial, and the curé hesitated, on the ground that the priest had arrived too late to give absolution to the comedian, who, it may almost be said, passed from the stage to the tribunal of God, his widow proved that he had received the sacraments in the last previous paschal season.
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Catholic Online Catholic Encyclopedia Digital version Compiled and Copyright © Catholic Online | <urn:uuid:85a45ccf-30ad-4270-af83-a85ea1d8d1bc> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view.php?id=8070 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394605.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00042-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974376 | 2,382 | 2.703125 | 3 |
The texture of evergreens contribute significantly to the winter landscape.
One of the earliest trees on earth, identified through fossils, was the Ginkgo biloba, also known as the maidenhair tree.
What can flower gardeners do when their perennials' roots are sleeping the winter away?
It contrasts well with other colors and flower shapes, never needs staking, is untroubled by pests and deer avoid it.
So while we cherish our natives, if we add a Japanese dogwood to our landscape that is a good choice too.
Vita Sackville-West's luxuriant plantings create a setting of decadence and romance at the garden of Sissinghurst Castle. | <urn:uuid:ce32a3e3-d652-4b0a-b570-f02208b569fa> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://indianapublicmedia.org/focusonflowers/tag/landscape/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392069.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00088-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937785 | 145 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Ford B-MAX Declared Child-Proof – Video
Car makers test their products thoroughly to make sure the quality and fit and finish is strong enough to withstand years of hard work. They test the car for many different scenarios such as rain, heat, bad roads, and so on. But none has a routine test for the most destructive element of them all: children!
Ford is probably the first car maker to officially declare a car ‘child-proof’. The model is question is the new B-Max, for which they have extensively tested the seats upholstery and other interior materials, tying to replicate whatever havoc children can wreak in a car.
As part of the test, engineers soak interior materials to gauge stain resistance, conduct testing with a sharp-spiked “mace” and use Velcro to replicate fabric snagging on children’s bags and clothing. They also have a pet “punishment tests” for the fabric and plastics. Samples of all leathers and fabrics used in the Ford B-MAX’s interior were tested for stain resistance and ease of cleaning after being soaked for 24 hours in the liquids and being smeared with soil and grease.
The result of all this is a car whose interior will remain shiny and unscathed for years.
“By testing for everything from soft drink spills to muddy boots, we’ve made sure the B-MAX interior is ready for anything,” said Mark Montgomery, senior materials engineer, Ford of Europe. “I’ve got young children myself, so I’m very familiar with the mess they can create.” | <urn:uuid:9cc99e57-615e-403b-80e1-2de6312a1794> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.motorward.com/2013/01/ford-b-max-declared-child-proof-video/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399106.96/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00091-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960357 | 340 | 2.515625 | 3 |
OKAZU, OR FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Food and language are the two pillars of every culture. There are other components -- religion, code of behavior, costume, games and rituals -- that interest cultural historians. But language and food are the most deeply ingrained features of everyday life in any culture, and, so, they appear so "natural" to the "natives" that their conventionality eludes them. To the Japanese, unless they have struggled with English, find <light> and <right> sound exactly the same, and they find nothing peculiar about answering yes when they mean no as when answering a negative question. Cross-cultural studies, indeed, raise questions about normalcy.
Japanese books are printed backwards; they open from right to left. So I was repeated told when I first came to America. No, I protested silently, you are backwards. My first Jewish friend told me triumphantly; our Hebrew books open from right to left. The computer normalized the habit; we all read on line from left to right.
A friend turned to me from the book he was reading and asked me: what is okazu? Out of the blue the question momentarily baffled me. "What?" I said. "Let's see." The word appeared in a chanpon conversation within a story set, of course, in Japan. "Oh, okazu," I said, "well, it's a kinda complicated. It's the dishes in a meal you eat rice with." "Dishes?" "No, I mean the food stuff other than rice. Sometimes it's served on a dish but sometimes in a bowl."
Most Japanese-English dictionaries translate okazu as side dish. This is not quite accurate. A typical Japanese meal consists of rice and, accompanying it, a dish of fish or, sometimes meat, and vegetables. These are seasoned food whereas rice is plain, unseasoned. Most commonly, an okazu is fish). It may be sautéed, poached, pan-fried, deep-fried, boiled, broiled, roasted, steamed, stewed in soy sauce, pickled, etc. Then, there are various fish products: kamaboko, hanpen, chikuwa, and such, all made from ground fish paste. But there are also western-style okazu: omelette, wiener schnitzel, croquette, curried meat, beef stew, and there are vegetarian okazu: potato, yam, eggplant, green beans, fava beans, spinach, cabbage, etc. These may be the principal okazu, or they may be secondary to a fish or meat dish. Taro cooked in sweet sour sauce can be an okazu by itself. So, a synonym of okazu is osai, which literary means vegetables. So'ozai is another synonym; it signifies a set of okazu [so'o: all or all kinds of, zai: same as sai] and implies a combination of fish or meat and a vegetable dish or two.
My Japanese-English dictionary defines so'ozai as "everyday dish." Huh? Well, everyday as opposed to feast or banquet food, I suppose. The word so'ozai also implies, in usage, family meal, and, therefore, homecooking as opposed to restaurant cooking, which is by definition more elaborate, except for Edo-period fast foods like noodles (udon and soba), sushi, tempura, and unagi (eels).
At a family dinner, a person normally eats three bowls of rice; seasoned food is eaten between bites of rice -- chopsticks potions, to be precise. Okazu is an accompaniment in this sense; it plays a supporting role. But in substance, the dishes that constitute okazu correspond to what is called entrée in the western menu. Vegetables are usually designated as side dishes, and the staples like rice and potato are considered accompaniment to the main dish. By contrast, in Japan, each meal is called go-han, the word for cooked rice -- as opposed to raw rice, which is kome. The same distinction is made in Korean (pap and ssal, respectively) and in Chinese (mi and fan, respective). In fact, the rice growing in the field is still another word: i'ne (dao and ttyo in Chinese and Korean, respectively).
So, A husband may walk into the kitchen and ask: "What's for dinner?" A Japanese husband would ask his wife: "What is the okazu today?" Saying this, he is asking what's for dinner, not what's the side dish.
Okazu in origin was a woman's word. Literally, it means the number. The first syllable <o> is the honorific-o, which is seen in polite language as well as in feminine diction; o-kome for kome and o-sakana for sakana (fish) are example as is go in go-han. Kazu is number; what the word okazu originally meant was a set of dishes of seasoned food. The proper translation, therefore, is something like "dishes accompanying the rice in a meal." But the number got trimmed down on the modern table, and today it means one principal seasoned food, fish, meat, or vegetable, trimmed with a variety of pickles and accompanied with a bowl of soup. Chinese cuisine, though served with rice, is opulent next to the Japanese single dish fare.
There is something curious about the word entrée, too. It means entry, and in the formal dinner in the nineteenth century, it designated the first dish in the two-part main offering. As we read in the OED, quoting Sir H. Thompson, Food and Feeding (1880), "A family dinner may consist of soup, fish, entrée, roast and sweet." Eventually, the main offering became one single dish, the entrée in today's restaurant menu and the main subject of the family dinner. The hors d'oeuvres, which literally means outside the works, has become the appetizer today; but originally it consisted of several dishes which remained on the table throughout the meal.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Japanese, in their first encounter with Commodore Perry and his cohorts, thought of them as voracious ogres whose copious diet accounted for their height and hairy body.
In Italy the entrée in the standard dinner menu is called il secondo. It's the second because it follows the first, il primo, and that can be soup, pasta, or risotto, quite hearty, so that il secondo, consisting of meat or fish, is not quite so substantial as the French-derived entrée. In German cooking the all prevailing kartoffeln -- potatoes -- feature prominently. But no Western meal makes the okazu subservient to the staple -- rice, pasta, potato, or bread. A child who sniffs at the unfamiliar seasoning in the main dish may be scolded for eating just bread. A Japanese child, by contrast, is often told not to eat okazu only: Eat more rice! Don't be an okazukkui: okazu-eater.
Japanese meals are austere, almost fit for the poor. Italians in poverty-stricken families content themselves with il primo and omit il secondo; meat is too costly. The extreme poor will have spaghetti sprinkled with olive oil and parmisan cheese to serve as a meal. Potatoes constitute the whole meal in Van Gogh's famous Potato Eaters. The poor people in Japan must satisfy themselves with minimal okazu with the obligatory bowls of rice. These may be tsukemono (pickled vegetables like takuwan, narazuke, and oshinko), salted fish, tsukudani -- fish, seaweed, or vegetable boiled down in soy sauce -- and umeboshi, pickled sour plum, often dyed bright red, so sour that a tiny bit makes your face grimace and the body tremble. We eat a tiny bit of these picked up on the tips of the chopsticks between mouthfuls of rice.
But the point of special interest is that the well-to-do also eat this kind of meal, say for lunch or for a midnight snack, sometimes with green tea over rice -- the ochazuke. So, the tsukudani, umeboshi, shiojake (salted salmon), and takuwan (pickled daikon, very yellow) come in gourmet quality as well as in the everyday, plebian quality. We might characterize the upscale simple meal as poverty chic. It is the alimentary counterpart to the rustic hut favored in the tea master Rikyu's exquisite ritual of tea, and the shoestring (or waraji) journey of the poet Basho through northern Japan on foot like a hobo.
Rice reigns supreme. At a family dinner, it is brought to the side of the table in a wooden tub to keep it warm, and the hostess serves; she may be the maid who sits by the table without eating (she will eat later in the kitchen) or else the mother serves. Each member of the family, having finished his or her bowl, will sticks it out in the direction of the hostess. In a large family, mother has hardly time to eat herself, if she is the hostess.
In Japanese inns and restaurants in Japan, the guest is provided with a small wooden or lacquerware tub of rice for one or two customers, a bigger one for a company. In Japanese restaurants here in America, only one small bowl of rice is delivered to the table, already filled. This is Americanization. I always feel sheepish about asking for the second bowl but I do. I never ask for the third, however, even when I could use a little more. I don't because more often the okazu is oversized here.
A senryu(a humorous or satirical haiku) says: Iso'oro'o sanbaime niwa sottodasu. Freely translated it says: A freeload lodger sticks out the bowl for the third diffidently.
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Why is "Filipino" spelled with an "F" when there is not even an "F" in the Pilipino alphabet? And why do many Filipinos pronounce their F's as P's?
|The Filipino admiring St. Stephen's|
Basilica with his daughter.
For several days in the last week, I was with my wife (and the kids as well) in Budapest, Hungary to celebrate our 12th wedding anniversary. But it was a special trip for my wife and I for two other reasons: The country was the 26th we've visited (we are aiming for 50 before age 50) and the city proved to be a traveler's must-see -- i.e., it has lots of fantastic sights and a history so colorful I wish we had a real historian as a local guide.
But ask my two kids (one is almost 8 and the other is 5 1/2) what stuck to them the most about the trip and you'll likely get a version of this: "Wow! The Hungarian language uses lots of Z's!"
And it's true -- the letter "Z" is indeed everywhere in Budapest, from the street signs to the ads to the names of places and things (and also, apparently, in lots of Hungarian verbs). That's because, of the 44 letters in the "greater" Hungarian alphabet (which is really an extension of the Latin language even though it's used to write the Hungarian language which is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family), 4 have the "Z" as an integral part (a glyph) of the particular letter -- i.e., Dz, Dzs, Sz and Zs -- on top of the stand-alone Z. (In orthography, the Hungarian letters Dz, Sz and Zs are called digraphs while the letter Dzs is called a trigraph. )
|The bus lane in Budapest which prompted The Filipino's|
son to ponder the question: "If bus is spelled as busz in
Hungarian, how do you spell chess in Hungarian?"
Like the Hungarians, the Japanese has an orthography which uses a comparable, albeit more complex, way of writing their language. I'm talking here of course of the three Japanese writing systems: Kanji, which is actually composed of traditional Chinese characters which have Japanese translations; the Hiragana which is used to write Japanese words not covered by Kanji; and the Katakana which is used primarily for transcription of foreign language, loan words, as well as technical and scientific terms.
|Ooppss! Somebody forgot the Z!|
Well, allow me to explain further.
I don't know about you, but when it comes to understanding my Filipino-ness, it has been my experience that I just understand things better when I look for explanation outside the Philippines, and, though difficult sometimes, search for clues and parallels beyond my very Filipino frame of mind.
For instance, the very premise of your question is that the "Pilipino alphabet" does not have "F" in it. But the premise is only correct if you're approaching it from a perspective which uses pre-Hispanic phonemes as basis. In other words, we don't have the "F" if you're thinking of the "smaller" Filipino alphabet which had only 20 "letters" -- i.e., the old "Abakada" as created by Lope K. Santos in 1940 which he supposedly patterned after the Baybayin despite the fact that the latter is actually technically a syllabary, not an alphabet, and in any case is written very differently from Latin-based alphabets.
But as a matter of fact, like the Hungarians, we also have had a "greater" alphabet, which at various times had either 28, 29, 31 or 32 letters because we were using the Spanish orthography which had digraphs like the Ch, Ll and Rr and because we were also using all the letters in the English orthography following the take-over of the Americans as our new colonizers. And actually, we could easily have had more if, like the Hungarians, we considered the vowels which use diacritical marks like the acute, the grave and the circumflex as separate letters. And it would actually have made sense because we pronounce vowels very, very differently depending on the words used. For instance, the "o" in guro (Tagalog for "teacher") should be written with the circumflex (as in gurô) because it is pronounced very differently from the "o" in siguro (etymologically Spanish but is now also the Tagalog word for "maybe").
In any case, the understandable confusion around our alphabet finally stopped in 1987 when we adopted what is now known as the "Modern Filipino Alphabet." This alphabet is made up of 28 letters and includes the entire 26-letter set of the Basic Modern Latin alphabet, the Tagalog digraph Ng, and the letter Ñ which was bequeathed to us by the Spaniards.
And speaking of the Spaniards, the word "Filipino" is itself -- it should come as no surprise -- actually Spanish ("efe" is one of the 27 letters in the Spanish alfabeto). The term, derived from the name given to the country by our Spanish colonizers to honor their king, was originally used to refer to Spaniards born in the Philippines (also called the insulares) and to distinguish them from Spaniards born in Europe (the peninsulares). However, according to historian Ambeth Ocampo, our national hero José Rizal appropriated it for all of us and was the first to call the indigenous inhabitants of the islands Filipinos. Thus, because of Rizal, the term Filipino began to be widely used to refer to the natives by the end of the 19th century.
But if the country is called the Philippines, why are we not called Philippinos instead? According to Daniel Engber of Slate:
The Philippines have only been called the Philippines (with a "Ph") since the United States bought the country from Spain around the turn of the 20th century, after the Spanish-American War. Under Spanish colonial rule -- which extended back to the 16th century -- the country had been called "Las Islas Filipinas," after King Felipe II. For Americans, Felipe was Phillip, so Las Filipinas became the Philippines. While the name of the country changed, the name of the nationality did not. Those who lived in the renamed Philippines were still called Filipinos.But where did the word "Pilipino" come from? Engber further explains that:
The term "Pilipino" derives from the convoluted story of how the Philippines got its national language. There was no official, native language under Spanish and American control. Those living on the islands could be divided into as many as 120 different groups, each with its own way of talking [175 actually, according to Ethnologue]. The desire to create a mother tongue increased when the United States pulled out of the country and the Philippines became a commonwealth in the 1930s. A national institute was given the task of making one of the native languages official.In 1936, this institute, the Institute of National Language, selected Tagalog as the basis of the national language but incorporated elements of the country's other native languages. The Abakada alphabet created by Santos in 1940 was also officially adopted to "indigenize" the writing system. However, because of the almost 400 years of combined Spanish and American influence, the newly adopted alphabet was seen as inadequate and impractical because many consonants used regularly by locals were missing in the Abakada.
Moreover, because speakers of the other Philippine languages were upset and felt marginalized, the government saw it fit to rename the national language into "Pilipino" instead in 1959. But why "Pilipino" and not "Filipino"? As already alluded to above and further expounded on by Engber:
The developers of the mother tongue looked back to the alphabet that was used before the Spaniards took over (and in the early years of Spanish rule). The native script, called "Baybayin," had fewer than two dozen letters and didn't include the sound for "F." Though the letter "F" had been incorporated into the language during the centuries of Spanish influence, the country's post-colonial leadership chose to return to the original alphabet. [NOTE: Here, I think Engber also made the mistake of thinking Baybayin is an alphabet rather than a syllabary.] Foreign words that used "non-native" sounds were respelled to fit the Baybayin-based alphabet. C's became K's, X's turned into SK's, and the letter F became a P. [NOTE: This is akin to the Japanese way of transcribing foreign words using Katakana.] Filipinos who spoke Tagalog became Pilipinos who spoke Pilipino.Now, onto your other question: Why do many Filipinos confuse their F's and P's?
The debate over the national language continued for decades. A constitution written in the early 1970s (drawn up as Ferdinand Marcos instituted an eight-year stretch of martial law) promised to create a new national language called "Filipino." The next constitution, from 1987, made the change official, designating Filipino -- which uses a larger alphabet and incorporates foreign sounds -- as the national language. With the letter "F" restored, presumably those who speak the national language are now, once again, Filipinos.
Indeed, many of us do and I know for a fact that this "pronunciation confusion" has also been a source of jokes, to say the least. Worse, it has also been a source of prejudice and disdainful elitism. I've personally seen it many times that Filipinos with a more Americanized way of speaking English go way beyond teasing and look down with an unwarranted sense of superiority upon those who speak the language with a "Filipino accent."
And for many of us who grew up in the provinces, the teasing and the condescension cause, at the very least, a lot of hurt "peelings." ;-) In fact, for the typical provinciano, speaking English with a strong Filipino accent can be costly because it can mean less career opportunities and even alienation in an environment (say, a top school or a business organization) which prizes fluency in spoken English.
And when you think about it, it's really quite unfair considering, for provincianos like myself, English is really our third language. After all, we have our provincial language as our first and native tongue, and then we are forced to learn Tagalog and English too! Now, compare us to the elitist folks who come mostly from Manila and who only needed to master English as a foreign language, and I say, if anything, we're supposed to be the ones "peeling" superior here, right?
But to go back to the crux of the topic, what's the real reason behind this Philippine phonological confusion involving the pronunciation of "F"? Well, it's simple really: Because, quite literally, our native Filipino tongues are still generally Malayo-Polynesian even if we've already adopted a more expansive alphabet as a country, even if we've undergone almost 400 years of colonization. So, if you're a typical provinciano who, as I've said earlier, has had to learn not only the local language (most likely Malayo-Polynesian) but also Tagalog (definitely Malayo-Polynesian), your tongue -- in fact, your entire vocal tract -- is just not naturally hard-wired for words with the "F" phoneme (or for that matter, the "V" phoneme). So unless you're exposed to English regularly (i.e., you're from a rich Filipino family or you were educated in top schools), or you are, say, an Ibaloi from Northern Luzon whose indigenous language contains the "F" phoneme, it's really not that easy to pick up the phonetic ability to pronounce "F" properly.
|The vocal tract and places of articulation.|
Personally, I always have fun making my Western friends try to pronounce the word "ngayon" (Tagalog for "now") because it uses the digraph "ng" which is a velar nasal, a type of consonantal phoneme which most Westerners, try as they might, just seem unable to make. Unfazed, they would try pronouncing the word many times and I would usually end up laughing even though I try not to. Fortunately, my friends know I'm just having fun. And to write it in Hungarian, I think they know I'm really juszt amuszed by their szilly attemptsz which yield nothing but erroneousz szoundsz.
Got a question for The Filipino? Email him now at firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:00abf776-cf08-414e-b76f-e77a16c6b791> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://askthepinoy.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-do-filipinos-use-f-and-why-do-they.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399106.96/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00072-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972383 | 2,707 | 2.921875 | 3 |
You wanted to know
"Why did dinosaurs become extinct?" asked students in Katherine Crawford's fifth-grade at West Oak Middle School in Mundelein.
What's a fossil?What's a fossil?
Fossils are the preserved remains of plants, animals, sea creatures and insects found in rock. They also can reveal imprints, molds, casts and tracks.
Fossils are formed in a variety of ways:
• Recrystallization: Minerals found in shells are replaced with a different mineral structure.
• Petrification: Plants become rock when the cell structure is replaced by minerals in rock.
• Replacement: Minerals replace the original cell structure of the organism.
• Preserved organisms: A plant, animal or insect can become forever sealed in amber, tree resin or tar.
What types of things can become fossils?:
• Whole bodies, whole plants, shells, bacteria and body parts
• Casts and molds of bones, body parts, insects and plants
• Tracks where a dinosaur walked or swam
• Dinosaur eggs and egg shell imprints
• Animal poop
• Stones digested by dinosaurs
What are living fossils?:
• Plants, insects and animals that have survived since prehistoric times are considered living fossils. Ginkgo trees, ferns, cockroaches, lungfishes and birds are just a few examples.
The Wauconda Area Library suggests these titles on dinosaurs:
•"Dinosaurs to Dodos: An Encyclopedia of Extinct Animals", by Don Lessem
• "The Mystery And Death Of The Dinosaurs", by Chris Oxlade
• "What Killed The Dinosaurs?", by Isaac Asimov
• "What Happened To The Dinosaurs?", by Rebecca Olien
• "Dinosaurs", by Don Nardo
If you had to answer a tough question, you might not rush out and grab a rock. But when trying to solve the puzzle of how dinosaurs became extinct, rocks hold the clues that experts use to decode the mysteries of the very distant past.
The story of dinosaurs goes way back. Fossils dating to 230 million years ago hold information about the very first dinosaurs; older dinosaur remains might exist but they haven't yet been discovered.
Fossils with dinosaur bones, eggs and footprints show these colossal beings existed during the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous time periods.
Giant meat- and plant-eaters ruled the land and the seas for about 160 million years. Then, they didn't. While almost all dinosaurs failed to survive the catastrophic event that wiped them out, one dinosaur relative still exists -- birds.
"All birds that have ever lived were and are dinosaurs," said Bill Simpson, Field Museum collections manager, fossil vertebrates. "There are still about three times as many dinosaurs alive as mammals."
How could the majority of those gigantic reptilelike creatures have been wiped off the face of the Earth? Many types of scientists are working on this puzzle, among them are paleontologists, archeologists, astrophysicists, astronomers, geologists, ecologists and geochemists.
"Extinction is very hard to analyze," Simpson said. "The extinction event in this case is the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction. The prevailing theory is that a large extraterrestrial body, like an asteroid, struck Earth, perhaps in the area of the Yucatán Peninsula, and threw up so much dust that a nuclear winter scenario began.
"The dust shut out sunlight, causing a broad extinction of plants followed by herbivores, and carnivores. Thus, the food chain collapsed. "
Other theories about the die-off include the possibility there was of a huge volcanic explosion, as well as a hypothesis that shifting tectonic plates could have triggered an avalanche of cataclysmic changes that resulted in a mass dinosaur and plant extinction.
Scientists have noted other mass extinctions. A catastrophic event occurred about 550 million to 250 million years ago that obliterated as much as 90 percent of the Earth's flora and fauna.
Learn more about dinosaurs and evolution at the Chicago Field Museum's Evolving Planet exhibit. See the Field Museum website for exhibit and special event information at www.fieldmuseum.org. | <urn:uuid:d58301f6-634a-420a-8f9b-3cff51d892e4> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20111025/news/710259879/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402516.86/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00054-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947025 | 873 | 3.46875 | 3 |
The capacity to distinguish between past, present, and future plays an important role in the formation of (self-)consciousness. Time is an essential criterion to order the flow of contingent events and experiences and to build up coherence and meaning. In turn, the narratives emerging from such temporal ordering are crucial for the development of identities. However, theoretical concepts of time in philosophy, physics, biology, sociology, or cultural studies are numerous and often opposing. It only remains obvious that humans have the ability to make some sort of experience of time.
Images have always played a part in these processes. Moving and still images represent time and duration and contribute to the organisation of temporality or atemporality in many ways. They may represent the flow of time, or singular moments or – through their subjects, modes of representation, or being objects of preferences or dislikes – stand as signs for the period in which they were produced or shown. Often the material body of the images becomes an indicator of time or a trigger of dynamic experiences of time. By means of their modes of representation, images also facilitate various experiential dimensions of time such as eventful or presentist moments and the stretching or folding of time.
The relationship between the pictorial representation of time and perception of time is influenced by various factors. Experience of time may be seen in relation to the different senses constituting such experience. On the other hand, it may be influenced by cultural concepts of time, time regimes, practices of perception, and environmental processes. To analyse time experience one may apply semiotic or phenomenological methods or turn to integrative concepts like cybersemiotics, biosemiotics, or theories of embodiment. Therefore, basic questions for the conference could be:
- How do images represent time?
- How is it possible that images represent time or duration?
- How are representations and experiences of time influenced by concepts and regimes of time?
- Which senses take part in the experience of time?
- How are the materials of media involved in the experience of time?
This third conference on visual culture at the University of Hamburg which is organised by students and postgraduates of archaeology, art history, and cultural anthropology will provide lectures on the main topics and opportunities for detailed discussion. We are particularly looking for trans- and interdisciplinary contributions which deal with the above questions in visual media of all kind (still images, sculpture, installation art, film etc.). There is no limitation to certain periods or cultures. The contributions will be published after the conference. Proposals for lectures (30 min) in German or English may be sent to
firstname.lastname@example.org (organisational team: Jacobus Bracker, Clara Doose-Grünefeld, Tim Jegodzinski und Kirsten Maack)
until 31 July 2015. Abstracts should not exceed 300 words. Furthermore, we would be grateful for the inclusion of a short academic CV. We especially encourage young scholars and students of all levels to contribute.
Funding of speakers’ travel and accommodation expenses cannot currently be guaranteed. However, participation in the conference is free of any charge. The conference will take place in the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg.
Download Call for Papers | <urn:uuid:2bdb9d22-e34f-4315-ae68-2cd73329e035> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.kulturkundetagung.de/index_en.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394414.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00117-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934065 | 664 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Yellowstone National Park is a natural habitat for Brown Bears, also known as "grizzlies". Their nickname dates back to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Grizzlies (ursus arctos horribilis) are the largest bears in Yellowstone, weighing from roughly 300 to 600 pounds or more. They live 15-20 years in the wild.
This photograph captures a rare look at grizzly behavior. The suspended water beads, tossed around by play "fighting" in a shallow stream, emphasize the intensity of the moment. | <urn:uuid:76ee373c-e3d6-41b6-b78b-ae8008b4afb0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.apertureacademy.com/qty-prints.iframe.php?pic=Grizzly%20Gaze | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396872.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00028-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.890382 | 107 | 3.15625 | 3 |
September 11, 2007
Parking spaces outnumber drivers 3-to-1, drive pollution and warmingWEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -
Purdue University researchers surveyed the total area devoted to parking in a midsize Midwestern county and found that parking spaces outnumbered resident drivers 3-to-1 and outnumbered resident families 11-to-1. The researchers found the total parking area to be larger than 1,000 football fields, or covering more than two square miles.
"Even I was surprised by these numbers," said Bryan Pijanowski, the associate professor of forestry and natural resources who led the study in Purdue's home county of Tippecanoe. "I can't help but wonder: Do we need this much parking space?"
Pijanowski said that his results are cause for concern, in part, because parking lots present environmental and economic problems. They are, for instance, a major source of water pollution, he said.
Tippecanoe County parking lots turn out about 1,000 pounds of heavy metal runoff annually, said Purdue professor Bernard Engel, who used a computer model to estimate changes in water-borne runoff caused by land-use changes. Engel, head of the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, said lots are troublesome because pollutants collect on their non-absorbent surfaces and are then easily carried away by rain.
"The problem with parking lots is that they accumulate a lot of pollutants – oil, grease, heavy metals and sediment – that cannot be absorbed by the impervious surface," Engel said. "Rain then flushes these contaminants into rivers and lakes."
Heavy metals accumulate on parking lots from car batteries and even from airborne fumes, a phenomenon called dry deposition. Also, since rainfall cannot penetrate parking lots, they generate large amounts of flowing water, worsening flooding and erosion – and water pollution, Engel said.
Parking lots also help add to the "urban heat island effect," which can raise local temperatures 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, according to Indiana state climatologist Dev Niyogi.
"Urban areas have a higher capacity to absorb radiation from the sun than surrounding areas, and these areas become warmer," Niyogi said. "This effect could be even more dramatic in much of the Midwest because there are many urban areas immediately surrounded by cooler rural areas."
Pijanowski said his study has relevance outside of Tippecanoe County because his findings typify a troubling trend he's observed and studied: Generally, Americans pave an increasing percentage of land each year for their cars and trucks.
While parking spaces are necessary, Pijanowski said that businesses could be more creative about utilizing combined-use or shared parking lots, thereby saving construction and property costs while minimizing land use. This approach might benefit large churches and "big-box" retailers, which often feature parking lots that take up more than twice the area of their buildings, he said.
"Parking lots at big-box stores and mega-churches are rarely filled," Pijanowski said.
A different approach to development planning could mitigate the monetary and environmental costs associated with parking areas, he said.
"In many areas of the world, particularly Europe, cities were planned prior to automobiles, and many locations are typically within walking distance," Pijanowski said. "This is just one different way to plan that has certain advantages."
Pijanowski counted 355,000 parking spaces in Tippecanoe County, home to about 155,000 residents. Farmers could produce 250,000 bushels of corn in the same space taken up by county parking lots, he said.
The county's parking lots also produce 1,000 times the amount of heavy metal runoff and 25 times the total runoff that the same area of agricultural land would produce, Engel said. The computer model, a type of "long-term impact assessment model," calculated predicted changes in runoff and compared them with runoff levels from land in agricultural production, which generally produces less runoff because soil is better able to absorb rainfall and contaminants than pavement.
Although Purdue University draws non-resident student drivers and visitors to Tippecanoe County, Pijanowski said the effect is negligible on his calculated ratios of lots to drivers and is typical of the manner in which midsized counties often attract non-residents and their cars for various reasons.
Pijanowski conducted his survey using digitalized aerial images of Tippecanoe County taken in 2005, which he then analyzed to count the number of total parking spaces and the land area they consume. Students Amélie Davis and Kimberly Robinson helped to collect and analyze data.
He presented the results of his work in May at a conference of land-use experts in the Netherlands. This survey is the first in a series aimed at assessing the automobile's impact on land-use patterns, Pijanowski said.
Pijanowski counted parking lots at businesses, Purdue University and other public properties. Since he didn't include lots on private property or count multiple levels of parking garages, he regards his calculation of parking area and spaces as a significant underestimate.
"People can help by first realizing that our land is not unlimited and that we need to use it prudently," Pijanowski said. "They can seek a lifestyle that requires less automobile use. They can express their opinions that parking lots do not have to be as large as they are, attend planning meetings and help guide others to act."
Writer: Douglas M. Main, (765) 496-2050, email@example.com
Sources: Bryan Pijanowski, (765) 496-2215, firstname.lastname@example.org
Bernard Engel, (765) 494-1162, email@example.com
Dev Niyogi, (765) 494-6574, firstname.lastname@example.org
Purdue researcher Bryan Pijanowski says vast expanses of parking lots help raise urban temperatures and add to water pollution. Pijanowski, an associate professor of forestry and natural resources, says parking lots in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, take up more space than 1,000 football fields. (Purdue Agricultural Communication photo/Tom Campbell)A publication-quality photo is available at http://news.uns.purdue.edu/images/+2007/pijanowski-parkinglots.jpg
To the News Service home page | <urn:uuid:c56cb413-623a-4433-901d-b836d05a72c1> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.purdue.edu/uns/x/2007b/070911PijanowskiParking.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397213.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00164-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955514 | 1,331 | 2.671875 | 3 |
Nicholas II was born on May 6, 1868, in Tsarskoe Selo. He was delivered by his mother Marie Fyodorovna Romanova, formerly Dagmar, Princess of Denmark. His father Alexander Romanov was an important member of the Russian government.
Unlike the rest of the Romanov men, Nicholas was not a very big man. The other men were always very intimidating; Nicholas however, was a mere 5' 6 tall. To make up for his lack of height, Nicholas worked out with weights and other various athletic equipment.
Nicholas was known for his regal appearance. He had lively blue eyes that people always thought were the well of his soul. He wore his brown hair parted to the left and had a thick beard. He had golden highlights throughout. Those golden highlights stayed with him throughout his life and became his signature feature.
Nicholas had a nervous habit of always brushing his thick mustache with the back of his hand. Nicholas inherited a pug nose from his father. He disliked it very much because it reminded him of Paul I whom he considered the most unattractive of his relatives.
Nicholas was an extremely smart man and very well educated. He was at the top of his class and was the most intelligent of the European monarchs of his time. His parents prepared him for the task of being a 20th Century Czar, knowing it would be quite different from previous years.
The family was guarded by secret police and military guards. This meant that Nicholas grew up in almost complete seclusion from the outside world. This was not helpful to his maturing process or understanding of the ways in which his future subjects lived. Because he was so secluded, Nicholas never grew an appreciation for how people lived, and his ideas about important issues were very narrow-minded. His immaturity and lack of understanding would hinder his ability to govern Russia in the future.
While heir to the throne, Nicholas worked his way into the rank of Colonel in the Life Guards. He had a love for the military and always considered himself an army man. His personality and social habits were greatly influenced by his years as a young officer. He made many of his longest lasting friendships among his fellow officers. These were the happiest years when he had no worries of his future reign as Czar of Russia.
Nicholas gave his heart to a young, German princess named Alex of Hess. It was thought that they were not a good match. She was not seen as the type of woman with the strong qualities needed in an Empress to be. Yet, they were formally engaged in 1893.
Nicholas felt he was not up to the task of ruling Russia. He felt as though he had not the abilities or the experience. Yet, he took his coronation oath very seriously. Realizing that he was surrounded by bureaucrats, he quickly figured out he could trust few people. He turned to his wife, knowing that she was the one true person that he could rely on for support. Loneliness became his way of life.
Nicholas always put his country before anything else in life. He thought the fate of his family and his country were inseparable. He knew the shortcomings of his family dynasty all too well. Only he could keep it from falling apart. Being a very smart man, he realized he was a target for assassination. His wife's love and devotion were cherished throughout his life.
Though praised for his admirable qualities, he was portrayed as a failure. It was very hard for him to distinguish his own views of what was right and wrong for Russia. Although he was not an unintelligent man, he was hesitant to draw his own conclusions. He often pondered on important issues. Lacking political knowledge and instinct, he was rarely sure how to handle the affairs of state. He was thought of as weak and very contradictorious. It was difficult to relate to his mentality and follow his leadership.
In 1914, World War I began. Nicholas II took command of the army in 1915. He left the government of Russia in the hands of Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna and her advisor Rasputin. Discontent spread throughout Russia. The army was tired of war, and food shortages worsened. The government was in complete disarray. In March of 1917, Nicholas II was forced to abdicate. He and his family were shot to death in Yekatinburg on July 16, 1918. | <urn:uuid:fd7cde45-ef00-4cd7-a420-984fcf5ddb3f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.worldwar1.com/biorczar.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397795.31/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00170-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.997587 | 900 | 2.78125 | 3 |
Seymour Mermelstein - Buchenwald
Seymour Mermelstein, from New Jersey, joined the First Special Service Force, composed of American and Canadian soldiers, an all-volunteer unit. After it was deactivated in December, 1944, Mr. Mermelstein and other Americans in the original unit became the nucleus of the 474th Infantry Regiment. The 474th followed the main infantry units, mopping up behind the lines. Mr. Mermelstein entered Buchenwald several days after liberation and took this picture.
Source: GIs Remember, (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Jewish Military History, 1994). | <urn:uuid:191eaeed-77a7-4d00-9ef4-f4ca971240ce> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/GI7.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397565.80/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00128-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.911106 | 138 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Two days ago, californians found a giant oarfish on a beach. Now A incredible saber-toothed Whale has washed up in California. But why do these mysterious sea creatures strand?
For the second time this week, Southern California has seen a rare sea creature washed ashore, far from home waters. This time, it’s a saber-toothed whale, better known to live in deep Alaskan waters than in the warm surf of tourist-choked Venice Beach in Los Angeles where it stranded Wednesday, October 16, 2013.
In an extraordinary way even for scientists, the carcass of the nearly 15-foot and 2,000-pound whale was intact — except for a couple of fresh bite marks from sharks. The whale, a female, apparently was barely alive when it came ashore — a highly unusual sight because beached whales are often badly decomposed or badly eaten by marine life.
Cause of death
Are their deaths freak events prompted by global warming?
I would believe it’s just a coincidence. But who knows! It’s too early to tell. If we were to see a whole bunch of these animal strandings, that would give more evidence of something going on. (SOURCE) | <urn:uuid:949dfeb8-ce18-4dfa-bd78-36c6a62279f1> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://strangesounds.org/2013/10/mysterious-sea-creatures-amazingly-rare-15-foot-saber-toothed-whale-washes-up-in-california.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392099.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00016-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957697 | 259 | 2.890625 | 3 |
Why can't I just use getline(infile,name) without a delimiter?
If you do, then a default delimiter is used.
has the same effect as getline(infile,name, '\n');
So really, you cannot avoid using a delimiter. The whole intention behind getline() is that it continues reading characters into the string until it finds a delimiter (or reaches the end of the stream).
The point is, in the context of the data in your file, both the tab '\t' and newline'\n' characters are present. You choose which one to use depending on what you are trying to achieve.
Before I start bugging you guys :D just one tiny concern please :) suppose on text file, this is the name on line 1 with scores. I use this function getline(infile, name,"\n") the "n" means newline. The string reads all the data in that line until new line is found. So, should it not read fahman David khan? Because new line is not happening at that time.
1 2 3
Fahman David khan 95 34 64
Won't bug you Fter this but I do appreciate for the help :D
Before I start bugging you guys :D just one tiny concern please :) suppose on text file, this is the name on line 1 with scores. I use this function getline(infile, name,"\n") the "n" means newline.
std::getline takes a char argument as the delimiter, not a pointer to char (std::getline(infile, name, '\n'))
If the format of the file is as you indicate in the post above, getline will return an empty string, because the first line consists of only a newline. Assuming you do another getline the string extracted would be "Fahman David khan 95 34 64"
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Most Cited Food Policy Articles
The most cited articles published since 2011, extracted from Scopus.
Where are the best opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the food system (including the food chain)?Tara Garnett
Volume 36, Issue SUPPL. 1, January 2011, Page
This paper reviews estimates of food related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at the global, regional and national levels, highlighting both GHG-intensive stages in the food chain, and GHG-intensive food types. It examines approaches that have been proposed for mitigating emissions at each stage in the chain and looks at how these sit within wider discussions of sustainability. It finds that efficiency-focused technological measures, while important, may not only be insufficient in reducing GHGs to the level required but may also give rise to other environmental and ethical concerns. It gives evidence showing that in addition to technological mitigation it will also be necessary to shift patterns of consumption, and in particular away from diets rich in GHG-intensive meat and dairy foods. This will be necessary not just in the developed but also, in the longer term, in the developing world. This move, while potentially beneficial for food secure, wealthier populations, raises potentially serious nutritional questions for the world's poorest. A priority for decision makers is to develop policies that explicitly seek to integrate agricultural, environmental and nutritional objectives. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Soil management in relation to sustainable agriculture and ecosystem servicesD. S. Powlson | P. J. Gregory | W. R. Whalley | J. N. Quinton | D. W. Hopkins | A. P. Whitmore | P. R. Hirsch | K. W T Goulding
Volume 36, Issue SUPPL. 1, January 2011, Page
Requirements for research, practices and policies affecting soil management in relation to global food security are reviewed. Managing soil organic carbon (C) is central because soil organic matter influences numerous soil properties relevant to ecosystem functioning and crop growth. Even small changes in total C content can have disproportionately large impacts on key soil physical properties. Practices to encourage maintenance of soil C are important for ensuring sustainability of all soil functions. Soil is a major store of C within the biosphere - increases or decreases in this large stock can either mitigate or worsen climate change. Deforestation, conversion of grasslands to arable cropping and drainage of wetlands all cause emission of C; policies and international action to minimise these changes are urgently required. Sequestration of C in soil can contribute to climate change mitigation but the real impact of different options is often misunderstood. Some changes in management that are beneficial for soil C, increase emissions of nitrous oxide (a powerful greenhouse gas) thus cancelling the benefit. Research on soil physical processes and their interactions with roots can lead to improved and novel practices to improve crop access to water and nutrients. Increased understanding of root function has implications for selection and breeding of crops to maximise capture of water and nutrients. Roots are also a means of delivering natural plant-produced chemicals into soil with potentially beneficial impacts. These include biocontrol of soil-borne pests and diseases and inhibition of the nitrification process in soil (conversion of ammonium to nitrate) with possible benefits for improved nitrogen use efficiency and decreased nitrous oxide emission. The application of molecular methods to studies of soil organisms, and their interactions with roots, is providing new understanding of soil ecology and the basis for novel practical applications. Policy makers and those concerned with development of management approaches need to keep a watching brief on emerging possibilities from this fast-moving area of science. Nutrient management is a key challenge for global food production: there is an urgent need to increase nutrient availability to crops grown by smallholder farmers in developing countries. Many changes in practices including inter-cropping, inclusion of nitrogen-fixing crops, agroforestry and improved recycling have been clearly demonstrated to be beneficial: facilitating policies and practical strategies are needed to make these widely available, taking account of local economic and social conditions. In the longer term fertilizers will be essential for food security: policies and actions are needed to make these available and affordable to small farmers. In developed regions, and those developing rapidly such as China, strategies and policies to manage more precisely the necessarily large flows of nutrients in ways that minimise environmental damage are essential. A specific issue is to minimise emissions of nitrous oxide whilst ensuring sufficient nitrogen is available for adequate food production. Application of known strategies (through either regulation or education), technological developments, and continued research to improve understanding of basic processes will all play a part. Decreasing soil erosion is essential, both to maintain the soil resource and to minimise downstream damage such as sedimentation of rivers with adverse impacts on fisheries. Practical strategies are well known but often have financial implications for farmers. Examples of systems for paying one group of land users for ecosystem services affecting others exist in several parts of the world and serve as a model. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Fertiliser availability in a resource-limited world: Production and recycling of nitrogen and phosphorusC. J. Dawson | J. Hilton
Volume 36, Issue SUPPL. 1, January 2011, Page
Without the input of fertiliser nitrogen it is estimated that only about half of the current global population can be supplied with sufficient food energy and protein. The anticipated increase in the population to 2050 will increase the dependency on fertiliser inputs. The paper examines the different potential sources of energy and hydrogen required for this essential fixation of atmospheric nitrogen into plant-available nitrogenous fertiliser and concludes that methane from natural gas is clearly the most suitable source. In the absence of a cost-effective alternative source of hydrogen it is recommended that an on-going requirement for methane is acknowledged and that consideration be given to strategic reserves for the production of food. Phosphorus is also an essential and unsubstitutable nutrient for plants and animals, but while the global reserves of atmospheric nitrogen are effectively unlimited, the reserves of phosphate rock are finite. Recent estimates of the reserve suggest that at the current rate of use this resource will become exhausted within some hundreds of years. The annual increment of phosphorus contained in the human population is estimated to be in the order of 1 Mt/yr, which is a small proportion of the quantity mined. There is a clear requirement to ensure that phosphorus is recycled to a large extent, so that the rate of exhaustion of the reserves of phosphate rock is significantly reduced. Legislation relating to the management of phosphorus appears entirely associated with its potential to upset natural ecosystems, with apparently no regulations yet requiring the efficient use and reuse of a scarce resource. © 2010.
The new competition for land: Food, energy, and climate changeMark Harvey | Sarah Pilgrim
Volume 36, Issue SUPPL. 1, January 2011, Page
The paper addresses the new competition for land arising from growing and changing demand for food when combined with increasing global demand for transport energy, under conditions of declining petro-chemical resources and the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The paper starts from the premise of a 'food, energy and environment trilemma' (Tilman et al., 2009), where all demands to expand the area of cultivated land present high risks of increasing the carbon footprint of agriculture. Having reviewed the main drivers of demand for food and for liquid transport fuels, the paper weighs the controversies surrounding biofuels arising from food-price spikes, the demand for land, and consequent direct and indirect land-use change. It suggests that we need a more complex, and geographically differentiated, analysis of the interactions between direct and indirect land-use change. The paper then reviews evidence of land availability, and suggests that in addition to technical availability in terms of soil, water, and climate, political, social, and technological factors have significantly shaped the competition for land in different global regions, particularly the three major biofuel producing ones of the USA, Brazil and Europe. This point is further developed by reviewing the different innovation pathways for biofuels in these three regions. The main conclusion of this review is firstly that any analysis requires an integrated approach to the food-energy-environment trilemma, and secondly that strategic political direction of innovation and sustainability regulation are required to bring about major shifts in agriculture leading to sustainable intensification of cultivation (Royal Society, 2009), rather than the continued expansion of cultivated area. The consequent perspective is one of considerable global variety in technologies, agricultural productive systems, and use of natural resources. This contrasts sharply with the world of a dominant global and integrated technology platform based on petro-chemicals to which we have become accustomed. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Minimising the harm to biodiversity of producing more food globallyBen Phalan | Andrew Balmford | Rhys E. Green | Jörn P W Scharlemann
Volume 36, Issue SUPPL. 1, January 2011, Page
Should farming and conservation policies aim broadly to separate land for nature and land for production (land sparing) or integrate production and conservation on the same land (wildlife-friendly farming)? Most studies that try to address this question suffer from flaws in sampling design, inappropriate metrics, and/or failure to measure biodiversity baselines. We discuss how these failings can be addressed, and what existing information tells us about the key debates on this topic. The evidence available suggests that trade-offs between biodiversity and yield are prevalent. While there are some wildlife-friendly farming systems that support high species richness, a large proportion of wild species cannot survive in even the most benign farming systems. To conserve those species, protection of wild lands will remain essential. Sustainable intensification could help to facilitate sparing of such lands, provided that as much attention is given to protecting habitats as to raising yields. We discuss the general circumstances under which yield increases can facilitate land sparing, recognising that policies and social safeguards will need to be context-specific. In some situations, bringing degraded lands into production could help reduce pressure on wild lands, but much more information is needed on the biodiversity implications of using degraded lands. We conclude that restricting human requirements for land globally will be important in limiting the impacts on biodiversity of increasing food production. To achieve this, society will need to integrate explicit conservation objectives into local, regional and international policies affecting the food system. © 2010.
