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Island Living Shapes Physiology and Lifestyle of Eastern Bluebirds
Island plants and animals often differ from their mainland relatives. Why? In general, isolated islands lack top predators and large herbivores, which can influence food chains and traits of island organisms. In addition, differences in human interactions and threats posed by pathogens and parasites can also contribute to variances in traits.
In a case study involving eastern bluebirds, (Sialia sialis) researchers show just how island life shapes the physiology and life history of a species.
Eastern bluebirds are familiar to many people living in the eastern United States, and also to residents and tourists in Bermuda, an archipelago that lies in the North Atlantic Ocean about 1,100 km off the East Coast of the United States. Although the current outlook for the bluebirds in the U.S. is good, their Bermuda relatives have been designated as threatened and vulnerable.
In an effort to determine the differences of this species, researchers compared island (Bermuda) and continental (Ohio, U.S.) populations of the Eastern bluebird.
First, researchers investigated how nestlings and adults differed in growth, size and shape, immune function, numbers of eggs and nestlings that pairs produce, and how frequently parents deliver food to their young.
Researchers also attempted to identify differences between continental and island birds that might intensify the risks of decline typically associated with small and geographically isolated populations, such as the Bermuda bluebirds.
The study showed that bluebirds in Bermuda were lighter weight and had longer wings than the Ohio birds.
Also, while parents fed their nestlings at equal rates throughout the season in both locations, island nestlings grew slower and, as the breeding season progressed, more chicks died in their nests in Bermuda, though no similar seasonal pattern was observed in Ohio.
Overall, the results suggest that the Bermuda bluebirds may be adjusted to certain aspects of the island environment but not to others.
As a result, the study provides insight on how conservationists in Bermuda can manage declining bluebird populations. For example, by removing any mammalian or avian predators and competitors, or by managing human-driven changes in populations of insects (which the bluebirds feed on), both changes in survival and mortality rates and changes regarding physiology and reproduction of the species may occur.
Read more at EurkeAlert!
Eastern bluebird image via Shutterstock. | <urn:uuid:793bef73-3cae-4640-99d1-53a26bc95e0a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/46945 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397695.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00139-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945375 | 489 | 4.125 | 4 |
Abbasid Revolution, Baghdad, Organization of the Caliphate
Samarra (Iraq), the Great Mosque
- Read: Kennedy, pp. 122-155
- Read 2 of the following, and submit one form - due Sunday February
- Richard Hodges and David
Whitehouse, "The Abbasid Caliphate" from their Mohammed, Charlemagne &
The Origins of Europe. Study Guide for Hodges
- David J. Wasserstein.
"The Caliphal Institution in al-Andalus until 422/1031" from his The
Caliphate in the West. Study Buide for Wasserstein.
- C. E. Bosworth, "The Concept
of Dhimma in Early Islam," in Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds),
Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society,
vol. I. Study Guide for Bosworth. | <urn:uuid:49b97b63-b2ec-4380-8576-d79a2e0af44e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/weekseven.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394937.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00143-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.814596 | 192 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Sloping farmland identification using hierarchical classification in the Xi-He region of China
Abstract:The Loess Plateau suffers the most serious soil erosion in China. Sloping cultivated land is one of the most common land types in the region, and it leads to severe soil erosion. Analyses based on fine resolution satellite imagery can play a key role in the surveying of sloping farmland. In this article, a combination of remote-sensing (RS) and geographical information system (GIS) techniques under the hierarchical classification framework is used to investigate the sloping cultivated land in the Xi–He ecological engineering demonstration region of the Loess Plateau. This article synthetically adopts Système Pour l'Observation de la Terre 5 (SPOT-5) high-resolution images, Thematic Mapper (TM) multi-spectral images, and a terrain map at a scale of 1:10,000 to calculate the spectral, textural, and slope attributes of the sloping land type. A Bayesian classification method is employed to distinguish the crop and non-crop areas with a priori knowledge provided by local experts. The Gabor filter and the grey-level co-occurrence matrices (GLCM) method are used in combination under a man–machine interactive interpretation to extract the differences of texture trends and density distributions between sloping cultivated land and terraces, and a window-based method of texture analysis operations is adopted. A classification accuracy assessment by field survey shows that the total interpretation accuracy exceeds 80%. The sloping cultivated land in the research region covers an area of 233.06 km2, and the sub-watersheds, such as the Yangliu watershed, need key management in the future.
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: 1: State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science,Institute of Remote Sensing Applications, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing,100101, China 2: Department of Land Resource Management,Tianjin Institute of Urban Construction, Tianjin,300384, China 3: Tianshui Soil and Water Conservation Experiment Station, YRCC, Gansu,741000, China
Publication date: January 20, 2013 | <urn:uuid:1460bf5f-9863-4576-b4f1-0ec0ec411808> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/tandf/tres/2013/00000034/00000002/art00009 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402699.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00037-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.869504 | 454 | 2.875 | 3 |
During August-November 1992 and August 1993, bed sediment and fish liver were sampled in the South Platte River Basin and analyzed for 45 elements in bed sediment and 19 elements in fish liver. The results for aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, iron, lead, manganese, selenium, silver, uranium, and zinc are presented here. All 12 trace elements were detected in bed sediment, but not all were detected in fish liver or in all species of fish. A background concentration of trace elements in bed sediment was calculated using the cumulative frequency curves of trace element concentrations at all sites. Arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, manganese, silver, uranium, and zinc concentrations were greater than background concentrations at sites in mining areas or at sites that have natural sources of these elements. Trace element concentrations in fish liver generally did not follow the same patterns as concentrations in bed sediment, although concentrations of aluminum and cadmium were higher in fish liver collected at mountain sites that had been disturbed by mining. Concentrations of aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, iron, lead, silver, and zinc increased in bed sediments in urban areas. Iron, silver, and zinc concentrations in fish liver also increased in urban areas. Concentrations of cadmium, copper, silver, and zinc in fish liver increased in the agricultural areas of the basin. Downstream changes in trace element concentrations may be the result of geological changes in addition to changes in land use along the river.
1 U.S. Geological Survey, Box 25046, MS 415, Denver Federal Center, Lakewood, CO 80225 | <urn:uuid:2fe52ca9-a311-4416-87ba-a36370774198> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://co.water.usgs.gov/nawqa/splt/journals/HEINY1.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394987.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00170-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939196 | 337 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Stand firm therefore, having girded your loins with truth, (6:14a)
The Roman soldier always wore a tunic, an outer garment that served as his primary clothing. It was usually made of a large, square piece of material with holes cut out for the head and arms. Ordinarily it draped loosely over most of the soldier’s body. Since the greatest part of ancient combat was hand–to–hand, a loose tunic was a potential hindrance and even a danger. Before a battle it was therefore carefully cinched up and tucked into the heavy leather belt that girded the soldier’s loins.
The ordinary citizen of the Near East had a similar problem with his robe. When he was in a hurry or had heavy work to do, he either took the robe off or tucked it around his waist. As God prepared the children of Israel to eat the Passover meal before they left Egypt, He instructed Moses to tell them, “Now you shall eat it in this manner: with your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it in haste” (Ex. 12:11). Concerning His second coming, Jesus tells us to “be dressed in readiness” (Luke 12:35), which is literally, “have your loins girded.” Peter used the same expression when he said, “Therefore, gird your minds [lit., “gird up the loins of your minds”] for action, keep sober in spirit, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 1:13). Girding the loins was a mark of preparedness, and the soldier who was serious about fighting was sure to secure his tunic with his belt.
The belt that girded it all securely together and demonstrates the believer’s readiness for war is truth. Aletheia (truth) basically refers to the content of that which is true. The content of God’s truth is absolutely essential for the believer in his battle against the schemes of Satan. Without knowledge of biblical teaching, he is, as the apostle has already pointed out, subject to being “carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming” (4:14). In his first letter to Timothy, Paul warns that “the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons” (1 Tim. 4:1). The “doctrines of demons” taught by cults and false religions have their origin in the “deceitful spirits” that in Ephesians Paul calls “rulers, … powers, … world forces of this darkness, … [and] spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (6:12). These false schemes of Satan can be successfully encountered only with the truth of the Word of God.
But aletheia (truth) can also refer to the attitude of truthfulness. It represents not only the accuracy of specific truths but the quality of truthfulness. That seems to be the primary meaning Paul has in mind here. The Christian is to gird himself in an attitude of total truthfulness. To be girded … with truth therefore shows an attitude of readiness and of genuine commitment. It is the mark of the sincere believer who forsakes hypocrisy and sham. Every encumbrance that might hinder his work for the Lord is gathered and tucked into his belt of truthfulness so that it will be out the way. Just as the serious runner takes off every unnecessary piece of clothing before the race (Heb. 12:1), the serious soldier tucks in every loose piece of clothing before the battle.
How much more important is the Christian’s preparedness as he faces the forces of Satan. “No soldier in active service,” Paul says, “entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier” (2 Tim. 2:4). It is sad that so many Christians are content to let the “tunics” of their daily cares and concerns flap in the breeze around them—continually interfering with their faithfulness to the Lord and giving the devil every opportunity to entangle and defeat them with their own immature habits and interests.
I believe that being girded … with truth primarily has to do with the self–discipline of total commitment. It is the committed Christian, just as it is the committed soldier and the committed athlete, who is prepared. Winning in war and in sports is often said to be the direct result of desire that leads to careful preparation and maximum effort. It is the army or the team who wants most to win who is most likely to do so—even against great odds.
Some years ago I was told of a young Jewish man from the United States who decided to go to Israel and live. After working there for two years he was required either to serve in the army for a given period of time or to return home. He decided to join the army. His father was a good friend of an Israeli general, who at first was afraid the young man would use that friendship to secure an easy, safe assignment. Instead, he went to the general and said, “My present duty is too easy. I want to be in the finest, most strategic, diligent, and difficult regiment in the Israeli army.” Commenting on that spirit of dedication, the general said, “People think Israelis are so successful at war because we are a super people or that we have super intellect or super strength. But our success is not built on any of those things; it is built on commitment, unreserved and sacrificial commitment.”
If athletes so dedicate and discipline themselves in order to possibly win a race and receive “a perishable wreath” from the world, how much more should believers in Jesus Christ dedicate and discipline themselves to absolutely win in their struggle against Satan and receive an “imperishable” wreath from God (1 Cor. 9:25)?
Being girded … with truth is being renewed in the mind, in order to “prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:2). When the mind is renewed in commitment to God’s truth, there is empowerment for the Christian soldier to become “a living and holy sacrifice” that please God and is that believer’s “spiritual service of worship” (v. 1). In many ways it is more difficult and more demanding to be a living sacrifice than a dying one. To be burned at the stake for one’s faith would be painful, but it would soon be over. To live a lifetime of faithful obedience can also be painful at times, and its demands go on and on. It requires staying power that only continual and total commitment to the Lord can provide. It demands that love “abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment, so that [we] may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ; having been filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God” (Phil. 1:9–11). Love, knowledge, and understanding of God all need to grow in us. And when those grow, so does our commitment to the Lord for excellence in all things—the ultimate goal of which is “the glory and praise of God.”
To be content with mediocrity, lethargy, indifference, and half–heartedness is to fail to be armored with the belt of God’s truth and to leave oneself exposed to Satan’s schemes.
John Monsell’s hymn focuses on the virtue of true commitment:
Fight the good fight with all thy might;
Christ is thy strength, and Christ thy right.
Lay hold on life, and it shall be
Thy joy and crown eternally.
Run the straight race through God’s good grace,
Lift up thine eyes, and seek His face;
Life with its way before thee lies,
Christ is the path, and Christ the prize.
Cast care aside, lean on thy Guide;
His boundless mercy will provide;
Trust, and thy trusting soul shall prove
Christ is its life, and Christ its love. | <urn:uuid:3c54194a-4579-455b-87a3-c76a3d32b9d8> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.gty.org/resources/bible-qna/BQ040612/girding-yourself-with-truthfulness | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395992.75/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00043-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970062 | 1,812 | 2.90625 | 3 |
World Radio Day
|Podcast||Events and news||Documents|
February 13 is World Radio Day, a day to celebrate radio as a medium; to improve international cooperation between broadcasters; and to encourage major networks and community radios alike to promote access to information, free, independent and pluralistic media.
UNESCO, the World Association of Community Broadcasters (AMARC) and all the stakeholders; public services, mainstream and community media, will celebrate the fourth edition of World Radio Day on February 13, 2015. This year, the theme is “Youth and Radio”. It's an important opportunity to evaluate the contribution of young people in the radio sector with the goal of increasing their participation along three levels:
- Youth-targeted programming
- Programmes produced by young people
- Programming devised and produced by young people
The organizers have proposed some subthemes that are designed to offer a wide array of opportunities for discussion and to lend themselves to interesting and informative programming. Here are some examples:
- The elimination of stereotypes and prejudice in the portrayal of young people in the media.
- Improving the security of young journalists, especially freelancers and fixers in conflict and disaster zones.
- The impact of young people on community radio (education, acculturation, coverage of conflicts not being covered by the wider media, emergency and humanitarian crises, etc).
- The link between the accessibility of information through radio amongst young people and the sustainable development of communities.
This is a special day to remember why we love radio, celebrate its unique power to bring people together all over the globe and share it with the world. To mark this important day, AMARC invites you to share your youth-related programmes via We Transfer to firstname.lastname@example.org.
AMARC will give international visibility to all the information and programmes received.
On February 13, let’s celebrate radio together! Thank you for your participation!
About the WRD
The decision to declare February 13th the World Radio Day was adopted by UNESCO following a proposal by the Spanish Academy of Radio and a consultation process supported by the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC). Please find further information on the UNESCO website and on the World Radio Day web page.
The main objectives of the World Radio Day are to raise the understanding among the public of the value of radio, including in the context of new media, and the importance of actively supporting radio; to encourage decision-makers to support, establish and provide access to radio and to provide a networking focus for radio proponents and practitioners worldwide, to exchange ideas, experiences and resources. | <urn:uuid:9d786b29-9fd4-4440-8aaa-d004ab338f2d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www2.amarc.org/?q=node/1095 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395613.65/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00154-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921123 | 538 | 3.3125 | 3 |
We decided to add this page due to the many times we have been asked questions on ferret colours. These are the colours we go by. Click on the photos if you would like to see the full size version.
First we will start with our four basic standard colours. Some colours have two different names as some countries refer to them differently.
Sable/Polecat: Very dark brown and black legs, tail and mask. Light cream to white undercoat with dark brown to black guard hairs. Nose is pink, speckled or T line. Eye colour can vary from burgundy, black, green or blue.
Silver: Silver has quite the variation. It can vary from dark silver which normally has a heavier mask or light silver where usually there will be a lack of a mask. Undercoat is mainly cream or white with light silver, dark silver or grey guard hairs. The legs aren’t a solid colour. Nose can be pink, speckled, T lined, grey or black. Eyes can be burgundy, black, blue or green.
Sandy/Champagne: Light brown legs and tail. Mask can be full or slight and light brown in colour. Light cream to white undercoat with light brown guard hairs. Nose is pink. Eye colour can be burgundy or black.
Then we move on to the different variations of the four basic colours.
Black Sable/Dark Sable/Dark Polecat: Guard hairs are black. Undercoat is white, cream or apricot in colour. The mask is black and defined with white, cream or apricot outlining the mask or giving the appearance of the ferret having eyebrows. Nose is preferred black but speckled is acceptable. Eyes can be black, blue or green.
Lilac: Guard hairs are a mix of sandy/champagne, chocolate, silver and grey. When the colours combine during season changes, they mix and give the coat a lilac hue. The paws will be cream or white and a cream or white bib is present. Colour is more prominent on the legs and tail and no mask is present. Nose is normally pink but sometimes can have a grey colour to it. Eyes are black or burgundy.
Black Eyed White (BEW)/Dark Eyed White (DEW): Coat is white or cream. There can be a tiny sprinkling of silver on the tail but shouldn’t be obvious. All white or cream is preferred. Most light silvers end up becoming this colour after a year or two. Eyes can be burgundy, black, green or blue. Nose is pink or sometimes speckled.
Cinnamon: Guard hairs have a rich reddish brown colour and cover more of the body than the sandy/champagne. The undercoat can be cream or white. The legs and tail have the most concentrated colouring. A mask will usually be present. The nose can be pink or light brown or a mix of both. Eyes are burgundy or black.
Chocolate: Fur is a rich dark brown chocolate colour. Most of the colour concentrates on the legs, tail and mask. The undercoat can be white, cream or apricot. The guard hairs run heavier on the body than the basic colours. Eyes can be black, green or blue. Nose is chocolate in colour or can be speckled or in a T line. Photos below provided by United Ferrets Ferretry.
And now we move on to coat and colour patterns.
Marked White: Fur is white or cream. The tail is usually silver, black or chocolate. Or even a mix of those colours. A line of chocolate, silver or black sometimes runs down the middle of the back into the tail. Basically it is any DEW/BEW who might have markings elsewhere that disqualifies them from being called a DEW/BEW. Eye colour can be black, burgundy, blue or green.
Self: No distinguishable points. Fur is the same colour from head to tail. White around the muzzle and slight eyebrows. Nose is the same colour as the fur and the mask much reach the nose. Undercoat isn’t really visible and is white, cream or apricot in colour. Eyes can be black, blue or green.
Below is a black self. Photo provided by United Ferrets Ferretry. Below is an example of a cinnamon self.
Solid: Fur is one solid colour from head to tail. No white visible on the face bar a tiny bit of white under the chin. Nose is the same colour as the fur. Eyes can be black, blue or green. Photo below is of a black solid. Photo provided by United Ferrets Ferretry.
Mitt: Mitts come in a variety of colours. Front paws and back paws are white and normally a white bib will accompany the mitted paws. Sometimes it is just the front paws that are mitted. Nose can be any colour. Eyes can be black, burgundy, blue or green.
Below is a photo of a black mitt. Below is a picture of a chocolate mitt.Below is a picture of a dark silver mitt. Photo provided by United Ferrets Ferretry.
Badger: Fur can be any colour. A wide white or cream line running from the muzzle and between the eyes and ears down the back of the neck. This marking usually has mitts and a bib. Sometimes white knees and tail tip. Nose is pink and eyes are black or burgundy.
Blaze: Fur can be any colour. A thin white or cream line running from the muzzle and between the eyes and ears and down the back of the neck. This marking usually has mitts and a bib. Sometimes white knees and tail tip. Nose is pink and eyes are black or burgundy. Photo provided by United Ferrets Ferretry.
Panda: Fur can be any colour. Head is all white and extends to the shoulders. Neck is also white. Sometimes they will have mitts and white rings around the tail. Eye colour can be burgundy or black. Nose is pink.
Milkmouth: Fur is either black or chocolate. There usually isn’t a mask present but sometimes a very slight mask is allowed. The muzzle is white all the way around, giving the ferret the appearance that it’s face has just been dipped in milk. A small bib is usually present.The nose is pink. Eye colour can be burgundy, black, green or blue. | <urn:uuid:9b25a5b1-2894-422d-aae7-ab8e2ef9ca9c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.angoraferret.co.uk/colour-chart/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399117.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00133-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.913283 | 1,351 | 2.59375 | 3 |
As we were recently talking about honeybees, the epidemic known as colony collapse, and the need for more local beekeepers, I thought that you might be interested in this recent Indian study showing that cell phones could play a part in hive collapse. Here’s a clip from an article on the study:
…when a mobile phone was kept near a beehive it resulted in collapse of the colony in five to ten days, with the worker bees failing to return home, leaving the hives with just queens, eggs and hive-bound immature bees…
I haven’t read the study, and the article, from an Indian news agency, isn’t terribly informative, but, still, I think it’s worth considering along with all the other possible reasons being suggested for Colony Collapse Disorder. Regardless of the cause, though, there’s hope on the horizon.
And it doesn’t involve the possibility of getting stung.
I just happened across the following comment left by a reader of Boing Boing, in the wake of an article on tiny, swarming robots:
I was actually just talking with someone who was working with a research team at Harvard looking to make some kind of prototype robotic “bee.”
My first assumption was that he meant a little, flying robot that would be used for spying or something like that.
It turned out that it was more literal than that: they want swarms of little, flying robots that could actually pollinate flowers if real bees ever become endangered or extinct…
Now, if there was just a way to have them also eat belly fat and excrete gasoline. | <urn:uuid:3addd5a6-e29d-46a4-becd-522437715b50> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://markmaynard.com/2009/08/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398869.97/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00115-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967113 | 341 | 2.75 | 3 |
In order to have effective K-12 education reforms we first need to identify the problems. As noted on the Education Funding page there is no correlation between funding and achievement in a state-by-state comparison. Nor are there any significant long term achievement gains credited to smaller classroom sizes. What then are the major problems in education?
Much has been made in academic discussions about “Achievement Gaps”. The achievement gaps most discussed are the academic performance differences between whites and minorities. The scores of white students tend to be greater than those of black and Hispanic students. What causes these achievement gaps? There are 4 possible answers and only 3 of them are worth investigating.
The cause without credibility is genetic inferiority of blacks and Hispanics. There are simply too many academic standouts among black and Hispanic students for this to be credible.
Poverty is the cause given the most consideration by educators. They say the economic condition that these students grow up in put them at a disadvantage that cannot be overcome without additional resources (i.e. funding). As discussed in the Logic pages of this site a hidden agenda can be spotted when you look for the statement not used in an argument. In this case the missing component is the academic performance of Asian students.
Though many Asian students come from homes where English is rarely used, live in crowded conditions, and do not have money for luxury items, these students tend to perform at or above the performance level of white students. If poverty was really the root of the problem poor Asian students would have academic performance levels similar to blacks and Hispanics. Exposed then is the hidden agenda that educators are fishing for more money for themselves.
Schools with the highest levels of poverty receive additional funds from the federal government under the Title programs (especially Title I), and often more funds from state, local, and private foundations. Yet these schools, despite their significant advantage in funding, continue to have low scores and minor academic improvements over time. Poverty and lack of funding then are not the root cause.
Culture seems like a great candidate for the root cause of achievement gaps and there is some validity to this option. Many Asian cultures value education very highly and see it as a means to ensure that the next generation will have a more financially successful future.
Hispanic culture tends to value having family members begin working as soon as possible to help support the family. Young low educated workers usually have to take less skilled blue collar jobs. Young Hispanic women are often expected to marry and begin families at a young age. Since entry level blue collar jobs and child rearing do not require high levels of education they are not valued highly in the broad Hispanic culture.
Many blacks come from single mother families who are dependent on government assistance. Education is often not emphasized and the dropout rate among black students is far greater than other students.
However not all Asians are great students and many black and Hispanic students go to colleges, service academies, and graduate schools. There has to be something other than poverty and culture that makes a difference for these students.
That difference is parent involvement. Parents who tell their kids, “School is important!” tend to have higher performing kids. As the Asian students demonstrate it doesn’t matter what language that message is given in. This is the common denominator among high achieving white, Asian, black, and Hispanic students.
In the book “Freakanomics”, a study of poor Chicago high school students who entered a lottery to go to higher achieving schools demonstrates the importance of parent involvement. Both the students who “won” the lottery and went to higher achieving high schools and the ones who “lost” the lottery and stayed at the lower achieving high schools had nearly identical academic achievement. Both the “winners” and the “losers” outperformed the students whose parents did not enter them in the lottery. The only significant difference between the students was the level of parent involvement.
It will be a much better use of funds to help black and Hispanic families understand the value of education and to show just how simple their part can be in order to have their students perform at higher levels. Using simple rewards for student improvement (a classic Economic principle) will go a long way toward making significant strides in erasing achievement gaps.
Reforming the Educators
Unfortunately teacher unions and many administrators have pushed an agenda in which education is exempt from significant accountability. Teacher unions make it hard to get rid of bad teachers and almost impossible to eliminate mediocre teachers. Teachers who follow the minimum effort negotiated by their unions will almost never provide a year’s worth of academic growth within a school year to their students.
Teacher salaries are based on their education levels along with time in service and never on the quality of their student’s performance. The best teachers and the worst teachers are paid the same if their education levels and time in service are identical. As we learned in the Economic Rewards page it is difficult to get great results when great performances are not rewarded and poor performances are not punished. We need a new system that is responsive to the students and the taxpayers. Luckily for educators we have developed just such a proposal.
Click this link to see our Blueprint for Teacher Union Reform. This blueprint offers incentives for better teacher performance, allows districts to get rid of underperforming teachers, provides accountability to taxpayers, and all for no additional cost. The only ones who will lose are the ineffective teachers who have to hide behind the union’s skirts to protect their jobs. Since they are a large part of the problem they will either have to seek employment in another field or resign themselves to putting forth a much greater effort. Those who persevere in the education field and make themselves into much better teachers will see their job satisfaction reach previously unimagined levels. There are certainly items in the blueprint that will need to be tweaked but it offers a great starting point and could be very effective if the key incentives are kept in place. Since the blueprint benefits effective teachers, students, and taxpayers we believe this is a win-win-win proposition. | <urn:uuid:77667b20-604e-47f3-a5bb-d802200adb8b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.ajtt.org/?page_id=128 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397696.49/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00006-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965987 | 1,243 | 3.265625 | 3 |
The preferred method for rendering a
Document or single
is by using the pretty printing facility defined in Pretty.
Pretty-printing does not work well for cases, however, where the
formatting in the XML document is significant. Examples of this
case are XHTML's
<pre> tag, Docbook's
and many more.
Theoretically, the document author could avoid this problem by
wrapping the contents of these tags in a <![CDATA[...]]> section,
but often this is not practical, for instance when the
literal-layout section contains other elements. Finally, program
writers could manually format these elements by transforming them
literal string in their
CFliter, etc., but this is
annoying to do and prone to omissions and formatting errors.
- HaXml's parser eats line feeds between two tags.
Attributes should be formatted by making them an instance of
Verbatimas well, but since an
Attributeis just a tuple, not a full data type, the helper function
verbAttrmust be used instead.
CMiscis not yet supported.
Elements, which contain no content, are formatted as
<element-name/>, even if they were not defined as being of type
EMPTY. In XML this perfectly alright, but in SGML it is not. Those, who wish to use
verbatimto format parts of say an HTML page will have to (a) replace problematic elements by
literals before running
verbatimor (b) use a second search-and-replace stage to fix this.
This class promises that the function
verbatim knows how to
format this data type into a string without changing the
This is a helper function is required because Haskell does not
allow to make an ordinary tuple (like
Attribute) an instance of a
class. The resulting output will preface the actual attribute with
a single blank so that lists of
Attributes can be handled
implicitly by the definition for lists of
Verbatim data types. | <urn:uuid:b8222a8e-c867-466a-a19a-6877ed183715> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://hackage.haskell.org/package/HaXml-1.23.3/docs/Text-XML-HaXml-Verbatim.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396887.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00176-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.786092 | 436 | 3.0625 | 3 |
|Ancient noria (water wheel) in Hama on the|
|Homs, circa 1900|
|Homs, Khalid ibn Al-Walid Mosque|
Hama was the site of the infamous Hama massacre in 1982 where an estimated 34,000 Syrians were killed by forces commanded by President Hafez Assad and his brother Rifaat -- the brother and uncle of today's leader of Syria, Bashar Assad.
Today, the cities of Homs and Hama are bearing the brunt of the vicious repression taking place in Syria. | <urn:uuid:29a9e84e-2566-429e-9bd3-91463c2c4091> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.israeldailypicture.com/2011/12/today-tribute-to-besieged-syrians-in.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398075.47/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00093-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963479 | 110 | 2.5625 | 3 |
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|A transmission electron microscope image shows the newly discovered thermoelectric material. The small grains reduce heat conduction, making thermoelectric power generation more efficient.|
University of Houston physicists have discovered a new thermoelectric material offering high performance at temperatures ranging from room temperature up to 300 degrees Celsius, or about 573 degrees Fahrenheit.
"This new material is better than the traditional material, Bismuth telluride, and can be used for waste heat conversion into electricity much more efficiently," said Zhifeng Ren, M.D. Anderson Chair professor of physics at UH and the lead author of a paper describing the discovery, published online by Nano Energy.
Ren, who is also principal investigator at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH, said the work could be important for clean energy research and commercialization at temperatures of about 300 degrees Celsius.
Bismuth telluride has been the standard thermoelectric material since the 1950s and is used primarily for cooling, although it can also be used at temperatures up to 250 C, or 482 F, for power generation, with limited efficiency.
For this discovery, Ren and other members of his lab used a combination of magnesium, silver and antimony to generate electricity from heat using the thermoelectric principle. They added a small amount of nickel, after which Ren said the compound worked even better.
The work was done in collaboration with researchers from the UH Department of Chemistry and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Huaizhou Zhao and Jiehe Sui, a member of Ren's lab whose home institute is the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, were primary contributors; Zhao is now a research scientist at the Institute of Physics with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The material works well up to 300 C, Ren said; work to improve its efficiency is ongoing.
The potential for capturing heat - from power plants, industrial smokestacks and even vehicle tailpipes - and converting it into electricity is huge, allowing heat that is currently wasted to be used to generate power. Ren said temperatures there can range from 200 C to 1,000 C, and until now, there hasn't been a thermoelectric material capable of working once conditions get beyond the lower levels of heat. Much of the demand ranges from 250 C to 300 C, he said.
Ren long has worked in thermoelectrics, among other scientific fields. His research group published an article in the journal Science in 2008 establishing that the efficiency - the technical term is the "figure of merit" - of Bismuth telluride could be increased as much as 20 percent by changing how it is processed. At the time, Ren was at Boston College.
And his lab last summer published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences establishing tin telluride with the addition of the chemical element indium as a material capable of converting waste heat to electricity. But tin telluride works best at temperatures higher than about 300 C, or about 573 F, making it important to continue looking for another material that works at lower temperatures.
Ren's group isn't the first to study the new material, which has not been named but is referred to in the Nano Energy paper as simply MgAgSb-based materials, using the chemical names for the elements used to create it. The paper cites work done in 2012 by M.J. Kirkham, et al; that work used magnesium, silver and antimony in equal parts, Ren said, but resulted in impurities and poor conducting properties.
He said his lab found that using slightly less silver and antimony, and mixing the elements separately - putting magnesium and silver first in the ball milling process, adding the antimony after several hours - eliminated the impurities and significantly improved the thermoelectric properties.
"We had much different qualities," he said. "Better, with no impurities, and smaller grain size, along with much better thermoelectric properties."
About University of Houston
The University of Houston is a Carnegie-designated Tier One public research university recognized by The Princeton Review as one of the nation's best colleges for undergraduate education. UH serves the globally competitive Houston and Gulf Coast Region by providing world-class faculty, experiential learning and strategic industry partnerships. Located in the nation's fourth-largest city, UH serves more than 39,500 students in the most ethnically and culturally diverse region in the country.
For more information, please click here
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Soft decoupling of organic molecules on metal June 23rd, 2016
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FEI and University of Liverpool Announce QEMSCAN Research Initiative: University of Liverpool will utilize FEIís QEMSCAN technology to gain a better insight into oil and gas reserves & potentially change the approach to evaluating them June 22nd, 2016
Battery Technology/Capacitors/Generators/Piezoelectrics/Thermoelectrics/Energy storage | <urn:uuid:9c1d812c-d46d-4498-956c-c79dcf645171> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=49474 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393533.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00060-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937882 | 1,116 | 3.34375 | 3 |
Statistics reveal that depression in children and youth is on the rise. In fact, it has increased by one-third in the past 30 years. Untreated depression costs a teenager in many ways: lost eductional opportunities, lost social opportunities and lost time.
Through the personal stories of three young people, this compelling documentary traces the journey of depression, from early signs and symptoms, to assessment, diagnosis and treatment. The documentary also helps shatter some stereotypes.
This powerful 3-part series on child and youth mental health sheds light on the current situation and offers practical tools to understanding the problems and knowing where to find solutions. Depressed kids don't just have a bad attitude--they have an illness. And the illness is treatable.
The two other titles in the series are Fighting their Fears: Child and Youth Anxiety and A Map of the Mind Fields: Managing Adolescent Psychosis. | <urn:uuid:820a43d9-5c00-41b4-84e6-adb2e0a5f299> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.onf.ca/film/beyond_the_blues/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392527.68/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00101-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951924 | 181 | 2.875 | 3 |
WORCESTER, Mass. There was a time when peeking at another student's work during class was a problem. Then again, there was a time when only televisions had clickers, not classrooms.
Starting in January, not only do students in the undergraduate biology lab sections at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) have clickers, they are using them in a new way that promises to improve student-achievement and enhance teaching during science labs. It's all part of a novel academic technology suite, dubbed "The Connected Lab," developed at WPI through a grant from the Davis Educational Foundation.
The Connected Lab has three main components: real-time display of student lab results during class; remote access to all student data for analysis after the lab; and an online library of multimedia content demonstrating lab procedures that students can view at their convenience to help prepare for class or to use as a resource in the lab.
During a lab session, students use hand-held remote devices (clickers) to enter their data as their experiments progress. All data is immediately displayed, by lab group, on a projection screen for the whole class to see. "The students like to see how they are doing compared to other groups, and it helps me to be more effective teaching the lab," says Michael Buckholt, principal investigator of The Connected Lab program and instructor in WPI's Department of Biology and Biotechnology. "When the lab is in progress, I can't be looking over every student's shoulder, all the time. But with this system, I can quickly see which groups are on track. If any groups are getting into trouble, I can go right away to the group that needs intervention and help them through it. When we catch mistakes early, it makes the rest of the lab more meaningful."
The Connected Lab project is also designed to minimize time taken up with discussions of routine set-up and experimental procedures, thereby giving the students more time to focus on the science. To that end, starting last fall, several groups of WPI students who were working on their required Interactive Qualifying Project (a project which relates technology and science to societal or human needs) began producing video clips and multimedia content pieces explaining the "pre-lab" information. "It's all been working very well," says Kate Beverage, manager of WPI's Technology for Teaching and Learning Support Services, the group coordinating the technical elements of the initiative. "The students who produced the video content were extremely motivated, and approached it as a true research project. They've tried different production methodssome with music, some without, some using humor, some more seriousand they will gather data about what works best for the students using the material."
Once a Connected Lab session is completed, students can log on to the WPI network to access their own data, and the data obtained by other groups in their class. With more data to analyze, students have the opportunity to make more thoughtful interpretations and conclusions about the lab results. The access to other groups' data also helps students who, for a variety of reasons, may not get enough experimental data on their own to complete the lab. "If students do something wrong during their experiments, then they may not get any useful data," said Jill Rulfs, associate professor and associate head of the Biology and Biotechnology Department. "We want them to learn from those mistakes, of course, but we also want them to have access to data so they can do the analysis, the statistical procedures, the interpretation, and hypothesizing, which are important parts of what we're trying to teach."
Clickers as classroom tools have been proliferating at schools and universities in the United States for several years. Typically, they are used to take attendance or to permit students to respond to multiple-choice questions posed for discussion during lectures or when taking tests. The Connected Lab initiative, however, significantly expands the use of clicker technology so to assess its impact, WPI has partnered with the Donahue Institute at the University of Massachusetts to conduct a detailed evaluation and report on the results of the initiative.
"What's really wonderful about this project is that we were brought in during the development phase, to build an evaluation component into this from the start," says Paula Quinn, research manager at the UMass Donahue Institute. "Last year, we collected data from a comparison groupstudents in similar lab sections at WPI not using the new technology. This year, we'll be collecting data from the students using the system, and we'll see if there are any differences. We'll focus on student engagement in the lab, student independence, and student efficiency, and see what impact the technology may have."
The Connected Lab is a three-year project. Last year, baseline data was collected and planning completed for the launch. This year, the biology lab sections will use The Connected Lab and the Department of Physics will develop its plan for using the model. Next year, the physics labs will implement the program and the Donahue Institute will complete its evaluation. If the initiative demonstrably improves student learning and performance, WPI plans to extend its use and potentially build a technology platform that could be leveraged at other universities.
In the fall of 2008, to prepare for the January launch in the biology labs, WPI piloted the real-time data display and collection elements of the system in one biology lab section, and the results were encouraging. "Based on the pilot program, we saw students were enthusiastic about using the system and were much more engaged in the lab," Professor Rulfs says. "This is a research program, and we'll have to wait and see what the results are in a year, but so far we are optimistic that using these technologies in this new way will have a positive impact."
|Contact: Michael Cohen|
Worcester Polytechnic Institute | <urn:uuid:c4dcc7a7-6e87-4075-8d3a-eb7ba3ca929c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.bio-medicine.org/biology-news-1/At-WPI--some-students-are-learning-its-OK-to-peek-7027-1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396959.83/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00035-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96752 | 1,207 | 3.015625 | 3 |
Job losses in this recession remain, by far, greater and longer lasting than in any economic downturn since the Great Depression. While economic data from before the Great Depression aren't as precise, the financial crisis that began in late 2007 is still in the running to be the second worst economic downturn in U.S. history from a jobs perspective. Only one U.S. recession since the Great Depression has had a higher peak unemployment rate, the early '80s recession with a peak of 10.8 percent, but it was a short sharp shock that quickly bounced back by comparison.
In June, the private sector created about 57,000 jobs, about half the number neeed to keep the unemployment rate constant. But, those gains were muted by the loss of 18,000 public sector losses.
The unemployment rate increased from 9.1% to 9.2%, and the participation rate declined to 64.1%. Note: This is the percentage of the working age population in the labor force.
The employment population ratio fell to 58.2%, matching the lowest level during the current employment recession. . . . [a] measure of labor underutilization that includes part time workers and marginally attached workers, increased to 16.2%, the highest level this year.
The BLS revised down April and May payrolls showing 44,000 fewer jobs were created than previously reported.
The average workweek declined slightly to 34.3 hours, . . . "average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls decreased by 1 cent to $22.99. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 1.9 percent." . . .
Through the first six months of 2011, the economy has added 757,000 total non-farm jobs or just 126 thousand per month. There have been 945,000 private sector jobs added, or about 158 thousand per month. This is a better pace of payroll job creation than last year, but the economy still has 6.98 million fewer payroll jobs than at the beginning of the 2007 recession.
There are a total of 14.1 million Americans unemployed and 6.3 million have been unemployed for more than 6 months.
Despite the dire situation, nobody in Washington is talking about stimulus and public sector layoffs killed 188,000 jobs in the first half of this year at a time when the economy needs more job creation, not less. The number of people working part-time because they can't find full time jobs and the number of people unemployed for more than six months are at near record highs.
Jobs have been below their peak for 42 months and are nowhere near returning to where they started. The longest previous post-war recession in jobs terms (the decline and recovery 2001 tech bust) created jobs to replace those lost in that recession in 48 months. But, that jobs slump was much more shallow; at its worst point 2% of payroll jobs were lost, while we are still 5% below peak now and we 6.3% below peak at the low point.
NPR noted this morning that GDP has actually been increasing for two years now, but the jobs situation is not catching up. Businesses are hoarding cash instead of investing. Interest rates remain remarkably low, but that isn't spurring more spending and borrowing. The leading economic indicators are negative, suggesting that we might even face a double dip recession.
This is happening at a time when the immigrant population of the United States is shrinking or constant. Inflation remains modest.
Politically, we are about six to eight months from the point at which the state of the economy starts to influence the next Presidential election. More pressingly, the U.S. will break though its debt ceiling by August 2 if corrective action isn't taken, possibly triggering a constitutional crisis or a default of the U.S. national debt that could have catastrophic economic consequences for the nation by driving up the interest rate that Treasury bond holders are willing to accept at a time when U.S. bonds have been a safe haven as many other developed nations are having to restructure or default on their sovereign debts and crisis after crisis looms on the horizon. | <urn:uuid:9051104e-a6cf-4511-bf29-97bdce955104> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://washparkprophet.blogspot.com/2011/07/jobs-situation-still-dismal.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395160.19/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00133-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967168 | 846 | 2.671875 | 3 |
In just a few quick steps, customize your own Stuffed Animal. It's easy and fun!
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Does biology make you squeamish? Or do you dig dissecting frogs and worms? Make a Model Magic® frog puzzle that’s as realistic or as gross as you can imagine!
Find a diagram that shows the anatomy of a frog. Or rely on your drawings and experiences from biology class. Your Crayola® Model Magic® frog can even be larger-than-life! It won’t smell or feel slimy, either!
Shape a frog with Model Magic. Use plastic dinnerware to "dissect" your frog. Cut out major organs and appendages. Make the pieces fit like a puzzle inside and outside. Air-dry all of your frog parts for at least 24 hours.
Cover your art area with newspaper. Use Crayola Washable Kid’s Paint and Paint Brushes to paint each body part. How realistic (or disgusting) can you make the frog’s colors? Air-dry everything.
Reassemble and dissect your frog as often as you like. It won’t ever hop away!
Let's make something!
Play your favorite outdoor games with Sock Worm Beanbags you make yourself using Crayola Fabric Markers, old socks, and
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Create lively desert scenes with Crayola® Color Wonder™. Kids' hands and fingers double as printing stamps—and stay mess
Create this intriguing bat cave for a Halloween decoration. It's also a great way to introduce children to bats as well
The sky's the limit with this mobile. Create fine-feathered friends to hang around-all year long!
Bubble, bubble! This simple printing technique goes along swimmingly when you use recycled bubble wrap.
Children spread their creative wings with this imaginative activity that helps them understand perspective and size. Flu
Create a colorful creeper with paper plates. Will it be a hairy woolly bear? Or a caterpillar that’s knobby, tufty, or h
Who's a bug watcher? There are so many fascinating insects and arachnids to discover! Create several Crawling Creatures | <urn:uuid:bf8b0fef-3ed9-4e62-b486-d0e6f062c07f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.crayola.com/crafts/frog-3d-puzzle-craft/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391519.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00058-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.876474 | 462 | 3.078125 | 3 |
- Ray Pierrehumbert
It's amazing more people are not caught by that.
When did the climate models forecast that Texas would fist have it 1 in 10,000 year heat wave? Is Texas warming and drying somewhat ahead of the climate models? If CO2 levels have been rising since before 1900, could rising CO2 have been a factor in the 1956 Texas drought? We know that by 1952 global warming was occurring, so there must have been some impact on water in Texas.
Aaron_ Deep in the esoterica of Climate Change theory it becomes clear that simple plowed land agriculture and controlled burns for pasture improvement started anthropogenic climate change thousands of years ago. The current trend is AGW on steroids. If those trees get some rain in the next month or so a surprising number of them will survive. It looks bad now but the land does heal after fires.
That's what, 5 or 6km an hour? (Say a minute to do 100m or so?)Scary. Could cut off your escape route in ten minutes. Although I suppose it varies locally depending on fuel and wind speed.
A litany of eye-popping statistics over at Texas Climate News, including:"Since Nov. 15 more than 3.5 million acres have burned in Texas, breaking the all-time record of 2.1 million acres for the same period set back in 2005-2006."and "Six of the 10 largest wildfires in Texas history occurred in 2011."
I feel for you folks in Texas. We've had some pretty bad wildfires ourselves here in Victoria Australia in recent years, with many deaths in 2009. Friends of ours also lost their home in the Canberra bushfires a few years back.However, to some extent fires are part of the ecosystem here so many Aussie plants thrive after a fire and gum trees have adaptations to survive all but the very worst fires. I was imagining the Pines area would not recover so well so I was heartened to see Pangolin's comments - I hope there is (enough but not too much) rain coming your way soon to help the land recover. We're on the other end of La Nina here so its been wet the last 18months which has kept the fires down for a while.Good luck I hope the fires are over soon.
Doug, those are probably records only for the modern period and they're confounded by the effects of fire suppression and landscape continuity changes, which greatly affect fire sizes. There could have had some whoppers before the modern era.
Jim, your point about historic records versus prehistoric events may well be true, though we're here now so naturally we're more concerned about the present era. Presumably the prehistoric record of fires in the region could be retrieved to some degree from scrutiny of soil cross sections.As to "effects of fire suppression" there's a bucket that's becoming a bit crowded, in the sense that every time we see a conflagration of this kind, we hear that we've caused it by extinguishing fires that ought to have happened in the normal course of affairs. That's a hypothesis that should go in the same class as "was this a climate driven event, or purely a weather event?" Have fires been actually been extinguished in the affected area? Has there been a buildup of fuel due to those suppression efforts? What do we actually know about this situation? "We're suppressing many fires" is too squishy to warrant complacency or comfort. In any case, what we're seeing here is relatively open woodland going up in flames, along with the intensely dry litter on the forest floor, apparently mingled continuously with various forms of development. It's hard to see how allowing a fire to burn "naturally" in this context is going to be functional.
Our local native american population in California are very clear that spring and fall burns of grass and brush to encourage oak and seed pines were standard occurrences. I would suppose whatever natives there were in Texas would have a variant of that practice suitable to the game and forage of the location. I doubt there were no "controlled" burns since it's a standard game management technique of hunter-gatherer and nomadic cultures.We just don't know what the regime was.
Little is known about the indigenous tribes, who got mixed up with Spaniards and Mexicans and horses and priests very early in history. I do have a book on the subject which I haven't cracked. I will venture to say that Texas was always very lightly populated, and there are far more signs of indigenous populations in New Mexico than here.It is also probably worth noting that the Bastrop area is an ecological outlier in this vicinity, so what local tribes there were probably had little use for it.
Doug, I'm not arguing for letting this thing burn without control. Nor do I know what the historic fire regime or landscape pattern was in central Texas. I'm just saying the historical record is limited wrt making statements about uniqueness of events. You can find many places where the effects of land management, and ignition sources, are indeed still the major driving factor in the current fire regime. Fire was a more ubiquitous and forceful player in prehistory than most people recognize. However, nobody should just say that it's the only one--especially in situations like this one where the drying is truly extreme and out of the norm, and there is certainly a definite climatic element.
Post a Comment | <urn:uuid:88651b8a-04c6-411b-98d9-b2147c6768b5> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2011/09/lost-pines-yesterday.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395679.18/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00062-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969699 | 1,104 | 2.6875 | 3 |
The delicate, white flowers of doll's eyes are small, measuring 6 mm. in width, and are arranged within a wide, slightly elongated flower cluster atop the terminal shoot of the stem. Each bloom has 4-10 widely spaced, diamond-shaped petals that surround a circle of long, sprawling stamens and a single, exaggeratedly-ovate pistil.
The fruit of the doll's eye grow out of the flower structures and, as indicated by its name, are round, white berries tipped with a single, black dot, and connected to a shockingly blood-red fruit stalk. The berries form a wide, slightly elongated cluster that gorily resembles a collection of eyeballs, connected by a network of red veins.
The compound leaves of this plant are several and contain a few small (10 c. in length), broadly-lanceolate, irregularly-toothed, irregularly-lobed, oppositely arranged, deep-green leaflets.
Doll's eyes grow best in rich woods and in thickets.
Although the berries of this plant may look too gruesome to eat, they should also be avoided because of the high levels of toxins in their flesh.
Other names attributed to doll's eyes include white baneberry, named so for the toxic properties of its fruit. | <urn:uuid:77781b46-9dad-440b-a68d-7941ad7ab014> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.bio.brandeis.edu/fieldbio/Wildflowers_Kimonis_Kramer/PAGES/DOLLSEYES_PAGE_FINAL.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396106.71/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00018-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933437 | 268 | 2.953125 | 3 |
It is important for robot designers to know how to make robots that interact effectively with humans. One key dimension is robot appearance and in particular how humanlike the robot should be. Uncanny Valley theory suggests that robots look uncanny when their appearance approaches, but is not absolutely, human. An underlying mechanism may be that appearance affects users’ perceptions of the robot’s personality and mind. This study aimed to investigate how robot facial appearance affected perceptions of the robot’s mind, personality and eeriness. A repeated measures experiment was conducted. 30 participants (14 females and 16 males, mean age 22.5 years) interacted with a Peoplebot healthcare robot under three conditions in a randomized order: the robot had either a humanlike face, silver face, or no-face on its display screen. Each time, the robot assisted the participant to take his/her blood pressure. Participants rated the robot’s mind, personality, and eeriness in each condition. The robot with the humanlike face display was most preferred, rated as having most mind, being most humanlike, alive, sociable and amiable. The robot with the silver face display was least preferred, rated most eerie, moderate in mind, humanlikeness and amiability. The robot with the no-face display was rated least sociable and amiable. There was no difference in blood pressure readings between the robots with different face displays. Higher ratings of eeriness were related to impressions of the robot with the humanlike face display being less amiable, less sociable and less trustworthy. These results suggest that the more humanlike a healthcare robot’s face display is, the more people attribute mind and positive personality characteristics to it. Eeriness was related to negative impressions of the robot’s personality. Designers should be aware that the face on a robot’s display screen can affect both the perceived mind and personality of the robot.
Citation: Broadbent E, Kumar V, Li X, Sollers J 3rd, Stafford RQ, MacDonald BA, et al. (2013) Robots with Display Screens: A Robot with a More Humanlike Face Display Is Perceived To Have More Mind and a Better Personality. PLoS ONE 8(8): e72589. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0072589
Editor: Mel Slater, ICREA-University of Barcelona, Spain
Received: November 12, 2012; Accepted: July 14, 2013; Published: August 28, 2013
Copyright: © 2013 Broadbent et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: This research was funded by a University of Auckland Research Excellence award. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
As technology advances, socially assistive robots are being developed for healthcare contexts , . It is important that such robots have an appearance that users feel comfortable with . Practically, robots cannot be completely humanlike at the current stage of robotics development. While robots such as HRP4 have been developed , they are too expensive and not capable of deployment in real world scenarios. Furthermore, interactions in speech are not easy, and vision for interaction is not very technically feasible. More practical robots have wheels and interact with touchscreens and speech output. Some have faces presented on the touchscreen and some do not have any faces; others have simplified plastic faces that have some lighting effects, and some have moving parts. It is important to understand how people perceive different robot designs and help designers create appropriate robots. For touchscreen robots, it is important to know whether to put faces on the screen to enhance the interactions and what kinds of faces are better than others. Examples of healthcare robots with touchscreen displays include the Healthbot and Care-o-bot , . This study aimed to understand robots with screens, and to give developers advice about the design of faces for screen display. Our goal was to evaluate the kind of face that a display screen robot might best show, and whether having a face on the screen is important. We hypothesize that the results will be translatable to real 3D versions of the faces displayed but we do not evaluate this claim in this paper. We seek to establish some knowledge based on screen-displayed faces in order to discover important factors, which is necessary before more expensive real faces are constructed since the practicalities of constructing real 3D faces are considerable. Since we typically interact with humans but we cannot yet make completely humanlike robots, a very relevant factor in the design of robot faces is the degree of humanlike appearance, and this is the focus of the current study. The introduction reviews previous work in the area of humanlike appearance on robots, including theories behind the effects observed. It then goes on to introduce the current study.
Humanlike Appearance of Robots
One theoretical model of the relationship between robot appearance and how comfortable humans feel with it is The Uncanny Valley theory , , which proposes that as robots become more humanlike, we feel more comfortable with them. But when a robot becomes highly humanlike we still know there is something that is not real about it, and then we experience a sense of strangeness or eeriness. The uncanny valley has been likened to how we might feel about seeing a dead person, and has implications for the design of acceptable robots. While the Uncanny Valley is popular, there has been little empirical research to test the theory. However, more work has been done over the past ten years. A recent review concluded that evidence for the Uncanny Valley is equivocal . In a case study, only a few people mentioned that a Geminoid robot (very humanlike but not human) gave them an uneasy feeling .
Humanlikeness can refer not only to visual appearance but also to behavioral features, such as the voice and movement of a robot. Research has shown that robots with humanlike voices are rated more highly than those with an identical appearance but with more a robotic voice , . Other work has shown that a mismatch between human or machinelike appearance with human or machinelike voice creates eeriness . Research on movement has shown that avatars that move in a more humanlike manner are perceived as more familiar and less eerie . However, there is some preliminary evidence for uncanny effects when mechanical movement is paired with an android robot .
Research on the Uncanny Valley and facial appearance has evaluated images of robots on scales that rate appearance (e.g. humanlike, familiar, eerie, appeal, creepy, strange), and emotional reactions (e.g. fear, disgust) , . Recent work asked people to rate a series of photographs that morphed a robot’s photo to a human’s photo, and found that there was a dip in familiarity that corresponded to a peak in eeriness in the middle of the series . Feelings of eeriness have been shown to disappear when the morphing is more carefully crafted, suggesting poor mixing of the faces rather than the humanlikeness of the image may be the cause of perceived eeriness . Indeed, research has suggested that the mixture of robot and human features may be the cause of perceived eeriness . In line with this, robots that have a clearly non-human appearance are liked more than robots that try to appear humanlike . Other work has shown that a bronze face with simplified eyes is rated more eerie than both a photorealistic face and a line drawing face .
Theories behind the Effects of Humanlike Appearance of Robots
Some work suggests that the Uncanny Valley may have an evolutionary purpose to cause animals to avoid unhealthy individuals. Monkeys spent longer looking at real or unrealistic synthetic faces than looking at realistic synthetic faces . The authors suggest that the monkeys identified the realistic synthetic faces as belonging to their own species more than the unrealistic synthetic faces, but these faces failed to live up to expectations for appearance and behavior. Other studies suggest that there is a developmental basis to Uncanny Valley effects, which requires early experience with real faces, as infants do not exhibit such effects until the age of 12 months .
A number of theories are relevant to the Uncanny Valley. One prominent theory is expectation violation. A humanlike appearance can induce expectations of humanlike behavior. When a robot looks human but does not behave in a humanlike manner, this violates expectations and can lead to surprise or fright , . It has been shown that people come to interactions with pre-existing mental representations of what robots can do and look like . These expectations can influence reactions to the robot. For example, using the same robot as used here (with a simple humanlike face on the screen), a previous study showed that people who had pre-existing ideas that a healthcare robot would be humanlike had higher blood pressure during the interaction than those who imagined the robot would be more machine-like . In related theory, Bayesian modeling posits that when there are conflicting cues as to which category an object belongs to, this can create perceptual tension, which in turn promotes behavior to decrease this tension – such as withdrawal, attack, ignoring one of the cues, or attempts to reduce the misalignment between categories . It has been suggested that faces can be categorized as human or non-human and where there is ambiguity this creates discomfort . Effectance motivation describes the desire to interact effectively with the environment, and to understand, predict and have control over it. It has been proposed that anthropomorphism of robots increases our feelings of understanding and control over them and reduces uncertainty . A humanlike appearance may therefore increase acceptance of the robot.
Mind perception and Personality
A recently proposed theory about why humanlike robots can appear uncanny is that humanlike features prompt users to perceive that the robot has a mind . This is related to anthropomorphism, in that a humanlike appearance prompts expectations of humanlike attributes. In the theory of mind, humans ascribe minds to other people in order to establish common ground and to enable communication. It has been suggested that developers should build a theory of mind into agents to enable better communication . Research in social psychology has investigated the dimensions along which we judge whether something has a mind and developed the Mind Perception Questionnaire to assess these dimensions . This research has shown two dimensions of mind perception – agency (the capacity to do things) and experience (the capacity to experience things). Both dimensions are associated with the liking of a character. The capacity for experience has been linked to being afforded moral rights and the capacity for agency has been linked to having moral responsibility . It has been suggested that the concept of agency (having the ability to interact, be autonomous, and adaptable) allows computers and animals to be considered moral agents without needing to have free will, emotions or mental states . In an initial survey, people rated a robot very low in the capacity to experience but with a moderate amount of agency . The robot was rated lower in both experience and agency than a human adult, but higher in agency than a baby, a monkey and a dog. Of all the other rated ‘beings’ in the study, a dead woman was rated closest to a robot in this two dimensional space. It has been proposed that the uncanny valley may be caused by the perception that a being has an incomplete mind, e.g. the robot has the capacity to do but not feel .
Studies using this Mind Perception Questionnaire have looked at how varying the humanness of a robot’s voice can affect perceptions of robot mind . Results suggested that female participants attributed more mind to a female voiced robot and males attributed more mind to a male voiced robot. That study summed all items rather than use the two subscales published in the original paper. Other work has examined appearance; participants who viewed a video of the robot Kaspar from the front (more humanlike) compared to the back (more mechanical), attributed a greater capacity to experience to the robot, and this capacity was linked to perceptions of the robot being uncanny . However, the front and back viewpoint may have contributed to the difference in perceptions rather than humanlikeness per se, and the participants watched a video rather than interacting with a physically present robot. Further research is needed to investigate how the humanlikeness of a robot is linked to perceptions of its mind and how this relates to eeriness in uncanny valley theory in a human-robot interaction with different kinds of faces presented from the front.
Another reason why humanlike robots are seen as uncanny may be that humanlike facial features cause the user to perceive that the robot has certain personality traits that cause feelings of unease. In humans, facial appearance has been shown to affect perceptions of a person’s personality . Similarly, the degree of humanlikeness of a robot’s face may also affect perceptions of the robot’s personality. Previous work supports this theory. A robot’s facial features, such as a nose, mouth and eyebrows, can contribute to ratings of how humanlike a robot is , . There is evidence that the shape of a robot’s head can influence ratings of the robot’s knowledge and sociability . Children rate robots to have different amounts of happiness and sadness, as well as different degrees of behavioural intention, based on their appearance . Other research has shown that more mechanical robots are rated to be lower on emotional stability, extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and intellect, than a humanoid robot . A robot with a higher-pitched voice is perceived to have a different personality to a robot with a lower pitched voice . Avatars have also been rated differently on personality compared to agents .
Summary and Current Study
This review of previous work has shown that there are many aspects of a robot’s appearance that can affect how the robot is perceived, and a number of possible theories behind these effects. The current study aimed to investigate the effects of humanlike facial appearance on perceptions of the robot’s eeriness, mind, and personality, as well as on the participants’ blood pressure. It also explored whether personality and mind were correlated with eeriness. We specifically aimed to investigate these effects on a robot with a display screen because robots with interactive touch screens are becoming more popular for practical applications in real world scenarios. We hypothesised that a robot with no-face at all on its display screen would be perceived as being the least alive and having the least mind; a robot with a humanlike face on the display screen would be perceived as having the most mind, and being most alive. However, a robot with a silver face on its display screen would be seen as intermediate in mind and aliveness, the face would be rated as more eerie, and people would have greater blood pressure (reflecting their unease). We hypothesised that the robot with the humanlike face display would be seen most positively in terms of personality.
Materials and Methods
The study was granted ethical approval by the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee. All participants provided written informed consent.
Thirty participants (14 female and 16 male) completed the study. Participants were recruited from email advertisements to university students and staff. The participants had a mean age of 22.50 years (range 18–38, SD 4.58). Inclusion criteria were age over 16 years and able to understand English.
In this experimental scenario, a Peoplebot robot with an on board Intel Pentium1300 MHz processor was used to act the part of a helper for a human nurse. Peoplebot is produced by Adept Mobile Robots (USA) and is designed for service and human-robot interaction projects. The robot was equipped with a speaker to talk, a display to show its face and a cuff blood pressure monitor connected to the robot via USB to measure the patient's blood pressure. Dialogues were designed for the robot to instruct the participant to use the blood pressure monitor, display the result on its screen and verbally report the results verbally (see Figure 1). The robot can move forward and rotate but has no articulated parts. This scenario has been used in previous studies , .
The robot’s display shows a 3D virtual face, which is capable of expressing several emotions as well as rendering the correct lip movements for speech. The virtual face has over 6000 polygons and looks humanlike. Software FaceGen Modeller, from Singular Inversions, can generate realistic 3D faces randomly or from a real person’s photograph. The face model can be any race, gender or adult age with different expressions, phonemes and modifiers. It allows the user to control the texture color, symmetric shape and add extra parts such as eyeglasses or hats. To animate the virtual face model so that it speaks in a natural way, we use Xface, an open source 3D talking head based on the MPEG-4 standard. The Xface toolkit is optimized enough to achieve at least 25 frames per second with a polygon count up to 12000, using modest hardware. To create the faces, a photograph was taken of a male student volunteer of European ethnicity. Hair was removed in the software. Figure 2 shows the 3D virtual face created by Facegen and how the 3D face looks with difference expressions and modifiers.
Top row: normal face, smile, blink. Bottom row: speak “Ah”, speak “Oh”, speak “J”.
The second face was created to look more robotic. The shape (mesh) of the first face was used and only its appearance was modified. As Figure 3 shows, the humanlike skin was replaced with the silver metal-like surface and the human eyes were replaced with blank holes to simplify them. Both faces had the same animation quality because they both used X-face animation software.
Each participant was invited to interact with the robot three times. They were told that the aim of the study was to see which robot people preferred. Each time the robot performed the same task: to enter the room, move to the participant, and assist the participant in taking their blood pressure. In each interaction the robot had a different face displayed on its screen: no-face display (NFD), a humanlike face display (HFD) or a silver face display (SFD). The NFD robot had the words “healthcare robot” on the screen instead of a face. The order of the robots with the different screen displays was randomly assigned and counter-balanced for each participant.
At the start of the interaction, the robot introduces itself to the participant and asks them how they are today, and tells them that it would like to measure their blood pressure. It asks the participant to roll up the sleeve of either arm, and to undo the velcro fastening on the cuff and to slide their arm into it making sure that the cord is on the inside part of the arm and coming out of the bottom of the cuff, and to refasten the cuff. At that point, the robot displays a video showing them how to do this. The robot asks them to press the start button on the meter when they are ready and tells them that the cuff will automatically inflate and deflate of its own accord, and when it is finished the robot will tell them the results. The robot then tells them that they have done very well and says their blood pressure and heart rate results. The results are displayed on the robot’s screen underneath the face. The robot then thanks the participant and moves out of the room. After each interaction, the participant completed a questionnaire.
The questionnaire contained a 6-item version of the Mind Perception Questionnaire . The scale contains two subscales – agency (the ability to think, recognise emotions, communicate) and experience (the ability to feel pleasure, pain, be conscious). Participants were asked to “Please indicate the degree to which you believe this robot has each of these capacities:” on scales from 1 to 7. For example, “How much is this robot capable of thinking?” Scores were summed for each subscale where a higher score indicated greater capacity (possible range 3 to 21 for each subscale). The scales were internally reliable for all faces (agency range.76 to.85; experience range.70 to.85).
The questionnaire also contained three visual analog scales asking the participants: “How humanlike did you think this robot was?” (very machine-like ‘0’ to very humanlike ‘100’); “Did the robot seem alive?” (not at all alive ‘0’ to very much alive ‘100’), and “How eerie did the robot’s face look?” (not at all eerie ‘0’ to very eerie ‘100’, for the human and silver faces only).
For each face display condition, participants rated their impression of the robot’s personality using Asch’s checklist of characteristics . This list comprises 18 pairs of traits, mostly opposites, and participants are asked to “Please select one word from each pair that is most in accordance with the view you have formed of this robot:”. The pair warm-cold was added due to evidence of its primary importance in Asch’s paper. After recoding negatively valenced items, factor analysis with varimax rotation was used to discern personality factors using the humanlike face display condition, and a scree plot indicated three factors explained the majority of variance. Factor one “sociable” included six items: unsociable-sociable, unpopular-popular, hard headed-imaginative, cold-warm, humourless–humourous, and irritable-good natured, (cronbach’s alpha.82). Factor two “amiable” included four items: unattractive-good looking, unhappy-happy, ruthless-humane, and ungenerous-generous, (cronbach’s alpha.76.) The third factor “trustworthy” included three items: unstable-persistent, shrewd-wise and dishonest-honest (cronbach’s alpha.63). Subscales were created to represent these factors by summing these items for each face. Participants were also asked to “Please give a brief characterization of this robot in just a few sentences:”. After interacting with all three robot face display conditions, the participants completed a final questionnaire in which they were asked, “Please rank below, which robot you liked the most for a healthcare robot, from most favorite to least favorite”.
Data were analysed using SPSS version 19. One sample Pearson’s chi-square was used to analyse robot face display condition preference. Repeated measures ANOVA were used to compare differences in ratings between the three conditions, with post-hoc tests using Sidak’s adjustment for multiple comparisons. Pearson’s correlations were run to investigate how perceptions of mind were related to how humanlike, alive and eerie each condition was rated. Associations between eeriness and personality factors were conducted using Pearson’s r. Significance was set at p<.05.
Robot Face Display Preference
When asked which was their favourite healthcare robot, 18 participants (60%) chose the robot with the HFD, nine chose the robot with the NFD (30%) and three (10%) chose the robot with the SFD, χ2 (2, N = 30) = 11.40, p = .003.
Differences between Robot Face Display Conditions in Ratings of Humanlike, Alive, and Eerie
The robots with the three different face displays were rated significantly differently on humanlikeness F (2, 29) = 25.00, p<.001. The humanlikeness means were: NFD 21.70 (SD 16.10); SFD 39.20 (SD 18.80); HFD 49.37 (SD 23.76). Post–hoc tests indicated the NFD condition was rated significantly less humanlike than both the SFD condition (p<.001), and the HFD condition (p<.001). In addition, the HFD condition was rated significantly more humanlike than the SFD condition (p = .020) There was also a significant difference in ratings of being alive, with perceived aliveness increasing with humanlikeness of the face display conditions; F (2, 29) = 10.63, p<.001. The alive rating means were: NFD 20.47 (SD 20.13); SFD 31.30 (SD 22.77); and HFD 40.63 (SD 26.16). Post-hoc tests indicated that there was a significant difference between NFD and HFD conditions (p<.001), but the difference between the NFD and SFD conditions was not significant (p = .057), and the difference between the SFD and HFD conditions was also not significant (p = .055). The SFD was rated more eerie (mean 54.47, SD 24.17) than the HFD condition (mean 39.70, SD 25.99), t (29) = 2.46, p = .020.
Differences between Robot Face Display Conditions in Perceived Agency and Experience
There was a significant difference in ratings of how much agency each robot had depending on face display condition, F (2, 58) = 9.34 (p<.001), see Figure 4. Post-hoc tests showed significant differences between the NFD and the SFD conditions (p = .049) and between the NFD and the HFD conditions (p<.001), but the difference between the SFD and HFD conditions was not significant (p = .259). Similarly, there was a significant difference in ratings of how much each robot could experience things depending on its face screen display F (2, 58) = 11.20, p<. 001, see Figure 4. Post hoc tests showed significant differences in experience between NFD and the SFD conditions (p = .022), and between NFD and the HFD conditions (p = .001) but the difference between the SFD and HFD conditions was not statistically significant (p = .072).
Differences between Robot Face Display Conditions in Personality Impressions
There were significant overall differences between robots with different face displays for sociability and amiability but there was no significant difference in the trustworthy factor between the robot face display conditions (see Table 1). Post-hoc tests with Sidak’s correction indicated a significant difference in sociability between the NFD and the HFD conditions (p = .011), while the difference between NFD and the SFD conditions was not significant (p = .069), and neither was the difference between the SFD and the HFD conditions (p = .315). There was a significant difference between the HFD and NFD conditions in amiability (p = .001) and between the HFD and the SFD conditions (p = .025), but the difference between the SFD and NFD conditions was not significant (p = .196).
Some examples of the brief personality impressions people gave for each robot are listed here. HFD: “Felt more close to the robot. It felt affectionate and humanlike. The face looked like a real doctor’s face serious/reliable”, “Robot seemed friendly, helpful, patient – didn’t rush”, “practical, calm, predictable, reliable, task-oriented, efficient”. SFD: “I thought it was efficient however it did lack some emotion…”, “Practical…sterile…”, “enough humanlike that the silver appearance becomes creepy”. NFD: “very robotic, impersonal, mechanical and soulless”, “…the robot does not give warmth and does not comfort you”, “…In some ways more honest because there isn’t a face and I know there is not a person inside…”.
Differences between Robot Face Display Conditions in Blood Pressure
The repeated measures ANOVA showed no overall significant effect of robot face display condition on diastolic (F (3, 87) = 0.40, p = .750), or systolic blood pressure (F (3, 87) = 0.90, p = .446).
Associations between Perceptions of having a Mind, being Alive, Humanlike, and Eerie
For each robot face display condition, there was a strong correlation between ratings of humanlikeness and being alive: NFD r = .73 (p<. 001), SFD r = .76 (p<. 001) and HFD r = .77 (p<. 001). Ratings of humanlikeness were significantly related to agency (NFD r = .37 (p = .046), SFD r = .36 (p = .048), HFD r = .68, p<.001), and to perceived capacity to experience for the HFD only (r = .59, p<.001). Ratings of humanlikeness were not significantly related to perceived capacity to experience for the NFD (r = .34, p = .066) or SFD conditions (r = .13, p = 483).
Ratings of being alive were related to agency ratings for both the SFD (r = .62, p<.001), and HFD conditions (r = .67, p<.001), and with the capacity to experience for both SFD (r = .41, p = .023), and HFD conditions (r = .50, p = .005). There were no significant relationships between ratings of being alive and agency or experience for the NFD condition (r = .108, p = .571), and r = .039 (p = .838) respectively.
The eeriness of the SFD and HFD conditions was not significantly related to ratings of being alive (SFD r = −.002, p = .990; HFD r = .11, p = .557), nor to being humanlike (SFD r = −.14, p = .458; HFD r = −.30, p = .110), nor to perceptions of agency (SFD r = .15, p = .437, and HFD r = −.21 p = .261) or experience (SFD r = −.004, p = .984, and HFD r = −.208, p = .271).
Associations between Eeriness and Personality
For the robot with the HFD, there were significant correlations with eeriness for all three factors: sociable (r = −.517, p = .003), amiable (r = −.535, p = .002), and trustworthy (r = −.514, p = .004). For the robot with the SFD, these correlations did not reach significance (r = −.148, p = .438), amiable (r = −.242, p = .197) and trustworthy (r = .224, p = .235).
This study presented three different faces on a robot with a display screen – no-face display, a silver face display, and a humanlike face display. As expected, the robot with the humanlike face display was rated the most humanlike, followed by the robot with the silver face display, and then the robot with the no-face display. The more humanlike the face display, the more people attributed mind (the ability to experience things and have agency) to the robot, and the more they saw the robot as being alive. The face displays influenced impressions of the robot’s personality, with the humanlike face display seen as the most sociable and amiable, but all three were seen as trustworthy. The robot with the humanlike face display was the most preferred, followed by the robot with the no-face display, and the robot with the silver face display was the least preferred. The robot with the silver face display was rated more eerie than the robot with the more humanlike face display. There were no differences in participants’ blood pressure between robot face display conditions.
The results are in line with Eyssel’s theory that people seek to attribute humanlike qualities to robots , and suggest that a humanlike appearance may augment this process. The findings tie in with the expectation violation and Bayesian models, because one interpretation is that the silver face provides conflicting cues as to whether the face is human or artificial. Mind perception processes may be part of this model, such that robots may not be expected to be able to feel emotions – but humans are, and the silver face could be seen to provide conflicting cues as to which category the entity belongs.
These results are congruent with initial studies on mind perception that have shown people attribute more mind to adult humans than all other characters . They also align with results that people attribute more mind to robots with voices of the their own gender , and this indicates that people attribute more mind to others that are more similar to themselves. This is the first study to show that changing the face can influence how much mind people attribute to a robot with a display screen during an interaction. The study used Mind Perception Questionnaire, which breaks mind into the capacity for experience and the capacity for agency. The advantage of this questionnaire is that is has been psychometrically validated, has distinct subscales for agency and experience, and has been used in different contexts and so allows comparisons to a range of other entities.
Designers need to think carefully about what qualities they wish their robot to be perceived as having and design the face accordingly. A humanlike face display should be used if the designers wish the robot to be perceived as having greater abilities to experience things, have agency and be seen as more sociable and amiable. On other hand if designers do not want people to have high expectations of the robot having these abilities, then a humanlike face display may not be useful. For example, retirement village residents have expressed a preference for a robot that is not humanlike , and they may not want a robot that they perceive can think and feel. The face on a robot presents information from which people form impressions and expectations of abilities. Previous research has found that users’ overly-high expectations of a robot’s abilities before an interaction are adjusted down after the interaction, while overly low expectations are adjusted up, suggesting that it is better to create low expectations to avoid disappointment .
The robot with the humanlike face display was rated highest in the capacity to experience followed by the robot with the silver face display, and then the no-face display, which is similar to findings that the front of a robot’s head is rated higher in experience than the back . This study found that the robots with the humanlike and silver face displays were rated as having greater agency than the no-face display, whereas the front and back of the head were rated as similar in agency in Gray and Wegner’s experiment. These new findings suggest that the presence of even a silver face display can promote perceptions of agency compared to no-face display.
Interestingly, ratings of eeriness were not related to ratings of humanlikeness or being alive. This finding supports earlier work that it is not the degree of humanlikeness per se that creates eeriness , . Instead, ratings of eeriness were significantly associated with the impression of personality; in particular, higher eeriness was related to perceptions of being less sociable, amiable, and trustworthy for the robot with the humanlike face display. The open–ended descriptions of personality suggested that people inferred warmth, affection, and friendliness from appearance. All of the faces were rated highly on trustworthiness, which is a characteristic that is desirable for a healthcare robot.
Neither ratings of experience nor agency were significantly correlated with perceptions of eeriness, whereas in earlier work, the capacity of experience partially explained feelings of uncanniness . These differences in findings may be due to methodological factors – this study used a within-group design rather than between groups design, all of the participants viewed the robot from the front, the robot was a Peoplebot rather than Kaspar, participants interacted with a robot with a display screen rather than watching a video of a robot, and there were differences in questionnaire items. The previous study assessed perceptions of the robots’ ability to experience pain and fear, whereas this study assessed perceptions of the robots’ ability to experience pain, pleasure and consciousness. The findings of this paper suggest that the perceived capacity to experience per se is not as important to the Uncanny Valley as the perceived lack of sociability and amiability. However, more research is needed to explore this further.
Limitations of the study include the presentation of a limited number of faces, and only the one robot body type. Using blank holes on the silver face may not have been the best method to simplify the eyes, however, we were limited by the software capabilities. Future research could further investigate how other forms of face and body affect perceptions of personality and mind and link to the Uncanny Valley. It could be argued that it is not clear whether the participants were rating the faces on the display screens or the robots as a whole. We argue that the participants saw each screen display as part of each robot, so they were in effect rating the robots as a whole. In support of this point: the questionnaires specifically asked the participants to rate each robot rather than each screen display; the participants had to use the blood pressure cuff mounted half way up each robot so much of the interaction took place around the body of the robot; and participants’ responses to the characterisation questions describe aspects of the robot and not just the screen. However, future work could investigate whether these results occur when these faces are shown on computers, videos or in photographs.
This work adds to the body of literature trying to discern how robot faces can affect user impressions. There are three main conclusions relating to faces on a screen display on a healthcare robot. First, the robot with the more humanlike face display was preferred to the robots with the no-face or the silver face displays, and was seen as less eerie than the robot with the silver face display. Second, people attributed more mind and more sociability to the robot with the humanlike face display than to the robot with the no-face display, and a more amiable personality to the robot with the humanlike face display than to the robots with either the silver face and no-face displays. Third, perceptions of sociability and amiability were negatively correlated with perceptions of eeriness in the robot with the humanlike face display. Robot developers need to be aware that the face they employ on a robot with a display screen will affect user impressions of the robot’s personality and mind, and that impressions of a lack of sociability and amiability may be linked to feelings of unease.
Conceived and designed the experiments: EB DW BM. Performed the experiments: VK. Analyzed the data: EB VK. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: XL RS JS DW EB VK BM. Wrote the paper: EB XL BM DW VK RS.
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- 39. Broadbent E, Kuo I, Lee YI, Rabindran J, Kerse N, et al. (2010) Attitudes and reactions to a healthcare robot. Telemed E-Health 16: 608–613. doi: 10.1089/tmj.2009.0171
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- 41. Broadbent E, Tamagawa R, Patience A, Knock B, Kerse N, et al. (2012) Attitudes towards health-care robots in a retirement village. Australas J Ageing 31: 115–120. doi: 10.1111/j.1741-6612.2011.00551.x
- 42. Paepcke S, Takayama L (2010) Judging a bot by its cover: an experiment on expectation setting for personal robots. Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. Osaka, Japan: IEEE Press. 45–52.
- 43. MacDorman KF (2005) Subjective ratings of robot video clips for human likeness, familiarity, and eeriness: An exploration of the uncanny valley. ICCS/CogSci-2006 Long Symposium: Toward Social Mechanisms of Android Science Vancouver, Canada. 26–29. | <urn:uuid:3d824b84-32c1-4595-9719-5eab5b8fa85b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0072589 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392159.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00114-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9306 | 10,681 | 2.578125 | 3 |
This video series shows growers and others how to identify BMSB, why this pest is important in agriculture, and what’s at stake if we don’t stop it. Update: We created four new videos to address recent developments in monitoring, trapping, management, and biological control.
The Asian wasp Trissolcus japonicus has been found in the wild in the United States. The wasp, native to the regions of Asia where the brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB) originates, is known to attack the eggs of BMSB and possibly other stink bugs.
Learn about currently open positions on the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug project.
Learn more about the kits and find out how to request one online.
This new guidance document for orchard crop growers provides a synopsis of what researchers have learned so far and management recommendations using an integrated approach.
New presentations are available for download from the December 2015 Brown Marmorated Stink Bug Stakeholder Advisory Panel Meeting.
The 2015 Summary Report for this project is now available for download.
Missing egg masses lead researchers to study native predators of the brown marmorated stink bug. Source: Entomology Today, March 25, 2016.
The brown marmorated stink bug, Halyomorpha halys (Stål), is a voracious eater that damages fruit, vegetable, and ornamental crops in North America. With funding from USDA’s Specialty Crop Research Initiative, our team of more than 50 researchers is uncovering the pest’s secrets to find management solutions that will protect our food, our environment, and our farms. | <urn:uuid:6d727602-3a42-417d-90e3-e516b9d6c388> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.stopbmsb.org/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395613.65/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00147-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.904313 | 343 | 3.109375 | 3 |
As noted in the previous post, Dr. Joseph Warren was one of the most important and influential Revolutionary War heroes, once more famous than George Washington, now largely forgotten given his untimely death in the American retreat from the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. Ever since, historians have debated the contemporary stories of the death of Warren, whether he was shot in the face as he valiantly rallied some retreating Yankees to a final volley against the oncoming British, or whether he was shot in the back of the head as he ran from the field. At last we have the answer.
Following the Battle of Bunker Hill, Warren was buried on the field of battle, which remained under the control of the British until their forced Evacuation of Boston, March 17, 1776.
It was on this date, 235 years ago, April 4, 1776, that Dr. Warren’s burial spot was discovered by two of his brothers, Ebenezer Warren and Dr. John Warren, along with Paul Revere. Though Paul Revere was known as a silversmith, his trade had its uses in dentistry as well. Joseph Warren’s unborn nephew would decades later specify that the body was recognized “from the circumstance that the left upper cuspidatus, or eye-tooth, had been secured in its place by a golden wire.“1 Whether the eye-tooth was the false tooth, or whether the false tooth was secured to it by the wire, is unclear. Revere’s use of dentistry to help identify Warren’s remains is oft cited as the first known use of dental forensics.
In the decades following, Warren’s body would be re-interred three more times. The final was on August 3, 1855, when the remains were moved to Boston’s Forest Hills Cemetery, where his tomb remains today.2 Joseph Warren’s grandnephew, Dr. Jonathan Mason Warren, participated in this fourth and final burial. He wrote in his journal:3
The remains of General Joseph Warren were removed from St. Paul’s to Forest Hills on Aug. 3, 1855, when my father [Dr. John Collins Warren], Sullivan, William Appleton, and myself [Dr. John Mason Warren] put them into a stone or earthen urn, like those of John Warren, Mrs. Warren, and my mother. The place was quite moist where they were put, and the hole in the head of General Warren was becoming enlarged by the crumbling of the margin. I had a photograph made of it in three positions. — Journal, May 6, 1859.
Alas! Photography now existed, and Dr. Jonathan Mason Warren had the foresight to take such photographs. The whereabouts of those photos have sadly long been forgotten. Fortunately, Dr. Lester L. Luntz, D.D.S., in writing his 1973 dental forensics Handbook for Dental Identification, photographed those lost originals when they were still to be found at the Old South Meeting House (they are no longer there) and included them in his book. That dental handbook has long been unknown to most historians, and thus the debate on the particulars of Warren’s death continued. Dr. Luntz placed the copies he made, his “photos of photos”, in the Center for the History of Medicine, part of the Countway Library of Medicine (under the auspices of the Harvard Medical School), where they have remained forgotten—until now. Below, with kind permission of Dr. Luntz’s heir, they are published here, online, for the first time ever. (These photographs will also appear in my forthcoming book, 1775.)
The authenticity of the photos is evidenced by the metal wire placed by Revere, barely visible between the eye-tooth and the first pre-molar in the frontal view. It is upon examination of these copies that the particulars of Warren’s death become apparent. The photos reveal a musket-ball sized hole just between the left nostril and left eye on Warren’s left side. There is a much larger exit wound at the back of the skull’s base, just right of center when looking at it from behind. This exit wound must have been the one Dr. John Mason Warren described as “crumbling at the margin.” Due to the low muzzle velocity of the musket, as evidenced by their extremely limited range, one can deduce that in order for a ball to pass entirely through the skull, the fatal shot was fired from close range.4
With these long-lost photos, we now have visual proof to answer the particulars of the fatal shot. Dr. Joseph Warren was shot in the face, looking at his assailant, and given the exit wound, he undoubtedly died instantly. He made no final speeches. He was not shot in the back of the head while retreating. Whether he rallied a few steadfast Yanks to give a final volley into the oncoming British is unknown, but Dr. Warren certainly died facing the swarm of redcoats as they poured over the Breed’s Hill redoubt toward him.
- John Collins Warren’s A Genealogy of Warren with some Historical Sketches (Boston: Printed by John Wilson and Son, 1854) 47.
- Richard Frothingham’s Life and Times of Joseph Warren (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1865) 525 and Arnold 245 (for citation, see next note). I am indebted to J. L. Bell for leading me to the latter source.
- Howard Payson Arnold’s The Memoir of Jonathan Mason Warren, M.D. (Boston: 1886) 245 n. 1.
- Smoothbore muskets had a lethal range of only about 100 yards at best. Non-uniform, handmade balls, imprecision in the manufacture, etc, make determining actual muzzle velocities difficult. Thank you to Mr. Paul O’Shaughnessy for his private discussion with me on this matter. | <urn:uuid:06abc9af-43fe-4fc6-b83d-06b141649c9f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.derekbeck.com/1775/info/circumstances-of-warrens-death/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396959.83/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00175-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972842 | 1,259 | 3.421875 | 3 |
The web's mother lode of free irrigation information!
Irrigation Master Valves
A master valve is an automatic valve, typically an electric solenoid type valve, that is installed at the point where the irrigation system connects to the water supply. The master valve is wired to a special "master valve circuit" on the irrigation controller. (Sometimes this circuit is called a "pump start circuit". Both types of circuits work similar or identical, and can be used for a pump and/or a master valve.) The irrigation controller turns the master valve on and off. Most, but not all, irrigation controllers have a master valve circuit built in to them.
How a master valve works:
Zone valves are the individual valves that operate a group of sprinklers or drip emitters. A typical irrigation system has several zone valves. Typically one zone valve is turned on at a time, and controls the irrigation in a specific area of the yard. Whenever one of the irrigation zone valves is told to open by the controller, the controller also signals the master valve to open. So the master valve is a little like a back up valve, or a fail-safe valve. The purpose of the master valve is to shut off the water to the irrigation system when none of the zone valves are operating.
Benefits of master valves:
- If a zone valve develops a leak, or doesn't close, the master valve will act as a back-up to shut off the water. Note that the water will still be on as long as any other zone valves are on. But when all are finished watering, the master valve will shut off the main water supply to the entire irrigation system. While this does not eliminate the water loss or damage, it may minimize it.
- If the mainline pipe (the pipe from the water source to the zone valves) breaks, the water will be turned off at the end of the irrigation cycle and this may minimize water loss and damage. This is especially useful if the mainline is on a hillside, where a leak might cause massive erosion and property damage. Again, the water will still be on as long as any other zone valves are on, so it only will stop the flow when the entire irrigation system is off.
- Some of the more expensive irrigation controllers can use a flow sensor in combination with a master valve to detect leaks and shut off the entire irrigation system. The controller memorizes how much water is used by each valve zone. If the flow sensor shows that the water use is higher than expected, indicating a leak, the controller detects the change in flow and closes the master valve. Unfortunately, most commercial landscape maintenance companies I have dealt with do not know how to use one of these sensor systems, and they disable the sensor. This has happened about 90% of the time on projects I have used these systems on.
Disadvantages of master valves:
- Leaks are more likely to go unnoticed and not get repaired when a master valve is used. This is because most irrigation systems run at night, when nobody is around to see the leak. During the day, when the irrigation system is shut down by the master valve, the leak is not noticed and goes unreported. My experience is that most property owners, homeowners and, yes, even professional landscape maintenance providers, do not regularly check the irrigation systems for proper operation. They make repairs only when damage becomes extreme or someone complains. No, this is not how it should be done, but sadly it is what I see 90% of the time. For this reason a master valve can actually increase the amount of water wasted when a leak develops.
- Master valves lead to premature failure of both PVC and PE (poly) mainlines. This is due to the stretching and contracting of the pipe each time the system is pressurized and then depressurized. This problem is greatly exaggerated at higher water pressures (over 65 PSI or 4,5 bars).
- A master valve can increase the severity of water hammer if the mainline has a pinhole, or one of the zone valves has a slight leak, or if the zone valves close slower than the master valve. This is due to the water draining out of the mainline. When the master valve opens and the pipe refills, the water charges through the empty pipe at a very high velocity, slamming into the tees and ells and causing damage to the pipe system.
- A master valve is one more item that can fail and require maintenance, plus it adds to the initial cost of the irrigation system.
What type of valve should be used for a master valve?