Sequestering carbon in soils of agro-ecosystemsR. Lal
Volume 36, Issue SUPPL. 1, January 2011, Page
Soils of the world's agroecosystems (croplands, grazing lands, rangelands) are depleted of their soil organic carbon (SOC) pool by 25-75% depending on climate, soil type, and historic management. The magnitude of loss may be 10 to 50. tons. C/ha. Soils with severe depletion of their SOC pool have low agronomic yield and low use efficiency of added input. Conversion to a restorative land use and adoption of recommended management practices, can enhance the SOC pool, improve soil quality, increase agronomic productivity, advance global food security, enhance soil resilience to adapt to extreme climatic events, and mitigate climate change by off-setting fossil fuel emissions. The technical potential of carbon (C) sequestration in soils of the agroecosystems is 1.2-3.1. billion. tons. C/yr. Improvement in soil quality, by increase in the SOC pool of 1. ton. C/ha/yr in the root zone, can increase annual food production in developing countries by 24-32. million. tons of food grains and 6-10. million. tons of roots and tubers. The strategy is to create positive soil C and nutrient budgets through adoption of no-till farming with mulch, use of cover crops, integrated nutrient management including biofertilizers, water conservation, and harvesting, and improving soil structure and tilth. © 2010.
Rethinking the global food crisis: The role of trade shocksDerek Headey
Volume 36, Issue 2, April 2011, Pages 136-146
Although fundamental factors were clearly responsible for shifting the world to a higher food price equilibrium in the years leading up the 2008 food crisis, there is little doubt that when food prices peaked in June of 2008, they soared well above the new equilibrium price. Numerous arguments have been proposed to explain overshooting, including financial speculation, depreciation of the United States (US) dollar, low interest rates, and reductions in grain stocks. However, observations that international rice prices surged in response to export restrictions by India and Vietnam suggested that trade-related factors could be an important basis for overshooting, especially given the very tangible link between export volumes and export prices. In this paper, we revisit the trade story by closely examining monthly data from Thailand (the largest exporter of rice), and the United States (the largest exporter of wheat and maize and the third largest exporter of soybeans). In all cases except soybeans, we find that large surges in export volumes preceded the price surges. The presence of these large demand surges, together with back-of-the-envelope estimates of their price impacts, suggests that trade events played a much larger and more pervasive role than previously thought. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Modeling heterogeneity in consumer preferences for select food safety attributes in ChinaDavid L. Ortega | H. Holly Wang | Laping Wu | Nicole J. Olynk
Volume 36, Issue 2, April 2011, Pages 318-324
Food safety issues often arise from asymmetric information between consumers and suppliers with regards to product-specific attributes. Severe food safety scandals were observed recently in China. These events not only caused direct economic and life losses, but also created distrust in the Chinese food system domestically, as well as internationally. While much attention has focused on the problems plaguing the Chinese government's food inspection system, little research has been dedicated to analyzing Chinese consumers' concerns surrounding food safety. In this paper, we measure consumer preferences for select food safety attributes in pork and take food safety risk perceptions into account. Several choice experiment models, including latent class and random parameters logit, are constructed to capture heterogeneity in consumer preferences. Our results suggest that Chinese consumers have the highest willingness-to-pay for a government certification program, followed by third-party certification, a traceability system, and a product-specific information label. The results of this study call for the direct involvement of the Chinese government in the food safety system. A stricter monitoring system will not only improve consumer well-being in the short-run, but also restore consumers' trust leading to a social welfare increase in the long run. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Protein efficiency per unit energy and per unit greenhouse gas emissions: Potential contribution of diet choices to climate change mitigationAlejandro D. González | Björn Frostell | Annika Carlsson-Kanyama
Volume 36, Issue 5, October 2011, Pages 562-570
The production, transport and processing of food products have significant environmental impacts, some of them related to climate change. This study examined the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production and transport to a port in Sweden (wholesale point) of 84 common food items of animal and vegetable origin. Energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for food items produced in different countries and using various means of production were compared. The results confirmed that animal-based foods are associated with higher energy use and GHG emissions than plant-based foods, with the exception of vegetables produced in heated greenhouses. Analyses of the nutritional value of the foods to assess the amount of protein delivered to the wholesale point per unit energy used or GHG emitted (protein delivery efficiency) showed that the efficiency was much higher for plant-based foods than for animal-based. Remarkably, the efficiency of delivering plant-based protein increased as the amount of protein in the food increased, while the efficiency of delivering animal-based protein decreased. These results have implications for policies encouraging diets with lower environmental impacts for a growing world population. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.
Total and per capita value of food loss in the United StatesJean C. Buzby | Jeffrey Hyman
Volume 37, Issue 5, October 2012, Pages 561-570
There are few peer-reviewed or major published studies that estimate the total amount of food loss in developed countries and even fewer attempt to estimate the monetary value. We compiled estimates of the amount and value of food loss for more than 200 individual foods in the United States using the US Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service's Loss-Adjusted Food Availability data and then aggregated these values to estimate the total value of food loss and the value by food group. The results indicate that in 2008, the estimated total value of food loss at the retail and consumer levels in the United States as purchased at retail prices was $165.6. billion. The top three food groups in terms of the value of food loss at these levels are: meat, poultry, and fish (41%); vegetables (17%); and dairy products (14%). Looking more closely at the estimates for the consumer level, this level of loss translates into almost 124. kg (273. lb) of food lost from human consumption, per capita, in 2008 at an estimated retail price of $390/capita/year. Food loss represents a significant share of household food expenditures: our estimates suggest that the annual value of food loss is almost 10% of the average amount spent on food per consumer in 2008 and over 1% of the average disposable income. This consumer level loss translates into over .3. kg (0.7. lb) of food per capita per day valued at $1.07/day. Our estimates of the total value of food loss in the United States and loss estimates by food group are useful in that they can generate awareness of the issue among the food industry members, governments, and consumers. Potential large-scale approaches and economic incentives to mitigate food loss in developed countries are also discussed. © 2012.
The use and usefulness of carbon labelling food: A policy perspective from a survey of UK supermarket shoppersZaina Gadema | David Oglethorpe
Volume 36, Issue 6, December 2011, Pages 815-822
Both the process of carbon footprinting and carbon labelling of food products are currently voluntary in the UK. Both processes derive from the UK's policy for sustainable development and in particular, the UK's Framework for Environmental Behaviours that strongly advocates a social marketing approach towards behavioural change. This paper examines whether carbon footprinting and labelling food products, borne from an overarching policy imperative to decarbonise food systems, is a tool that will actively facilitate consumers to make 'greener' purchasing decisions and whether this is a sensible way of trying to achieve to a low carbon future. We do so by drawing from a survey exploring purchasing habits and perceptions in relation to various sustainability credentials of food products and particularly 'carbon', using a combination of descriptive and cluster analysis. The data, from 428 UK supermarket shoppers, reveals that whilst consumer demand is relatively strong for carbon labels with a stated preference rate of 72%, confusion in interpreting and understanding labels is correspondingly high at a total of 89%, primarily as a result of poor communication and market proliferation. Three statistically distinct clusters were produced from the cluster analysis, representing taxonomies of consumers with quite different attitudes to carbon and other wider sustainability issues. Whilst the majority of consumers are likely to react positively to further carbon labelling of food products, this in itself is unlikely to drive much change in food systems. As such, the data imply that a concerted policy drive to decarbonise food systems via voluntary carbon footprinting and labelling policy initiatives is limited by a fragmented and haphazard market approach where retailers are being careful not to disaffect certain products by labelling others within the same category. Consumers may want to make choices based on the carbon footprint of products but do not feel empowered to do so and relying on consumer guilt is inappropriate. The paper concludes that the establishment of effective linkages between food policy and food market actors to drive a targeted and coherent carbon labelling policy is needed. This would provide consumers with the opportunity to make informed choices, especially within food product categories and negate the need for retailers to depend on the demand side of the supply chain to achieve carbon reduction targets. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.
Global developments in the competition for land from biofuelsRichard Murphy | Jeremy Woods | Mairi Black | Marcelle McManus
Volume 36, Issue SUPPL. 1, January 2011, Page
The potential global demand for biofuels and the implications of this for land use and its interaction with food agriculture is reviewed. It is expected that biofuels will form an important element of global transport energy mix (in the order of 20-30% of total requirement) over the next 40. years and beyond. Over this time, there will be a transition from so called first generation biofuels, based on commodity agricultural crops with food/feed uses, to advanced biofuels, sometimes called second and third generation biofuels, based primarily upon lignocellulosic feedstocks. It remains unclear whether these advanced biofuels, based on lignocellulosic materials, will entirely replace first generation or if second generation will be supplemental to first generation. This expansion in biofuels will be coupled to a substantial increase in alternative fuels (electricity, hydrogen, biogas and natural gas) and modal shifts. Biofuel production from agricultural commodity crops that exhibit strong sustainability criteria will remain important (e.g. sugarcane) with supportive and competitive aspects for food security. Land requirement projections estimated for a range of potential biofuel development trajectories range widely and are inherently uncertain. Under the most active scenario that delivers substantive greenhouse gas reductions in transport by 2050 (relative to 2005 levels), approximately 100 Mha of additional land is projected. In the 'business-as-usual' scenario, in which transport energy demand rises by 80% by 2050 from present levels, a land use requirement of 650. Mha is projected. Significant potential exists for producing biofuels that possess high productivity and sustainability profiles through continued research, development and demonstration. Policy and regulation at a global level, that focuses biofuel development on these goals in ways that are synergistic with food agriculture, will simultaneously help to decarbonise transport and maintain a diverse and financially robust agricultural (and forestry) sector. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
The price of protein: Review of land use and carbon footprints from life cycle assessments of animal food products and their substitutesDurk Nijdam | Trudy Rood | Henk Westhoek
Volume 37, Issue 6, December 2012, Pages 760-770
Animal husbandry, aquaculture and fishery have major impacts on the environment. In order to identify the range of impacts and the most important factors thereof, as well as to identify what are the main causes of the differences between products, we analysed 52 life cycle assessment studies (LCAs) of animal and vegetal sources of protein. Our analysis was focused only on land requirement and carbon footprints.In a general conclusion it can be said that the carbon footprint of the most climate-friendly protein sources is up to 100 times smaller than those of the most climate-unfriendly. The differences between footprints of the various products were found mainly to be due to differences in production systems. The outcomes for pork and poultry show much more homogeneity than for beef and seafood. This is largely because both beef and seafood production show a wide variety of production systems.Land use (occupation), comprising both arable land and grasslands, also varies strongly, ranging from negligible for seafood to up to 2100m 2ykg -1 of protein from extensive cattle farming. From farm to fork the feed production and animal husbandry are by far the most important contributors to the environmental impacts. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.
The China melamine milk scandal and its implications for food safety regulationXiaofang Pei | Annuradha Tandon | Anton Alldrick | Liana Giorgi | Wei Huang | Ruijia Yang
Volume 36, Issue 3, June 2011, Pages 412-420
This article examines the development of the Chinese dairy sector since 2000 and investigates how this has affected food safety. The ongoing problems caused by melamine contamination are linked to the rapid and unregulated development of this sector. Currently, China is faced with demands - both from home and abroad - to improve its food safety record. This will necessitate it upgrades its regulatory framework to meet the standards of Codex Alimentarius and the EU. A serious restructuring of the dairy sector as well as of the public food safety control agencies is called for. The costs and benefits to be accrued by these reforms are the subject of this article. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.
Agricultural pesticides and land use intensification in high, middle and low income countriesPepijn Schreinemachers | Prasnee Tipraqsa
Volume 37, Issue 6, December 2012, Pages 616-626
We study levels and trends in agricultural pesticide use for a large cross-section of countries using FAO data for the period 1990-2009. Our analysis shows that a 1% increase in crop output per hectare is associated with a 1.8% increase in pesticide use per hectare but that the growth in intensity of pesticide use levels off as countries reach a higher level of economic development. However, very few high income countries have managed to significantly reduce the level of intensity of their pesticide use, because decreases in insecticide use at higher income levels are largely offset by increases in herbicide and fungicide use. The results also show very rapid growth in the intensity of pesticide use for several middle income countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Cameroon, Malaysia and Thailand. Complementing our analysis with data from the Rotterdam Convention on Prior Informed Consent (PIC), we show that hazardous pesticides covered in the PIC procedure are more weakly regulated in lower than in higher income countries. We discuss the policy challenges facing developing countries with a rapid growth in pesticide use and recommend a four-pronged strategy, including an environmental tax on pesticides with revenues allocated to long-term investments in awareness building, the development of integrated crop management methods and the setting of food safety standards. The interactions between these measures should help contribute to the effectiveness of the overall strategy package. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.
Sustainability labels on food products: Consumer motivation, understanding and useKlaus G. Grunert | Sophie Hieke | Josephine Wills
Volume 44, Issue , February 2014, Pages 177-189
This study investigates the relationship between consumer motivation, understanding and use of sustainability labels on food products (both environmental and ethical labels), which are increasingly appearing on food products. Data was collected by means of an online survey implemented in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and Poland, with a total sample size of 4408 respondents. Respondents expressed medium high to high levels of concern with sustainability issues at the general level, but lower levels of concern in the context of concrete food product choices. Understanding of the concept of sustainability was limited, but understanding of four selected labels (Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, Carbon Footprint, and Animal Welfare) was better, as some of them seem to be self-explanatory. The results indicated a low level of use, no matter whether use was measured as self-reported use of different types of information available on food labels or as use inferred from the results of a choice-based conjoint analysis. Hierarchical regression indicated that use is related to both motivation and understanding, and that both motivation, understanding and use are affected by demographic characteristics, human values as measured by the Schwartz value domains, and country differences. The results imply that sustainability labels currently do not play a major role in consumers' food choices, and future use of these labels will depend on the extent to which consumers' general concern about sustainability can be turned into actual behaviour. © 2013 The Authors.
Eye tracking and nutrition label use: A review of the literature and recommendations for label enhancementDan J. Graham | Jacob L. Orquin | Vivianne H M Visschers
Volume 37, Issue 4, August 2012, Pages 378-382
Nutrition labels on food packages are among the most prominent and far-reaching policy measures related to diet and have the capacity to promote healthy eating. Unfortunately, certain nutrition label characteristics may impede consumer detection and comprehension of labels. Research using precise cameras monitoring consumer visual attention (i.e., eye tracking) has begun to identify ways in which label design could be modified to improve consumers' ability to locate and effectively utilize nutrition information. The present paper reviews all published studies of nutrition label use that have utilized eye tracking methodology, identifies directions for further research in this growing field, and makes research-based recommendations for ways in which labels could be modified to improve consumers' ability to use nutrition labels to select healthful foods. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.
What is the irrigation potential for Africa? A combined biophysical and socioeconomic approachLiangzhi You | Claudia Ringler | Ulrike Wood-Sichra | Richard Robertson | Stanley Wood | Tingju Zhu | Gerald Nelson | Zhe Guo | Yan Sun
Volume 36, Issue 6, December 2011, Pages 770-782
Although irrigation in Africa has the potential to boost agricultural productivities by at least 50%, food production on the continent is almost entirely rainfed. The area equipped for irrigation, currently slightly more than 13 million hectares, makes up just 6% of the total cultivated area. More than 70% of Africa's poor live in rural areas and mostly depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. As a result, agricultural development is key to ending poverty on the continent. Many development organizations have recently proposed to significantly increase investments in irrigation in the region. However, the potential for irrigation investments in Africa is highly dependent upon geographic, hydrologic, agronomic, and economic factors that need to be taken into account when assessing the long-term viability and sustainability of planned projects. This paper analyzes the large, dam-based and small-scale irrigation investment potential in Africa based on agronomic, hydrologic, and economic factors. We find significant profitable irrigation potential for both small-scale and large-scale systems. This type of regional analysis can guide distribution of investment funds across countries and should be a first step prior to in-depth country- and local-level assessment of irrigation potential, which will be important to agricultural and economic development in Africa. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.
The sustainability and resilience of global water and food systems: Political analysis of the interplay between security, resource scarcity, political systems and global tradeJeremy Allouche
Volume 36, Issue SUPPL. 1, January 2011, Page
This article looks at the interrelationship between water and food security. More specifically, it examines the resilience and sustainability of water and food systems to shocks and stresses linked to different levels and intensity of conflict, global trade and climate change. The article makes four points: (1) that resource scarcity as a driver of conflict is inconclusive especially at regional and national levels (2) most insecurities surrounding water and food are explained by political power, social and gender relations; (3) global trade has enabled national food and water security, but that is now threatened by increasing food prices, food sovereignty movements and land 'grabbing' (4) and that water and food security will face major challenges under conditions of climate change. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
What do we really know? Metrics for food insecurity and undernutritionHartwig de Haen | Stephan Klasen | Matin Qaim
Volume 36, Issue 6, December 2011, Pages 760-769
In this article, we critically review the three most common approaches of assessing chronic food insecurity and undernutrition: (i) the FAO indicator of undernourishment, (ii) household food consumption surveys, and (iii) childhood anthropometrics. There is a striking and worrying degree of inconsistency when one compares available estimates, which is due to methodological and empirical problems associated with all three approaches. Hence, the true extent of food insecurity and undernutrition is unknown. We discuss strengths and weaknesses of each approach and make concrete suggestions for improvement, which also requires additional research. A key component will be the planning and implementation of more comprehensive, standardized, and timely household surveys that cover food consumption and anthropometry, in addition to other socioeconomic and health variables. Such combined survey data will allow much better assessment of the problems' magnitude, as well as of trends, driving forces, and appropriate policy responses. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.
Certifying catfish in Vietnam and Bangladesh: Who will make the grade and will it matter?Ben Belton | Mohammad Mahfujul Haque | David C. Little | Le Xuan Sinh
Volume 36, Issue 2, April 2011, Pages 289-299
Certification is an increasingly pervasive form of market governance through which retailers and NGOs are able to exert control over producers of primary products in order to secure their commercial and institutional interests. This paper assesses the likely outcomes of emerging certification standards intended to govern production of a new global commodity, Pangasius catfish. This evaluation focuses on Pangasius producers in Vietnam and Bangladesh, and one of the key areas which standards seek to regulate; the environment. We conclude that certification is likely to result in greater differentiation and polarisation between larger and smaller farm operators and will increasingly act to exclude of the latter from access to Western European and North American markets, and that any local environmental gains produced may be of relatively minor significance. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Recent developments in modifying crops and agronomic practice to improve human healthFang Jie Zhao | Peter R. Shewry
Volume 36, Issue SUPPL. 1, January 2011, Page
Malnutrition of micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) affects more than two billion people worldwide, especially in developing countries, largely due to low concentrations or poor bioavailability of these nutrients in the diet. In contrast, over-consumption, particularly of over-refined cereal-based foods, has contributed to the development of an " epidemic" of metabolic diseases in some developed countries. This review highlights recent progress in modifying crops and agronomic practice to increase health benefits. Mineral concentrations or bioavailability in crop edible parts can be increased by fertilisation, breeding or biotechnology. It is also possible to modify crops using transgenic technology to enable or increase the biosynthesis of vitamins and long chain omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, or to modify the composition of starch or dietary fibre. Although technologically feasible now or in the near future, the development of micronutrient biofortified or composition-modified crops would also depend on other factors such as consumer acceptance, cost, regulations and national or international intervention. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Food health claims - What consumers understandGiuseppe Nocella | Orla Kennedy
Volume 37, Issue 5, October 2012, Pages 571-580
Issues pertaining to consumer understanding of food health claims are complex and difficult to disentangle because there is a surprising lack of multidisciplinary research aimed at evaluating how consumers are influenced by factors impacting on the evaluation process. In the EU, current legislation is designed to protect consumers from misleading and false claims but there is much debate about the concept of the 'average consumer' referred to in the legislation. This review provides an overview of the current legislative framework, discusses the concept of the 'average consumer' and brings together findings on consumer understanding from an international perspective. It examines factors related to the personal characteristics of individuals such as socio-demographic status, knowledge, and attitudes, and factors pertaining to food and food supplement products such as the wording of claims and the communication of the strength and consistency of the scientific evidence. As well as providing insights for future research, the conclusions highlight the importance of enhancing the communication of scientific evidence to improve consumer understanding of food health claims. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.
Agricultural growth, poverty, and nutrition in TanzaniaKarl Pauw | James Thurlow
Volume 36, Issue 6, December 2011, Pages 795-804
Rapid economic growth does not appear to have significantly improved poverty and nutrition outcomes in Tanzania. We link recent production trends to household incomes using a regionalized, recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium and microsimulation model. Results indicate some inconsistency between recent growth and poverty measurements in Tanzania. We also find that the structure of economic growth may have constrained the rate of poverty reduction. Agricultural growth has been driven by larger-scale farmers who are less likely to be poor; and has been concentrated among crops grown in specific regions of the country. Slow expansion of food crops and livestock also explain the weak relationship between agricultural growth and nutrition outcomes. We find that accelerating agricultural growth, particularly in maize, strengthens the growth-poverty relationship and enhances households' caloric availability, while also contributing significantly to growth itself. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.
Agricultural technologies for climate change in developing countries: Policy options for innovation and technology diffusionTravis J. Lybbert | Daniel A. Sumner
Volume 37, Issue 1, February 2012, Pages 114-123
Climate has obvious direct effects on agricultural production. The reverse is more apparent than ever as greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture are tallied. The development and effective diffusion of new agricultural practices and technologies will largely shape how and how well farmers mitigate and adapt to climate change. This adaptation and mitigation potential is nowhere more pronounced than in developing countries where agricultural productivity remains low; poverty, vulnerability and food insecurity remain high; and the direct effects of climate change are expected to be especially harsh. Creating the necessary agricultural technologies and harnessing them to enable developing countries to adapt their agricultural systems to changing climate will require innovations in policy and institutions as well. Potential constraints to innovation involve both the private and public sectors in both developing and developed countries. The process of transferring agricultural innovations across agroecological and climatic zones is often subject to agronomic constraints. Often, the most binding constraints occur at the adoption stage, with several factors that potentially impede poor farmers' access to and use of new technologies. Based on discussions of these constraints, we derive six policy principles and use these principles to suggest several specific investments and policy priorities. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. | <urn:uuid:99f0a989-401e-4d2e-b8bb-6929f57109df> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.journals.elsevier.com/food-policy/most-cited-articles/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397562.76/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00153-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930911 | 7,865 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Shrinks objects or people
Wave hand in front of target
Shrinking is the magical ability to shrink objects or beings in size. Typically the target is shrunk to only a few inches in size, though the exact mechanics of this ability are unknown.
- Gammill owned a wand that would shrink his victims so he could add them to his collection. Once shrunk, the target also has the strength of their powers reduced.
- Genies shrink themselves when they remain inside their bottles.
- Wyatt Halliwell once shrank his parents and trapped them inside the Halliwell manor doll house to keep them safe from Zankou.
- When Fairies use their Fairy dust to turn other beings into fairies, they are magically shrunk during the transformation.
List of UsersEdit
- Origial power
- Through spell, potion, power stealing, etc.
- Tuatha - (With magical dust)
- Gammill - (With Gammill's Wand)
- The Charmed Ones - (With Gammill's Wand)
- Wyatt Halliwell - (Through Projection)
- Fairies - (With fairy dust) | <urn:uuid:f655f4e5-6573-4e83-b057-ecc8f60c34b2> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://charmed.wikia.com/wiki/Shrinking | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393518.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00196-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93567 | 241 | 2.671875 | 3 |
“Much has fallen silent, many people have left,” the poem begins. “But songs have remained and days have remained. This truth has remained: You and I are alone. . . . My heart is completely open, like the surface of a river. If you want to see it, you may.”
The verse belongs to the Russian poet Alexander Blok, but the qualities of its glow might also describe one of the many musical voices of Mieczyslaw Weinberg: solitary, wistful, unguarded, beaming.
Weinberg (1919-1996) is surely the most fascinating Soviet-era composer that most Western listeners, until a decade ago, had never heard of. He chose this Blok poem for a song cycle called “Beyond the Border of Past Days,” a title that also hints at the forces of memory that shaped Weinberg’s own life and his almost surreally prolific career writing music in the shadow of catastrophe.
Weinberg, whose Holocaust-themed opera, “The Passenger,” just received its New York premiere, lived a life buffeted by the winds of a dark century. He was born into a Polish-Jewish family in Warsaw. Both of his grandfathers and two of his great-grandfathers had been murdered in a pogrom on Easter Sunday in 1903. The rest of his own nuclear family — his mother, his father, and his sister — were later murdered by the Nazis.
Weinberg escaped by himself and fled east in 1939 to the Soviet Union, arriving at age 20. He was given a new name (Mieczyslaw became Moisey), and began a new chapter of his life, one of startling accomplishment. He studied composition with a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, he married the daughter of the legendary Jewish actor and director Solomon Mikhoels, and he settled in Moscow with help from Dmitri Shostakovich, a musical idol who became a close friend and artistic fellow traveler.
Weinberg’s own brutal trials, however, continued in the Soviet Union. His father-in-law, Mikhoels, was notoriously murdered by Stalin’s operatives in 1948, and for the next five years, Weinberg himself was under intense state surveillance. The long-anticipated knock at the door came in 1953, and he was imprisoned for 11 weeks, saved from execution perhaps only by the fact that Stalin died one month later.
Weinberg went on to outlive not only Stalin and Hitler, but the Soviet Union itself. Remarkably, as the scholar David Fanning conveys in his biography, the composer never saw himself as a victim, though along the way Weinberg did come to feel that it was, in his own words, “impossible to repay the debt” he had incurred through the simple, mind-warping fact of his own survival. He seemed to compose music almost penitentially — he once called it “creative hard labor” — to atone, to memorialize, to find sense in a world in which there was none to be found. And he composed constantly. The ultimate results were seven operas, 26 symphonies, 17 string quartets, six concertos, and over two dozen sonatas, as well as ballets, rhapsodies, and more.
Dipping into Weinberg’s catalog is a heady and strange experience. At first blush, the music’s indebtedness to Shostakovich can feel glaringly obvious. But the more closely you listen, the more individual, and at times powerfully raw, his voice becomes. You come to realize that the lines of influence between the two composers ran in both directions.
Jewish folk materials appear in some of Weinberg’s music, but they are only one among the composer’s many guises. The Symphony No. 10, to name just one piece recently recorded by the violinist Gidon Kremer and his ensemble, is a sui generis work of lapel-grabbing intensity and riveting dramatic force, marked by strenuous dissonances and pools of eerie calm, with opening chords that call to mind Tchaikovsky’s C major Serenade in a shattered mirror. The Violin Concerto bolts out of the gate with an angular virtuosity that recalls Shostakovich, but with an itinerary all its own. The Quartet No. 6 is an aggressive tour de force. The Quartet No. 7 is by contrast deeply reflective in tone, full of music that seems to look out onto the world from afar, beginning with an adagio of wise and gentle radiance.
Of course there are peaks and dips, but after a bit of time spent wandering among Weinberg’s musical estate, you start to wonder how art with this degree of conviction and quality could simply vanish as it did. Fanning’s account fills out the story. During the 1950s and ’60s, the leading Russian soloists of the day took up Weinberg’s works, including David Oistrakh,
Mstislav Rostropovich, and Emil Gilels. Shostakovich also promoted his music widely. But Weinberg never seems to have done much to promote himself. He also harbored a deep ambivalence toward the state-sponsored Composer’s Union, and for long periods supported himself outside of the system by writing film scores, cartoon scores, and even circus music.
Since his music was of little use to the Soviet propaganda machine, it was not publicized outside the country. In 1975 came the death of Shostakovich, not only a great personal supporter but the prime standard-bearer for Weinberg’s own stylistic breed of modern music: communicative to a wider public, skeptical of avant-garde provocation for its own sake, yet also possessed of its own private expressive ambitions as separate from the demands of the State.
Suddenly Weinberg found himself lagging far behind the rising generation of post-Shostakovich radicals, composers such as Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke, and Edison Denisov. By the 1980s performances of Weinberg’s works were in steep decline. By the 1990s he was practically a living ghost. “As before,” wrote the composer Alexander Chaykovsky in 1992, “Weinberg somehow does not exist for Soviet music.”
Yet it would not be long before his star began to rise, largely on the basis of new recordings that began to arrive in the mid-1990s and just keep coming unabated. There have been at
least four new albums devoted to his symphonies this year alone, and the Danel Quartet has just completed its excellent six-volume survey of his complete quartets, issued as a set this spring.
A critical level of curiosity about Weinberg’s art seems to have been reached — this music is not going away again — though his output is so large it will require time to take its full measure, to place it sensibly in the context of his own era and ours. For now, at the very least, to listen to Weinberg’s music against the backdrop of his biography is to encounter not only a compelling musical voice but also a fierce rejoinder to Adorno’s famous dictum against writing poetry after the Holocaust. Clearly for Weinberg art after Auschwitz was not only possible; it was the only antidote to life after Auschwitz.
Life after — and inside of — Auschwitz was in fact the subject of Weinberg’s first opera, “The Passenger,” completed in 1968. Its first staged production, directed by David Pountney, arrived earlier this year at the Houston Grand Opera, whose forces gave the work its New York premiere this month at the Park Avenue Armory (co-presented by the Lincoln Center Festival and the Armory).
Weinberg believed this opera to be his finest work. Its libretto, by Alexander Medvedev, was based on a 1962 novel by the Polish Catholic writer Zofia Posmysz, who had herself been interned in Auschwitz, where most of the opera’s action takes place. Its narrative framing, however, makes for unexpected drama, in part because it is viewed not through the lens of a victim but of a perpetrator, grappling with her deeds years later.
The first act opens with a German couple, Walter and Liese, aboard an ocean liner in the 1960s, bound for a new life in Brazil, where Walter has been appointed to a diplomatic post for the West German government. On the ship’s deck, Liese glimpses a familiar face, and the past begins flooding in like seawater after a breach. She confesses to her husband that she had been a guard at Auschwitz, and that she fears the woman she has just spotted on deck is one of her former prisoners. Walter’s anguished first response, we note, is that his diplomatic career will be ruined. Liese meanwhile is carried back into the domain of memories, and much of the remainder of the opera plays out in flashbacks to Liese’s time in the camp, ingeniously staged in a hellish underworld directly below the brightly lit, antiseptically cheerful deck of the ocean liner.
We soon meet Marta, the woman Liese believes she has glimpsed, as a Polish prisoner two decades earlier, and the grim life of the camp rises up before our eyes. We watch inmates lament their fate, pray to Jesus, and defend each other from the brutal guards. A Russian prisoner sings of missing home. Marta has a reunion with her fiance, Tadeusz.
The opera’s climax is set up when Tadeusz, a violinist, is ordered to perform a tawdry waltz, the favorite tune of the camp commandant. He agrees but at the last minute switches the program, confronting his captor with the serrated chords of Bach’s grand D minor Chaconne. The instruments of Weinberg’s orchestra leap into the fray, joining the Chaconne in progress as if defending one of their own. We are given a few moments to savor this musical mutiny before the concert is stopped, the violin is smashed, and Tadeusz is taken away. At the end, Marta is left alone to lament her fate.
Weinberg’s score is a masterful mix of styles, by turns expressionistic, sarcastic, and at times purposefully banal, but the piece nonetheless sits uneasily with contemporary sensibilities regarding the Holocaust and its artistic representation. Pountney in a program note wisely calls the opera a time capsule. And it is just that: essentially, a work of 1960s Polish Holocaust art. As such it also underscores the ways in which national memory of the Holocaust varied widely from country to country. In this Polish perspective, we are far from the camps of “Schindler’s List,” most notably in the fact that this Auschwitz is not even principally a place for Jews. Marta is in fact a non-Jewish Pole, and we meet five other prisoners of varying nationalities before we encounter Hannah, a minor character, whose uniform is marked by a star of David.
The Soviets, too, had their preferred narratives of commemoration, and “The Passenger” did not conform to them, as it was apparently deemed insufficiently reflective of Russian suffering in the war. The work’s only production during Weinberg’s lifetime — at the Bolshoi Theatre — was scuttled before its first performance. (A similar fate almost befell Shostakovich’s “Babi Yar” Symphony, for the same reasons.) The opera had to wait until 2010 for its staged premiere, which took place at the Bregenz Festival in Austria.
The work’s time-capsule status comes through, too, in the naive directness of its operatic depictions of camp life. The early 1960s were after all a span of first-time reckonings with the enormity — and sheer facticity — of the Holocaust. The Eichmann trial was taking place in Jerusalem, and the Polish government, having preserved Auschwitz as “a memorial to the martyrdom of the Polish nation and other peoples,” had set up a committee to design the site’s very first monument.
Fast-forward a half-century to our own memory-saturated moment, in which sophisticated and allusive works like Steve Reich’s “Different Trains” still set the standards for Holocaust memorial art, and one feels more than slightly uneasy watching opera singers portraying concentration camp prisoners in striped uniforms belting out heartfelt arias about their lives in the barracks. We are by now attuned to the uncomfortable ways that scenes like this aestheticize victims’ suffering. And Bach’s music was of course coopted by the Nazis just as thoroughly as that of the other great German composers; one could easily imagine a scenario in which a commandant actually requests the Chaconne.
But on a still more basic level, moments like Tadeusz’s climactic musical rebellion convey a Romantic and fundamentally false idea: that each prisoner could actively choose whether or not to preserve his own personal dignity in Auschwitz. The camp was, rather, a system designed with ruthless efficiency for a single purpose, as summarized by Primo Levi: “the demolition of a man.”
For all of these reasons, I suspect “The Passenger” will retain a respected place as a period work of power and fascination, created by artists whose lives were directly impacted by the tragedy they depict. But for now, Weinberg’s reputation will continue to grow through separate channels, via his chamber works and orchestral music, of which we will be hearing more and more.
Prior to the opera, I attended a performance at the Armory by the ARC Ensemble, one of the earliest groups to champion Weinberg’s chamber music. It featured a searing account of the composer’s Piano Trio of 1945, a visceral and harrowing work that is clearly its own memorial without words. The same concert also featured the North American premiere of a song cycle titled “From the Lyrics of Baratynsky.” The opening song,“My Gift Is Poor,” tells of a rueful poet who has not found his audience. Near the end, the poet reassures himself: “And in the way I made a friend among contemporaries, I’ll find a reader in future generations.”
It’s easy to imagine these self-effacing words resonating with Weinberg when he set them in 1979, but perhaps less so if he were alive today. It’s been said that important works of music generate their own posterity. Weinberg’s may already be here.
A short list of recommended recordings:
“MIECZYSLAW WEINBERG” with Gidon Kremer (violin) and Kremerata Baltica; 2 CDs, ECM. A powerful sampler that includes the Symphony No. 10.
“MIECZYSLAW WEINBERG: COMPLETE STRING QUARTETS” with Quatuor Danel; 6 CDs, CPO.
“ON THE THRESHOLD OF HOPE” with the ARC Ensemble; Sony Masterworks.
“THE PASSENGER”; NEOS. Blu-ray disc of the David Pountney production, filmed at the Bregenz Festival.
“RUSSIAN LIVE RECORDINGS FROM THE 1960S” with Weinberg [listed here as Vainberg] (piano), Galina Vishnevskaya (soprano), Mstislav Rostropovich (cello), and David Oistrakh (violin); Melodiya. Weinberg was a fine pianist, though recordings are hard to find. This one, out of print but obtainable, captures a performance, in starry company, of the world premiere of Shostakovich’s Blok Romances.Jeremy Eichler can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org | <urn:uuid:d6938290-3d86-4a14-a7f4-68164b411dd8> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2014/07/19/weinberg-stepping-out-history-shadows/6NZdqdhmV3mdt0AWixekbL/story.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402746.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00107-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970661 | 3,413 | 2.71875 | 3 |
When news breaks, Wikipedians all over the world–in scores of languages– help news followers understand and filter the news by curating and summarizing it as quickly and as accurately as possible. Editors essentially distill the universe of news down so that readers can quickly understand the bigger picture without having to navigate through a cyclone of articles and headlines. Due to the quick and careful work of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors, readers have an in-depth and comprehensive understanding of breaking news, informed by aggregated information from various trustworthy, international scholarly and media organizations. The end result is dynamic, contextual information in the form of an encyclopedic article. But researchers at the Wikimedia Foundation and Ushahidi wonder: How does an editor decide which sources to include or reject? How do they keep track of rapidly-changing topics happening in other parts of the world, reported in foreign languages? How do editors verify information in crisis scenarios like earthquakes and political unrest situated outside their frame of reference?
As Wikipedia volunteers maintain the integrity of article information during high-pressure situations like breaking news cycles, they do so manually using their personal spheres of reference and Ushahidi has kicked off a new research project to study how this happens. They’re looking at how Wikipedia editors track, evaluate and verify sources on rapidly evolving pages of Wikipedia, the results of which will inform the development of Ushahidi’s Sweeper tool. It’s Ushahidi’s hope that Sweeper could potentially be used by Wikipedia editors to collaboratively make sense of sources rather using separate tracking and verification strategies.
We’re excited to support this research with Ushahidi and look forward to defining new tools and resources to help Wikipedians incorporate the best information possible into the encyclopedias. If you’re interested in learning more, see the WikiSweeper project page for more information or sign up for project updates. | <urn:uuid:4d79c7e2-904c-4aa2-a0ef-1ab156df9a7b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/13/ushahidi-to-track-breaking-news-trends-on-wikipedia/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399428.8/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00035-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.90746 | 396 | 2.921875 | 3 |
Scotland, the birthplace of iconic environmentalist John Muir, is celebrating the hundredth anniversary of his death with a new coast to coast trail. If you can't make it to Scotland, come visit his namesake woods near San Francisco. California's majestic coastal redwoods, as well as Yosemite's granite valleys, inspired Muir to commit his life to preserving the earth's natural beauty. And only the earth was big enough to contain this Scot's overwhelming passion. Muir Woods — Photo courtesy of Choudhury Nanda/iStock
Most of us who visit National Parks can easily take them for granted. But the current "green" movement had little or no standing in John Muir's time. In the early part of the 20th century, America was bursting with global ambitions - and needing all the resources it would take to feed those ambitions. Trees were for ships and houses; lakes were asking to be dammed for power; and any animals needed to get out of the way of this "progress."
It took a wily, relentless, Nature-loving maniac like Muir to get us to stop and think about preserving our greatest asset: the natural beauty of America itself. John Muir bends the ear of Teddy Roosevelt — Photo courtesy of Wikimedia
If you want to feel the deep spirituality and sense of peace that Muir spent his life trying to save, there's no better place than Muir Woods. Tucked into a small valley and stocked full of the coastal redwoods that made Muir's poetic, Scottish heart sing, Muir Woods is an easy drive north over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.
Even if the weekend traffic has you bumper to bumper (and possibly using the shuttle system if the parking lot is overflowing), there's no better cure for residual road rage than a quiet walk through this magnificent forest.The towering coastal redwoods of Muir Woods — Photo courtesy of Wikimedia
If you think we're exaggerating, consider Muir's own description of these woods when he learned that William and Elizabeth Kent were naming a redwood forest near San Francisco in his honor:
"This is the best tree-lovers monument that could possibly be found in all the forests of the world."
Considering how many forests Muir saw in his life, it's no small compliment. (In 1867, when Muir was 29, he walked a thousand miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico.) John Muir resting during a hike in his beloved Yosemite — Photo courtesy of Wikimedia
Don't worry - no thousand mile treks are necessary at Muir Woods. This National Monument is easily accessible for visitors of all ages and abilities. A one and half mile path alternates between pavement and boardwalk, and it takes you on a lovely tour of the park's big (and we mean big) star: the Coastal Redwood, sequoia sempervirens, the tallest trees on earth, towering up to almost 400 feet. Coastal redwoods will tower over your every move in Muir Woods. — Photo courtesy of Tom Molanphy
Wildlife in the park includes stellar jays, black-tailed deer, and banana slugs. But if you're here to honor John Muir, sit on one of the many benches and let the forest speak to you.
Who knows? Maybe you'll be inspired to help save something beautiful in your own part of the world.
The thought alone could make a certain Scottish Nature-lover weep for joy.The next generation in the shadows of Muir Woods — Photo courtesy of Tom Molanphy | <urn:uuid:97766a1f-591b-4ff9-8c35-c2884381a134> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.10best.com/interests/travel-features/experience-natures-cathedral-in-muir-woods/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402699.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00034-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958142 | 725 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Dispositional and Learning Theories
Dispositional and Learning TheoriesPersonality Analysis: Dispositional and Learning Theories
Analysis of personalities helps to give a better understanding for human behaviors and the process in which people learn. Theorists have worked for years discovering new theoretical approaches. Gordon Allport studied the personalities of individuals because that approach gave more definition to individuality and emphasized the uniqueness of the individual (Feist & Feist, 2009). Describing an individual with general traits only classifies people as a group. However, Allport believed to accurately know a person is by knowing the person as an individual.
Individuality makes people different, no one person is the same; because people have different personalities the abilities to learn will be different too. Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory observes the manners in which people learn. Observational learning allows people to learn without performing actions or tasks (Feist & Feist, 2009). Basically people do learn from direct experiences but also learn from observing various tasks and actions by others. Most important the factors that give the answers to questions can be found through these forms of research and development.
Dispositional Theories and Personalities
Allport began his research of individual psychology by introducing his morphogenic science. Morphogenic science is the study of an individual, gathering information, and important data about the individual. Allport’s approach to personality theory poses questions such as What is personality? What is the role of conscious motivation in personality theory? What are the characteristics of the psychologically healthy person? The questions asked by Allport sets a foundation for learning the basics behind personalities. Personalities affect a person’s actions and reactions to external stimuli.
Subsequently, the term dynamic organization describes a personality as an organized pattern. Although this pattern can change, Allport used the term... | <urn:uuid:eb19694e-2d6a-4887-81fa-1122b80802f0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.termpaperwarehouse.com/essay-on/Dispositional-And-Learning-Theories/77624 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399425.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00123-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941089 | 373 | 3.515625 | 4 |
July 29, 2013
- journey (noun)
- What does it mean?
- : travel from one place to another
- How do you use it?
- It was a long, tedious journey by car from my home in New Jersey to my cousin's house in northern Maine.
- Are you a word wiz?
What do you think was happening in the world when "journey" first became a part of the English language?"Journey" made the trip from French to English in the 13th century, the same century during which Marco Polo made his famous trip to China. "Journey" comes from the Old French word "journee," meaning "day's journey." The English word also originally had the meaning of "a distance that can be traveled in a day," which, during the Middle Ages, usually figured as twenty miles. If you travel back through the history of "journey," the connection with "day" becomes clear. The French "journee" developed from the French word "jour," meaning "day." "Jour" traces back to Latin "diurnus," meaning "of the day." "Diurnus" comes from "dies," the Latin word for "day." | <urn:uuid:6458e287-a377-41e5-b300-468f08fc5a38> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.wordcentral.com/buzzword/buzzword.php?month=07&day=29&year=2013 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396147.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00199-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985476 | 255 | 3.125 | 3 |
In November I previewed a new lead-safety group that shares my concerns about the insidious damage lead poisoning inflicts on a child’s cognitive development. Repercussions range from low test scores to loss of impulse control and even appear to have an impact on crime rates.
The group officially debuted last month as Lead Safe Louisiana and announced that they would focus on removing lead hazards in daycare centers and playgrounds in at-risk neighborhoods. NolaDefender had a fine write-up about the group’s founders the day prior to their well-attended fundraiser at The Foundation Gallery. The proceeds of that event will help decontaminate the playground at Abeona House child discovery center.
Lead Safe Louisiana’s emergence could not have been better timed, as it followed Kevin Drum’s enormously important article about the link between lead and crime in the January issue of Mother Jones magazine. In his piece, Drum distilled research showing lead exposure as a key factor in the dramatic increase and decline of violent crime in America since 1970.