Any electric solenoid valve can be used as a master valve, except for anti-siphon valves. Anti-siphon valves may not be used as master valves. (You should never install an anti-siphon valve in a location where there is another valve downstream of it, if you do it will break the anti-siphon part of the valve.) Many professionals like to use brass valves for master valves due to the higher pressure rating and a general attitude that "if it's brass it must be better". I don't feel that a brass valve is necessary unless you can't find a plastic valve with a high enough pressure rating. Note that the pressure rating of the valve should be at least double the expected water pressure in the irrigation system. So if you have 75 PSI, or 5,2 bars, of water pressure the valve should be rated for at least 150 PSI, or 10,4 bars. If the master valve is installed before the irrigation system filter, then a "contamination-proof", "self-filtering", or "dirty water" valve would be the best type of valve to use as the master valve. These are expensive valves that have a small built-in filter to help protect the valve from dirt, which is a major cause of valve failure. If a valve with a filter is too expensive, a valve featuring a "self-cleaning metering rod" or "self-flushing ports" would be the next best thing. At a minimum the master valve should be equal in quality to the zone control valves. I typically install a filter upstream of the master valve, so most of the time I use the same valve model for the master valve as I use for the zone control valves. If you are designing an irrigation system that uses hydraulically operated zone valves, you will want to use a hydraulic operated master valve rather than an electric solenoid type. Hydraulic operated systems are rare, so if you don't know what I'm talking about it doesn't apply to you!
Where to install the master valve:
The master valve can be installed anywhere you would like. It can be before or after the backflow preventer and or the pressure regulator (if used). A few water districts do not allow any valves to be installed before the backflow preventer, but most don't care. I typically place them in an underground box after the backflow preventer and the pressure regulator. In most cases, putting it after the pressure regulator allows the use of a less expensive valve with a lower pressure rating. In freezing climates the basement, utility room, or a heated shed is a good place for them. If you need to repair the master valve it will spill water when you open it, so make sure it is not installed in a location where a little water spilling out will cause harm. Some master valves spit water out of the valve when they are manually turned on. I suggest that the master valve not be used as the emergency shut off/winterization valve for the irrigation system. Use a separate ball valve installed before the master valve for that. Like all electric valves, sooner or later it will need to be repaired, and you will need to shut off the water while you fix it.
My opinion; when should you use a master valve?
If your mainline is located in a place where a leak might cause severe property damage or a danger to the public, you should use a master valve. If you are willing to pay the price of a flow monitoring irrigation controller with a flow sensor, a master valve can be used as a water conservation measure. The controller should be programmed to shut the master valve only if a leak is detected, and not at the end of every irrigation cycle. For a typical residential irrigation system, and even many commercial systems, I don't think the benefits of a master valve outweigh the risks or justify the cost. Many water districts in areas with limited water supplies require the use of master valves as a water conservation measure. I absolutely oppose the use of master valves as a water conservation measure when not used with a flow sensor and appropriate irrigation controller. My experience indicates they actually result in an increase in wasted water!
Text and Images by Jess Stryker unless noted. Copyright © Jess Stryker, 1997-2011. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:0f12de0a-2f3d-4ab1-8ec4-3fc9d12976ad> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.irrigationtutorials.com/faq/master-valve.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397695.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00100-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940411 | 1,818 | 3.171875 | 3 |
Pronunciation: (sin'u-nim), [key]
1. a word having the same or nearly the same meaning as another in the language, as joyful, elated, glad.
2. a word or expression accepted as another name for something, as Arcadia for pastoral simplicity; metonym.
3. Biol.one of two or more scientific names applied to a single taxon.
Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Copyright © 1997, by Random House, Inc., on Infoplease. | <urn:uuid:a210bb90-62da-4d1b-a6bc-d906a6854f45> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://dictionary.infoplease.com/synonym | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399522.99/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00156-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.908898 | 109 | 2.84375 | 3 |
Twenty years after the last summary publication on the region, this volume presents the most complete modern summary of the latest surveys and research on all the birds now found in the Thai-Malay Peninsula. Over 380 species are described using data derived from field and museum research, as well as previously unpublished or poorly distributed data from local compilers, diaries, and personal records. More than 70 spectacular full-page color plates show almost all of the species covered. This volume also includes a fully referenced bibliography of over 800 sources. An extensive introduction covers aspects of history, biogeography, and ecology of the region's birds, plus main conservation issues.
- Over 380 species are described in modern handbook format using data derived from field and museum research
- The only detailed handbook of the birds of the region; supplies a benchmark synopsis (first in 20 years) of the bird fauna and ornithological research in the Peninsula, much of it published for the first time.
- Over 70 color plates
- Many species illustrated for the first time
- Serves as an introductory text which describes the region and its conservation crisis
"In the heavyweight class and it will surely offer very interesting reading."--Alula
"This is a beautifully produced book, with an extremely thorough text, which every enthusiast of southeast Asian birds will want to own."--Nick Dymond, British Birds
"This is a scholarly work and a great advance on anything so far produced for this important area. The book is an invaluable reference and should be an essential addition to any serious ornithological library."--David Clugston, Scottish Bird News
"The text is superbly done, and the book will become the standard reference for years to come."--Choice
"Comprehensive and highly detailed volume bringing together the latest information gathered from recent research on birds in this area."--BBC Wildlife
"An essential addition to the libraries of all ornithologists with a keen interest in the region. . . . It justifiably reflects the colossal amount of work that has obviously gone into this high-class production."--Pete Davidson, Birding World
"The book represents a major contribution to the ornithological literature of Southeast Asia, and David Wells must be congratulated."--David Blakesley, Ibis
"A world-class handbook."--Winging It
Formerly published by Academic Press
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Solar Hot Water System— To ensure a highly efficient flat-plate collector, Gaviotas engineers stripped a copper sheet in nitric acid, then oxidized it with a solution of copper sulfate dissolved in hydrochloric acid. The outcome is a deep black color, deposited directly on the copper, resulting in a solar collector so efficient that water is heated to 120°F even on overcast days. Street kids turned solar hot water technicians manufacture the collectors in the Gaviotas factory in Bogota.
“Sleeve” Water Pump—Typical hand pumps require a person to lift a piston to make the water rise. In the Gaviotas sleeve pump, the piston stays in place inside a lightweight plastic sleeve, and the sleeve is lifted instead. This design requires much less effort and enables water pumping from much deeper wells than a conventional hand pump—its submerged piston and cylinder allow it to operate in wells with water depths greater than 10 meters. Gaviotan engineers took this idea one step further, coupling the sleeve pump to a seesaw, turning a common children’s playground toy into a life-nurturing technology that can provide clean water to rural communities.
Windmill Water Pump—After building 58 different models of windmills over nine years, Gaviotan engineers finally hit on a simple and inexpensive design to suit Gaviotas’ tropical climate. Building off of ideas from Holland, Australia, and Africa, the village designed a windmill that pumps thousands of gallons of water per day, and can operate at wind speeds as low as 4 miles per hour. The windmill has five aluminum blades, patterned after landing flaps Gaviotan engineers spotted in a NASA airfoil catalog, each turned inward to eliminate the need for a tail. It drives a double-acting stainless steel piston pump. The result is a windmill that is 10 times lighter than a traditional windmill, needs three times less wind, and does not need to be stopped in a storm.
Hydraulic Ram Pump—The Gaviotas Hydraulic Ram can pump thousands of gallons of water, day and night, to a maximum distance of 1,000 meters with a height of 100 meters, without electricity or fuel consumption. The ram pump uses the force of falling water, developing pressure that lifts to a point higher than where the water originally started. | <urn:uuid:96635c2b-b163-48df-a0a1-764782f48934> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.homepower.com/sustainable-designs?iframe=true&template=colorbox&width=600&height=600 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393518.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00015-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922233 | 486 | 3.625 | 4 |
1. Nocturnal bird of prey with hawk-like beak and claws and large head with front-facing eyes.
4. Write upon.
12. Lacking self-confidence.
15. Liquid excretory product.
16. Irish playwright remembered for his satirical comedies of manners (1751-1816).
17. The corporate executive responsible for the operations of the firm.
18. Jordan's port.
20. United States cartoonist who drew intricate diagrams of very complicated and impractical contraptions that accomplished little or nothing (1883-1970).
22. Australian shrubs and small trees with evergreen usually spiny leaves and dense clusters of showy flowers.
23. Fiddler crabs.
25. Port city on Atlantic coast.
26. Red pear-shaped tropical fruit with poisonous seeds.
28. A field of cultivated and mowed grass.
31. Wild or domesticated South American cud-chewing animal related to camels but smaller and lacking a hump.
35. Overgrown with ivy.
37. A former agency (from 1946 to 1974) that was responsible for research into atomic energy and its peacetime uses in the United States.
38. An unwholesome atmosphere.
41. The vein in the center of a leaf.
44. Nocturnal mouselike mammal with forelimbs modified to form membranous wings and anatomical adaptations for echolocation by which they navigate.
45. A sock knitted or woven with a diamond-shaped pattern.
47. Title for a civil or military leader (especially in Turkey).
48. A colorless volatile water-soluble liquid aldehyde used chiefly in manufacture of acetic acid and perfumes and drugs.
50. (Greek mythology) A river in Hades across which the souls of the dead were carried by Charon.
53. A Mid-Atlantic state.
54. Low stingless nettle of Central and South America having velvety brownish-green toothed leaves and clusters of small green flowers.
58. A light touch or stroke.
59. United States writer of poems and plays about racial conflict (born in 1934).
64. The size of a book whose pages are made by folding a sheet of paper twice to form four leaves.
68. Being nine more than ninety.
70. A constitutional monarchy in northern Europe on the western side of the Scandinavian Peninsula.
71. A kind of person.
72. A member of the Iroquoian people formerly living east of Lake Ontario.
75. Fleshy spore-bearing inner mass of e.g. a puffball or stinkhorn.
76. The compass point that is midway between north and northeast.
77. In or relating to the duodenum.
79. A rotating disk shaped to convert circular into linear motion.
80. An anxiety disorder characterized by chronic free-floating anxiety and such symptoms as tension or sweating or trembling of light-headedness or irritability etc that has lasted for more than six months.
81. Of or relating to or characteristic of Assam or its people or culture.
82. A loose sleeveless outer garment made from aba cloth.
1. Large elliptical brightly colored deep-sea fish of Atlantic and Pacific and Mediterranean.
2. Flightless New Zealand rail of thievish disposition having short wings each with a spur used in fighting.
3. An accidental hole that allows something (fluid or light etc.) to enter or escape.
4. (Old Testament) The second patriarch.
5. A state in New England.
6. Any abnormality following or resulting from a disease or injury or treatment.
7. A hard brittle blue-white multivalent metallic element.
8. Port city that is the capital and largest city of Latvia.
9. An artificial language that is a revision and simplification of Esperanto.
10. A field game played with a ball (especially baseball).
11. Give qualities or abilities to.
12. The place where some action occurs.
13. A group of cattle or sheep or other domestic mammals all of the same kind that are herded by humans.
14. A Hindu theistic philosophy.
19. A baseball deliberately thrown at the batter's head.
21. A Japanese cheer of enthusiasm or triumph.
24. Widely cultivated herb with aromatic leaf stalks that are eaten raw or cooked.
27. Before noon.
29. Fly a plane.
30. The extent of something from side to side.
32. A radioactive element of the actinide series.
33. (psychoanalysis) An idealized image of someone (usually a parent) formed in childhood.
34. Hungarian choreographer who developed Labanotation (1879-1958).
36. English aristocrat who was the first wife of Prince Charles.
39. A state in the Rocky Mountains.
40. A mark left by the healing of injured tissue.
42. Broken husks of the seeds of cereal grains that are separated from the flour by sifting.
43. Small beads made from polished shells and formerly used as money by native Americans.
46. Showing or causing joy and pleasure.
49. South American armadillo with three bands of bony plates.
51. A compartment in front of a motor vehicle where driver sits.
52. Register formally.
55. Informal terms for a mother.
56. In the same place (used when citing a reference).
57. Dried out by heat or excessive exposure to sunlight.
60. The space between two lines or planes that intersect.
61. Any of several tall tropical palms native to southeastern Asia having egg-shaped nuts.
62. Cubes of meat marinated and cooked on a skewer usually with vegetables.
63. Small terrestrial lizard of warm regions of the Old World.
65. The inner and longer of the two bones of the human forearm.
66. A member of a pastoral people living in the Nilgiri hills of southern India.
67. An onerous or difficult concern.
69. A stick that people can lean on to help them walk.
73. (Greek mythology) The winged goddess of the dawn in ancient mythology.
74. An agency of the United Nations affiliated with the World Bank.
78. A very poisonous metallic element that has three allotropic forms. | <urn:uuid:c61f0e79-11ed-4b21-889a-6dc09bba1f02> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.crosswordpuzzlegames.com/puzzles/gm_233.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393463.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00191-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.913358 | 1,347 | 2.625 | 3 |
Tennessee State Parks, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indian, and the Cherokee Nation will host the first-ever Cherokee Heritage Festival at Red Clay State Park on August 2 and 3. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Red Clay is an interpretive site on the National Park Service’s Trail of Tears Historic Trail and is honored by Cherokee people today as sacred ground.
Prior to the Cherokee Removal in 1838, the Cherokee Nation claimed land that included parts of Southeast Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Today, the legacy of the Cherokee people continues in this region through the natural, historical and cultural landscape. Red Clay State Historic Park, located just south of Cleveland, is one of these sites.
The Cherokee Heritage Festival, which will take place on the historic grounds of Red Clay State Historic Park outside of Cleveland, will focus on the formation of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
Red Clay will have two Cherokee leaders on tap to speak during the festival. On Saturday, Aug. 2, the Honorable Terri Henry, the first female chairperson of the Tribal Council for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, will speak during a time to be announced. On Sunday, August 3, Principal Chief Michell Hicks of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians will speak to festival participants.
During the festival, the park will dedicate its newest addition, the Seven Clans Sculpture, which was carved this spring by Cherokee artists John Grant and Alva Crowe, members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Sculpted into the stump of a tree that was downed two years ago by lightning, Grant carved the masks of the seven clans of the Cherokee culture into seven remaining stumps of the centuries-old tree that grew along the wooded edges of the park. The formation, which will be dedicated on Saturday, Aug. 2, has been supported bythe Bradley County Chamber of Commerce, Friends of Red Clay, and the Tennessee Arts Council.
An exhibit featuring documents, pictures and Cherokee artwork that tells the story of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians will be on display in the James F. Corn Museum at Red Clay State Historic Park during the festival. The exhibit’s creator, Dr. Michael Abram, will speak about the culture of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
The festival will also feature noted Southern herbalist and writer Darryl Patton, who will lead hikes and provide live demonstrations about how to use various plants found around Red Clay and the South.
Other activities during the festival will include traditional dances, games, guided tours through the park, foods, storytelling, Cherokee stickball, guided hikes, and a quilt raffle. Park staff will portray history through interactive, living interpretations of Native Americans and early settlers from the early 19th century.
Nolichucky Films, in association with Red Clay State Historic Park, will begin filming a new interpretive film to describe the events that occurred at Red Clay and that led to the infamous Trail of Tears.
There is a $5 charge for parking for the event. | <urn:uuid:1ddd1e2f-f214-4ced-89ea-f2779cc8e09f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.chattanoogan.com/2014/7/17/280549/Red-Clay-State-Park-Hosts-Cherokee.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397842.93/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00192-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940728 | 621 | 2.546875 | 3 |
As parents, if you are asked about what skills you think are necessary for your child’s success, you might be inclined to pick Math over even social skills, says this article. Math might win by a small margin according to these polls, but most of us are aware that it is definitely one of the basic building blocks of our child’s education. Here are some reasons to understand why:
Forms a basis: Math is a fundamental need for nearly all parts of our lives – from counting the number of steps in our staircase, to shopping for groceries – it is definitely not something we can stay clear of. Kids can also experience another aspect of math by learning mental math calculations, which will really help in the daily aspects.
Builds confidence: You must remember the time your kid aced a Math test at school, and how good they feel about their performance when that happens. This confidence extends to other aspects of schoolwork too, as Math is always supposed to be one of the formidable subjects and doing well in it will improve the child’s approach to other areas too.
First step towards career: A proficiency in Math can guide older children towards the path they would like to take in life. It can illustrate to them if they want a career in Engineering, Architecture or any other subject related to different aspects of the subject. In one way or the other, math is a basis subject for a lot of the mainstream and individualized careers available to kids nowadays.
Other aspects: It is very important how we as parents approach math when kids are young, because building it up to be scary may not be the ideal thing to do. Teaching numbers in a fun way such as through hopscotch, or doing multiplication-based projects together will help a lot in the long run. If we help our kids embrace it at an early age by making a big deal of the fun aspects of it, they will have a much more open mind to more difficult parts as they grow up.
Math is definitely a subject that is very important to lay a foundation for our children. If you are interested in exploring more about mental mathematics, and a way to build your child’s confidence in the subject, do check out our classes at Aloha: http://www.aloha-usa.com | <urn:uuid:1885807e-6347-49ee-8104-20d4be9c24db> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://alohamath.com/category/math-for-kids/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399117.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00170-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959474 | 469 | 3.046875 | 3 |
Writing an application essay that is memorable and engages the reader can have a big impact on whether you win a scholarship. It is one of the few selection criteria that is completely under your control.
- Read the directions. Read and follow the directions. Sometimes the directions can clarify the intent of the question. If you don't follow the directions, you will give the scholarship committee a negative impression, telling them that you can't or won't follow instructions.
- Do not skip questions. If a question does not apply to you, write "Not Applicable". Do not leave any question blank. An incomplete application will be rejected.
- Write an interesting essay. The usual pseudo-philosophical rambling essays most students write are boring. Most students haven't lived long enough to develop a personal philosophy or life story that isn't trite, superficial, preachy or tiresome. A truly interesting essay will engage the reader and attract attention. So don't edit the life out of your essay, and stray a little from the safe topics.
Write about something you find interesting. Chances are, if you are passionate about a topic, you'll be able to write a more interesting essay about the topic.
If you find it difficult to write essays, try talking about the essay topic while recording the conversation. After you're done, transcribe the recording and edit it into essay form. This will give you a good start on your essay. The key to writing a good essay is to make it interesting, and the key to that is to write about something you are passionate about. Since the act of writing often interferes with the flow of ideas (most people can think and speak ten times faster than they can write or type), speaking into a tape recorder can help you capture your ideas and emotions better than staring at a blank piece of paper.
Try to find a unifying theme that binds together the threads of your background into a tapestry that shows not only where you have been and where you are now, but where you will go in the future. This will provide a sense of direction and cohesiveness.
- Write an outline for your essays. Writing an outline can help provide focus and structure to the essay. Too many application essays are written in a stream of consciousness style, which jumps from point to point and rambles without connecting one thought to another. Using an outline will allow you to present your arguments and ideas in a manner that supports your conclusions, yielding a more powerful essay.
- Give concrete examples. When answering application questions or writing application essays, support your statements with concrete examples. For example, if you say that one of your best qualities is leadership, give an example where you demonstrated leadership. Similarly, a question about community service should not be answered with a vague "I like helping others and feel that it is important", but should also include specific examples where you have helped others.
This can have a big impact on whether you win the award. If your application is filled with vague and abstract answers, the selection committee doesn't have any way of evaluating your qualifications. Selection committees never accept an applicant's self-evaluation at face value. If you give them concrete examples, they can form their own opinion and cite those experiences and accomplishments as evidence in support of their opinion.
The only situation in which self-evaluation is appropriate is when you are writing about how an experience affected you. In such a situation you are the only source of information about your personal reaction. But do not limit the essay to how you felt about the experience. Instead, also talk about how it affected your future actions. By linking your feelings to concrete examples and actions, you allow the committee to judge how the experience affected you through a tangible result.
- Don't exaggerate. Stretching the truth can hurt your application. For example, if you list photography as a hobby on an application for a science scholarship, don't be surprised if you're asked to explain the chemical reactions that make photography possible during your interview. Selection committees are good at detecting when a student exaggerates, and the dishonesty will cause you to lose a scholarship you might otherwise have won.
- Proofread your applications.Check your application forms and essays for correct spelling and grammar usage.
- Ask a teacher or parent to review your application. It sometimes helps to have a second pair of eyes read over your application. They can catch errors you missed and make helpful suggestions. But don't allow your parents to edit all the life out of your essay. Discuss the essay with them, but don't let them rewrite it. | <urn:uuid:21d26600-980e-4626-9ce7-bd4155842450> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.finaid.org/scholarships/essays.phtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399117.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00081-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94797 | 937 | 2.796875 | 3 |
The waters along the west coast of North America are some of the most biologically productive in the world. Cool water from high latitudes flows southward from the edge of British Columbia to Baja; this is the California Current. At the same time, breezes often blow from land to sea and push ocean surface waters away from the coast. As a result, cooler, nutrient-rich water rises up from the depths to take its place—a process known as upwelling.
The combination of cool water and abundant nutrients promotes the growth of plant life in the sea, from microscopic phytoplankton to dense kelp forests. Those plants—primary producers—become the center of a food web that includes highly productive fisheries, sizable populations of marine mammals (whales, seals, dolphins), and vast numbers of sea birds. This productive ecosystem can extend as much as 500 kilometers (300 miles) out from the coast.
On February 8, 2016, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite captured several images of blooming phytoplankton and swirling currents along the coast of California and western Mexico. The images were stitched together into a composite built with data from the red, green, and blue wavelength bands on VIIRS, along with chlorophyll data. A series of image-processing steps highlighted the color differences and subtle features in the water.
The California Current is what scientists call an eastern boundary current. Strong current systems flow along the east side (or boundary) of all of Earth’s major ocean basins. They tend to move water toward the equator, and they are prone to strong upwelling. That’s because an ocean current moving from north to south along a west coast is pulled away from the shore by Earth’s rotation (the Coriolis effect), leaving a void that allows deep water to fill in behind.
In the image above, note how the green phytoplankton near the coast trace out the meanders and eddies from the California Current. The presence of this cool water current keeps the region’s temperatures milder for much of the year than they otherwise would be.
Recent research suggests that global warming could intensify upwelling in coastal boundary currents, which could change the chemistry of those nearshore waters and possibly have effects on the species that now populate them. Some changes are already underway, as other research projects have detected a decline in the abundance of zooplankton in the region and a deepening of the thermocline—the submarine boundary layer between warmer surface waters and cooler deep waters.
Researchers are also watching the California Current closely this year because El Niño warms the sea more than usual and can reduce upwelling. This leads to increased water temperatures, which in past El Niño events has done real damage to fisheries and the marine mammals that feed on them.
References and Related Reading
- Central and Northern California Ocean Observing System (2014) Flowing Ocean: Understanding the California Current. Accessed February 25, 2016.
- Bakun, A., et al. (2015) Anticipated Effects of Climate Change on Coastal Upwelling Ecosystems. Current Climate Change Reports, 1 (2), pages 85-93.
- The Encyclopedia of Earth (2011, June 13) California Current large marine ecosystem. Accessed February 25, 2016.
- NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center (2014) Research in the California Current. Accessed February 25, 2016.
- NSF Long-Term Ecological Research (2016) California Current Ecosystem. Accessed February 25, 2016.
- Wikipedia (2016) California Current. Accessed February 25, 2016.
NASA image by Norman Kuring, NASA’s Ocean Color Web. Caption by Mike Carlowicz, with aid from Stephanie Schollaert-Uz.
- Suomi NPP - VIIRS | <urn:uuid:68300065-309d-47f4-b4e0-bcf9b273c9c2> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=87575&src=iotdrss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783400031.51/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155000-00181-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919688 | 800 | 4.34375 | 4 |
Multi Touch Paper Presentation & Seminar
Multi-touch technology is an advanced human-computer interaction technique that recogonises multiple touch points and also includes the hardware devices that implement it, which allow users to compute without conventional input devices . Multi-touch consists of a touch screen (screen, table, wall, etc.) or touchpad, as well as a software that recognizes multiple simultaneous touch points, as opposed to the standard touchscreen which recognizes only one touch point at a time.
Multi touch using Frustrated Total Internal Reflection is a simple, inexpensive, and scalable technique for enabling high-resolution multi- touch sensing on rear-projected interactive surfaces. Different applications for multi-touch interfaces both exist and are being proposed. Some uses are individualistic eg iPhone, iPod touch, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air. The use of multi-touch technology is expected to rapidly become common place.
Please find the attached file along with this
If You have any query regarding the files.Please feel free to | <urn:uuid:28212179-bb38-435c-a305-21b091092e98> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.faadooengineers.com/threads/4403-Multi-Touch-PPT-PDF-Paper-Presentation-amp-Seminar-Report | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392099.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00009-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921669 | 204 | 3 | 3 |
Italian deputy and author; born at Florence, July 27, 1840. On the death of his father he was obliged to discontinue his studies and earn his livelihood as compositor and correctorfor the press. In 1859 he enlisted as a volunteer in the Piedmontese regiment of Alpine chasseurs, and took part in the war for independence. The war over, he returned to the printing-house, which he left again to follow Garibaldi to Sicily in 1860. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant on the battle-field of Milazzo, and entered the regular army with the same grade. Arbib served in the campaign against Austria in 1866, and on the cessation of hostilities he retired from the army and found employment on the staff of "La Nazione," a newspaper published in Florence; subsequently he became editor-in-chief of the "Gazzetta del Popolo" in the same city. Ultimately he removed to Rome, where in 1870 he founded a daily newspaper, "La Libertà." His political career began in 1880, when he was elected by the citizens of Viterbo as their representative in the Chamber of Deputies; and some time later he was elected to the Chamber by the people of Perugia. His contributions to Italian literature are: (1) "L'Esercito Italiano alla Campagna del 1866"; (2) "Raconti Militari" (1870), in the "Biblioteca Amena" (vol. lxv.); (3) "Guerra in Famiglia" (1871); (4) "La Moglie Nera" (1874); (5) "Rabagas Bandiere" (1878). | <urn:uuid:19485165-b136-4fcb-b422-cdca84926256> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/1723-arbib-eduardo | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783404382.73/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155004-00153-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978606 | 364 | 3.203125 | 3 |
If you mean that you're evaluating at x = -1, then definitely use the parentheses! Otherwise, for instance, -1^2 = -(1^2) = -1, which is not what you mean!
That is the question
First post for me, so hi everyone.
I'm uncertain if this is the correct subforum for this question, I'm from Sweden and having a bit of a problem with what's Algebra and what is not since we do not use the term.
But anyhow, here's my problem.
I'm doing some derivative problems (think it's derivative in english at least ) and I ran into a problem which isn't even related to the derivative but I'll just punch out the whole thing:
Which then comes to
And now I wanna see if it's a positive or negative tangent prior to the first bend.
And here comes my problem, I am uncertain if I should put the number in parentheses or not, if I do it looks like this:
If not it's like this:
Which is the correct one
Thanks in advance
Thanks a bunch for the quick answers!
I was pretty sure I had to use the parentheses but it's one of those things that I know I've asked my teacher about and he said something like "XXXX use parentheses" and I couldn't remember if the XXXX was always or never
Thanks again guys | <urn:uuid:e52c7098-8174-4758-b547-30fde3173a60> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://mathhelpforum.com/algebra/89518-use-parentheses-not.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397636.15/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00185-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949003 | 291 | 2.984375 | 3 |
Brown Recluse Spider
One of the most notorious spiders which gets a lot of bad
press. These brown recluse spiders were captured in extreme
Southern Illinois and commonly make their homes under rocks,
logs, and abandoned cabins. They are usually non aggressive,
and bites are usually sustained by rolling over in bed, putting
on socks and shoes, or carrying boxes out of a dark basement.
It's very common for this bite to be painless at the time
that it occurs. The brown recluse spider is also called, the
'fiddleback spider' or 'violin spider' due to the dark violin
shape on its cephalothorax (head). The venom is not completely
understood, however we do know that it causes severe tissue
death at the bite site and less often generalized reactions
including renal failure, and even death. After 6-8 hours of
a stinging sensation, there will be aching and severe itching
at the area. In 2-3 days an ulcer may occur at the bite site.
After 2-5 weeks, a rather noticeable hole in the skin can
occur. The best way to identify a brown recluse spider bite
is by identification of the spider.
The two pictures above are from Southern Illinois while the
two at the bottom are from Arkansas. Notice the differences
in size and color.
Arkansas recluse photos by:
Launa McCray R.N.
Outdoor Treatment for Brown Recluse
Elevation of the extremity is important.
Cool compresses rather than warm are important. Tetanus update
should be provided. Keep the bite site clean until reaching
your health care provider for further treatment. Antihistamines
may help control itching but will not change the wound. Sometimes
surgical excision of the wound site needs to occur. | <urn:uuid:d7df74b2-d305-44d8-b066-46220845d408> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.surviveoutdoors.com/reference/spiders/brown_recluse.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396872.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00114-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.911248 | 391 | 2.953125 | 3 |
The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
Anthony Rudd defends a series of interrelated claims about the nature of the self. He argues that the self is not simply a given entity, but a being that constitutes or shapes itself, guided by its own sense of the good. This means that there is an essentially ethical or evaluative dimension to selfhood, and one which has an essentially teleological character. Such self-constitution takes place in narrative terms, through one's telling--and, more importantly,living-one's own story. Rudd takes Kierkegaard's account of the self as his main inspiration, and argues (controversially) that this account belongs in the Platonic rather than the Aristotelian tradition of teleological thinking. He presents a convincing case for an ancient and currently unfashionable view: that the polarities and tensions that are constitutive of selfhood can only be reconciled through an orientation of the self as a whole to an objective Good.
Anthony Rudd is Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at St Olaf College, Minnesota. He is the author of Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical (Oxford, 1993), Expressing the World: Skepticism, Wittgenstein and Heidegger (Open Court, 2003), as well as numerous articles. He is co-editor of Kierkegaard After MacIntyre (Open Court, 2001) with John Davenport.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction Part One 1. Self-Shaping and Self-Acceptance 2. The Teleological Self: Plato and Kierkegaard 3. Character Part Two Introduction to Part Two 4. Personhood, Self-Shaping, and the Good 5. Three Theories of Value: A Kierkegaardian Critique 6. Being for the Good Part Three Introduction to Part Three 7. Selfhood and Narrative 8. Narrative and Value 9. The Unconscious Self Bibliography Index | <urn:uuid:027246fb-626e-4d29-81cf-71b32cba4ce8> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.ecampus.com/self-value-narrative-kierkegaardian/bk/9780199660049 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397865.91/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00115-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.912515 | 482 | 2.5625 | 3 |
(Source: New Energy Times) This paper contains a new explanation for anomalous patterns of nuclear abundances experimentally observed in metallic hydride cathodes of electrolytic chemical cells. These experimental transmuted nuclear abundances have been something of a scientific enigma since they were first published by G. H. Miley et al. starting in 1996.
Earlier attempts by other researchers to explain the experimental distinctive multipeak patterns of nuclear abundances employed a two-body fission spectrum. However, no sensible physical mechanism has been proposed that plausibly could create the required large quantities of very massive fissionable nuclei capable of producing such a spectrum.
Highlights of the Attached Paper
When we apply the theory cited previously, a new explanation is provided for the experimental nuclear transmutation data that we regard as both plausible and consistent with known science. There are no new physical laws assumed. We do not see any evidence in the experimental data for fusion processes with their implied low energy Coulomb barrier penetration.
In contrast to earlier explanations, the data is described as primarily the result of a neutron absorption spectrum. Ultra-low momentum neutrons are produced (along with virtually inert neutrinos) by the weak interaction annihilation of electrons and protons when the chemical cell is driven strongly out of equilibrium. Large quantities of these neutrons are produced on the surface of a metal hydride cathode in an electrolytic cell. The ultra-low momentum of these nuclei implies extremely large cross-sections for absorption by various "seed" nuclei present on or near the surface of a cathode in a chemical cell, increasing their nuclear masses. The increasing masses eventually lead to instabilities relieved by beta decay processes, thereby increasing the nuclear charge. As stated in the paper, in this manner, "most of the periodic table of chemical elements may be produced, at least to some extent."
The experimentally observed pattern of distinctive peaks and valleys in the transmuted nuclear mass-spectrum reflects the neutron absorption resonance peaks as theoretically computed employing a simple and conventional neutron optical model potential well.
An intriguing possibility is briefly noted in the paper. The varieties of different elements and isotopes that we find in the world around us were thought to arise exclusively from nuclear reactions in stars and supernova explosions. Recent astrophysical calculations have indicated some weaknesses in the above picture regarding the strengths of the neutron flux created in a supernova. Our paper asserts, "It appears entirely possible that ultra-low momentum neutron absorption may have an important role to play in the nuclear abundances not only in chemical cells but also in our local solar system and galaxy." | <urn:uuid:bc89e03a-9be2-434c-934a-82b7ad63c339> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/WL/docs/Summaryof3rdWidom-LarsenPaper.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393518.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00022-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930616 | 531 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Researchers have developed and opensourced a low-cost 3D metal printer capable of printing metal tools and objects with cost under £1,000.
A team of researchers led by Associate Professor Joshua Pearce at the Michigan Technological University developed the firmware and the plans for the printer and have made it available freely to anyone interested in taking this further. Built with cost of just £913, the open source 3D printer is definitely a huge leap forward as the starting price of commercial counterparts is £300,000.
Pearce claimed that their technology will not only allow smaller companies and startups to build inexpensive prototypes, but it will allow other scientists and researchers to build tools and objects required for their research without requiring to shell out thousands. The associate professor also claimed that using the technology, countries can use it to print components and parts for machines such as windmills.
The researchers are optimistic that their 3D metal printer would witness the same level of innovation which the first RepRap plastic 3D printers garnered after it was opensourced. “I anticipate rapid progress when the maker community gets their hands on it,” said Pearce.
“Within a month, somebody will make one that’s better than ours, I guarantee it”, he added.
However, the 3D metal printer requires the use of extensive protective gear while operating and hence is not suitable for every household in its current state. | <urn:uuid:caec4030-57bb-4483-913b-f70ec79f6a60> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.techienews.co.uk/973657/affordable-3d-metal-printer-developed-opensourced/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403823.74/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00179-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957684 | 287 | 2.859375 | 3 |
A discouraging new study concludes that most antidepressants are ineffective for children and adolescents, and may even be harmful in some cases. But the researchers caution that the low quantity and quality of clinical trials are obscuring the true effects of these drugs.
A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association has found that women who take antidepressants during the mid-to-late stages of their pregnancy experience an 87% increased risk of having a child diagnosed with autism. Here’s what the study actually found and why there’s no immediate cause for…
One in ten Americans takes an anti-depressant drug like Zoloft or Prozac. These drugs have been shown to work in some patients, but their design is based on a so-called “chemical imbalance” theory of depression that is incomplete, at best.
If you are depressed, or schizophrenic or have Alzheimer's, scientists say you probably have a shrunken hippocampus. The good news: a drug that just entered human trials promises to re-grow that part of the brain. | <urn:uuid:33239406-579b-43fb-89db-ecfebd0d6b6e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://gizmodo.com/tag/anti-depressants | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396147.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00068-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949172 | 216 | 3.0625 | 3 |
Marc Chagallb. 1887 and died 1985
Marc Chagall defies classification. He felt equally comfortable working in mediums as diverse as paintings, children’s books illustrations, tapestries, stained glass, set design and lithographs. He is often classified as a Jewish artist but many also consider him Russian and French. All three of these identities play important roles in his work. Additionally, Chagall was very active in Jewish avante-garde theatre in Russia, having been a set designer for numerous theater groups. These Yiddish acting troupes were often at the forefront of literature and intellectual movements and Chagall’s art helped to convey their content.
The most consistent element of Chagall’s work is his use of vivid color and imagery. Some of Chagall’s paintings hark back to his early childhood in Belarus and borrow heavily from his Jewish upbringing, but in adulthood Chagall had a more estranged relationship with Judaism. It seems that Chagall was an extremely cultural Jew, having visited Israel in 1957 and making numerous artworks based on the Torah and other Jewish texts but he sought to create universal images and content based on peace and love.
Chagall’s work has reached a wide audience not just because of his prolific production but also because of its placement in many major international museums, stained glass in numerous churches and synogagues, the great ceiling mural at the Paris Opera, and his huge murals at the Metropolitan Opera House. | <urn:uuid:d1a3c138-663f-402e-a24c-5b012f0029ab> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://davidbenrimon.com/artists/chagall-marc.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396106.71/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00166-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983843 | 303 | 3.625 | 4 |
Global Review finds Comprehensive Sexuality Education key to gender equality and reproductive health
The evidence is clear. Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) leads to improved sexual and reproductive health, resulting in the reduction of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), HIV, and unintended pregnancy. It not only promotes gender equality and equitable social norms, but has a positive impact on safer sexual behaviours, delaying sexual debut and increasing condom use.
The findings have been revealed in a new report examining CSE status in 48 countries across the world, ‘Emerging Evidence, Lessons and Practice in Comprehensive Sexuality Education - A Global Review 2015’. Published by UNESCO, in consultation with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the UNAIDS Secretariat, the report shows that almost 80 per cent of assessed countries have policies or strategies in place that support CSE.
In the Asia-Pacific region, 21 out of 25 countries’ national HIV strategies referenced the role of education, in West and Central Africa, most countries had a policy on life-skills based HIV and AIDS sexuality education, and in Latin America and the Caribbean, health and education ministers signed a declaration affirming a mandate for national school-based sexuality and HIV education.
However, Senior Programme Specialist in Health Education at UNESCO, Joanna Herat said that, despite the increased political will, there remained a significant gap between the many global and regional policies in place and the implementation on the ground.
“Young people are consequently often denied even the most basic information about their sexual and reproductive health and rights,” Herat said. “Thankfully, a global movement has galvanized around ensuring universal access to CSE, with youth-led movements calling for stronger responses, and sustained commitment. This has played a major role in the scaling-up of sexuality education and sexual and reproductive health services globally.”
The report also found that teacher training was crucial to the effective delivery of CSE. In fact building teacher capacity to deliver age-appropriate, culturally-relevant CSE, is proven to support the development of learners’ life skills.
“We also need to be looking to programmes which address gender or power relations, as they have been associated with a significant decrease in pregnancy, childbearing or STI’s,” Herat said. “CSE empowers young people to reflect on their behaviours, their environment, and their attitudes regarding gender and rights, all critical factors for improving health outcomes and HIV infection rates.”
The report found that effective implementation and scale-up of CSE is reliant on engagement and support from parents and whole communities.
The report was made possible with support from the Governments of Sweden and Norway.
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Aging Differently: Physical Limitations Among Adults Aged 50 years and Over: United States, 2001–2007
NCHS Data Brief No. 20, July 2009
On this Page
- Key findings
- Does the prevalence of physical limitations increase with age?
- Does the prevalence of physical limitations vary by race?
- Does sex make a difference in the prevalence of physical limitations?
- Does the prevalence of physical limitations differ by educational attainment?
- Data source and methods
- About the authors
- Suggested Citation
PDF Version (988 KB)
by Julia Holmes, Ph.D.; Eve Powell-Griner, Ph.D.; Margaret Lethbridge-Cejku, Ph.D.; and Kathleen Heyman, M.S.
Data from the National Health Interview Survey
- The prevalence of physical limitations increases with age, as does the number of physical limitations among adults aged 50 years and over.
- Non-Hispanic black adults aged 50 years and over have higher rates of physical limitations than non-Hispanic white adults in each age group
- Non-Hispanic black adults generally have rates of physical limitations similar to non-Hispanic white adults a decade older.
- In each race group, women are more likely than men of the same age to have one or more physical limitations, and the gap widens with increasing age.
- Adults aged 50 years and over with less than a high school education have higher rates of physical limitations than their counterparts with at least a high school diploma.
Many adults experience increases in physical limitations with age. A physical limitation, as defined here, refers to having difficulty performing any of eight physical activities, (see “Definition”). Physical limitation is important because of its relationship with the ability to live independently and to overall quality of life (1). Recent studies show that in the United States the onset of physical limitations occurs later in today’s older population than in earlier cohorts of the elderly (2,3). This “compression of morbidity” (4,5) means that on average older adults are living longer without experiencing a significant loss of independence in performing a wide range of activities. However, not all Americans have shared equally in this compression of morbidity; less advantaged groups such as minorities and the poor are more likely to report limitations in physical functioning at earlier ages than their more advantaged counterparts (6).
Keywords: aging, physical limitations, functional limitations, National Health Interview Survey
- The presence of one or more physical limitations increases with age. Adults aged 80 and over are 2.5 times as likely to have one or more physical limitations as adults aged 50–59 (43% and 17%, respectively).
- The percentage of adults with three or more physical limitations also increases with age. Among adults aged 50-59, 8% have three or more physical limitations compared with 27% of adults aged 80 and over.
- Rates of physical limitations vary by race as well as age. Non-Hispanic black adults are more likely to have one or more physical limitations than non-Hispanic white adults. For example, at aged 50–59, fewer than one in five non-Hispanic white adults have physical limitations, whereas almost one in four non-Hispanic black adults have physical limitations.
- Non-Hispanic black adults generally have rates of physical limitations similar to non-Hispanic white adults a decade older. For example, non-Hispanic black adults aged 50–59 have about the same rate of physical limitations (24%) as non-Hispanic white adults aged 60–69 (24%).
- For each age and race group, women are more likely than men of the same age to have one or more physical limitations. For example, 20% of non-Hispanic white men aged 60–69 have a physical limitation compared with 28% of non-Hispanic white females of the same age. Similarly, 27% of non-Hispanic black males experience physical limitations at aged 60–69 in contrast to 40% of non-Hispanic black females aged 60–69.
- Differences between men and women in the prevalence of one or more physical limitations widens with increasing age.
- Among adults aged 50 years and over, those with less than a high school education have higher rates of physical limitations than adults in the same age group with a high school education or higher.
- The effect of education on the prevalence of physical limitations applies for each age and race group. For example, the rate of physical limitations among non-Hispanic white adults aged 60–69 with less than a high school education is about twice the rate of their counterparts with a high school diploma. Similarly, among non-Hispanic black adults aged 70–79, those without a high school diploma are 1.5 times as likely to have one or more physical limitations than non-Hispanic blacks aged 70–79 with a high school diploma.
The prevalence of having one or more physical limitations as well as the prevalence of having three or more physical limitations increases with advancing age. Almost 43% of adults aged 80 and over have physical limitations, and about 27% of adults in this age group have three or more physical limitations. The prevalence of physical limitations varies by race, sex, and educational attainment. Non-Hispanic black adults aged 50 and over not only have higher rates of physical limitations than non-Hispanic white adults of the same age, but they generally experience rates of physical limitations similar to non-Hispanic white adults a decade older. In each age group, women are more likely than men to have physical limitations, and these differences increase with age. Adults with less than a high school education have higher rates of physical limitations than adults with a high school diploma or higher. The social and economic costs of earlier onset of functional decline in segments of an aging society and the subsequent need to provide supportive services at an earlier age, and perhaps for a longer period of time, imposes heavy burdens on the individual, the family, and society.