Criminologists continue to fumble for reasons why crime skyrocketed between 1970 and 1990 and then steadily declined afterwards despite wars, demographic bulges and the Great Recession. It’s a mystery that none of the usual hypotheses — such as “get tough” police laws or murky “cultural” shifts — can explain.
The impact of lead exposure on children strongly correlates with confounding crime trends. Drum summarizes lead research done on multiple levels: individual, neighborhood, national and even international. The associations between childhood lead exposure and violent crime rates always lines up perfectly.
Drum distills Tulane University professor Howard Mielke’s decades of research on the topic. Like so many lead activists and concerned parents, Mielke learned about the issue after he was “haunted” by his child’s high lead readings over three decades ago. After careful sampling, mapping and study, Mielke concluded that the chief culprit was lead from automobile exhaust fumes. The lead particles had settled into urban garden soils, and children who played in the contaminated soils inevitably ingested the poisonous particles.
The seventies — just before unleaded gas was finally phased in — marked the apex of contamination. Mielke says that surveys at the time indicated nearly nine in 10 kids were lead-poisoned. So, roughly speaking, Generation X grew up and crime increased. But subsequent generations were less poisoned by lead and lower crime rates followed.
In January Mielke, Drum and others discussed the issue on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show on MSNBC. Locally, WWL ran a story about the lead-crime link that included activist Sarah Hess’s story as well as informative links to Mielke’s latest research.
Lead Safe Louisiana features a quote from Drum’s article at the top of their blog page. That’s a smart move, in my opinion, because the link to crime fosters the possibility of political traction. Overwhelming research shows that lead is bad for a child’s cognitive development. But there’s no outrage over that. The sad reality seems to be that no one pays attention to the effects of lead on public health, on education, and on the environment. But a connection to crime — that wakes everyone up. Maybe it will even stir the kind of outrage that translates into political will and leads to an organized attack on the problem.
The fact is, New Orleans has a high amount of lead in its soils. And as I recall, we have a persistent crime problem. If we follow the direction of Mielke, as Lead Safe Louisiana intends, and work to remediate and cover play areas in contaminated areas, the compounded future dividends would be enormous. Lower crime, higher test scores, healthier kids — what other single initiative can bring so many combined benefits?
Talk to your pediatrician about it, as I did, and see if she regularly tests for lead. (Mine does.)
One last thing. I want to give special praise to Abeone House director Emmy O’Dwyer, who had the courage to face the problem head on, even though it meant raising a worrisome issue with parents whose children attend her center. Sure, ignoring the problem might have been easier and perhaps cost-effective in the short run. No doubt many other day care centers do so. But that approach only kicks the (lead) can down the road.
I think O’Dwyer’s situation is a microcosm of what we’re facing as a city. Do we want to ignore the lead problem or only address it in piecemeal fashion, as more kids become poisoned? Or do we address it responsibly as O’Dwyer did, right now, and work together to solve it? | <urn:uuid:953cec39-06c8-408f-9dbe-700cfb063e85> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://thelensnola.org/2013/03/06/new-group-makes-timely-debut-in-fight-against-lead-poisoning/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397749.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00189-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966549 | 994 | 2.6875 | 3 |
The rules of volleyball have changed many times since William Morgan first
developed the game in 1895 with an original purpose of providing some form
of recreation and relaxation for businessmen at
the Holyoke, MA Y.M.C.A. The first rules, written by Mr. Morgan in long hand, contained the following basic features:
1. The net was 6 feet, 6 inches high.
2. The court was 25 X 50 feet
3. Any number of participants was allowed.
4. The length of the game was nine innings, with three outs allowed per team per inning.
5. Continuous air dribbling of the ball was permissible up to a restraining line 4 feet from the net.
6. No limit on the number of hits on each side of the court.
7. A served ball could be assisted across the net.
8. A second serve (as in tennis) was permitted if the first resulted in a fault.
9. Any ball hitting the net, except on the first service, was a fault and resulted in side out.
Following are dominant rule changes as they occur by year:
1. Net height was raised to 7 feet, 6 inches.
2. Dribbling line was eliminated.
3. Length of game was changed to 21 points.
1. Court size became 35 X 60 feet.
2. Official ball was designated as 26 inches in circumference and was to weigh between 7 and 9 ounces.
3. Number of players on a side was established at six.
4. Teams required to rotate prior to serving.
1. Number of players on a side could range from one to six.
2. Losing team served in each subsequent game.
3. Official timer was included.
Between 1897 and 1915, the rules were published in the HANDBOOK OF THE ATHLETIC LEAGUE OF THE Y.M.C.A. In 1916 the American Sports published the rules
Publishing Company in a separate book called OFFICIAL VOLLEYBALL RULES.
1. Game points were reduced from 21 to 15 points.
2. Two out of three games determined the winner of a match.
3. The ball could be struck with the feet.
4. The net height was raised to eight feet.
5. The weight of the ball was changed to range from 8 to 10 ounces.
6. Each man rotated in order and served in turn.
7. A serve that hit the net or any outside object was out of bounds.
8. The ball could not come to rest in the hands.
9. The ball could not be touched a second time unless another player had played it.
1. The ball could be played by any part of the body above the waist.
2. The court size was changed to 30 feet by 60 feet.
3. The ball could only be played three times by each team on its side of the court.
1. Reaching over the net in any manner was prohibited.
2. A back position player was prohibited from spiking when playing a back position.
3. The double foul was written in the rules.
4. The centerline was added as well as a scorer.
5. It was necessary for one team to score two consecutive points to win if the score was tied at 14-14.
1. Ceiling height minimum was to be 15 feet.
2. Six players constituted a team and 12, a squad.
3. Players were numbered.
4. The team receiving the serve rotated clockwise.
5. The right back player served.
6. If a player touched the opponents' court in completing a play it constituted a foul.
In 1924 the net specifications were written in detail: 3 feet wide, 4-inch square mesh of number 30 brown thread, canvas cover, top and bottom with 1/4 inch cable at tope and 1/4 inch rope at the bottom.
1. The ball weight was changed to range from 9 to 10 ounces.
2. An umpire was added.
3. A player could not leave the court without the referee's permission.
4. The ball had to cross the net over the sidelines.
5. A team was permitted two times out per game.
6. A 14-14-tie game was won by a team having a two-point advantage instead of 2 consecutive points.
1. The court was measured to the outside edges of the lines.
2. The net length was placed at 32 feet.
3. A team that was reduced to less than six players would forfeit the game.
In 1928 four different sets of rules were published: the official rules,
simplified rules, modified rules for the
playground, and rules for girls and women. Although the last three sets of rules were changed many times and had interest and support from various groups, the official rules are the only ones covered.
No changes occurred from 1927 to 1931.
1. The centerline was extended indefinitely.
2. A tape was put on the net over the sidelines.
3. Times out were limited to one minute.
4. A player could not interchange positions or move outside his understood playing area.
5. A player could go outside his court to make a play.
1. A 3/8-inch cable replaced the 1/4-inch cable in the top of the net.
1. Crosses were placed on the floor defining player positions.
2. All players were required to wear numbers on their suits.
3. It became a foul to deliberately screen an opponent from the server.
4. Players could not leave their court unless the ball was on their side of the net. (At this time spikers would stand outside their court and wait till the ball was set to the outside of the court and come running in with a one-leg take-off spike).
5. Any touching of the net was a foul.
6. A play was not complete unless a player resumed normal control on the floor.
7. Deliberate shouting and stomping the feet at an opponent was deemed unsportsmanlike.
1. A third contact ball driven into the net causing the net to contact the
opponent was not a foul.
2. A player could re-enter a game once.
3. A substitute was no longer restricted from talking to his teammate until the ball was put into play.
4. Multiple contacts were allowed in receiving a hard drive spike.
Blocking was first included in the rules in 1938. Blocking was defined as impeding the ball at the net. A one or two-man block was permitted, providing the blockers played in adjacent positions.
In 1939, no changes occurred and the only change during 1940 was that the official ball must be a twelve-piece lace less leather-covered ball. During 1941 a rewording and clarifying of the rules took place.
1. Ball could be played with any part of the body from the knees upward.
2. The score of a forfeited game would be 15-0.
1. Only the front line players could interchange positions to make a two-man
2. The numbers on players' shirts had to be 4 inches high.
The rules were clarified and rewritten to aid in interpretation. Blocking
was defined and the service area
stipulated as being the right third of the back line. Other items clarified were:
1. Each player should be in his own area before the ball leaves the server's
2. Points made from wrong server were cancelled.
3. Simultaneous hits by two players constituted one hit.
4. Time out for rest was one minute.
5. Time out for injury was five minutes.
6. Time out between games was three minutes.
1. The game was allowed to be played under a time limit of 8 minutes of ball
2. The winner was to have a 20-point advantage after expiration of time or 15 points, whichever came first.
3. A timekeeper was included as one of the officials.
4. Time-out period for injury was reduced to three minutes.
5. A three-man block was made legal, provided they were front line players.
1. There should be no warm-up time allowed substitutes.
2. A clarification of what constituted a held ball included "the ball must be clearly batted."
1. The service area and the court with crosses were clearly defined.
2. A backcourt spiker was allowed to spike the ball provided he remained in the backcourt.
1. Any player was allowed to block at the net.
2. A 7-foot line drawn back and parallel to the net as a restraining line for back court players blocking at the net.
3. The restriction was lifted on players leaving their position to perform any play except the back line spiker.
4. A defensive player, when blocking, must indicate whether or not he touched the ball.
5. The server was allowed to serve the ball from anywhere back of the service line.
6. Teams were allowed to warm up during time out for rest or for injury.
7. The players were allowed to leave the court without the referee's permission.
8. The coach, captain, or manager was allowed to call time out.
1. The rubber ball was ruled legal.
2. A substitute was allowed to re-enter the game twice instead of once.
3. Players were allowed to use any part of the body to play the ball.
4. The whole format of the rules was changed and each rule items was numbered from 1 to 75 under 8 major headings.
5. Errors and fouls were defined.
1. Clarified the rule concerning players being in position until the ball
was struck on the serve.
2. A set of co-ed rules was adopted.
3. An attempt to draft a standard set of rules failed due to the different styles of play used by various groups.
4. Screening the serve was allowed.
1. The official rules came out in a new format with 5 main headings and 24
sub-titles for cross reference and coverage.
2. A back line player was allowed to take-off from in front of the 7-foot line but had to alight behind the line.
3. Movement during a screen was allowed.
1. The players were allowed to stand anywhere in the court during the serve
as long as they were in rotation order.
2. Teams automatically changed courts during the third game of a match when one team reached 8 points or 4 minutes of playtime expired.
There were no changes but various innovations were tried.
1. Using a higher net.
2. Twenty-one and fifty point games.
3. Playing the ball off obstacles.
4. Playing all underhand balls with the fist.
There were no major changes made.
1. Players screening the serve were allowed to wave their hands and move
during the serve.
2. The umpire was given the authority to call ball-handling errors and to keep time between games.
1. Women's net height was lowered to 7 feet 4 inches.
2. Teams were to alternate the initial serve of each succeeding game in a match.
1. Gloves were allowed to be worn during play.
1. Clarification of timing rule and player position.
2. A player was not allowed to grab the officials' platform to keep from going over the centerline.
1. Clarification of the overlapping rule of player positions on the serve.
1. Defined the method of service whereby a server could hit the serve from a toss by a teammate or from a bounce.
1. Center line was limited only to the side of the court.
2. A player could cross the assumed extension if he did not attempt to play the ball.
3. Screening was made illegal.
1. The blocker's fingers were permitted to stray across the net inadvertently as long as they did not contact the ball or affect the play.
No changes made due to the widespread use of International Rules.
An attempt was made to draw USVBA rules and International Rules together,
causing several major changes to be made:
1. Definition of fouls changed to include ball-handling errors.
2. Ceiling minimum height was raised to 26 feet.
3. Lines depicting the 10-foot serving area were added to the court.
4. The server was required to toss the ball into the air when initiating the serve.
5. The spiking line was moved from 7 feet to 10 feet back from the net.
6. Blockers were allowed to reach across the net as long as they did not contact the ball until after the attacker had contacted it.
7. One player from the rear could block but at no time could there be more than three players deployed in position to block.
8. Back line spikers were allowed to land in front of the spiking line as long as they left the ground behind it.
9. The ball could not be played with any part of the body below the waist.
1. Only front line players were permitted to block.
2. A team was limited to 12 substitutions per game.
1. Numbers on uniforms must be 6 inches on the front, 3 inches on the back,
and at least 4 inches above the waist.
2. The centerline was widened from 2 inches to 4 inches.
3. Upon request by the referee, the umpire can call all violations not viable to the referee.
4. The ball on the serve does not have to be tossed in the air before it is struck.
5. When a player is injured, a substitute shall be put in without undue delay.
6. Once a team has received the signal to take the court, the lineup cannot be changed.
From 1970 to the present Volleyball became big business.
Many of the rules from 1970 to the present differed between Federation (High School), National Association of Girls and Women in Sports which has now been replaced by the NCAA, USA Volleyball and other amateur and professional associations. Each Association rulebook needs to be studied. Even the timing of time outs varies between Associations. For the latest rule changes see articles elsewhere on this page. | <urn:uuid:847af04c-2736-4a32-953c-09a274619983> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://home.earthlink.net/~tfakehany/100.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396222.11/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00080-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983378 | 2,992 | 3.609375 | 4 |
Yes We Have No Bananas: A Critique of the 'Food Miles' Perspective
affiliation not provided to SSRN
University of Toronto - Department of Geography; PERC - Property and Environment Research Center
October 24, 2008
Mercatus Policy Series No. 8
As modern food production and distribution becomes ever more complex and globalized, a "buy local" food movement has arisen. This movement argues that locally produced food is not only fresher and better tasting, but it is also better for the environment: Because locally produced food does not travel far to reach your table, the production and transport of the food expend less energy overall. The local food movement has even coined a term, "food miles," to denote the distance food has traveled from production to consumption and uses the food miles concept as a major way to determine the environmental impact of a food.
This Policy Primer examines the origins and validity of the food miles concept. The evidence presented suggests that food miles are, at best, a marketing fad that frequently and severely distorts the environmental impacts of agricultural production. At worst, food miles constitute a dangerous distraction from the very real and serious issues that affect energy consumption and the environmental impact of modern food production and the affordability of food.
The course of the debate over food miles is nonetheless instructive for policy makers. It highlights the need to remain focused on the issues that are important-in this case, the greenhouse gas emissions of highly subsidized first-world agriculture, the trade imbalances that prevent both developed and developing countries from realizing the mutual benefits of freer trade, biofuel subsidies, and third-world poverty. With the population of the planet growing rapidly, numerous food-policy issues other than food miles should preoccupy policy makers.
Number of Pages in PDF File: 21
Keywords: food miles, agri-business, sustainable development
Date posted: December 15, 2008
© 2016 Social Science Electronic Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This page was processed by apollobot1 in 0.234 seconds | <urn:uuid:25f2fd60-7d7b-42c1-9fd3-5b8ebf2cbc78> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1315986 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395560.69/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00036-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921913 | 419 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Many people get through Calculus by memorizing formulae. But you'll learn best by combining "conceptual understanding" with "procedural knowledge".
To answer your question regarding how to develop the "problem-solving" creativity needed to manipulate expressions into forms you can apply theory:
Answer: Practice! AND Effort (Perseverance)!, AND Time (Patience)!
Practice: Math is not a spectator sport! The more problems you encounter, the more strategies and techniques you'll encounter, and interacting with both problems and their solutions will build your "repertoire": some tools you'll be able to use when encountering similar problems.
Perseverance: Keep at it! What might seem like "tricks" at first, or what might seem as "creative" now, will become "second nature" to you in no time at all, if you acquire "working knowledge" of how to use the "tools" you acquire!
Patience: Already addressed, in part. Proficiency, creativity, and mastery can be developed and nurtured with effort, practice, and time. No need to feel intimidated if you don't immediately "get" it. The creativity you speak of is a reflection of the collaborative work of mathematicians over time, each learning from one another...No one "knows it all" from the "get-go."
So, in short: You'll be on your way if you commit to the "three P's":
Practice, perseverance, and patience.
EDIT - One point of observation: The mere fact that you are questioning your strategies, wondering about creativity, thinking about how to merge conceptual understanding with procedural efficacy when attacking problems: these are all indicators that you are engaging in "meta-cognitive" scrutiny. That is, you're thinking about how you think mathematically, questioning how to best learn, and scrutinizing your current "plan of attack" with the aim to develop greater procedural flexibility in applying what you're learning accurately and creatively. These are all good things. Self-awareness and self-examination are key components to effective learning, and they indicate your recognition that you are an active player in your own education.
One book I highly recommend to anyone/everyone serious about mathematics is the book authored by Mason, Burton, and Stacey' Thinking Mathematically. When you're not under the grind with homework and/or exams, or can otherwise find the time, you might want to "have a read." | <urn:uuid:aa5e9d6e-5369-4c98-a264-07561ae37c74> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/262099/how-to-get-more-creative-in-calculus/262127 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395548.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00048-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95618 | 512 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2006 September 5
Explanation: What causes the bright streaks on Dione? Recent images of this unusual moon by the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn are helping to crack the mystery. Close inspection of Dione's trailing hemisphere, pictured above, indicates that the white wisps are composed of deep ice cliffs dropping hundreds of meters. The cliffs may indicate that Dione has undergone some sort of tectonic surface displacements in its past. The bright ice-cliffs run across some of Dione's many craters, indicating that the process that created them occurred later than the impacts that created those craters. Dione is made of mostly water ice but its relatively high density indicates that it contains much rock inside. Giovanni Cassini discovered Dione in 1684. The above image was taken at the end of July from a distance of about 263,000 kilometers. Other high resolution images of Dione were taken by the passing Voyager spacecraft in 1980.
Authors & editors:
NASA Web Site Statements, Warnings, and Disclaimers
NASA Official: Jay Norris. Specific rights apply.
A service of: EUD at NASA / GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U. | <urn:uuid:2a2bccf6-c6c3-4381-b53e-335a28a60e4d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060905.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395613.65/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00068-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936321 | 273 | 4.1875 | 4 |
For many of us, the bodies of moving snakes look like little more than wiggly strands of spaghetti.
A brown tree snake moving on a smooth artificial branch.
However, Bruce Jayne, University of Cincinnati professor of biology in the McMicken College of Art and Sciences, sees a wide variety of anatomy and behavior that allows diverse snake species to crawl and climb almost anywhere, including tree branches with variable bark texture.
Using three different species to test their tree-worthy talents, Jayne and his students studied stout and heavy boa constrictors, medium-weight corn snakes and the slender and agile brown tree snakes.
Unlike most snakes that have a nearly circular cross sectional shape, Jayne found that brown tree snakes look more like a loaf of bread where the top is rounded but the bottom has corners –– called keels –– where the skin on either side of the belly is folded. He says these sharply contoured keels are the key for how various tree snakes can exploit subtle nooks and crannies in tree bark to prevent slipping, and propel themselves up a tree quickly, making it easier to get to their prey in a flash with less effort. To a smaller extent corn snakes have this shape, and boa constrictors were the roundest species that Jayne studied.
Acquiring a better understanding for how flat-bellied species like the brown tree snakes lodge their keeled ridge against protrusions and secure themselves in place during climbing could help lead Jayne and others toward many practical applications for biology, mechanics and engineering.
Depending on the snakes’ shape and behavior, Jayne discovered that variations in surface structure can have interactive effects on their speed and type of locomotion.
TAKING SERPENTS TO TASK
The bark on different species of trees may be nearly smooth or have ridges of considerable height on natural branches. Therefore, Jayne simulated some of this variety of natural branches by using cylinders that were smooth or had pegs interspersed ranging in heights from 1 to 40 mm. He also varied the steepness of his artificial branches.
“Our most notable finding is how the keel helps to prevent slipping and can allow snakes to use a type of crawling that not only is fast but also probably saves energy,” says Jayne. “This becomes more important as the surface steepness increases. For example, the brown tree snakes were able to climb straight up a vertical cylinder by only pushing against pegs that were a mere 1 mm high.”
Jayne also found how uniquely snakes can cope with different structures in their environment by modifying their behavior. For example, on the steep smooth cylinders that lacked any pegs, all three snake species had an accordion-like movement as S-shaped portions of the snake periodically stopped and squeezed the cylinder while another region of the body was straightened and extended uphill. By contrast, when the pegs were tall enough to prevent slipping and the inclines were shallow, all of the snakes were very adept at balancing and sliding as they pushed against the pegs to propel themselves.
In his recent video, Jayne effectively illustrates how the snakes will actually change their behavior depending on their climbing surface.
While analyzing the different climbing techniques, Jayne observed that the effects of habitat structure on behavior and speed varied among the different snake species. For example, the boa constrictors and corn snakes were more likely to plod along and grip the pole with the concertina-like motion, whereas for a much wider range of inclines and surface texture the brown tree snakes commonly used seemingly effortless sinuous undulations to slide along the artificial branches.
LET THE GAMES BEGIN
In these snake Olympics to determine the fastest speed, the brown tree snakes were always the gold medalists. Both of the other two species won silver depending on the steep angle and degree of rough surface texture.
Although boa constrictors were slowpokes compared to the corn snakes when pegs were present, the boas had such incredible strength that they were better at gripping and steadily climbing some of the steep surfaces on which the corn snakes failed to make any progress.
Bruce Jayne demonstrates a brown tree snake's rapid climb using its sharp keels on a pole with 10 mm pegs.
“By understanding what allows (brown tree snakes) to move so quickly and efficiently up vertical obstacles, we can hopefully design unfriendly surfaces to prevent invasive species like the brown tree snakes in Guam from getting into areas where they are causing harm,” Jayne says.
Jayne says brown tree snakes are not indigenous to Guam, but were probably introduced by cargo ships during and after World War II. Because there are no natural predators to keep the snake numbers in check, they have devastated the native bird species and small mammals. They also have caused great economic damage by gaining access to power lines and creating power outages by short-circuiting those power lines.
On closer inspection, Jayne says that in most cases the snakes didn’t actually climb up the utility poles that hold the power line, but rather the guy wires that support them.
Through this research, Jayne hopes to develop a sleeve that can be placed over the guy wire that has the right diameter and surface texture so that it is impassable to the snakes, therefore preventing further power outages. Variations of this application may also prevent the snakes from gaining access to bird nests or to ships via the ropes that secure them to docks.
Jayne's prior interdisciplinary efforts have also included collaboration with engineers to help develop robots using bio-inspired designs. Using snake behavior and shapes can help improve robotic designs such as camera-equipped snake-like robots that can climb flagpoles, up inside pipes and inside tight spaces like fallen buildings or caved-in areas where humans and robots with wheels cannot enter.
This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation [IOS0843197 to B.C.J.]. M.M.Z. and was supported by the Women In Science and Engineering program of the University of Cincinnati. | <urn:uuid:5e65f0d2-4819-4a9e-9fa5-384337b8e862> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.aspx?id=22647 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397428.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00173-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963788 | 1,250 | 3.921875 | 4 |
Nocturnal Enuresis or nighttime urinary incontinence, commonly called bedwetting, or “‘sleepwetting'” is involuntary urination while asleep after the age at which bladder control usually occurs.
End-Stage Renal Disease is the complete or almost complete failure of the kidneys to work.
Bladder Cancer is a common form of cancer that begins in the lining of the bladder as a superficial tumor.
Renal Failure (also kidney failure or renal insufficiency) is a medical condition in which the kidneys fail to adequately filter waste products from the blood.
Renal Cell Carcinoma is the most common form of kidney cancer. It originates in the lining of the proximal convoluted tubule.
Incontinence is the inability to restrain natural discharges or evacuations of urine or feces.
A Urinary Tract Infection is a bacterial infection that affects any part of the urinary tract. Symptoms include frequent feeling and/or need to urinate, pain during urination, and cloudy urine.
Renal Failure or kidney failure describes a medical condition in which the kidneys fail to adequately filter toxins and waste products from the blood.
Renal Calculi, also known as kidney stones, are a solid concretion or crystal aggregation formed in the kidneys from dietary minerals in the urine.
Chronic Kidney Disease occurs when one suffers from gradual and usually permanent loss of kidney function over time. | <urn:uuid:37c462e1-3b1e-43a6-9107-637283b40d9d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.symplur.com/healthcare-hashtags/diseases/excretory/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402746.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00064-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945994 | 293 | 3.21875 | 3 |
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The mission of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Schoolyard Habitat Program is to get students across the country outside to experience nature. To accomplish this mission the program helps schools create natural spaces on their grounds where students can connect with the outdoors, using it as a classroom to observe, draw, write, think and question. In Connecticut the program is a partnership between U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Audubon Connecticut and the Long Island Sound Study.
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OAK is a national strategic partnership of organizations from diverse sectors with a common interest in connecting children, youth and families with the outdoors. OAK’s members are brought together by the belief that the wellness of current and future generations, the health of our planet and communities and the economy of the future depend on humans having a personal, direct and life-long relationship with nature and the outdoors.
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For more than four decades, NAAEE has been a leader in promoting excellence in environmental education throughout North America. NAAEE’s influence stretches across North America and around the world, with members in more than 30 countries. NAAEE and its 54 state, provincial, and regional affiliate organizations in the United States, Canada, and Mexico have more than 16,000 members. These members are professionals with environmental education responsibilities and interests across business, government, higher education, formal (K–12) education, nonformal education, early childhood education, science education and STEM, and other sectors of society.
American Hiking Society is the only national organization that promotes and protects hiking trails, their surrounding natural areas, and the hiking experience. As the national voice for hikers, American Hiking Society recognizes that foot trails and hiking are essential to connect people with nature, conserve open space, provide biological corridors for diverse plants and wildlife, and for the health of Americans and our natural environment.
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The West End House is an independent Boys & Girls Club in the City of Boston that provides outcomes-driven programs to Boston youth residing in the most underserved neighborhoods. These high-impact programs provide opportunities in critical areas of youth development, ensuring that young people most in need are succeeding academically, exploring the arts, developing career readiness skills and adopting healthy lifestyles.
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Since 1995, New Century School has been a K-5 public school option for all residents in the Verona Area School District in Wisconsin. Since 2010, we've refined our charter to include a focus on environmental studies and most recently a move to integrate STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) into our curriculum. Our environmental themes connect core subjects, nature provides an engaging context for scientific exploration and hands-on learning, our integrated arts program provides cultural context, and partnerships with local non-profits and businesses encourage a sense of community and inspire students to understand the larger world beyond the classroom.
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Apple-1 at Smithsonian
At the Homebrew Computer club in Palo Alto, California (in Silicon Valley), Steve Wozniak, a 26 year old employee of Hewlett-Packard and a long-time digital electronics hacker, had been wanting to build a computer of his own for a long time. For years he had designed many on paper, and even written FORTRAN compilers and BASIC interpreters for these theoretical machines, but a lack of money kept him from carrying out his desire. He looked at the Intel 8080 chip (the heart of the Altair), but at $179 decided he couldn’t afford it. A decision to not use the 8080 was considered foolhardy by other members of the club. Consider this description of the microcomputer “world” as it was in the summer of 1975:
That summer at the Homebrew Club the Intel 8080 formed the center of the universe. The Altair was built around the 8080 and its early popularity spawned a cottage industry of small companies that either made machines that would run programs written for the Altair or made attachments that would plug into the computer. The private peculiarities of microprocessors meant that a program or device designed for one would not work on another. The junction of these peripheral devices for the Altair was known as the S-100 bus because it used one hundred signal lines. Disciples of the 8080 formed religious attachments to the 8080 and S-100 even though they readily admitted that the latter was poorly designed. The people who wrote programs or built peripherals for 8080 computers thought that later, competing microprocessors were doomed. The sheer weight of the programs and the choice of peripherals, so the argument went, would make it more useful to more users and more profitable for more companies. The 8080, they liked to say, had critical mass which was sufficient to consign anything else to oblivion.
Another chip, the Motorola 6800, interested Wozniak because it resembled his favorite minicomputers (such as the Data General Nova) more than the 8080. However, cost was still a problem for him until he and his friend Allen Baum discovered a chip that was almost identical to the 6800, while considerably cheaper. MOS Technology sold their 6502 chip for $25, as opposed to the $175 Motorola 6800. Wozniak decided to change his choice of processor to the 6502 and began writing a version of BASIC that would run on it. A friend over at Hewlett-Packard programmed a computer to simulate the function of the 6502, and Wozniak used it to test some of his early routines. When his BASIC interpreter was finished, he turned his attention to designing the computer he could run it on. Except for some small timing differences, he was able to use the hardware design he had earlier done on paper for the 6800.
MOS Technologies 6502 chip – Photo credit: Larry Nelson
To make the computer easier to use, Wozniak favored a keyboard over the front panel switches that came on the Altair. He also made it simple to use a television for a video terminal. (Recall that at this time the most common mechanism used for input/output was a Teletype, which consisted of a keyboard, typewriter, and if you were lucky, a paper tape reader/puncher). Functionally, it was a television terminal attached to a computer, all on one printed circuit board (another enhancement over the Altair). Wozniak used two 256 x 4 PROM (programmable read-only memory) chips to create a 256 byte program (called a “monitor”) that looked at the keyboard when the computer was turned on. This monitor program could not do much more than allow entry of hex bytes, examine a range of memory, and run a program at a specific address. (The Altair needed these “bootstrapping” instructions to be entered by hand each time the computer was turned on).
Because there were no cheap RAM chips available, Wozniak used shift registers to send text to the TV screen. Consequently, his video terminal was somewhat slow, displaying characters at about 60 characters per second, one character per scan of the TV screen. (This speed would be similar to watching a computer communicate via a modem at 1200 baud). It was slow by today’s standards, but an advancement over the Teletypes that could only type 10 characters per second. If the board was fully populated, it had 8K of dynamic RAM, allowing room to load BASIC into 4K of memory and have a little less than 4K left over for the user’s programs. It had a video connector, but it was up to the owner to connect a monitor. Also, a keyboard was not included and so had to be purchased separately and then wired into a 16-pin DIP connector. The power supply had to be connected to two transformers to get 5 volts and 12 volts for the motherboard. There was no speaker, no graphics, and no color. There was a single peripheral slot, and when it was first released there was nothing available to plug into this slot. It was entirely contained on a single printed circuit board, only sixteen by twelve inches in size (most hobby computers of that time needed at least two boards), used only 30 or 40 chips, and because it could run BASIC programs it got people’s attention.
Apple Computer Company logo
By early 1976, Steve Wozniak had completed his 6502-based computer and would display enhancements or modifications at the bi-weekly Homebrew Computer Club meetings. Steve Jobs was a 21 year old friend of Wozniak’s and also a visitor at the Homebrew club. He had worked with Wozniak in the past (together they designed the arcade game “Breakout” for Atari) and was very interested in his computer. During the design process Jobs made suggestions that helped shape the final product, such as the use of the newer dynamic RAMs instead of older, more expensive static RAMs. He suggested to Wozniak that they get some printed circuit boards made for the computer and sell it at the club for people to assemble themselves. They pooled their financial resources together to have PC boards made, and on April 1st, 1976 they officially formed the Apple Computer Company. Jobs had recently worked at an organic apple orchard, and liked the name because “he thought of the apple as the perfect fruit–it has a high nutritional content, it comes in a nice package, it doesn’t damage easily–and he wanted Apple to be the perfect company. Besides, they couldn’t come up with a better name.”
Jobs approached the owner of a new computer store in the bay area called “The Byte Shop.” This businessman, Paul Terrell, expressed an interest in the Apple Computer (to be known later as the “Apple I” on their price lists, and “Apple-1” in the computer’s manuals), but wanted only fully assembled computers to sell. If they could provide this, Terrell told them he would order fifty Apples, and pay cash on delivery. Suddenly, the cost of making (and selling) this computer was considerably more than they expected. Jobs and Wozniak managed to get the parts on “net 30 days” (30 days credit without interest), and set themselves up in Job’s garage for assembly and testing of the Apple-1. After marathon sessions of stuffing and soldering PC boards, Jobs delivered the computers to the Byte Shop. Although these “fully assembled” computers lacked a power supply, keyboard, or monitor, Terrell bought them as promised. In July of 1976 the Apple-1 was released and sold for $666.66, which was about twice the cost of the parts plus a 33% dealer markup. Two hundred Apple-1 computers were manufactured, and all except twenty-five of them sold over a period of ten months.
Although the Apple-1 was easier to begin using than the Altair (thanks to its built-in ROM code), it was still a time consuming process to set it up to do something useful. Steve Wozniak would have to type in about 3K of hexadecimal bytes before BASIC was ready to use. He could do it in about 20 to 30 minutes, but he almost knew the code by heart. The typical user was more limited in ability to use BASIC on the Apple-1. To broaden the appeal of the Apple-1 (and at the insistence of Paul Terrell), Wozniak designed a cassette interface. It was mounted on a small two-inch-high printed circuit board and plugged into the single slot on the motherboard. The card sold for $75 and a cassette tape of Woz’s BASIC was included with it. The advertisement Apple included with the card stated, “Our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost.” The interface worked, but it was tricky to get volume and tone on the cassette player properly adjusted to successfully load from cassettes. However, it ran at 1200 baud (most microcomputer cassette interfaces in 1976 and 1977 ran at only 300 baud) and was more consistently successful at getting a good load into memory when compared to other computers of the day. To further try to enhance sales, the Byte Shop stores found a local cabinetmaker that made some koa-wood cases for the Apple computer (so it would no longer be just a “naked” circuit board).,
Apple-1 Cassette interface card
Although most of the design and construction action in the micro world was going on in Silicon Valley, news of the Apple-1 made its way east. In 1976, Stan Veit opened The Computer Mart in New York City, and had the east coast’s first computer store. Operating first out of a part of Polk’s Hobby Department Store in midtown Manhattan, and moving later to a larger store on Madison Avenue, he sold the IMSAI 8080, the Sphere and Southwest Technical Products M6800 (both Motorola 6800-based computers), and others. Paul Terrell of the Byte Shop referred Steve Jobs to Veit, and after a phone call with fast-talking Jobs on the phone, a $500 C.O.D. package appeared on the doorstep of The Computer Mart. Veit showed it to one of his techs, who didn’t believe that something that small (sixteen by twelve inches) could be a computer. Nevertheless, after attaching a power supply and keyboard (they had to call Jobs about the keyboard, and he gladly sent one out, also C.O.D.) they had a working computer that was more compact and used fewer chips on the motherboard than every other microcomputer they had yet seen. Along with the keyboard Jobs had included their cassette interface, and a tape of the Game Of Life program.
Impressed with this compact computer, Veit had his techs install the Apple-1 in an attache’ case, and along with a 9-inch monitor and keyboard, he and his wife attended a dinner meeting of the New York Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery. Most of those attending were involved with large computers (mainframes or minicomputers) but the ACM had invited computer dealers in the area to attend and show their products. Veit set up the Apple-1 and started the Game Of Life, so that during the meeting it was visible to the speaker at the podium. When the speaker interrupted himself to ask Veit what was running on the monitor, he did not believe that there could actually be a computer in that briefcase. Some of those attending were sure that the machine was just a portable terminal, attached by a hidden phone line to a mainframe somewhere! Later, during the product demonstration part of the meeting, the Apple-1 caused quite a lot of excitement amongst the other dealers present.
Veit later traveled to California and met Jobs and Wozniak in their garage operation. Wozniak demonstrated a prototype of the Apple II with his color Breakout game running, and Veit felt that it clearly had better graphics than the Cromemco Dazzler (a popular add-on for S-100 bus on the Altair and IMSAI computers). Jobs told him that they were dropping the Apple-1 in favor of the better Apple II, but Veit strongly urged him to fulfill the committment they had made to their customers (and the dealers who purchased Apple-1 boards to sell) in delivering a finished BASIC. He felt that this would be vital to their reputation and any future success the company might have.
They were offered space at PC ’76, a national computer show to be held in Atlantic City, New Jersey on August 28, 1976, and so the two Steves packed up demonstration models of the Apple-1 and flew out to join Stan Veit’s display booth. Using the hotel television, Wozniak put the finishing touches on his Apple BASIC interpreter to make it ready for its official introduction. With several Apple-1 computers in operation at the show, the small size and speed of its cassette interface attracted quite a bit of attention, in spite of the fact that there were two other 6502-based computers on display at the show (the KIM-1 and the Baby computer). By the end of the show, Jobs had taken twenty orders from dealers for the Apple-1.
The Apple-1 motherboard was designed in such a way as to make it possible for the hobbyist to remove the 6502 processor and use a Motorola 6800 as the CPU instead. This was not a trivial operation, as the 6502 and the 6800 were not pin-compatible (the earlier 6501 was pin-compatible, but was withdrawn after Motorola sued MOS Technology). However, some other hardware would need to be added, and the software needed to operate it would be completely different.
The least expensive Apple-1 motherboard was sold with 4K of RAM. This was only one sixteenth of the total RAM space that the 6502 processor could address, but recall that memory in 1976 was very expensive. Since the 6502 processor must have at least the bottom 512 bytes of memory accessible for its operations (the “zero page” and “stack”), this 4K covered memory locations $0000-$0FFF (0-4095 decimal; the “$” was commonly used in 6502 systems to refer to hexadecimal numbers). An 8K system would run from $0000-$1FFF (0-8191 decimal). However, if Apple BASIC was to be used, a hardware modification had to be made to the motherboard in order to move (logically) the 2nd 4K bank of RAM up to $E000-$EFFF (which was where BASIC was designed to operate).
Apple-1 BASIC Manual – Photo credit: Joe Torzewski
According to the Apple-1 Cassette Interface Manual, it was necessary to make another change to the motherboard in order to use the interface. Besides removing the jumper that relocated the 2nd 4K of RAM, another jumper had to be added to the motherboard in one place. Then, after the interface was properly installed, an assembly language program would be available at $C100. This program allowed operation of the cassette load and save routines. To load Apple BASIC, the user would type “C100R” and press “RETURN” on the keyboard (this instructed the Apple-1 Monitor program to run an assembly language program at the address $C100).
The Monitor program was designed to allow the user to examine and change RAM locations and to run programs at a specific address. To enter the Monitor it was necessary to press the “RESET” key on the keyboard; this caused the 6502 processor to jump to the location on the PROM where the Monitor program started. Displaying and entering hex digits was quite similar to the use of the Monitor that later appeared in the Apple II computer. In fact, many of the subroutines used in the Monitor had the same names as were later used on the Apple II (“GETLINE” to get a line of text from the keyboard, “PRBYTE” to print a byte in hexadecimal, “PRHEX” to print a digit (half a byte) in hex, and so on).
A memory map of an Apple-1 system would be as follows:
||Zero page: location of single or double byte values used by programs
||Zero page locations used by the Monitor
||Stack: used by the 6502 processor as a temporary holding place for addresses or data
||Keyboard input buffer storage used by the Monitor
||RAM space available for a program in a 4K system
||RAM space available for a program in an 8K system not using cassette BASIC
||Port for output to cassette
||ROM program used to operate the cassette interface
||Port where a byte of keyboard input appears
||Port to indicate that “return” key on keyboard was pressed
||Port to output a byte character to the display monitor
||Port to cause display to skip down to the next line
||RAM space available for a program in an 8K system modified to use cassette BASIC
||PROM (programmable read-only memory) used by the Apple Monitor program
EXPERIENCES OF USERS
One of the pioneers who took a chance, bought one of the original Apple-1 boards, and dealt with the trials and tribulations of making it a workable computer was Joe Torzewski. As documented on the Apple-1 Owner’s Club web site (click on the link for the full story with pictures), he purchased his Apple-1 system in August 1977 for $430. The motherboard itself was sold to him for only $200, truly a bargain over the original asking price of $666; this probably represented the wishes of the seller to clear out his inventory of a computer that just was not selling well. For his $430, Torzewski received the Apple-1 board with a full 8K of RAM, plus a keyboard, two power transformers (one for needed each voltage), and cassette interface. And just as many computer buyers today have discovered, soon after he bought his Apple-1 he received notice from Apple Computer that a new and better model was coming out (the Apple II), and that they were dropping support for his Apple-1. He did not view this as an obstacle; instead, he decided to start an Apple-1 user group, and (at his request) Apple eventually forwarded nearly all of the support requests that they received to his group.
With the help of five other Apple-1 owners who formed the core of this user group, Joe states: “We developed the hardware and software which included such things as interfacing a graphic board, memory expansion, and writing a chess game. We converted the Focal language for the Apple 1 computer and had it in use. We were also working on the expansion slot hoping to put in a better monitor and other various programs.” All this they accomplished with a more primitive ROM than was supplied later with the Apple II, and with only 4K or 8K of RAM (although some users upgraded to as much as 20K).
By April 1977, Apple Computer had reduced the official list price of the Apple-1 from $666 to $475 for a computer with 4K of RAM or, or $575 for 8K. There were also several program cassettes available to purchase (assuming that you had the cassette interface). These included Wozniak’s BASIC (which took about 30 seconds to load), a disassembler, an extended monitor, and games such as “Star Trek” (mini and 16K versions), “Mastermind”, “Lunar Lander”, “Blackjack”, and “Hamurabi”, all selling for $5.00, and some of which appeared later in revised forms to run on the Apple II.
Apple-1 Cassette – Photo credit: Apple-1 Owner’s Club)
One of the members of the Apple-1 club, Larry Nelson, used his Apple-1 for a simple payroll and accounts payable program that he wrote in BASIC for his business. He also spent some time with Apple’s “DisAssembler” program and examine the BASIC interpreter to see how it worked. He was interested to find keywords for graphics commands that did nothing on the Apple-1, commands that later found their way to functionality on the Apple II. He found that he could include a statement such as “COLOR=12” in a line of a BASIC program, and although it would not generate an error, it also did not do anything on the Apple-1. He also modified a KIM-1 6502 chess-playing program to run on his Apple-1, and then used that computer to challenge the Micro-Chess program on his Radio Shack TRS-80. (As he recalls, the contest was a draw.)
Apple-1 Motherboard – Photo credit: Larry Nelson
The Apple-1 club also disseminated information to its members about hardware enhancements, such as a monochrome graphics board (recall that the Apple-1 was built as a text-only computer), how to interface a 40-column printer (the SWTPC PR-40), and how to connect a Teletype.
As time passed, some of the users of the Apple-1 faded away as they graduated to newer and more powerful machines; however, Torzewski’s Apple-1 user group never completely disbanded. It still exists and communicates via its website, Apple-1 Owner’s Club.
The start and end dates for the Apple-1 and Apple II:
- Apple-1 – April 1976 – Mar 1977
- Apple II – April 1977 – May 1979
(Many thanks to Peltier Technical Services, Inc. for assistance in creation of this chart.)
[Note: This chapter was translated, with permission, to Serbo-Croatian language by WHGeeks. You can see the translation here.] | <urn:uuid:7a03ce72-ef31-4deb-a3d6-6d62d662b66d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://apple2history.org/history/ah02/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783408828.55/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155008-00135-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973059 | 4,657 | 3.171875 | 3 |
In the early days the Sioux Indians of the plains were firm friends of the white people. The first traders among them were welcomed as brothers. They left their goods piled in the open air in Sioux villages and found them safe on their return. The white men who made the first trails across Nebraska often found food and shelter with the Sioux. The early emigrant trail wound for four hundred miles through the heart of the Sioux country. Over it went white men, singly and in companies, with ox-wagons, on foot, and pushing wheelbarrows and no harm came to them from the Sioux.
All this was changed in a single day. The Sioux became the fierce and bloody foes of the white men. War with the Sioux nation lasted thirty years. It cost thousands of lives and millions of dollars. The cause of this bloody war was a lame Mormon cow.
On the 17th of August, 1854, a party of Mormon emigrants on their way to Great Salt Lake were toiling along the Oregon Trail in the valley of the North Platte. They were in what was then Nebraska Territory, but is now about forty miles beyond the Nebraska state line and eight miles east of Fort Laramie, Wyoming. A great camp of thousands of Indians stretched for miles along the overland trail. They were the Brule, Oglala and Minneconjou bands -- the whole Sioux nation on the plains -- and were gathered to receive the goods which the United States had promised to pay them for the road through their land.
Behind the train of Mormon wagons lagged a lame cow driven by a man. When near the Brule Sioux camp something scared the cow. She left the road and ran directly into the Sioux camp The man ran after her, but stopped after a few steps, fearing to follow her alone into a camp of so many Indians. He turned back to the overland trail and followed after the wagons, leaving the lame cow to visit the Sioux.
In the Brule camp was a young Sioux from the Minneconjou, or Shooters-in-the-Mist, band. These were wilder than the other Sioux. The young Minneconjou killed the lame cow and his friends helped to eat her.
The next day the Mormon emigrants stopped at Fort Laramie and complained to the commander there that they had lost their cow. On the morning of August 19th, Lieutenant Grattan and twenty-nine men with two cannon were sent from the fort to the Brule camp after the young Indian who had killed the cow. Lieutenant Grattan was a young man from Vermont, barely twenty-one years old, who had no experience with Indians.