Physical limitation: A response of “can’t do at all” or “very difficult” to any of eight separate questions asking about difficulties in doing certain activities because of a health problem. By yourself, and without using any special equipment, how difficult is it for you to . . . walk a quarter of a mile ― about 3 city blocks; walk up 10 steps without resting; stand or be on your feet for about 2 hours; sit for about 2 hours; stoop, bend, or kneel; reach up over your head; use your fingers to grasp or handle small objects; lift or carry something as heavy as 10 pounds, such as a full bag of groceries?
Data from the 2001–2007 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) were used for this analysis. NHIS collects information about the health and health care of the civilian noninstitutionalized population of the United States. Most interviews are conducted in the respondents’ households, but follow ups in order to complete interviews may be conducted over the telephone. In 2001–2007, 238,018 persons aged 50 and over from the Sample Adult component of the NHIS, were included in this analysis.
NHIS is designed to yield a nationally representative sample of the civilian noninstitutionalized U.S. population, and this analysis uses weights to produce national estimates. Data weighting procedures are described in more detail elsewhere (7). Point estimates and estimates of corresponding variances for this analysis were calculated using the SUDAAN software package (8) to account for the complex sample design of the NHIS. The Taylor series linearization method was chosen for variance estimation. All estimates shown meet the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) standard for having a relative standard error less than or equal to 30%. Differences between percentages were evaluated using two-sided significance tests at the 0.05 level. Terms such as “higher than” and “less than” indicate statistically significant differences. Terms such as “similar” and “no difference” indicate that the statistics being compared were not significantly different. Lack of comment regarding the difference between any two statistics does not necessarily suggest that the difference was tested and found to not be significant. NHIS is conducted continuously throughout the year by interviewers of the U.S. Census Bureau for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s NCHS. For further information about NHIS visit the NHIS website.
Julia Holmes is with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, Division of Vital Statistics; Eve Powell-Griner, Margaret Lethbridge-Cejku, and Kathleen Heyman are with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, Division of Health Interview Statistics.
- Kaplan, GA. Maintenance of functioning in the elderly. AEP Vol 2(6): 823–34. 1992.
- Manton KG, Gu X, Lowrimore GR. Cohort changes in active life expectancy in the U.S. elderly population: experience from the 1982–2004 National Long-Term Care Survey. J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci Vol 63(5):S269–81. 2008.
- Kramarow E, Lubitz J, Lentzner H, Gorina Y. Trends in the health of older Americans, 1970–2005. Health Aff Vol 26(5): 1417–25. 2007.
- Fries, JF. Measuring and monitoring success in compressing morbidity. Ann Intern Med Vol 139(5): 455-9. 2003.
- Cai L, Lubitz J. Was there compression of disability for older Americans from 1992 to 2003? Demography Vol 44(3): 479–95. 2007.
- House JS, Lantz PM, Herd P. Continuity and change in the social stratification of aging and health over the life course: evidence from a nationally representative longitudinal study from 1986 to 2001/2002 (America’s changing lives study). J Gerontol B Vol 60B (Special Issue II): 15–26. 2005.
- Botman SL, Moore TF, Moriarity CL, Parsons VL. Design and estimation for the National Health Interview Survey, 1995–2004. National Center for Health Statistics. Vital Health Stat 2(130). 2000.
- Research Triangle Institute. SUDAAN (Release 9.1). Research Triangle Park, NC: Research Triangle Institute. 2004.
Holmes J, Powell-Griner E, Lethbridge-Cejku M, Heyman K. Aging differently: Physical limitations among adults aged 50 years and over: United States, 2001–2007. NCHS data brief, no 20. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2009.
All material appearing in this report is in the public domain and may be reproduced or copied without permission; citation as to source, however, is appreciated.
National Center for Health Statistics
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Acting Co-Deputy Directors
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The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the incarcerated being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience."
Bentham himself described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."
Bentham derived the idea from the plan of a military school in Paris designed for easy supervision, itself conceived by his brother Samuel who arrived at it as a solution to the complexities involved in the handling of large numbers of men. Bentham supplemented this principle with the idea of contract management; that is, an administration by contract as opposed to trust, where the director would have a pecuniary interest in lowering the average rate of mortality.
The Panopticon was intended to be cheaper than the prisons of his time, as it required fewer staff; "Allow me to construct a prison on this model," Bentham requested to a Committee for the Reform of Criminal Law, "I will be the gaoler. You will see ... that the gaoler will have no salary — will cost nothing to the nation." As the watchmen cannot be seen, they need not be on duty at all times, effectively leaving the watching to the watched. According to Bentham's design, the prisoners would also be used as menial labour walking on wheels to spin looms or run a water wheel. This would decrease the cost of the prison and give a possible source of income.
Bentham devoted a large part of his time and almost his whole fortune to promote the construction of a prison based on his scheme. After many years and innumerable political and financial difficulties, he eventually obtained a favourable sanction from Parliament for the purchase of a place to erect the prison, but in 1811 after the King refused to authorize the purchase of the land, the project was finally aborted. In 1813 he was awarded a sum of £23,000 in compensation for his monetary loss which did little to alleviate Bentham's unhappiness for the miscarriage.
While the design did not come to fruition during Bentham's time, it has been seen as an important development. For instance, the design was invoked by Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) as metaphor for modern "disciplinary" societies and their pervasive inclination to observe and normalise. Foucault proposes that not only prisons but all hierarchical structures like the army, schools, hospitals and factories have evolved through history to resemble Bentham's Panopticon. The notoriety of the design today (although not its lasting influence in architectural realities) stems from Foucault's famous analysis of it.
The architecture incorporates a tower central to a circular building that is divided into cells, each cell extending the entire thickness of the building to allow inner and outer windows. The occupants of the cells are thus backlit, isolated from one another by walls, and subject to scrutiny both collectively and individually by an observer in the tower who remains unseen. Toward this end, Bentham envisioned not only venetian blinds on the tower observation ports but also maze-like connections among tower rooms to avoid glints of light or noise that might betray the presence of an observer
—Ben and Marthalee Barton
The Panopticon is widely, but erroneously, believed to have influenced the design of Pentonville Prison in North London, Armagh Gaol in Northern Ireland, and Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. These, however, were Victorian examples of the Separate system, which was more about prisoner isolation than prisoner surveillance; in fact, the separate system makes surveillance quite difficult. No true panopticons were built in Britain during Bentham's lifetime, and very few anywhere in the British Empire.
Many modern prisons are built in a "podular" designinfluenced by the Panopticon design, in intent and basic organization if not in exact form. As compared to traditional "cellblock" designs, in which rectangular buildings contain tiers of cells one atop the other in front of a walkway along which correctional officers patrol, modern prisons are often decentralized and contain triangular or trapezoidal-shaped housing units known as "pods" or "modules" designed to hold between 16 and 50 prisoners each. Cells are laid out in three or fewer tiers arrayed around either a central control station or a desk which affords a single correctional officer full view of all cells within either a 270° or 180° field of view (180° is considered a closer level of supervision).
Control of cell doors, CCTV monitors and communications are all conducted from the control station. The correctional officer, depending on the level of security and segregation, may be armed with nonlethal and lethal weapons. Increasingly, meals, laundry, commissary items and other goods and services are dispatched directly to the pods or individual cells. These design points, whatever their deliberate or incidental psychological and social effects, serve to maximize the number of prisoners that can be controlled and monitored by one individual, reducing staffing; as well as restricting prisoner movement throughout the prison as tightly as possible.
The Panopticon has been suggested as an "open" hospital architecture: "Hospitals required knowledge of contacts, contagions, proximity and crowding... at the same time to divide space and keep it open, assuring a surveillance which is both global and individualising", 1977 interview (preface to French edition of Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon").
The Worcester State Hospital, constructed in the late 19th century, extensively employed panoptic structures to allow more efficient observation of the inmates. It was considered a model facility at the time.
The only industrial building ever to be built on the Panopticon principle was the Round Mill in Belper, Derbyshire, England. Constructed in 1811 it fell into disuse by the beginning of the 20th century and was demolished in 1959.
Contemporary social critics often assert that technology has allowed for the deployment of panoptic structures invisibly throughout society. Surveillance by closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in public spaces is an example of a technology that brings the gaze of a superior into the daily lives of the populace. Furthermore, a number of cities in England (UK), including Middlesbrough, Bristol, Brighton and London have recently added loudspeakers to a number of their existing CCTV cameras. They can transmit the voice of a camera supervisor to issue audible messages to the public. Similarly, critical analyses of internet practice have suggested that the internet allows for a panopticon form of observation. ISPs are able to track users' activities, while user-generated content means that daily social activity may be recorded and broadcast online.
Shoshana Zuboff used the metaphor of the panopticon in her 1988 book In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power to describe how computer technology makes work more visible. Earlier, Michel Foucault used the term more generally as a metaphor in describing Western society.
The use of photographic surveillance began in 1913 with the surreptitious taking of pictures from disguised locations of the suffragette inmates of Holloway Prison. The first use on record of camera surveillance in public space was that of the Metropolitan Police at Trafalgar Square in 1960. They used two temporary cameras to monitor crowds during the arrival of the Thai royal family and on Guy Fawkes Day. Between 1960 and 1996, the proliferation of the closed circuit system resulted in government spending on it accounting for more than three-quarters of the total crime prevention budget and a mass demonstration against camera surveillance in Brighton in May 1997. Over the next few years, face and license plate recognition was installed in key positions in London. With the recent 7/7 bombings, the effectiveness of the CCTV system has come under scrutiny, with emerging reports showing little or no deterrence of overall crime in London.
New York City has stated ambitions to create its very own 'ring of steel', very much similar to that surrounding London. It would surround 1.7 square miles (4.4 km2) of Lower Manhattan and cost $90 million. As of August 2007, the city had raised about $25 million. As in the case of the already-installed camera security system in London, its ostensible effectiveness is continually under question.
|Panopticon; or the
PANOPTICON; OR, THE INSPECTION-HOUSE:
CONTAINING THE IDEA OF A NEW PRINCIPLE OF CONSTRUCTION APPLICABLE TO ANY SORT OF ESTABLISHMENT, IN WHICH PERSONS OF ANY DESCRIPTION ARE TO BE KEPT UNDER INSPECTION; AND IN PARTICULAR TO PENITENTIARY-HOUSES, PRISONS, HOUSES OF INDUSTRY, WORK-HOUSES, POOR-HOUSES, LAZARETTOS, MANUFACTORIES, HOSPITALS, MAD-HOUSES, AND SCHOOLS: WITH A PLAN OF MANAGEMENT ADAPTED TO THE PRINCIPLE:
IN A SERIES OF LETTERS, WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1787, FROM CRECHEFF IN WHITE RUSSIA. TO A FRIEND IN ENGLAND
BY JEREMY BENTHAM, OF LINCOLN'S INN, ESQUIRE.
Morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated—instruction diffused—public burthens lightened—Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea in Architecture!—Thus much I ventured to say on laying down the pen—and thus much I should perhaps have said on taking it up, if at that early period I had seen the whole of the way before me. A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example: and that, to a degree equally without example, secured by whoever chooses to have it so, against abuse.—Such is the engine: such the work that may be done with it. How far the expectations thus held out have been fulfilled, the reader will decide.
The Letters which compose the body of this tract were written at Crecheff in Russia, and from thence sent to England in the year 1787, much about the same time with the Defence of Usury. They were addressed to a particular person, with a view to a particular establishment then in contemplation (intelligence of which had found its way to me through the medium of an English newspaper), and without any immediate or very determinate view to general publication. The attention of the public in Ireland having been drawn to one of the subjects to which they relate, by the notice given not long ago by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, of a disposition on the part of government there, to make trial of the Penitentiary system, it is on that account that they now see the light through the medium of the Irish press.
They are printed as at first written, with no other alteration than the erasure of a few immaterial passages, and the addition of a Postscript, stating such new ideas as have been the fruit of a more detailed and critical examination, undertaken chiefly with an eye to the particular establishment last mentioned, and assisted by professional information and advice.
In running over the descriptive part of the letters, the reader will find it convenient to remember, that alterations, as stated in the Postscript, have been made, though he need not at that period trouble himself with considering what they are: since in either shape the details will serve equally well for the illustration of the general principle, and for the proof of the advantages that may be derived from it.
In what concerns the Penitentiary system, I may be observed to have discussed, with rather more freedom than may perhaps be universally acceptable, a variety of measures either established or proposed by gentlemen who have laboured in the same line. A task this, which I would gladly have avoided: but complete justice could not otherwise have been done to the plan here proposed, nor its title to preference placed in a satisfactory point of view. Among the notions thus treated, it is with pleasure rather than regret that I observe several which on a former occasion I had myself either suggested or subscribed to. I say with pleasure: regarding the incident as a proof of my having no otherwise done by others than as I not only would be done by, but have actually done by myself: a consideration which will, I hope, make my apology to the respectable gentlemen concerned, and assist their candour in recommending me to their forgiveness. If by the light of reciprocal animadversion I should find myself enabled to rectify any errors of my own which may still have escaped me, the correction, instead of being shrunk from as a punishment, will be embraced as a reward.
In point of method and compression, something might have been gained, had the whole, Letters and Postscript together, been new cast, and the supplemental matter worked up with the original. But time was wanting; and, if the invention be worth any thing, the account given of it will not be the less amusing or less instructive, for being exhibited in an historical and progressive point of view.
The concluding Letter on Schools is a sort of jeu d’esprit, which would hardly have presented itself in so light a form, at any other period than at the moment of conception, and under the flow of spirits which the charms of novelty are apt enough to inspire. As such, it may possibly help to alleviate the tedium of a dry discussion, and on that score obtain the pardon, should it fail of receiving the approbation, of the graver class of readers.
Crecheff in White Russia, -1787.
Dear * * * *,—I observed t’other day in one of your English papers, an advertisement relative to a House of Correction therein spoken of, as intended for * * * * * * *. It occurred to me, that the plan of a building, lately contrived by my brother, for purposes in some respects similar, and which, under the name of the Inspection House, or the Elaboratory, he is about erecting here, might afford some hints for the above establishment. I have accordingly obtained some drawings relative to it, which I here inclose. Indeed I look upon it as capable of applications of the most extensive nature; and that for reasons which you will soon perceive.
To say all in one word, it will be found applicable, I think, without exception, to all establishments whatsoever, in which, within a space not too large to be covered or commanded by buildings, a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection. No matter how different, or even opposite the purpose: whether it be that of punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curring the sick, instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the rising race in the path of education: in a word, whether it be applied to the purposes of perpetual prisons in the room of death, or prisons for confinement before trial, or penitentiary-houses, or houses of correction, or work-houses, or manufactories, or mad-houses, or hospitals, or schools.
It is obvious that, in all these instances, the more constantly the persons to be inspected are under the eyes of the persons who should inspect them, the more perfectly will the purpose of the establishment have been attained. Ideal perfection, if that were the object, would require that each person should actually be in that predicament, during every instant of time. This being impossible, the next thing to be wished for is, that, at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so. This point, you will immediately see, is most completely secured by my brother’s plan; and, I think, it will appear equally manifest, that it cannot be compassed by any other, or to speak more properly, that if it be compassed by any other, it can only be in proportion as such other may approach to this.
To cut the matter as short as possible, I will consider it at once in its application to such purposes as, being most complicated, will serve to exemplify the greatest force and variety of precautionary contrivance. Such are those which have suggested the idea of penitentiary-houses: in which the objects of safe custody, confinement, solitude, forced labour, and instruction, were all of them to be kept in view. If all these objects can be accomplished together, of course with at least equal certainty and facility may any lesser number of them.
Before you look at the plan, take in words the general idea of it.
The building is circular.
The apartments of the prisoners occupy the circumference. You may call them, if you please, the cells.
These cells are divided from one another, and the prisoners by that means secluded from all communication with each other, by partitions in the form of radii issuing from the circumference towards the centre, and extending as many feet as shall be thought necessary to form the largest dimension of the cell.
The apartment of the inspector occupies the centre; you may call it if you please the inspector’s lodge.
It will be convenient in most, if not in all cases, to have a vacant space or area all round, between such centre and such circumference. You may call it if you please the intermediate or annular area.
About the width of a cell may be sufficient for a passage from the outside of the building to the lodge.
Each cell has in the outward circumference, a window, large enough, not only to light the cell, but, through the cell, to afford light enough to the correspondent part of the lodge.
The inner circumference of the cell is formed by an iron grating, so light as not to screen any part of the cell from the inspector’s view.
Of this grating, a part sufficiently large opens, in form of a door, to admit the prisoner at his first entrance; and to give admission at any time to the inspector or any of his attendants.
To cut off from each prisoner the view of every other, the partitions are carried on a few feet beyond the grating into the intermediate area. such projecting parts I call the protracted partitions.
It is conceived, that the light, coming in in this manner through the cells, and so across the intermediate area, will be sufficient for the inspector’s lodge. But, for this purpose, both the windows in the cells, and those corresponding to them in the lodge, should be as large as the strength of the building, and what shall be deemed a necessary attention to economy, will permit.
To the windows of the lodge there are blinds, as high up as the eyes of the prisoners in their cells can, by any means they can employ, be made to reach.
To prevent thorough light, whereby, notwithstanding the blinds, the prisoners would see from the cells whether or no any person was in the lodge, that apartment is divided into quarters, by partitions formed by two diameters to the circle, crossing each other at right angles. For these partitions the thinnest materials might serve; and they might be made removeable at pleasure; their height, sufficient to prevent the prisoners seeing over them from the cells. Doors to these partitions, if left open at any time, might produce the thorough light. To prevent this, divide each partition into two, at any part required, setting down the one-half at such distance from the other as shall be equal to the apperture of a door.
These windows of the inspector’s lodge open into the intermediate area, in the form of doors, in as many places as shall be deemed necessary to admit of his communicating readily with any of the cells.
Small lamps, in the outside of each window of the lodge, backed by a reflector, to throw the light into the corresponding cells, would extend to the night the security of the day.
To save the troublesome exertion of voice that might otherwise be necessary, and to prevent one prisoner from knowing that the inspector was occupied by another prisoner at a distance, a small tin tube might reach from each cell to the inspector’s lodge, passing across the area, and so in at the side of the correspondent window of the lodge. By means of this implement, the slightest whisper of the one might be heard by the other, especially if he had proper notice to apply his ear to the tube.
With regard to instruction, in cases where it cannot be duly given without the instructor’s being close to the work, or without setting his hand to it by way of example before the learner’s face, the instructor must indeed here as elsewhere, shift his station as often as there is occasion to visit different workmen; unless he calls the workmen to him, which in some of the instances to which this sort of building is applicable, such as that of imprisoned felons, could not so well be. But in all cases where directions, given verbally and at a distance, are sufficient, these tubes will be found of use. They will save, on the one hand, the exertion of voice it would require, on the part of the instructor, to communicate instruction to the workmen without quitting his central station in the lodge; and, on the other, the confusion which would ensue if different instructors or persons in the lodge were calling to the cells at the same time. And, in the case of hospitals, the quiet that may be insured by this little contrivance, trifling as it may seem at first sight, affords an additional advantage.
A bell, appropriated exclusively to the purposes of alarm, hangs in a belfry with which the building is crowned, communicating by a rope with the inspector’s lodge.
The most economical, and perhaps the most convenient, way of warming the cells and area, would be by flues surrounding it, upon the principle of those in hot-houses. A total want of every means of producing artificial heat might, in such weather as we sometimes have in England, be fatal to the lives of the prisoners; at any rate, it would often times be altogether incompatible with their working at any sedentary employment. The flues, however, and the fire-places belonging to them, instead of being on the outside, as in hot-houses, should be in the inside. By this means, there would be less waste of heat, and the current of air that would rush in on all sides through the cells, to supply the draught made by the fires, would answer so far the purpose of ventilation. But of this more under the head of Hospitals.*
So far as to the characteristic parts of the principle of construction. You may now, perhaps, be curious to know to what extent a building upon this principle is capable of being carried, consistently with the various purposes to which it may come to be applied. Upon this subject, to speak with confidence belongs only to architects by profession. Indulge me, however, with a few words at a venture.
As to the cells, they will of course be more or less spacious, according to the employment which it is designed should be carried on in them.
As to the whole building, if it be too small, the circumference will not be large enough to afford a sufficient number of cells: if too large, the depth from the exterior windows will be too great; and there will not be light enough in the lodge.
As to this individual building of my brother’s, the dimensions of it were determined by the consideration of the most convenient scantlings of the timbers, (that being in his situation the cheapest material,) and by other local considerations. It is to have two stories, and the diameter of the whole building is to be 100 feet out and out.
Merely to help conception, I will take this size for an example of such a building as he would propose for England.
Taking the diameter 100 feet, this admits of 48 cells, 6 feet wide each at the outside, walls included; with a passage through the building, of 8 or 9 feet.
I begin with supposing two stories of cells.
In the under story, thickness of the walls 2½ feet.
From thence, clear depth of each cell from the window to the grating, 13 feet.
From thence to the ends of the partition walls, 3 feet more; which gives the length of the protracted partitions.
Breadth of the intermediate area, 14.
Total from the outside of the building to the lodge, 32½ feet.
The double of this, 65 feet, leaves for the diameter of the lodge, 35 feet; including the thickness of its walls.
In the upper story, the cells will be but 9 feet deep; the difference between that and the 13 feet, which is their depth in the under story, being taken up by a gallery which surrounds the protracted partitions.
This gallery supplies, in the upper story, the place of an intermediate area on that floor; and by means of steps, which I shall come to presently, forms the communication between the upper story of cells to which it is attached, and the lower story of the cells, together with the intermediate area and the lodge.
The spot most remote from the place where the light comes in from, I mean the centrical spot of the building and of the lodge, will not be more than 50 feet distant from that place; a distance not greater, I imagine, than what is often times exemplified in churches; even in such as are not furnished in the manner of this building, with windows in every part of the exterior boundary. But the inspector’s windows will not be more than about 32½ feet from the open light.
It would be found convenient, I believe, on many accounts, and in most instances, to make one story of the lodge serve for two stories of the cells; especially in any situation where ground is valuable, the number of persons to be inspected large, the room necessary for each person not very considerable, and frugality and necessity more attended to than appearance.
For this purpose, the floor of the ground story of the lodge is elevated to within about 4½ feet of the floor of the first story of the cells. By this means, the inspector’s eye, when he stands up, will be on, or a little above, the level of the floor of the above mentioned upper story of the cells; and, at any rate, he will command both that and the ground story of the cells without difficulty, and without change of posture.
As to the intermediate area, the floor of it is upon a level, not with the floor of the lodge, but with that of the lower story of the cells. But at the upper story of the cells, its place, as I have already mentioned, is supplied by the above-mentioned gallery; so that the altitude of this area from the floor to the ceiling is equal to that of both stories of the cells put together.
The floor of the lodge not being on a level with either story of the cells, but between both, it must at convenient intervals be provided with flights of steps, to go down to the ground story of the cells by the intermediate area, and up to the first floor of the cells by the gallery. The ascending flights, joined to the descending, enable the servants of the house to go to the upper story of the cells, without passing through the apartment of the inspector.
As to the height of the whole, and of the several parts, it is supposed that 18 feet might serve for the two stories of cells, to be inspected, as above, by one story of the lodge. This would hold 96 persons.
36 feet for four stories of cells, and two of the lodge: this would hold 192 persons.
54 feet for six stories of the cells, and three of the lodge: this would hold 288 persons.
And 54 feet, it is conceived, would not be an immoderate elevation.
The drawings which, I believe, will accompany this, suppose four for the number of stories of the cells.
You will see, under the head of hospitals, the reasons why I conceive that even a less height than 9 feet, deducting the thickness of a floor supported by arches, might be sufficient for the cells.
The passage might have, for its height, either the height of one story, or of two stories of the cells, according as the number of those cells was two or four. The part over the passage might, in either case, be added to the lodge, to which it would thereby give a communication, at each end, with the world without doors, and ensure a keeper against the danger of finding himself a prisoner among his prisoners.
Should it be thought, that, in this way, the lodge would not have light enough, for the convenience of a man of a station competent to the office, the deficiency might be supplied by a void space left in that part, all the way up. You may call it if you please the central area. Into this space windows may open where they are wanted, from the apartments of the lodge. It may be either left open at the top, or covered with a sky-light. But this expedient, though it might add, in some respects, to the convenience of the lodge, could not but add considerably to the quantity and expense of the building.
On the other hand, it would be assistant to ventilation. Here, too, would be a proper place for the chapel: the prisoners remaining in their cells, and the windows of the lodge, which is almost all window, being thrown open. The advantages derivable from it in point of light and ventilation depending upon its being kept vacant, it can never be wanted for any profane use. It may therefore, with the greater propriety, be allotted to divine service, and receive a regular consecration. The pulpit and sounding-board may be moveable. During the term of service, the sky-light, at all other times kept as open as possible, might be shut.
In my two last letters, I gave you such idea as it was in my power to give you by words, of this new plan of construction, considered in its most simple form. A few more with regard to what further extensions it may admit of.
The utmost number of persons that could be stowed in a single building of this sort, consistently with the purposes of each several institution, being ascertained, to increase the number, that of the buildings must of course be increased. Suppose two of these rotundas requisite: these two might, by a covered gallery constructed upon the same principles, be consolidated into one inspection-house. And by the help of such a covered gallery, the field of inspection might be dilated to any extent.
If the number of rotundas were extended to four, a regular uncovered area might in that way be inclosed; and being surrounded by covered galleries, would be commanded in this manner from all sides, instead of being commanded only from one.
The area thus inclosed might be either circular like the buildings, or square, or oblong, as one or other of those forms were best adapted to the prevailing ideas of beauty or local convenience. A chain of any length, composed of inspection-houses adapted to the same or different purposes, might in this way be carried round an area of any extent.
On such a plan, either one inspector might serve for two or more rotundas, or if there were one to each, the inspective force, if I may use the expression, would be greater in such a compound building, than in any of the number singly taken, of which it was composed; since each inspector might be relieved occasionally by every other.
In the uncovered area thus brought within the field of inspection, out-door employments, or any employments requiring a greater covered space than the general form of construction will allow, might be carried on upon the same principle. A kitchen-garden might then be cultivated for the use of the whole society, by a few members of it at a time, to whom such an opportunity of airing and exercising themselves would be a refreshment and indulgence.
Many writers have expatiated with great force and justice, on the unpopular and unedifying cast of that undistinguishing discipline, which, in situation and treatment, confounds the lot of those who may prove innocent, with the lot of those who have been proved to be guilty. The same roof, it has been said, ought not to inclose persons who stand in predicaments so dissimilar. In a combination of inspection-houses, this delicacy might be observed without any abatement of that vigilance with regard to safe custody, which in both cases is equally indispensable.
It may be of use, that among all the particulars you have seen, it should be clearly understood what circumstances are, and what are not, essential to the plan. The essence of it consists, then, in the centrality of the inspector’s situation, combined with the wellknown and most effectual contrivances for seeing without being seen. As to the general form of the building, the most commodious for most purposes seems to be the circular: but this is not an absolutely essential circumstance. Of all figures, however, this, you will observe, is the only one that affords a perfect view, and the same view, of an indefinite number of apartments of the same dimensions: that affords a spot from which, without any change of situation, a man may survey, in the same perfection, the whole number, and without so much as a change of posture, the half of the whole number, at the same time: that, within a boundary of a given extent, contains the greatest quantity of room:—that places the centre at the least distance from the light:—that gives the cells most width, at the part where, on account of the light, most light may, for the purposes of work, be wanted:—and that reduces to the greatest possible shortness the path taken by the inspector, in passing from each part of the field of inspection to every other.
You will please to observe, that though perhaps it is the most important point, that the persons to be inspected should always feel themselves as if under inspection, at least as standing a great chance of being so, yet it is not by any means the only one. If it were, the same advantage might be given to buildings of almost any form. What is also of importance is, that for the greatest proportion of time possible, each man should actually be under inspection. This is material in all cases, that the inspector may have the satisfaction of knowing, that the discipline actually has the effect which it is designed to have: and it is more particularly material in such cases where the inspector, besides seeing that they conform to such standing rules as are prescribed, has more or less frequent occasion to give them such transient and incidental directions as will require to be given and enforced, at the commencement at least of every course of industry. And I think, it needs not much argument to prove, that the business of inspection, like every other, will be performed to a greater degree of perfection, the less trouble the performance of it requires.
Not only so, but the greater chance there is, of a given person’s being at a given time actually under inspection, the more strong will be the persuasion—the more intense, if I may say so, the feeling, he has of his being so. How little turn soever the greater number of persons so circumstanced may be supposed to have for calculation, some rough sort of calculation can scarcely, under such circumstances, avoid forcing itself upon the rudest mind. Experiment, venturing first upon slight trangressions, and so on, in proportion to success, upon more and more considerable ones, will not fail to teach him the difference between a loose inspection and a strict one.
It is for these reasons, that I cannot help looking upon every form as less and less eligible, in proportion as it deviates from the circular.
A very material point is, that room be allotted to the lodge sufficient to adapt it to the purpose of a complete and constant habitation for the principal inspector or headkeeper, and his family. The more numerous also the family, the better; since, by this means, there will in fact be as many inspectors, as the family consists of persons, though only one be paid for it. Neither the orders of the inspector himself, nor any interest which they may feel, or not feel, in the regular performance of his duty, would be requisite to find them motives adequate to the purpose. Secluded oftentimes, by their situation, from every other object, they will naturally, and in a manner unavoidably, give their eyes a direction conformable to that purpose, in every momentary interval of their ordinary occupations. It will supply in their instance the place of that great and constant fund of entertainment to the sedentary and vacant in towns—the looking out of the window. The scene, though a confined, would be a very various, and therefore, perhaps, not altogether an unamusing one.
I flatter myself there can now be little doubt of the plan’s possessing the fundamental advantages I have been attributing to it: I mean, the apparent omnipresence of the inspector (if divines will allow me the expression,) combined with the extreme facility of his real presence.
A collateral advantage it possesses, and on the score of frugality a very material one, is that which respects the number of the inspectors requisite. If this plan required more than another, the additional number would form an objection, which, were the difference to a certain degree considerable, might rise so high as to be conclusive: so far from it, that a greater multitude than ever were yet lodged in one house might be inspected by a single person; for the trouble of inspection is diminished in no less proportion than the strictness of inspection is increased.
Another very important advantage, whatever purposes the plan may be applied to, particularly where it is applied to the severest and most coercive purposes, is, that the under keepers or inspectors, the servants and subordinates of every kind, will be under the same irresistible controul with respect to the head keeper or inspector, as the prisoners or other persons to be governed are with respect to them. On the common plans, what means, what possibility, has the prisoner, of appealing to the humanity of the principal for redress against the neglect or oppression of subordinates in that rigid sphere, but the few opportunities which, in a crowded prison, the most conscientious keeper can afford—but the none at all which many a keeper thinks fit to give them? How different would their lot be upon this plan!
In no instance could his subordinates either perform or depart from their duty, but he must know the time and degree and manner of their doing so. It presents an answer, and that a satisfactory one, to one of the most puzzling of political questions—quis custodiet ipsos custodes? And, as the fulfilling of his, as well as their, duty would be rendered so much easier, than it can ever have been hitherto, so might, and so should, any departure from it be punished with the more inflexible severity. It is this circumstance that renders the influence of this plan not less beneficial to what is called liberty, than to necessary coercion; not less powerful as a controul upon subordinate power, than as a curb to delinquency; as a shield to innocence, than as a scourge to guilt.
Another advantage, still operating to the same ends, is the great load of trouble and disgust which it takes off the shoulders of those occasional inspectors of a higher order, such as judges and other magistrates, who, called down to this irksome task from the superior ranks of life, cannot but feel a proportionable repugnance to the discharge of it. Think how it is with them upon the present plans, and how it still must be upon the best plans that have been hitherto devised! The cells or apartments, however constructed, must, if there be nine hundred of them (as there were to have been upon the penitentiary-house plan,) be opened to the visitors, one by one. To do their business to any purpose, they must approach near to, and come almost in contact with each inhabitant; whose situation being watched over according to no other than the loose methods of inspection at present practicable, will on that account require the more minute and troublesome investigation on the part of these occasional superintendents. By this new plan, the disgust is entirely removed, and the trouble of going into such a room as the lodge, is no more than the trouble of going into any other.
Were Newgate upon this plan, all Newgate might be inspected by a quarter of an hour’s visit to Mr. Akerman.
Among the other causes of that reluctance, none at present so forcible, none so unhappily well grounded, none which affords so natural an excuse, nor so strong a reason against accepting of any excuse, as the danger of infection—a circumstance which carries death, in one of its most tremendous forms, from the seat of guilt to the seat of justice, involving in one common catasťrophe the violator and the upholder of the laws. But in a spot so constructed, and under a course of discipline so insured, how should infection ever arise? or how should it continue? Against every danger of this kind, what private house of the poor, one might almost say, or even of the most opulent, can be equally secure?
Nor is the disagreeableness of the task of superintendence diminished by this plan, in a much greater degree than the efficacy of it is increased. On all others, be the superintendent’s visit ever so unexpected, and his motions ever so quick, time there must always be for preparations blinding the real state of things. Out of nine hundred cells, he can visit but one at a time, and, in the meanwhile, the worst of the others may be arranged, and the inhabitants threatened, and tutored how to receive him. On this plan, no sooner is the superintendent announced, than the whole scene opens instantaneously to his view.
In mentioning inspectors and superintendents who are such by office, I must not overlook that system of inspection, which, however little heeded, will not be the less useful and efficacious: I mean, the part which individuals may be disposed to take in the business, without intending, perhaps, or even without thinking of, any other effects of their visits, than the gratification of their own particular curiosity. What the inspector’s or keeper’s family are with respect to him, that, and more, will these spontaneous visitors be to the superintendent,—assistants, deputies, in so far as he is faithful, witnesses and judges, should he ever be unfaithful, to his trust. So as they are but there, what the motives were that drew them thither is perfectly immaterial; whether the relieving of their anxieties by the affecting prospect of their respective friends and relatives thus detained in durance, or merely the satisfying that general curiosity, which an establishment, on various accounts so interesting to human feelings, may naturally be expected to excite.
You see, I take for granted as a matter of course, that under the necessary regulations for preventing interruption and disturbance, the doors of these establishments will be, as, without very special reasons to the contrary, the doors of all public establishments ought to be, thrown wide open to the body of the curious at large—the great open committee of the tribunal of the world. And who ever objects to such publicity, where it is practicable, but those whose motives for objection afford the strongest reasons for it?
Decomposing the plan, I will now take the liberty of offering a few separate considerations, applicable to the different purposes to which it appears capable of being applied.
A Penitentiary-house, more particularly is (I am sorry I must correct myself, and say, was to have been) what every prison might, and in some degree at least ought to be, designed at once as a place of safe custody, and a place of labour. Every such place must necessarily be, whether designed or not, an hospital—a place where sickness will be found at least, whether provision be or be not made for its relief. I will consider this plan in its application to these three distinguishable purposes.
Against escapes, and in particular on the part of felons of every description, as well before as after conviction, persons from the desperateness of whose situation attempts to escape are more particularly to be apprehended, it would afford, as I dare say you see already, a degree of security, which, perhaps, has been scarce hitherto reached by conception, much less by practice. Overpowering the guard requires an union of hands, and a concert among minds. But what union, or what concert, can there be among persons, no one of whom will have set eyes on any other from the first moment of his entrance? Undermining walls, forcing iron bars, requires commonly a concert, always a length of time exempt from interruption. But who would think of beginning a work of hours and days, without any tolerable prospect of making so much as the first motion towards it unobserved? Such attempts have been seldom made without the assistance of implements introduced by accomplices from without. But who would expose themselves even to the slightest punishment, or even to the mortification of the disappointment, without so much as a tolerable chance of escaping instantaneous detection?—Who would think of bringing in before the keeper’s face, so much as a small file, or a phial of aqua fortis, to a person not prepared to receive any such thing, nor in a condition to make use of it? Upon all plans hitherto pursued, the thickest walls have been found occasionally unavailing: upon this plan, the thinnest would be sufficient—a circumstance which must operate, in a striking degree, towards a diminution of the expense.
In this, as in every other application of the plan, you will find its lenient, not less conspicuous than its coercive, tendency; insomuch that, if you were to be asked who had most cause to wish for its adoption, you might find yourself at some loss to determine between the malefactors themselves, and those for whose sake they are consigned to punishment.
In this view I am sure you cannot overlook the effect which it would have in rendering unnecessary that inexhaustible fund of disproportionate, too often needless, and always unpopular severity, not to say torture—the use of irons. Confined in one of these cells, every motion of the limbs, and every muscle of the face exposed to view, what pretence could there be for exposing to this hardship the most boisterous malefactor? Indulged with perfect liberty within the space allotted to him, in what worse way could he vent his rage, than by beating his head against the walls? and who but himself would be a sufferer by such folly? Noise, the only offence by which a man thus engaged could render himself troublesome (an offence, by the bye, against which irons themselves afford no security,) might, if found otherwise incorrigible, be subdued by gagging—a most natural and efficacious mode of prevention, as well as punishment, the prospect of which would probably be for ever sufficient to render the infliction of it unnecessary. Punishment, even in its most hideous forms, loses its odious character, when bereft of that uncertainty, without which the rashest desperado would not expose himself to its stroke. If an instance be wanted, think what the means are, which the so much admired law of England makes use of, and that in one of its most admired branches, to work, not upon criminals, but upon its favourite class of judges? what but death? and that no common death, but death the slow but necessary result of lingering torture. And yet, whatever other reproach the law may be thought to merit, in what instance was it ever seen to expose itself in this way to the reproach of cruelty?
In my last, I endeavoured to state to you the advantages which a receptacle, upon the plan of the proposed building, seemed to promise in its application to places of confinement, considered merely in that view. Give me leave now to consider it as applicable to the joint purposes of punishment, reformation, and pecuniary economy.
That in regard to persons of the description of those to whom punishments of the nature in question are destined, solitude is in its nature subservient to the purpose of reformation, seems to be as little disputed, as its tendency to operate in addition to the mass of sufferance. But that upon this plan that purpose would be effected, at least as completely as it could be on any other, you cannot but see at the first glance, or rather you must have observed already. In the condition of our prisoners (for so I will call them for shortness sake) you may see the student’s paradox, nunquam minus solus quam cum solus, realized in a new way: to the keeper, a multitude, though not a crowd; to themselves, they are solitary and sequestered individuals.
What is more, you will see this purpose answered more completely by this plan, than it could possibly be on any other. What degree of solitude it was proposed to reduce them to in the once-intended penitentiary-houses, need not be considered. But for one purpose, in buildings of any mode of construction that could then and there have been in view, it would have been necessary, according to the express regulations of that plan, that the law of solitude should be dispensed with; I mean, so often as the prisoners were to receive the benefits of attendance on Divine service. But in my brother’s circular penitentiary-houses, they might receive these benefits, in every circumstance, without stirring from their cells. No thronging nor jostling in the way between the scene of work and the scene destined to devotion; no quarrellings, nor confederatings, nor plottings to escape; nor yet any whips or fetters to prevent it.
I am come now to the article of pecuniary economy; and as this is the great rock upon which the original penitentiary-plan I understand has split, I cannot resist the temptation of throwing out a few hints relative to the mode of management, which I look upon as the most eligible in this view; but which could not, as you will see, have been established with anything like the advantage, upon any other ground than that of my brother’s inspection principle.
To come to the point at once, I would do the whole by contract. I would farm out the profits, the no-profits, or if you please the losses, to him who, being in other respects unexceptionable, offered the best terms. Undertaking an enterprise new in its extent, in the description of the persons to be subjected to his management, and in many other circumstances, his success in if, if he does succeed, may be regarded in the light of an invention, and rewarded accordingly, just as success in other inventions is rewarded, by the profit which a monopoly secured by patent enables a man to make; and that in proportion to the success which constitutes their merit. He should have it during good behaviour; which you know is as much as to say, unless specific instances of misbehaviour, flagrant enough to render his removal expedient, be proved on him in a legal way, he shall have it for his life. Besides that when thus secured he can afford to give the better price for his bargain, you will presently see more material reasons to counterbalance the seeming unthriftiness of granting him a term, which may prove so long a one. In other respects, the terms of the contract must, of course, depend upon the proportion of capital, of which the contract gave him the use. Supposing the advance to amount to the whole manufacturing stock, he must of course either pay something for his contract, or be contented with a share of the gross profits, instead of the whole, unless that from such profits an interest upon the capital so advanced to him should be deducted: in which case, nobody, I suppose, would grudge him the whole net profit after such deduction, even though the rate of interest were much below the ordinary one: the difference between such reduced rate of interest and the ordinary one, would constitute the whole of the expense which the public would be at. Suppose, to speak at random, this expense were to amount to £6000, £8000, or £10,000 a-year, for the 3000 convicts which, it was computed, would be the standing number to be maintained in England, I should not imagine that such a sum as even this latter would be much grudged. I fancy the intended expedition to Botany Bay, of which I am just apprized, will be rather more expensive. Not that it appears to me that the nation would remain saddled with any such expense as this at the long run, or indeed with any part of it. But of this hereafter.
In the next place, I would give my contractor all the powers that his interest could prompt him to wish for, in order to enable him to make the most of his bargain, with only some slight reservations, which I will mention afterwards; for very slight ones you will find they will be, that can be needful or even serviceable in the view of preventing abuse.
But the greater latitude he has in taking such measures, the less will he grudge the letting it be known what the measures are which he does take, knowing, at the same time, that no advantage can be taken of such knowledge, by turning him out in case of his success, and putting in another to reap the fruits of his contrivance. I will then require him to disclose, and even to print and publish his accounts—the whole process and detail of his management—the whole history of the prison. I will require him, I say, on pain of forfeiture or other adequate punishment, to publish these accounts, and that upon oath. I have no fear of his not publishing some accounts, because, if the time is elapsed and some accounts not published—a fact not liable to dispute—the punishment takes place of course: and I have not much fear that the accounts, when published, will not be true; because, having power to do every thing that is for his advantage, there is nothing which it is his interest to conceal; and the interest which the punishment for perjury gives him not to conceal, is manifest, more especially as I make him examinable and cross-examinable viva voce upon oath at any time.
It is for clearing away as much as possible every motive of pecuniary interest that could prompt him to throw any kind of cloak or reserve upon any of his expedients for increasing his profits, that I would insure them to him for life.
From the information thus got from him, I derive this advantage. In the case of his ill success, I see the causes of it, and not only I, but every body else that pleases, may see the causes of it; and amongst the rest, those who, in case of their taking the management out of his hands, would have an interest in being acquainted with such causes, in order to obviate or avoid them. More than that, if his ill success is owing to incapacity, and that incapacity such as, if continued, might raise my expense above the calculation, I can make him stop in time—a measure to which he can have as little objection as myself; for it is one advantage of this plan, that whatever mischief happens must have more than eaten out all his profits before it reaches me.
In the case of his good success, I see the causes of that too; and every body sees them, as before; and, amongst others, all persons who could propose to themselves to get into a situation similar to his, and who in such case would naturally promise themselves, in the event of their getting into his situation, a success equal to his—or rather superior; for such is the presumption and vanity natural to man.