The great chief among the Sioux at that time was named The Bear. He had a talk with the lieutenant and said he would try to get the young Minneconjou to give himself up. It was a great disgrace for a free Indian of the plains to be taken to prison and the friends of the cow-killer would not let him go. The Bear then tried to have Lieutenant Grattan go back to the fort and let him bring in the young Minneconjou later. The lieutenant ordered his soldiers to run the two cannon to the top of a little mound, to point them on the Brule camp and told The Bear that he would open fire if the cow-killer was not given up at once. Pointing to the thousands of Indians, men, women and children, who were spread over the valley as far as eye could see, The Bear said, "These are all my people. Young man you must be crazy," and walked toward his lodge, while his warriors began to get their guns and bows. A moment later the two cannon and a volley of muskets were fired at the Sioux camp. The Bear was killed. A storm of Sioux bullets and arrows cut down Lieutenant Grattan and his men before they had time to reload their guns.
The Sioux camp went wild. The death of The Bear, the taste of white man's blood, set them crazy. Warriors mounted their ponies and rode about the field. The squaws tore down the tepees and packed them for flight. Some one called out to the Indians to take their goods which were in a storehouse near a trader's post waiting for the United States officer who was coming to distribute them. The Sioux burst into the storehouse, tumbled the goods from the shelves, piled them on their ponies. There were two traders near by who were married to Indian women. Their friends hurried them out of sight to keep them from being killed by the furious warriors. Before sundown the Indians were riding over the northern ridges by thousands, carrying away their plunder. They buried The Bear wrapped in richest buffalo robes in a high pine tree near the Niobrara River. From this burial the bands scattered over Nebraska, Wyoming and Dakota, urging Indians everywhere to kill the white men and to drive them from the country. Thus the Sioux war began. | <urn:uuid:6fcd5b76-0213-4a38-a10d-105e253b48fa> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.olden-times.com/oldtimenebraska/n-csnyder/nbstory/story24.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392099.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00071-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987877 | 1,026 | 3.5625 | 4 |
A century ago, Ford Motor Company adopted the assembly line and began cranking out Model T cars that were as alike as peas in a pod and affordable by just about every family in America.
While Henry Ford is often credited with inventing the assembly line, it was really Eli Whitney (of cotton gin fame) who, a hundred years earlier, began assembling muskets in linear fashion using interchangeable parts. Before that, each musket was handcrafted, unique, and expensive to buy or to repair.
So what has happened in fruit production over that span of time?
The black and white photographs of pruning or apple harvests taken a century ago by Kodak Brownie cameras look a lot like those taken today with digital color Nikons and Canon cameras. Trees are smaller, but people are on ladders with pruning shears and picking bags today, just as they were a century ago.
But more and more, growers are moving toward an assembly-line future for fruit production. They are being nudged along by advisors who tell them to prepare for a mechanized future that is, in fact, already in evidence in many orchards.
Dr. Jim Schupp, a pomologist at Penn State University’s Fruit Research and Extension Center in Biglerville, Pennsylvania, spoke at Michigan’s horticulture show last winter showing how mechanization is taking hold in Pennsylvania orchards.
Mario Miranda Sazo, with Cornell University’s Lake Ontario fruit program, also spoke in Michigan about the benefits of simple rules and relatively simple machines for fruit growing. Cornell also hosted a summit on precision management in mid-March in Geneva, New York.
“How beautiful it is to be a fruit grower,” Sazo said. “Orcharding will remain something you do outdoors expecting to make a profit without working under a roof.”
But in many ways, orcharding will follow the pattern of other industries in which processes are broken into pieces and simplified and scientific rules replace artisanal skills.
Pruning is an example. When trees are complex, they are hard to prune. “When workers are faced with a superabundance of pruning cut alternatives, they are afraid of making the wrong choice,” Sazo said. “As a result, they delay the pruning cut decision, default to the safest obvious cut, or avoid choosing altogether. Your pruning crew ends up being less efficient, and you end up growing wood, not fruit.”
The tall spindle system Cornell has developed takes the guesswork out of pruning, he said. There are simple pruning rules:
—Limit the tree to 11 feet tall by cutting the leader to a side branch.
—Take out two or three of the largest limbs each year.
—Cut large limbs back to a stub an inch or so long to encourage a bud to grow from the base and grow a new branch in the same location.
In tree training systems, Cornell is advocating a three–wire trellis if there is a vertical supporting element such as a conduit pipe, a bamboo stick, or a wire stabilizer, and a four- or five-wire trellis support if no vertical support element is used. Not only can the trellis wires be strung easily, the stabilizer wires and the tie wires are all a standard size. They install easily and fast, with workers doing specialized jobs. One worker puts in the stabilizer wire, while a second clips branches to the bottom wire and the stabilizer wire. As the tree grows tall enough to reach the top wire, it will be fastened in a speedy operation in which one worker makes the same simple tie over and over. A tool for twisting the tie wires makes it faster still.
Both Sazo and Schupp see big roles in the future for workers to use orchard platforms for installing trellis wire, tying branches, pruning trees, installing mating disruption dispensers, and monitoring traps. Ultimately, platforms will also carry harvest-assist tools that allow workers to pick without climbing ladders.
Schupp is pleased about a fortunate match—the systems that growers need to use labor more efficiently also produce the best fruit. In his studies with peaches, he found platforms reduced the time spent hand thinning tall trees to the same as would be spent thinning shorter, open vase style trees from the ground.
In his studies, peaches grown on the V system—with two, four, or even six 14-foot tall stems—were much more productive than open vase trees and generated twice the income.
These upright trees are taller (13 to 14 feet), have more bearing surface, better light interception, more natural growth (since peach trees want to grow up, not out), produce less “retaliatory” growth when pruned, and don’t shade the fruit.
“Growers pay a huge price to stay on the ground,” Schupp said. “A ladder doubles the cost of hand thinning,” which is why platforms are needed. Narrow walls of trees work best with platforms, and they produce the best fruit because of the light.
He encourages apple and peach growers to plant and design their orchard for a future with machines—essentially, tall, thin walls of fruit trees with alleys the right width for the machines.
Another machine with a place in the orchard, in Schupp’s view, is the string blossom thinner. The Darwin machine is being rapidly adopted by peach growers, who find knocking off all those blossoms saves hundreds of dollars per acre in hand thinning costs and pays off with larger fruit size because it is done early. No energy is wasted growing green fruit that will later be thinned off.
He’s tested the Darwin in apples, but damage to leaves and spurs needs to be reduced if it is to work there, he said.
In New York, Sazo said, a few innovative growers are also using hedgers on apple trees to establish the width of each row and set the dimension for follow-up pruning.
Cornell scientists are working closely with growers and machinery designers in New York, who are creating and using platforms, hedgers, and are working on a harvesting system. | <urn:uuid:a936e118-4b05-4aff-aafd-decf66a9f228> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.goodfruit.com/simple-rules/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398516.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00072-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947606 | 1,307 | 3.203125 | 3 |
State of the world's birds: not good
They are the quite-literal canaries in the non-literal coal mine, and researchers say their worsening fates are a troubling indicator of the world's overall environmental health.
Roughly one in eight bird species are threatened with extinction, according to a report on the state of the world's birds released Thursday. The report was written by BirdLife International, a partnership of conservation organizations, and published today during their annual meeting in Ottawa.
Birds are an excellent biodiversity bellwether, according to the report, because they are found in habitats all across the world, because they are a well-understood animal group, and because scientists don't add too many new species to their ranks, making them a stable population for year-to-year comparisons.
And those comparisons do not paint a rosy picture. More bird populations in Canada have declined since 1970 than improved, according to Environment Canada data. Waterfowl and raptors are doing better, thanks to conservation efforts, the report says, but shorebirds, aerial insect-eating birds, and grassland birds have all seen marked declines, all as a result of human activities.
In Asia, over half of all waterbird populations are declining as a result of vanishing wetland habitat. In Europe, there are 300 million fewer farmland birds today than there were in 1980.
Brazil alone, with it's super-biodiverse rainforests and other habitats, has 152 threatened bird species within its borders.
Logging, transport, and invasive species are all major pressures on bird populations. But the report singles out agriculture as the single biggest factor influencing birds' marked declines. The massive growth of cropland over the last century, and the expansion of industrial farming monocultures in recent years, have both served to negatively impact bird health.
Climate change will also pose a serious threat, the report says. Shifting climate patterns will alter bird habitats, and many birds have a narrow range of environmental tolerances and don't have the ability to adapt quickly.
BirdLife International says $4 billion USD a year could improve the fate of all birds and stop human-caused extinctions, and a further $76 billion could "effectively protect and manage all known sites of global conservation significance" -- a bit of a slippery statement, but okay. They point out that global annual spending on softdrinks is $469 billion, global military spending is many times that, and the combined revenues of the world's ten largest companies is many, many, many times that again.
The group believes the solution is to protect areas they call Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas, or IBAs, a set of 12,000 regions identified as crucial to biodiversity that are strewn across the globe. Only 28% are currently protected.
The full report can be found here.
Kate Allen is the Star's science and technology reporter. Find her on Twitter at @katecallen. | <urn:uuid:7aca4842-573c-479b-9da8-8f0c5875e59b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://thestar.blogs.com/worlddaily/2013/06/state-of-the-worlds-birds-not-good.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399425.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00018-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949556 | 610 | 3.171875 | 3 |
EmergencyAction Plans for Levees Fort Bend County Flood Management Association Emergency Preparedness Committee February 12, 2013
• For what creature were the Canary Islands named?• Originally named by Roman sailors “insulae canariae” for the wild dogs that inhabited the island. The small birds found there were later named “Canary”.
• Cat gut was used for centuries to string instruments and tennis racquets. What animals’ intestines are used to make cat gut?• Sheep and sometimes cow. The name cat gut may comes from the “caterwauling” sound created by lousy musicians.
• Where do panama hats come from?• Ecuador – when they were most popular in the 1800s, they were shipped from Panama.
• Where is the German porcelain known as “Dresden China” produced?• Not in Dresden Germany but in near-by Meissen where the oldest porcelain factory in Europe was established in 1710.
Why an EAP?PURPOSE: to provide a plan for anexpedited, effectiveresponse to prevent failure of the levee.
Plans help mitigate impacts wheneverything goes wrong. Why an EAP?
Why an EAP?• BECAUSE USACE IT’S A FEMA Fort Bend VERY County GOOD • PLUS these guys say so! IDEA!
“Larger levee systems with multiple pumpingstations requiremore detailed plans than smaller systems.”Department of Homeland Security What does the plan look like?
Engineers – technical description of the projectWhat does the plan look like?
What does the plan look like? Attorneys – legally sufficient to meet regulations, gui dance and liability issues
Emergency Management and Responders – sample messages for warning, inundation maps for evacuations and provide assistance with resourcesWhat does the plan look like?
What does the plan look like? LEVEE OPERATOR – specific information for the levee including: identifying problems, who to notify, steps to take to resolve or minimize problems
Guidelines• USACE • Other o PL 84-99 o Fort Bend County Office o Rehabilitation and of Emergency Inspection Program (RIP) Preparedness o Levee Owner’s Manual o TCEQ 30 TAC Chapter o Flood Fighting 299 (dams) Techniques on Levees o Department of • (Appendix D of Levee Homeland Security Owner’s Manual) (FEMA) o Flood Emergency Plans • Emergency • (for Corp Dams) Preparedness Guidelines for Levees A Guideline for Owners and Operators, January 2012
Contents of an EAP • USACE and TCEQ guidelines MUST included: o Notification Flow Chart o Responsibilities/Authorities o Emergency Identification System/Situational Awareness o Emergency SOGs
• TCEQ model: Legal and regulatory information upfront Description of the project Responsibilities Situational Awareness Preventive Actions Supplies and Resources Inundation Area Implementation (More legal/documentation) Supplemental Information • (TABs or Annexes with additional/supportive material) Contents of an EAP
Who has responsibility during an emergency? What resources do you really have? What resources will you need to acquire? What are your vulnerabilities? What are your upstream impacts? What are your downstream impacts? Based on YOUR Levee
Legal and Regulatory• Legal description of project• Legal authority under which project is operated• Legal authority during emergency• Regulatory information• Limits of plan• Purpose of plan: • Plan for an expedited, effective response to prevent failure of embankment
• Levee Description: • Where located – exactly • Construction method used • Key Measurements • Elevation of crest, height, length, etc. • Description of other features • Pump Stations, Gate Structures, etc. Project Description * Texas Division of Emergency Management
The Board• Subchapter E –local entity is “. . . responsible for disaster preparedness and coordination of response. The presiding officer of the governing body shall notify the division* of the manner in which the political subdivision is providing or securing an emergency management program . . . .” • Texas Disaster Act of 1975, V. T. C. A. Government Code, Title 4, Chapter 418 Responsibilities * Texas Division of Emergency Management
• WHAT IS AN EMERGENCY? • Abnormal Condition – • could be an emergency if ignored • Watch Condition – • an obvious problem which may not lead to failure but requires remedial actions • Possible Failure Condition – • progressively worsening problem despite actions taken • Imminent Failure Conditions – • despite all efforts, failure is likelySITUATIONAL AWARENESS
Who to notify• at each stage of a problem Simple steps to take problem specific (sloughing not the same as a sand boil) List of equipment required for steps flagging material up to excavator SPECIFIC TO YOUR LEVEE No concrete = no concrete SOGs PREVENTIVE ACTIONS
Where does the water go? How Floodplain mapping Breach Analysis Overtopping Piping Failure Inundation Map Share with Office of Emergency Management and Law Enforcement AgenciesINUNDATION AREAS
EAPs are “living and breathing” documents!• When do you review the document?• When do you review the Notification Flowchart?• With whom do you share the document (and updates)?• What training is required?• How and when are exercises conducted? Implement/Maintain Plan
• People! BoardWhat resources do Key Consultants you have? Volunteers • Equipment Yours Your Operators Lease/Purchase Borrow/Share • Other USACE
Other Resources Emergency Lighting Sand and sandbags Shovels Weather gear Floatation Vests Plastic Sheeting Rip rap (gravel/rock) Portable Pumps Plywood Steel Posts Fencing Material Barricades Orange Fencing Fork Lift Backhoe Dump Truck Excavator Crane Boat Gator/ATVs Emergency Communications Equipment Levee Patrol Members Operations Center Staging Area (cell phones, radios, pagers – backup batteries) Safety gear for all participants (vest, gloves, etc.) Meals for responders/staff/volunteers
Are there seepsConsider your /sloughing?vulnerabilities What areas of the levee are difficult to patrol/observe? What intrusions have been made into your levee? Is your equipment working properly? Know capabilities of your personnel
• What happens to other Districts if you breach? Impacts - Upstream• What happens to you if the / Downstream District next to you breaches?• Which river indicator do you use?• What are your triggers to take specific actions?• When to prepare for the arrival of tropical storm/hurricane.
“Abnormal Conditions” What is an Unusual but not necessarilyEmergency? dangerous Observed: Cracks in the embankment crest or on slopes Action: Walk area of crest and slope and check for additional cracking. Stake the cracks and document size and location. Notify: District Engineer for further inspection. When do you worry about cracking?
What is an “Watch Conditions” Can become an emergency; seriousEmergency? enough for close surveillance Observed: Numerous cracks in crest that are enlarging. Action: Initiate 24-hour surveillance. Monitor and measure cracking to determine speed and extent of problem. Mobilize to fill cracks. Notify: District Engineer, Board, Local Emergency Management officials When do you worry about cracking?
“Possible Failure” What is an Working on it but failure is possibleEmergency? Observed: Large cracks in the crest that are rapidly enlarging during high water event (or if levee is loaded) Action: Continue monitoring and remedial actions. Parallel cracks indicate a slide – see remedial action for slides. Notify: District Engineer, Board, State and Local Emergency Management officials When do you worry about cracking?
“Imminent Failure” What is an We can only lessen the impacts – notEmergency? prevent failure Observed: Cracking that extends to pool elevation – during high water event. Action: Evacuation within leveed area. Continue remedial actions. Notify: EVERYONE When do you worry about cracking?
SPEAK THE SAME LANGUAGE! Observation City of Sugar Land Many guidelines USACENew cracking, minor Emergency Level 3 Abnormal Level 1Progressive ------------------------- Watch -----------Increasing, multiple Emergency Level 2 Possible Failure Level 2Large chunks, loss of integrity Emergency Level 1 Imminent Failure Level 3
Guidelines for Operating the Levee “Under Duress” Who to call /when to call When to turn on / turn off the pumps How to start the generator What to look for during levee surveillance What equipment to take during levee surveillance What to watch for if threatened with sabotage ALL MUST BE SPECIFIC TO YOUR LEVEE!!
• Project Name• River/Tributary• Location o (city/county; township/section; GPS)• Emergency Contact Information o Notification Flowchart• Map o Inundation – could include your leveed area o Additional inundation information is obtained through modeling What the County Needs
Rita AndersonFreese and Nichols, Inc.10497 town and Country BoulevardSuite 600Houston, Texas email@example.com | <urn:uuid:be30a882-d35d-4da2-a27b-df89f7c2aa7a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.slideshare.net/fbcoem/emergency-action-plans-levee | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393093.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00004-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.866905 | 1,935 | 2.609375 | 3 |
- George Beadle, born 1903, researcher in chemical genetics; Nobel Prize in Medicine (1958).
- Gilbert N. Lewis, born 1875, developed theories of chemical bond and valency; researcher in thermodynamics.
- Today is Mole Day, 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m. (Mole Times). Mole Moment: 50.453 s after 6:42 p.m.
- Nikolai A. Menshutkin, born 1842, researcher on kinetics of nucleophilic substitution reactions of amines and quaternary ammonium ions.
- Hendrik W. B. Roozeboom, born 1854, researcher on application of phase rule.
- Roger Clark Wells, born 1877, researcher on sodium compounds and chemical analyses of radioactive minerals; chief chemist of U. S. Geological Survey.
- Edgar C. Britton, born 1891, contributed to industrial organic developments.
- Trust Agreement creating American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund signed in 1944.
- P. E. Marcellin Berthelot, born 1827, founder of thermochemistry; showed nitrogen was fixed by electric discharges and bacteria; synthesized alcohol, formic acid, methane, and acetylene.
- John E. Lennard-Jones, born 1894, researcher on surface chemistry, chemistry of carbon, liquid structure, and interatomic forces.
- Zygmunt F. von Wróblewski, born 1845, first to liquefy air on large scale; liquefied nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon monoxide.
- Christopher K. Ingold, born 1893, researcher in mechanisms of organic reactions and naming stereoisomers (Cahn-Ingold-Prelog system).
- Richard L. M. Synge, born 1914, discovered partition chromatography; Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1952). | <urn:uuid:6c2a8632-d1eb-4590-bcaa-0875c0fa1d60> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/this-week-in-chemical-history/week-43.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397562.76/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00084-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.853882 | 392 | 2.875 | 3 |
Last week, researchers at Boston University presented what may be the most solid evidence yet that mild head injuries – if they occur again and again – can have devastating effects on the human brain. Their work, published in the journal Brain, adds to a growing body of research linking repetitive head injuries to chronic brain disease.
Much of the attention around the research has focused on its implications for people who play contact sports, particularly football. But military veterans were also part of the study – and the findings come at a time when both the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs are starting to take traumatic brain injury more seriously.
In the BU study, researchers analyzed the donated brains of 85 athletes, veterans and civilians with a history of repetitive mild traumatic brain injury, looking for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE is a degenerative neurological disease for which symptoms include irritability, depression, heightened suicide risk and memory loss. In its most severe later stages, it can also trigger dementia and tremors. The research team also interviewed brain donors’ families and friends, to catalog past incidents of traumatic brain injury. The study’s authors concluded that “for some athletes and war fighters, there may be severe and devastating long-term consequences of repetitive brain trauma that has traditionally been considered only mild.”
Sixty-four of the brains studied came from athletes (some of whom were also military veterans), including 58 who played football at the high school level or higher. [We’ve previously covered contact sports and head injuries here.]
But the study, conducted in partnership with the VA Boston Health Care System, also found evidence of CTE in the brains of several veterans. That adds urgency to the military’s growing concern about traumatic brain injury, which has emerged, along with post-traumatic stress disorder, as one of the “signature injuries” of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom were different kinds of war, with a lot more blast injuries,” says neuropsychologist Cynthia Boyd. Boyd is one of the senior scientific directors at the San Diego branch of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center (DVBIC), where doctors and scientists have been researching traumatic brain injury and caring for afflicted veterans and active-duty military since 1992. She says she’s seen thousands of veterans and active-duty service members arrive at the center with injuries caused by improvised explosive devices and roadside bombs.
“The good news is, military medicine is so advanced, we save a lot of lives,” Boyd says. But instead of being killed in combat, “service members come home with brain injuries.”
Since 2000, according to figures from the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, more than 250,000 service members have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. These numbers don’t just represent combat injuries; according to DVBIC, the majority of TBIs occur in non-combat situations, like training, especially as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down.
And the military is taking the threat of TBI seriously.
New Department of Defense regulations issued in September mandate a 24-hour rest period from duty for service members involved in a ‘potentially concussive event’ while deployed. If a service member has suffered multiple concussions or brain injuries, return to duty is to be delayed a week or more.
And just last Friday, the Department of Veterans Affairs proposed changes that would expand eligibility for TBI-related disability benefits claims. If approved, the revisions would allow veterans diagnosed with service-related TBI who now experience dementia, seizures, difficulty walking or talking, depression or hormone deficiency to file for disability benefits for those illnesses from the VA. The new regulations are based on the growing body of research indicating that repeated traumatic brain injury can lead to significant health consequences later in life.
So what does all this mean for service members and veterans? For one thing, it raises practical questions about disability benefits claims. For several months, we’ve been reporting on the long wait times for service-related disability benefits. Nationally, it takes the VA an average of 262 days to process benefits claims; in some cities, the wait time can stretch to more than a year. New claims for TBI-related disability benefits may add considerable strain to a system that’s already overtaxed.
But it also reinforces something that’s come up again and again in our reporting on veterans’ health and the VA system: Caring for veterans is a long-term proposition, not something that ends when deployment does. As last week’s report out of Boston and the VA’s new stance on TBI-related disabilities clearly show, the injuries sustained in service can play out over the course of a lifetime. So while the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan might be winding down, the service members who fought them will be dealing with the physical costs of war for years to come.
>>Does any of this sound familiar? Please help us continue to tell this story by sharing your experience — or that of someone you love — with us. | <urn:uuid:89d13da6-69a3-42e7-84a5-58797c7b3995> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.publicinsightnetwork.org/2012/12/11/study-multiple-injuries-in-combat-can-devastate-brain/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397749.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00001-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954079 | 1,050 | 2.890625 | 3 |
New research has identified that a key protein called PEA-15 stops T-cell proliferation by blocking the cell's ability to reproduce. The control of T-cell proliferation is essential in preventing certain blood cancers and autoimmune diseases, as well as the orchestration of the immune response to infection. Findings of the study are reported in a recent online issue of The FASEB Journal, a publication of The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
A team of researchers from the University of Hawai'i Cancer Research Center, Rutgers University and Washington University in St. Louis examined the normal function of PEA-15, which acts as a tumor suppressor in some cancers including brain, ovarian and breast cancers. They found that PEA-15 normally controls lymphocyte (white blood cell) proliferation.
To determine the normal role of this protein, investigators examined mice lacking PEA-15. They found that those without the protein had both spatial learning disabilities and a pronounced increase in lymphocyte (white blood cell) proliferation. Upon closer inspection, they further found that loss of PEA-15 particularly affected a group of lymphocytes called T-cells. T-cells are involved in killing invading pathogens as well as stimulating more long-term immunity. The PEA-15 protein works by acting as a brake on a group of proteins that activate cell cycling and proliferation when they recognize a signal from an invading organism. Lymphocytes without PEA-15 continue proliferating beyond normal response levels as if they lack the "brakes" to stop.
"Understanding how T-cell expansion is controlled at the molecular level should lead to new methods to control the immune response during infection as well as perhaps helping the development of novel ways to utilize these cells to attack tumors," said Joe Ramos, Ph.D. principal investigator and assistant professor in natural products and cancer biology at the University of Hawaii. "Dysregulation of PEA-15 function might also play a role in the development or progression of lymphomas or leukemias," he added. "Finding ways to regain normal function of PEA-15 might contribute to identification of new approaches to treat these cancers. "
The study, titled "The death effector domain protein PEA-15 negatively regulates T-cell receptor signaling" was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NCI) to Joe W. Ramos at the University of Hawai'i Cancer Research Center and Andrey Shaw from Washington University in St. Louis. Support for Guy Werlen at Rutgers University came from the New Jersey Commission on Cancer Research. | <urn:uuid:200638b3-f589-480d-aaf8-d294da92a35d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-05/uoha-sfk050310.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397428.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00089-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952331 | 520 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Help support New Advent and get the full contents of this website as an instant download. Includes the Catholic Encyclopedia, Church Fathers, Summa, Bible and more all for only $19.99...
A square cap with three ridges or peaks on its upper surface, worn by clerics of all grades from cardinals downwards. The use of such a cap is prescribed by the rubrics both at solemn Mass and in other ecclesiastical functions. Etymologically, the word biretta is Italian in origin and would more correctly be written beretta (cf. however the French barette and the Spanish bireta). It probably comes from birrus, a rough cloak with a hood, from the Greek pyrros, flame-coloured, and the birretum may originally have meant the hood. We hear of the birettum in the tenth century, but, like most other questions of costume, the history is extremely perplexed. The wearing of any head-covering, other than hood or cowl, on state occasions within doors seems to have originally been a distinction reserved for the privileged few. The constitutions of Cardinal Ottoboni issued by him for England in 1268 forbid the wearing of caps vulgarly called "coyphae" (cf. the coif of the serjeant-at-law) to clerics, except when on journey. In church and when in the presence of their superiors their heads are to remain uncovered. From the law the higher graduates of the universities were excepted, thus Giovanni d'Andrea, in his gloss on the Clementine Decretals, declares (c. 1320) that at Bologna the insignia of the Doctorate were the cathedra (chair) and the birettum.
At first the birettum was a kind of skull-cap with a small tuft, but it developed into a soft round cap easily indented by the fingers in putting it on and off, and it acquired in this way the rudimentary outline of its present three peaks. We may find such a cap delineated in many drawings of the fifteenth century, one of which, representing university dignitaries at the Council of Constance, who are described in the accompanying text as birrectati, is here reproduced. The same kind of cap is worn by the cardinals sitting in conclave and depicted in the same contemporary series of drawings, as also by preachers addressing the assembly. The privilege of wearing some such head-dress was extended in the course of the sixteenth century to the lower grades of the clergy, and after a while the chief distinction became one of colour, the cardinals always wearing red birettas, and bishops violet. The shape during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was everywhere considerably modified, and, though the question is very complicated, there seems no good reason to reject the identification, proposed by several modern writers, of the old doctor's birettum with the square college cap, popularly known as the "mortar-board", of the modern English universities. The college cap and ecclesiastical biretta have probably developed from the same original, but along different lines. Even at the present day birettas vary considerably in shape. Those worn by the French, German, and Spanish clergy as a rule have four peaks instead of three; while Roman custom prescribes that a cardinal's biretta should have no tassel. As regards usage in wearing the biretta, the reader must be referred for details to some of the works mentioned in the bibliography. It may be said in general that the biretta is worn in processions and when seated, as also when the priest is performing any act of jurisdiction, e.g. reconciling a convert. It was formerly the rule that a priest should always wear it in giving absolution in confession, and it is probable that the ancient usage which requires an English judge assume the "black cap" in pronouncing sentence of death is of identical origin.
APA citation. (1907). Biretta. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02577a.htm
MLA citation. "Biretta." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907. <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02577a.htm>.
Transcription. This article was transcribed for New Advent by Janet Grayson.
Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. 1907. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor. Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York.
Contact information. The editor of New Advent is Kevin Knight. My email address is webmaster at newadvent.org. Regrettably, I can't reply to every letter, but I greatly appreciate your feedback — especially notifications about typographical errors and inappropriate ads. | <urn:uuid:d09439e7-175b-4433-98db-1df4011a5d35> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://noreply@newadvent.org/cathen/02577a.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396945.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00022-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963119 | 1,031 | 3.375 | 3 |
At our next Bear den meeting we are going to focus on Bear Elective 1: Space. So I want to try to do the pinhole planetariums with them. I think they will enjoy this because it involves hammers, nails, and flashlights.
Printable copy of Pinhole Planetarium
- Clean, empty 15 oz cans (1 for each constellation)
- Constellation patterns (see printable copy)
- Cut out the patterns. (See the printable version to get the patterns.)
- Glue the patterns to the ends of the cans and let the glue dry.
- Using the hammer and nail, punch holes through the patterns into the can where the dark black dots are locate.
- Turn out the lights in the room.
- Place a flashlight in the can and turn it on.
- Look at the bottom of the can. You should be able to see the pattern of the constellation through the holes.
The universe is not static. Plus, some of the placements for the nail holes had to be adjusted due to being to close together. If the accuracy of the constellation pattern is important, you must use a star chart. The pictures on the patterns are just to give the scouts an idea how the ancients used their imaginations to visualize the constellations.
This activity can be used with | <urn:uuid:f8d1ae53-b926-4d0a-87a2-167be1c6def6> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://scoutermom.com/313/pin-hole-planetariums/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397797.77/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00094-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.899029 | 276 | 3.078125 | 3 |
Focus on where you live:
'Rights without responsibilities - a decade of the Human Rights Act'
‘Rights without responsibilities – a decade of the Human Rights Act’, Lecture at the British Library
It is a great pleasure to be here today.
I would like to thank the British Institute of Human Rights for sponsoring this public lecture, and for the British Library for hosting us.
In two weeks' time we will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1948 the world had just emerged from the first truly global war which claimed the lives of more than 50 million people. Nation states had been responsible for the most shocking abuses of human rights. In the shadow of this catastrophe, there emerged a genuine mood among governments and people in all countries that a new world order based on shared values was needed.
The creation of the United Nations became the vehicle for this ambition, and the Declaration of Human Rights its clearest expression. Great rights were proclaimed: the right to life, liberty and security of person; the presumption of innocence; freedom of thought, conscience and religion; of movement; of association and peaceful assembly; the prohibition of slavery and torture.
Sixty years on, the Declaration retains a deep symbolic value. Barack Obama recently described its principles as ‘both beacons to guide us and the foundations for building a more just and stable world.' From the Declaration sprang other statements and treaties on rights, including, three years later, the European Convention on Human Rights.
The Convention was drafted by British lawyers and designed to reflect British traditions. Indeed, British involvement in the framing of the Convention reminds us that in some respects none of these rights were new to us. It was a Convention grounded in political freedoms which had been fought for and won in this country. And we should never down-play this fact. The Chairman of the Commission which drafted the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt, described it as ‘the international Magna Carta for all men everywhere.'
The history of rights and liberties in our country is core to our national identity.
The British Library's excellent Taking Liberties exhibition faithfully charts the story of the rights in England, and later in the United Kingdom, as one of rights being claimed - or as the exhibition says ‘taken' - against the Sovereign and a ruling elite.
Evaluating the Human Rights Act
The United Nations Declaration drew heavily on the US Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen some 175 years earlier. But our own Bill of Rights, which preceded these texts, differed in an important respect: it referred to the ‘true, ancient and indubitable rights and liberties' established by English law, but it did not make a declaration of equality or the natural rights of man.
The concept of natural rights had, of course, been powerfully opposed by Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham. ‘Right is the child of law ... from real laws come real rights', Bentham said. Neither these thinkers nor the English law recognised the idea of ‘positive rights' which existed in the absence of legal provision. And until the Human Rights Act was passed a decade ago, that constitutional principle held sway.
Some have viewed the Act as merely the logical development of the declarations that the United Kingdom signed up to after the War - ‘bringing rights home', to use the Government's phrase. But in seeking to give domestic legal effect to rights which until how had been essentially declaratory, the Act has had a far more profound effect than that. Helena Kennedy has described ‘a different Zeitgeist, a shift in the legal tectonic plates.' Professor Wade has said that the Act is a ‘quantum leap into a new legal culture'. Today, I want to challenge the assertion that this constitutional change has been a success, and to warn against the way in which a human rights culture is conceived by some of its proponents.
In doing so, I reject the crude accusation that to criticise the Human Rights Act is to denigrate the concept of human rights. It is precisely because we should all care deeply about rights that we have to give a faithful assessment of the Act and what it has delivered. Over the course of the last decade the Conservative Party has been resolute in the defence of civil liberties, notably in resisting the further extension of detention without charge in terrorism cases and in defending jury trial in fraud cases. It is significant that it was Parliamentary opposition led by the Conservative Party which saw off those measures, not the Human Rights Act. As David Cameron has said, ‘we will never be casual about our freedoms.'
Parliamentary sovereignty undermined
Unlike most statutes - a notable exception being the 1972 European Communities Act - the effect of the Human Rights Act on Parliament itself has been profound. One of the greatest impacts of the Act has been the undermining of Parliamentary sovereignty - the feature of our Constitution that the great Victorian jurist, Dicey saw as vital.
In theory, Parliamentary sovereignty is not affected by the Act. Parliament made the Act, and Parliament can revoke it. Parliament can legislate in contravention of the Act, and if judges find a law incompatible with the it, Parliament can ignore that declaration of incompatibility. But in practice, as we all know, this has never happened. The Act has transferred significant power out of the hands of elected politicians and into the hands of unelected judges. This was known, predicted, and indeed intended. Roger Smith, now director of Justice, spoke of the ‘landmines' that the Human Rights Act had deployed, and the ‘disguised' - a startling admission perhaps from a supporter of the Act - ‘disguised, but real, shift of power to the judiciary ... and the accompanying tremor to the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty'.
Even before the passage of the Act, senior judges like Lord Justice Laws and Lord Justice Sedley were beginning to challenge the notion of parliamentary sovereignty - not yet in their judgments, but in comments and articles. The Act shifted the balance more fundamentally. Notwithstanding the very deliberate way in which Parliament expressly limited the courts' powers over primary legislation, so that it was Parliament which would decide how to address an incompatibility between statute law and the Convention, they have argued that the Act does something more fundamental.
Lord Steyn, for instance, claims that the Human Rights Act created a new legal order. The supremacy of Parliament, he argues, has been downgraded from the central principle of our constitution, to a general principle - created by judges and implicitly one which judges could set aside under some unspecified constitutional principle. Lord Justice Sedley has argued that the Act enables the courts ‘to reconfigure legislation wherever possible to give effect to Convention rights'. Lord Hope has said that ‘the courts have a part to play in defining the limits of Parliament's legislative sovereignty'.
To allow an unelected judiciary to change laws passed by the elected Parliament is a dangerous precedent. Parliament may have many flaws, but as Lord Bingham has noted ‘the democratic process is liable to be subverted if, on a question of moral and political judgment, opponents of the Act achieve through the courts what they could not achieve in Parliament'. And democracy, not legalism, represents our best protection for liberty.
The development of civil and political rights in England, and later in the United Kingdom, was a story of rights being claimed against an overbearing centre. But it was also a struggle for a greater say - individually and collectively - in the governance of the country. From the 17th Century onwards, representative government was seen as the best defence against tyranny. Prominently displayed in the Taking Liberties exhibition is the declaration by Richard Overton, the leader of the Leveller movement in 1646 that ‘The parliament, and the whole kingdom whom it represents, is truly and properly the highest supreme power of all others - yea, above the King himself.'
Whether it was Magna Carta in 1215, the Bill of Rights in 1689, the Great Reform Act of 1832 or the Representation of the People Acts in the 19th and 20th Century, it is Parliament which has by popular will secured liberty and equality. It was Parliament which defended the right to trial by jury. It was Parliament which abolished the slave trade and the death penalty. It was Parliament which gave equal voting rights to women, and legalised homosexuality. In more recent times it was Parliament which blocked the Government's plans for 90- and then 42-days pre-charge detention. I do not profess that Parliament has been on the right side of every argument, or that legislators always get it right - far from it. But when Parliament falls short, it is accountable to the people whose rights and responsibilities are affected, in a way that the courts are not.
To tolerate - let alone celebrate - the erosion of Parliamentary sovereignty is to ignore the fact that Parliament has been a staunch defender of rights in this country. And it poses a challenge for all democrats: by losing faith in democracy like this, are we not also losing faith in the people whose rights we claim to defend?
The separation of powers eroded
Related to the undermining of Parliament's position has been the effect of the Human Rights Act on the judiciary. The Act has propelled judges into the political arena, and in so doing, has eroded the principle of the separation of powers.
It is ironic, given the changes in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 that were designed to create a more impermeable separation between the judiciary on the one hand and Parliament and the executive on the other, that one of the effects of the Human Rights Act has been to blur the roles of these branches - in particular by turning judges into decision-takers and law-makers. Essentially political questions that should be decided by Parliament are now being decided by judges.
Consider the way in which a privacy law is steadily being created from the law on confidence, as the courts - public bodies under the Human Rights Act - are compelled to shape the Common Law to take account of the Strasbourg jurisprudence.
This is an issue on which Parliament has been highly reluctant to legislate, and understandably so. The issue of where the balance should lie between the right of free expression and the right of privacy is both challenging and controversial. Creating a privacy law would amount to a substantial redistribution of rights, imposing new restrictions on the media.
In recent weeks we have seen a highly personal attack on Mr Justice Eady by leaders of the press relating to his judgement in the Mosley case. Yet the judge was doing no more than Parliament had demanded of him. It was Parliament that instead of passing a privacy law had simply pointed the judge in the direction of two conflicting rights and asked him to decide where the balance should lie. That is not a task that should have been asked of him. The reason why we charge Ministers with making administrative decisions is that their responsibility to the people equips them to judge where the public interest lies. It is because the job of judges is far more restrained - to interpret and apply the law impartially - that we ensure their independence from the political system. But when judges enter the business of creating new rights and new responsibilities, people start to question to whom they are accountable. We must guard against what the United States Supreme Court Justice Scalia has called a ‘judicial aristocracy'.
It is integral to the principle of judicial independence that judges remain apart from - some would say above - political debates and controversies. But it was not the press who put Mr Justice Eady in the political firing line; it was the Human Rights Act. It is for States - not necessarily the courts - to strike the appropriate balance between Convention rights, and the main way of doing that is through the formulation of clear laws that balance rights and responsibilities. If we leave it to the judiciary to create law in this way then we drag them into the political fray, whether they want to be there or not.
Over the past twenty years, constitutional reformers have complained about the inadequacy of parliamentary scrutiny of legislation. I strongly agree with them. But the answer cannot be to duck the issue completely, draft vague, uncertain law and then let the judiciary take responsibility. Balancing privacy and freedom of expression is a tough issue, but on this and other matters, there is a responsibility on politicians to grasp it. In this respect, the Human Rights Act has not just eroded sovereignty; it has encouraged Parliamentary irresponsibility. If Parliament no longer feels that it is the custodian of liberties, it will become more cavalier about protecting them.
The emerging privacy law is by no means the only example where the Human Rights Act has involved judges in making decisions which are in essence political. Earlier this year, the High Court ruled that to send a soldier out on patrol or into battle with defective equipment could constitute a breach of Article 2 (Right to Life) under the European Convention. The Ministry of Defence, which is appealing against the judgement, argued that it was ‘impossible to afford to soldiers who were on active service outside their bases the benefits of the Human Rights Act.' Whatever we may feel about the Government's failure to equip our armed forces properly, it is highly undesirable that judges, rather than politicians, should be deciding such matters. And in my view the intrusion of the Human Rights Act into the field of conflict in this matter will be highly problematic.
The evolution of rights
The UN Declaration has lasting value as a declaratory document, a statement of principle that enters and frames our discourse. The European Convention makes the rights a binding international obligation. But entrenching them into our domestic legal system fixes these laws in time. As society evolves so must the law, and even great texts whose overarching principles stand the test of time need to be adapted. We cannot divorce rights from the historical context in which they were declared.
The Magna Carta states that no one should be arrested or imprisoned on the appeal of a woman for the death of any person, except her husband, and that where anyone who dies owing money, his heir shall pay no interest on that debt while he is under age, if the creditor is a Jew. The Bill of Rights states that Protestants may carry arms for their defence, but not Catholics. These are some of our greatest constitutional texts, but they have been amended to suit changing sensibilities.
The European Convention, too, was a product of its time, designed as a response to the greatest violations of human rights, genocide and the Holocaust. But in seeking to protect all human rights it could not anticipate future developments in science and technology that may pose a threat to those rights. It did not anticipate the potential for the accumulation, storage and processing of enormous amounts of data; or the extent to which the State could monitor its citizens; or that information on millions of people - their medical records, bank account details - could be digitised and transferred across the world in seconds to be accessed by anonymous administrators in another country. Nor did it anticipate a world in which powerful non-State actors, who are not party to treaties or conventions, could threaten the rights and security of millions of people with weapons of mass destruction previously only available to governments.
Parliament's historic role has been to respond to changing times and legislate accordingly. And its record, as I have noted, has generally been the provision of new rights. Such flexibility is now denied. While Parliament may wish to legislate for new rights to private information, or to make new arrangements to protect its citizens from terrorism, its decisions can - and indeed have - been declared incompatible by our own courts applying Convention rights which were framed over half a Century ago. For an unwritten, evolving and flexible Constitution, we have substituted a framework which was set in the 1940s.
The place of politics
When we hear the justifications for establishing a canon of law that somehow sits above politics, it's not hard to identify a strong undercurrent of distrust in the political process and in particular a lack of faith in Parliament. In this view, our democracy has become an ochlocracy, or mobocracy, where the people need saving from themselves, and elected governments cannot be relied upon to respect minorities. At its worst, this distrust of democracy can become the sneer of the metropolitan elite, consciously divorced from the mores of the people. But even at its best, the idea that the people's rights cannot be protected by the people's representatives is surely misconceived.
Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of Liberty, has said that ‘to some extent human rights laws exists to protect society when politics lets it down.' There is no doubt that our Parliamentary processes need strengthening. But ultimately, without the agreement of the people, human rights will be no more than nonsense upon stilts. Human rights are by definition universal. They cannot exist without popular consent. They cannot be an elitist ideal, imposed upon an unwilling public. Jefferson might have believed that men's rights were ‘endowed by their Creator', but he also believed ‘That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'. For the truths of rights to be self-evident, they must be evident to all. They cannot merely be a canon for the enlightened few.
The strengthening of Parliament is an important cause for all democrats, but for those who champion liberty it should be a particular ideal. Human rights cannot be located outside politics, because they cannot be divorced from the will of the people. Those who seek to promote human rights by circumventing Parliament, or challenging the validity of popular opinion, will soon find that their cause is powerless. The great gains in liberty over the centuries were made by popular demand. As one study of the United States Supreme Court argued, ‘A society that relies upon courts and judges to make the important political and moral decisions is a society that has lost touch with what self-government is about. It is a society in which citizenship has little or no meaning.'
The rights culture
Proponents of the Human Rights Act explicitly intended it to have a wider impact on society. Lord Irvine, the former Lord Chancellor, said: ‘Our courts will develop human rights throughout society. A culture of awareness of human rights will develop.' And since the Act was introduced, we have seen the steady development of what can be described - I think accurately - as a rights culture. I do not mean by this a culture of respect for rights, or even a culture of awareness, but rather a trend that has seen rights devalued and misapplied.
This culture has distorted priorities in public bodies and undermined public safety. Consider the case of Naomi Bryant, who in 2005 was murdered by Anthony Rice - a convicted rapist - who was released by the Parole Board following a recommendation by probation officers. The Chief Inspector of Probation, Andrew Bridges, said that prison and other officials were side-tracked by considering Rice's human rights above their duties to the public.
The Rice case is not an ‘urban myth'. Cases like this have happened because of the corrosive effect that the Human Rights Act has had on administrative decision-making. Andrew Bridges warned that ‘Prisoners are now legally represented at Parole Board hearings, often by counsel, who also have recourse to judicial review. It is a challenging task for people who are charged with managing offenders effectively to ensure that public protection considerations are not undermined by the human rights considerations.' This is not a passing comment. It is repeated six times in the Chief Inspector's report, and it goes to a deeper problem with the Act, and the way it requires public officials to make human rights judgements in individual cases. Such an exercise in ‘balancing' rights by officials is bound to be problematic.
In this respect the Human Rights Act has not led to a universal regard for the rights of all, but a skewed regard for the rights of those who shout the loudest. As Andrew Dismore MP, Chairman of Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights concedes: ‘Victims have human rights, too. It's a challenging question for the human rights lobby, as to how the rights of criminals and victims should be assessed.'
Only this month, the Serious Organised Crime Agency was advised - by its own lawyers - that issuing ‘wanted posters' for criminals would amount to a breach of Article 8 of the Convention. This is a clear hindrance to the work of the authorities that jeopardises public safety. And if the issuing of wanted posters is a myth, then why are lawyers at SOCA instructing their officials otherwise? Either this advice is legally sound, in which case it makes a mockery of the Act and confirms the public reaction, or it is a myth, in which case the myth has transfixed the lawyers as much as the readers of tabloid newspapers. Either way, the effect is the same - the wanted posters are not produced, the names of serious criminals on the run from the authorities are not publicised, and people are less safe as a result.