Without such publication, whom should I have to deal with, besides him? certainly, in comparison, but a very few; not many more than I may have had at first: the terms, of course, disadvantageous as at first; for disadvantageous terms at first, while all is yet in darkness, they certainly must be.
After such publication, whom should I have then? I should have every body; every body who, by fortune, experience, judgment, disposition, should conceive himself able, and find himself inclined, to engage in such a business; and each person seeing what advantage had been made, and how, would be willing to make his offer in proportion. What situation more favourable for making the best terms?
These best terms, then, I should make at his death, even for his establishment; but long before that, had I others upon the carpet, I should make similar good terms for all those others. Thus I make his advantage mine, not only after it has ceased to be his, but almost as soon as it commences so to be: I thus get his success in all the rest, by paying for it only in the one; and in that not more than it was necessary to pay for it.
But contractors, you will say perhaps, or at least if you don’t, there are enough that will, “are a good-for-nothing set of people; and why should we be fleeced by them? One of them perjured himself not long ago, and we put him into the pillory. They are the same sort of gentry that are called farmers-general in France, and publicans in the Gospel, where they are ranked with sinners; and nobody likes them anywhere.” All this, to be sure, is very true: but if you put one of them into the pillory, you put another of them into the post-office; and if in the devoted city five righteous would have screened the whole gang from the perdition called for by the enormities of ninety-five unrighteous, why should not the merits of one Palmer be enough to make it up for the demerits of twenty Atkinsons? Gentlemen in general, as I have had manifold occasion to observe, love close reasoning, and here they have it. It might be thought straying from the point, if I ventured to add, that gentlemen in the corn trade, or in any other trade, have not commonly quite so many witnesses to their bargains, as my contractor would have to the management of his house.
In my last I troubled you with my sentiments on the duration of the first contract, and the great article of publicity in the management, which was my motive for admitting of a duration so unlimited. But long before my contractor and I had come to any settlement about these points, he would have found various questions to propose to me. One thing he would not fail to say to me is—What trades may I put my men to when I have got them? My answer is soon given. Any whatever that you can persuade them to turn their hands to. Now, then, Sir, let us think for a moment, if you please, what trades it may be most for his advantage to put them to, and what it is therefore most likely he should be disposed to put them to.
That he may get the better view of them, I throw them into four classes. In the first, I place those who already are possessed of businesses capable of being carried on with advantage in the prison: in the second, those trained up to businesses which, though not capable in themselves of being carried on within such limits, yet by the similarity of operation have a tendency to render it more or less easy for a man to learn some of those other businesses which are: in the third rank, I would place such as had been trained up indeed to industry, but to branches which have no such tendency as I have just mentioned; such, for instance, as porters, coalheavers, gardeners, and husbandmen. In the last I would place men regularly brought up to the profession of thieving, and others who have never been brought up to any kind of industry. Some names for these different classes I may as well endeavour to find as not; for names they must have when they get into their house; and if I perform not that business myself, somebody else must do it for me. I will call them the good hands, the capable hands, the promising hands, and the drones. As to the capable hands, they will, of course, be the more valuable, the nearer the businesses they understand approach to those of the good ones; in other words, the less difficulty there would be in teaching the latter the business of the former. The same observation of course applies to the promising hands; in as far as the advantage which the one possess by habit the others may appear to possess by disposition. Lower down in the scale of detail I will not attempt to lead you.
You have a very pretty law in England for enriching the country, by keeping boys backward, and preventing men from following the trades they could get most by. If I were jealous of Russia’s growing too rich, and being able to buy too many of our goods, I would try to get such a law as that introduced among these stupid people here, who have never yet had the sense to think of any such thing. Having no such jealousy against any country, much less against my own Utopia, I would beg that law might be banished from within my walls. I fancy my contractor would be as well pleased with its room as its company; and as the same indulgence has been granted to other persons of whose industry no great jealousy seems to be entertained, such as soldiers and sailors, I have no great fear the indulgence would be denied me. Much I believe is not apprehended in that way from the red-coats and jack-tars; and still less, I believe, would be apprehended from my heroes.
This stumbling-block cleared away, the first thing I imagine my contractor would do, would be to set to work his good hands; to whom he would add as many of his capable hands as he could muster.
With his promising hands and his drones, he would set up a manufacture. What, then, shall this manufacture be? It may be this, and that, and t’other thing, says the hard-labour bill: it shall be anything or everything, say I.
As to the question, What sort of manufacture or manufacturer would be likely to answer best? it is a discussion I will not attempt to lead you into, for I do not propose at present to entertain you with a critical examination of the several actual and possible manufactures, established and establishable in Great Britain. The case, I imagine, would be, that some manufacturer or other would be the man I should have for my contractor—a man who, being engaged in some sort of business that was easy to learn, and doing pretty well with as many hands as he was able to get upon the ordinary terms, might hope to do better still with a greater number, whom he could get upon much better terms. Now, whether there are any such manufacturers, and how many, is what I cannot so well tell you, especially at this distance; but, if you think it worth while to ask Mr. Daily Advertiser, or Mr. St. James’ Chronicle, I fancy it will not be long before you get some answer.
In my View of the Hard-Labour Bill, I ventured to throw out a hint upon the subject of putting the good hands to their own trades. Whether any and what use was made of that hint, I cannot recollect; for neither the act which passed afterwards, nor any chapter of that history, has travelled with me to Crecheff; nor should I have had a single scrap of paper to refresh my memory on that subject, but for the copy of my own pamphlet which I found on my brother’s shelf. The general notion seemed to be, that as the people were to be made to work for their punishment, the works to be given to them should be somewhat which they would not like; and, in that respect, it looks as if the consideration of punishment, with its appendage of reformation, had kept the other of economy a little behind the curtain. But I neither see the great danger nor the great harm of a man’s liking his work too well; and how well soever he might have liked it elsewhere, I should still less apprehend his liking the thought of having it to do there. Supposing no sage regulations made by any body to nail them to this or that sort of work, the work they would naturally fall upon under the hands of a contractor would be that, whatever it might be, by which there was most money to be made; for the more the prisoner-workman got, the more the master could get out of him; so that upon that point I should have little fear of their not agreeing. Nor do I see why labour should be the less reforming for being profitable. On the contrary, among working men, especially among working men whom the discipline of the house would so effectually keep from all kinds of mischief, I must confess I know of no test of reformation so plain or so sure as the improved quantity and value of their work.
It looks, however, as if the authors of the above provision had not quite so much faith in such an arrangement as I must confess I have. For the choice of the trade was not to be left to the governor of the prison, much less to the prisoner-workman, but was given to superintending committees of justices of the peace. In choosing among the employments exemplified, and other similar ones (for if I mistake not this restriction of similarity was subjoined) it was indeed recommended to those magistrates to take “such employments as they should deem most conducive to profit.” But the profit here declared to be in view was, not the profit of the workman or his master the governor, but I know not what profit “of the district,” the “convenience” of which (though I know not what convenience there could be, distinct from profit) was another land-mark given them to steer by. If you cast an eye on the trades exemplified (as I believe I must beg you to do presently) you will find some difficulty, I believe, in conceiving that in the choice of them the article of profit could have been the uppermost consideration. Nor was this all; for besides the vesting of the choice of the employments in committees of justices in the first instance, the same magistrates are called upon to exercise their judgment and ingenuity in dividing the prisoners into classes; in such sort, that the longer a man had stayed in the house his labour should be less and less “severe,” exception made for delinquency, in which case a man might at any time be turned down from an upper class to a lower. But had the matter been left to a contractor and his prisoner-workmen, they would have been pretty sure to pitch upon, and to stick to, what would be most conducive to their profit, and by that means to the profit of the district; and that without any recommendation. Whether the effect of that recommendation would have been equally sure upon the above-mentioned magistrates, would have remained to be decided by experience. Understanding me to be speaking merely of a magistrate in the abstract, you will forgive my saying, that in this one point I have not quite so great a confidence in a set of gentlemen of that description, as I have in that sort of knave called a contractor. I see no sort of danger, that to the contractor there should be any one object upon earth dearer than the interest of the contractor; but I see some danger that there may be, now and then by accident, some other object rather dearer to the magistrate. Among these rival objects, if we do not always reckon the pleasure of plaguing the contractor, should he and the magistrate chance not to agree, we may however not unfrequently reckon the exercise of his (the magistrate’s) own power, and the display of his own wisdom; the former of which, he may naturally enough conceive, was not given to him for nothing, nor the latter confided in without cause. You must, I think, before now have met with examples of men, that had rather a plan of the public’s, or even of an individual’s for whom they had a more particular regard, should miscarry under their management, than prosper under a different one.
But if, without troubling yourself about general theories of human nature, you have a mind for a more palpable test of the propriety of this reasoning, you may cut the matter short enough, by making an experiment upon a contractor, and trying whether he will give you as good terms with these clogs about him, as he would without them. Sure I am, that, were I in his place, I should require no small abatement to be made to me, if, instead of choosing the employments for my own men, I was liable at every turn to have them taken out of my hands and put to different employments, by A, B, and C to-day, and by X, Y, and Z to-morrow.
Upon the whole, you will not wonder that I should have my doubts at present, whether the plan was rendered much better for these ingenious but complicated refinements. They seemed mighty fine to me at the time, for when I saw contrivance, I expected success proportionable.
So far as to the choice of businesses: As to the new ones, I see no reason why any point should be made of multiplying them: a single one, well chosen, may answer the purpose, just as well as ever so many more. I mention this, because though it may be easy to find one species of manufacture, or five, or ten, that might answer with workmen so cramped, and in a situation so confined, it might not be quite so easy to find fifty or a hundred. The number of hands for which employment is to be found, can scarcely be admitted as a reason for multiplying the subjects of manufacture. In such a nation as Great Britain, it is difficult to conceive that the greatest number of hands that can be comprised in such an establishment, should be great enough to overstock the market; and if this island of ours is not big enough, this globe of ours is still bigger. In many species of manufacture, the work is performed with more and more advantage, as every body knows, the more it can be divided; and, in many instances, what sets bounds to that division, is rather the number of hands the master can afford to maintain, than any other circumstance.
When one turns to the hard-labour bill, it looks as if the framers of it had been under some anxiety to find out businesses that they thought might do in their penitentiary-houses, and to make known the result of their discoveries. It accordingly proposes for consideration a variety of examples. For such of the prisoners as were to be worked the hardest: 1. treading in a wheel; 2. drawing in a capstern for turning a mill or other machine or engine; 3. beating hemp; 4. rasping logwood; 5. chopping rags; 6. sawing timber; 7. working at forges; 8. smelting. For those who are to be most favoured: 1. making ropes; 2. weaving sacks; 3. spinning yarn; 4. knitting nets.
I find some difficulty, however, in conceiving to what use this instruction was destined, unless it were the edification of that class of legislators, more frequently quoted for worth than knowledge—the country gentlemen. To some gentlemen of that respectable description, it might, for aught I know, be matter of consolation to see that industry could find so many shapes to assume, on such a stage. But if it was designed to give a general view of the purposes to which manual labour may be applied, it goes not very far, and there are publications enough that go some hundreds of times farther. If the former of its two chapters was designed as a specimen of such works of a particularly laborious cast, as are capable of being carried on to the greatest advantage, or with least advance of capital, or with the greatest security, against workmen of so refractory a complexion—or if either chapter was destined as a specimen of employments that required least extent of room—in any of these cases the specimen seems not a very happy one:—1st and 2d, Of the treading in a wheel, or drawing in a capstern for turning a mill, nothing can be said in respect of pecuniary productiveness, till the mill, the machine, or the engine, are specified; nor anything that can be found to distinguish them from other employments, except the room and the expense which such implements seem more particularly to require, 3d, Beating of hemp is a business too proverbial to be unknown to any body, and in those establishments where it has had compulsion for its motive, has not hitherto, I believe, proved a very profitable one; and if I may believe people who are of the trade, and who have no interest to mialead me, hemp beaten by hand, though it takes more labour, does not fetch so good a price, as when beaten at a water-mill. 4th, Rasping logwood is an employment which is said by Mr. Howard, I think, and others, to be carried on in some work-houses of Holland, and I believe to some profit. But I know it has been carried on likewise by the natural primum mobiles; witness a wind-mill, which, I remember, a tenant of yours employed in this way; and I can conceive few operations in which those natural powers promise to have greater advantage over the human. 5th, Chopping rags is a business that can answer no other purpose than the supplying materials for paper-mills, which cannot anywhere be established without a supply of running-water—an element which, I am sure in many, and, I am apt to think, in all paper-mills hitherto established, affords for this operation a primum mobile much more advantageous than human labour. In the 6th, 7th, and 8th examples, viz. sawing timber, working at forges, and smelting, I see nothing to distinguish them very remarkably from three hundred others that might be mentioned, unless it be the great room they all of them occupy, the great and expensive establishment which they suppose, or the dangerous weapons which they put into the hands of any workman who may be disposed to turn that property to account. 9th, As to rope making, which stands at the head of the less laborious class, besides being, as I always understood, remarkably otherwise, it has the particular property of taking up more room than, I believe, any other manufacturing employment that was ever thought of. As to the three last articles of the dozen, viz. weaving sacks, spinning yarn, and knitting nets, I know of no particular objections that can be made to them, any more than to three score others. But, without going a stone’s throw from the table I am writing upon, I could find more than as many businesses, which pay better in England, than these three last, in other respects exceptionable ones, which are as easy to learn, take up as little room, and require a capital nearly, or quite as moderate, to set up. By coming here, if I have learnt nothing else, I have learnt what the human powers are capable of, when unfettered by the arbitrary regulations of an unenlightened age; and gentlemen may say what they please, but they shall never persuade me that in England those powers are in any remarkable degree inferior to what they are in Russia. However, not having the mantle of legislation to screen me from the ridicule of going beyond my last, I forbear to specify even what I have under my eye, knowing that in Mr. Arthur Young, a gentleman whom no one can accuse of hiding his candle under a bushel, anybody that chooses it might find an informant, who, on this, as well as so many other important subjects, for every grain of information I could give, could give a thousand.
But without any disparagement to that gentleman, for whose public-spirited labours and well-directed talents no man feels greater respect than I do, there are other persons, who on these same subjects could, for such a purpose, give still more and better information than he, and who would not be less communicative: I mean, as before, Mr. Daily Advertiser and his brethren.
There are two points in politics very hard to compass. One is, to persuade legislators that they do not understand shoemaking better than shoemakers; the other is, to persuade shoemakers that they do not understand legislating better than legislators. The latter point is particularly difficult in our own dear country; but the other is the hardest of all hard things everywhere.
The point, then, being settled, what trades the people may be employed in, another question my contractor will ask is, what powers he is to have put into his hands, as a means of persuading them to betake themselves to those trades? The shortest way of answering this question will be to tell him what powers he shall not have. In the first place then, he shall not starve them. “What then,” you will say perhaps, “do you think it likely that he would?” To speak the truth, for my own part I have no great fear of it. But others perhaps might. Besides, my notion is, that the law, in guarding itself against men, ought to do just the contrary of what the judge should do in trying them, especially where there is nothing to be lost by it. The business, you know, of the judge, is to presume them all honest till he is forced to suspect the contrary: the business of the law is to conclude them all, without exception, to be the greatest knaves and villains that can be imagined. My contractor, therefore, I make myself sure, would starve them—a good many of them at least—if he were let alone. He would starve, of course, all whom he could not make pay for their board, together with something for his trouble. But as I should get nothing by this economy, and might lose some credit by it, I have no mind it should take place. Bread, though as bad as wholesome bread can be, they shall have, then, in plenty: this and water, and nothing else. This they shall be certain of having, and, what is of full as much consequence, every body else that pleases shall be certain of their having it. My brethren of the would-be-reforming tribe may go and look at it at the baker’s: they may weigh it, if they will, and buy it, and carry it home, and give it to their children or their pigs. It shall be dealt out by sound of trumpet, if you please; and Christian starers may amuse themselves with seeing bad bread dealt out to felons, as Christian ambassadors are entertained with the sight of bags of bad money counted out to Janissaries. The latter wonder I saw: the other I assure you would give me much more pleasure.
With this saving clause, I deliver them over to the extortioner, and let him make the most of them. Let him sell porter at the price of port: and “humble port” at the price of “imperial tokay:” his customers might grumble, but I don’t think you would, and I am sure I should not: for it is for that they were put there. Never fear his being so much his own enemy, as to stand out for a price which nobody will give.
In the next place I don’t know that I should be for allowing him the power of beating his boarders, nor, in short, of punishing them in any shape. Anywhere else, such an exemption must have been visionary and impracticable. Without either punishment, or interest given him in the profits of his labour—an interest which, to get the better of so many adverse motives, must have been a pretty strong one, how could you have insured a man’s doing a single stroke of work? and, even with such interest, how could you have insured his not doing all sorts of mischief? As to mischief, I observed to you, under the article of safe custody, how easy their keeper might make himself upon that score: and as to work, I flatter myself you perceive already, that there need be no great fear of a want of inducements adequate to that purpose.
If, after all, it should be insisted that some power of correction would be absolutely necessary—for instance, in the case of a prisoner’s assaulting a keeper or teacher at the time of receiving his food or his instruction (a case which, though never very probable, would be always possible)—such a power, though less necessary here than anywhere else, might, on the other hand, be given with less danger. What tyranny could subsist under such a perfect facility of complaint as is the result of so perfect a facility of inspection? But on this head a word is sufficient, after what I have said in considering the general heads of advantage dependent on this principle. Other checks assistant to this are obvious enough. A correction-book might be kept, in which every instance of chastisement, with the cause for which it was administered, might be entered upon record: any the slightest act of punishment not entered to be considered as a lawless injury. If these checks be not enough, the presence of one or more persons, besides him by whom the correction was actually administered. might be required as witnesses of the mode and quantum of correction, and of the alleged cause.
But, besides preventing his starving them or using them ill, there is another thing I should be much inclined to do, in order to make it his interest to take care of them. I would make him pay so much for every one that died, without troubling myself whether any care of his could have kept the man alive. To be sure, he would make me pay for this in the contract; but as I should receive it from him afterwards, what it cost me in the long run would be no great matter. He would get underwriter’s profit by me; but let him get that, and welcome.
Suppose three hundred prisoners; and that, out of that number of persons of their ages, ten, that is, one out of thirty, ought to die every year, were they taken at large. But persons of their character and in their condition, it may be expected, will die faster than honest men. Say, therefore, one in twenty, though I believe, as jails stand at present, if no more than one in ten die, or, for aught I know. out of a much smaller number, it may be thought very well. Give the contractor, then, for every man that ought to die, for instance ten pounds: that sum, repeated for every man in twenty among three hundred, will amount to a hundred and fifty pounds. Upon these terms, then, at the end of the year make him pay ten pounds for every man that has actually died within that time; to which you may add, or escaped, and I dare say he will have no objection. If by nursing them and making much of them he should find himself at the end of the year a few pounds the richer by his tenderness, who would grudge it him? If you have still any doubt of him, instead of the ten pounds you may put twenty: you will not be much the poorer for it. I don’t know, upon second thoughts, whether somewhat of this sort has not been put in practice, or at least proposed, for foundlings. Be that as it may, make but my contractor’s allowance large enough, and you need not doubt of his fondness of these his adopted children; of whom whosoever may chance while under his wing to depart this vale of tears, will be sure to leave one sincere mourner at least, without the parade of mourning.
Some perhaps may be for observing, that, upon my own principles, this contrivance would be of no use but to save the useless, since the contractor, of himself, knows better things than not to take care of a cow that will give milk. But, with their leave, I do not mean that even the useless should be starved; for if the judges had thought this proper, they would have said so.
The patrons of the hard-labour bill, proceeding with that caution and tenderness that pervades their whole system, have denied their governor, as they call him, the power of whipping. Some penal power, however, for putting a stop to mischief, was, under their plan, absolutely necessary. They preferred, as the mildest and less dangerous power, that of confining a man in a dark dungeon under ground, under a bread-and-water diet. I did then take the liberty to object against the choosing, by way of punishment, the putting of a man into a place which differed not from other places in any essential particular, but that of the chance it stood of proving unwholesome; proposing, at the same time, a very simple expedient, by which their ordinary habitations might be made to receive every other property of a dungeon; in short, the making of them dark.
But in one of my brother’s inspection-houses, there the man is in his dungeon already (the only sort of dungeon, at least, which I conceive any man need be in,) very safe and quiet. He is likewise entertaining himself with his bread and water, with only one little circumstance in his favour, that whenever he is tired of that regimen, it is in his own power to put himself under a better: unless my contractor chooses to fine himself for the purpose of punishing his boarder—an act of cruelty which I am in no great dread of.
In short, bating the checks you have seen, and which certainly are not very complicated, the plan of establishment which such a principle of construction seems, now at least, if not for the first time, to render eligible, and which as such I have been venturing to recommend, is exactly upon a par, in point of simplicity, with the forced and temporary expedient of the ballast-lighters—a plan that has the most perfect simplicity to recommend it, and, I believe, not much else. The chief differences are, that convicts are not, in the inspection-houses, as in those lighters, jammed together in fetters under a master subject to no inspection, and scarce under any controul, having no interest in their welfare or their work, in a place of secret confinement, favourable to infection and to escapes.
Understanding thus much of his situation, my contractor, I conceive, notwithstanding the checks you have seen, will hardly think it necessary to ask me how he is to manage to persuade his boarders to set to work.—Having them under this regimen, what better security he can wish for of their working, and that to their utmost, I can hardly imagine. At any rate, he has much better security than he can have for the industry and diligence of any ordinary journeyman at large, who is paid by the day, and not by the piece. If a man won’t work, nothing has he to do, from morning to night, but to eat his bad bread and drink his water, without a soul to speak to. If he will work, his time is occupied, and he has his meat and his beer, or whatever else his earnings may afford him, and not a stroke does he strike but he gets something, which he would not have got otherwise. This encouragement is necessary to his doing his utmost: but more than this is not necessary. It is necessary every exertion he makes should be sure of its reward; but it is not necessary that such reward be so great, or any thing near so great, as he might have had, had he worked elsewhere. The confinement, which is his punishment, preventing his carrying the work to another market, subjects him to a monopoly; which the contractor, his master, like any other monopolist, makes, of course, as much of as he can. The workman lives in a poor country, where wages are low; but in a poor country, a man who is paid according to his work will exert himself at least as much as in a rich one. According to Mr. Arthur Young, and the very cogent evidence he gives, he should work more: for more work that intelligent traveller finds always done in dear years than in plentiful ones: the earnings of one day affording, in the latter case, a fund for the extravagance of the next. But this is not all. His master may fleece him, if he pleases, at both ends. After sharing in his profits, he may again take a profit upon his expense. He would probably choose to employ both expedients together. The tax upon earnings, if it stood alone, might possibly appear liable to be evaded in some degree, and be frustrated in some cases, by a confederacy between the workmen and their employers out of doors; the tax upon expenditure, by their frugality, supposing that virtue to take root in such a soil; or in some instances, perhaps, by their generosity to their friends without doors. The tax upon earnings would probably not be laid on in an open way, upon any other than the good hands; whose traffic must be carried on, with or without his intervention, between them and their out-of-door employers. In the trades which he thought proper to set up of himself for his capable hands, his promising hands, and his drones, the tax might be levied in a more covert way by the lowering of the price paid by him, in comparison of the free prices given out of doors for similar work. Where he is sure of his men, as well with regard to their disposition to spend as with regard to their inability to collude, the tax upon expenditure, without any tax upon profits open or covert, would be the least discouraging: it would be the least discouraging for the present, as the earnings would sound greater to their ears; and with a view to the future, as they would thereby see (I mean such of them as had any hopes of releasement) what their earnings might at that happy period be expected to amount to, in reality as well as in name.
The circumstance touched upon at the close of my last letter, suggests another advantage, and that not an inconsiderable one, which you will find more particularly, if not exclusively, connected with the contract plan.
The turning of the prisoners’ labour into the most profitable channels being left free, depending upon the joint choice of the two only parties interested in pushing the advantage to the utmost, would afford a resource, and that I should conceive a sure one, for the subsistence of the prisoners, after the expiration of their terms. No trade that could be carried on in this state of thraldom, but could be carried on with at least equal advantage in a state of liberty. Both parties would probably find their account in continuing their manufacturing connexion, after the dissolution of every other. The workman, after the stigma cast on him by the place of his abode, would probably not find it so easy to get employment elsewhere. If he got it at all, it would be upon terms proportioned in some measure to the risk which an employer at large might think he would run on his own part, and in some cases to the danger of driving away fellow-workmen, by the introduction of an associate who might prove more or less unwelcome. He would therefore probably come cheaper to his former master than another man would; at the same time that he would get more from him in his free state than he had been used to get when confined.
Whether this resource was in contemplation with the planners of the hard-labour bill, I cannot pretend to say: I find not upon the face of that bill any proof of the affirmative. It provides a sum for each prisoner, partly for present subsistence, partly as a sort of little capital to be put into his pocket upon his discharge. But the sole measure assigned to this sum is the good behaviour of the party, not the sum required to set him up in whatever might have been his trade. Nor had the choice of his employment been left to the governor of the house, still less to the prisoner, but to committees of justices, as I observed before.
As to the Woolwich Academy, all ideas of reformation under that name, and of a continuance of the like industry as a means of future provision, seem there to have been equally out of the question. That they should hire lighters of their own to heave ballast from, does not appear to have been expected; and if any of them had had the fortune to possess trades of their own before, the scraping of gravel for three, five, or seven years together out of the river, had no particular tendency, that I can see, to rub up the recollection of those trades. The allowance upon discharge would, however, always have its use, though not always the same use. It might help to fit them out for trades; it might serve them to get drunk with; it might serve them to buy any house-breaking implements which they could not so well come at to steal.—The separation between the landlord and his guests must on his side have been rendered the less affecting, by the expectation which he could not but entertain of its proving but a short one. Nor was subsequent provision of one sort or other by any means wanting, for those who failed to find it there. The gallows was always ready with open arms to receive as many as the jail-fever should have refused.
Many are the data with which a man ought to be furnished (and with not one of which am I furnished) before he pretended to speak upon any tolerable footing of assurance with regard to the advantage that might be expected in the view of pecuniary economy from the inspection plan. On the one hand, the average annual amount of the present establishments, whatever they are (for I confess I do not know,) for the disposal of convicts: The expected amount of the like average with regard to the measure which I have just learnt has been resolved upon, for sending colonies of them to New South Wales, including as well the maintenance of them till shipped, as the expense of the transportation, and the maintenance of them when they are got there:—On the other hand, the capital proposed to have been expended in the building and fitting up the experimental penitentiary house:—The further capital proposed to have been expended in the furniture of it:—The sum proposed to have been allowed per man for the maintenance of the prisoners till the time when their labour might be expected to yield a produce. These points and a few others being ascertained, I should then be curious to know what degree of productiveness, if any, would be looked upon as giving to the measure of a penitentiary-house, either of any construction or of this extraordinary one, the pre-eminence upon the whole over any of the other modes of disposal now in practice or in contemplation. Many distinct points for the eye to rest upon in such a scale will readily occur:—1st, The produce might be barely sufficient to pay the expense of feeding;—2d, It might farther pay the expense of clothing;—3d, It might farther pay the expense of guarding and instructing, viz. the salaries or other emoluments of the numerous tribe of visitors, governors, jailors, task-masters, &c. in the one case, and of the contractor and his assistants in the other;—4th, It might farther pay the wear and tear of the working-stock laid in;—5th, It might farther pay the interest of the capital employed in the purchase of such stock;—6th, It might farther pay the interest of the capital laid out in the erecting and fitting up the establishment in all its parts, at the common rate of interest for money laid out in building;—7th, It might farther pay, at the ordinary rate, the interest of the money, if any, laid out in the purchase of the ground. Even at the first mentioned and lowest of these stages, I should be curious to compare the charge of such an institution with that of the least chargeable of those others that are as yet preferred to it. When it had arisen above the last, then, as you see, and not till then, it could be said to yield a profit, in the sense in which the same thing could be said of any manufacturing establishment of a private nature.
But long before that period, the objections of those whose sentiments are the least favourable to such an establishment would, I take for granted, have been perfectly removed. Yet what should make it stop anywhere short of the highest of those stages, or what should prevent it from rising even considerably above the highest of them, is more, I protest, than I can perceive. In what points a manufacturer setting up in such an establishment would be in a worse situation than an ordinary manufacturer, I really do not see; but I see many points in which he is in a better. His hands, indeed, are all raw, perhaps, at least with relation to the particular species of work which he employs them upon, if not with relation to every other. But so are all hands everywhere, at the first setting up of every manufacture. Look round, and you will find instances enough of manufactures where children, down to four years old, earn something, and where children a few years older earn a subsistence, and that a comfortable one. I must leave to you to mention names and places. You, who have been so much of an English traveller, cannot but have met with instances in plenty, if you have happened to note them down. Many are the instances you must have found in which the part taken by each workman is reduced to some one single operation of such perfect simplicity, that one might defy the awkwardest and most helpless idler that ever existed to avoid succeeding in it. Among the eighteen or twenty operations into which the process of pin-making has been divided, I question whether there is any one that is not reduced to such a state. In this point, then, he is upon at least as good a footing as other manufacturers: but in all other points he is upon a better. What hold can any other manufacturer have upon his workmen, equal to what my manufacturer would have upon his? What other master is there that can reduce his workmen, if idle, to a situation next to starving, without suffering them to go elsewhere? What other master is there, whose men can never get drunk unless he chooses they should do so? and who, so far from being able to raise their wages by combination, are obliged to take whatever pittance he thinks it most for his interest to allow? In all other manufactories, those members of a family who can and will work, must earn enough to maintain not only themselves but those who either cannot or will not work. Each master of a family must earn enough to maintain, or at least help to maintain a wife, and to maintain such as are yet helpless among his children. My manufacturer’s workmen, however cramped in other respects, have the good or ill fortune to be freed from this incumbrance—a freedom, the advantage of which will be no secret to their master, who, seeing he is to have the honour of their custom in his capacity of shopkeeper, has taken care to get the measure of their earnings to a hair’s-breadth. What other manufacturers are there who reap their profits at the risk of other people, and who have the purse of the nation to support them, in case of any blameless misfortune? And to crown the whole by the great advantage which is the peculiar fruit of this new principle, what other master or manufacturer is there, who to appearance constantly, and in reality as much as he thinks proper, has every look and motion of each workman under his eye? Without any of these advantages, we see manufacturers not only keeping their heads above water, but making their fortunes every day. A manufacturer in this situation may certainly fail, because so may he in any other. But the probability is, he would not fail: because, even without these great advantages, much fewer fail than thrive, or the wealth of the country could not have gone on increasing as it has done, from the reign of Brutus to the present. And if political establishments were to wait till probability were converted into certainty before trial, Parliament might as well go to bed at once, and sleep on the same pillow with sister convocation.
To speak in sober sadness, I do dearly love, as you well know, in human dealings no less than in divine, to think and to say, as far as conscience will allow me, that whatever is, is right;” as well concerning those things which are done, as concerning those which have been left undone. The gentlemen who gave themselves so much trouble about the penitentiary-house plan, did extremely well; and, for aught I know, the gentlemen who put it under the table at last, may have done still better. If you have a mind to share with me in this comfortable feeling, turn once more to that discarded favourite, and observe what load of expense, some part then necessary, some perhaps not altogether so, it was to have thrown upon the nation; and, at the same time, what will be still more comfortable to you, how great a proportion of that expense would be struck off, by the new and of course still greater favourite, which I have ventured to introduce to you.
In the first place, there was to have been a vast extent of ground; for it was to have had rope-walks and timber-yards, and it is well it was not to have had dock-yards. Then, for the sake of healthiness, that ground was to have a command of running water: then again, for the convenience of dignified inspectors, that ground and that water were to have been in the vicinity of the metropolis. It was to have been on the banks of the Thames—somewhere, I think, about Wandsworth and Battersea; and a site fit for I know not how many of the most luxurious villas that fancy could conceive or Christie describe, was to be buried under it. Seven-and-twenty thousand pounds, I think, was the price talked of, and, for aught I know, paid, for the bare ground, before so much as a spade was put in it. As to my contractor, eighteen or twenty acres of the most unprofitable land your country or any other contains, any waste land, in short, which the crown has already in its possession, would answer every plea he could put in; and out of that he would crib gardens for his own accommodation, and farm-yards, and I know not what besides. As to running water, it is indeed to every purpose a very agreeable circumstance, and, under the ordinary jail regimen, a very desirable, possibly an essential one. But many of the Lords and Commons make shift without it, even at their villas, and almost all of them when not at their villas, without ascribing any want of health they may labour under to the want of running water. As to my contractor’s boarders, they must have water, indeed, because everybody must have water; but under the provision I have made for turning the operations of cleanliness into motions of course, I should apprehend their condition might still be tolerable, should they have no other running stock of that necessary element than what falls to the share of better men.
When the ground thus dearly wrung from the grasp of luxury came to be covered, think what another source of expense was to be opened, when, over and above nine hundred roomy chambers for so many persons to lie in, three other different classes of apartments were to be provided, to I know not what number nor extent, for them to work in, to pray in, and to suffer in!—four operations, the scenes of which are, upon our plan, consolidated into one.
I need not add much to what I have said in a former letter, about the tribe of subordinate establishments, each of them singly an object of no mean expense, which it seems to have been in contemplation to inclose within the fortress: I mean the mills, the forges, the engines, the timber-yards, and the rope-walks. The seal which stamps my contract dispels, as if it were a talisman, this great town in nubibus; and two or three plain round houses take its place. Either I am much mistaken, or a sum not much exceeding what was paid or destined for the bare ground of the proposed penitentiary-houses, would build and completely fit up those round houses, besides paying for the ground.
To this account of the dead stock is to be added, if I may say it without offence, that of the live stock of inspectors, of every rank and denomination: I mean the pyramid of under-keepers, and task-masters, and store-keepers, and governors, and committees of magistrates, which it builds up, all to be paid up and salaried, with allowances rising in proportion to the rise of dignity: the whole to be crowned with a grand triumvirate of superintendents, two of whom were to have been members of parliament, men of high birth and quality, whose toilsome dignity a minister would hardly have affronted by the offer of salaries much inferior to what are to be found annexed to sinecures.
I will not say much of the “other officers,” without number, which I see, by my View of the Hard-labour Bill, were to have been added, and of course must have been added, in such number as the “committees” of your * * * * to whom this business was then committed, or at any rate some other good judges should have judged “necessary.”
Officers and governors, eo nomine, my contractor would have none: and any superfluous clerk or over-looker, who might be found lurking in his establishment, he would have much less tenderness for, than your gardener has for the sow-thistles in your garden. The greatest part of his science comes to him in maxims from his grand-mother; and amongst the foremost of those maxims is that which stigmatizes as an unfrugal practice, the keeping of more cats than will catch mice.
If, under all these circumstances, the penitentiary-houses should have been somewhat of a bugbear, it will be the less to be wondered at, when one considers the magnitude of the scale upon which this complicated experiment was going to be made. I mentioned in round numbers nine hundred as the number of convicts which was going to be provided for; but 888 was the exact number mentioned in the bill. Three eights, “thus arranged, a terrible show!” But granting this to be the number likely to require provision of some kind or other, it surely does not follow that all that require it must necessarily be provided for in this manner, or in none. If the eight hundred and eighty eight appear so formidable, gentlemen may strike off the hundreds, and try whether the country will be ruined by an establishment inferior to that which an obscure ex-countryman of theirs is going to amuse himself with.
What I have all along been taking for granted is, that it is the mere dread of extravagance that has driven your thrifty minister from the penitentiary-house plan—not the love of transportation that has seduced him from it. The inferiority of the latter mode of punishment in point of exemplarity and equality—in short, in every point but that of expense, stands, I believe, undisputed. I collected the reasons against it, that were in every body’s mouth, and marked them down, with, I think, some additions (as you may or may not remember) in my view of the hard-labour bill, supplement included. I have never happened to hear any objections made to those reasons; nor have I heard of any charms, other than those of antiquity and comparative frugality, that transportation has to recommend it. Supposing, therefore, what I most certainly do not suppose, that my contractor could not keep his people at home at less expense than it would take to send them abroad, yet if he could keep them at no greater expense, I should presume that even this would be reckoned no small point gained, and that even this very moderate success would be sufficient to put an end to so undesirable a branch of navigation.
Nor does any preference that might be given to the transportation plan, supersede the necessity of this or some other substitute to it, in the many cases to which it cannot be conceived that plan should be extended. Transportation to this desert for seven years—a punishment which under such circumstances is so much like transportation for life—is not, I suppose, to be inflicted for every peccadillo. Vessels will not be sailing every week or fortnight upon this four or five or six months navigation: hardly much oftener, I should suppose, than once a twelvemonth. In the meantime, the convicts must be somewhere: and whether they are likely to be better qualified for colonization by lounging in an ordinary jail, or rotting on board a ballast bulk, or working in an inspection-house, may now, I think, be left for any one to judge.
In considering my brother’s inspection plan as applicable to the purpose of establishments designed to force labour, my principal theme has hitherto been the national establishment of penitentiary-houses. My first design, however, was to help to drive the nail I saw agoing: I mean the house of correction, which the advertisement informed me was under consideration for your * * * *. I had little notion, at the outset, of attempting any such up-hill work as the heaving up again that huge stone, the penitentiary-house, which the builders at last had refused, and which, after the toiling and straining of so many years, had tumbled to the bottom. But the greater object grew upon me as I wrote; and what I found to say on that subject I grudged the less, as thinking it might, most of it, be more or less applicable to your establishment. How far, and in what particular respects, it may prove so, I have no means of knowing: I trouble you with it at a venture. In my last I proposed, if the nation were poor and fearful, a penitentiary-house upon a very small scale—so small, if such caution were thought necessary, as not to contain so many as a hundred prisoners. But however poor the nation may be, the * * * * * of * * * * surely is rich. What then should hinder your * * * * * from standing forth and setting the nation an example? What the number of persons you may have to provide for in this way is supposed to be, I have no means of knowing; but I should think it strange if it did not considerably exceed the one just mentioned. What it is you will risk by such an experiment, is more than I can see. As far as the building is concerned, it is a question which architects, and they alone, can answer. In the meantime, we who know nothing of the matter, can find no reason, all things considered, why a building upon this plan should cost more than upon another. But setting aside the building, every other difference is on the profitable side.
The precautions against escapes, and the restraints destined to answer the ends of punishment, would not, I suppose, in your establishment be quite so strict, as it would be necessary they should be in an establishment designed to answer the purpose of a penitentiary-house. Bars, bolts, and gratings, would in this of your’s, I suppose, be rejected; and the inexorable partition walls might for some purposes be thinned away to boards or canvass, and for others thrown out altogether. With you, the gloomy paradox of crowded solitude might be exchanged, perhaps, for the cheerfulness of a common refectory. The Sabbath might be a Sabbath there as elsewhere. In the penitentiary inspection-house, the prisoners were to lie, as they were to eat, to work, to pray, and to do every thing, in their cells, and nowhere else. In your house of correction, where they should lie, or how they should lie, I stay not to inquire.
It is well, however, for you * * * * gentlemen, that you are so rich; for in point of frugality, I could not venture to promise you anything like the success that I would to “poor old England.” Your contractor’s jailbirds, if you had a contractor, would be perpetually upon the wing: the short terms you would be sending them to him for, would seldom admit of their attaining to such a proficiency, as to make a profit upon any branch of industry. In general, what in a former letter I termed the good hands, would be his chief, if not his whole dependence; and that, I doubt, but a scanty one.
I will not pester you with further niceties applicable to the difference between houses of correction, and work-houses, and poor-houses, if any there should be, which are not work-houses; between the different modes of treatment that may be due to what are looked upon as the inferior degrees of dishonesty, to idleness as yet untainted with dishonesty, and to blameless indigence. The law herself has scarcely eyes for these microscopic differences. I bow down, therefore, for the present at least, to the counsel of so many sages, and shrink from the crime of being “wiser than the law.”
A word or two respecting the condition of offenders before conviction: or, if that expression should appear to include a solecism, of persons accused, who either for want of bail, or as charged with offences not bailable, have hitherto been made, through negligence or necessity, to share by anticipation so much of the fate of convicts, as imprisonment more or less rigid may amount to.
To persons thus circumstanced, the inspection principle would apply, as far as safe custody was concerned, with as much advantage as to convicts. But as there can be no ground for punishing them any otherwise than in so far as the restraint necessary for safe custody has the effect of punishment, there can be as little ground for subjecting them to solitude; unless where that circumstance should also appear necessary, either to safe custody, or to prevent that mental infection, which novices in the arts of dishonesty, and in debauchery, the parent of dishonesty, are so much in danger of contracting from the masters of those arts. In this view, therefore, the partitions might appear to some an unnecessary ingredient in the composition of the building; though I confess, from the consideration just alleged, they would not appear in that light to me. Communication must likewise be allowed to the prisoners with their friends and legal assistants, for the purpose of settling their affairs, and concerting their defence.
As forced labour is punishment, labour must not here be forced. For the same reason, and because the privation of such comforts of any kind as a man’s circumstances allow him, is also punishment, neither should the free admission of such comforts, as far as is consistent with sobriety, be denied; nor, if the keeper is permitted to concern himself in any part of the trade, should he be permitted to make a greater profit than would be made by other traders.
But amongst persons of such description, and in such a multitude, there will always be a certain number, nor that probably an inconsiderable one, who will possess no means of subsistence whatever of their own. These then will, in so far, come under a predicament not very dissimilar to that of convicts in a penitentiary-house. Whatever works they may be capable of, there is no reason why subsistence should be given to them, any more than to persons free from suspicion and at large, but as the price for work, supposing them able to perform it. But as this ability is a fact, the judgment of which is a matter of great nicety, too much it may be thought by far to be entrusted to such hands, if to any, some allowance must therefore be made them gratis, and that at least as good a one as I recommended for the penitentiary-house. In order to supply the defects of this allowance, the point then will be, to provide some sort of work for such, who not having trades of their own which they can work at, are yet willing to take work, if they can get it. If to find such work might be difficult, even in a house of correction, on account of the shortness of the time which there may be for learning work, for the same reason it should be still more difficult in a prison appropriated to safe custody before conviction, at least in cases where, as it will sometimes happen, the commitment precedes the trial but a few days. If on the ground of being particularly likely to have it in his power to provide work, the contracting keeper of a penitentiary-house should be deemed the fittest person for the keeping of a safe-custody house (for so I would wish to call it, rather than a prison,) in other respects he might be thought less fit, rather than more so. In a penitentiary-house, he is an extortioner by trade: a trade he must wholly learn, every time he sets his foot in a safe-custody house, on pain of such punishment as unlicensed extortioners may deserve. But it by no means follows, because the keeper of a penitentiary-house has found one, or perhaps half-a-dozen sorts of work, any of which a person may make himself tolerably master of in the course of a few months, that he should be in possession of any that might be performed without learning, or learnt in a few days. If, therefore, for frugality’s sake, or any other convenience, any other establishments were taken to combine with that of a safe-custody house, a house of correction would seem better suited to such a purpose, than a penitentiary-house. But without considering it as matter of necessity to have recourse to such shifts, the eligibility of which might depend upon local and other particular considerations, I should hope that employments would not be wanting, and those capable of affording a moderately good subsistence, for which a man of ordinary faculties would be as well qualified the first instant, as at the end of seven years. I could almost venture to mention examples, but that the reasons so often given stop my pen.