In contrast, the list of social achievements claimed for the Act over ten years is, if I'm being frank, a relatively modest one. A frequently cited case relates to an elderly married couple in need of long-term care who successfully claimed their rights under the Act in order to be kept together, an outcome which everyone will applaud. But it shouldn't take judicial intervention to make local authorities behave properly, and we cannot rely on human rights laws in every case to do so, however entrenched they become. What was missing in those cases was not respect for human rights, but common sense and compassion. It is the responsibility of councils and the public servants who work for them to behave decently and to follow good public policy. When they don't, they should be held accountable.
Taking public bodies to court to enforce such rights is not only a negative and expensive means of achieving changes in practice; it is bound to be largely ineffective. Real advances in healthcare, social services provision and education will only be secured through the positive action of making those services effective and accountable to their users. The blunt instrument of human rights laws is no way to drive better performance in public services.
The myth of British influence
After decades where British governments faced judgements handed down from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, but were denied the capacity to influence those judgements through the developing jurisprudence, it is claimed that the Human Rights Act has enabled British judges to play a role in shaping the jurisprudence of the European Court. But this is unconvincing. In the case of Hirst v UK in 2005, the Court held that Britain's laws banning convicted - but only convicted - prisoners from voting in elections was contrary to the requirement in Protocol 1, Article 3, of the Convention to hold free and fair elections. Before this, the British courts had held that the restriction was a proportionate interference. The European Court ruled that it was not.
As the Government says, the matter had been considered fully by our national courts yet Strasbourg paid little attention to this fact and instead concentrated on the views of a court in another country - indeed another continent - decided by a narrow majority of 5 to 4, concerning a law different in text and structure, interpreted by domestic courts to which the margin of appreciation did not apply. On this matter, the enactment of the Human Rights Act, and the successive verdicts of British courts, had no effect whatsoever on the decisions of Strasbourg judges. They reached their own conclusion, and the ruling still stands.
I have highlighted a number of detrimental effects of the Human Rights Act, including constitutional changes that have eroded the separation of powers and undermined Parliament and the development of a rights culture. But arguably the worst effect of the Act has been to devalue the language, and so the very concept, of human rights.
Terrible human rights abuses in the world are taking place as we sit here today - in Zimbabwe, in Iran, in Sudan, in Burma. They amount to serious violations and they cause harm on a tragic scale. The Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, has said that ‘torture persists, devastating millions of victims and their families.' In Eritrea 2,000 Christians are detained without trial. Given Eritrea's population this is the equivalent of more than a quarter of a million EU citizens being detained indefinitely. They are all held pending denial of their faith, or are released if they are so debilitated by torture or mistreatment that they are a burden to their captors. More than a quarter of a million people have been displaced during the past three months of fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since the conflict began in Darfur in 2003, at least 300,000 Sudanese civilians have been killed, and thousands raped. Millions have been forcibly displaced.
Of course, the multiple infringements of human rights abroad is no justification for tolerating a single breach at home. But international abuses of human rights are on a different scale of seriousness. These abuses are devalued when the same language, indeed the same legal rights, are invoked in relatively trivial complaints in our own country, whether or not they are successful, such as the prisoner who brought a case on Article 3 grounds of inhuman or degrading treatment because the toilet in his cell was blocked.
The British Institute for Human Rights' dossier ‘Changing Lives', to which the Chairman referred, cites the case of a man with learning disabilities who was provided with a single room to be used as bedroom, bathroom, toilet and living space. A case brought under the Human Rights Act citing Article 8 right to a private life and Article 3 to not be treated in a degrading manner, ensured he was placed in more suitable accommodation that respected his dignity. Now of course, this is a good outcome for the man concerned, but Article 3 of the Convention was intended to prevent torture. Yes, he should have been better served, but the policy should not have to be changed by recourse to the Human Rights Act, and to do so, is an abuse of Article 3, and devalues the fundamental right which it encapsulates.
The very concept of human rights as understood in public discourse is now in danger. The Government admits that the Human Rights Act has never carried the public with it. The big mistake now would be to see this as a public relations problem, the result of the public's poor understanding, and the propagation of myths by the tabloid press. Hostility to the Act is not just a communications problem. The new Equalities and Human Rights Commission wants to educate the public, but the problem won't be solved by awareness campaigns and a few good news stories, and any good will soon be undone if the Commission - as it has promised - challenges laws passed by Parliament. A more fundamental change is needed if rights are to be respected again.
The great rights of the United Nations Declaration were generally individual rights, but as the Declaration made clear, in society we have responsibilities to one another. It explicitly states that ‘Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.' But in a more atomised and increasingly consumerist society, there is a danger that rights become not tools for protecting the individual within society, but advantaging the individual against society. The Czech author Milan Kundera has warned of prolific human rights in free countries ‘becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone against everything, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights. The world has become man's right and everything in it has become a right'.
The answer to the age of increasing individualism must surely be the strengthening of society and its bonds, and the promotion of responsibility. Yet the modern civil religion of rights is not only silent about responsibilities; it pushes in the opposite direction. In the ‘commoditisation of rights', they become goods to be claimed, where people exercise their rights to the detriment of the rights of others. Those are not my words; they are the words of the architect of the Human Rights Act, my opposite number, Jack Straw. Unfortunately, Straw's answer to this problem appears to be yet another layer - or two - of rights to be claimed. It also is reported that Ministers favour an expanded sphere for socio-economic and environmental rights. It seems highly unlikely that such rights could be justiciable, even if they should be. ‘What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine?' thundered Burke. ‘The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics.'
Such an extension of rights would, I suggest, be a serious mistake. If commoditised rights start being used by one individual to make a claim directly against another, as the Government is apparently contemplating, then rights will become not defensive instruments but attacking ones. We have seen the damage that the vertical claiming of rights - that is, against public bodies - has done to the language of rights. To give them horizontal effect - that is, against individuals, as has already happened in the sphere of privacy - could extinguish any residual public support for human rights.
The Government's plans in this area, for a Bill of Rights to add to the Human Rights Act, will take us down the wrong path. Piling rights upon rights, with a new rights Bill, and then the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights, would further undermine both Parliament and the judiciary, and it would distance the concept of rights from ordinary people.
Instead we should be focusing more on how we can seek to better balance rights with responsibilities. This requires us to look fundamentally at the place of rights in Britain today. We need to reclaim rights and restore them in the eyes of the public; to go back and look fundamentally at what rights mean to ordinary people, and how best they can be protected in the 21st Century. As Solzhenitsyn urged, ‘It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.'
A British Bill of Rights
One of the key opening questions posed by the Taking Liberties exhibition is, ‘In gaining so many rights, have we lost our responsibility?' And I think this is the crucial question.
Two years ago, David Cameron set out the limitations of the Human Rights Act and proposed that it should be replaced with a modern British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, grounded in our laws and traditions. Since then, we have convened a panel of lawyers and constitutional experts to meet and discuss how this might be achieved, and their work is ongoing. I believe that there should be a number of key objectives for such a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.
First, we want to make clear where the balance between competing rights lies in areas of law where nation states enjoy a margin of appreciation. We want a greater stress on responsibilities than the Human Rights Act or the European Convention - to which we would continue to remain a party - currently afford.
Second, we want a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities to help us restore the place of Parliament and repair the separation of powers. Parliament should be deciding the great issues of the day. We should not be asking the judiciary to define our rights: in a democracy it must be for the people, and their representatives, to create a framework of rights. In the words of Edward I, when he summoned the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Parliament of 1295, ‘What touches all, should be agreed by all'.
Next year we will have a Supreme Court and from 2010 it will be hearing cases. But how supreme will it be? With a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, we aim for a settlement that restrains the influence of Strasbourg case law, and truly allows the development of a distinctive British jurisprudence on human rights.
Third, we want a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities to bring greater clarity, to aid Parliament in drawing up laws and issuing guidance, preventing judge-made law and helping those public servants on the frontline who have to take difficult decisions. We want greater clarity to limit the spread of bad practice and address the rights culture by introducing common sense into decisions by public authorities.
In the drawing up of such a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, we would be able to have a public debate about what further rights might be added and whether any limitations within the Convention might be lifted. Additional rights could be made available, such as a right to trial by jury - which is not guaranteed by the Convention, but is fundamental to our conception of rights - and rights to government information and protection of personal data. During this process, we would need to ask ourselves important questions. Which rights need greater protection than the Convention currently affords? How do we ensure that the State can protect the rights of its citizens against the new threats in the modern world?
To seek answers to these questions is not to undermine human rights, but to protect them. I began by quoting the soon to-be 44th President of the United States, whose commitment to human rights is about to be demonstrated by the closure of Guantanamo Bay . But I hope that we will still hear the echo of words spoken by the 35th President, who famously called for active citizenship and for the nations of the world to join together to fight what he called the ‘common enemies of man'. Speaking six months before his assassination, John F Kennedy said:
‘... this Nation was not founded solely on the principle of citizens' rights. Equally important, though too often not discussed, is the citizen's responsibility. For our privileges can be no greater than our obligations. The protection of our rights can endure no longer than the performance of our responsibilities. Each can be neglected only at the peril of the other.'
Lifting our sights
I end with an appeal to all human rights advocates. Around the world today, rights are being horrifically abused by governments and individuals acting in medieval ways. This afternoon, the Law Society and Peace Brigades International are convening a meeting which will hear from human rights lawyers in Latin America and Asia who face intimidation, threats and even a risk to life through their work, violations which, as the organisers say, ‘undermine the fabric of society as a whole'. It is sobering indeed to reflect on the risk which such campaigners are facing.
The European Convention gives some rights greater weight than others, for instance by allowing no derogation in some. Rights are not of equal value, and some violations are worse than others. In many areas the courts apply the tests of proportionality, and so should we. Rights matter everywhere, but let's be clear: appalling violations in parts of the world where human rights are currently unknown and disrespected matter most.
The right not to be stoned to death for adultery. The right to practice your religion free from persecution by the authorities. The right not to have your property seized and livelihood destroyed by Party henchmen. The right of women to have an equal say in the choice of their leaders. The right to love who you choose without being condemned to death for it by religious leaders. The right not to be killed because of your race, your religion, your tribe, or your sexuality.
We must lift our sights and focus our minds on how we can ensure that the worst human rights abuses never go unanswered. If human rights are truly to represent the advance of civilisation, and not to become the preserve of lawyers and litigants and so permanently discredited in the eyes of the public, then our efforts must be on defending the concept of rights abroad, and guarding against their devaluation at home. Only then, will we be able to reach a settlement in Britain that the public can support.
24 November 2008
"I pledge to work hard for everyone in the constituency, to stand up for local people, and to be a strong voice at Westminster for your concerns" | <urn:uuid:66ddb4f3-a128-4e24-88e5-49fda2f5d4ec> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.nickherbert.com/media_centre.php/76/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395560.14/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00058-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967323 | 7,352 | 3.09375 | 3 |
|Need a 7 Kelvin, ultra low vacuum planetary environment? |
Emma Mitchell, pictured above in front of her lab equipment can
help create those conditions in LASP.
According to NASA:
The purpose of NESSF is to ensure continued training of a highly qualified workforce in disciplines needed to achieve NASA’s scientific goals:
Study planet Earth from space to advance scientific understanding and meet societal needs;
Understand the Sun and its effects on Earth and the solar system;
Advance scientific knowledge of the origin and evolution of the solar system, the potential for life elsewhere, and the hazards and resources present as humans explore space; and Discover the origin, structure, evolution, and destiny of the universe and search for Earth-like planets.
LASP lab-mate and fellow EP student Micah Schaible also won an Earth and Space Science Fellowship in 2010. Having two winners of the competitive award in the same group reflects well on the high quality of work within the Laboratory for Atomic and Surface Physics. | <urn:uuid:61839d49-0d5c-4122-a51b-70f5dc32ccb2> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://uvamatsci.blogspot.com/2013/06/emma-mitchell-nets-nasa-earth-and-space.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783408828.55/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155008-00117-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.915934 | 209 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Scientists have created a genetically engineered skin substitute designed to accelerate wound healing, according to a study published in this week's Journal of the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology (FASEB). The new artificial tissue is believed to be unique in that it expresses a protein known as keratinocyte growth factor, which appears to promote skin cell proliferation.
Another approach to replacing skin involves substitutes made from collagen gels, but these have a consistency similar to that of gelatin, which poses certain problems. "What's significant about our substitute is that it contains the basement membranethe matrix molecules that the cells of the epidermis like to sit onthat retains the natural composition and topography of skin," says team member Stelios Andreadis of the State University of New York at Buffalo. Unlike collagen gels, this new type of artificial skin has high mechanical stability and is pliable. "This is very important for burn patients who have lost a substantial fraction of their total body surface area and who suffer from excessive dehydration and bacterial infection," Andreadis explains. "Because they are very much like real skin, the engineered cell-based skin equivalents can provide these functions."
So far the team has only studied their skin substitute in vitro. But they hope to investigate the therapeutic effect of their product in animals in the future. | <urn:uuid:f4f4879c-0cc8-4679-afbf-0c4a596f5e3f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/skin-substitute-promotes/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398075.47/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00139-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96244 | 268 | 3.03125 | 3 |
A new online checklist program turns recreational
birders into global “biological sensors.”
This story is featured in Montana Outdoors May-June 2014 issue
On a warm morning not long ago on the shore of a small prairie lake outside Montana’s state capital, Bob Martinka trained his spotting scope on a towering cottonwood tree heavy with blue heron nests. He counted a dozen of the tall, graceful birds and got out his smartphone, not to make a call but to type the number of birds and the species into an app that sent the information to researchers in New York.
Martinka, a retired Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks biologist and an avid bird watcher, is part of the global ornithological network eBird. Several times a week he heads into the mountains to scan lakes, grasslands, even the local dump, and then reports his sightings to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a nonprofit organization based at Cornell University.
“I see rare gulls at the dump quite frequently,” Martinka says, scanning a giant mound of bird-covered trash.
Tens of thousands of birders are now what the lab calls “biological sensors,” turning their sightings into digital data by reporting where, when, and how many of which species they see. Martinka’s sighting of a dozen herons is a tiny bit of information, but such bits, gathered in the millions, provide scientists with a very big picture: perhaps the first crowd-sourced, real-time view of bird populations around the world.
Birds are notoriously hard to count. While stationary sensors can measure things like carbon dioxide levels and highway traffic, it takes people to note the type and number of birds in an area. Until the advent of eBird, which began collecting daily global data in 2002, so-called one-day tallies were the only method.
While counts like the Audubon Christmas Bird Count and the Breeding Bird Survey bring a lot of people together on one day to make bird observations across the country, and are scientifically valuable, they are different because they don’t provide year-round data.
And eBird’s daily view of bird movements has yielded a vast increase in data—and a revelation for scientists. The most informative product is what scientists call a “heat map”: a striking image of the bird sightings represented in various shades of orange according to their density, moving through space and time across black maps. Now, more than 300 species have a heat map of their own.
“As soon as the heat maps began to come out, everybody recognized this is a game changer in how we look at animal populations and their movement,” says John W. Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab.
“Really captivating imagery teaches us more effectively.”
It was long believed, for example, that the United States had just one population of orchard orioles. Heat maps showed that the sightings were separated by a gap, which means there are not one but two genetically distinct populations.
Moreover, the network offers a powerful way to capture data that was lost in the old days. “People for generations have been accumulating an enormous amount of information about where birds are and have been,” Fitzpatrick says. “Then it got burned when they died.”
No longer: eBird has compiled 141 million reports, or bits, and the number is increasing by 40 percent a year. In May 2013, eBird gathered a record 5.6 million new observations from 169 countries.
Martinka’s sighting of 12 herons at once, for example, is considered one species observation, or bit.
The system also offers incentives for birders to stay involved, with apps that enable them to keep their life lists (records of the species they have seen), compare their sightings with those of friends (and rivals), and know where to look for birds they haven’t seen before.
“When you get off the plane and turn your phone on,” Fitzpatrick says, “you can find out what has been seen near you over the last seven days and ask it to filter out the birds you haven’t seen yet, so with a quick look you can add to your life list.”
The system is not without problems.
Citizen scientists may not be as precise in
reporting data as experienced researchers are, like the ones in the Breeding Bird Survey. Cornell has tried to solve that problem by hiring top birders to travel around the world to train people in methodology. And 500
volunteer experts read the eBird submissions for accuracy, rejecting about 2 percent. Rare-bird sightings get special scrutiny.
The engine that makes eBird data usable is machine learning, or artificial intelligence—a combination of software and hardware that sorts through disparities, gaps, and flaws in data collection, improving as it goes along.
“Machine learning says, ‘I know this data is sloppy, but fortunately there’s a lot of it,’ ” Fitzpatrick says. “It takes chunks of this data and sorts through it to find patterns in the noise. These programs are learning as they go, testing and refining and getting better and better.”
Still, some experts question eBird’s validity. John Sauer, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, says that bird watchers’ reports lack scientific rigor. Rather than randomness, he says, “you get a lot of observations from where people like to go.” And he doubts that Cornell has proved the reliability of its machine learning efforts.
Still, the information has promise, he says, “and it’s played a powerful role in coordinating birders for recording observations, and encouraging bird watching.”
And the data is being used by a wide array of researchers and conservationists. Cagan H. Sekercioglu, a professor of ornithology at the University of Utah who has used similar bird watching data in his native Turkey to study the effects of climate change on birds, calls eBird “a phenomenal resource.” He says it was “getting young people involved in natural history, which might seem slow and old-fashioned in the age of instant online gratification.”
Data about bird populations can help scientists understand other changes in the natural world and be a marker for the health of overall biodiversity. “Birds are great indicators because they occur in all environments,” says Steve Kelling, director of information science at the Cornell bird lab.
A decline in eastern meadowlarks in part of New York State, for example, suggests that their habitat is shrinking—bad news for other species that depend on the same habitat. In California, eBird data is being used by some planners to decide where cities and towns should steer development.
The data is also being combined with radar and weather data by BirdCast, another Cornell bird lab project that forecasts migration patterns with the aim of protecting birds as they move through a gauntlet of threats. “We can predict migration events that would be usable for the timing of wind generation facilities to be turned off at night,” Fitzpatrick says.
In California, biologists use the migration data to track waterfowl at critical times. When the ducks are headed through the Central Valley, for example, biologists can ask rice farmers to flood their fields to create an improvised wetland habitat before the birds arrive. “The resolution is at such a level of detail they can make estimates of where species occur almost at a field-by-field level,” Kelling says.
The data from eBird has been used in Britain, too, combined with that of a similar program called BirdTrack, which uses radar images, weather models, and even data from microphones on top of buildings to record the sounds of migrating birds at night.
And for bird watchers, the eBird project has given their pastime a new sense of purpose. “It’s a really neat tool,” Martinka says. “If you see one bird or a thousand, it’s significant.”
Jim Robbins is a freelance journalist in Helena. A version of this article originally appeared in The New York Times. Used with permission.
[ BACK TO TOP ] | <urn:uuid:160bea21-9623-4ba3-b052-56a6c5cdac39> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://fwp.mt.gov/mtoutdoors/HTML/articles/2014/ebird.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397695.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00012-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954973 | 1,732 | 3.09375 | 3 |
Five things everyone should know about the fearless, pioneering journalist William Worthy ’42
William Worthy ’42 who died May 4 in Brewster, Mass., at age 92, was, in the words of The Washington Post, a “defiant journalist” whose reports from communist countries during the Cold War drew the ire of the U.S. government and inspired a folk song.
1. Worthy steadfastly believed in the free flow of information.
For 41 days in 1956, Worthy reported from China despite a U.S.-imposed travel ban to the Communist nation. While there, Worthy interviewed Chinese leader Chou En-lai. In retaliation for his unauthorized travel, U.S. officials seized his passport upon his return. But that didn’t deter him. Four years later, and without a passport, he made his way into communist Cuba to report on the early days of the Castro regime. When he came back, he was charged and convicted of entering the United States without a passport. A federal appeals court later overturned his conviction, saying the travel restrictions were unconstitutional. Later, he tussled with the FBI and CIA over documents he obtained while reporting on the Iran hostage crisis.
2. He inspired a folk song.
Singer Phil Ochs entered Worthy into the annals of legend on his debut album, All the News That’s Fit to Sing, with “Ballad of William Worthy.” The lyrics go, in part, “William Worthy isn’t worthy to enter our door, went down to Cuba, he’s not American anymore. But somehow it is strange to hear the State Department say, ‘You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay.’” Listen to the “Ballad of William Worthy.”
3. He was red-baited in the U.S. Senate.
In March 1957, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on whether State Department actions had “seriously restricted the travel of American newsmen in foreign countries.” Though McCarthyism and the Red Scare had waned, it was still common for politicians to red-bait, as this exchange between Worthy and Sen. Joseph O’Mahoney, D-Wyo., suggests:
O’Mahoney: May I ask you again, Mr. Worthy, if, in your own consciousness, you are aware of any reason which the State Department might cite for its delay and apparent opposition in issuing your requested passport?
Worthy: No, sir, not at all.
O’Mahoney: You are an American citizen?
O’Mahoney: A loyal American citizen?
O’Mahoney: Has any charge of subversive activity ever been made against you?
Worthy: Not at all.
O’Mahoney: Has any charge of any kind been made against you?
Worthy: No, sir. If you want to make it more specific, if you want to ask me the $64 question, I will be glad to answer it.
O’Mahoney: Well, I don’t want to go into the movies today.
4. He never wavered.
As a Bates student in 1941, he said this after Pearl Harbor: “We must now work to prevent war hysteria and intolerance and to retain civil liberties intact.” At age 84, he was asked if a lifetime of challenging authority had made him weary: “Not weary, but it was not pleasant always to have to defend what you believe in. By temperament, I am not really inclined to get weary.”
5. His anti-imperialist beliefs were forged in the Bates library.
By pure chance, Worthy came across a copy of Scott Nearing’s Dollar Diplomacy, which described how in 1914, U.S. soldiers took $500,000 from Haiti’s national bank and shipped it to New York City for “safe keeping.” This gave the U.S. control over the national bank at a critical time in Haiti’s history. Worthy would later say that learning about that event that day in the library “really, turned me in an anti-imperialist direction, from which I have not veered ever since. It was one of the great shocks of my life, to read that.” | <urn:uuid:6047028c-140e-4f4c-8e58-4b6ec01eab80> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.bates.edu/news/2014/05/20/on-the-passing-of-william-worthy-42-five-things-everyone-should-know-about-the-fearless-pioneering-journalist/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396949.33/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00164-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969021 | 924 | 2.640625 | 3 |
With the 1-h assimilation cycle, the RUC-2 integrates into one system
the RUC-1 and RSAS (RUC Surface Analysis System) from the 60-km era.
The RUC-2 surface analyses are improved over those from RUC-1 due to
the use of a forecast background combined
with new design features to ensure that the 40km surface analyses
not only draw more closely
to the data, but also have better consistency and reliability.
Specific advantages of RUC-2 surface analyses over those from RUC-1 are:
- use of a forecast background rather than persistence
- multivariate/univariate two-pass analysis for winds/pressure
instead of a single-pass univariate analysis
- consistency in data-void regions with terrain-induced dynamics and
surface physics in the 40-km version, allowing features of
the background (forecast) fields such as mountain/valley
circulations, drainage winds, effects
of variations in soil moisture, vegetation type, land use, roughness length,
cover, land/water contrast, and explicit clouds to be present
in the analysis.
- improved quality control due to the forecast background. This is
a fairly significant item, as the 60km QC led to frequent bullseyes that could
only be eliminated by black-listing problematic stations
- lack of spurious temperature, moisture, and wind
gradients at ocean or data-void boundaries.
The following new features are added to ensure that the 40km surface
draw very closely to surface data:
- All station pressure (altimeter) and surface wind observations are used
regardless of the difference between station and model elevation. The
pressure is reduced to the model elevation using the local lapse rate
over the bottom 5 levels in the background field.
- Temperature and dewpoint observations are reduced, via the local lapse
from model terrain height to actual station elevation, provided,
that the reduction does not exceed 70 mb. With this change and
the higher-resolution 40km terrain, a far higher percentage (95%) of
surface temperature and dewpoint observations in the western U.S.
are used in the 40km
3-d analysis than in the 60km RUC-1 3-d analysis.
for a list of surface stations used in the RUC-2 at a particular
time and the pressure separation between station pressure and model
pressure for each.
- The surface wind analysis is performed in two passes, as noted earlier.
The first pass is a multivariate wind/height analysis with weak
geostrophic coupling since some correlation between the
actual and geostrophic winds is expected at the surface,
especially over water. The second pass uses the first pass as its
background and is univariate, so that local details, particularly
in the wind observations, are drawn for.
- Expected surface observation errors for the 40km RUC-2 (a parameter in
the analysis) have been reduced from values in
the 60km RUC to force closer fit to observations.
- Through use of a minimum topography field, surface temperature and
dewpoint are diagnosed at close to the station elevation in both the
and RUC-2. The minimum topography field is determined
from a high-resolution 10km topography field, with the value for the
grid box being the minimum 10km elevation, which is
of valley elevations in rough terrain. The rationale is that
surface stations in
mountainous areas are usually located in valleys or open parks at
- The reduction from the model topography to the minimum topography is done
using the model lapse rate limited to be between the dry adiabatic and
Comparison of 60km RUC-1 and
40km RUC-2 surface temperature analyses
for 1200 UTC 19 February 1997.
3.d. Quality control
As in RUC-1, quality control in RUC-2 involves a buddy check. The buddy check
is of observation residuals, the differences betwen the observation and
the background field interpolated to the observation point, and not of the
observations alone. This is an important distinction, since it means that
any known anomaly in the previous forecast has already been subtracted out,
improving the sensitivity of the QC procedure to actual errors.
observation point, the parameter in question is estimated via optimum
interpolation of values from surrounding observation points. If the estimated
and measured values differ by more than a prescribed amount, further checks
determine whether the central observation or one of its neighbors is erroneous.
Bird contamination for radar/profiler winds
Checks are made for bird contamination for both VAD and profiler winds in
RUC-2. A careful check for bird (and other) contamination in profiler winds
is made at the Profiler Hub in Boulder, CO. This check includes use of
second-moment data to examine for likelihood of bird contamination.
If the quality control
flag produced by this check
indicates suspicious data, the profiler data at that level is not used
by RUC-2. For VAD winds, no second-moment data is available, so a cruder
and more conservative check is made. A solar angle is calculated, and if
the sun is down and the temperature is warmer than -2 deg C, VAD winds
are not used if they have a northerly component between 15 August and 15 November
or a southerly component between 15 February and 15 June.
3.e. Future improvements
A new 3-d variational analysis (Devenyi and Benjamin 1998) is nearing
completion for the RUC-2 and will follow the rest of the RUC-2 into
operations with a lag time of several months.
4. ONE-HOUR ASSIMILATION CYCLE FOR RUC-2
See also information on
1-h cycle and data used for more differences.
1-h assimilation cycle. The background for each analysis is
the previous 1-h forecast. The 1-h cycle allows much more complete use of profiler,
and VAD data, which are all available at least hourly. The time window for
aircraft data is now -1h to 0h instead of -2h to +1h, meaning that aircraft
data are now applied closer to the time that they are actually reported.
Grids from RUC-2 will be available almost 1 hour earlier
than those from RUC-1. The data cut-off
time from the 40km system is 20 min after the analysis valid time.
A catch-up cycle at 0000 and 1200 UTC runs at +55 min
to catch late-arriving rawinsonde data. Twelve-hour forecasts from
these times are run from the catch-up cycle analysis, rather than the
"early look" analysis at 20 min after.
5. RUC-2 FORECAST MODEL
The RUC-2 forecast model is an updated version of the generalized
vertical coordinate model described by Bleck and Benjamin (1993).
Modifications to a 20-line section of code in the model are sufficient
to modify it from the hybrid isentropic-sigma coordinate described
in section 2.c to either a pure sigma or pure isentropic model.
The RUC-2 model is considerably different from the RUC-1 model in
its parameterizations of physical processes such as cloud microphysics
turbulent mixing, radiation, and convective precipitation. To some
extent, this was made possible by changing the RUC-2 model to use
the code structure of the NCAR/Penn State Mesoscale Model version 5 (MM5,
Grell et al. 1994). This allowed relatively easy transfer of MM5
parameterizations (cloud microphysics, radiation) into the RUC-2
model, and will continue to do so in the future as new MM5 parameterizations
5.a. Basic dynamics/numerics
Here are some of the basic numerical characteristics of the RUC-2 model:
The atmospheric prognostic variables of the RUC-2 forecast model are:
- Arakawa-C staggered horizontal grid (Arakawa and Lamb 1977); u and v horizontal wind
points offset from mass points to improve numerical accuracy.
- No vertical staggering.
- Time step is 60 seconds at 40-km resolution.
- Positive definite advection schemes used for continuity equation
(advection of pressure thickness between levels) and for horizontal
advection (Smolarkiewicz 1983)
of virtual potential temperature and all vapor and hydrometeor
The soil prognostic variables (at six levels) of the RUC-2 forecast model are:
- pressure thickness between levels
- virtual potential temperature
- horizontal wind components
- water vapor mixing ratio
- cloud water mixing ratio
- rain water mixing ratio
- ice mixing ratio
- snow mixing ratio
- graupel (rimed snow) mixing ratio
- number concentration for ice particles
- turbulence kinetic energy
- turbulent variance of potential temperature
- turbulent variance of water vapor mixing ratio
- turbulent covariance of potential temperature perturbations
with water vapor mixing ratio perturbations
Other surface-related prognostic variables are snow water equivalent moisture
and snow temperature.
- soil temperature
- soil volumetric moisture content
5.b. Physical parameterizations | <urn:uuid:1959f7f5-497a-43be-8e72-cba81c890a3f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://ruc.noaa.gov/ruc2.tpb.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393463.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00138-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.865799 | 1,999 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Skip to comments.Scientists 'Surprised' to Discover Very Early Ancestors Survived On Tropical Plants, New Study...
Posted on 12/24/2012 6:20:36 PM PST by SunkenCiv
An international research team extracted information from the fossilised teeth of three Australopithecus bahrelghazali individuals -- the first early hominins excavated at two sites in Chad. Professor Julia Lee-Thorp from Oxford University with researchers from Chad, France and the US analysed the carbon isotope ratios in the teeth and found the signature of a diet rich in foods derived from C4 plants.
Professor Lee-Thorp, a specialist in isotopic analyses of fossil tooth enamel, from the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, said: "We found evidence suggesting that early hominins, in central Africa at least, ate a diet mainly composed of tropical grasses and sedges. No African great apes, including chimpanzees, eat this type of food despite the fact it grows in abundance in tropical and subtropical regions. The only notable exception is the savannah baboon which still forages for these types of plants today. We were surprised to discover that early hominins appear to have consumed more than even the baboons."
The research paper suggests this discovery demonstrates how early hominins experienced a shift in their diet relatively early, at least in Central Africa. The finding is significant in signalling how early humans were able to survive in open landscapes with few trees, rather than sticking only to types of terrain containing many trees. This allowed them to move out of the earliest ancestral forests or denser woodlands, and occupy and exploit new environments much farther afield, says the study.
The fossils of the three individuals, ranging between three million and 3.5 million years old, originate from two sites in the Djurab desert.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Cosmogenic nuclide dating of Sahelanthropus tchadensis and Australopithecus bahrelghazali: Mio-Pliocene hominids from Chad
Infectious Evolution: Ancient Virus Hit Apes, Not Our Ancestors, In The Genes
Science News | 3-5-2005 (issue) | Bruce Bower
Posted on Sat Apr 2 14:48:39 2005 by blam
Asia the home of primate ancestors
The Times of London | March 15, 2002 | By Mark Henderson
Posted on Thu Mar 14 17:48:49 2002 by Map Kernow
The Scars of Evolution"The most remarkable aspect of Todaro's discovery emerged when he examined Homo Sapiens for the 'baboon marker'. It was not there... Todaro drew one firm conclusion. 'The ancestors of man did not develop in a geographical area where they would have been in contact with the baboon. I would argue that the data we are presenting imply a non-African origin of man millions of years ago.'" [Primary Literature by Jonathan Marks
by Elaine Morgan
Benveniste, Raoul E. and Todaro, George J. (1976) Evolution of type C viral genes: Evidence for an Asian origin of man. Nature, 261:101-107. This study also applied DNA hybridization to the apes. They found a 3-way split.
|GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach|
Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution.
From carbon isotopes the whiz kids say that this beast/man chowed down on grass or sedges?
I’d like to know how this got figured out. What if they ate beef... which in turn ate the grass or sedges?
we weren’t allowed to eat meat until after the flood, no surprise here.
I’m surprised at how Mick Jagger can play bluesy harmonica the way he does...
That was the time of the first quotation of a divine affirmative statement in scripture about it; however the concept of animal sacrifices was much older (it was the point of friction between Cain and Abel), and the use of skins was obviously deemed okay. It would be surprising if in such a situation people yet remained vegetarians.
I’d want to know how the whiz kids deduced this. Humans and humanoid animals have traditionally been omnivores.
interesting but I doubt we know half of it
Well, it seems that very early man knew how to chew those pesky plants that soaked up CO2, to give him energy whilst balancing the CO2 of the planet for thousands of later generations to enjoy the sun on a beach
The use of skins was deemed okay because God Himself first made coverings for Adam and Eve out of an animal skin.
However the sacrifices were burnt offerings and they were consumed by the fire. Nowhere in the sacrifice rituals did anyone ever eat the animal after it was made a burnt offering to God.
Permission was given only after the flood, after the entire earth’s ecosystme had drastically changed. And at this time God put fear of man into animals because of this change, so that they wouldn’t be hunted to extinction.
This is, at best, speculation.
Quickly following on the heels of the Fall was a time when men stopped caring about the Lord. To assume that people remained faithful to a command to be vegetarian is naive.
I knew my ex-wife would use the Christmas present I bought her three years ago.
Your viewpoint is as speculative as mine, as the fruit and vegetation before the flood grew greatly and was watered from below the ground, all various kinds of edible fruits and nuts and plants were in abundance and nobody would have needed to eat meat.
However, whether some did or didn’t, what is fact is that permission for peole to eat animals was not given until after the Flood, and the fear of man was not placed in animals until after the Flood.
It is a crucial point to the credibility of omnivore diets vs. vegetarian to note that disobedience was the norm — in fact meat may have been viewed not just as something nice but as an overtly pagan act.
Funny post....this guy has massive forearms....quite impressive...
It would seem possible the species of the tooth in question was from a non humanoid species.
I would agree on the last point you make, it could very well have been regarded as a pagan act, act of rebellion, etc. But again, we don’t know as there are no affirming statements of it being done before the flood, and with those people being evil and not possessing complete knowledge and separation from God, they could have also just as easily come to believe eating meat was a dangerous thing to do, as inevitably if it was tried people may have died eating spoiled meat. Maybe they thought the other animals and insects may be okay doing it, but not people. You have to realize since God didn’t permit man to eat meat yet, He’d have shared no knowledge of preparing meat, storing it, etc. On the other hand we see that when He instruted man to make burnt offerings to Him He did spend time explaining how to make a proper offering, on what, what to use for a proper offering, etc.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works. | <urn:uuid:f6698269-63e1-46f9-9a3d-b640efee5681> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2972049/posts | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395679.92/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00198-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960762 | 1,576 | 3.4375 | 3 |
This site is produced for archivists, librarians, curators and conservators who want to identify the videotapes in their collections. Since video recording became a viable technology in 1956, there have been over 50 different formats created. Most of these formats are represented in this chronology.
Clicking the date ranges at the left will load thumbnail images of the prominent videotape formats and a short essay on the formats for the particular time period. As obsolescence of video media and hardware is of prime concern, this chronology labels each format with one of the following designations:
Complete definitions of Obsolesce Rating, a concept developed by Andrew Robb, are found at rating_definitions.html. | <urn:uuid:756df885-ceb4-4940-9c3e-65c3ddaa2f1b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://videopreservation.conservation-us.org/vid_id/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397565.80/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00133-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924652 | 145 | 2.625 | 3 |
Yehuda Loew (The Maharal)
(1525 - 1609)
Yehudah Loew of Prague,
also known as the Maharal, was one of the outstanding Jewish minds of
the sixteenth century. He wrote numerous books on Jewish law, philosophy,
and morality, and developed an entirely new approach to the aggada of the Talmud. The
Maharal rejected the idea that boys should begin instruction at an early
age, insisting instead that children be taught in accordance with their
He was held in great esteem by his contemporaries and
has had a profound impact on all streams of Judaism. Rabbi
Kook stated that the "Maharal was the father of the approach
of the Gaon of Vilna on the one hand, and of the father of Chasidut,
on the other hand." Rabbi
Shneur Zalman, founder of Chabad Chasidism, and a direct descendant of the Maharal, bases much of his
famous work - the Tanya - on the teachings of his great grandfather.
Ironically, he is credited with the
creation of a golem, an activity he would probably have opposed. A golem
is a human figure created from clay and brought to life by use of the
Ineffable Name of God. Since
the letters of that name were considered to be the original source of
life, it is thought possible for one knowledgeable in the secrets of
the Divine Power to use them to create life.
Discussions of golems go back to the Talmud. Rava is said
to have created such a man. In the sixteenth century numerous golems
were said to have been created, but in each case their power increased
and threatened human life, so they were destroyed by their makers.
Yehudah Loew of Prague was said to have
created a golem to protect the Jewish community from Blood Accusations.
It was close to Easter, and a Jew-hating priest was trying to incite
the Christians against the Jews. The golem protected the community from
hard during the Easter season. However, the creature threatened innocent
lives, so Yehudah Loew removed the Divine Name, thus rendering the golem
Today someone who is large but intellectually
slow is sometimes called a golem. Pete Hamill has written a book called Snow in August about a golem created in the late 1940's in Brooklyn.
The Maharal was very active in community work. He did
much to improve social ethics. He was a far-seeing educator whose many
ideas for educational reform struck deep chords in many people.
His resting place in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague
is still visited today by thousands of people.
to Jewish Heritage; Jewish | <urn:uuid:18811dd8-b4b3-4aa2-babf-c5e359eeede4> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Loew.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398216.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00195-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972634 | 582 | 3.046875 | 3 |
Are Missouri Children Over-Diagnosed With ADHD?
Medication is often a routine treatment for children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
A recently released report by the Centers for Disease Control shows nearly 9 percent of Missouri’s children are diagnosed with ADHD and that about 80 percent of them receive prescription medication for the behavioral disorder, a rate second only to Mississippi.
“I think it’s a case of the good, bad, and the ugly. As far as Missouri’s ranking second in terms of the proportion of children with ADHD being treated with medication, that is in and of itself not a terrible thing. If a diagnosis of ADHD is made, children should receive the appropriate treatment,” Dr. John Constantino said.
Constantino is the Blanche F. Ittleson Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine and Director of the William Greenleaf Elliot Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.
Over-Diagnosis and Treatment
“The issue of over-diagnosis is another matter,” Constantino said. “It is a tremendous issue because often times the diagnosis is made without the proper rule-outs of other conditions which may look like ADHD. This results in a high proportion of children who are believed to be affected,” Dr. Constantino said.
“The ugly part of this is that science has not yet established which proportion of children who are on this continuum of impairment of attention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity problems – which proportion of them should really be treated.”
More Numbers (CDC Report)
- 4.1 million (7.2%) U.S. school-aged children have a current diagnosis of ADHD
- 8.6% of Missouri school-aged children have a current diagnosis of ADHD
- 78.3% of Missouri school-aged children diagnosed with ADHD are being medicated for ADHD
Follow St. Louis on the Air on Twitter - @STLonAir | <urn:uuid:4a484513-fe75-4ee5-ba17-3dfdcc3e8133> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/are-missouri-children-over-diagnosed-adhd | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397749.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00041-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951362 | 415 | 2.8125 | 3 |
June 24, 2014
Criteria for judging content critically based on Google Safety resources as well as on an article I shared here a couple of years ago
1- Be skeptic
Before you believe ask yourself questions such as: what's the point of view of the site? And what opinions or ideas are missing. Does the information show a minimum of bias ? Is the author impartial in their reasoning ? Is the page designed to sway opinions ?
Always double check the facts that you find through comparing them with other sources of information. Ask yourself: Is the information reliable ? Is it error-free ? Does it include links to other resources ?
3- About the author
Is the author qualified ? An expert in their domain ? Is there a link to the information about the author or the sponsor of the website ? If the page does not include no author name or sponsor, then is there any other way to determine its origin.
4- About the page
Check out if the page is dated and if so , is it current enough ? what topics this website cover ? What is it that this page offers to readers ? How in-depth is the material ? What about the writing style, arguments, data , and facts included ? how are these developed ?
5- Search strategically
Use advanced search features to refine your searches. Think critically about your online searches and use specific and descriptive keywords.
6- Conduct multiple searches
Search for the same topic using various keywords and phrases. Compare the search results and evaluate the different perspectives.
7- Pay attention to the URL domains
The URL domain is located at the end of a website address. URL domains reveal the kind of organization you are dealing with . Educational institutions and government entities usually aim to share knowledge and improve communities. Examples of URL domains are .com = company, .gov = government website, .edu = educational institution, .org = organization.
Follow us on : Twitter, Facebook , Google plus, Pinterest .
June 24, 2014 | <urn:uuid:7d9d1744-dad9-416d-a8e9-2fcacdbbd51a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2014/06/new-classroom-poster-on-how-to.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398209.20/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00037-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.907668 | 404 | 3.09375 | 3 |
About the Class:
The focus of this course is the Microsoft Windows 7 operating system. The purpose of this course is to present the basic features of the OS, and help you get comfortable using it. This is a hands-on class.
What You’ll Learn:
Upon completion of this class, participants will:
- Start Up and Login – Logout and Restart or Shut Down.
- Navigate the Operating System (OS) .
- Open, close and move between multiple applications .
- Manage files, folders and shortcuts (create, save, copy, move, delete, name, rename, modify folder display options).
- Apply good file management techniques (organizing files, backing up).
- Use the Search feature to locate files.
- Open and view the Task List.
- Identify local and network drives using My Computer.
- Identify different file formats and extensions with related applications.
- Utilize the Windows Help System.
- Change / customize the look of the desktop or taskbar.
- Use the control panel to check or change settings.
- Install or Uninstall software.
- Add or remove items from the Startup Folder.
- Add, choose, or change default printer (local or network).
- Use maintenance tools (defrag, scan disk, virus scan, updates).
- Access support resources (web pages, help desk).
What You Need to Know:
- Basic keyboarding and mouse skills are recommended.
If you don’t have those skills, consider first taking the workshop: | <urn:uuid:a676d3c6-7472-4f9a-952b-e120a5b41641> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://adminfinance.umw.edu/hr/employee-development-program-2/technology-training/courses/electives/tech-101-windows-basics/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396945.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00142-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.689905 | 327 | 2.90625 | 3 |
At a Glance: A blue flowered violet that grows from slender rhizomes and is stemless in the early season, later grow upright stem.
|Sun/Shade Tolerance||Hydrology||Elevation Range||
full sun > 80%
mostly sunny 60%-80%
partial sun and shade 40%- 60%
mostly shady 60%-80%
full shade > 80%
|Common in dry and moist habitats.
Wetland Indicator Status:
NI (no indicator data)
|(data not available)|
Aquatic and Wetland:
Ponds or lakes
Swales or wet ditches
Seasonally inundated areas
Marshes or swamps
Aquatic bed wetlands
Seeps, springsShorelines and Riparian:
Streams or rivers
Stream or river banks
In or near saltwater
Coastal dunes or beachesRocky or Gravelly Areas:
Slide areasSub-alpine and Alpine:
Forests and Thickets:
Forests and woods
Old growth forests
Forest edges, openings, or clearings
ThicketsMeadows and Fields:
Pastures or fields
Meadows or grassy areas
Mossy areasDisturbed Areas:
|(data not available)|
|Ethnobotanical Uses and Other Facts||
Medicinal Uses: The flowers and leaves have long be used in various herbal remedies as poultices, laxatives, and to relieve cough and lung congestion. The Makah women used to eat the violet flowers and leaves during labor. The Klallam mashed the leaves and applied them to the chest or stomach to relieve pain. The crushed leaves were applied only for a few hours because they can irritate and blister the skin.
Food Uses: The flowers can be eaten and used in salads, potherbs, or tea. Some violet species are used for decoration on certain types of food such as cake. In the southern US the leaves are often added to soups as a thickening agent.
- Alden, P., D. Paulson. 1998. National Audubon Society, Field Guide to the Pacific Northwest. Chanticleer Press. Page 164.
- Gunther, E. 1973. 2nd ed. Ethnobotany of Western Washington. University of Washington Press. Page 40.
- Hitchcock, C.L., A. Cronquist. 1973. Vascular Plants of the Pacific Northwest. University of Washington Press. Page 298.
- Jacobson A.L. 2001. Wild Plants of Greater Seattle. Published by author. Page 456.
- Link, R. 1999. Landscaping for Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest. University of Washington Press. Page 224.
- Lyons, C., W. Merilees. Trees and Shrubs to Know in Washington and British Columbia. Lone Pine Publishing. Page 315.
- Pojar, J., A. Mackinnon. 1994. Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Lone Pine Publishing. Page 201.
The landscaping and restoration information provided on this page is taken from the Starflower Foundation Image Herbarium. All photographs © Starflower Foundation unless otherwise noted. | <urn:uuid:b049af9b-60e4-4988-94f3-4e181c7adfef> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://wnps.org/landscaping/herbarium/pages/viola-adunca.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395548.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00003-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.764457 | 661 | 3.203125 | 3 |
From YouTube, produced by TVOntario
Eureka! shows viewers how a pulley works to lift a heavy object. If you double the number of ropes supporting the weight, you double the mechanical advantage. Eureka was a series of short cartoons on physics that ran on public television in the 1980's. The video explains the concept in simple and well illustrated way. Good for students of any elementary school level. | <urn:uuid:a335eade-a2b6-4d84-b296-89f789fd7782> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.watchknowlearn.org/Video.aspx?VideoID=7241&CategoryID=1745 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403502.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00187-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951213 | 85 | 3.109375 | 3 |
Understanding eLearning is simple. eLearning is learning utilizing electronic technologies to access educational curriculum outside of a traditional classroom. In most cases, it refers to a course, program or degree delivered completely online.
There are many terms used to describe learning that is delivered online, via the internet, ranging from Distance Education, to computerized electronic learning, online learning, internet learning and many others. We define eLearning as courses that are specifically delivered via the internet to somewhere other than the classroom where the professor is teaching. It is not a course delivered via a DVD or CD-ROM, video tape or over a television channel. It is interactive in that you can also communicate with your teachers, professors or other students in your class. Sometimes it is delivered live, where you can “electronically” raise your hand and interact in real time and sometimes it is a lecture that has been prerecorded. There is always a teacher or professor interacting /communicating with you and grading your participation, your assignments and your tests. eLearning has been proven to be a successful method of training and education is becoming a way of life for many citizens in North Carolina.
To find out more about eLearning, simply select from the links on the left menu. | <urn:uuid:414d98f3-f66a-4e38-ab6f-eee7601d92a6> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.elearningnc.gov/about_elearning/what_is_elearning/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783400031.51/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155000-00043-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954473 | 252 | 3.25 | 3 |
Through the use of specially prepared and actively-based curriculum, teachers are trained to use RCCP lessons during a four day, introductory workshop. The workshop provides teachers with an opportunity to think about the ways they perceive conflict, examine their styles for handling disputes, classroom management, as well as, anger management skills. RCCP stresses that teachers must model the behavior students are expected to imitate.
Each trained teacher using the RCCP curriculum receives staff development visits from RCCP trained Staff Developers. These visits are considered a crucial component of the program because they provide support to teachers as they prepare to incorporate program concepts into their standard teaching practice. Questions regarding instructional style and methodology, as well as approaches to discipline are discussed on a one-to-one basis. Staff developers co-teach lessons to further illustrate ways for the teacher to deliver classroom instruction in conflict resolution more effectively.
Based on teacher, student, parent referral, a specially selected group of students with a minimum of two faculty sponsors are trained off site in advanced conflict resolution skills. A minimum of 18 hours are devoted to intense, experiential activities and dialogue facilitated by N.O. RCCP senior staff. The training, which culminates in a formal graduation ceremony, equips students with skills to assist their peers in resolving conflicts without violence during school and recessional periods.
It is essential that parents understand and support the RCCP model. To ensure that new behaviors are reinforced in the home, parents attend a two day workshop to learn the same skills taught to students and school staff. Participation in the workshop experience enables parents to think about the way they deal with conflict and anger, as well as how their children may be imitating their behavior. The workshops assists parents in not only understanding and committing to altering their behavior, but supporting their children's attempts at peaceful resolution to conflict in the larger school and community.
Research data has shown that in order for RCCP to be fully implemented and sustained over time, on-site leadership beginning with the principal is a necessary component for program success. In addition, school leaders face daily challenges which provide multiple opportunities to model skills not only for staff, but also for students. RCCP offers leadership training and coaching for leaders who "not only want to talk the talk, but want to walk the walk."
Administration leadership, though a very important aspect of school leadership, benefits from the support of others when working to change the school environment. Because the school environment includes everyone with whom the student is likely to come into contact with during the day. It is crucial that parents, custodial, dietary staff, social workers, counselors and community partners be trained in the model so that everyone is speaking the same language and modeling appropriate behavior. | <urn:uuid:e6119977-5105-4090-ae19-b3fcada4c037> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://loyno.edu/twomey/conflict-resolution-program-core-components | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399117.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00072-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969451 | 556 | 3.03125 | 3 |
A publication of the Archaeological Institute of America
For the past decade, Afghans have been asking the world to protect what remains of their cultural heritage. A Swiss museum tried to do something before it was too late.
Along the main highway between Zürich and Basel, chemical plants and lumberyards are slung across the hills, and the occasional nuclear plant sends roils of steam along the treetops. In this unlikely Swiss landscape is an even more unlikely museum, housed in a white, three-story compound off the main street in the village of Bubendorf, population 4,400. It's discreet among the centuries-old wooden buildings and stuccoed taverns clustered around it, and unless you catch a flash of an elaborately embroidered caftan in a window--almost riotously creative against the clean, orderly lines of the village--you'll pass right by the Afghanistan Museum.
The low profile of this museum, established under a most unusual agreement between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance in 1998, is deceptive, for its mission presents a direct challenge to the international heritage community's near-sacred policy of keeping objects of archaeological and cultural importance in their country of origin, regardless of the depths of chaos and destruction that country has fallen into.
The force behind the museum is Swiss architect Paul Bucherer-Dietschi, who, despite criticism from scholars and reluctance from international organizations, refused to ignore entreaties from Afghan political leaders and archaeologists to find a safe haven for the country's cultural treasures while the country fell apart during decades of war. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in March of 2001 ("Cultural Terrorism," May/June 2001) has swung popular opinion to Bucherer's side, and organizations like UNESCO, which did not initially endorse the idea, are re-evaluating their policies on safeguarding cultural heritage.
Kristin M. Romey is managing editor of ARCHAEOLOGY. | <urn:uuid:a7585959-cb2e-4383-a493-010480e731f8> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://archive.archaeology.org/0205/abstracts/afghan.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397213.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00052-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941356 | 395 | 2.640625 | 3 |
The most common species of bumblebee are not fussy about a plant’s origin when searching for nectar and pollen among the nation’s urban gardens according to a study by ecologists at Plymouth University.
But other species – in particular long-tongued bees – do concentrate their feeding upon plants from the UK and Europe, for which they have developed a preference evolved over many millennia.
Dr Mick Hanley, Lecturer in Ecology at Plymouth University, said the study showed the continued importance of promoting diversity and encouraging gardeners to cast their net wide when choosing what to cultivate.
“Urban gardens are increasingly recognised for their potential to maintain or even enhance biodiversity,” Dr Hanley said. “In particular, the presence of large densities and varieties of flowering plants supports a number of pollinating insects whose range and abundance has declined as a consequence of agricultural intensification and habitat loss. By growing a variety of plants from around the world, gardeners ensure that a range of food sources is available for many different pollinators. But until now we have had very little idea about how the origins of garden plants actually affect their use by our native pollinators.”
The findings of this study were backed up by preliminary results from the Royal Horticultural Society's Plants for Bugs research project.
The four-year study is the first field research project designed to find out if native or non-native garden plants are best at supporting wildlife – with the term ‘native plants’ referring to those species which arrived in Britain after the ice age without the assistance of humans.
At a conference held by the RHS and Wildlife Gardening Forum this week scientists said provisional analysis of the data indicated that all garden plant combinations (native and non-native) support abundant and diverse invertebrate wildlife.
However RHS entomologist Andrew Salisbury said analysis was at a very early stage and the data needed to be investigated in greater detail before firm conclusions and advice could be provided to wildlife gardeners.
Click here for more advice on gardening for bees. | <urn:uuid:af37754f-b02f-45d2-90e7-8b8e70ea5c01> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://bumblebeeconservation.org/news/archive/2014/03 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391634.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00128-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953283 | 422 | 3.578125 | 4 |
Mankind has been making plans to live on the moon since well before the first human set foot on the satellite. To many scientists, a human colony on the moon makes sense for a number of reasons. If you thought that setting up neighborhoods out there was the stuff of science fiction, think again: by 2012, we’ll see the first moon garden.
Paragon Space Development Corporation and Odyssey Moon have recently joined forces to compete for the Google Lunar X Prize: the contest that will award $30 million to the first private company to land on the moon by 2012. Their plan is to send a small pressurized greenhouse to the lunar surface containing a seed, soil, water and carbon dioxide. The seed will grow to maturity and go to seed itself while on the moon, completing its life cycle and showing that, with the right equipment, it is possible to grow gardens in space.
The plant used for the experiment will be in the Brassica family (a relative of cabbage), giving it a very short growing cycle. It will only need approximately 14 days of sun to go from seed, through maturity, to releasing its own seeds. The special greenhouse will remove the waste oxygen produced by the plant during its growing cycle while providing it with everything it needs to be healthy. If successful, this small moon garden will be a giant leap toward colonizing the moon. | <urn:uuid:e2c03110-8bd6-474d-86dd-3fd18f6f8983> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://gajitz.com/astro-plant-if-you-believe-they-put-a-plant-on-the-moon/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393463.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00164-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956016 | 275 | 3.984375 | 4 |
32% of the world's fisheries are overexploited, depleted or recovering, which threatens the health, economy, and livelihoods of communities all over the world. The global fishing fleet is estimated to be 250% larger than needed to catch what the ocean can sustainably produce.
» Demand for fish hits record high - UN report shows that the global consumption of fish hits a record high, while the status of the world's fish stocks have not improved. [The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2010 UN report]
» Aquacalypse Now - The End of Fish
There are a number of issues that need to be addressed quickly in order to preserve fish stocks as a natural resource. These include among others:
Overfishing, formally defined as "situations where one or more fish stocks are reduced below predefined levels of acceptance by fishing activities", means that fish stocks are depleted to the point where they may not be able to recover. Areas such as the eastern coast of Canada and the northeastern coast of the U.S. have fished certain species to collapse, which consequently caused the fishing communities that relied on those stocks to collapse.
In some cases, depleted fish stocks have been restored; however, this is only possible when the species' ecosystem remains intact. If the species depletion causes an imbalance in the ecosystem, not only is it difficult for the depleted stocks to return to sustainable levels, other species dependent on the depleted stocks may become imbalanced, causing further problems.
Access agreements through government deals are helping fisheries in developing nations negotiate better agreements with rich countries that will help protect the marine environment and livelihoods of fishing communities. These local people rely on fish to sustain their health and their livelihoods.
Foreign fishing fleets of enormous size and power from rich countries can overwhelm local people and deplete the fish stocks, causing further harm to the marine environment by disrupting the food chain. The more fish stocks become overexploited, the more fisheries must search for productive waters which are then quickly depleted.
The seafood industry, like all industries, is largely market driven. Seafood consumers are increasingly aware of the threats to global fish stocks, yet greater awareness is needed so that the market demands sustainable products from well-managed fisheries. A potentially powerful intervention is being implemented by organizations such as Blue Ocean Institute and the Monterey Bay Aquarium by publishing seafood guides to help consumers make informed choices when buying seafood. Furthermore, recent legislation requires fish sellers to identify the source of seafood. Some retail outlets such as Whole Foods Market are supposedly committed to preserving the ocean's resources by raising awareness and selling only products from well-managed fisheries. Organizations such as the WWF have worked with corporations such as Unilever, one of the world's largest consumer food companies, to form the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which provides a mechanism for identifying and certifying sustainable fisheries.
Seafood Summit brings together global representatives from the seafood industry and conservation community for in-depth discussions, presentations and networking with the goal of making the seafood marketplace environmentally, socially and economically sustainable.
Fish2fork is the world's first website to review restaurants according to whether their seafood is sustainable, and not just how it tastes. It is brought to you by the people behind the film, The End of the Line.
An independent, global charity, the MSC is headquartered in London and works to promote sustainable marine fisheries, and responsible, environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial and economically viable fishing practices. This is accomplished by the development of a set of standards, the MSC Principles and Criteria for Sustainable Fishing, to assess and certify fisheries. These standards are based on scientific data and were developed with relevant stakeholders. Third-party certifiers are used to assess MSC certified products. The MSC "seal of approval" should allow consumers to purchase fish and other seafood from well-managed sources though Daniel Pauly wrote in September, 2009 in his article titled Aquacalypse Now - The End of Fish:
At first, the MSC certified only small-scale fisheries, but lately, it has given its seal of approval to large, controversial companies. Indeed, it has begun to measure its success by the percentage of the world catch that it certifies. Encouraged by a Walton Foundation grant and Wal-Mart's goal of selling only certified fish, the MSC is actually considering certifying reduction fisheries, with the consequence that Wal-Mart, for example, will be able to sell farmed salmon shining with the ersatz glow of sustainability. (Given the devastating pollution, diseases, and parasite infestations that have plagued salmon farms in Chile, Canada, and other countries, this “Wal-Mart strategy” will, in the long term, make the MSC complicit to a giant scam.)
Take Action Against Overfishing
Feedback & Citation
Start or join a discussion below about this page or send us an email to report any errors or submit suggestions for this page. We greatly appreciate all feedback!
Help Protect and Restore Ocean Life
Help us protect and restore marine life by supporting our various online community-centered marine conservation projects that are effectively sharing the wonders of the ocean with millions each year around the world, raising a balanced awareness of the increasingly troubling and often very complex marine conservation issues that affect marine life and ourselves directly, providing support to marine conservation groups on the frontlines that are making real differences today, and the scientists, teachers and students involved in the marine life sciences.
With your support, most marine life and their ocean habitats can be protected, if not restored to their former natural levels of biodiversity. We sincerely thank our thousands of members, donors and sponsors, who have decided to get involved and support the MarineBio Conservation Society. | <urn:uuid:91e4b243-2e57-4523-8d5e-3e4c8fa682db> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://marinebio.org/oceans/conservation/sustainable-fisheries/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395166.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00021-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943552 | 1,170 | 3.46875 | 3 |
In his 1963 paper `On the design of machine independent programming languages' Dijkstra explained why he wanted to avoid using case distinctions in the design of a programming language. For example, a programming language that allows a procedure to call another procedure but not itself was unneeded sophistication according to Dijkstra. Such a restriction not only complicates the definition of the language (by introducing a case distinction), it also complicates the task of implementing the language. Details are presented in my `Dijkstra's Rallying Cry ...' article. See also my previous post on the case distinctions of Irons and Feurzeig.
Almost 20 years later, Dijkstra explained why case distinctions are preferably also avoided when reasoning mathematically. Consider the following example:
- Let each of the 15 edges of a complete 6-graph be either red or blue.
- 3 of the nodes form a "monochrome triangle" when the 3 edges connecting them are of the same color.
- Prove the existence of at least one monochrome triangle.
It is very tempting to start the proof by taking an arbitrary node and giving it a name X and to then enumerate over different cases as follows:
Among the 5 edges meeting X, one of the two colors, say red, dominates. Let XP, XQ, and XR be three red edges.
+ Case 1: Triangle PQR has a red edge, PQ say. Then triangle XPQ is monochrome red.
+ Case 2: Triangle PQR has no red edge. Then triangle PQR is monochrome blue.
Dijkstra was unsatisfied with the above proof because it destroys the intrinsic symmetries of the problem. Saying that the color red dominates over the color blue destroys the symmetry between the two colors. Furthermore, naming one node X and another node P destroys the symmetry between the nodes as well.
To exploit the aforementioned symmetries, Dijkstra introduced the following definitions:
- Call two edges of different color and having one node in common a "mixed V" meeting at that node.
- Call a triangle "bichrome" if it is not a monochrome triangle.
In this particular problem there is no need to distinguish between the nodes (and giving them a unique name). Just take an arbitrary node, notice that it has 5 edges, and hence, note that at most 2*3 = 6 mixed V's meet at that node. Continue as follows:
- Since there are 6 nodes, there are at most 6*6 = 36 mixed V's.
- Each mixed V occurs in one bichrome triangle.
- Each bichrome triangle contains two mixed V's.
- Hence, there are at most 36/2 = 18 bichrome triangles.
- The total number of distinct triangles is (6*5*4) / (3*2*1) = 20.
Hence, there are at least 20 - 18 = 2 monochrome triangles.
Dijkstra's point is that by recognizing and exploiting the symmetries of the problem at hand, the proof becomes simpler and hence easier to conduct. The word "simpler" here refers to less case distinctions (and hence to "generality"). The word "easier" refers to the virtue that the proof has less of an invitation to visualization. (My personal experience is that I have indeed had to draw much less in order to understand Dijkstra's proof compared with the first proof.)
To summarize in Dijkstra's own words:
Being of equal or of different colour are the only functions that are invariant under colour inversion --- note that, accordingly, in the last proof the colours themselves are not mentioned at all! --- ; furthermore somewhere the topology of the complete 6-graph has to be taken into account, hence the notion of a V, hence the mixed V. [...] Similarly the last proof fully maintains the symmetry between the nodes (to the extent that they too remain anonymous). Its final virtue is that it is much less of an invitation to visualization. [EWD803, p.21] | <urn:uuid:8b6577c5-1723-4231-badf-038cc96e83d3> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://dijkstrascry.com/comment/693 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393442.26/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00200-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92412 | 852 | 3.4375 | 3 |
1. A syndrome that occurs in many women from 2 to 14 days before the onset of menstruation.
4. Law intended to eradicate organized crime by establishing strong sanctions and forfeiture provisions.
8. 100 pyas equal 1 kyat.
11. Of or relating to or characteristic of Thailand of its people.
12. Common Indian weaverbird.
13. The basic unit of money in Albania.
14. Title for the former hereditary monarch of Iran.
15. The rate at which energy is drawn from a source that produces a flow of electricity in a circuit.
16. Consisting of or made of wood of the oak tree.
17. A metric unit of volume or capacity equal to 10 liters.
20. A rare silvery (usually trivalent) metallic element.
21. Extremely pleasing.
24. Rare (usually fatal) brain disease (usually in middle age) caused by an unidentified slow virus.
26. Small European freshwater fish with a slender bluish-green body.
28. By bad luck.
31. A radioactive element of the actinide series.
32. A flat wing-shaped process or winglike part of an organism.
35. Offering fun and gaiety.
39. A colorless and odorless inert gas.
40. The blood group whose red cells carry both the A and B antigens.
41. The capital and chief port of Qatar.
44. Relating to or characteristic of or occurring on land.
46. An international organization of European countries formed after World War II to reduce trade barriers and increase cooperation among its members.
48. A light touch or stroke.
49. (law) A comprehensive term for any proceeding in a court of law whereby an individual seeks a legal remedy.
50. A condition (mostly in boys) characterized by behavioral and learning disorders.
51. Title for a civil or military leader (especially in Turkey).
52. An Arabic speaking person who lives in Arabia or North Africa.
1. An anxiety disorder associated with serious traumatic events and characterized by such symptoms as guilt about surviving or reliving the trauma in dreams or numbness and lack of involvement with reality or recurrent thoughts and images.
2. A member of the Siouan people formerly living in the Missouri river valley in NE Nebraska.
3. The granite-like rocks that form the outermost layer of the earth's crust.
4. A soft silvery metallic element of the alkali metal group.
5. The United Nations agency concerned with atomic energy.
6. Any of various plants of the genus Cymbidium having narrow leaves and a long drooping cluster of numerous showy and variously colored boat-shaped flowers.
7. An awkward stupid person.
8. The noise of a rounded object dropping into a liquid without a splash adv.
9. Not only so, but.
10. A town and port in northwestern Israel in the eastern Mediterranean.
18. Resinlike substance secreted by certain lac insects.
19. Tropical starchy tuberous root.
22. A silvery ductile metallic element found primarily in bauxite.
23. Any of numerous local fertility and nature deities worshipped by ancient Semitic peoples.
25. 35th President of the United States.
27. A loose sleeveless outer garment made from aba cloth.
29. Someone who works (or provides workers) during a strike.
30. Counting the number of white and red blood cells and the number of platelets in 1 cubic millimeter of blood.
33. East Indian tart yellow berrylike fruit.
34. A unit of dry measure used in Egypt.
36. In bed.
37. An amino acid that is found in the central nervous system.
38. Type genus of the Alcidae comprising solely the razorbill.
39. Cut off from a whole.
42. An agency of the United Nations affiliated with the World Bank.
43. 10 grams.
45. A river in north central Switzerland that runs northeast into the Rhine.
47. Being one hundred more than three hundred. | <urn:uuid:743e08f4-43fe-4226-857d-1cbeb4762ca0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.crosswordpuzzlegames.com/puzzles/gt_943.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396945.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00026-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.876859 | 865 | 2.578125 | 3 |
What's the Latest Development?
To the phenomena of sleepwalking and sleep-driving we can now add a new activity: the practice of texting while asleep. Villanova University nursing professor Elizabeth Dowdell has researched sleep-texting and found that young people, who are all but glued to their smartphones, are particularly susceptible. In a survey of 300 college students, she learned that as many as 35 percent had sleep-texted, and more than 50 percent admitted that technology had a negative effect on their sleep habits.
What's the Big Idea?
Although, comparatively speaking, sleep-texting is harmless, anything that interrupts sleep on a regular basis has negative health consequences, says sleep disorder specialist Josh Werber. Sleep-texting appears to take place before a person enters the deep sleep necessary for physical and mental restoration. Also, according to a Pew survey, at least four out of every five teenagers sleeps next to their phone. Werber and Dowdell both suggest creating some sort of separation, either by putting the phone out of reach, silencing it, or turning it off. "Maybe we don't need to be connected 24-7 – maybe it's better to be connected 18-7," says Dowdell.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com | <urn:uuid:32d32d45-6bc9-4ff0-bade-df96261b3292> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/something-else-more-people-are-doing-while-asleep-texting | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397695.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00065-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966581 | 258 | 3.34375 | 3 |
Fox Hollies, Sutton Coldfield
B76 - Grid reference SP147943
Fox Hollies lies on Fox Hollies Road opposite Signal Hayes Road to the east of Sutton Coldfield. The house of the same name is a Grade II Listed building. The complex of buildings here were the centre of a farming estate and date from different periods. The house itself is probably early Victorian.
The origin of the name is unknown, but may well be topographical unlike Fox Hollies in Acocks Green, which includes Fox as a surname.
A number of flints have been discovered in fields near Fox Hollies in recent years dating from the New Stone Age c4000 BC - c2500 BC. The finds included flint cores, ie. the stone left after tools had been made from the outer layers. A flint scraper was also found which had been retouched as a knife. In earlier times tools tended to be made from whatever stone was locally available. Neolithic flint tools, however, were usually made from larger pieces of higher quality flint imported from chalk areas where it had been mined. The presence of flint cores implies a site of tool manufacture and therefore of settlement in the immediate area. As the Neolithic period saw the introduction of agriculture, the site here may have been farmed perhaps for over 5000 years. east of the junction of Fox Hollies Road/ Webster Way a Bronze Age burnt mound has been discovered.
Shards of medieval pottery dating from the 13th and 14th centuries have been found during archaeological fieldwalking. This is common around medieval settlement sites, where broken pottery was thrown onto the compost/ dung heap with the household waste and then later scattered onto the fields as fertiliser. Some of the farms here were assarts, the medieval enterprise of individual farmers, However, co-operative farming is also represented by extensive ridge and furrow east of the roads junction stretching as far as the A38. These earth features are the remnants of the strip farming system.
William Dargue 21.01.09/ 16.10.2012
Google Maps - If you lose the original focus of the Google map, press function key F5 on your keyboard to refresh the screen. The map will then recentre on its original location.
For 19th-century Ordnance Survey maps of Birmingham go to British History Online.
Map below reproduced from Andrew Rowbottom’s website of Old Ordnance Survey maps Popular Edition, Birmingham 1921.
Click the map to link to that website. | <urn:uuid:7346b0a5-6c80-43de-b3b1-29ba8d2038e9> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://billdargue.jimdo.com/placenames-gazetteer-a-to-y/places-f/fox-hollies-sutton-coldfield/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396147.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00141-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966496 | 515 | 2.6875 | 3 |
A: That's pretty demoralizing. Deer are incredibly voracious feeders, but they're also prolific poopers as you're finding out - on average 94 pellets at a time and 13 times a day, according to one intrepid study.
In small to moderate amounts, the droppings on the lawn should help. Deer manure is a good source of nitrogen that lawns need as their leading nutrient. The problem is that deer aren't as accurate as Scott fertilizer spreaders. Areas where they dump a lot can suffer nitrogen overload (potential burning of the grass) and maybe even a smothering of the grass where piles block sunlight. Meanwhile, areas in between dumps get little to no nutrient benefit. That can lead to alternating patches of green and dense vs. thin and yellow/green.
If you can rake out the piles to create a thin, continuous layer of deer manure across the lawn, that should be a lawn plus. At least that would be some consolation for the loss of so much of your landscaping. (Actually, those little piles are what's left of your landscaping.)
On the other hand, if you've got way more than that, you ought to rake the droppings into the woods or collect them to dump in the woods or bury them.
Most of the time, deer manure is safe to compost - especially if you hot-compost (use techniques so the compost is hot while breaking down) or if let it break down for a year. Don't use any fresh manure on a vegetable garden. Occasionally deer poop can carry the human-infectious type of e.coli, so take precautions not to track poop into the house or get it on your hands and clothes. | <urn:uuid:4b48c4f9-a8ed-4f70-8c08-a8b6ed80a9d7> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://blog.pennlive.com/gardening/2009/01/deep_in_deer_doodoo.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403508.34/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00137-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950161 | 351 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Walnuts and Its Health Benefits
Come winter and markets are abuzz with nuts and dried fruits. Walnut is always associated with a small hammer my mom used to sit with and break the hard shells off this wonder food. The reason I avoided eating walnuts during my childhood days. I was more for pine nuts with thin and delicate shells.
Now that there is good quality of shelled walnuts available in the market, this health nut is a must in my pantry especially in the baking goodies.
Composition: The inside kernel of walnut with all the folds and curves, resembles the anatomy of human brain. The shell is hard or delicate depending upon the variety of walnuts.
- Omega 3 the key component present in this wonder nuts is what has made this nut a very sought after food. Omega 3 is a type of essential oil which our body cannot produce by itself.
- The presence of Omega 3 makes walnuts a great food for curing many cardiovascular diseases.
- Good against high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.
- Omega 3 helps curing many skin diseases and is anti inflammatory in nature.
- The anti oxidant Ellagic acid in walnuts is good against cancer and improves the immune system.
- Walnuts are an excellent source of vitamin E.
- The other important minerals present in walnuts are calcium, copper, manganese, potassium, zinc, selenium etc.
- Walnuts have folate and Vitamin B6 in it.
- Another important health source in walnuts in the presence of monounsaturated fats in it. This in turn helps control the cholesterol levels and many heart diseases.
- Thus eating a handful of nuts can reduce weight gain.
Prudent ways to include walnuts in your diet;
- Easy and trouble free way is to have it straight from the shell, as it is.
- Roast the walnuts slightly in a skillet or oven and crush it. Sprinkle the same over your morning healthy breakfast porridge.
- Sprinkle crushed walnuts over you veggies salads to give a crunchy texture to it.
- Make a healthy breakfast by sprinkling the roasted and crushed walnuts over a cup of fresh yogurt and honey.
- Sprinkle them over sautéed veggies.
- Make a dip by grinding walnuts, herbs and some boiled lentils together.
- Walnut butter could be a great spread for sandwiches and pita bread.
- Add the nuts in the mixture for making granola for the kids.
- Baked recipes get a makeover with the addition of chopped and crushed walnuts. Bread, cakes, muffins and walnut cookies are a delicacy.
- Just a tablespoon of crushed walnuts over your favorite ice-cream or dessert can make it taste heavenly.
- The essential oil in the walnuts get rancid very soon. The kernels should be stored in a refrigerator for more shelf life.
- People allergic to nuts should take advice from their physician before consuming walnuts.
- Avoid walnuts which are stored for very long, as it may taste bitter.
- A handful of these nuts is good enough for getting the most out of this wonder food – Walnuts. | <urn:uuid:7dd0b305-208a-450c-a0f9-2ebafa20b01c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://litebite.in/walnuts-health-benefits/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398075.47/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00028-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930967 | 662 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Wonks Potatoe Chips
Wonks Potatoe ChipsThe potato chip industry in the Northwest in 2007 was competitively structured and in long-run competitive equilibrium; firms were earning a normal rate of return and were competing in a monopolistically competitive market structure. In 2008, two smart lawyers quietly bought up all the firms and began operations as a monopoly called “Wonks.” To operate efficiently, Wonks hired a management consulting firm, which estimated a different long-run competitive equilibrium. This paper will cover the benefits of this new monopoly, the changes which will occur in price and output of the product in this particular type of market structure; and market structure that will most benefit the Wonks potato chip company.
A monopoly is defined as a company that dominates and controls a specific industry. Moreover it is a market condition in which a single seller controls the entire output of a particular good or service. A firm is a monopoly if it is the sole seller of its product and if its product has no close substitutes. Close substitutes are those goods that could closely take the place of a particular good. A monopoly is also where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted (Business Dictionary, 2012). An example of this would be Microsoft and Windows.
Monopolies come about for many reasons such as the government gives a firm the exclusive right to sell a particular good or service, a key resource is owned by the firm, or The costs of production make one producer more efficient than many, due to increasing returns to scale–“natural monopoly.” A natural monopoly is when a single firm can supply a good or service to an entire market at a lesser cost than could two or more firms.
Monopolistic competition is a market structure characterized by a large number of relatively small firms. While the goods produced by the firms in the industry are similar, slight differences often exist. As such, firms operating in monopolistic competition are extremely... | <urn:uuid:b920a202-5fc1-44a6-a518-554079fc5deb> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.termpaperwarehouse.com/essay-on/Wonks-Potatoe-Chips/110792 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396100.16/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00021-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966036 | 398 | 3.375 | 3 |
Afghanistan Table of Contents
Although variations may exist between ethnic groups and those practicing different modes of subsistence, the family remains the single most important institution in Afghan society. Characteristically, the Afghan family is endogamous (with parallel and cross-cousin marriages preferred), patriarchal (authority vested in male elders), patrilineal (inheritance through the male line), and patrilocal (girl moves to husband's place of residence on marriage). Polygyny (multiple wives) is permitted, but is no longer so widely practiced.
Within families there is a tendency toward respect for age, male or female, reverence for motherhood, eagerness for children, especially sons, and avoidance of divorce. Rigorously honored ideals emphasizing family cohesiveness through extended kinship networks endow the family with its primary function as a support system.
The extended family, the major economic and social unit in the society, replaces government because of the absence of an adequate nation-wide service infrastructure. Child socialization takes place within the family because of deficiencies in the education system. Thus, individual social, economic and political rights and obligations are found within the family which guarantees security to each man and woman, from birth to death.
The strength of this sense of family solidarity has been amply evident throughout the past years of disruption. Although families may be split and now reside on separate continents a world apart, those that are more affluent regularly send remittances to less fortunate family members. Many urban Afghan refugee families in Pakistan would otherwise be totally destitute. Similarly, newly arrived refugees always find shelter with families already established in Pakistan. At times, single family living spaces will be stretched to accommodate up to twenty new persons because family members cannot be turned away. Similar obligations extend to finding employment for relatives. This at times leads to the blatant nepotism which plagues the aid assistance network in Pakistan.
This is not to say that no tensions exist within the extended family system. Fierce competition over authority, inheritance, and individual aspirations do develop. The violent enmity that rises between cousins, for example, particularly over the selection of brides, is so often present that it has become a favorite theme of countless songs and folktales.
In Afghanistan extended families are characterized by residential unity be it in a valley, a village or a single compound. Extended family households may contain three to four generations including the male head of family and his wife, his brothers, several sons and their families, cousins with their families, as well as all unmarried and widowed females. Nuclear family households geographically grouped within extended family settings are also common. These will frequently accommodate elderly grandparents and single or widowed aunts. No matter how they may be spaced, these multigenerational units practice close economic cooperation and come together on all life-crisis occasions. This permits cohesive in-group solidarity to be maintained.
The core of the family consists of the mother-in-law, the daughters-in-law and daughters, with the senior woman reigning at the top of the power hierarchy within the household. In families with plural wives, each wife has her own room, with her own belongings and furnishings; sometimes her own cooking space is provided. The courtyard provides space for joint household activities and entertainment.
Relations between co-wives can be amiable, sister-like and mutually supportive in sharing household chores and in securing favorable attention from the husband, but relations can also be stormy and many men hesitate to take a second wife because of the fierce battles that can erupt. Some co-wives resort to magic to ease household tensions by purchasing a variety of amulets and charms, including dried hoopoe heads and wolf claws which are believed to guarantee loving attention from husbands, peace with mothers-in-law and sweet tempers all around.
The practice of taking more than one wife became less and less prevalent over the past few decades. Few men could afford to do so. Barrenness and a failure to produce sons are common reasons for its continuation. Barrenness is a frightening social stigma, not only for wives but for her family as well. Most men feel obliged to rectify the situation, but because divorce is so repugnant the option of a second wife is preferred by all.
In other cases, multiple wives are taken in order to fulfill familial obligations to provide unmarried kin or young widows with a home and security. Although the institution of the levirate in which a widow is married, with or without her consent, to a member of her deceased husband's family is explicitly forbidden in the Quran, it functions traditionally to stabilize family identification and ensure economic security. By the 1960s the levirate had all but ceased to function in many areas, but it was increasingly employed after 1978 because of the unprecedented number of war widows. The vulnerability of widows too young to have established a commanding status in the family hierarchy is more frequently addressed through the levirate today than in pre-exodus Afghanistan.
While male authority in the family is paramount in all groups, some important differences in male-female interrelations can be noted within rural and urban environments. In the rural areas interrelated responsibilities between men and women establish a bond of partnership that builds mutual respect. Carpet making is but one example. The men herd and sheer the sheep, the women spin the wool, the men dye the wool, the women weave the carpet, and the men market the product. One highly important family activity performed by rural women that is often overlooked is their management of family food supplies. A women, often an elderly member of the household, receives the household's supply of grain following the harvest. She must make sure that this supply of the family's basic food staple is apportioned correctly over the year until the next harvest comes in. Otherwise the family must go into debt, or starve. Household management and responsibility for the upbringing of children thus give rural women considerable authority in their domestic sphere.
By contrast, in traditional urban lower and middle class homes men daily leave the house to work at jobs with which women are not involved and about which they have little knowledge or interest. These women are consequently more rigidly relegated to purely domestic duties of serving husbands and caring for children. Remarkable changes took place among middle class and elite families after 1959 when the government supported the voluntary end to seclusion for women. Women sought education and moved into the public sphere in ever increasing numbers. Nevertheless, working women are still expected to socialize within the family, not with their colleagues at work.
The innate belief in male superiority provides an ideological basis for the acceptance of male control over families. Socially circumscribed and male determined roles open to women are believed necessary to maintain social order, and when women do not appear to be controlled in traditional ways, as, for example, when they take up unusual public career or behavioral roles, this is taken as a danger sign heralding social disintegration. Life crisis decisions about education, careers and marriage are, therefore, made by male family members.
Embodied in the acceptance of the male right to control decisions on female behavior is the dual concept of male prestige and family honor. Any evidence of independent female action is regarded as evidence of lost male control and results in ostracism, which adversely affects the entire family's standing within the community. Community pressures thus make women dependent on men, even among modernized urban families. On the other hand, since the construction of family and male reputations, notably their much valued honour, depends upon the good behavior of women, women derive a certain amount of leverage within family relationships from their ability to damage family prestige through subtle nonconformist behavior, such as simply failing to provide adequate hospitality, or a lack of rectitude within the home.
Afghan society places much emphasis on hospitality and the rules of etiquette that distinguish good behavior toward guests. By disregarding social niceties a person diminishes the reputation of both the immediate family and the extended family or group. Conversely, families gain respect, maintain status and enhance their standing in the community through exemplary behavior.
Since the family is so central to the lives of men, women and children, and since women's roles are pivotal to family well-being, the selection of mates is of prime concern. The preferred mate is a close relative or at least within a related lineage; the ideal being the father's brother's daughter, or first cousin, although this is not always feasible. In reality the process is far more complicated and involves a multiplicity of considerations, including strengthening group solidarity, sustaining social order, confirming social status, enhancing wealth and power or economic and political standing, increasing control over resources, resolving disputes, and compensating for injury and death.
Within this complicated web governing marriage negotiations, other factors must also be taken into account such as sectarian membership, ethnic group, family status, kin relationships, and economic benefits. The bride's skills, industriousness and temperament is also considered and, with all, the happiness and welfare of the girl is often not neglected.
Although endogamous marriage is prevalent in all groups, marriage between ethnic groups have always occurred. Over the past few decades these have increased because large populations have settled outside their ancestral areas, communication networks have improved and industrial complexes have drawn workers from many areas. In addition, political and economic changes occasioned by these developments shifted the balance of various types of productive resources and this led to forging marital links between unrelated and previously unconnected groups for benefits other than expressions of status.
Except in cases in which the institution of marriage is manipulated for political and economic purposes, female family members initiate the elaborate process of betrothal through their own women's networks. Men are generally not involved in the initial stages although sometimes a son will elicit the support of his mother; sometimes a brother will bring about a match for his sister with one of his friends, or even a young man she has observed from the rooftop of her home. Brother-sister bonds are very strong.
Men enter the process in order to set the financial agreements before the engagement is announced. These entail the transfer of money, property or livestock from the groom's family to the bride's family. The large sums frequently demanded should not be seen only as evidence of avaricious fathers. Brides gain status according to the value set for them; too meager sums devalue both father and bride in the eyes of their community. Islam does not prescribe such a brideprice, but does enjoin the giving of mahr in the form of money or property for the personal use of the bride so that her financial welfare may be ensured in the event of divorce. Islamic law does not include the concept of alimony.
In many cases, however, the bride fails to receive her legitimate portion of the marriage settlement. This causes friction, and cases concerning inheritance are frequently brought before the urban family courts, to which rural women seldom have access. In addition, because exorbitant sums are often demanded, many men are unable to marry until they are older. Very young girls, therefore, are frequently married to much older men. As a result young widowhood is common, giving rise to the practice of the levirate described above. Under normal circumstances, however, girls are married while in their teens to boys in their mid-twenties. Cases of child marriage, however, are not unknown .
Every marriage entails two exchanges. The dowry brought by the bride to her husband's home normally equals the value of the brideprice. It includes clothing, bedding and household utensils which are expected to last the couple for fifteen years. Most importantly, the quality of the dowry often influences the treatment and status accorded the bride on her arrival at her husband's home. A majority of the items are made by the girl, in cooperation with her female relatives and friends. The preparation of the bridal hope chest, therefore, constitutes a crucial female activity in every home. The trousseau of embroidered, woven and tailored items is important to the prestige of both families and must be as impressive as possible.
The ratio of inheritance is two to one in favor of males; a wife receives one-third of her son's shares. In practice, women are often denied their rightful inheritance, again causing tensions not only within nuclear families, but among kin groups of the wife as well.
Various tribal and ethnic groups follow practices which are not strictly consistent with Islamic law. Past governments have sought to institutionalize social reforms pertaining to the family for over one hundred years. Using the dictates of Islam, Afghan monarchs since Amir Abdur Rahman (1880-1901) have decreed and legislated against child marriages, forced marriages, the levirate and exorbitant brideprices. They upheld hereditary rights of women, authorized women to receive the mahr for their personal use, and supported the right of women to seek divorce under certain circumstances such as non-support, maltreatment and impotency.
Subsequent constitutions while guaranteeing equal rights to men and women tended to avoid specific reference to women. The Penal Code of 1976 and Civil Law of 1977, however, contained familiar articles outlawing child marriage, forced marriage and abandonment but at the same time combined them with elements of customary laws favorable to male dominance and prejudicial to women in matters of divorce, child custody, adultery and the defence of male honour. A Special Court for Family Affairs opened in 1975 in which female judges participated, but such legal documents were scarcely heeded by the majority of the population because they were seen to interfere with family prerogatives in matters seen to be the provenance of Islam and therefore beyond the competence of secular law.
The leftist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan which came to power on 27 April 1978, issued Decree No. 7 with the expressed purpose of ensuring "equal rights of women with men and ... removing the unjust patriarchal feudalistic relations between husband and wife for the consolidation of sincere family ties." This simplistic decree, like earlier pronouncements, forbade child marriage, forced marriages and exorbitant brideprices. The DRA's social reforms were viewed as a threat to cherished cultural values and an intolerable intrusion into the closely- knit, family-based society and consequently met with early dissent. Rhetoric urging children to defy family restraints and inform on parents was repugnant. Encroachments on family decision-making concerning the conduct of female members was intolerable. The establishment of day-care centers usurped the family's paramount role in child socialization and sending young children to the Soviet Union for education was regarded as a particularly barbarous weapon designed to break up the family through the replacement of stable traditional relationships with fragmented, individualized interactions. As the massive flow of refugees into Pakistan began in 1979, many cited the assault on the integrity of their families as a major reason for their flight.
Decree No. 7 was the first DRA regulation to be eliminated by The Islamic State of Afghanistan on its assumption of power in 1992. To the Taliban, all past legislation touching upon women and the family threatened to undermine the society's values. As such they are anathema. Under the Taliban the sanctity of the family, with secluded women at its core, is a paramount requisite in their crusade to establish a fully Islamic society.
Source: U.S. Library of Congress | <urn:uuid:91412bee-a1ba-4ebd-9e74-5590d826e683> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://countrystudies.us/afghanistan/57.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392527.68/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00021-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966465 | 3,120 | 3.359375 | 3 |
Learn Italian Vocabulary With Babbel
Mastering Italian vocabulary will enable you to communicate with over 85 million speakers around the world. Designed to work according to your schedule, Babbel is the most effective, intuitive way to learn Italian currently available.
The Origins of Italian
Italian is the Romance language that retains the most resemblance to Latin. Modern Italian is based on a dialect that originated in Florence. The version of Italian people speak today became official in the 19th century.
Italian and English Cognates
Italian and English have many cognates, which are words that sound or are spelled the same way. For instance, the Italian word for ‘familiar’ is ‘familiare.’ ‘Musica’ is the Italian word for music. In Italian, ‘diary’ is ‘diario,’ and ‘professor’ is ‘professore.’
Italian and English: False Friends?
Italian and English also have many false cognates, sometimes known as false friends. False cognates are words that are spelled or pronounced similarly in two languages but don’t have the same meaning. For example, the Italian word ‘camera’ means ‘room,’ and ‘parente’ means ‘relative,’ not parent. ‘Confrontare’ doesn’t mean to confront someone, but rather to compare something. The Italian ‘estate’ isn’t someone’s property – it means ‘summer.’ In Italian, ‘cane’ isn’t something to walk with or a hollow plant stem. Instead, it’s the word for ‘dog.’
Italian Words in English
English speakers use many Italian words, sometimes without realizing their true origin. ‘Ditto’ comes from Italian, as does ‘broccoli.’ The words ‘pasta’ and even ‘soda’ were both part of Italian vocabulary first. If you have ever taken an algebra class or read a novel, you probably didn’t realize that both ‘algebra’ and ‘novel’ come from Italian as well.
English Words in Italian
Italian speakers use their share of English words as well. The words ‘weekend’ and ‘welfare’ are popular with Italian speakers, as are ‘shopping’ and ‘privacy.’ ‘Computer’ has also evolved into a frequently used Italian term.
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At Babbel, we make mastering the Italian language intuitive, easy, and most importantly, fun. Head to Babbel.com to learn more about how simple it is to learn Italian with Babbel. | <urn:uuid:9265d656-1118-4792-bc61-924892776959> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://www.babbel.com/italian-vocabulary | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397795.31/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00048-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945274 | 944 | 2.9375 | 3 |
Antique Jewelry: 19th and 20th Century Gypsy JewelryAugust 8th, 2012 by admin
The Gypsy people, also called Roma or Romani, can trace their origins back more than 1000 years to the Indian subcontinent. Gypsy bloodlines and cultures have since proliferated across Europe and most of the rest of the world. During the early part of the 20th century, many Gypsy families arrived in the United States, bringing with them their culture and of course their possessions, which tend to showcase the Roma’s unique skill with intricate metalwork. This skill is easily recognized in a form of rare and now highly valued antique jewelry.
Metal smelting, plating, and shaping skills were believed to have developed among the Roma more than a millennium ago and have since been passed down from one generation to the next. As a result, the most beautiful and prized antique jewelry of this century is often set in or composed of various metals, specifically copper and gold. Gold cuff bracelets and earrings, gold belts, and gold medallions made by Roma are often more valuable then the gold used to make them– worth more than their weight, so to speak. But there are other reasons why these pieces are so sought after, many originating in aspects of the Roma culture and lifestyle.