After so much as has been said on the application of our principle to the business of manufactories, considered as carried on by forced labour, you will think a very few words more than sufficient, in the view of applying it to manufactories carried on upon the ordinary plan of freedom.
The centrality of the presiding person’s situation will have its use at all events; for the purpose of direction and order at least, if for no other. The concealment of his person will be of use, in as far as controul may be judged useful. As to partitions, whether they would be more serviceable in the way of preventing distraction, or disserviceable by impeding communication, will depend upon the particular nature of the particular manufacture. In some manufactories they will have a further use, by the convenience they may afford for ranging a greater number of tools than could otherwise be stowed within the workman’s reach. In nice businesses, such as that of watch-making, where considerable damage might result from an accidental jog or a momentary distraction, such partitions, I understand, are usual.
Whatever be the manufacture, the utility of the principle is obvious and incontestible, in all cases where the workmen are paid according to their time. Where they are paid by the piece, there the interest which the workman has in the value of his work supersedes the use of coercion, and of every expedient calculated to give force to it. In this case, I see no other use to be made of the inspection principle, than in as far as instruction may be wanted, or in the view of preventing any waste or other damage, which would not of itself come home to the workman, in the way of diminishing his earnings, or in any other shape.
Were a manufactory of any kind to be established upon this principle, the central lodge would probably be made use of as the compting-house: and if more branches than one were carried on under the same roof, the accounts belonging to each branch would be kept in the corresponding parts of the lodge. The lodge would also serve as a sort of temporary store-room, into which the tools and materials would be brought from the work-houses, and from whence they would be delivered out to the workmen all around, as well as finished work received, as occasion might require.
I come now with pleasure, notwithstanding the sadness of the subject, to an instance in which the application of the principle will be of the lenient cast altogether: I mean, that of the melancholy abodes appropriated to the reception of the insane. And here, perhaps, a noble lord now in administration might find some little assistance lent to the humane and salutary regulations for which we are chiefly indebted to his care.
That any of the receptacles at present subsisting should be pulled down only to make room for others on the inspection principle, is neither to be expected nor to be wished. But, should any buildings that may be erected in future for this purpose be made to receive the inspection form, the object of such institutions could scarce fail of receiving some share of its salutary influence. The powers of the insane, as well as those of the wicked, are capable of being directed either against their fellow-creatures or against themselves. If in the latter case nothing less than perpetual chains should be availing, yet in all instances where only the former danger is to be apprehended, separate cells, exposed, as in the case of prisons, to inspection, would render the use of chains and other modes of corporal sufferance as unnecessary in this case as in any. And with regard to the conduct of the keepers, and the need which the patients have to be kept, the natural, and not discommendable jealousy of abuse would, in this instance as in the former ones, find a much readier satisfaction than it could anywhere at present.
But without thinking of erecting mad-houses on purpose, if we ask Mr. Howard, he will tell us, if I do not misrecollect, that there are few prisons or work-houses but what are applied occasionally to this use. Indeed, a receptacle of one or other of these descriptions is the ready, and, I believe, the only resource, which magistrates find vested in their hands. Hence it was, he so often found his senses assailed with that strange and unseemly mixture of calamity and guilt—lunatics raving and felons rioting in the same room. But in every penal inspection-house, every vacant cell would afford these afflicted beings an apartment exempt from disturbance, and adapted to their wants.
If any thing could still be wanting to show how far this plan is from any necessary connexion with severe and coercive measures, there cannot be a stronger consideration than that of the advantage with which it applies to hospitals; establishments of which the sole object is the relief of the afflicted, whom their own entreaties have introduced. Tenacious as ever of the principle of omnipresence, I take it for granted that the whole tribe of medical curators—the surgeon, the apothecary, the matron, to whom I could wish to add even the physician, could the establishment be but sufficient to make it worth his while, find in the inspection-lodge and what apartments might be added above it, their constant residence. Here the physician and the apothecary might know with certainty that the prescription which the one had ordered and the other made up, had been administered at the exact time and in the exact manner in which it was ordered to be administered. Here the surgeon would be sure that his instructions and directions had been followed in all points by his pupils and assistants. Here the faculty, in all its branches, might with the least trouble possible watch as much as they chose to watch, of the progress of the disease, and the influence of the remedy. Complaints from the sick might be received the instant the cause of the complaint, real or imaginary, occurred; though, as misconduct would be followed by instant reprehension, such complaints must be proportionably rare.
The separation of the cells might be in part, continued either for comfort or for decency. Curtains, instead of grating, would give the patients, when they thought fit, the option of being seen. Partitions of greater solidity and extent might divide the fabric into different wards, confining infection, adapting themselves to the varieties of disease. and affording, upon occasion, diversities of temperature.
In hot weather, to save the room from being heated, and the patients from being incommoded by the sun, shades or awnings might secure the windows towards the south.
I do not mean to entertain you here with a system of physic, or a treatise upon airs. But a word or two on this subject you must permit me. Would the ceilings of the cell be high enough? Is the plan of construction sufficiently favourable to ventilation? I have not the good fortune to have read a book published not long ago on the subject of hospitals, by our countryman Mr. Aikin, though I remember seeing some account of it in a review. But I cannot help begging of you to recommend to the notice of your medical friends, the perusal of Dr. De Maret’s paper, in the Memoirs of the Academy of Dijon for the year 1782. If either his facts or his reasoning are to be trusted, not only no loftiness of ceiling is sufficient to ensure to such a building a purity of air, but it may appear questionable whether such an effect be upon the whole promoted by that circumstance.
His great anxiety seems to be, that at some known period or periods of the day, the whole mass of air may undergo at once a total change, not trusting to partial and precarious evacuations by opening here and there a window; still less to any height or other amplitude of room—a circumstance which of itself tends to render them still more partial and precarious. Proscribing all rectilinear walls and flat ceilings forming angles at the junctions, he recommends accordingly for the inside of his building, the form of a long oval, curved in every direction except that of the floor, placing a door at each end. By throwing open these doors, he seems to make it pretty apparent, that the smallest draught will be sufficient to effect an entire change in the whole stock of air; since at which ever end a current of air happens first to enter, it will carry all before it till it gets to the other. Opening windows, or other apertures, disposed in any other part of the room, would tend rather to disturb and counteract the current, than to promote it.
From the same reasoning it will follow, that the circular form demanded as the best of all by the inspection principle, must, in a view to ventilation, have in a considerable degree the advantage over rectilinear; and even, were the difference sufficiently material, the inspection principle might be applied to his oval with little or no disadvantage. The form of the inspection lodge might in this case follow that of the containing building; and that central part, so far from obstructing the ventilation, would rather, as it should seem, assist it, increasing the force of the current by the compressure.
It should seem also, that to a circular building, the central lodge would thus give the same aptitude to ventilation, which the Doctor’s oval form possesses of itself.
To save his patients from catching cold while the current is passing through the room, the Doctor allows to each a short screen, like the head of a cradle, to be rested on the bed.
Here the use of the tin speaking-tubes would be seen again, in the means they would afford to the patient, though he were equal to no more than a whisper, of conveying to the lodge the most immediate notice of his wants, and receiving answers in a tone equally unproductive of disturbance.
Something I could have wished to say on the important difference between the general and comparatively immaterial impurity resulting merely from the phlogiston, and the various particular impurities constituted by the various products of putrefaction, or by the different matters of the various contagions. Against these very different dangers, the mode and measure of precaution might admit of no small difference. But this belongs not necessarily to the subject, and you would not thank me, any more than gentlemen of the faculty who understand it better than I, or gentlemen at large who would not wish to understand it.
An hospital built and conducted upon a plan of this kind, of the success of which everybody might be an observer, accessible to the patients’ friends, who, without incommoding or being incommoded, might see the whole economy of it carried on under their eye, would lose, it is to be hoped, a great part of those repelling terrors, which deprive of the benefit of such institutions many objects whom prejudice, in league with poverty, either debars altogether from relief, or drives to seek it in much less eligible shapes. Who knows but that the certainty of a medical attendance, not occasional, short-lived, or even precarious, as at present, but constant and uninterrupted, might not render such a situation preferable even to home, in the eyes of many persons who could afford to pay for it? and that the erection of a building of this kind might turn to account in the hands of some enterprising practitioner?
A prison, as I observed in a former letter includes an hospital. In prisons on this construction, every cell may receive the properties of an hospital, without undergoing any change. The whole prison would be perhaps a better hospital than any building known hitherto by that name. Yet should it be thought of use, a few cells might be appropriated to that purpose; and perhaps it may be thought advisable that some cases of infection should be thrown out, and lodged under another roof.
But if infection in general must be sent to be cured elsewhere, there is no spot in which infection originating in negligence can, either in the rise or spread of it, meet with such obstacles as here. In what other instance as in this, will you see the interests of the governor and the governed in this important particular, so perfectly confounded and made one?—those of the keeper with those of the prisoners—those of the medical curator with those of the patients? Clean or unclean, safe or unsafe, he runs the chance that they do: if he lets them poison themselves, he lets them poison him. Encompassed on all sides by a multitude of persons, whose good or bad condition depends upon himself, he stands as a hostage in his own hands for the salubrity of the whole.
== Letter XXI.: Schools. == After applying the inspection principle first to prisons, and through mad-houses bringing it down to hospitals, will the parental feelings endure my applying it at last to schools? Will the observation of its efficacy in preventing the irregular application of undue hardship even to the guilty, be sufficient to dispel the apprehension of its tendency to introduce tyranny into the abodes of innocence and youth?
Applied to these, you will find it capable of two very distinguishable degrees of extension:—It may be confined to the hours of study; or it may be made to fill the whole circle of time, including the hours of repose, and refreshment, and recreation.
To the first of these applications the most captious timidity, I think, could hardly fancy an objection: concerning the hours of study, there can, I think, be but one wish, that they should be employed in study. It is scarce necessary to observe that gratings, bars, and bolts, and every circumstance from which an inspection-house can derive a terrific character, have nothing to do here. All play, all chattering—in short, all distraction of every kind, is effectually banished by the central and covered situation of the master, seconded by partitions or screens between the scholars, as slight as you please. The different measures and casts of talent, by this means rendered, perhaps for the first time, distinctly discernible, will indicate the different degrees of attention and modes of culture most suitable to each particular disposition; and incurable and irreproachable dulness or imbecility will no longer be punished for the sins of idleness or obstinacy. That species of fraud at Westminster called cribbing, a vice thought hitherto congenial to schools, will never creep in here. That system of premature corruption, in which idleness is screened by opulence, and the honour due to talents or industry is let out for hire, will be completely done away; and a nobleman may stand as good a chance of knowing something as a common man.
Nor, in point of present enjoyment, will the scholars be losers by the change. Those sinkings of the heart at the thoughts of a task undone, those galling struggles between the passion for play and the fear of punishment, would there be unknown. During the hours of business, habit, no longer broken in upon by accident, would strip the master’s presence of its terrors, without depriving it of its use. And the time allotted for study being faithfully and rigidly appropriated to that service, the less of it would serve.
The separate spaces allotted for this purpose would not in other respects be thrown away. A bed, a bureau, and a chair, must be had at any rate; so that the only extraordinary expense in building would be for the partitions, for which a very slight thickness would suffice. The youth of either sex might by this means sleep, as well as study, under inspection, and alone—a circumstance of no mean importance in many a parent’s eye.
In the Royal Military School at Paris, the bed-chambers (if my brother’s memory does not deceive him) form two ranges on the two sides of a long room; the inhabitants being separated from one another by partitions, but exposed alike to the view of a master at his walks, by a kind of a grated window in each door. This plan of construction struck him, he tells me, a good deal, as he walked over that establishment (about a dozen years ago, was it not?) with you; and possibly in that walk the foundation was laid for his Inspection-House. If he there borrowed his idea, I hope he has not repaid it without interest. You will confess some difference, in point of facility, betwixt a state of incessant walking and a state of rest; and in point of completeness of inspection, between visiting two or three hundred persons one after another, and seeing them at once.
In stating what this principle will do in promoting the progress of instruction in every line, a word or two will be thought sufficient to state what it will not do. It does give every degree of efficacy which can be given to the influence of punishment and restraint. But it does nothing towards correcting the oppressive influence of panishment and restraint, by the enlivening and invigorating influence of reward. That noblest and brightest engine of discipline can by no other means be put to constant use in schools, than by the practice which at Westminster, you know, goes by the name of challenging—an institution which, paying merit in its fittest and most inexhaustible coin, and even uniting in one impulse the opposite powers of reward and punishment, holds out dishonour for every attention a boy omits, and honour for every exertion he can bestow.
With regard to the extending the range of inspection over every moment of a boy’s time, the sentiments of mankind might not be altogether so unanimous. The notion, indeed, of most parents is, I believe, that children cannot be too much under the master’s eye; and if man were a consistent animal, none who entertain that notion but should be fonder of the principle the farther they saw it pursued. But as consistency is of all human qualities the most rare, it need not at all surprise us, if, of those who in the present state of things are most anxious on the head of the master’s omnipresence, many were to fly back and change their note, when they saw that point screwed up at once to a pitch of perfection so much beyond whatever they could have been accustomed to conceive.
Some there are, at any rate, who, before they came into so novel a scheme, would have many scruples to get over. Doubts would be started—Whether it would be advisable to apply such constant and unremitting pressure to the tender mind, and to give such herculean and ineludible strength to the gripe of power?—whether persons, of the cast of character and extent of ideas that may be expected to be found in the common run of schoolmasters, are likely to be fit receptacles for an authority so much exceeding anything that has been hitherto signified by despotic?—whether the in-attention of the master may not be as necessary to the present comfort of his pupil, in some respects, as the attention of the one may be to the future welfare of the other, in other respects?—whether the irretrievable check given to the free development of the intellectual part of his frame by this unintermitted pressure, may not be productive of an imbecility similar to that which would be produced by constant and long-continued bandages on the corporeal part?—whether what is thus acquired in regularity may not be lost in energy?—whether that not less instructive, though less heeded, course of discipline, which in the struggles of passion against passion, and of reason against reason, is administered by the children to one another and to themselves, and in which the conflicts and competitions that are to form the business of maturity are rehearsed in miniature; whether I say, this moral and most important branch of instruction would not by these means be sacrificed to the rudiments, and those seldom the most useful, of the intellectual?—whether the defects, with which private education has been charged in its comparison with public, would not here be carried to the extreme?—and whether, in being made a little better acquainted with the world of abstraction than they might have been otherwise, the youth thus pent up may not have been kept more than proportionably ignorant of the world of realities into which they are about to launch?—whether the liberal spirit and energy of a free citizen would not be exchanged for the mechanical discipline of a soldier, or the austerity of a monk?—and whether the result of this high-wrought contrivance might not be constructing a set of machines under the similitude of men?
To give a satisfactory answer to all these queries, which are mighty fine, but do not any of them come home to the point, it would be necessary to recur at once to the end of education. Would happiness be most likely to be increased or diminished by this discipline?—Call them soldiers, call them monks, call them machines: so they were but happy ones, I should not care. Wars and storms are best to rid of, but peace and calms are better to enjoy. Don’t be frightened now, my dear * * * * *, and think that I am going to entertain you with a course of moral philosophy, or even with a system of education. Happiness is a very pretty thing to feel, but very dry to talk about; so you may unknit your brow, for I shall say no more about the matter. One thing only I will add, which is, that whoever sets up an inspection-school upon the tiptop of the principle, had need to be very sure of the master; for the boy’s body is not more the child of his father’s, than his mind will be of the master’s mind; with no other difference than what there is between command on one side and subjection on the other.
Some of these fine queries which I have been treating you with, and finer still, Rousseau would have entertained us with; nor do I imagine he would have put his Emilius into an inspection-house; but I think he would have been glad of such a school for his Sophia.
Addison, the grave and moral Addison, in his Spectator or his Tatler, I forget which, suggests a contrivance for trying virginity by means of lions. You may there find many curious disquisitions concerning the measures and degrees of that species of purity; all which you will be better pleased to have from that grave author than from me. But, without plunging into any such discussions, the highest degree possible, whatsoever that may be, is no more than anybody might make sure of, only by transferring damsels at as early an age as may be thought sufficient, into a strict inspection-school. Addison’s scheme was not only a penal but a bloody one: and what havoc it might have made in the population of the country, I tremble but to think of. Give thanks, then, to Diana and the eleven thousand virgins, and to whatever powers preside over virginity in either calendar, for so happy a discovery as this of your friend’s. There you saw blood and uncertainty: here you see certainty without blood. What advantage might be made by setting up a boarding-school for young ladies upon this plan, and with what eagerness gentlemen who are curious in such matters would crowd to such a school to choose themselves wives, is too obvious to insist on. The only inconvenience I can think of is, that if the institution were to become general, Mrs. Ch. H. and other gentlewomen of her calling, would be obliged either to give up house-keeping, or take up with low wenches or married ladies.
Dr. Brown the estimator would have been stark mad for an inspection-school upon the very extremity of the principle, provided always he were to have been head-master, and then he would have had no other schools but those. His antagonist, Dr. Priestly, would, I imagine, be altogether as averse to it, unless, perhaps, for experiment’s sake, upon a small scale, just enough to furnish an appendix to Hartley upon Man.
You have a controversy, I find, in England, about Sunday-schools. Schools upon the extremity of the inspection-principle would, I am apt to think, find more advocates among the patrons than among the oppugners of that measure.
We are told, somewhere or other, of a King of Egypt (Psammitichus, I think, is his name) who thinking to re-discover the lost original of language, contrived to breed up two children in a sequestered spot, secluded, from the hour of their birth, from all converse with the rest of humankind. No great matters were, I believe, collected from this experiment. An inspection-house, to which a set of children had been consigned from their birth, might afford experiments enough that would be rather more interesting. What say you to a foundling-hospital upon this principle? Would * * * *’s manes give you leave to let your present school and build another upon this ground? If I do not misrecollect, your brethren in that trust have gone so far as to make a point, where it can be effected, of taking the children out of the hands of their parents as much as possible, and even, if possible, altogether. If you have gone thus far, you have passed the Rubicon; you may even clap them up in an inspection-house, and then you make of them what you please. You need never grudge the parents a peep behind the curtain in the master’s lodge. There, as often as they had a mind, they might see their children thriving and learning, if that would satisfy them, without interrupting business or counteracting discipline. Improving upon Psammitichus’s experiment, you might keep up a sixteen or eighteen years separation between the male and female part of your young subjects; and at the end of that period see what the language of love would be, when Father Francis’s Ganders were turned into Father Francis’s Geese.
I know who would have been delighted to set up an inspection-school, if it were only for the experiment’s sake, and that is Helvetius: at least, if he had been steady to his principles, which he was said to be: for by that contrivance, and by that alone, he might have been enabled to give an experimental proof of the truth of his position (supposing it to be true) that anybody may be taught anything, one person as well as another. It would have been his fault, if what he requires as a condition, viz. that the subjects of the experiment be placed in circumstances exactly similar, were not fulfilled.
A rare field for discovery in metaphysics: a science which, now for the first time, may be put to the test of experiment, like any other. Books, conversation, sensible objects, everything, might be given. The genealogy of each observable idea might be traced through all its degrees with the utmost nicety: the parent stocks being all known and numbered. Party men, controversialists of every description, and all other such epicures, whose mouth waters at the mammon of power, might here give themselves a rich treat, adapted to their several tastes, unembittered by contradiction. Two and two might here be less than four, or the moon might be made of green cheese; if any pious founder, who were rich enough, chose to have her of that material. Surrounded by a circle of pupils, obsequious beyond anything as yet known under the name of obsequiousness, their happiness might in such a mansion be complete, if any moderate number of adherents could content them; which unhappily is not the case. At the end of some twenty or five-and-twenty years, introduce the scholars of the different schools to one another (observing first to tie their hands behind them) and you will see good sport; though perhaps you may think there is enough of that kind of sport already. But if you throw out this hint to anybody, you will take care, as far as sects and religions are concerned, not to mention names; for of these, how few are there but would be ready to pull us to pieces, if they saw their rivals set down upon the same line, as candidates for the same advantage? And this is what we should get by our impartiality.—You may, however, venture to hint, that the money which is now laid out for propagating controversy, by founding sermons and lectures, might be laid out with greater certainty of advantage in the founding controversial inspection-schools. The preachers must be sad bunglers, indeed, if they had not there as many adherents as auditors; which is not always the case in the world at large. As to flagellation, and other such ceremonies, which more through custom than necessity are used by way of punishment in schools, but which under some institutions form the routine of life, I need not take up your time in showing how much the punctuality of those transactions might, in the latter case, be improved by the inspection principle. These monastic accomplishments have not been in fashion in our country for some ages:—therefore it would be lost labour to recommend the principle in that view. Neither are they a whit more so where I write; so that I should get as little thanks for my pains, were I to make such a proposal here. On the contrary, we are dissolving monasteries as you would lumps of sugar. A lump, for instance, we got the other day at Kieff, enough to feed a brace of regiments, besides pickings for other people. But if in my return to England, or at any other time, I should happen to go by the monastery of La Trappe, or any other where they are in earnest about such business, it would be cruelty to deny them the assistance it might be made to receive from the inspection principle. Flinching would then be as impracticable in a monastery, as cribbing in a school. Old scores might thus be rubbed out with as much regularity as could be desired; nor would the pride of Toboso have been so long a-disenchanting, could her Knight have put his coward Squire into an inspection-house.
Neither do I mean to give any instructions to the Turks for applying the inspection principle to their seraglios: no, not though I were to go through Constantinople again twenty times, notwithstanding the great saving it would make in the article of eunuchs, of whom one trusty one in the inspection-lodge would be as good as half a hundred. The price of that kind of cattle could not fail of falling at least ten per cent., and the insurance upon marital honour at least as much, upon the bare hint given of such an establishment in any of the Constantinople papers. But the mobbing I got at Shoomlo. only for taking a peep at the town from a thing they call a minaret (like our monument) in pursuance of invitation, has cancelled any claims they might have had upon me for the dinner they gave me at the divan, had it been better than it was.
If the idea of some of these applications should have brought a smile upon your countenance, it won’t hurt you, my dear * * * *; nor should it hurt the principle. Your candour will prevent you from condemning a great and new invented instrument of government, because some of the purposes to which it is possible to apply it may appear useless, or trifling, or mischievous, or ridiculous. Its great excellence consists in the great strength it is capable of giving to any institution it may be thought proper to apply it to. If any perverse applications should ever be made of it, they will lie in this case as in others, at the doors of those who make them. Knives, however sharp, are very useful things, and, for most purposes, the sharper the more useful. I have no fear, therefore, of your wishing to forbid the use of them, because they have been sometimes employed by school-boys to raise the devil with, or by assassins to cut throats with.
I hope no critic of more learning than candour will do an inspection-house so much injustice as to compare it to Dionysius’ ear. The object of that contrivance was, to know what prisoners said without their suspecting any such thing. The object of the inspection principle is directly the reverse: it is to make them not only suspect, but be assured, that whatever they do is known, even though that should not be the case. Detection is the object of the first: prevention, that of the latter. In the former case the ruling person is a spy; in the latter he is a monitor. The object of the first was to pry into the secret recesses of the heart; the latter, confining its attention to overt acts, leaves thoughts and fancies to their proper ordinary, the court above.
When I consider the extensive variety of purposes to which this principle may be applied, and the certain efficacy which, as far as I can trust my own conceptions, it promises to them all, my wonder is, not only that this plan should never have hitherto been put in practice, but how any other should ever have been thought of.
In so many edifices, as, from the time of the conquest to the present, have been built for the express purpose of safe custody, does it sound natural that, instead of placing the prisoners under the inspection of their keepers, the one class should have been lodged at one end, perhaps, of a vast building, and the other at another end?—as if the object of the establishment were, that those who wished to escape might carry on their schemes in concert, and at leisure. I should suppose the inspection principle must long ago have occurred to the ingenious, and been rejected by the judicious, could I, after all my efforts, conceive a reason for the rejection. The circular form, notwithstanding its taking demonstrably less materials than any other, may, for aught I know, on its first construction, be more expensive than one of equal dimensions in any of the ordinary forms. But this objection, which has no other source than the loose and random surmise of one who has had no experience in building, can never have held good in comparison with all the other prisons that we have, if in truth it holds good in comparison with any. Witness the massy piles of Newgate, of which the enormous, and upon the common plans by no means unnecessary expense, has been laid out in the purchase of a degree of security, not equal to that which the circular form would have given to the slightest building that could be made to hold together. In short, as often as I indulge myself in the liberty of fancying that my own notions on this head may prove conformable to other people’s, I think of the old story of Columbus and his egg.
I have now set this egg of ours on its end:—whether it will stand fast, and bear the shocks of discussion, remains to be decided by experience. I think you will not find it stale; but its freshness is a circumstance, that may not give it an equal relish to every palate.
What would you say, if by the gradual adoption and diversified application of this single principle, you should see a new scene of things spread itself over the face of civilized society?—morals reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated, instruction diffused, public burthens lightened, economy seated as it were upon a rock, the gordian knot of the poor-laws not cut but untied—all by a simple idea in architecture?
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Copyright © 1996-2005 jsd
The most important part of taking off is making the decision to do so. Discussion of decisionmaking (section 13.7) will be postponed until after we have discussed normal takeoffs — not because it gets lower priority, but just because it’s hard to appreciate an abnormal situation unless you understand the normal situation.
Also: Before taking off, remind yourself of your duty to see and avoid other traffic, as discussed in section 16.2. You remain responsible until the aircraft is parked at the end of the flight.
This section presents a “case study” of a takeoff in which the pilot has to do remarkably little work. (In subsequent sections we will describe ways in which you can get better results by doing a little more work.)
This procedure applies when you have a well-paved runway with plenty of length and no obstructions to worry about. As shown in figure 13.1 and table 13.1, part way down the runway you rotate so that the pitch attitude is about 7.5 degrees. You then just hold that pitch attitude. Period.
Angle of Attack Angle of Climb Pitch Attitude Incidence Airspeed Initial roll 4.5∘ 0∘ 0.0∘ 4.5∘ small, incr. After rotation 12.0∘ 0∘ 7.5∘ 4.5∘ increasing At liftoff 12.0∘ 0∘ 7.5∘ 4.5∘ 6% below VY Initial climb decr. incr. 7.5∘ 4.5∘ increasing Steady climb 7.0∘ 5∘ 7.5∘ 4.5∘ 10% above VYTable 13.1: Simplified Takeoff
Remarkably, at the moment of liftoff, the pilot doesn’t have to do anything. The plane lifts off when it is ready, that is, when it has enough airspeed to support its weight at a 12 degree angle of attack. This will occur a few knots below VY, assuming VY corresponds to a 8.5 degree angle of attack (which is pretty typical; see also section 2.4). To construct the last phase of the scenario (asymptotic climb), I made some additional assumptions, namely that your engine is just powerful enough to provide a climb gradient of 5∘ at a speed 10% above VY. In particular, I imagine climbing out with airspeed = 83 knots and vertical speed = 735 feet per minute, in an airplane where VY is 75 knots. These are certainly believable numbers.
Note that before liftoff, most of the engine power is going into increasing your kinetic energy; a little is needed to overcome drag, and none is going into potential energy. Then, in the initial climb, we have a funny situation where we are climbing and accelerating at the same time. Finally, in the asymptotic climb phase, most of the power is going into potential energy; some is needed to overcome drag and none is going to increase airspeed.
The technique just described is smooth, simple, and elegant, but it has drawbacks. It does not give optimal climb performance (see section 13.3), it can cause problems if there is a gusty wind (section 13.2) or a crosswind (section 13.5), and it can cause problems if climb performance is impaired for any reason (section 13.7.3 and section 2.9).
Imagine that you are using the simplified technique of the previous section, that is, rotating early and letting the airplane “fly itself off” whenever it is ready. Then imagine that just after liftoff, a gust of wind comes along and robs you of a few knots of airspeed. This will cause the airplane to settle back onto the runway. This is not elegant. To get around this, use a refined procedure: do not rotate until the airplane has a few knots more than the liftoff airspeed. This means that liftoff will occur right then, while you are rotating. It also means that by the time you are airborne, you can stay airborne even if you lose a few knots.
Here is another issue to consider: Most runways are not perfectly smooth. If the nosewheel hits a bump at 50 knots, it is likely to knock the nose of the airplane into the air, which has several disadvantages: (1) It will cause your passengers to be bounced around more than is necessary. (2) It could cause a premature liftoff. (3) It causes unnecessary wear and tear (and possibly outright damage) to the airframe.
To deal with this, you can use a second refinement, called semi-rotatation. That is, fairly early in the takeoff roll, rotate to a pitch attitude of 3 degrees or so. This is enough to get the nosewheel slightly off the ground, but not so much that the airplane will lift off (at any reasonable speed), and not so much that the nose will obstruct your vision (in most airplanes). This semi-rotation involves a pretty tiny pitch attitude compared to, say, proper landing attitude. When the airspeed reaches VX or thereabouts, you raise the nose another few degrees, whereupon you will get a nice positive lift-off.
Finally, here is a third refinement: You know that the airplane will climb more rapidly at VY than at any other airspeed. Therefore, during the earliest part of the climb-out, where the plane is both climing and accelerating, you should watch for the point where the airplane reaches VY. At that point, you should make one more pitch adjustment: increase the pitch attitude a small amount (another 2.5 degrees, according to the numbers in our scenario) and trim to maintain VY. See figure 13.2 and table 13.2
Angle of Attack Angle of Climb Pitch Attitude Incidence Airspeed Initial roll 4.5∘ 0∘ 0.0∘ 4.5∘ small, incr. After semi-rotation 7.5∘ 0∘ 3.0∘ 4.5∘ increasing Just after rotation & liftoff 12∘ 0∘ 7.5∘ 4.5∘ just above VX Initial climb decr. incr. 7.5∘ 4.5∘ increasing Steady climb 8.5∘ 6∘ 10.0∘ 4.5∘ VYTable 13.2: Normal Takeoff
The last phase of this scenario assumes your engine can sustain a 6 degree climb gradient at VY. In particular, I imagine 800 feet per minute at 75 knots.
In the figure, the dotted-line flight path and the uncolored airplane show the results you would have obtained using the simplified procedure described in the previous section. Remember that by climbing out at VY you gain more altitude (per unit time) than you would at any other airspeed.
Extending the flaps for takeoff will improve your ability to see over the nose. This is because it increases the incidence; therefore the airplane will fly at a lower pitch attitude (for any given angle of attack). If the Pilot’s Operating Handbook recommends flaps for a short-field or soft-field takeoff, there’s no law against using them even when the field is long and smooth.
Choosing an attitude and letting the airplane “fly itself off” as described in the previous section has the advantage that you don’t need to look at the airspeed indicator, meaning you can devote all your attention to outside references. However, this can get you into trouble if you choose the wrong attitude (see section 2.9). Airspeed, not attitude, is your best information about angle of attack (section 2.13).
At the opposite extreme, certainly it is not a good idea to devote all of your attention to the airspeed indicator. Fortunately, you can use your eyes (to perceive your speed relative to ground references), your ears (to perceive the sound of the engine and the sound of the wind on the airframe), and your fingertips (to perceive the forces on the yoke). This means you can get qualitative information about airspeed while keeping most of your attention focused outside. Every so often, though, you should glance at the airspeed indicator to supplement the qualitative information with quantitative information.
This section describes the procedure to use when you have a well-paved runway with an obstruction relatively nearby in the departure area.1
Plan the takeoff carefully. Take into account density altitude, runway slope, headwind or lack thereof, et cetera. Make sure you know the value of VX under these conditions, and choose a suitable rotation speed VR as discussed below.
Use the proper flap settings, as specified in the Pilot’s Operating Handbook. Here’s a useful cross-check: on most light aircraft, when you extend the flaps for an obstructed-field takeoff, you will observe that the angle of the flap matches the angle of a fully-deflected aileron.
Start at the beginning of the runway. If the taxiway leads you onto the runway some distance from the beginning, you will have to back-taxi on the runway, back to the very beginning.
Open the throttle smoothly, but not so slowly that you use up significant amounts of runway before the engine reaches full power. Some people advocate using the brakes to hold the aircraft stationary until the engine comes up to full power, but this is rarely necessary; if you open the throttle properly the airplane will move only a few feet while you’re doing so.2
As shown in figure 13.3 and table 13.3, you should choose a rotation speed VR at or near VX — that is, quite a bit higher than what you would use for a soft-field takeoff (section 13.4) or even a normal takeoff. The idea is to use the wheels to support the weight of the airplane until you have built up a lot of energy. It’s OK to semi-rotate a little bit, to take some load off the nosewheel, but you don’t want the wings to be producing significant lift until you’re ready to climb away. Then rotate smoothly to the “climb-out” pitch attitude, whereupon the airplane will lift off immediately. Climb away at VX. Trim for VX. After you have cleared the obstruction, you can accelerate to VY. Finally, after you have reached a comfortable altitude, you can accelerate to “cruise climb” speed and trim again.
Angle of Attack Angle of Climb Pitch Attitude Incidence Airspeed Initial roll 4.5∘ 0∘ 0.0∘ 4.5∘ small, incr. climb 13.0∘ 7∘ 15.5∘ 4.5∘ VXTable 13.3: Obstructed Field Takeoff
In the last phase of the example scenario, I imagine a climb rate of 780 fpm at 63 knots, which gives a climb gradient of 7 degrees.
In the figure, the dotted-line flight path and the uncolored airplane show the results you would have obtained following the normal-takeoff procedure, that is, accelerating while climbing and then climbing at VY. Note that using by using obstructed-field procedure, you have not climbed as high, but you have better obstacle clearance because you have not flown nearly so far horizontally.
It may seem paradoxical that you get better obstacle clearance by staying on the runway longer, but it’s true (if the obstacle is not too near the runway). The rationale is as follows: You want to pass over the obstacle at a reasonable altitude with a reasonable airspeed. This requires a certain amount of energy. To maximize energy you want to minimize drag throughout the maneuver. Keeping the airplane on the runway until reaching a high speed is rough on the airplane, but supporting its weight with the wheels usually involves less drag than supporting its weight with the wings. To say it another way: rolling resistance is less than induced drag, unless the field is quite soft or bumpy.
Once airborne, you want to climb at VX until you have cleared the obstacles, for reasons discussed in section 7.5.4.
The idea of choosing VR to be equal to VX is only an approximation. There are exceptions:
Still, for typical circumstances, choosing VR at or near VX is a reasonable guideline.
The procedure outlined above (staying on the runway at high speed, with the flaps extended) may not be possible in your airplane. Depending on the incidence of the wings, the airplane may fly itself off well before you reach the desired rotation speed.
Usually the best way to deal with this situation is to let the airplane come off the ground, and then skim along in ground effect, rather like a soft-field takeoff.
Another possible procedure (which is usually not recommended) is to keep the flaps retracted until you are ready to leave the runway. Less flaps means less incidence. A big disadvantage is that “popping” the flaps like this increases your workload at a time when there are lots of other things you should be attending to. Another disadvantage is that you run the risk of extending the flaps past the takeoff position to the landing position, creating lots of drag, which is really not what you want in this situation. If your POH calls for this procedure, go ahead, but be careful. Make sure you have some sort of detent to block inadvertent over-extension.
An even worse situation arises if you try to keep the plane on the ground by pushing forward on the yoke. This is called wheelbarrowing. What happens is that while you are holding the nose wheel down, the main wheels come off the ground. You are counteracting the incidence with a negative pitch attitude. The steering becomes dangerously unstable. There is also a risk of the propeller striking the ground.
Sometimes you want to get the airplane airborne at the lowest possible airspeed, using the shortest possible takeoff roll. For example, gooey mud on the runway will cause tremendous amounts of friction on the wheels. The sooner you become airborne, the sooner you are free of that friction and the better you will be able to accelerate. Additional reasons for using soft-field procedure will be given below.
The procedure is as follows: Extend the flaps as recommended by the manufacturer; in the absence of a specific recommendation, extend the flaps so that they just match a fully down-deflected aileron. The idea is to get the most coefficient of lift without undue drag.
At the beginning of the takeoff roll, pull the yoke fully backward. Early in the takeoff roll, the nose will rise, as indicated in figure 13.4. Allow it to rise to the pitch attitude that corresponds to the stalling angle of attack, or slightly less. This is typically about 15 degrees nose up.
To maintain this pitch attitude as the aircraft accelerates, you will have to gradually let the yoke move forward. You will become airborne at a very low airspeed — roughly the stalling speed.4 If you were to maintain the liftoff attitude, a typical airplane will accelerate poorly while climbing poorly, but that’s not what we want. (A lower-powered airplane might get into a situation where it can neither accelerate nor climb.) Instead, gradually lower the nose, so that you fly parallel to the ground, remaining one foot above the ground. As the aircraft accelerates in ground effect, the required angle of attack will decrease, so you will see the pitch attitude get lower and lower.
There are two ways of completing the maneuver.
You may be surprised at how well soft-field procedure works. Just after liftoff, the airspeed is extremely low. In ordinary conditions of flight, your airplane might well have a negative rate of climb at that airspeed — yet in this case it not only maintains altitude, but accelerates. The special ingredient in this case is ground effect: a wing produces very little induced drag while it is in ground effect (that is, roughly, within one wingspan or less of the ground) for reasons discussed in section 3.14.4.
Just after liftoff using this procedure,
The engine is producing full power, so if none of it goes into drag and none of it goes into climb, the airplane will accelerate like crazy.
There are many situations where this procedure is useful.
In all cases you must be careful to remain in ground effect until you have accelerated to a proper climb speed. If you try to climb at the liftoff speed you will have a big problem: in many cases, you will be unable to climb out of ground effect. That is, as soon as you climb to a height where ground effect is no longer significant, the induced drag will become so large that you will be unable to climb or accelerate.
If you have passengers aboard who haven’t seen a soft-field takeoff before, give them the courtesy of an explanation. Otherwise, they may find the procedure extremely disturbing.5 Just tell them you will lift off at a low airspeed and then fly horizontally for a few moments while you accelerate to the optimal climb speed. Tell them that (a) this is standard procedure for getting best performance, and (b) it minimizes jolts to the passengers.
Whereas in a normal takeoff you can guide the airplane by looking out the front, in a soft-field takeoff the nose will block your view during most of the maneuver. Therefore you must use the edge of the runway as your reference. Practice this skill during taxi. You will need this skill for landings and for soft-field takeoffs, but those aren’t the best times to be learning it.
There is not a “crosswind procedure” that you would use instead of normal procedure, soft-field procedure, or obstructed-field procedure. Rather, you use crosswind technique in conjunction with such procedures.
A crosswind takeoff is not as tricky as a crosswind landing, but it does call for some special care. Consider the following scenario: You are trying to take off in gusty conditions using the (over)simplified techniques of section 13.1. You’ve already rotated, and are accelerating toward liftoff speed with the wings level. As the speed increases, the wings produce more and more lift, lightening the load on the main wheels. The wind is still blowing against the side of the fuselage as strongly as ever. The ability of the wheels to provide a sideways force to resist the wind is proportional to the downward load on the wheels.6 If you keep the wings level, there will necessarily come a point — prior to liftoff — where the wind overpowers the wheels and blows the airplane to the side, scraping the tires across the runway.
So, here are the correct techniques for handling a crosswind takeoff.
Regarding rudder usage: To counteract the airplane’s weathervaning tendency (section 8.12), you must press on the downwind pedal to keep the plane going straight. Before rotation, both the rudder and the nosewheel contribute useful steering. In the period after rotation but before liftoff, with just the main wheels on the runway, weathervaning continues, but the rudder has to do 100% of the steering. Therefore you can plan on applying a little additional pedal deflection during this period. Once you are fully airborne, there is no weathervaning tendency.
Regarding aileron usage, there are two options:
Suppose the crosswind is coming from the left. Just before liftoff, you are holding the ailerons deflected to the left, and the rudder deflected to the right. That is, you are commanding a slip, a nonturning slip, which is just what you want at this point. A moment later, after liftoff, this slip is no longer what you want. You promptly and smoothly undo the left aileron deflection and apply some right aileron, to roll the wings level. At the same time, you undo the right rudder deflection and maybe apply a bit of left rudder, to yaw the nose around to establish zero slip. (The adverse yaw from the aforementioned right-rolling maneuver decreases the amount of left rudder you need.) The goal is to keep the direction of flight aligned with the runway, while the nose moves to the left, to the proper wind-corrected heading.
Immediately before liftoff you are holding some right rudder pressure (to counteract the weathervaning tendency). Immediately after liftoff you use left rudder to align the fuselage with the airflow. Some tiny amount of aileron deflection may be needed to keep the wings level while the heading is changing. Again the goal is to keep the direction of flight aligned with the runway, while the nose moves to the left, to the proper wind-corrected heading.
Note that in both cases, the heading change that occurs right after liftoff is not a normal, coordinated turn. The motion of the center of mass is already aligned with the runway, so you do not want to change the direction of motion, just the heading.
After you have lifted off, you must take care not to settle back onto the runway. Since the airplane’s heading is no longer aligned with the runway, re-landing would cause a severe sideways force on the landing gear.
As you climb out, you should expect that the crosswind will be stronger at altitude than it was near the ground. To compensate, make the appropriate heading changes.
In a multi-engine airplane, an engine failure shortly after takeoff is a very critical situation. It places considerable demands on the pilot. Make sure you know what to do; brief yourself in detail before the takeoff. Engine failures and related procedures are discussed in section 17.1.
Early in the takeoff roll, verify that both engines are developing the same amount of power. If the aircraft is trying to pull to one side, you’ve got a problem. Also, check the engine gauges to make sure (a) you’ve got the normal RPM on both engines, (b) you’ve got the normal manifold pressure on both engines, and (c) you’ve got the normal fuel flow on both engines. The instruments that measure these three quantities are usually a single gauge with two needles, so if you notice that the needles are split you’ve got a problem.
If anything funny happens while there is runway remaining ahead of you, close both throttles immediately and stop straight ahead. Even if you are airborne, close the throttles and re-land if there is sufficient runway available. Indeed, even if the remaining runway is not quite enough, you might want to land on it: Suppose that because of density altitude or whatever, your aircraft has poor single-engine climb performance. You will sustain vastly less damage if you land and run off the end of the runway at low speed, rather than making an unsuccessful attempt to climb out on one engine.
You really don’t want to be airborne at a speed below VMC, i.e. at a speed where you can’t maintain directional control on one engine. In many aircraft, you should aim for a lift-off speed of VMC plus 5 knots. To make sure you do not lift off too soon, you can delay rotation until reaching VMC. You can semi-rotate earlier if you want; just make sure you don’t rotate to a pitch attitude that will cause liftoff below the desired airspeed. After liftoff, climb while accelerating to VY (which ought to be greater than or equal to VYSE).
In many twins, VMC is essentially equal to the stalling speed. In others, however, it is considerably higher, which makes soft-field takeoffs problematic. You don’t want to lift off at “the lowest possible airspeed” (like you would in a single) since if you lost an engine at that speed you’d have a big problem: uncontrollable yaw. It would be a lot safer to lift off at VMC or higher, even if this means staying away from soft, bumpy fields.
As a pilot, the most important thing you can do to promote aviation safety is to leave the airplane tied down, when appropriate. Don’t pressure yourself into making a questionable flight. Also, don’t let your employer or passengers or anybody else pressure you into doing something questionable.
Well in advance of any flight, I advise all my passengers explicitly, usually in writing:
Plan every takeoff. Sometimes today’s takeoff is exactly equivalent to yesterday’s takeoff, which simplifies the planning, but don’t get complacent. If something changes, you need to take that into account. There might be less headwind, higher density altitude, more passengers, less runway, more obstacles, or whatever.
In general, you have to ask yourself a number of questions, including:
Note that you need to calculate the required runway length twice: Once for the desired takeoff and climb-out scenario, and again for the rejected takeoff scenario, i.e. accelerate/stop. A rejected takeoff is less desirable than a successful takeoff that leads to a normal flight, but still vastly preferable to an unsuccessful takeoff that leads to a crash.
By way of analogy, remember that on every approach, you should be prepared for a successful landing and prepared for a go-around. The same logic tells us that on every takeoff, you should be prepared for a successful takeoff and prepared for a rejected takeoff.
It is likely that at sea level, the accelerate/stop scenario requires more runway (relative to the accelerate/climb scenario) and therefore determines how much runway you need. However, as the density altitude approaches the aircraft’s absolute ceiling, climb performance becomes more critical, so it pays to check both scenarios.
Use a takeoff checklist that is appropriate to the particular aircraft you are flying (not a generic “all purpose” checklist). See section 21.6 for more on this. Some airplanes require the fuel boost pump on for takeoff, while others require it off. A C-152 requires 10 degrees of flaps for short-field takeoff, while a C-172 requires zero.
In many cases, you will need to add things to the checklist. For example, right before takeoff you should brief yourself (and your copilot) about the takeoff decision point and rejected takeoff procedure (as discussed in section 13.7.4). This topic is missing from the checklist in the POH for most single-engine aircraft.
Predicting takeoff performance, beyond what is covered in the POH, requires knowing a tremendous amount about your airplane. It is a challenge for professional engineers and test pilots. The methods are beyond the scope of this book.
When planning your takeoff, do not trust the so-called Koch chart. It purports to predict takeoff and climb performance as a function of altitude and temperature. It says it applies to “personal” airplanes, whatever that means. The bottom part of the chart is fairly accurate but useless, because better information is available in your POH. The upper part of the chart, if it were accurate, would be informative in situations not covered in a typical POH, such as takeoffs from airports high in the mountains. Alas, though, this chart is not reliable. For one thing, it is based on the assumption that all “personal” airplanes have the same absolute ceiling at standard temperature. That’s nowhere near true. Even for a specific airplane, you can increase the absolute ceiling by operating at a reduced gross weight. Ceiling can have an infinitely large effect on takeoff performance, as will be discussed in conjunction with figure 13.5, yet the Koch chart takes no account of it whatsoever. In some conditions the chart is absurdly pessimistic, while in other conditions it is dangerously over-optimistic. Other simple extrapolation schemes are just as bad.
I sometimes hear statements which are even worse, such as:
People even claim to “prove” statement #1, using physics plus a number of hare-brained assumptions, including:
The following modified version is also wrong, and even more dangerous:
A little thought shows this cannot possibly be correct in general. It cannot even be repaired by changing the percentages. As shown in figure 13.5, consider a very, very long runway and a density altitude slightly above the airplane’s absolute ceiling. You will able to reach 100% of flying speed before you have used up even 10% of the runway. You will be able to take off and climb a few feet, but you will never be able to climb out of ground effect, no matter how long the runway. Therefore:
Suppose that you are on your takeoff roll, and several subtle things have gone wrong: (a) you have underestimated the density altitude; (b) for various reasons (see below) the engine is only producing 80% as much power as it should, even at this altitude; (c) the parking brake is partially stuck so the brakes are dragging; (d) you didn’t notice a shift in the wind, so you now have a few knots of tailwind; (e) you didn’t notice that the runway has a slight up-slope; and (f) your mother-in-law has stowed away in the back seat, so the airplane is 15% heavier than you planned for. You may not be able to complete the takeoff safely. The question is, can you somehow notice the performance deficit in time to abort the takeoff?
If you are familiar with the airplane, you should know how the engine is supposed to sound; if it sounds rough, have it checked. Similarly, you may know what engine RPM to expect early in the takeoff roll; if you get less, abort the takeoff and investigate.
Unfortunately, if you are not intimately familiar with the airplane, it can be very difficult to notice a performance deficit until it is too late. Careful planning and checking is required, as we shall see.
Using the Pilot’s Operating Handbook (POH), calculate two numbers:
Observe and note well what part of the runway should be consumed by the takeoff roll, i.e. the small number. Translate this into a “decision point” somewhere along the runway. There are several good ways to do this: (a) Some runways have standard markings every 500 feet. (b) Sometimes the required takeoff distance is a half or a third (or some other convenient fraction) of the total runway length. (c) Sometimes you can pace off the distance between runway lights, and then count lights. (d) Sometimes you just have to pace off the whole distance from the starting point to the decision point. Then, during takeoff, if you are not airborne by the chosen decision point, close the throttle and apply the brakes immediately. Taxi back to the hangar and figure out what’s wrong.
Do not attempt to use “extra” runway length to salvage the takeoff if there is a significant performance deficit. If you’ve got a deficit, you should figure out why, and the takeoff roll is no place to be doing complicated figuring.
Now let’s consider the annoying situation where the available runway is just a little shorter than the aforementioned “takeoff plus landing” ground roll distance. The POH tells you that a takeoff should be possible, if everything goes right, but it does not tell you how to make a timely determination that you’ve got a problem. In such a situation, there are three possibilities. One is to change the situation; that is, you can offload some fuel, toss out some payload, wait for cooler air, and wait for more headwind — so that you can attempt a takeoff using the procedure described two paragraphs ago. The second possibility is to figure out how much runway your airplane should consume reaching various speeds less than flying speed, so that you can have earlier opportunities to abort the takeoff. This is a job for a test pilot; the typical POH does not provide such information, and takeoff performance is notoriously hard to predict accurately. Please do not try this; playing “amateur test pilot” is like playing Russian roulette. The third possibility, if you have any remaining doubts about your airplane’s performance, is to stay home.
Last but not least, let’s consider the situation where the runway is too short, and/or you did not notice the performance deficit until it is too late, so that there is no possibility of stopping on the remaining runway. In almost all cases, you should reject the takeoff anyway. Pull the throttle and apply the brakes immediately. The rationale is simple: It is much, much better to go off the end of the runway at 5 knots then to go into the trees at 50 knots. The energy involved is 100 times less. The chance of serious injury is more than 100 times less. To say the same thing another way: given the choice between (a) a 100% chance of destroying the airplane and walking away uninjured, or (b) a 50-50 chance of saving the airplane coupled with a 50-50 chance of getting killed, I recommend option (a).
There are dozens of things that could go wrong with an aircraft engine.
Such problems are not particularly rare; I have personally experienced the first four items in this list.
If some such thing goes wrong, the engine will usually not stop cold. It will continue to run, producing a fairly large percentage of its normal power. In flight, this resilience is clearly an advantage.
During takeoff, however, this resilience is a two-edged sword. Because the engine continues to develop lots of power, you might not notice the degradation. You might be tempted to take off with such an engine. This could lead to big trouble, especially on an obstructed-field takeoff.
There are many types of problems that you may not notice until you have begun your takeoff roll. Early in the takeoff roll, scan the airspeed, engine RPM, manifold pressure, and fuel flow to make sure you’re getting reasonable readings.8
You should always plan your takeoff. This includes planning for a rejected takeoff, for reasons discussed in section 13.7.4.
Be sure you practice this. The first few times the rejected-takeoff situation arises, your expectation of a normal takeoff will be so strong that it is difficult to accept the situation and make the correct decision. After the decision is made, the maneuver is easy to carry out, but the decision is hard, especially if you have not sufficiently practiced it. There is a psychological barrier. The rejected-takeoff decision is psychologically at least as difficult as the go-around decision. Actually, most single-engine pilots find it more difficult than a go-around, if only because it isn’t given as much emphasis during training.
You want the rejected-takeoff decision to be thoughtful, but when the time comes, you won’t have much time to think about it, so it needs to be a pre-thought decision. Decide before takeoff that if anything fishy happens during the takeoff roll, you will reject the takeoff. Decide before takeoff that if you use up the expected takeoff-roll distance without achieving the expected takeoff speed, you will reject the takeoff.
After you’ve got the airplane stopped, there will be plenty of time to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. See also section 15.1.
Instructors: here’s an instructional technique: During preflight, brief the student on the procedures for rejected takeoff. Choose a runway that is plenty long. During the takeoff roll, wait until the airspeed is about half of the liftoff speed. Then simulate some sort of malfunction, perhaps by slapping a suction cup on the airspeed indicator and saying, “simulated airspeed indicator failure” or perhaps by gently applying the left brake. Let the pilot make the decision. The correct decision is to close the throttle and apply the brakes immediately.
Here is a recipe for disaster: Suppose somebody who lives in a relatively flat area becomes complacent and develops the habit of turning on-course immediately after takeoff. That might work OK at some airports in flat territory, but it is a Bad Idea in mountainous territory, especially at night or in reduced-visibility conditions. The vast majority of pilots live within a few hours’ flying time of some mountains, so beware.
Obstacle clearance is a particular problem if you are operating VFR at night at an unfamiliar field. I recommend you don’t attempt such operations, unless you can remove at least one of the risk factors. That is, get familiar with the field and its environs, or take off while there’s still daylight, and/or adhere to the IFR procedures. I’m not saying you need to file IFR or even have an instrument rating, but if you really want to depart an unfamiliar field at night, you should have a copy of the approved Terminal Procedures and know how to use them.
The Terminal Procedures can be purchased in booklet form, and/or downloaded for free from the web. In most cases the procedures are quite easy to follow. There is a particularly simple “default” procedure that is approved for a great number of airports. It can be summarized as 35 feet, 400 feet, and 200 feet per nautical mile. That is, you must cross the departure end of the runway at least 35 feet above field elevation. You must climb straight out along the extended centerline until reaching at least 400 feet above field elevation, and then you can turn at your discretion. You must maintain a climb gradient of at least 200 feet per nm all the way from liftoff until reaching a safe enroute altitude.
Such a procedure should be well within the capabilities of the ordinary pilot and the ordinary airplane. The required climb-out slope is less than two degrees. That should be no problem unless you have an impaired rate of climb, an unusually high airspeed, and/or a huge tailwind.
At some other airports, the published departure procedure is only slightly more complicated than the default – for instance, it might require a slightly steeper climb gradient.
If you find an airport where the approved departure procedure is complicated, you should assume it’s complicated for a reason. There are probably nasty obstacles in the area.
Airlines and air-taxi operators are required to follow an approved departure procedure. In contrast, as a Part 91 general aviation operator, VFR or IFR, you are allowed to invent your own DP ... but I don’t recommend this, unless you are very careful and are experienced enough to know what a huge responsibility you are taking on. In particular: If you file an IFR flight plan, receive a clearance “as filed”, and then fly the flight as cleared, terrain separation is not guaranteed during the departure climb. Absolutely not. I personally have received clearances that would have flown me into the side of a mountain if I had not followed a complicated departure procedure, including circling over the field to gain altitude before proceeding enroute. Remember: As the pilot, you are responsible for terrain clearance. ATC is not. Except at the busiest airports, controllers generally don’t care what departure procedure you use, and they are certainly not required to assign one as part of your clearance. They are not going to ask whether you have done your homework properly.
If you are worried that ATC might be surprised by your departure procedure, you can mention it in the Remarks section of the flight plan. For example: “Homebrew DP: circle over field to 4000, then climb on course”.
Usually the simplest thing is to just follow the approved departure procedure. Sometimes, however, the approved procedure is annoyingly complicated and inefficient, in which case you may be tempted to cook up a simplified version, especially if you only need VFR terrain clearance (as opposed to IFR terrain clearance, which is higher). Also, sometimes you want to depart at night – or in bad weather – from a mom-and-pop airport that doesn’t have any published instrument procedures at all. Creating a homebrew departure procedure is difficult, because it is hard to obtain enough information. Scouting the area under day VFR conditions might help. The VFR chart will tell you about some nasty terrain and some obstructions, but it is easy to find examples where it doesn’t tell you enough. The Airport/Facility Directory will usually tell you about the 50-foot tree near the end of the runway, but it may not tell you about the power lines on the hill half a mile away. The circling minimums on the IFR approach plate may provide additional information. Experienced local pilots may have useful warnings and suggestions. On the other hand, it might be simpler to just follow the published procedure, or wait for good day VFR conditions.
See section 12.1.3 for an analogous discussion of approaches. See section 21.4 for a discussion of general decisionmaking issues.
At a tower airport, you will need to get taxi instructions before taxiing, and get takeoff clearance before taking off.
During the takeoff roll and climb-out, you will need to apply right rudder to compensate for the helical propwash, as discussed in section 8.4.
In an aircraft with retractable landing gear, you have to decide when to retract them. It is not a good procedure to retract them the instant you become airborne. The reason is that sometimes things go wrong in the first seconds after liftoff, and you don’t want to foreclose the option of re-landing on the remaining runway. Therefore the usual procedure is to retract the gear when it is no longer possible to re-land on the departure runway. You should say aloud the checklist item: “No more useful runway; gear coming up”.
On a really, really long runway, it’s OK to reduce drag by getting the gear up somewhat before you’ve flown all the way down the runway. However: (1) it’s usually not worth the trouble, and (2) make sure that you’re high enough that, in the event you do want to land immediately, you have time to re-extend the gear.
When ATC gives you a takeoff clearance, supposedly nobody but you should be on that runway. This applies to the runway itself, not to the airspace, so as soon as you are airborne, you are 100% responsible for seeing and avoiding other traffic. Even on the runway, it pays to keep your eyes open; there’s always a chance that ATC has made a mistake, and an even bigger chance that some other pilot has made a mistake and is encroaching on your runway without a clearance.
Very early in the climb, pick a landmark somewhere a few miles along your intended flight path, so you can maintain direction of flight primarily by outside references. The upwind leg of the traffic pattern is supposed to be an extension of the runway centerline. Similarly, note the pitch angle relative the horizon, so you can maintain the proper angle of attack and detect any windshear. You can cross-check direction, pitch angle, and angle of attack using the directional gyro, horizon gyro, and airspeed indicator, but you don’t want to spend more than a tenth of your time looking at gauges. You need to be looking outside to check for traffic.
Upon reaching a comfortable altitude, say 500 feet AGL, there are a number of things that might need doing: If your aircraft has cowl flaps, check them. On a normal takeoff they will already be open, but on a go-around you will have to open them. This is also be a good time to throttle back to normal climb power, which is less than takeoff power on most aircraft with controllable-pitch propellers. This is also a good time to retract any remaining flaps. Finally, this might be a good time to accelerate from VY to a nice cruise-climb speed.
You should not mess with the cowl flaps or other items until you are several hundred feet up. Turbulence might cause a pitch or bank excursion while your attention is distracted, or you might bump the yoke. At low altitude, basic aircraft control should get your undivided attention.
In some aircraft, the fuel-boost pumps should be turned off at 1000 AGL; in other aircraft they stay on throughout the initial climb. Other aircraft don’t use boost pumps at all.
Four of the most-common takeoff procedures are related in a fairly logical way, as summarized in table 13.4.
Unobstructed Obstructed Well-paved Semi-rotate early.
Fully rotate at VR.
Climb while accelerating to VY.
Rotate at VX.
Climb at constant airspeed: VX.
Soft Hop into ground effect just above VS.
Accelerate horizontally (1 foot AGL) to VR.
Climb while accelerating to VY.
Hop into ground effect just above VS.
Accelerate horizontally (1 foot AGL) to VX.
Climb at constant airspeed: VX.Table 13.4: Basic Takeoff Procedures
Additionally, in each of the four cases, you must take into account the crosswind if any.
Proper planning is important. A wise “no-go” decision could save you a lot of trouble. Make sure you know the proper procedures, including the critical airspeeds. Make sure you know how much runway you will need. If, during the takeoff roll, it looks like you are getting less performance than you should, stop and figure out what’s wrong. Practice rejected takeoffs.
Make sure you know what angle of climb you should expect. You need this to check obstacle clearance. This also affects your choice of initial pitch attitude.
When choosing an initial pitch attitude, remember that pitch attitude is not the same as angle of attack. See section 2.9 for information on the right (and wrong) ways to handle cases where the correct pitch attitude differs from what you expected.
Keep the aircraft properly trimmed and fly with a light touch. Don’t forget the after-takeoff checklist. | <urn:uuid:d4738893-7086-4370-a722-3803aab2fe1c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.av8n.com/how/htm/takeoff.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398216.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00109-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941703 | 9,715 | 2.578125 | 3 |
By Meghan Laslocky
"I tell my children today they don't know anything. . . . 'You haven't seen anything. You just don't know what it's all about. I don't know what it is you can't take.' And when I go back telling them some of my history, you know, they perk up their ears." (Mary Sanford)
Ask people on the street what events they associate with the Civil Rights Movement, and chances are they will say, "The bus boycott in Montgomery" or "The march on Washington." Ask people whom they think of first in association with the Civil Rights Movement, and chances are they will say, "Martin Luther King" or "Rosa Parks."
Now the names and voices of ordinary citizens who were the foot soldiers in the battle to dismantle the Jim Crow South are being heard. They are part of a radio documentary series called "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," which is currently airing on public radio stations across the nation. There is Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine young blacks to enter Central High School in Little Rock. There is Septima Clark, who pushed for equal pay for black teachers in South Carolina in the 1930s. There are other others: Jean Gordon, Johnnie Carr, William Townsend, Billie Fleming, Modjeska Simkins, Winson Hudson, Brownie Ledbetter, and hundreds more.
For those too young to remember, the series is an engrossing and sometimes shocking tour of the social and legal history of the Civil Rights Movement in this country. For those who are old enough, it is a potent refresher, an auditory voyage through moments in the history of five southern cities that played roles: Little Rock, Arkansas, where resistance to school desegregation fomented a constitutional crisis; Montgomery, Alabama, which saw the first sustained movement against Jim Crow laws with a bus boycott; Columbia, South Carolina, where the groundbreaking lawsuits were filed by the state branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Jackson, Mississippi, where the movement met the most flagrant and vicious resistance; and Atlanta, Georgia, which called itself the "city too busy to hate" and found footdragging a more useful gambit than confrontation.
Years in the making, the twenty-seven-part series was assembled from audiotape of hundreds of interviews with men and women, black and white. George King, the producer, and his colleagues sorted through tapes found in libraries, in shoe boxes, even under people's beds. The obstacles were many: Not only was the task of sorting through hours and hours of audiotape footage gargantuan, but in many cases the recordings were in such poor condition or so "feeble," as King calls them, that only the most advanced "no-noise" audio technology could restore them and make the recorded voices comprehensible. Even after restoration, some were too difficult to understand to be included in the final cut.
Reflecting all points of view was another difficulty. While there were plenty of recordings of people who supported the Civil Rights Movement and plenty of surviving activists to fill in the gaps, it was far tougher to find taped material of those who were in favor of maintaining the Jim Crow laws and customs of the day. In the course of the project, when the producers decided that the series would be strengthened by the incorporation of more of the segregationist viewpoint, their only option was to call upon living people. They expected that recollections of thirty or forty years ago would be difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct. Some declined to be interviewed; some had had religious conversions; some had failing memories.
Despite such challenges, seamless and multifaceted portraits of the five communities emerge. We come to understand that each community joined the Movement in its own way, at its own pace, depending upon the personalities involved, the particular injustices inflicted, and its own political and social climate.
For example, the five episodes devoted to Little Rock chronicle the battle that ignited when, in 1957, Governor Orval Faubus defied the 1954 U. S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Faubus called in the Arkansas National Guard in defiance of the Federal government, saying he expected there to be "blood in the streets" if black students attended a traditionally white public high school. Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, recollects the September morning when she first tried to attend her new school and saw the National Guard lined up: "When I approached them the first time they closed ranks. I thought that they were there for my protection. The second time, he just pointed me away in the direction away from the area that I was attempting to enter...And I thought that he was directing me into another entrance, so I walked further down the street, and the mob fell in behind me." Another black student, Ernest Green, recalls watching Elizabeth's progress towards the school: "It had to be the most frightening thing because she had a crowd of a hundred, two hundred white people threatening to kill her. She had nobody. I mean there was not a black face in sight anywhere." They tried again the next day with the same results.
President Eisenhower responded to the mob by calling in the 101st Airborne to ensure that the students could attend. The following year, Governor Faubus approved a law that closed the public schools rather than integrate them, and for the next twelve months no public schools were open in Little Rock. In the meantime, the local battle accelerated and was fought between pro- integration forces such as the Women's Emergency Committee to Support the Public Schools and S. T. O. P. (Stop This Outrageous Purge) on the one side, and the segregationist organizations such as C.R.O.S.S. (The Committee to Retain Our Segregated Schools) and the White Citizens Council (modeled after those begun in Mississippi), on the other. The desegregationists ultimately prevailed, and the city maintained an uneasy truce into the sixties. Although the events of the sixties in Little Rock did not receive attention from the world press, activists did manage to abolish the poll tax, which had kept blacks from effectively participating in elections, and protests continued to promote the desegregation of every part of life in Little Rock.
Little Rock's story is told by dozens of people -- from Elizabeth Eckford, to Irene Samuel, one of the many women who organized the Committee to Support the Public Schools. The story has its crystallizing moments, as well, as when Craig Rains, a segregationist at the beginning of the fight over the public schools, reflects on his reaction to the mob and the National Guard:
"I had never seen that before...and I think it was at that point that I began to change from being a moderate, or somebody who said, 'I believe in states' rights and let's don't integrate because it's the state's right to decide whether to do so or not,' to someone who felt a real sense of compassion for these students. That maybe they had a right to the things I already had. I think at that point is when I really began to change my mind and realize that this was not a states' rights issue, it was a people issue."
In the other cities, the course of civil rights was different. Columbia's was played out in the courts. The litigation against Jim Crow began in 1938, when a young black lawyer named Thurgood Marshall prosecuted in Thompson & DeVault vs. State of South Carolina, which sought equal pay for black teachers. Even the famous Brown vs. Board lawsuit was the successor of an earlier South Carolina case, Briggs vs. Elliott, in which a black farmer with five school-aged children filed suit for bus transportation to school (white children had buses). While the original intent of the case was to make the State of South Carolina provide equal opportunities for black children, it evolved into the landmark federal case that demanded the elimination of segregation itself.
The third city in the series, Jackson, Mississippi, is emblematic of another phase: white resistance to desegregation in the fifties and sixties. Mississippi was the first state to organize a white citizen's council -- immediately following the 1954 Supreme Court decision to end segregation; the councils soon became the cornerstone of resistance throughout the South. Jackson's story is of the demonstrations and violent exchanges that transpired as black Mississippians pushed for political power.
The Montgomery, Alabama, sequence concentrates on the boycott by blacks wanting an end to preferential seating for whites on city buses. The episodes focus on three groups that galvanized the Montgomery movement: a group of black professional women, the local NAACP, and the city's black ministers. Listeners learn that although the Rosa Parks case was the first to reach federal court, several similar cases had been litigated in Montgomery and other parts of the South. It wasn't until 1955, with Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat on a bus and the subsequent boycott of Montgomery buses, that the NAACP had a case which was pristine -- meaning that Rosa Parks's character was so unimpeachable that she could become a symbol.
The fifth city, Atlanta, has a claim to fame as the home of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; its freedom movement, however, began long before King came on the scene. For years the city's white politicians had maintained the modus operandi of presenting it as a civilized, courteous place for all, while moving as slowly as possible on desegregation. The radio series picks up at the point where Atlanta's black middle class had become sizable and students there increasingly vocal, insisting on a faster pace and creating a supportive climate for King.
While much of the series' poignancy comes from the intermingling of the voices that tell the many stories of the Movement, the music is equally compelling. Producer George King uses gospel, blues, jazz, and other music to set the moral mood of the Movement. He accompanies a segment in which blacks describe growing up in a world where the threat of lynching loomed with Billie Holliday's recording of "Strange Fruit." Music also acts as a precise and powerful time locater -- placing events where they fit in the midst of America's pop culture. For example, Martha Holmes-Jackson, one of the first black students to attend a white school in Atlanta, describes her prom:
"I did attend the prom, but I didn't stay very long. My escort and I hung around for a little while, but then they were playing music that we didn't dance to, so we went on our way." Spliced in at that moment is the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There," which was a hit that spring.
Throughout the series, the seamlessness of story and music nearly conveys the sense that these people were recorded at the same time, in the same room, sharing their stories. It comes as a surprise to remember that these recordings were made independently, at different times and by different people whose own objectives varied. And at moments, a very spiritual, almost religious mood pervades the episodes. The series offers a number of lessons -- in history, in biography, in moral courage -- and reminds the listener that the lessons must be learned if, as the title of the series suggests, the circle is to be unbroken. | <urn:uuid:ca2791a7-7027-423d-8f02-d53faa582fc7> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.neh.gov/print/15216 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403502.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00113-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977291 | 2,339 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Back in 2001, I was trying to get my eleventh grade U.S. history class to focus on a passage from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Unfortunately, I was not surprised when a student protested, “We already know about him. We’re tired of hearing about Martin Luther King.”
So I asked, “Okay, what do you know about him?”
“He had a dream,” another student replied as others laughed.
I insisted that there was infinitely more to King and his ideas than one very famous speech. “Well, that’s all they ever show us,” someone complained.
“And that’s why I’m trying to show you something new about him,” I responded, showing—I hope—only a hint of my frustration.
I decided to put together a unit designed to help students penetrate the curtain of clichés and lies the corporate media have erected around Martin Luther King, Jr. in order to make him “safe” for public consumption. The bland projection of an image promoting moderate reforms and racial harmony obscures King’s legacy of opposition to capitalist exploitation and violence at home and abroad.
My goal was for my students to be able to explicitly identify the ways in which King is portrayed in the mass media, and specifically, which of his ideas are communicated to the public. I also wanted them to read and discuss a range of King’s ideas that are almost completely unknown to most of the public today and reflect upon why many of King’s ideas introduced in this lesson are almost never referenced in the mass media or in U.S. history textbooks.
For example, like the students in my class, most students have heard about Dr. King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, but they rarely hear about his “Beyond Vietnam,” address given four years later on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City. At a time when nearly 25 percent of American children live in poverty, King’s words on the extremes of wealth and poverty still resonate today:
“…I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
Many students also don’t know that corporate outsourcing of jobs overseas was also a problem nearly 46 years ago when Dr. King gave this speech. He went on to note:
“…A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: ‘This is not just.'”
While many of my students have at least some knowledge of the Vietnam War, most have been surprised to learn that King vehemently opposed the war and called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Of course, this leads to a discussion of parallels with U.S. militarism in our time.
One student wrote,
“What I didn’t know was what he wanted to do for Vietnam. He said the bulldozers destroyed their areas and the precious trees, poison their water and kill a million acres of crops. He said if ‘we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing [clergy and laymen concerned] committees for the next generation.’ I never heard this whole speech before and I thought it was cool that he wanted to help not just the African Americans but Vietnamese.”
Others were equally surprised that King planned to lead a massive direct action Poor People’s Campaign. One student explained that she “didn’t know that his plan was to ‘mobilize and train thousands of poor and allies to camp out [in front of the White House] with him until they help the poor.’ He planned to group the poor together, no matter the color, race. I didn’t know he wanted unity, well maybe I did, but I didn’t know he fought for the justice of poor people of all color and race.”
This student’s closing sentence highlights a key difference between the simplistic racial harmony typically attributed to Dr. King and the militant, multiracial class solidarity he actively organized just before he was murdered.
I have taught a version of this mini-unit every year since developing it, revising it each time based on the previous year’s experience. When I moved to middle school last year I adjusted the pedagogy and content for my eighth graders, who proved to be as receptive to King’s radical vision as my eleventh graders had been. But the administration at my new school objected that “its place in the sequence of the curriculum and its relevance to the content standards is questionable,” since California’s eighth grade U.S. History framework formally concludes in 1914.
The administration apparently hadn’t noticed the explicit connections the lesson—taught during Black History Month—made between struggles against slavery and Native American removal. Or maybe they didn’t think these connections sufficiently justified two days of instructional time in the weeks preceding the state’s high stakes standardized history test.
I cannot justify taking this material out of my curriculum and denying my students what may be their only chance to encounter Martin Luther King’s radical vision that is as relevant now as ever. As one of my students wrote, “We never hear about King’s other ideas because the people in power are afraid that we might try to take up some of King’s ideas and make it a reality.”
Craig Gordon has been a teacher and a union activist in Oakland, Calif. since 1990.
Reprinted from GOOD (1/21/2013) based on a lesson by Craig Gordon on the Oakland Unified School District Urban Dreams website and shared by the Zinn Education Project and Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching. | <urn:uuid:8270290b-709a-4678-bf62-391f8211ca25> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://zinnedproject.org/2013/01/theres-so-much-more-to-mlk-than-i-have-a-dream/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396100.16/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00033-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963503 | 1,367 | 3.234375 | 3 |
Aunting: Book Illuminates Why Aunts Matter
Last Modified 9:16 AM on Fri Sep 10, 2010
September 9, 2010—
Perhaps she let you do things mom and dad didn’t. Maybe she made you work hard but paid you for your chores. There are myriad other examples of relationships most of us have had with aunts, and a new book explores their importance in our lives.
“Aunting: Cultural Practices that Sustain Family and Community Life” has been published by Baylor Press. Authors Laura Ellingson, associate professor of communication at Santa Clara University and Patty Sotirin, professor of humanities at Michigan Technological University, uncover many stories and some surprising nuances about our interactions with our aunts—those who are related and those we choose.
“We can develop important relationships with aunts outside of the nuclear family,” Sotirin says. “The relationship with an aunt might change over time, as you become an adult, but aunts can be important in our lives in many ways—filling in gaps in your family’s story, for instance.”
Many of the strong connections with aunts exist because this role is more negotiable, flexible, and adaptable than parenting, Sotirin says. And aunts don’t necessarily have to be related, either, hence the new verb, “aunting,” a set of practices that supports personal, familial and community bonds through material, emotional, and symbolic means.
Aunting might be practiced as nurturing, encouraging, mentoring, story telling or listening. Across these practices, there is a reciprocal sense of connection and—usually—caring, she says.
Aunting can be expanded beyond traditional kinship roles. “An aunt could be anyone who plays a significant role in guiding or nurturing us. When we name someone an aunt, that person is in a special relationship that is ongoing, important and supportive in whatever ways make sense to those involved,” Sotirin says. “For example, even a step-mom or a mentor at school can do aunting. Laura (Ellingson) and I realized early that aunting was a rich and complex topic.”
Sotirin says that aunting includes emotional expectations and socialization aspects that are both varied and flexible.
“We heard stories of aunts who indulged their nieces and nephews, aunts who were strict and demanding, and eccentric aunts,” she says. “Aunts can operate with different rules—outside but not necessarily contrary to—those in your house.”
And these special kinship (or kinship-like) relationships can also spur “generativity” (concern and care for future generations), as when older aunts pass along family traditions and stories. Reciprocally, nephews and nieces may express a desire to “pay back” by aunting others in the spirit of their own aunts or by caring for elderly aunts, whether they are related or chosen.
Perhaps you see your aunts only at family gatherings or infrequently because they live so far away. Distances don’t necessarily cancel out aunting relationships, Sotirin says. Time spent during holidays and family get-togethers can be emotionally significant, and even an absent aunt may be a character in a family’s history or a kinship network.
Also importantly, aunts show both nephews and nieces that there are many life choices possible.
“Each aunt shows a different possible life path. One may be a career woman, another a stay-at-home mom,” Sotirin says. “One aunt may seem like a great role model, another’s situation may make a niece or nephew realize the consequences of certain choices. The interesting thing is that, whereas the example of our parents may impose expectations for a child to follow, the example of an aunt doesn’t weigh as heavily.”
The topic of aunts is becoming popular. Several trade books are available about aunts, and at least one other scholarly book on aunts and uncles was released earlier this year. Sotirin and Ellingson are already busy on their next aunt project: aunts in popular culture.
“Aunt Bee on Andy Griffith, Auntie Em in the Wizard of Oz, Auntie Mame, they are all taking care of a nephew or niece. but they each do that very differently,” Sotirin says. “These aunts may reaffirm family values and ideals, but they can also be seen as examples of more alternative, more eccentric families.”
Whether or not your aunts are “normal” or “eccentric,” you probably have had an aunt whom you admired and/or learned from. You may even have had a favorite aunt who indulged you just a bit.
Michigan Technological University (www.mtu.edu) is a leading public research university developing new technologies and preparing students to create the future for a prosperous and sustainable world. Michigan Tech offers more than 120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in engineering; forest resources; computing; technology; business; economics; natural, physical and environmental sciences; arts; humanities; and social sciences. | <urn:uuid:9e72f33c-32fa-46f5-976e-92dac32f6be9> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.mtu.edu/news/stories/2010/september/story31286-print.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783400572.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155000-00053-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953654 | 1,117 | 2.96875 | 3 |
Very little is known about the Chiriquita shadowdamsel’s reproductive biology, life history patterns or feeding behaviour. Nevertheless, there are general biological characteristics of dragonflies and damselflies (Odonata) that are likely to apply here. Odonata species start their life as aquatic larvae or nymphs, before passing through a series of developmental stages or ‘stadia’ during which they must undergo several moults as they grow (4). The larval period in Palaemnema probably lasts one year (2). Before the final moult (emergence), metamorphosis occurs in which the larvae transform into the adult form. After emergence, adults undergo a pre-reproductive phase known as the maturation period, and this is when individuals normally develop their full adult colour. Odonata usually feed on flying insects, but are generalised, opportunistic feeders, and will often congregate around abundant prey sources such as swarms of termites or near beehives (4).
There is often fierce competition between males for access to reproductive females. Although females typically begin to lay eggs in the water immediately after copulation, often guarded by their mate, they can store live sperm in their body for days (4). In shadowdamsels (Palaemnema), pairs often concentrate at suitable oviposition sites, and males may guard females after copulation to prevent other males from mating with them (2). | <urn:uuid:9392e305-a72c-4540-8f48-200dc8c9b3f1> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.arkive.org/chiriquita-shadowdamsel/palaemnema-chiriquita/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402746.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00168-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959249 | 297 | 3.875 | 4 |
Rupert Brooke’s poems are often seen in the context of the early part of the First World War: a time when literature was characterised by a patriotic fervour not yet eroded by the long years of trench warfare that followed. This poem, ‘The Soldier’, is not only one of Brooke’s most famous poems but one of the most famous poems written during the war and indeed in the 20th century. Here it is accompanied by another of Brooke’s well-known sonnets, ‘The Dead’.
These handwritten copies of the poems were written by Brooke for Edward Marsh, who was an early critic of Brooke’s poetry and the editor of the anthology, Georgian Poetry, published in 1912. Both poems are almost fair copies with the exception, in ‘The Soldier’, of corrections in the first two lines of the second stanza and, in ‘The Dead’, of corrections in the first and last lines of the first stanza, and the substitution of ‘all’ for ‘and’ in the final sentence of the first stanza.
Marsh donated these handwritten copies of ‘The Soldier’ and ‘The Dead’ to the Library at the British Museum in 1915. He explains in a letter accompanying his donation that the poems were written when Brooke was staying with him in January 1915 three months before his death of septicaemia at Skyros in Greece. Marsh writes that the poems are ‘one of my most precious possessions’ which he can hardly bear to part with but for the fact that he thinks that they should become part of the Library’s collections. | <urn:uuid:b17b6c04-927a-4b2d-b8ec-bc1465b08617> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/rupert-brooke | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783400572.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155000-00062-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974545 | 345 | 3.453125 | 3 |
What is a Music Librarian?
A music librarian is a librarian qualified to specialize in music. A broad musical background is essential, for music of any style, medium, or era can find a place in a library. Aptitude and training in both music and librarianship are necessary.
Where are Music Librarians employed?
Music librarians work in large research libraries such as the Library of Congress or the New York Public Library; in the music section or branch library in universities, colleges, and conservatories; in public libraries; in radio and television station libraries; with music publishers and dealers; with musical societies and foundations; and with bands and orchestras.
What do Music Librarians do?
The traditional responsibilities of librarians are at the heart of most music librarians' activities: organizing, cataloging, and maintaining collections; providing instruction in use of the library; answering reference inquiries; selecting music, books, journals, recordings, microforms, and sometimes manuscripts and other rare materials for acquisition. Music librarians recommend means of preservation and housing of materials in their custody and use electronic bibliographic and reference resources to their full potential.
Beyond these typical responsibilities, the activities of music librarians will reflect the nature of the institution where they are employed and their personal interests. For example, they may plan exhibits and concerts, and collaborate with other institutions in organizing lectures, classes, or other public programs. In a conservatory or university school of music, librarians often order or rent the music needed by student performing ensembles-orchestra, band, opera workshop, and chamber groups. Music librarians employed by symphony orchestras and broadcasting stations organize and maintain libraries of performance materials or recordings for use only by those particular organizations. Librarians who work for music publishers might have editorial duties or manage the inventory of rental music. Those employed by music dealers acquire materials from numerous publishers world-wide for retail sale to over-the-counter and mail-order customers.
Librarians can take an active role in music scholarship by compiling bibliographies, pursuing research, or writing reviews of new publications. They often teach music bibliography and other classroom subjects within their areas of specialization. As members of professional organizations, they may serve on local, national, or international committees devoted to issues such as electronic information storage and retrieval, cataloging standards, education for librarianship, preservation, and library management. Within the library it might be their responsibility to organize training programs for staff, researchers, or interns.
How do you become a Music Librarian?
Training for music librarianship should include as broad an education as possible in both music and the liberal arts. Training in music must be the equivalent of at least substantial undergraduate work. Undergraduates need a wide background in the humanities, for music librarians need to be familiar with the relationship of music to other disciplines. Music and the literature about it are published in many countries and languages; basic cataloging and bibliographic research require a working knowledge of German and at least one Romance language. A master's degree in library or information science is required by most employers. Because music librarians need a thorough knowledge of music history and repertory, a second master's degree in music is required or highly desired for some positions. Libraries specializing in folk music or musics of non-Western cultures require training in ethnomusicology, archives management, and other languages. In libraries where music is combined with other subjects, such as dance or fine arts, background in those subjects may also be expected.
To understand more about a standard of core competencies acquired for music librarians, you may wish to view: Core Competencies and Music Librarians, a report prepared for the Library School Liaison Committee, April, 2002.
Some library schools offer special courses or internships in music librarianship. Information about these programs appears in the Directory of Library School Offerings in Music Librarianship.
What are the career prospects?
Commitment to music draws individuals interested in librarianship to this field of specialization. To enjoy it and to become an accomplished practitioner, intellectual curiosity, concern for detail, and an ability to organize ideas as well as things are essential. Music librarianship is a financially stable career, and one that many musicians find compatible with a part-time second career as a performer. Most music librarians work with the public, either in full-time public service positions or as a part-time responsibility shared with their other work. Technical services librarians, such as those in cataloging or acquisitions, may work entirely behind the scenes.
Music librarianship offers a broad range of administrative and supervisory positions. Some of the smaller music collections are administered and operated by a single professional, with support staff. In large academic and public libraries, there are management positions as department heads and assistant heads. The head of a music library, whatever its size, may have budget, personnel, facilities, and collection management responsibilities.
The best introduction to music librarianship as a career is employment in a music library in a non-professional capacity; full-time, part-time and hourly positions are available in public and academic libraries, and with music publishers and performance ensembles. To learn about the profession's current activities and to make useful contacts, join the Music Library Association as a student member. MLA was founded in 1931 to promote the establishment, growth, and use of music libraries. Members receive the MLA Newsletter and its quarterly journal Notes, which contains articles, bibliographies, and reviews of music, books, and software. MLA holds an annual meeting in the late winter or early spring. There are twelve regional chapters that also meet regularly.
Where can I get more information?
See our brochure, "Careers in Music Librarianship"
Explore the MLA site! The Career Resources page contains lists and bibliographies covering a range of topics useful to music librarians at every stage of their career. You can also view current job openings, and view research reports, publications in print, and committee and chapter working papers. Our website also has links to additional pages concerning copyright and the annual meeting, to committees and chapters pages, and other Internet resources of interest to music librarians.
You can also find more information in the following books and articles:
Careers in Music Librarianship III: Reality and Reinvention
Edited by Susannah Cleveland & Joe C. Clark
Middleton, Wis.: A-R Editions, 2014
(Music Library Association Technical Reports, 33)
Music Librarianship at the Turn of the Century
Edited by Richard Griscom and Amanda Maple
Canton, Mass.: MLA, 2000.
(Music Library Association Technical Reports, 27)
Libraries, History, Diplomacy, and the Performing Arts
Ed. by Israel J. Katz.
Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1991.
American Music Librarianship
by Carol June Bradley
New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. | <urn:uuid:21ebd303-f4cd-4096-9296-469855f57153> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/?page=MusicLibrarianship | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392527.68/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00126-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938532 | 1,470 | 2.671875 | 3 |
Lower-level math skills mean less understanding on GMO issues, study says
'Math anxiety' led to a decrease in comprehension of statistics about genetically modified foods, researchers say.
Researchers at Penn State University found that lower levels of math skill and feelings of anxiety related to math may be less able to understand messages about genetically modified foods and other health information. So-called 'math anxiety' led to decreased comprehension among those who read statistics in a message about GMOs.
"Math anxiety, which happens when people are worried or are concerned about using math or statistics, leads to less effort and decreases the ability to do math," says Roxanne Parrott, distinguised professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and Health Policy and Administration. "Math anxiety also has been found to impair working memory."
Interestingly, researchers found math anxiety increased for people with high math skills when presented with a message about GMO foods, although the anxiety did not significantly affect the understanding of the message. To read more, click here. | <urn:uuid:412c5d9d-2fd7-43db-88f5-79ffbb0ffda4> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.foodengineeringmag.com/articles/91965-lower-level-math-skills-mean-less-understanding-on-gmo-issues-study-says | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394937.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00110-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942653 | 201 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Floor, ceiling and wall insulation workers are critical to helping create and maintain an energy efficient home and office.
Floor, ceiling and wall insulation workers install and replace the materials used to insulate homes and office buildings making them more energy efficient. These green job holders are often referred to as insulators. As part of their job, floor, ceiling and wall insulation workers read blueprints and specifications to determine the appropriate insulation materials required and the amount needed to properly insulate homes and buildings.