For example, as a nomadic people, Gypsies historically limit their possessions to what they can carry or wear, so jewelry has become a form of wearable currency. But this exposes items to damage and loss and so, as generations go by, truly antique jewelry can become harder to find. The Roma also traditionally bury possessions with their owner upon the owner’s death, the possible exception being a single ring given to the owners oldest daughter. Jewelry belonging to a deceased person cannot be sold, and even as these restrictions have changed and lifted over the years, it still remains taboo to sell this jewelry within the Roma community. All of these factors contribute to a general attrition of truly authentic antique jewelry displaying Roma metalwork. The current rarity of these items can also be traced to the 1930’s and the great depression which left many families in financial circumstances that forced them to pawn or melt antique jewelry pieces down in order to sell the gold.
A few features to look for when evaluating antique jewelry with Gypsy origins: First, the metalwork. Gems and stones are often set in the pieces, but Gypsy owners typically preferred to invest in gold, since gold is more difficult to counterfeit. Intricate wirework, or filigree, is also a common feature of authentic Gypsy pieces.
Keep an eye out for Gypsy motifs as well, the most popular being horseshoes, hearts, and the head of a beautiful woman in profile, often referred to as “the Gypsy queen.” If you happen to own antique jewelry displaying these images, keep in mind the Gypsy belief that such pieces are good luck to own, but bad luck to sell. This also, of course, escalates the pieces in both rarity and value.
- Erin Sweeney | <urn:uuid:849f6cde-c3f5-41cb-873d-116e8dd2163b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://blog.antiques.com/2012/08/08/antique-jewelry-19th-and-20th-century-gypsy-jewelry/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783404382.73/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155004-00079-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966194 | 631 | 2.75 | 3 |
State Street and the Albany Waterfront
The fertile land on Albany’s riverbanks was cultivated by Native
peoples long before the arrival of Europeans. Early Dutch explorers and
fur traders were quick to take note of the land’s potential as a
strategic location for commerce. In 1614, Hendrick Christensen established
the first trading post in New York State near the present-day location
of the Port of Albany. Ten years later, under the direction of the Dutch
West India Company, the permanent settlement of Fort Orange was built
in 1624. The location of State Street, and subsequently the positioning
of downtown Albany itself, came about as a result of Peter Stuyvesant’s
order that no house be built within cannon range of the fort.
Planning State StreetThe original State (or 'Joncker') Street led up the sandy river bluff from Market Street (Broadway) to the western edge of the stockade. Just beyond, the hillside leveled somewhat and there, in the public space just west of modern Eagle Street, the civic focus of both city and state were to take shape as Capitol Hill. The impulse upward and westward along this short axis symbolizes the colonial transition from the Dutch east (the river, Fort Orange, and the Dutch church), to the English west (the new fort and St. Peters). When the Dongan Charter of 1686 formalized the city's status under the new regime, among the many rights and privileges it granted the city was 'the power, license and authority' to 'establish, appoint, order, and direct the establishing, making, laying-out, ordering, amending, and repairing of all streets, lanes, highways ...'
This could be read as a mandate for ambitious plans, but it was not really so. The Dongan Charter was merely confirming the immemorial privileges that urban corporations possessed to regulate and improve almost all aspects of urban life and urban form, with the public good in mind. From various regulations and initiatives of the Common Council we can read some of their concerns. Precautions against fire were the highest priority of all. Thus 'fyre-masters' (chimney inspectors) were empowered in 1706.
During the century of British rule, State Street continued to develop in its slow, muddy way, taking shape as an ever more impressive civic axis and attracting the residences of Schuylers, Livingstons, and others of Albany's elite. By 1749 Peter Kalm could note 'the street which goes between the two churches is five times broader than the others, and serves as a market place.' Actually at this time the central line of State Street was impeded by the Dutch Church, St. Peters, and the Fort.
After the Revolutionary War, though, the Dongan mandate came to life. Albany was caught up with a vengeance in the 'laying-out' of streets, as it outgrew the old stockades. These efforts took their cue from English Baroque practices. Regular street grids were laid out to be filled in by speculative housing. The rather cramped grid of the Pastures was the first development, taking its alignment from South Ferry Street (1789). In 1794 Simeon DeWitt dusted off and expanded a much larger plan dating from about 1764, renamed the streets after birds and animals (rather than European grandees) and gave the city an ambitious blueprint for its westward growth.
The DeWitt grid extended west from Eagle Street. It was centered on State Street, from which it took its east/west alignment almost exactly. In this way the DeWitt plan confirmed the importance of State Street and provided it with a westward extension (first known as Deer Street). Further widening of State ensued as the embankments of the old fort were dug up. The importance of the public square at its western end was reinforced when Albany became the capital of New York State in 1797.
Having set the alignment for Albany's westward expansion, State Street continued to develop incrementally, by steady improvement and regulation rather than by large planning gestures. For example in 1793 pedestrians' lives were made a little drier as Dutch-style projecting gutters were banned. During his long term as city surveyor, Philip Hooker was concerned with grading, draining, and paving Albany's notorious ravines, and much of this work, too, took its levels and alignment from the axis of State Street, which the Common Council ordered to be paved (in 1792, and again in 1804 and 1828). The fort and two churches were cleared from the median, giving it the character of a grand boulevard with plenty of 'parking' for wagons and commercial activity along the center. Later this generous width was occupied by the rails of horse-cars and electric-trolleys.
It was at the beginning of the 20th century, when urban planning in its modern sense was taking shape, that perhaps the most significant intervention in State Street occurred. The newly installed Republican boss of the city, William Barnes, was concernedólike later officialsóto improve Albany's riverfront, which was a tangle of railroad connections and run-down buildings. The distinguished local architect Marcus Reynolds was a friend of Barnes. They developed a plan for the riverfront at the foot of State Street Hill involving a plaza, a bridge across the tracks, and various waterfront improvements. The crucial piece the D & H building was missing from the concept, and the plan was opposed by local commercial leaders and prominent state politicians. Thus (as noted elsewhere in this exhibit) Arnold Brunner and Charles Lay were commissioned to produce the first comprehensive planning report on the city (1914).
Brunner recognized a fine civic axis when he saw it and he wrote of State Street: '... after trying various schemes for parking in the middle and at the sides, and making designs based on the motifs of other large and famous streets, I have abandoned them all, feeling that it was essential to preserve the character of the street as it is and simply improve it.' He merely proposed wider sidewalks, more elm trees, and better electric lighting. However at the crucial plaza site at the foot of State a meeting of minds between Brunner, Barnes, and Reynolds gave us Marcus Reynolds' D & H building (1914-18). In a magnificent Neo-Baroque gesture typical of City Beautiful planning, this structure closes and shapes the downhill vista, obscures the riverfront, and elaborates on Albany's history in the symbolic language of Flemish Gothic.
The mid-twentieth century was a time of urban renewal, massive highway development, and megaprojects. Albany as a whole was profoundly affected by these trends, but State Street itself was relatively unscathed, except for the development of the hotel-bank complex by old Elm Tree corner, a development that obliterated significant portions of the historic street plan. The Zeitgeist of planning has mercifully changed, and planning thought now strongly values the historical depth, architectural variety, attractive pedestrian ambience, and powerful civic symbolism that State Street so richly expresses. The development plans laid out in Capitalize Albany (1996) and more recent city plans aim to preserve and enhance these aspects of 'the key civic street in Albany.'
Dr. John S. Pipkin | <urn:uuid:762def8c-ce12-4f96-83aa-8a959279d99e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.albany.edu/museum/wwwmuseum/statestreet/riverbasin.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395346.72/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00190-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970486 | 1,504 | 2.984375 | 3 |
Funding tensions, water pollution slow down the most ambitious ecosystem restoration plan in the world
The Everglades is a stunning tropical wetland ecosystem in southern Florida that once stretched nearly 3 million acres from just below the city of Orlando all the way down south to the Florida Bay. It is also, however, one of the most threatened ecosystems in the world, the only UNESCO World Heritage site in the United States that is listed as in danger. In recognition of the immense impact the continued degradation of the Everglades would have on humans and wildlife, the region is now also the focus of one of the most ambitious ecosystem restoration plans the world has ever seen.
Photo by Chauncey Davis
The Everglades supports wildlife and humans alike. Fifty-six threatened or endangered species, including the Florida panther, the West Indian manatee, the snail kite, and the wood stork, depend on it for survival, and it’s the main source of drinking water for more than 7.7 million South Florida residents. Twenty percent of the original Everglades ecosystem has been protected within Everglades National Park.
But the Everglades is under severe stress due to the diversion of much of its original freshwater flow. This freshwater comes from the Kissimmee River, just outside Orlando which discharges into Lake Okeechobee, a vast and shallow lake that overflows during the wet season forming a 60 mile wide and 100 mile long slow-moving river dominated by sawgrass marsh that flows into the Florida Bay.
In the early 1900s, the Army Corps of Engineers began building a network of water control structures to divert millions of gallons of freshwater from the Everglades, in part to save small towns in the region from flooding during the wet season. Local towns and municipalities, too, dug canals and built levees in order to dry out the marshlands, allowing agricultural and land development interests to appropriate large areas of the Everglades for their own needs.
The diversions — which interrupted the natural flow of the freshwater and forced it to flow directly to coastal towns and cities instead of passing through the Everglades — caused several areas of this unique ecosystem to dry out. As a result, the Everglades is now less than half its original size. 1,800 miles of …more
Proposal to rewild cats across England and Scotland moves forward in the British Isles
A wildlife group in the UK is putting forward a case for bringing wild cats back to the British countryside as part of a long-term rewilding proposal, igniting a debate about the merits, and risks, of reintroduction.
The nonprofit Lynx UK Trust has led the charge for reintroduction of the Eurasian lynx, which disappeared from the UK more than 1,000 years ago due to hunting, trapping, and deforestation. The trust has proposed reintroduction of 18 lynx, and is examining potential locations in Aberdeenshire, Argyll, Northumberland, Cumbria and Norfolk counties. Under the trust’s proposal — which will be submitted to environmental agencies in both England and Scotland — lynx could be released as early as next year. They would be observed and monitored for their social, economic, and environmental impacts throughout the five-year trial.
Photo by Tambako The Jaguar
The Lynx UK Trust has launched its own public consultation process surrounding the rewilding project, and has relied on research by AECOM, an infrastructure and environmental services company, to assess the benefits of reintroduction.
The trust believes that reintroduction will improve ecosystem health. In particular, lynx would prey on deer which would help control deer populations and decrease overgrazing. Reduced overgrazing would, in turn, allow for forest regeneration and improved habitat for other wildlife.
AECOM’s research also indicates that reintroduction would increase eco-tourism in the British countryside, and would result in hundreds of new jobs during the trial reintroduction period, and tens of millions of pounds in eco-tourism revenue over a 25-year period. AECOM estimates that for every £1 spent on the reintroduction scheme, £47 will be returned to the UK economy. Some expect that the increased interest in eco-tourism, in turn, will have an impact on local attitudes toward the environment more generally, as residents will become more aware of how their actions alter their surroundings and the habitat of lynx.
But the project is motivated by more than just economic incentives. Jonny Hughs, chief executive of the Scottish Wildlife Trust, which supports the reintroduction project, has suggested that rewilding efforts are closely related to the heart …more
An artist uses her creativity to fight the construction of natural gas pipelines
In June 2015, ecological artist Aviva Rahmani installed an unusual work of art in a forest in Peekskill, New York. She and several dozen volunteers used non-toxic paint to create blue sine waves, the symbol for sound waves, on trees that stood in the pathway of a proposed natural gas pipeline. It would pass within 105 feet of the Indian Point nuclear power plant and carry the fuel under the Hudson River to within 30 feet of New York City. Each painted tree signified a different note. When strung together, they became the overture of a symphonic score by Rahmani named Blued Trees.
Photo by Jack Baran.
“When I looked at [maps of] the proposed pipeline, the first thing I thought of was musical lines,” Rahmani says. “I’ve had a great interest in music my whole life.” The 70-year-old, however, hoped that her creation—installed on private land with the owner's permission—would do more than just expose people to her art. She and a group of anti-fracking activists thought they could fight the future pipeline’s very existence. They hoped that by copyrighting the work, they might legally supersede the ability of Spectra Energy to take the land by eminent domain law (which allows the U.S. government to acquire private land for projects that benefit the public) and install the pipeline.
Rahmani and the other activists are opposed to fracking for the potential environmental impacts such as methane leaks, earthquakes, and groundwater contamination. They want the U.S. government to move away from fossil fuels and invest instead in clean and sustainable energy such as wind and solar power. “I have been intensely frustrated by the lack of regulatory programs against fossil fuel companies and the creeping horror of climate change,” Rahmani says when asked why she decided to join the activists.
Photographer: Aviva Rahmani
The Seed of an Idea
The copyright idea came …more
A visit with Tumursukh Jal, director of one of the largest protected areas in northern Asia
A few months ago, when Mongolian national park director Tumursukh Jal was on an official visit to the Grand Canyon, one of his hosts asked a simple question: “How many national parks do you guys have there in your home country?” When Tumursukh mentioned there were 99 of them, his US colleagues seemed a bit nonplussed. “That many, really?”
Sensitive to his audience’s surprise, Tumursukh* went on to say: “Well, it seems to me that, when you Americans think of national parks, you normally conjure up a picture of one of your own amazing areas, like Yellowstone or Yosemite, or the Grand Canyon here. But you know, my friends, the rest of the world is catching up with you. Before long, we’ll have just as many national parks in Mongolia as you do here.”
Although it might take a few decades for Mongolia to surpass the United States in the sheer number of its national parks, in one way it already has outstripped America. The Mongolian parks now cover nearly seventy million acres, or almost one fifth of the entire country. By comparison, all the American national parks and monuments put together protect only 14 percent of US lands. And unlike America, where the pace of change is slower, there are new parks being created virtually every year in Mongolia. (Read more about the need for new national parks in the United States in the Journal feature “Room for More.”)
Photo by Kerik Kouklis, courtesy of the Mongol Ecology Center
The issue that worries Tumursukh is not that Mongolia lacks enough national parks. Instead, there is almost too much territory to protect – and certainly not enough park rangers and other resources to do the job correctly. This seems to be a problem facing many of the former Soviet bloc countries. Over the last 25 years, countries like Mongolia and Russia have been creating new parks at near-record rates. But now they need to catch up, and recruit qualified rangers and train them for the rigorous work of managing these parks. And to do this, they often need to reach out for advice …more
Isolated population, down to three wolves, strained by rising temperatures and inbreeding
In the late 1940s, Isle Royale’s moose population, which swam to the island decades earlier, welcomed some new visitors: a group of gray wolves. The wolves had walked to the Michigan island from Canada, crossing Lake Superior in the winter when the water was frozen and establishing Isle Royale as their new home. The wolf population grew over the next several years, preying on moose and mating both internally and with new wolves who crossed the ice bridge during the winter.
Photo by John & Karen Hollingsworth/USFWS
Now the wolf population is in trouble, and wildlife managers in Isle Royale National Park, a designated wilderness area, face a tough decision: Repopulate the island’s dwindling wolf population, or allow the species to go extinct on the isolated island?
Managers have a plentiful source of information about the wolves at their fingertips. In 1958, researchers launched a 10-year study to monitor the predation habits of wolves and the wolf-moose relationship on the island. The project, which includes an annual survey of the wolf population, was extended past the 10-year mark, and continues to this day as the longest running predator-prey system study in the world.
At its high point in the early 1980s, the Isle Royale wolf population numbered above 50 wolves, then leveled out at about 22 wolves. But in 2008, wolf numbers began to irreparably decline, and this year, the population dropped to an all-time low of only three wolves due primarily to complications from inbreeding and weather changes.
Rising global temperatures have prevented ice bridges from forming between Isle Royale and Canada — they’ve only formed twice in the past 16 years — so the wolves are stuck on the island to inbreed and the population is becoming unhealthier by the year. Wolves can’t walk over the ice to find healthy mates to breed with, and healthy wolves can’t come to the island.
Wolves are the top predator on the island, and historically, they have helped control moose numbers, saving the remote Isle Royale environment from ruin. With the wolf population down, there’s little to stop the moose from wildly overpopulating the island — which is exactly what’s happening. The number …more
US and Canada working together to reduce summer phosphorous levels in the smallest Great Lake
As summer gets into full swing, the people of Toledo, Ohio, begin what has become a disturbing annual ritual —- the wait for a toxic algae bloom to erupt across Lake Erie. This year, however, the anticipation may be mixed with hope, as state and federal officials take on this persistent problem.
The harmful blooms have a notorious history. In 2011, toxic algae in the open waters of Lake Erie’s Western Basin were 50 times higher than the World Health Organization limit for safe body contact. That same year, levels were 1,200 times higher than the limit for safe drinking water, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In August 2014, toxic algae shuttered the Toledo, Ohio drinking water treatment plant for several days, leading to advisories against the use of tap water in the city. The bloom also led to warnings for Pelee Island, Ontario residents not to use lake water. In total, more than 500,000 people were impacted. And the summer of 2015 produced the largest algae bloom in Lake Erie in 100 years. While it didn’t reach earlier toxicity levels, the bloom covered 300 square miles.
Lake Erie is the 12th largest lake on the planet and provides drinking water source for 11 million people. It’s the smallest and shallowest of the Great Lakes. Ohio, Michigan, and Ontario all border Erie’s Western Basin, which is particularly vulnerable to toxic blooms. While algae are a natural presence in fresh water systems, large harmful outbreaks are linked to excessive levels of phosphorus in the lake waters. Coming into contact with the toxic algae, or swallowing algae-laden water, can cause rashes, vomiting, numbness, and difficulty breathing, among other symptoms. The toxic algae threaten not only drinking water, but rob oxygen from the waters creating dead zones where fish are unable to survive.
The algae problem begins when phosphorus enters the Erie watershed, primarily through agriculture fertilizer and manure runoff. Watersheds contributing to the problem include Canada’s Thames River and Leamington tributaries. In the United States, the Maumee River Basin with its 6,500-mile watershed is the largest phosphorus contributor.
Harmful Lake Erie blooms have been on the increase over the last …more
Study finds increased psychiatric disorders among kids living in areas with higher vehicle emissions
Add one more to the long list of harms caused by air pollution — mental health problems in children.
A new study by researchers from Umeå University in Sweden warns that prolonged exposure to polluted air, especially air containing particulates from vehicle emissions, may affect brain and cognitive development in children and adolescents.
Photo by Jaume Escofet
The study, based on a survey of medical prescriptions given to more than half a million Swedish children, found that the risk of psychiatric disorders increased in areas where the ambient air contained even a slightly higher concentration of nitrogen dioxide — a harmful gaseous compound emitted by vehicles.
“There may be a link between exposure to air pollution and dispensed medications for certain psychiatric disorders in children and adolescents even at the relatively low levels of air pollution in the study regions,” the researchers noted.
For their study, the researchers collated data on prescriptions for a broad range of psychiatric disorders — including sedative medications, sleeping pills, and antipsychotic medications — given to children and adolescents below the age of 18 in Sweden’s four major counties, Stockholm, Västra Götaland, Skåne and Västerbotten over a period of three and a half years, from 2007 to 2010.
They then compared this data to concentrations of particulate matter and nitrous dioxide found in each neighborhood and found that air pollution increased the risk of children and adolescents being given medication for at least one psychiatric disorder.
They found that the risk of children suffering from such disorders increased by 9 percent with every 10 microgram per cubic meter rise in the concentration of nitrogen dioxide in the ambient air. And the risk remained the same even when socio-economic and demographic factors were taken into account.
"The results can mean that a decreased concentration of air pollution, first and foremost traffic-related air pollution, may reduce psychiatric disorders in children and adolescents," lead researcher Anna Oudin, from Umeå University’s Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine, said in a statement.
Air pollution, which the …more | <urn:uuid:f001de33-203b-4281-b544-02a8e3171ff5> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/elist/eij/article/reluctant_warrior/P7/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398216.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00119-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948168 | 3,273 | 3.46875 | 3 |
- Keep records of your telephone calls (including when you get constant busy signals, when no one answers and when you leave a message and no one returns your calls).
- Take notes during meetings (or use a tape recorder if you have one). Don't be afraid to ask people to repeat things if you don't understand, or if you don't get a chance to write it all down.
- Take notes when you talk to someone on the telephone, just like when you meet with someone.
- Write down (or tape record) any information you think you may need later. Don't rely on your memory. You have a lot to think about, and it's impossible to keep all that information in your head!
- When you meet with someone, ask for a business card. Or ask the person to write down his or her name, title, agency, address and telephone and fax numbers.
- Make sure you get the names, titles, agency names, addresses, and phone numbers of everyone who is in a meeting with you. You never know whom you may want to call later.
- Write down your thoughts and questions as you go along during meetings or phone calls. That way, when it's your turn to talk, you won't forget anything you want to say or ask!
- Write down file/case numbers, the names and phone numbers of workers and supervisors, etc.
- When you finish a conversation (on the phone or in person) - review your notes right away and confirm with the person what she or he will do next and what you will do next. Do this before you hang up the phone or leave the office – it reminds the worker (and you) what has to be done.
- Keep extra copies of documents/records you need (such as your grandchild's birth certificate, Social Security numbers, etc.) | <urn:uuid:eb9f6c17-00ce-429e-b541-13ecae545d71> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.nyc.gov/html/caregiver/grandparenting_1d.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393093.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00201-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950262 | 381 | 2.921875 | 3 |
Although West Point — the first military school in America — was founded by Congress in 1802, the first African-American cadet would not graduate from the academy for more than half a century.
On June 15, 1977, former slave Henry Ossian Flipper graduated from West Point with the ranking of second lieutenant in the all-African-American 10th Cavalry.
While he was not the first Black cadet in the school — James Webster Smith was admitted in 1870 but did not graduate -- Flipper spent four years at the academy and was never greeted or spoken to by a white cadet the entire time.
The prejudice at West Point coincided with racist and sexist bias within the American military, which on some levels is still prevalent today. However, the Academy is now fully integrated with women and men of all races with an enrollment of more than 4,000 students.
Follow Dominique Zonyeé on Twitter/Instagram: @DominiqueZonyee
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(Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images) | <urn:uuid:e8f5092a-18f8-48aa-a3b9-4b47931c4aea> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.bet.com/news/national/2014/06/15/this-day-in-black-history-june-15-1877.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397213.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00095-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96737 | 245 | 2.671875 | 3 |
Disaster Looms for Megacities, UN Official Says
KOBE, Japan Earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters could kill millions in the world's teeming megacities and time is running out to prevent such a catastrophe, the United Nations point man on emergency relief said on Tuesday.
Jan Egeland, the U.N. Director of Disaster Relief, said many of the world's megacities, including Tokyo, are extremely vulnerable to natural disasters and the poor were most at risk from a lack of investment and planning.
"Perhaps the most frightening prospect would be to have a truly megadisaster in a megacity," he said on the first day of a disaster prevention conference in the Japanese city of Kobe, where an earthquake killed nearly 6,500 people a decade ago.
"Then we could have not only a tsunami-style casualty rate as we have seen late last year, but we could see one hundred times that in a worst case."
The five-day conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the Kobe quake is also aiming to draw lessons from last month's quake and tsunami that killed more than 175,000 people along Indian Ocean coastlines.
Megacities have a population of 10 million or more and a dense concentration of people, many of them in slums.
"Time is running short for some of those megacities in Asia, in Africa and in Latin America," Egeland said.
"Some of the megacities are earthquake prone, others are prone to flooding, etcetra. We have to have city planning, we have to have development, we have to have investment in the poor areas, because the poor people now are the most vulnerable," he said.
"There is still time to prevent that, and we hope that some attention could be given to the megacities and not just to the countryside, which we normally associate with tsunamis and with flooding and with drought."
As the world's population continues to grow, so will the size of megacities across the globe, stretching resources and the ability to cope with disasters.
According to U.N figures, the top five megacities now are the greater Tokyo area with 35.3 million people, Mexico City with 19 million, New York-Newark 18.5 million, Bombay 18.3 million and Sao Paulo 18.3 million.
But by 2015, the United Nations estimates the populations of the top five will be: the greater Tokyo area at 36.2 million, Bombay 22.6 million, Delhi 21 million, Mexico City 20.6 million and Sao Paulo 20 million.
Tokyo remains a great concern because of its high population, history of earthquakes and impact on the world economy if a major quake devastates the capital of the world's number 2 economy.
Experts say a major quake is long overdue for Tokyo, which was flattened in 1923 by a quake and subsequent fires.
Egeland also said that last month's tsunami, while tragic, could benefit developing nations over time by alerting wealthy donor nations to the importance of spending small sums of money to save lives and property before disaster strikes.
"It has really been a global eye-opener to the devastating impact of natural disasters," he said, adding that he hoped investment would not end when the drama of disaster had faded.
"We have a momentum of understanding, and we have to use that as much as we can to get institutions going and get funds, not only for relief but also for early warning, for prevention and development," he said.
(Reporting by Elaine Lies, editing by David Fogarty) | <urn:uuid:6cb45d8a-6829-41cc-9d7f-4479eeaac33a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/801 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395613.65/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00081-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963447 | 741 | 2.78125 | 3 |
GLRPPR Sector Resource: Managing Wet Weather with Green Infrastructure
Managing Wet Weather with Green Infrastructure
Green infrastructure is an approach to wet weather management that is cost-effective, sustainable, and environmentally friendly. Green Infrastructure management approaches and technologies infiltrate, evapotranspire, capture and reuse stormwater to maintain or restore natural hydrologies. At the largest scale, the preservation and restoration of natural landscape features (such as forests, floodplains and wetlands) are critical components of green stormwater infrastructure. By protecting these ecologically sensitive areas, communities can improve water quality while providing wildlife habitat and opportunities for outdoor recreation. On a smaller scale, green infrastructure practices include rain gardens, porous pavements, green roofs, infiltration planters, trees and tree boxes, and rainwater harvesting for non-potable uses such as toilet flushing and landscape irrigation.
This web site includes basic information, case studies, technical information, and funding sources for green infrastructure projects.
U.S. EPA Office of Water
Date of Publication:
One East Hazelwood Drive; Champaign, IL; 61820; (800) 407-0261; email@example.com | <urn:uuid:31c1876d-a2e2-473e-a745-61e349de7f2d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.glrppr.org/contacts/fullrecord.cfm?sectordocid=2896 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396959.83/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00064-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.841707 | 244 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine studied a total of 133 children aged between two and 15 who had head lice, or Pediculosis capitis.
The scientists described in the British Medical Journal how half of the children were treated with over-the-counter lotions which contained insecticide, while the other children were asked to use a Bug Buster kit which contained four special combs to remove the infestation.
Health experts have expressed concern about the toxicity of insecticide treatments and there is evidence that head lice can develop resistance to them, leading to a rise in rates of infection.
The Bug Buster kit has been developed by the charity Community Hygiene Concern and costs £5.95. The fine-toothed combs in the kit are designed to pick up the head lice and break their life cycle so that they do not return. The Bug Buster kits had a 57 per cent cure rate among children, compared to 13 per cent among those using the lotions.
However, the authors pointed out that even the Bug Buster kit had a four in 10 failure rate and called for more research into the problem.
Last month, communal combs and brushes were removed from the washrooms of the House of Commons in an attempt to stop the spread of head lice among MPs. | <urn:uuid:d2567254-8a86-47fa-9b04-8f7ddd5668ba> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/nit-combs-four-times-more-effective-than-head-lice-lotions-study-says-303756.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393093.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00054-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975149 | 268 | 3.40625 | 3 |
H2O is the molecule everybody knows, and nobody can live without. But for all its familiarity and import for life, aspects of water’s behavior have been hard to pin down, including how it conducts positive charge.
In Science, Yale Univ. chemists report tracing how a cluster of water molecules adapts to the presence of an extra proton, the positively charged subatomic particle.
Water constantly encounters stray protons—in biological contexts, as when light impinges on the eye’s retina, for example, or in purely chemical contexts, as when water is split by electrolysis, or in technological contexts, as in the operation of fuel cells.
The new research results provide long-sought experimental data that advance understanding of water’s ability to conduct charge, and researchers expect the data to help theoretical chemists simulate how positive charge propagates through a more extended 3-D water network. This in turn will shed light on the way positive charge moves in biological systems.
“Getting this right is one of the grand challenges of contemporary physical chemistry research, and we believe we’ve taken a big step,” said Yale chemist Mark Johnson, the lead investigator. “We now have a clear picture of how an extra proton effectively ‘hides’ in a 3-D water network, solving a decade-long mystery raised by earlier work that revealed everything except the lair of that critical proton.”
Scientists have long known and understood how water conducts negative charge (electrons). But showing how positive charge moves through water has been difficult because water molecules are not spectators in the process, Johnson said, but rather “are in fact intrinsic to the effect.”
The researchers used advanced laser spectroscopy and mass spectrometry techniques to identify the presence and movement of a proton in the 3-D structure of the H+(H2O)21 cluster, an extremely stable group of water molecules first observed by the late Nobel laureate and Yale professor John Fenn.
Slow cooling of the water cluster close to absolute zero was key, allowing the nanocrystals (all of the individual H+(H2O)21 clusters) to freeze into the same shape, removing clutter that obscured previous spectroscopic pictures.
The results showed that the cluster has unique infrared signatures for each type of water molecule in the network, from the ones closest to the proton to the ones farthest away. These signatures were specific enough to provide detailed insight into how the proton affects each water molecule, and can be used to test and improve the most advanced theoretical calculations.
“It will be important to follow how these signatures evolve with cluster size and increasing temperature,” said lead author Joseph Fournier, a graduate student in Johnson’s laboratory.
Source: Yale Univ. | <urn:uuid:2402daa7-fabf-46e6-be89-199c2fe4a54b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.rdmag.com/news/2014/06/researchers-discover-how-water-molecules-adapt-presence-extra-proton | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398216.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00015-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.911695 | 581 | 3.8125 | 4 |
Geochemistry of Wetland Sediments from South FloridaEntry ID: USGS_SOFIA_metorem
Abstract: This project is examining (1) sources of nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus), sulfur, and carbon to wetlands of south Florida, (2) the important role of chemical and biological processes in the wetland sediments (biogeochemical processes) in the cycling of these elements, and (3) the ultimate fate (i.e. sinks) of these elements in the ecosystem. The focus on nutrients and carbon reflects the ... problem of eutrophication in the northern Everglades, where excess phosphorus from agricultural runoff has dramatically altered the biology of the ecosystem. Major project objectives are as follows - (1) use isotope and other tracer methods to examine the major sources of nutrients, carbon, and sulfur to the south Florida ecosystem, (2) use geochemical methods to examine the major forms of nutrients, carbon, and sulfur in the sediments, the stabilities of the observed chemical species, and sinks of these elements in the sediments, (3) examine the biogeochemical processes controlling the cycling of nutrients, carbon, and sulfur in the ecosystem, and use geochemical modeling of porewater and sediment chemical data to determine the rates of these recycling processes, (4) develop geochemical sediment budgets for nutrients, carbon, and sulfur on a regional scale, including accumulation rates of these elements in the sediments, fluxes out of the sediments, and sequestration rates, (5) collaborate with mercury projects (USGS ACME team and others) to examine the role of sulfur and sulfate reduction in the production of methyl mercury in wetlands of south Florida, and the bioaccumulation of mercury in fish and other wildlife, (6) develop a geochemical history of the south Florida ecosystem from an examination of changes downcore in the concentration, speciation, and isotopic composition of nutrients, carbon and sulfur; use organic marker compounds and stable isotopes to develop a model of seagrass history in Florida Bay, (7) incorporate information from nutrient studies in overall ecosystem nutrient model, and results from sulfur studies in ecosystem mercury model.
This project addresses three major areas of interest to land and water managers in south Florida: (1) nutrients and eutrophication of the Everglades, (2) the role of sulfur in the methylation of mercury and its bioaccumulation, and (3) the geochemical history of the south Florida ecosystem. Our nutrient studies are focused on using isotope methods to examine the sources of nutrients to the ecosystem, and on using sediment and porewater geochemical studies to determine the rates of nutrient recycling and nutrient sinks within the sediments. A nutrient sediment budget will be developed for incorporation in the nutrient model for the ecosystem. Results will assist managers in determining the fate of excess nutrients (especially phosphorus) stored in contaminated sediments (e.g. will the excess nutrients be buried, or recycled for movement further south into protected areas). The sediment studies will also provide managers with information relevant to the effectiveness of planned remediation methods. Studies of sulfur within the ecosystem relate directly to the issue of methyl mercury production and bioaccumulation, a serious threat to both wildlife and to the human population. Microbial sulfate reduction in wetlands (an anaerobic process) is the primary driver of mercury methylation. Understanding the source of sulfate to the wetlands of south Florida may be a key to understanding why mercury methylation rates are so high, and on how remediation efforts in the Everglades may impact mercury methylation rates. We are also examining the sulfur geochemistry of sediments on a regional scale, with emphasis on areas that are methyl mercury "hotspots". We are emphasizing co-sampling with USGS mercury researchers (ACME team). The geochemical history component of this project will provide information on historical changes in the chemical conditions existing in south Florida wetlands. This will provide wetland managers with baseline information on the water quality goals needed to achieve "restoration" of the ecosystem. It will also provide land managers with an estimate of the range of water quality and environmental conditions that have affected the south Florida ecosystem in the past. Geochemical history data in combination with information from paleontologic studies of the USGS paleoecology group and others will also provide insights on how organisms in the south Florida ecosystem have responded to environmental change in the past, and predict how these organisms will likely respond to changes in the ecosystem resulting from restoration efforts.
Data Set Citation
Dataset Originator/Creator: William H. Orem
Dataset Title: Geochemistry of Wetland Sediments from South Florida
Dataset Release Date: 2005
Data Presentation Form: spreadsheetOnline Resource: http://sofia.usgs.gov/projects/wetland_seds/
Start Date: 1994-01-01Stop Date: 1999-12-31
AGRICULTURE > SOILS > SULFUR
BIOSPHERE > ECOSYSTEMS > TERRESTRIAL ECOSYSTEMS > WETLANDS
TERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE > WATER QUALITY/WATER CHEMISTRY > NITROGEN COMPOUNDS
TERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE > WATER QUALITY/WATER CHEMISTRY > NUTRIENTS
TERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE > WATER QUALITY/WATER CHEMISTRY > PHOSPHOROUS COMPOUNDS
LAND SURFACE > EROSION/SEDIMENTATION > SEDIMENTS
LAND SURFACE > SOILS > SULFUR
OCEANS > OCEAN CHEMISTRY > CARBON
BIOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION > PLANTS > ANGIOSPERMS (FLOWERING PLANTS) > MONOCOTS > SEAGRASS
BIOSPHERE > ECOSYSTEMS > AQUATIC ECOSYSTEMS > WETLANDS
Access Constraints None
Use Constraints None
Data Set Progress
Distribution Size: 0.44
Distribution Format: Excel
Role: TECHNICAL CONTACT
Email: borem at usgs.gov
U.S. Geological Survey 12201 Sunrise Valley Drive
Province or State: VA
Postal Code: 20192
Role: DIF AUTHOR
Email: alicia.m.aleman at nasa.gov
Goddard Space Flight Center Code 610.2
Province or State: MD
Postal Code: 20771
Gough, L. P., Kotra, R. K.; Holmes, C. W.; Orem, W. H.; Hageman, P. L.; Briggs, P. H.; Meier, A. L.; Brown, Z. A., 2000, Regional Geochemistry of Metals in Organic-Rich Sediments, Sawgrass, and Surface Water from Taylor Slough, Florida, USGS Open-File Report, OFR 00-327, Reston, VA, U.S. Geological Survey.
Bates, Annie L., Spiker, Elliott C.; Holmes, Charles W, 1998, Speciation and isotopic composition of sedimentary sulfur in the Everglades, Florida, USA, Chemical Geology, 146 (3-4), Amsterdam, Netherlands, Elsevier.
Orem, W. H., Holmes, C. W.; Kendall. C.; Lerch, H. E.; Bates, A. L.; Silva, S. R.; Boylan, A.; Corum, M.; Marot, M.; Hedgman, C., 1999, Geochemistry of Florida Bay sediments: I. nutrient history at five sites in eastern and central Florida Bay, Journal of Coastal Research, v. 15, Royal Palm Beach, FL, Coastal Research and Education Foundation (CERF), The entire paper is available from the Journal of Coastal Research website at: http://www.jcronline.org/
Journal membership is required for download.
Orem, W. H., Lerch, H. E.; Rawlik, P., 1997, Geochemistry of surface and pore water at USGS coring sites in wetlands of South Florida, 1994 and 1995, USGS Open-File Report, 97-454, Reston, VA,
U.S. Geological Survey.
Jahnke, R. A., 1988, A simple, reliable, and inexpensive pore-water sampler, Limnology and Oceanography, v. 33, n. 3, Washington, DC, American Society of Limnology and Oceanography, Articles in this volume are FREE Access Publications and are available without a subscription.
Extended Metadata Properties
(Click to view more)
Creation and Review Dates
DIF Creation Date: 2007-04-10
Last DIF Revision Date: 2016-01-27 | <urn:uuid:5c66b477-dc9d-4542-b7c4-74ec5fb8f978> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://gcmd.nasa.gov/KeywordSearch/Metadata.do?Portal=GCMD&KeywordPath=Parameters%7CAGRICULTURE%7CSOILS%7CSULFUR&OrigMetadataNode=GCMD&EntryId=USGS_SOFIA_metorem&MetadataView=Full&MetadataType=0&lbnode=mdlb5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399425.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00173-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.773384 | 1,851 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Unless the context in which used clearly requires a different meaning as used in this article:
(a) "Open-pit mine" means an excavation worked from the surface and open to daylight.
(b) "Underground mine" means subterranean workings for the purpose of obtaining a desired material or materials.
(c) "Sand" means waterworn sandstone fragments transported and deposited by water.
(d) "Gravel" means an occurrence of waterworn pebbles.
(e) "Sandstone" means a compacted or cemented sediment composed chiefly of quartz grains.
(f) "Limestone" means a sedimentary rock composed mostly of calcium carbonate.
(g) "Clay" means a natural material of mostly small fragments of hydrous aluminum silicates and possessing plastic properties.
(h) "Shale" means a laminated sedimentary rock composed chiefly of small particles of a clay grade.
(i) "Iron ore" means a mineral or minerals, and gangue which when treated will yield iron at a profit.
(j) "Manganese ore" means a metalliferous mineral which when treated will yield manganese at a profit.
Note: WV Code updated with legislation passed through the 2015 Regular Session
The WV Code Online is an unofficial copy of the annotated WV Code, provided as a convenience. It has NOT been edited for publication, and is not in any way official or authoritative. | <urn:uuid:a9e1a5bd-cebd-4e53-a06a-0f75f2ba8e39> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.legis.state.wv.us/WVCODE/ChapterEntire.cfm?chap=22A&art=4§ion=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783404405.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155004-00092-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927771 | 306 | 3.265625 | 3 |
Developing intercultural understanding and skills: models and approaches
*Subscription may be required
Researchers from a range of disciplines have been theorising and empirically examining intercultural competence and intercultural education for decades. This review article synthesises the research literature about these concepts around three questions: What is intercultural competence? How can it be developed? And how can it be measured? Our aim is to provide an overview of current theories and empirical findings, as well as to show gaps in the literature.
|Publication Type:||Journal Article|
|Murdoch Affiliation:||School of Education|
|Publisher:||Taylor & Francis|
|Copyright:||© 2011 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.|
|Item Control Page| | <urn:uuid:ee493846-7d0a-41e3-92f8-e6a0374af8bd> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/6809/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402516.86/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00115-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.8591 | 155 | 2.625 | 3 |
Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane - a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.
The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.
In an exclusive interview with the Independent, Dr Igor Semiletov, of the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that he had never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.
"Earlier, we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1000m in diameter. It's amazing," Semiletov said. "I was most impressed by the sheer scale and high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area, we found more than 100 but, over a wider area, there should be thousands."
Scientists estimate that there are hundreds of millions of tonnes of methane gas locked away beneath the Arctic permafrost, which extends from the mainland into the seabed of the relatively shallow sea of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.
One of the greatest fears is that with the disappearance of the Arctic sea-ice in summer, and rapidly rising temperatures across the entire region, which are already melting the Siberian permafrost, the trapped methane could be suddenly released into the atmosphere, leading to rapid and severe climate change.
Semiletov's team published a study last year estimating that the methane emissions from this region were about 8 million tonnes a year, but the latest expedition suggests this is a significant underestimate of the phenomenon.
In late northern summer, the Russian research vessel Academician Lavrentiev conducted an extensive survey of about 25,900sq km of sea off the East Siberian coast. Scientists deployed four highly sensitive instruments, seismic and acoustic, to monitor the "fountains" - or plumes - of methane bubbles rising to the sea surface from beneath the seabed.
"In a very small area, less than [25,900sq km], we have counted more than 100 fountains, or torch-like structures, bubbling through the water column and injected directly into the atmosphere from the seabed," Semiletov said.
"We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale - I think on a scale not seen before. Some plumes were 1km or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere - the concentration was 100 times higher than normal."
Semiletov released his findings for the first time last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. | <urn:uuid:61f6bcc6-b9af-4e19-93cd-ad401806f61f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10773020 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392159.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00200-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948929 | 586 | 3.609375 | 4 |
What Are Appreciation and Depreciation?
When you use the term appreciation or depreciation, make sure you’re referring to currencies that are traded in foreign exchange markets with no government interventions. A country may unilaterally peg its currency for various reasons. In the absence of such government interventions, the exchange rate or the relative price of two currencies is determined mainly in foreign exchange markets through the buying and selling of currencies by market participants.
If both currencies are traded in international foreign exchange markets, you can use appreciation or depreciation to describe the changes in the exchange rate.
|Date||Exchange Rate||Percent Change||Terminology (Refers to the Dollar)|
Notes: FRED, St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank. Available at http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EXUSEU/downloaddata?cid=95.
All monthly rates imply the exchange rate on the first of the month.
The table shows that the dollar–euro exchange rate increased in February and August 2012 . Compared to the previous period, the changes in both months imply that more dollars were needed to buy one euro. Therefore, the fourth column refers to these months as depreciation in the dollar. In February and August 2012, there was a 2.54 and 1.04 percent depreciation in the dollar from their respective previous periods.
Because the example exchange rate is the dollar–euro rate, depreciation in the dollar means appreciation in the euro. You can invert the exchange dollar–euro rates and express them as euro–dollar rates. You can see that, in February and August 2012, the euro appreciated.
The following equations show that, from January to February 2012, fewer euros were needed to buy a dollar, which indicates the appreciation of the euro:
All other observation points (March, April, May, June, and July) indicate a negative percent change in the exchange rate, meaning that fewer dollars were needed to buy one euro. Therefore, the table refers to these changes as appreciation of the dollar against the euro.
Check out the graph and apply the terminology for changes in the exchange rates. It shows changes in the monthly dollar–euro exchange rate since the introduction of the euro in 1999. Note that the dollar appreciates following the euro’s introduction until 2001, and then the dollar depreciates until early 2008.
Note the change in the nominal dollar–euro exchange rate, which indicates only the number of dollars necessary to buy one euro. The following figure, on the other hand, shows the nominal effective exchange rates (NEER) for the euro and the dollar, which compare currencies with those of their respective trade partners.
The figure shows an increase in the NEER for the dollar until 2001. This movement indicates an appreciation of the dollar compared to the currencies of major trade partners of the U.S. Then the NEER declines until 2008, indicating a depreciation of the dollar. After a slight appreciation until late 2009, the NEER for the dollar indicates depreciation again.
The figure also shows the NEER for the euro. Compared to the currencies of the Euro-zone’s major trade partners, the euro depreciates following the introduction of the new currency in 1999. But between 2001 and 2009, the euro appreciates compared to the currencies of the Euro-zone’s major trade partners. | <urn:uuid:34f65e2a-0033-4388-a34b-fd5080bd1dca> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/what-are-appreciation-and-depreciation.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402746.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00199-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.918196 | 682 | 3.875 | 4 |
History: What has happened; science
of what has happened.
If you want to know what human beings
are, have been, and may be, in majority,
minority and individually, you have to learn human history, if only to
learn about the sort of mistakes that can be avoided, and how human
beings behaved in fact, which is usually quite unlike their
ideology makes them say or think they
The following are great historians who wrote great histories:
Thucydides: The Pelopponesian War.
Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Burckhardt: Kultur der Renaissance in Italien.
And this is a well-known adequate sum-up by a great historian and
"History is little else but the
register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind" (Gibbon)
What makes a historian great is difficult to say, except that it is a
combination of knowledge, style of writing, and personal
the historian, for he must decide both what facts to present, and how to
An interesting 'potted history' is
John Carey Ed.: Eyewitness to History
that contains many brief selections from 'people who were mostly
there when it happened'. This also happens to illustrate Gibbon's
diagnosis, in a rather systematic way, since it concerns eyewitnesses
reports from 2500 years of human history.
A useful observation about
history and lesson from it, that also concerns plans for
Utopia and more moderate attempts of
trying to improve the world, is that so far nobody has been able to see
as little as 25 years into the future: History shows that all
expectations about the future have been mistaken, usually radically so.
The history of humanity will be quite different from what it is expected
- hoped, feared, guessed, predicted - to be, always excepting the
confident expectation that it will be painful for many as long as human
beings will be mostly as they have been through known history.
main reason why history will probably be quite different from what it is
expected to be is interesting, and tells something about human ingenuity
and intelligence: What has radically upset all notions of what the
future would bring is the progress of science
and technology, that again and again introduced new ways of using
nature, and of helping and harming humans. | <urn:uuid:9e70762d-fade-4c97-b6fb-8db2df221a09> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.maartensz.org/philosophy/Dictionary/H/History.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783404405.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155004-00071-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952342 | 504 | 2.765625 | 3 |
The number 27 is special because it is three times the sum of its digits 27 = 3 (2 + 7). Find some two digit numbers that are SEVEN times the sum of their digits (seven-up numbers)?
Find the five distinct digits N, R, I, C and H in the following
Many numbers can be expressed as the sum of two or more consecutive integers. For example, 15=7+8 and 10=1+2+3+4. Can you say which numbers can be expressed in this way?
Find some triples of whole numbers a, b and c such that a^2 + b^2 + c^2 is a multiple of 4. Is it necessarily the case that a, b and c must all be even? If so, can you explain why?
Take any four digit number. Move the first digit to the 'back of
the queue' and move the rest along. Now add your two numbers. What
properties do your answers always have?
Can you convince me of each of the following: If a square number is
multiplied by a square number the product is ALWAYS a square
Think of a two digit number, reverse the digits, and add the numbers together. Something special happens...
Two motorboats travelling up and down a lake at constant speeds
leave opposite ends A and B at the same instant, passing each
other, for the first time 600 metres from A, and on their return,
400. . . .
Find all the ways of placing the numbers 1 to 9 on a W shape, with
3 numbers on each leg, so that each set of 3 numbers has the same
Find b where 3723(base 10) = 123(base b).
A car's milometer reads 4631 miles and the trip meter has 173.3 on
it. How many more miles must the car travel before the two numbers
contain the same digits in the same order?
My two digit number is special because adding the sum of its digits to the product of its digits gives me my original number. What could my number be?
A 2-Digit number is squared. When this 2-digit number is reversed
and squared, the difference between the squares is also a square.
What is the 2-digit number?
Choose four consecutive whole numbers. Multiply the first and last numbers together. Multiply the middle pair together. What do you notice?
Use the numbers in the box below to make the base of a top-heavy
pyramid whose top number is 200.
A cyclist and a runner start off simultaneously around a race track each going at a constant speed. The cyclist goes all the way around and then catches up with the runner. He then instantly turns. . . .
Pick the number of times a week that you eat chocolate. This number must be more than one but less than ten.
Multiply this number by 2. Add 5 (for Sunday). Multiply by 50... Can you explain why it. . . .
Arrange the numbers 1 to 16 into a 4 by 4 array. Choose a number.
Cross out the numbers on the same row and column. Repeat this
process. Add up you four numbers. Why do they always add up to 34?
Find some examples of pairs of numbers such that their sum is a
factor of their product. eg. 4 + 12 = 16 and 4 × 12 = 48 and
16 is a factor of 48.
Imagine starting with one yellow cube and covering it all over with
a single layer of red cubes, and then covering that cube with a
layer of blue cubes. How many red and blue cubes would you need?
Sets of integers like 3, 4, 5 are called Pythagorean Triples, because they could be the lengths of the sides of a right-angled triangle. Can you find any more?
How could Penny, Tom and Matthew work out how many chocolates there
are in different sized boxes?
Fifteen students had to travel 60 miles. They could use a car, which could only carry 5 students. As the car left with the first 5 (at 40 miles per hour), the remaining 10 commenced hiking along the. . . .
Crosses can be drawn on number grids of various sizes. What do you notice when you add opposite ends?
Some students have been working out the number of strands needed for different sizes of cable. Can you make sense of their solutions?
Watch these videos to see how Phoebe, Alice and Luke chose to draw 7 squares. How would they draw 100?
In a three-dimensional version of noughts and crosses, how many winning lines can you make?
Investigate how you can work out what day of the week your birthday will be on next year, and the year after...
Label this plum tree graph to make it totally magic!
The diagram illustrates the formula: 1 + 3 + 5 + ... + (2n - 1) = n² Use the diagram to show that any odd number is the difference of two squares.
Use algebra to reason why 16 and 32 are impossible to create as the
sum of consecutive numbers.
32 x 38 = 30 x 40 + 2 x 8; 34 x 36 = 30 x 40 + 4 x 6; 56 x 54 = 50
x 60 + 6 x 4; 73 x 77 = 70 x 80 + 3 x 7 Verify and generalise if
Take any two numbers between 0 and 1. Prove that the sum of the
numbers is always less than one plus their product?
Two semi-circles (each of radius 1/2) touch each other, and a semi-circle of radius 1 touches both of them. Find the radius of the circle which touches all three semi-circles.
Imagine a large cube made from small red cubes being dropped into a
pot of yellow paint. How many of the small cubes will have yellow
paint on their faces?
Semicircles are drawn on the sides of a rectangle ABCD. A circle passing through points ABCD carves out four crescent-shaped regions. Prove that the sum of the areas of the four crescents is equal to. . . .
How good are you at finding the formula for a number pattern ?
What would you get if you continued this sequence of fraction sums?
1/2 + 2/1 =
2/3 + 3/2 =
3/4 + 4/3 =
Attach weights of 1, 2, 4, and 8 units to the four attachment
points on the bar. Move the bar from side to side until you find a
balance point. Is it possible to predict that position?
If the sides of the triangle in the diagram are 3, 4 and 5, what is
the area of the shaded square?
How to build your own magic squares.
A moveable screen slides along a mirrored corridor towards a
centrally placed light source. A ray of light from that source is
directed towards a wall of the corridor, which it strikes at 45
degrees. . . .
Show that all pentagonal numbers are one third of a triangular number.
Think of a number... follow the machine's instructions. I know what
your number is! Can you explain how I know?
Try entering different sets of numbers in the number pyramids. How does the total at the top change?
When number pyramids have a sequence on the bottom layer, some interesting patterns emerge...
Think of a number and follow my instructions. Tell me your answer, and I'll tell you what you started with! Can you explain how I know?
Take a few whole numbers away from a triangle number. If you know
the mean of the remaining numbers can you find the triangle number
and which numbers were removed?
Jo made a cube from some smaller cubes, painted some of the faces
of the large cube, and then took it apart again. 45 small cubes had
no paint on them at all. How many small cubes did Jo use?
Can you find a rule which connects consecutive triangular numbers? | <urn:uuid:94dd7cf4-5bd2-4404-ba1e-2e2166eaf80d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://nrich.maths.org/public/leg.php?code=47&cl=3&cldcmpid=1974 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398873.39/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00048-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92236 | 1,694 | 3.671875 | 4 |
Petrified Tree Trunk - OKC Zoo - Oklahoma City, OK
Posted by: hamquilter
N 35° 31.355 W 097° 28.233
14S E 638677 N 3932073
Quick Description: A fascinating specimen of ancient times.
Location: Oklahoma, United States
Date Posted: 11/10/2010 11:57:08 AM
Waymark Code: WMA3HD
Along one of the pathways throughout the Oklahoma City Zoo, outside the Herpetarium building, is a display of a petrified tree trunk.
The plaque states: "Petrified tree trunk found near Berwyn, Oklahoma estimated by geologists to be more than five million years old. Presented to Oklahoma City by Will S. Guthrie, Board of Park Commissioners 1919-1934."
The town where this petrified tree trunk was found is located just East of Interstate 35, northeast of Ardmore, in Carter County, OK. It is located along the Santa Fe Railroad line that ran through the Oklahoma Territory. The town of Berwyn was renamed "Gene Autry" in 1941, as it was the boyhood home of that famous cowboy.
Type of Display: Geological
When posting a visit, please provide at least one photo - including yourself in one of of the photos, your GPSr, or a photo different than the default photo.
Also, please provide your impression of the specimen or display. | <urn:uuid:40468df3-78e7-464d-bceb-66d49c73afb8> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMA3HD | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397567.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00126-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947535 | 297 | 2.640625 | 3 |
More than 2,000 years ago, at a time when Egypt was ruled by a dynasty of kings of Greek descent, someone, perhaps a group of people, hid away some of the most valuable possessions they had — their shoes.
Seven shoes were deposited in a jar in an Egyptian temple in Luxor, three pairs and a single one. Two pairs were originally worn by children and were only about 7 inches (18 centimeters) long. Using palm fiber string, the child shoes were tied together within the single shoe (it was larger and meant for an adult) and put in the jar. Another pair of shoes, more than 9 inches (24 cm) long that had been worn by a limping adult, was also inserted in the jar.
The shoe-filled jar, along with two other jars, had been "deliberately placed in a small space between two mudbrick walls," writes archaeologist Angelo Sesana in a report published in the journal Memnonia.
Whoever deposited the shoes never returned to collect them, and they were forgotten, until now. [See Photos of the Ancient Egyptian Shoes]
In 2004, an Italian archaeological expedition team, led by Sesana, rediscovered the shoes. The archaeologists gave André Veldmeijer, an expert in ancient Egyptian footwear, access to photographs that show the finds.
"The find is extraordinary as the shoes were in pristine condition and still supple upon discovery," writes Veldmeijer in the most recent edition of the Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. Unfortunately after being unearthed the shoes became brittle and "extremely fragile," he added.
Veldmeijer's analysis suggests the shoes may have been foreign-made and were "relatively expensive." Sandals were the more common footwear in Egypt and that the style and quality of these seven shoes was such that "everybody would look at you," and "it would give you much more status because you had these expensive pair of shoes," said Veldmeijer, assistant director for Egyptology of the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo.
The date of the shoes is based on the jar they were found in and the other two jars, as well as the stratigraphy, or layering of sediments, of the area. It may be possible in the future to carbon date the shoes to confirm their age.
Why they were left in the temple in antiquity and not retrieved is a mystery. "There's no reason to store them without having the intention of getting them back at some point," Veldmeijer said in an interview with LiveScience, adding that there could have been some kind of unrest that forced the owners of the shoes to deposit them and flee hastily. The temple itself predates the shoes by more than 1,000 years and was originally built for pharaoh Amenhotep II (1424-1398 B.C.).
Veldmeijer made a number of shoe design discoveries. He found that the people who wore the seven shoes would have tied them using what researchers call "tailed toggles." Leather strips at the top of the shoes would form knots that would be passed through openings to close the shoes. After they were closed a long strip of leather would have hung down, decoratively, at either side. The shoes are made out of leather, which is likely bovine.
Most surprising was that the isolated shoe had what shoemakers call a "rand," a device that until now was thought to have been first used in medieval Europe. A rand is a folded leather strip that would go between the sole of the shoe and the upper part, reinforcing the stitching as the "the upper is very prone to tear apart at the stitch holes," he explained. The device would've been useful in muddy weather when shoes are under pressure, as it makes the seam much more resistant to water.
In the dry (and generally not muddy) climate of ancient Egypt, he said that it's a surprising innovation and seems to indicate the seven shoes were constructed somewhere abroad.
The shoes also provided insight into the health of the people wearing them. In the case of the isolated shoe, he found a "semi-circular protruding area" that could be a sign of a condition called Hallux Valgus, more popularly known as a bunion. [The 9 Most Bizarre Medical Conditions]
"In this condition, the big toe starts to deviate inward towards the other toes," Veldmeijer writes in the journal article. "Although hereditary, it can also develop as a result of close fitting shoes, although other scholars dispute this ...."
Another curious find came from the pair of adult shoes. He found that the left shoe had more patches and evidence of repair than the shoe on the right. "The shoe was exposed to unequal pressure," he said, showing that the person who wore it "walked with a limp, otherwise the wear would have been far more equal."
Still, despite their medical problems, and the wear and tear on the shoes, the people who wore them were careful to keep up with repairs, Veldmeijer said. They did not throw them away like modern-day Westerners tend to do with old running shoes.
"These shoes were highly prized commodities."
Veldmeijer hopes to have the opportunity to examine the shoes, now under the care of the Ministry of State for Antiquities, firsthand. | <urn:uuid:5818f214-2ba7-409d-a6a9-bd6a5e53cd73> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.livescience.com/27464-ancient-egypt-shoes-discovered.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395039.24/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00061-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987297 | 1,113 | 2.921875 | 3 |
The Aesthetics of Loss
The Aesthetics of Loss
German Women’s Art of the First World War
Claudia Siebrecht, Oxford University Press 188pp £65
In August 1932 the German artist Käthe Kollwitz was present at the unveiling of the war memorial she had designed at the German war cemetery in Eesen Roggeveld in Belgium. In itself this was not remarkable, as in the years following the First World War thousands of memorials to the dead and missing were erected in the cemeteries, battlefields, villages, towns and cities of Europe, as societies profoundly affected by the mass loss of life during the war attempted to mark it. However, what was unusual was the intimate nature of Kollwitz’s sculpture. Die Traurnden Eltern (The Grieving Parents) marked a private grief as well as a public remembrance: Kollwitz’s youngest son, Peter, had been killed on the Western Front in October 1914 and the sculpture was placed in the cemetery where he was buried. Thus, Kollwitz’s sculpture is a memorial to the German war dead, a representation of ber-eaved parents and a means of commemorating her son, and her personal loss.
Claudia Siebrecht’s fascinating and timely book, The Aesthetics of Loss: German Women’s Art of the First World War, begins with Kollwitz’s story to draw the reader into the world of wartime and postwar Germany through a study of the visual responses to war and loss of a range of female German artists. Across Europe, artists responded to this new kind of war with new forms of representation: modernist visions by Nash and Lewis in Britain, Dadaism in Switzerland and a reworking of traditionalist iconography among German women artists, who drew widely on images of the Pieta to represent maternal sacrifice. Siebrecht examines the work of 38 women to explore the ways that they were affected by, and responded to, war. Of course these responses were varied, shaped by the impact of war on the individual, by the progress of the war and by the artist’s political beliefs and moving, as the war dragged on, from patriotic representations of citizenship and nationhood to a more personal focus on grief and loss. However, Siebrecht finds common themes and modes of expression in the images and sculptures she analyses, which combined modern forms with traditional iconographical tropes, increasingly focusing on maternal grief, redemptive sacrifice and the hope for a peaceful future. Well illustrated, the stark nature of many of the sculptures, paintings, woodcuts, linographs and linocuts discussed here act as a visual narrative of the multiple demands that the war made on civilians as well as combatants.
This cultural history draws on these public works of art, so redolent of private emotion, both to explore civilian responses to mass death and bereavement in wartime and to expand our understanding of aesthetic responses to this modern, total, war. By focusing her research on female artists, Siebrecht helps to move the historical studies of the First World War away from the male world of the battlefield towards a wider understanding of the impact of, and responses to, this most transformative of conflicts. Sensitively written and carefully researched, Siebrecht’s book opens up a whole range of German sources to an English- speaking audience, reminding us of the universality of grief amongst the bereaved of the First World War.
Lucy Noakes has co-edited (with Juliette Pattinson) British Cultural Memory and the Second World War (Bloomsbury, 2013). | <urn:uuid:4ef84fa2-567c-45b9-9f04-19230a6783bb> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.historytoday.com/blog/2014/08/aesthetics-loss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402516.86/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00066-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954212 | 749 | 2.546875 | 3 |
The uptake of solar power has never been significantly greater than in the past few years in comparison with any other instance in the past. There are far more manufacturing businesses of solar cells and inverters than there ever was before. Solar panels currently cost approximately fifty percent whatever they use to one or two years ago. Government authorities are tweaking legal guidelines to motivate the utilization of renewable energy. Local councils are incorporating alternative energy into their construction codes. Financial institutions are providing ‘green’ financial loans particularly concentrating on the investment of ecologically friendly hot water systems, solar panels, water tanks etc. Solar collectors have become part of the normal landscape in suburbs throughout the world. It seems so many people are getting on the solar train. Then again just what is the value of solar technology to the ordinary household user? Is solar power worth it?
This issue may be answered from several different perspectives. This article is going to seek to supply answers for those who are enquiring from a monetary, environmental and a practical perspective.
The majority will be wondering about the benefit of solar energy from a monetary perspective. Exactly what is the return on my investment (ROI)? The solution to this question largely depends on a variety of factors. The greatest factor affecting this answer is where you reside in the world. Where you reside influences the amount of sunshine hours that your potential solar panel system will be exposed to. Typically, the closer you live to the equator, the more hours your PV system is going to be exposed to the sun on a daily basis. Also, more electric power you system will produce compared to the other parts of the world. Which country you live in, also determines whether you can obtain government financial incentives to put in a photovoltaic system. Consider what your numerous levels of government are offering. Also, do your homework and find what the price is to set up a system. When calculating the time it will take to pay back the initial cost of the install, take into account your electricity use, as well as the forecasted rising cost of electricity in the future. Based on these factors, you will get much more of an idea if solar can pay itself off in the short term, in the long run, or if perhaps even at all.
Secondly, a lot of people are enquiring about the benefit of solar energy from an environmental perspective. Is the quantity of embodied energy of solar technology less than or greater than the embodied energy of other types of power generation? My investigation into that question found that the energy payback for solar technology has reduced from the estimated 20 years back in 1975, to at present a period of less than 3 years. In recent years, there has been a speedy technological improvement in the production of PV cells and panels, such that the ecological advantages of setting up solar power are increasingly becoming more and more apparent.
Additionally, people are asking about the effect that solar will have on them from a practical point of view. For instance, you might have a need to get electricity to an isolated region. The substantial reduction of cost to install solar has made it a real, practical alternative as opposed to other alternate options. Evidently in Australia, consumers are installing stand-alone systems as the cost to set up electrical power infrastructure such as power poles and a transformer is considerable. You may be wondering what the routine maintenance cost is when you own a system. Most PV systems are grid connected. These systems need little if any maintenance. When ever the sun is shining and the Photovoltaic system is producing adequate electricity, excess power is fed back into the power grid. At times when the dwelling requires more electricity than the system can create, the power grid supplies what is required. The inverter as well as the meter take care of it all. Absolutely no interaction by the property owner is needed. However, isolated stand-alone systems require a little more attention. This might consist of the intermittent operation of a diesel generator when ever the battery packs of an isolated system have been depleted due to a prolonged time period of cloud cover.
When it comes to the overall benefits of solar, many points need to be considered. This short article only has begun to skim the surface, looking at three wide-ranging factors.
To help you with your investigation into the benefit of solar power, one site that I have found very helpful is aimed at informing individuals about the important things they need to be aware of when considering solar power for Brisbane, Australia. Despite the fact that it happens to be intended for the locals in Brisbane, the basics should be considered all over the world. Go here now. | <urn:uuid:449a82c0-efc8-411a-b9b8-8f23577551f0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://speedgainers.com/why-you-should-decide-to-purchase-solar-power-panels/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403826.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00031-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958848 | 926 | 3.078125 | 3 |
Here’s a summary of a conversation I had with a student in a lab yesterday. I can’t remember the exact words, but it went something along these lines:
Student (showing me some work): Is this right?
Me: What do you think?
Student: I don’t know
Me: Well, is there anything about it that makes you suspect that it isn’t right?
Me: So do you think you’ve done it correctly? – I mean, what about it suggests that it’s doing what is should be doing?
Student: I don’t know. Is it right?
And round in circles we went. I think from the student’s point of view, he was just unconfident in his ability. But what I was trying to do was to get the student to take the initiative with assessing his own work. It’s all very easy for me to say ‘Yeah, that’s right’, but I suspect if I did my student would be learning nothing from it. Someone doing physics in ‘the real world’ will have to make their own judgements on whether they have done a task correctly. Knowing what to expect, and how things should behave, is a key step to doing any kind of laboratory or modelling work. Put another way, if you are selling a product you need to be able to recognize if it’s faulty. Too often we set students activities that lead them to think that they can always look up the answer in a textbook, website, or get model answers from a teacher, etc – i.e. take away the need for them to do any independent thinking and critically assess their own work.
So, in a lab situation, with an unconfident student, I am reluctant to say ‘yeah, that looks right to me’ without the student first thinking about whether it looks right to him or herself. It’s probably infuriating for the student, who probably just wants me to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but I am sure they will learn more if I don’t. | <urn:uuid:bb9977d2-5ded-443b-9039-79289db717de> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://sciblogs.co.nz/physics-stop/2011/05/10/student-diy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397749.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00175-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976197 | 453 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Food Consumption and Foraging Success of Free-ranging Southern Elephant SealsEntry ID: ASAC_769
Abstract: Elephant seals use a suite of physiological and behavioural mechanisms to maximise the time they can be submerged. Of these hypo-metabolism is one of the most important, so this study quantified maximum O2 consumptions relative to dove depth and swim speed.
From the abstract of the referenced paper:
The ability of air-breathing marine predators to forage successfully depends on their ability to ... remain submerged. This is in turn related to their total O2 stores and the rate at which these stores are used up while submerged. Body size was positively related to dive duration in a sample of 34 adult female southern elephant seals from Macquarie Island. However, there was no relationship between body size and dive depth. This indicates that smaller seals, with smaller total O2 stores, make shorter dives than larger individuals but operate at similar depths, resulting in less time being spent at depth. Nine adult female elephant seals were also equipped with velocity time depth recorders. In eight of these seals, a plot of swimming speed against dive duration revealed a cloud of points with a clear upper boundary. This boundary could be described using regression analysis and gave a significant negative relationship in most cases. These results indicate that metabolic rate varies with activity levels, as indicated by swimming speed, and that there are quantifiable limits to the distance that a seal can travel on a dive of a given swimming speed. However, the seals rarely dive to these physiological limits, and the majority of their dives are well within their aerobic capacity. Elephant seals therefore appear to dive in a way that ensures that they have a reserve of O2 available.
Data were collected on Time Depth Recorders (TDRs), and stored in hexadecimal format. Hexadecimal files can be read using 'Instrument Helper', a free download from Wildlife Computers (see the url given below).
Data for this project is the same data that was collected for ASAC projects 857 and 589 (ASAC_857 and ASAC_589).
Start Date: 1994-09-01Stop Date: 1996-03-31
Access Constraints The data are publicly available for download from the url given below.
Use Constraints This data set conforms to the PICCCBY Attribution License
Please follow instructions listed in the citation reference provided at http://data.aad.gov.au/aadc/metadata/citation.cfm?entry_id=ASAC_769 when using these data.
Also, please contact the investigator when using these data.
Data Set Progress
Distribution Media: HTTP
Distribution Size: 9266 kb
Distribution Format: hexadecimal
Role: TECHNICAL CONTACT
Role: DIF AUTHOR
Phone: +61 3 6226 2645
Fax: +61 3 6226 2745
Email: mark.hindell at utas.edu.au
ANTARCTIC WILDLIFE R'SRCH UNIT Department of Zoology University of Tasmania GPO BOX 252-05
Province or State: Tasmania
Postal Code: 7001
Hindell, M.A., Lea, M., Morrice, M. and McMahon, C.R. 2001. Metabolic limitations on dive duration and swimming speed in the southern elephant seal, Mirounga leonina. Physiological and Biochemical Zoology 73: 790-798.
Extended Metadata Properties
(Click to view more)
Creation and Review Dates
DIF Creation Date: 2000-08-07
Last DIF Revision Date: 2016-01-27 | <urn:uuid:7324c386-2809-433f-9671-d4f076e085f7> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://gcmd.nasa.gov/KeywordSearch/Metadata.do?Portal=GCMD&KeywordPath=Parameters%7CBIOSPHERE%7CECOLOGICAL+DYNAMICS%7CECOSYSTEM+FUNCTIONS%7CCONSUMPTION+RATES&OrigMetadataNode=AADC&EntryId=ASAC_769&MetadataView=Full&MetadataType=0&lbnode=mdlb3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397865.91/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00185-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.882614 | 773 | 2.6875 | 3 |
In a world of depleting resources, the onus to think about consumption is not just on the manufacturer but also the consumer. There are many everyday items that take up natural resources that you might not think about. Take for example your morning coffee – have you ever wondered about the footprint of this little drink we all take for granted? Every sip translates to land, water, labour, food miles and carbon emissions.
Water is probably the most important component of food production. According to a recent article in The Guardian by Jason Clay from WWF, it takes only 0.05 litres to brew a cup of coffee, for example. But it takes a lot more to make the plastic lid (2.5 litres) as well as the paper cup and sleeve (5.6 litres) it comes in. It takes water to process the coffee and grow the sugar (7.6 litres). But it takes the most water to produce the milk (49.4 litres) and actually grow the coffee beans (142.8 litres) needed to make that single drink. Most of the water that goes into the drink is invisible i.e., the consumer doesn’t actually get to see it because it belongs to the back processes of the final product that they hold in their hands. In sum total, it takes more than 200 litres of water to make the average grande latte.
Within the final product, there are several components, each with a different variable. For example, coffee grown in Vietnam may use more water than coffee grown in Peru. A coffee shop only has control over the amount of water it uses within its premises and consumers have even lesser control over the water footprint of their drink. The key to effective production is the relationship between all these variables. Clay states that:
“On a finite planet, we shouldn’t be trying to maximise one variable. Rather we should try to optimise several. For a grande latte, how much land it takes may be key, how much soil is lost, how many greenhouse gases are produced and whether the producers can afford to feed their children with the money they make from producing coffee, milk or sugar are also important. And, it is not as simple as getting a number for each ingredient and adding them up. Each pound of coffee will be different as will each liter of milk. In short, an index would be more insightful than a single number.”
It is a well known fact that we are living beyond the Earth’s carrying capacity. By 2050 we will have 2-3 billion more people and they will all be consuming more and earning more. Therefore, we have to learn to do more with less. Current methods of thinking and resource management isn’t exactly projecting an encouraging picture for the future.
We need to learn to think about our products and resources differently and start setting higher standards for sustainability. Every product should be better than the last in terms of resource use. It is not enough to be ‘less bad’, we need to get better at being good. Being awesome even; because sustainability is no longer a choice.
Image Credit: Coffee. Akhila Vijayaraghavan © | <urn:uuid:26db4d9d-0b98-4a8f-ba69-8c0dcd1f7070> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/08/coffees-grande-water-footprint/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391766.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00020-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956907 | 650 | 3.25 | 3 |
About the Collection
The Stuckenberg Map Collection consists of three 17th century atlases and over 500 map sheets from the 16th through the 19th century. A few of the cartographers represented are: Willem Janszoon Blaeu (1571-1638), Matthaus Seutter (1678-1756), and Tobias Conrad Lotter (1717-1777).
The original maps are housed in Special Collections at Musselman Library and are a popular teaching tool for students of history and other disciplines.
John H. W. Stuckenberg (1835-1903)
Stuckenberg was an Army chaplain in the 145th Pennsylvania volunteers in the Civil War. He held several pastorates before becoming a theology professor at his alma mater, Wittenberg College. A native of Germany, Stuckenberg had a lifelong interest in maps and, on one of his visits to his homeland, purchased the majority of his collection.
Over the years, he and his wife, Mary, became increasingly interested in Gettysburg College (then Pennsylvania College). They not only bequeathed the map collection, but also over 3,000 books, and a desk, secretaire, personal items and maps that once belonged to founder of modern geography, Alexander Von Humboldt. The Stuckenbergs are interred at the Gettysburg National Cemetery.
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Suggest an artiFACT: firstname.lastname@example.org
Curated by Musselman Library | <urn:uuid:9cd1a413-a4e8-4de3-bd4f-d90c38bb1ebb> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.gettysburg.edu/library/m/qr/maps.dot | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393997.50/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00039-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947161 | 313 | 3.25 | 3 |
Dump Now, Pay Later: Coal Ash Disposal Risks Facing U.S. Electric Power Producers
The U.S. coal-fired power plant fleet produces over 130 million tons of coal ash each year, much of which is buried in landfills or stored as wet slurry in more than a thousand containment ponds around the country. Many of these ponds and landfills were built without synthetic bottom linings and therefore leach toxic coal ash contaminants into groundwater. And since 2002, multiple coal ash ponds have ruptured without warning, resulting in disastrous ash spills. RAN’s Coal Risk Update for July 2013 assesses the legal, regulatory, and financial risks facing electric power producers that own coal ash ponds and landfills
Forthcoming EPA coal ash regulations will likely require power producers to close hundreds of coal ash ponds that lack a bottom lining. These closure costs will range from under $1 million to potentially over $100 million per pond and may, in combination with other new coal ash regulations, accelerate the closure of smaller coal-fired generating units. Contamination from ponds and landfills has also prompted several environmental groups and more recently, a major plaintiff firm to file lawsuits on behalf of residents near contamination sites.
This report assesses EPA coal ash pond data and finds that the following electric power producers are most exposed to ash pond failure risk and groundwater contamination risk based on their ownership of high-risk ponds:
|U.S. electric power producers with the most coal ash ponds with significant or high hazard ratings||U.S. electric power producers with the most coal ash ponds that lack bottom linings|
|1. Duke Energy (24)||1. Duke Energy (45)|
|2. Tennessee Valley Authority (19)||2. Southern Company (45)|
|3. American Electric Power (18)||3. American Electric Power (36)|
|4. PPL Corporation (12)||4. Tennessee Valley Authority (28)|
|5. Southern Company (10)||5. AES Corporation (22)|
Unlined coal ash ponds and landfills can leach contamination into groundwater for decades, leaving investors in publicly traded electric power producers exposed to major litigation and regulatory compliance risks. However, the report finds that electric power producers have disclosed very little information about their coal ash ponds and landfills or their plans for managing hazard and contamination risks at these disposal sites. | <urn:uuid:229781a5-6c98-477c-ba59-d8ce59db10c3> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.ran.org/coal_risk_update_july_2013 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783400572.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155000-00193-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923128 | 496 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Zhang Leads Group’s Discovery of Atom Movement Rules in Ionic Glass Material
The way that atoms move within a class of network-forming ionic glass materials depends upon whether the material consists of an odd or even number of atomic structural units, Illinois researchers have discovered.
NPRE Assistant Prof. Yang Zhang and his graduate student, Ke Yang, co-supervised by Chemistry Prof. Jeffrey S. Moore, have been joined by Dr. Madhusudan Tyagi, a research scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in investigating whether these characteristics of species of ionic glass can help them in creating a new intrinsically self-healing material.
The group discovered the phenomenon in observing liquid material as it cooled and formed glass. The Journal of the American Chemical Society recently published their work online.
The odd-even effect previously had been documented in crystalline material, but had not been known in amorphous or glassy material, where the atomic or molecular arrangements are disordered. In solid crystals, the odd-even effect is determined by how the crystals’ atoms are structured or packed. In ionic glasses, which are essentially extremely viscous liquids, the odd-even effect is dynamic and is determined by how the atoms move, Zhang said. The researchers discovered that the material made of an even number of atomic structural units becomes a glass quicker upon being cooled than the material with an odd number of atomic structural units.
The group has been working at the NIST Center for Neutron Research in Gaithersburg, Maryland, to conduct neutron scattering experiments to better understand the microscopic origin of the odd-even effect. The potential for self-healing lies in controlling the atoms’ movement to fill cracks or fractures within a material.
Many self-healing materials rely on additional agents to promote self-healing. Zhang and Moore see a potential for the ionic glass material to achieve repeated self-healing cycles and improved efficiency to adapt to dynamically changing environments. The scientists believe the material could be useful in coatings for residential and industrial use.
In August 2013, Ke Yang's team won the Best Group Presentation Award at the national neutron and X-ray scattering summer school organized by Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. | <urn:uuid:b05a7137-8ba7-43ae-a517-31397756bff7> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://npre.illinois.edu/news/zhang-leads-group%E2%80%99s-discovery-atom-movement-rules-ionic-glass-material | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403823.74/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00196-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935415 | 466 | 3.109375 | 3 |
I recently came across a list of prominent scientists who passed away during 2009. A number of great men who made notable contributions to physics, medicine and even political science are, sadly, no longer among us. On this list was one man who, for me, stood out from the others because his significant contributions were to agriculture. His name was Dr. Norman Borlaug. Widely hailed as "the Father of the Green Revolution," Borlaug and his team were ultimately responsible for breeding dwarf wheat varieties with improved disease resistance as well as bringing modern growing practices to Mexico.
In the arena of potato science, we had our own champion: Dr. John S. Niederhauser, who was a colleague of Borlaug's in Mexico on the same Rockefeller grant. Niederhauser made significant contributions toward a better understanding of Potato Late Blight and how to combat it-particularly through resistant varieties. Borlaug was instrumental in creating the World Food Prize, established in 1987 to ".honor outstanding individuals who have made vital contributions to improving the quality, quantity or availability of food throughout the world." John Niederhauser was the recipient of this prestigious prize in 1990. He, too, is gone now, having passed away in 2005.
Borlaug estimated that the use of modern growing techniques on all of the world's land area currently under cultivation could allow our planet to support perhaps 10 billion people. The Earth's human population is projected to reach 7 billion sometime during 2011 and rise to 8 billion by 2025. That 10-billion mark may arrive sometime around 2050 but, naturally, estimates vary. Increased production requirements and "low tech" approaches to food production almost inevitably mean the conversion of more forests and other sensitive, irreplaceable environmental areas into farm land. Are we in need of another "Green Revolution" of some sort in the near future? Could genetic modification provide some answers?
For those of us in the potato industry, the future is now. The "sustainability" movement that so many of us are currently involved in represents the beginnings of what must evolve into an agricultural system that not only produces lots of affordable, nutritious, safe food but also provides America's farms with the tools to remain profitable while lowering risk and maintaining environmental quality. This effort will require the cooperation of all the players in the industry, but some of the most important contributions have and will continue to come from potato scientists.
The Potato Association of America (PAA), which came into being in 1913, represents the "scientific arm" of the industry and is made up of potato scientists from all disciplines-production, breeding and genetics, physiology, crop protection, utilization and marketing , seed certification and extension. PAA will be well represented at the upcoming 2011 Potato Expo in Las Vegas. We'll have a booth and, like last year in Orlando, a poster display. Many of the speakers that you will see making presentations in the breakout sections will also be PAA members.
There is no doubt that science has played and will continue to play a vital role in feeding the world's billions. Potatoes, with their excellent nutritional qualities and efficient use of land area, will also play an important role in mankind's future. As a scientist and member of the PAA, I urge you to attend the PAA presentations, peruse the posters or just stop by the booth to chat. We'll be more than happy to talk potato science with you! Many of you might consider becoming members. We'll have application materials at the booth, but you might also wish to check out our website: www.potatoassociation.org. | <urn:uuid:582eaec4-96d8-41c3-8bd4-9d8dbac091b3> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.potatogrower.com/2010/11/the-future-is-now | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395166.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00001-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966367 | 736 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Also known as:
Cerebral artery occlusion with infarction
Providence Stroke Center:
A stroke occurs when a blood vessel in the brain is blocked or bursts. Without blood and the oxygen it carries, part of the brain starts to die. The part of the body controlled by the damaged area of the brain can't work properly.
Brain damage can begin within minutes, so it is important to know the symptoms of stroke and act fast. Quick treatment can help limit damage to the brain and increase the chance of a full recovery.
The first nationally certified primary stroke center in Oregon and a leader in accessible, comprehensive, state-of-the-art stroke care, education and research, Providence Stroke Center
cares for more stroke patients than any other health system in Oregon. | <urn:uuid:016c6ae9-79c1-43d9-9884-09cb479cfb21> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://oregon.providence.org/health-library/s/stroke/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393146.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00131-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.910241 | 164 | 2.75 | 3 |
Tipster Sam Lucido shares an AutoCAD tip to help you determine where your current file is located.
"Have you ever been in a drawing and wanted to know what the drawing location is? There are several ways to determine this in AutoCAD. First, you can type DWGPrefix at the Command prompt and get the path in the Command area.
"The path will be placed below, in the Command window. You could easily paste it into Windows Explorer to get to the correct folder on your network.
"Second, in the Options dialog box, under Open and Save, make sure you check 'Display full path in title.'
"The drawing path will be displayed in the Window bar above the AutoCAD display."
Notes from Cadalyst Tip Reviewer Brian Benton: Knowing where you are and what you are working on is important. Another trick is to Save As; that will open up the Save window in the folder your current file is in. If you need to know who has a specific file open (other than yourself), use the WhoHas command: Type WhoHas on the Command line, then browse to the appropriate file. | <urn:uuid:7b956fbd-f98a-4218-96ca-41876f35c86c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://cadtips.cadalyst.com/drawing-properties/dude-wheres-my-drawing | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398516.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00006-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.912468 | 237 | 2.671875 | 3 |
Moon and Jupiter
Two of the three brightest objects in the night sky stage a beautiful conjunction the next couple of evenings. And the third member of the bright trio is also nearby, although it’s a little bit tougher to spot.
The brightest of the three is the Moon, which is quite low in the west as night begins to fall. It’s a thin crescent right now, which means that the Sun is illuminating only a tiny sliver of the lunar hemisphere that faces our way.
The planet Jupiter stands above the Moon this evening. It looks like a brilliant cream-colored star. It’s the third-brightest object in the night sky. Right now, though, Jupiter is near its faintest. That’s because it’s getting ready to pass on the far side of the Sun as seen from Earth, so it’s farthest away from us — more than half a billion miles. Even so, Jupiter still outshines all the true stars in the night sky.
The second-brightest object in the night sky, the planet Venus, is to the lower right of the Moon. Although it’s quite bright, it’s also quite low in the sky, so there’s not much time to look for it before it drops below the horizon. And any buildings or trees along the horizon will block it from view.
Over the next few nights, though, Venus will climb higher into the evening sky, so it’ll be much easier to pick out. In fact, Venus and Jupiter will sweep past each other in just a couple of weeks. We’ll keep you posted. And we’ll have more about the Moon and Jupiter tomorrow.
Script by Damond Benningfield, Copyright 2013 | <urn:uuid:fd025e64-5ae8-4b4d-a4c9-95e8ea9935f1> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://stardate.org/print/9892 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398516.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00191-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927517 | 370 | 3.078125 | 3 |
República Argentina (Spanish)
|Sol de MayoTemplate:Sfnm
(Sun of May)
Mainland Argentina shown in dark green, with territorial claims shown in light green
and largest city
|Government||Federal presidential constitutional republic|
|-||Vice President||Gabriella Michetti|
|-||Supreme Court President||Ricardo Lorenzetti|
|-||Lower house||Chamber of Deputies|
|Independence from Spain|
|-||May Revolution||25 May 1810|
|-||Declared||9 July 1816|
|-||Constitution||1 May 1853|
|-||Recognized||29 April 1857|
|-||Total||2,780,400 km2 (8th)
1,073,518 sq mi
|-||2010 census||40,117,096 (32nd)|
|GDP (PPP)||2014 estimate|
|-||Total||$927.382 billion (25th)|
|-||Per capita||$22,101 (55th)|
|GDP (nominal)||2014 estimate|
|-||Total||$536.155 billion (24th)|
|-||Per capita||$12,778 (60th)|
|Gini (2011)||▼ 43.6
|HDI (2013)|| 0.808
very high · 49th
|Currency||Peso ($) (ARS)|
|Time zone||ART (UTC−3)|
|Date format||dd.mm.yyyy (CE)|
|Drives on the||right[b]|
|a.||^ De facto at all government levels. In addition, some provinces have official de jure languages:|
|b.||^ Trains ride on left.|
The capital city of the Argentina is Buenos Aires, one of the largest cities in the world, in eastern Argentina. In order by number of people, the largest cities in Argentina are Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Rosario, Mendoza, La Plata, Tucumán, Mar del Plata, Salta, Santa Fe, and Bahía Blanca.
Argentina is between the Andes mountain range in the west and the southern Atlantic Ocean in the east and south. It is bordered by Paraguay and Bolivia in the north, Brazil and Uruguay in the northeast, and Chile in the west and south. It also claims the Falkland Islands (Spanish: Islas Malvinas) and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.
History[change | change source]
The name Argentina comes from the Latin argentum (silver) as the Spanish conquistadors believed the area had silver. In the Americas, Canada, US, Brazil and Argentina are the largest countries (in that order).
The oldest signs of people in Argentina are in the Patagonia (Piedra Museo, Santa Cruz), and are more than 13,000 years old. In 1480 the Inca Empire conquered northwestern Argentina, making it part of the empire. In the northeastern area, the Guaraní developed a culture based on yuca and sweet potato however typical dishes all around Argentina are pasta, red wines (Italian influence) and beef.
Other languages spoken are Italian, English and German. Lunfardo is Argentinean slang and is a mix of Spanish and Italian. Argentineans are said to speak Spanish with an Italian accent.
Argentina declared independent from Spain in 1816, and achieved it in 1818. It grew a lot after immigrants from Europe came to the country. By the 1920s it was the 7th wealthiest country in the world, but it began a decline after this. In the 1940s, following the "infamous decade" where the country's politics were not stable, Juan Peron came to power. Peron was one of the most important people in the country's history and many politicians today call themselves Peronist. Peron was forced out of power in 1955. After spending years in exile he returned to power in the 1970s.
In 1976, the country was falling into chaos, and the military took power. This was not the first time the military had done this. Leading the new government was Jorge Rafael Videla. Videla was one of history's most brutal dictators. Thousands of people disappeared or were killed during his time as president. Videla retired in 1980.
One of his successors was another general turned dictator, Leopoldo Galtieri. By the time Galtieri was in office in 1981 the dictatorship became unpopular. To try to stir up support, Galtieri ordered an invasion of the Falkland Islands, starting a war. Argentina lost the war, and soon the country fell into chaos again. Galtieri was removed from power and eventually democracy was restored. Galtieri and Videla would be charged with "crimes against humanity" because of the mass murder and other crimes that they ordered as president.
Today, Argentina is one of the most important countries in Latin America, though it still has many problems facing it. It has a large economy and is an influential country in the "southern cone" of South America.
Politics[change | change source]
Argentina is a federal republic. The people of Argentina vote for a President to rule them and Senators and Deputies to speak for them and make laws for them. The President is Mauricio Macri since December 2015.
Administrative divisions[change | change source]
Argentina is divided into 23 provinces (provincias; singular: provincia), and 1 city (commonly known as capital federal):
Geography[change | change source]
Argentina is almost 3,700 km long from north to south, and 1,400 km from east to west (maximum values). It can be divided into three parts: the Pampas in the central part of the country, Patagonia in the southern part down to Tierra del Fuego; and the Andes mountain range along the western border with Chile, with the highest point in the province of Mendoza. Cerro Aconcagua, at 6,960 metres (22,834 ft), is the Americas' highest mountain.
The most important rivers include the River Plate, Paraguay, Bermejo, Colorado, Uruguay and the largest river, the Paraná. River Plate was incorrectly translated though, and should have been translated to English as River of (the) Silver. River Plate is also a famous Buenos Aires soccer team.
See List of cities in Argentina for the many places people live in Argentina.
Other information[change | change source]
The majority of the Argentineans are descendants of Europeans mainly from Spain, Italy, Germany, Ireland, France, other Europeans countries and Mestizo representing more than 90% of the total population of the country.
Football or soccer is the most popular sport, although the national sport of the country is Pato. Argentina has a number of highly-ranked Polo players. Field hockey (for women) rugby and golf are also favorites.
Argentina is a Christian country. Most of Argentina's people (80 percent) are Roman Catholic. Argentina also has the largest population of Jewish community after Israel and US. Many Middle Eastern immigrants who were Muslims converted to Catholicism, but there are still Muslims as well.
Medicine is socialized and so is education, making Argentina's literacy rate about 98%. State University is free as well.
Related pages[change | change source]
References[change | change source]
- "Cuadro 1. Población estimada al 1 de julio de cada año calendario por sexo. Total del país. Años 2010–2040" (in Spanish) (XLS). Censo Nacional de Población, Hogares y Viviendas 2010. Buenos Aires: INDEC – Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos. 2010. Archived from the original on 8 June 2014. http://www.indec.mecon.ar/nuevaweb/cuadros/2/c1_proyecciones_nac_2010_2040.xls.
- "Argentina". World Economic Outlook Database, October 2014. International Monetary Fund. 2 November 2014. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2014/02/weodata/weorept.aspx?sy=2012&ey=2019&scsm=1&ssd=1&sort=country&ds=.&br=1&c=213&s=NGDPD%2CNGDPDPC%2CPPPGDP%2CPPPPC&grp=0&a=&pr.x=65&pr.y=4.
- "GINI index (World Bank estimate)". World Bank. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI. Retrieved 19 February 2015.
- "Human Development Report 2014 – Summary" (PDF). New York, NY, USA: United Nations Development Programme. 2014. pp. 15, 16. Archived from the original on 27 July 2014. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/hdr14-summary-en.pdf.
- Ley No. 5598de la Provincia de Corrientes, 22 de octubre de 2004
- Ley No. 6604de la Provincia de Chaco, 28 de julio de 2010, B.O., (9092)
- World Factbook
Other websites[change | change source]
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- Argentina.gov.ar - Official national portal
- Gobierno Electrónico - Official government website
- Presidencia de la Nación - Official presidential website
- Honorable Senado de la Nación - Official senatorial website
- Honorable Cámara de Diputados de la Nación - Official lower house website
- Secretaría de Turismo de la Nación - Official tourism board website | <urn:uuid:640aa3f8-0ffa-40eb-9293-899677b98e68> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397873.63/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00084-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.853281 | 2,236 | 2.859375 | 3 |
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