Before starting the insulation application, insulators prepare the insulation surfaces by brushing or spreading on adhesives, cement, asphalt, or by attaching metal pins to surfaces. They then use hand tools such as tape measures, handsaws, power saws, knives, or scissors to measure and cut insulation materials to fit into walls or surfaces. Floor, ceiling and wall insulation workers use additional tools such as blowers to cover and line structures with insulating material to protect structures against heat, cold or moisture. To finish up the job, they cover and seal insulated surfaces with plastic covers, canvas strips, sealants, tape, cement or asphalt mastic to protect insulation from moisture.
Floor, ceiling and wall insulation workers are required to follow safety guidelines. When remodeling old buildings, they often must remove old insulation. In some old industrial buildings, asbestos – a material linked to cancer was used to insulate walls and ceilings. Because of this, it’s required to be removed by licensed insulators before new insulation materials can be installed.
Floor, ceiling and wall insulation workers usually work indoors in residential and industrial settings. During the workday they are often required to stand, bend, or kneel in confined spaces. Floor, ceiling, and wall insulators have a higher rate of injury than others professions. To protect themselves from small particles, they keep the work area well ventilated. They also wear protective suits, masks, and may wear respirators. Most floor, ceiling, and wall insulators were employed in the drywall and insulation contractors industry and have a 40-hour work week. Only 4% of insulators are self-employed.
A floor, ceiling and wall insulation worker usually enters this green career with some previous work-related skill, knowledge, or experience. There are no formal education requirements for floor, ceiling, and wall insulation workers. High school courses in English, math, woodworking, mechanical drawing, algebra, and general science are considered helpful for this job. Employees in these jobs are required to obtain up to one year of on-the-job training with more experienced workers. There are 2 recognized apprentice-able specialties associated with this job: Cork Insulator and Refrigeration Plant; Insulation Worker. Insulation workers who work with asbestos must be certified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Voluntary certification may be provided by some insulation contractor organizations to help workers demonstrate their skills and knowledge of residential and industrial insulation.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) expects employment of this field to grow 23 percent from 2010 until 2020; this is faster than the average for all green jobs. The increasing demand in improving energy efficiency for homes and buildings will result in good employment opportunities for insulators although they will face competition for jobs. The BLS projected 14,600 floor, ceiling and wall insulation workers job openings between 2010 and 2020, and noted 23,000 jobs are currently filled. Titles included insulation installer, insulator, insulation estimator, retrofit installer, insulation mechanic, and warehouse insulation worker. The BLS further reports that the median annual wage for salaried floor, ceiling and wall insulation workers was $32,420 in 2011 with median hourly wage of $15.59. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $20,360, and the top 10 percent earned more than $60,990. | <urn:uuid:4e8d1c49-ca32-4f93-aff0-b68fa33a609d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.isustainableearth.com/green-jobs/energy-efficiency-job-profiles/insulation-worker-green-job-profile | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396027.60/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00060-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946811 | 784 | 3.640625 | 4 |
At first we thought that [Pete Prodoehl] was using the wrong term when calling his project a Laser Kaleidoscope. We usually think of a kaleidoscope as a long tube with three mirrors and some beads or glass shards in one end. But we looked it up and there’s a second definition that means a constantly changing pattern. This fits the bill. Just like the laser Spirograph from last week, it makes fancy patterns using spinning mirrors. But [Pete] went with several 3D printed parts rather than repurposing PC fans.
In the foreground you can see the potentiometers which adjust the motor speeds. The knobs for these were all 3D printed. He also printed the mounting brackets for the three motors and the laser diode. A third set of printed parts makes mounting the round mirrors on the motor shaft quite easy. All of this came together with very tight tolerances as shown by the advanced shapes he manages to produce in the video after the break. | <urn:uuid:617fdfb6-216a-4615-925d-4544af55e9dc> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://hackaday.com/2013/02/25/laser-kaleidoscope-uses-more-3d-printing-and-less-scavenging/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397428.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00016-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965204 | 208 | 2.8125 | 3 |
1. At the invitation of the Government, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (hereafter "the Commission" or "the Inter-American Commission") visited the Republic of Bolivia between November 12 and 17, 2006, to observe the human rights situation in that country, as part of its primary mission to promote the observance and defense of human rights in the American States, and the powers granted to the Commission under Article 41 of the American Convention on Human Rights (hereafter "the Convention" or "the American Convention").
2. The Commission met with authorities and officials of the Executive Branch, the Legislative Branch and the Judiciary, as well as the Prosecutors’ Office ("Ministerio Público") and the Ombudsman’s Office ("Defensoría del Pueblo"). It also held meetings with various organizations of civil society. A delegation of the Commission visited the Chonchocorro Penitentiary in El Alto and the San Pedro Prison and the Women’s Prision ("Centro de Orientación Femenina Obrajes"), both in the city of La Paz. Working meetings were also held on various cases and precautionary measures before the Commission, and a lecture was given on the human rights protection mechanisms of the inter-American system.
3. During its visit, the Commission observed different issues related to respect of human rights in Bolivia, as well as the political and social context of recent years, which has been characterized by institutional fragility and persistent social conflicts. That situation has hampered the design and implementation of measures aimed to overcoming those problems, principally the lack of access to justice and the social exclusion.
4. The Commission acknowledges that the issues observed about the human rights situation in Bolivia represent the legacy of previous eras. It also considers that the current political and social context represent the beginning of an important democratization and social inclusion process which may help the traditionally excluded majority of the population to participate actively in decision-making on political, economic, and social questions that affect them directly.
5. While the Commission learned of several important reforms proposed by the current government, however, social and political conflicts continue, demonstrating the deep polarization amount of the different sectors of Bolivian society, and the need to find channels of dialogue for consensus building and negotiation.
6. For example, the Commission found that, during 2006 and thus far in 2007, demonstrations, strikes and blockades continued to be the principal means of pressure and protest, leading in some cases to acts of violence. This was the case with the mining conflict in Huanuni on October 5 and 6, 2006, between salaried mine workers and cooperative miners, which led to 16 deaths and dozens of injured.
7. On the other hand, after the enactment of the Special Law 3364 calling for the Constituent Assembly on March 6, 2006, two important democratic mechanisms started to have place in Bolivia: i) the creation and constitution of the Constituent Assembly; and ii) the referendum on autonomy for regions. Nonetheless, in the context of these processes the deep polarization has continued.
8. For example, the strong discussion regarding the voting system lead to some members of the Constituent Assembly to adopt extreme measures as a hunger strike in November 2006, followed by some acts of violence during demonstrations of groups close to both groups of Assemblers in dispute. The Commission is also concerned about the acts of violence that took place on December 14, 15 and 16 in the municipality of San Julián, department of Santa Cruz, and on January 11 and 16, 2007, in the city of Cochabamba resulting in two deaths and dozens injured, regarding the results of the regions’ autonomy referendum.
9. The Commission regrets the continuation of events such as those described which, by their violent nature, disrupt the normal democratic mechanisms of participation and demonstration, and it urges the Bolivian State to take all measures necessary to prevent the repetition of such acts, and to investigate the events seriously and thoroughly, with full respect for human rights.
10. Nevertheless, the Commission welcomes the channels of dialogue that have recently permitted the negotiations over the voting system in the Constituent Assembly. It hopes that the process will no longer be blocked by persistent antagonisms, and that consensus-building mechanisms will be pursued to ensure political representation by all sectors of Bolivian society in this important forum.
11. Together with deepening the channels for dialogue, negotiation and consensus building, it must be stressed that the process of social inclusion championed by the current government must be accompanied by institutional strengthening in all areas, and in particular the guarantee of an impartial judiciary, access to justice, the enforceability of rights recognized under the Constitution and international law, strict compliance with due process without discrimination, policies for coordination between the community and formal justice systems, and, most especially, fighting the severe problem of impunity for those responsible for human rights violations.
12. During its visit the IACHR gave special attention to these aspects and observed closely the general circumstances and the access to justice of some groups of society that require special attention given their particular situation; persons deprived of liberty, indigenous peoples and peasant communities, women, children and asylum seekers. The following are the topics that the Commission considers that require priority attention by the government in the context of the reforms that it is proposing. The specific considerations regarding those aspects are indicated in the text of the report with specific indication of the international law applicable, the relevant international standards and the respective recommendations.
Administration of justice
13. The Commission noted the legal and institutional changes that have been made in recent years. However, it found that most of these reforms and legal provisions have not been properly implemented, for their promulgation and entry into force have not been accompanied by the necessary budgetary and human resources to ensure their effective application.
14. With respect to the coverage of justice services, the Commission was deeply concerned at the widespread absence, nationwide, of officials of the Judiciary, the Prosecutor’s Office and the Public Defender's Office. For example, only 180, or 55%, of Bolivia's 327 municipalities have a judge; only 76, or 23%, have a prosecutor; and only 11, or 3%, have a Public Defender.
15. With respect to guarantees of independence, impartiality, suitability and transparency in the Judiciary, the Commission received information about the persistence of vacancies in the highest judicial authorities, and the widespread use of interim personnel to make up for the lack of constitutionally appointed officials. As well, it received complaints about irregularities in the system of appointment and promotion of judges, and shortcomings in the development of a professional career for prosecutors. This situation has been aggravated by gaps in the law and irregularities in the systems for disciplining judges and prosecutors.
16. The Commission also learned of problems in implementing the accusatorial criminal prosecution procedure, reflecting the lack of training, technical support, infrastructure, institutional coordination, and clearly defined responsibilities for the equitable distribution of cases and the failure to take steps to resolve the serious backlog of cases. It also noted that the National Public Defenders System has not been fully implemented: its coverage remains minimal, and the quality of service is poor.
17. The Commission identified some factors that lead to impunity for serious violations of human rights, such as the forced disappearances that occurred during times of military dictatorship, and the deaths and injuries caused during suppression of social protests by the police and the military. These factors point to the lack of institutional coordination, shortcomings in the collection of evidence, the absence of adequate investigation protocols, obstruction by institutions to which the alleged perpetrators belonged, and in general, procedural delays.
18. In the following paragraphs the Commission will indicate the general problems affecting the groups identified (para. 12), highlighting for some of them the aspects observed by the Commission regarding their particular situation on access to justice.
prisons and penitentiaries and the rights of persons
19. The Commission identified a number of problems of special concern with respect to rights of persons deprived of liberty in Bolivia, in the course of its visits to some penitentiaries. In the first place, it noticed that the prisons are severely overcrowded, to the extent of 400% in San Pedro prison, a situation that is the direct result of excessive resort to preventive arrest. On this point, the Commission learned that 74% of persons in prison are awaiting sentence. The Commission was also informed of certain preventive detention criteria such as “danger to others” or “danger to relapse” that may be contrary to international standards.
20. There are still inadequate criteria for separating and distinguishing the prison population by categories. The Commission noted in particular that there is no distinction between convicted and accused persons, or between juveniles and adult convicts and accused. In terms of security, the Commission also found that prison police personnel do not meet the training standards, and that internal security is generally in the hands of the inmates themselves.
21. The Commission noted that living conditions are so precarious and may constitute inhumane and degrading treatment under international law. The penitentiaries have no study and work programs for the social readaptation of convicts. Given the circumstances, the Commission is concerned that in some penitentiaries, persons deprived of liberty have their families living with them.
Indigenous peoples and peasant communities
22. On the rights of indigenous peoples and peasant communities ("comunidades campesinas") the Commission notes the institutional framework constituted by ministries and vice ministries in this area, and the legal framework introduced through ratification of Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (therefore "Convention 169 of the ILO"), as well as the proclamation in the Constitution that Bolivia is a "multiethnic and pluricultural" country. Nevertheless, these rights are still not effectively exercised. An example of this is the continued discrimination that these communities suffer in the accessibility and quality of health and education services.
23. On access to land, the Commission received information about corruption, institutional weaknesses, irregular practices, and the failure to recognize legal status, among other factors that have obstructed the regularization and distribution of lands. The Commission noted approval and promulgation of Law 3545 of November 28, 2006, renewing the agrarian reform, and hopes that this will serve to eliminate the problems observed.
24. The Commission also learned of projects for the exploitation of natural resources that were designed and executed without proper participation by the indigenous people affected, and in particular without any prior consultation to obtain their free and informed consent. As well, the Commission was concerned at the continuation of mining projects that are contaminating the environment and posing a risk to the life and health of many indigenous and peasant families.
25. The Commission was deeply concerned at the persistence of various forms of debt bondage analogous to slavery, including some elements of forced labor, despite the absolute prohibitions in the international legal framework to which Bolivia is a party. This situation has been worsened by the lack of government response, through either administrative or judicial channels, and by the absence of comprehensive policies for resolving this complex problem.
26. Finally, the Commission observed that indigenous peoples and peasant communities have problems of access to justice which, in the few rural areas to which the system's coverage extends, continues to be meted out in a discriminatory manner that takes no account of the particular features of these groups and their special situation. The Commission also learned of the glaring gap in the law with respect to guidelines for coordinating official justice with community justice, and the serious confusion this has generated, whereby important groups continue to interpret lynchings as a reflection of indigenous justice, or as an alternative or fallback mechanism of dispute settlement.
Rights of women
27. On women's rights, the Commission observed that an important legal framework has been established with ratification of the international instruments in this area, and a number of internal laws to guarantee women's political participation, their access to land, and to prevent and punish family violence, among other aspects. Nevertheless, there are still laws on labor, family and even criminal matters that contain highly discriminatory language and that continue to exclude women from various spheres of national life and from exercise of their rights to education, health, work, etc.
28. With respect to women's participation in the conduct of public affairs, the Commission received information that legislation calling for fixed percentages has yet to be effectively implemented, and is not being strictly enforced. The Commission also learned of "political harassment" against women who win elections to public office.
29. The Commission learned of alarming statistics relating to cases of violence against women, involving both "femicide" and family or domestic violence and sexual violence, including physical and psychological violence. The situation is compounded by the lack of comprehensive and consistent policies for preventing and punishing conduct of this kind. As well, there are few complaints laid, there are no official records, and disparities in the statistics suggest that many cases go unreported.
30. There is a high degree of impunity attached to such offenses as well. Some of the factors identified as the cause of this situation are the institution of conciliation proceedings for premature termination of legal proceedings; the interpretation regarding the fact that sexual crimes are public that need private denounce in the sense that the victim must provide the required evidence; the inadequate treatment of victims by officials before whom they must lay their complaints, and who in many cases arrange for them to be withdrawn; and in general misinformation about the available legal remedies, and social pressure that continues to discourage women from reporting crimes of this kind.
Rights of children
31. The Commission observed that, despite the current legal framework protecting the rights of children in Bolivia, the lack of information and discrepancies in the statistics tend to conceal the issue in the face of persistent practices that are of profound concern to the Commission.
32. The Commission learned of many children who are not recorded in the civil registry, especially in rural areas even though the legal framework establishes the gratuity of the service. The Commission also received some alarming figures on the number of children working under conditions that ignore international standards. As well, it learned of many cases of sexual trafficking and exploitation as well as physical and psychological violence against children in many areas.
33. The Commission was also informed of some disturbing aspects of the criminal system for dealing with juvenile delinquents, especially procedural delays, the lack of specialized authorities for hearing such cases, the widespread use of imprisonment as punishment, and preventive detention under the excuse of "public threat."
Rights of asylum seekers
34. The Commission also received complaints about the situation of refugee applicants in Bolivia, particularly relating to guarantees of due process in administrative procedures. Specifically, it learned of irregularities in the make-up of the National Refugees Commission, problems with the presentation of evidence, inadequate justification for decisions rejecting or revoking refugee status, shortcomings in the notification of decisions, and obstacles to the presentation of appeals.
35. The Commission also received information on decisions taken in the course of deportation or extradition procedures that run counter to the duty not to return persons with recognized refugee status.
36. In consideration of the observations made throughout the report and highlighted in this executive summary and in order to contribute to strengthening the defense and protection of human rights in a democratic context in Bolivia, the IACHR presented specific recommendations to the State, which will be the subject of close follow-up.
37. Regarding the administration of justice, the Commission’s recommendations are related to the need to increase the coverage of judicial authorities, prosecutors and public defenders throughout the national territory; to increase budgetary resources in order to solve the serious institutional problems of the Judiciary; to strengthen mechanisms for publicizing and disseminating the rights of citizens and the judicial actions available to make them effective; to consolidate and regulate the professional careers of judges and prosecutors; to guarantee transparency in the appointment of senior judiciary officials; to strengthen the disciplinary system for judges and prosecutors; to adopt measures for guaranteeing effective implementation of the accusatorial criminal prosecution procedure; to strengthen the National Public Defender System; and to promote investigations of gross human rights violations.
38. With respect to the situation of persons deprived of liberty, the Commission included recommendations to correct the excessive use of preventive detention; decrease persistent procedural delays in criminal proceedings; decrease overcrowding in prisons; improve prison infrastructure conditions; guarantee adequate training of personnel in charge of administration, supervision, operations and security inside prisons; ensure the appropriate separation of convicted and accused persons, and of juveniles and adults; guarantee access to adequate medical care; guarantee opportunities for education and work; take into account the best interests of children when they are living in prison with one of their parents; guarantee the adequate control of detention conditions by criminal judges; and create adequate and effective remedies of individual and collective nature in order to facilitate a judicial control of detention conditions.
39. Regarding the situation of indigenous peoples and peasant communities, the Commission deemed it appropriate to make recommendations on the effective implementation of ILO Convention 169; the adoption of necessary measures to eradicate all kinds of discrimination against persons within the State’s jurisdiction on the basis of their indigenous or peasant status; the compatibility of the measures adopted in favor of these groups with their particular features and cultural identity; effective implementation of the new legal framework for agrarian reform in order to overcome the obstacles identified; the effective participation of indigenous peoples and communities affected by development projects; the search for a solution to the serious environmental problems caused by some of those projects when environmental standards are not adhered to; and the eradication of bondage and forced labor situations.
40. With respect to the status of women, the Commission made recommendations on application of the existing legal framework and public policies to protect women from violence and discrimination; the design of integrated, coordinated government policies to ensure that victims of violence have access to judicial protection; the launching of public awareness campaigns on the obligation to respect women’s rights in all spheres; training of civil servants in addressing holistically the right of women to live free from violence and discrimination; ensuring compliance with the legal framework for the participation of women in public affairs; the creation and improvement of data collection systems on violence against women; strengthening of the institutional capacity of respective bodies to fight impunity; and guaranteeing adequate treatment of victims by officials in charge of investigations.
41. Regarding the situation of children, the Commission included recommendations on the execution of comprehensive public policies to prevent human rights violations; free and effective access to civil registration; the adoption of measures to expand as much as possible access to and the quality of public education; coverage of Ombudsman for Children offices and similar institutions; the eradication of child labor (children under 14 years of age) in both urban and rural areas; the prevention, investigation and punishment of all kinds of sexual exploitation of children; the exceptional application of both deprivation of liberty as a sanction and preventive detention; compliance with special due process guarantees in favor of children; derogation of the articles of the Juvenile Code that establish a "threat to others" as a criterion for preventive detention.
42. With respect to asylum seekers, the Commission made recommendations to eliminate the procedural obstacles faced by these persons; to facilitate the issuance of identity documents; to guarantee full compliance with due process; to prevent the return to their country of persons with valid refugee status, and to guarantee that, before the adoption of any decision regarding deportation or extradition, actual risks are evaluated and determined in the framework of a procedure with full defense and access to effective remedies.
The delegation consisted of Commission members Evelio Fernández Arévalos, President; Florentín Meléndez, Second Vice-President and Rapporteur for Bolivia; Commissioner Victor Abramovich; and Santiago Canton, Executive Secretary. The delegation also included the specialists Débora Benchoam, Leonardo Hidaka, and Silvia Serrano; and Gloria Hansen provided administrative support.
The international community uses the term "femicide" to cover the murder of women "because they are women." Femicide is often accompanied by sexual abuse and other signs of physical aggression. For more information, see United Nations, Report of the Secretary-General, In-depth Study on All Forms of Violence in Women, A/61/122/Add 1, July 6, 2006, para. 84. Available at: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/. | <urn:uuid:a980aa95-d2d2-49ab-b751-f851c4e81553> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://cidh.org/countryrep/Bolivia2007eng/Bolivia07resumen.eng.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397562.76/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00133-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947675 | 4,124 | 2.84375 | 3 |
impaired glucose tolerance
Medical Definition of impaired glucose tolerance
: a condition in which an individual has higher than normal levels of glucose in the blood upon fasting or following a carbohydrate-rich meal or ingestion of a glucose test solution but not high enough to be diagnostic of diabetes mellitus
Seen and Heard
What made you want to look up impaired glucose tolerance? Please tell us where you read or heard it (including the quote, if possible). | <urn:uuid:61a9e5d7-f04e-4a3f-84c8-3fd8fdd4ccf4> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/impaired%20glucose%20tolerance | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399106.96/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00002-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.88126 | 91 | 2.53125 | 3 |
26 Weeks Pregnant
Pregnancy Body Changes
At 26 weeks pregnant, your uterus is now about 2½ inches above your belly button. Your weight gain will increase to about a pound per week. You may also experience rib pain, indigestion, heartburn, or stitch-like pains down the sides of your abdomen as your uterine muscle stretches.
You may begin to feel Braxton Hicks contractions more regularly. These contractions are painless, but feel similar to menstrual cramps, and occur at irregular intervals. Braxton Hicks contractions are your body's way of practicing for delivery and will help to tone your uterus for labor.
Your Baby's Growth and Development
At 26 weeks pregnant, your baby will be about 9.2 inches long and will weigh around 2 pounds. He or she is still wrinkly, but will continue to gain weight and fill out as time goes on.
Although your baby's eyes have been sealed shut for the last few months to allow the retinas to develop, they are likely opening and beginning to blink during week 26 of pregnancy.
Your baby begins to make breathing movements (although there is no air in the lungs) and will respond to touch. The eyelids, eyebrows, and fingernails are still developing. | <urn:uuid:31192f96-9f14-4062-a5c2-0c182a718eb9> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.momswhothink.com/pregnancy-weeks/26-weeks-pregnant.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399425.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00003-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942618 | 260 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Hydrogen can be prepared by the following methods,
(i) By action of water with metals
(a) Active metals like Na, K react at room temperature
2M + 2H2O → 2MOH + H2 [M = Na, K etc.]
(b) Less active metals like Ca, Zn, Mg, Al liberate hydrogen only on heating.
2Al + 3H2O → Al2O3 + 3H2
(c) Metals like Fe, Ni, Co, Sn can react only when steam is passed over red hot metals.
3Fe + 4H2O (steam) → Fe3O4 + 4H2
(ii) By the action of water on alkali and alkaline earth metals hydrides
NaH + H2O → NaOH + H2
CaH2 + 2H2O → Ca(OH)2 + 2H2
(iii) By reaction of metals like Zn, Sn, Al with alkalies (NaOH or KOH)
Zn + 2NaOH ————→ Na2ZnO2 + H2
Al + 2NaOH + H2O ————→ 2NaAlO2 + 2H2
Si + 2NaOH + 2H2O ————→ Na2SiO2 + 3H2
Sn + 2NaOH ————→ Na2SnO2 + H2↑
Tin Sod. stannite
(iv) By action of metal with acids :All active metals which lie above hydrogen in electrochemical series, can displace hydrogen gas from dilute mineral acids like HCl, H2SO4.
Fe + 2HCl → FeCl2 + H2
(v) By the electrolysis of acidified water
2H2O ———————→ 2H2O ↑ + O2↑
At cathode At anode
(vi) Laboratory method :In laboratory, it is obtained by action of granulated zinc with dilute .
Zn + dil. H2SO4 → ZnSO4 + H2
It must be noted that
(a) Pure zinc is not used for the preparation of H2 as rate of reaction of pure Zn with dil. H2SO4 is quite slow.
(b) Conc. H2SO4 is not used because then SO2 gas is evolved instead of H2.
(vii) Preparation of pure hydrogen:It can be obtained by
(a) The action of pure dil. H2SO4 on pure magnesium ribbon.
Mg + H2SO4 → MgSO4 + H2
(b) Hydrogen of high purity (> 99.95%) is obtained by electrolysing warm aqueous barium hydroxide between nickel electrodes.
(c) By the action of water on sodium hydride.
NaH + H2O → NaOH + H2↑
(d) By the action of KOH (aq.) on aluminium.
2Al + 2KOH + 2H2O → 2KAlO2 + 3H2↑
(viii) Commercial production of hydrogen
(a) Bosch process : In this method, water gas is mixed with twice its volume of steam and passed over heated catalyst Fe2O3 in the presence of a promoter Cr2O3 or ThO2 at 773 K when CO2 and H2 are obtained. CO2 is removed by dissolving it in water under pressure (20-25 atm) and H2 left undissolved is collected.
About 18% of the world’s production of H2 is obtained from coal.
(b) Lane’s process : By passing steam over spongy iron at 773-1050 K.
3Fe + 4H2O → Fe3O4 + 4H2
The ferrosoferric oxide (Fe3O4) so produced is reduced back to iron with water. this reaction is known as Vivification reactions
Fe3O4 + 4H2O → 3Fe + 4H2O
Fe3O4 + 4CO → 3Fe + 4CO2
(c) By electrolysis of water :Electrolysis of acidified water using platinum electrodes is used for the bulk preparation of hydrogen.
(d) From hydrocarbons :Hydrocarbons (alkanes) react with steam at high temperature to produce carbon monoxide and hydrogen, e.g.,
CH4(g) + H2O(g) —————→ CO(g) + 3H2(g)
The mixture of CO and H2 so obtained can be converted into hydrogen as in Bosch process. About 77% of the world’s production of H2 is obtained from hydrocarbons.
(e) It is also produced as a by-product of the brine electrolysis process for the manufacture of Cl2 and NaOH.
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Map of Rock Properties at Giant Asteroid Vesta
Nov.6, 2013. This colorized map from NASA's Dawn mission shows the types of rocks and minerals distributed around the surface of the giant asteroid Vesta. In this color scheme, red shows diogenite, a type of mineral thought to be formed through magmatic processes deep in the crust. Green shows howardite, a type of surface rock that is made of broken bits of different materials that are excavated, ejected and mixed by meteor impacts. These types of rocks are the most abundant observed on Vesta's surface. Blue shows eucrite, a type of rock formed in the crust of Vesta that isn't as deep down as diogenite. For example, Vesta's equatorial region is replete with eucrites. Yellow areas show regions with diogenite and howardite. The yellow and red areas have large quantities of the magnesium-and silicate-rich mineral diogenite, especially in the southern hemisphere. Cyan areas show regions with eucrite and howardite. Many howardite, eucrite and diogenite meteorites have been found on Earth, and earlier work from Dawn confirmed theories that they came from Vesta.
The location of two craters, Arruntia and Bellicia, are noted in the annotated version. At these craters, scientists unexpectedly found the mineral olivine. The outlines of the giant craters Rheasilvia and Veneneia are also noted. Scientists thought they'd find olivine in those locations but have not.
The data for this map were obtained by Dawn's visible and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIR) during Dawn's orbital measurements of Vesta from 2011 to 2012.
The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. It is a project of the Discovery Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., designed and built the Dawn spacecraft. The visible and infrared mapping spectrometer was provided by the Italian Space Agency and is managed by Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics, Rome, in collaboration with Selex Galileo, where it was built. | <urn:uuid:06b171b2-1bc1-46e4-91f5-603969369619> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/Map_Rock_Properties.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783400572.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155000-00041-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938395 | 480 | 3.765625 | 4 |
Tapioca is a starch extracted from the root of the plant species Manihot esculenta. This species, native to the Amazon (e.g., Brazil), is now cultivated worldwide and has many names, including cassava, bitter-cassava, manioc, ``mandioca``, ``aipim``, ``macaxeira``, ``manioca``, ``boba``, ``yuca`` (not to be confused with yucca), ``Sagudana`` (literally, Sagu drops)--with local variation of ``Sabudana``--and ``kappa``. In Vietnam, it is called bột năng. Tapioca is a staple food in some regions and is used worldwide as a thickening agent, principally in foods. Tapioca is gluten free, and nearly protein free. The commercial form of tapioca most familiar to many people is pearl tapioca.
The name tapioca is a word derived from tipi'óka, the name for this starch in Tupi This Tupi word refers to the process by which the starch is made edible. However, as the word moved out of South America it came to refer to similar preparations made with other esculents. 'Tapioca' in Britain often refers to a milk pudding thickened with arrowroot, while in Asia the sap of the sago palm is often part of its preparation.
Pearl tapioca is similar to pearl sago, which is used in essentially the same ways. Consequently, tapioca may be called sago, and vice versa.//
The cassava plant can have either red or green with blue spindle pulls branches. The toxin found in the root of the red-branched variant is less harmful to humans than the green-branched variety. Therefore, while the root of the red/purple-branched variant can be consumed directly, the root of the green-branched variant requires treatment to remove the toxin. Konzo (also called mantakassa) is a paralytic disease associated with several weeks of almost exclusive consumption of insufficiently processed bitter cassava.Colored tapioca sticks
Commercially, the starch is processed into several forms: powder, fine or coarse flakes or meal (``flour``), sticks, and ``pearls``. Flakes, rectangular sticks, and spherical pearls must be soaked well before cooking, to rehydrate them; they will easily absorb water equal to twice their volume, becoming leathery and swollen. All these products traditionally are white, but sticks and pearls may be colored. The oldest and most common color is brown, but pastel colors are now available. In all its forms tapioca starch is opaque before cooking; after cooking it becomes translucent.
Pearls are made in several sizes, ranging from about 1 mm to 5 mm. In the United States, 2–3 mm pearls are the most common size and are labeled ``small``. In good quality pearl tapioca, the pearls are very uniform in size, smooth, and few are broken. The pearls must be further prepared before use. For use in tapioca pudding, pearls are prepared by soaking them overnight in water. For use in tapioca drinks, they are prepared by boiling for 25 minutes, until they are cooked thoroughly and are chewy, though not gummy, then allowed to cool. If not used immediately, they may be kept for hours in a syrup of sugar or honey.
Pearl tapioca is easily confused with pearl sago, an equivalent product made from a different starch.
In Southeast Asia, the cassava root is commonly cut into slices, wedges or strips, fried, and served as a snack, similar to potato chips, wedges or french fries. Another method is to boil large blocks until soft, and served with grated coconut as a dessert, either slightly salted or sweetened, usually with palm sugar syrup. Tapai is made by fermenting large blocks with a yeast-like bacteria culture to produce a sweet and slightly alcoholic dessert. A variation of the chips popular amongst the Malays is kerepek pedas, where the crisps are coated with a hot, sweet and tangy chili and onion paste, or sambal, usually with fried anchovies and peanuts added.
Commercially prepared tapioca has many uses. Tapioca powder is commonly used as a thickener for soups and other liquid foods, and is also used as a binder in pharmaceutical tablets and natural paints. The flour is used to make tender breads, cakes, biscuits, cookies, and other delicacies (see also Maida flour). Tapioca flakes are used to thicken the filling of pies made with fruits having a high water content.
A typical recipe for tapioca jelly can be made by washing 2 tablespoonfuls of tapioca, pouring a pint of water over it, and soaking for three hours. It is then placed over low heat and simmered until quite clear. If too thick, a little boiling water can be added. It can be sweetened with white sugar, flavored with coconut milk or a little wine, and eaten alone or with cream.Tapioca cracker from Indonesia sold in a Los Angeles, California, market
In various Asian countries (India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Malaysia) tapioca pearls are used and can be mistaken for sago pearls also known as sagudana or sabudana (Pearl Sago) also called 'Sabba Akki' (ಕನà³à²¨à²¡ : ಶಾಬಕà³à²•à²¿)in Kannada. Also the pearls (sagudana or sabudana) are used to make snacks.
In Indian cuisine, the granular preparation of cassava starch also keera is known as tapioca. It can also be used to thicken puddings.
While frequently associated with dessert in the United States, tapioca is now being used by some cooks in other courses as well. Chef Thomas Keller serves oysters on tapioca. The pairing, called ``Oysters and Pearls,`` is considered Keller's ``signature dish.``
The popular savory crisp snack, Skips, are made of tapioca and flavored like Prawn cocktail as well as other flavors.
In southern parts of India, especially the state of Kerala, tapioca is a favorite food. Tapioca is consumed, either boiled or cooked with spices. Tapioca and fish curry is a famous combination food of Kerala. Tapioca is eaten almost everyday in many houses in central part of Kerala. Some times, tapioca is thinly sliced and made into wafers, similar to potato wafers. Cassava, often referred to as tapioca in English, is called Kappa (à´•à´ªàµà´ª) or Poola (in norther Kerala) or Maracheeni or Cheeni in Malayalam. Tapioca is used to make a granules like product (Tapioca Pearls) called chowwary in Malayalam. Chowwary is used to make a light porridge by adding milk or buttermilk, recommended for patients recovering from illness.
Tapioca is also available in Andhra Pradesh and coastal regions and is called with the name ``Karrapendalam`` in Telugu. Cassava is called ``Pendalam`` in Telugu. In Kannada, the actual cassava root is called kolli.
The Tapioca Pearls are known as ``Sabudana`` in Marathi. It is commonly used as a food during fasting (popularly called khichadi) among Hindus in Western and central part of India (Gujarat & Maharashtra region).
In Tamil, the roots of tapioca are called Maravallikezangu or Kuchikezangu, and are used to prepare chips. Tapioca is also used to prepare maida flour. Tapioca chips are also prepared in parts of South India.
In Tamil Nadu, Tapioca is cultivated more in the districts of Namakkal and Salem. In Tamil Nadu, there are so many Tapioca Processing units and they are called Sago Factories. A large number of tapioca industries are found in Attur Taluk, Salem District. Salem City has a marketing center for the sago (known as ``Javvarisi``).
In these factories the Sabudana (Hindi) / Javvarisi (Tamil) is produced and distributed throughout India and exported to different countries.
The cultivation of Tapioca is manpower intensive only at the time of plantation and harvest and it provides a steady income to the farmers. The Tapioca roots are one of the cheapest food available for the poor. The Tapioca --- Maravallikilangu can be consumed raw (after removing the skins / outer cover). At the same time it can be boiled and different dishes like Uppuma (Tamil) can be made. We can make Chips and use it as snacks during tea time.
In Northern India during the festival season, Sabudana is usually consumed during Vrat (Hindi) or fasting, either prepared as a ``Kichdi`` (savory) or Kheer (Sweet).
Tapioca is also referred to as ``Poor Man's Food``
During World War II's Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia, many refugees survived on tapioca, as the plant is easily propagated by stem-cutting, grows well in low-nutrient soils, and can be harvested every two months. (However, to grow to full maturity, it takes 10 months). The plant thus provided much needed carbohydrate and protein.
In Brazilian cuisine, tapioca is used for different types of meals. The tapioca is stirred, drained through a sieve, fried into a tortilla shape, and often sprinkled with coconut. Then it may be buttered and eaten as a toast (its most common use as a breakfast dish), or it may be filled or topped with either doces (sweet) or salgados (salty) ingredients, which define the kind of meal the tapioca is used for: breakfast, afternoon tea or dessert. Choices range from butter, cheese, chocolate, bananas with condensed milk, chocolate with bananas, to various forms of meats and served warm. A traditional dessert called sagu is also made from pearl tapioca cooked with cinnamon and cloves in red wine. A restaurant which specializes in tapioca-based dishes (mostly fillings) is called in Brazil a tapiocaria. In Colombia and Venezuela, arepas may be made with tapioca flour rather than cornmeal. Tapioca arepas probably predate cornmeal arepas; among traditional cultures of the Caribbean the name for them is casabe.
A casabe is a thin flatbread made from bitter cassava root without leavening. It was originally produced by the Native American Arawak and Carib nations because these roots were a very common plant of the rain forests where they lived. In eastern Venezuela many Native American ethnic groups still make casabe and it remains their main bread-like food. Native American communities including the Ye-Kuana, Kari-Ña, Yanomami, Guarao or Warao are from either the Caribe or Arawac Nations and still make casabe.
To make casabe, the starchy root of bitter cassava is ground to a pulp, then squeezed to expel a milky, bitter liquid called yare which carries the poisonous substances with it out of the pulp. Traditionally, this squeezing is done in a sebucan, an 8 to 12-foot (3.7 m) long tube-shaped pressure strainer woven in a characteristic helical pattern from palm leaves. The sebucan usually is hung from a tree branch or ceiling pole, and it has a closed bottom with a loop that is attached to a fixed stick or lever, which is used to stretch the sebucan. When the lever is pushed down, stretching the sebucan, the helical weaving pattern causes the strainer to squeeze the pulp inside. This is similar to the action of a Chinese finger trap. The pulp is then spread in thin, round cakes about 2 feet (0.61 m) in diameter on a budare' to roast or toast.Casabe baking in a small commercial bakery
Thin and crisp cakes of casabe are often broken apart and eaten like crackers. Like bread, casabe can be eaten alone or with other dishes. Thicker casabe usually are eaten slightly moistened. Just a subtle sprinkle of a few drops of liquid is enough to transform a very dry casabe into a very soft and smooth bread very similar to the softest slice of a wheat bread loaf, an incredible change in texture. Because of its capacity to absorb liquid immediately, casabe may cause someone to choke, but goes down quickly with a sip of liquid. In Guyana, South America the casabe is simply called cassava bread. It is prepared with an instrument called a matape by the natives of the Rupununi Savanah and other areas of the country that have a high concentration of Amerinidians.
Pearl tapioca is a common ingredient in Southeast Asian desserts such as kolak, in tapioca pudding, and in sweet drinks such as bubble tea and taho, where they provide a chewy contrast to the sweetness of the drink. Small pearls are preferred for use in puddings; large pearls are preferred for use in drinks. These large pearls most often are brown, not white (and traditionally are used in black tea drinks), but are available in a wide variety of pastel colors.
Tapioca root can also be used to manufacture environmentally friendly plastic bags. A polymer resin produced from the plant is a viable plastic substitute that is not only biodegradable, but is also compostable, renewable, and recyclable. The resulting product biodegrades in less than 1 year, as opposed to thousands of years for traditional plastics.
Sosa, C. (1979), Casabe, Editorial Arte: Caracas. | <urn:uuid:3184e454-f976-4c5b-bfd3-25c3576b950b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.foodguts.com/?ingredient=tapioca | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395160.19/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00043-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948435 | 3,013 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Web Date: March 15, 2012
Scientists Synthesize Star-Fruit-Shaped Gold Nanoparticles
Researchers continually seek to craft nanoparticles with complex, exotic structures to yield unique properties. Now chemists have made gold nanoparticles that look like star fruit (Langmuir, DOI: 10.1021/la300218z).
Scientists already use gold nanorods in medical imaging. And others have demonstrated that star-shaped nanoparticles have unique optical and electronic properties useful for detecting chemicals. Eugene R. Zubarev and Leonid Vigderman of Rice University thought that combining those two morphologies into star-fruit-shaped particles could lead to materials ideal for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), a detection technique that relies on signals produced by molecules adsorbed onto gold surfaces and nanoparticles. Electromagnetic fields should concentrate at the tips of the star-fruit spikes, Zubarev says, and amplify the Raman signals of adsorbed molecules.
To make the gold star fruits, the researchers started by making gold nanorods with a pentagonal cross section using a technique Zubarev’s team reported in 2008 (J. Am. Chem. Soc., DOI: 10.1021/ja806043p). Next they stirred the rods into a solution of gold chloride, silver nitrate, and cetyltrimethylammonium bromide, to deposit more gold onto the nanorods. A few hours later, they filtered out the particles and observed the particles’ star-fruit shape using scanning electron microscopy.
The silver nitrate was the key to making the star-fruit shape, Zubarev says. Without it, the gold would have deposited evenly on the nanorods’ surface. But adding silver nitrate created a layer of silver bromide on the particles’ faces, hindering gold deposition. As a result, the highest rate of deposition happens at the rods’ five long edges, he says, “and the cross section becomes a star.”
The researchers also ran SERS experiments with the gold particles by placing them on a gold surface coated with 1,4-benzenedithiol. They found that Raman signals from 1,4-benzenedithiol were 25 times greater with the star-fruit particles than with the flat pentagonal nanorods.
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Release Date: 2009-05-01
Release Date: 2009-01-08
This is a program for the development of Windows installers. Its main function is to install the programs which are programmed by Perl to make the aim that you can install them by yourself become true. It is like NSIS.
Because the installation of Perl interpreter is not so popular, it leads to the procedure which is written by Perl is difficult to run in other machines. In this condition, it needs an installer which is installing the Perl interpreter while installing the programs that are written by yourself. Opener Package can carry this use into effect. We hope that Perl interpreter can install on every computer around the world.
Certainly, this installed program is not only can install the programs which are written by Perl, but also can install the programs which are written by the other languages.
The making of installed program can not only use script to write, but also use GUI directly.
The function of Opener Package: install the programs. It orients the stand-alone Perl programs, like NSIS.
The program consists of three elements:
1.The main program, Setup.exe, which is capable of parsing setting.ini files, can execute relevant installations. It contains an intact interpreter and the runtime environment.
2. The configuration file, Setting.ini, guide Setup.exe how to execute the target program for installing.The file needed to install, .Zip, waits the Setup.exe to install to the directory specified.
1. Package the installation programs you need and relevant resource files into a .zip pack, and place them in the directory in which the setup.exe lives. If there are multiple attached sections need to be installed, you can package them into multiple .zip files and place them in the directory in which the setup.exe lives. For example, Gtk runtime library.
2. Edit setting.ini files. Based upon the examples, edit and set the option what you need, such as: registry, start menu, environment variables, etc.What’s the most important is setting the .zip files you just package in the [File] option. For example:
File1=setup.zip; main_run_file=perl.exe; install_dest=c: \test
file2=svn.zip; install_dest=c: \test\test
File1=setup.zip is the file what you packaged to be installed. install_dest=c: \test orients the directory where you default install to.
file2=svn.zip is the file need to be installed too.
3. Release the setup.exe file, the setting.ini file and the .zip file together.
Feature:1. Built-in contains the Perl interpreter, which makes the installation of Perl program much easier. Specify an installation of Perl interpreter in setting.ini file. Then, the Perl program you released can be executed directly.
2. There are relatively perfect installation parts. You can set the registry, installation menu, file associations, environment variables, shortcut and autorun.
3. You can create the installer in the way of editing the simple setting.ini script. It’s quite simple, you just set some values. It is quite easy to set the registry with the same format as the registry of Win32.
4. Support for the installation of multiple programs. You can install multiple .zip programs to different directories.
5. Support for multiple languages interface. Build-in support for Chinese and English.
1. It runs slowly. The Perl program , packaged by Par, runs not so fast at the first time. The installation program packages many Per1 attached modules. （In order to solve this complex problem ,we have to study the Par itself first.）
2. We can not package the whole installation program into a file like NSIS for a while. We divide the installation program into three files. (To solve the problem, we can create a GUI program which can create the installer.)
3. There's no uninstall program (It isn't made yet)
4. The Perl library needed by the Perl program, which you want to install, may be not in the installation program . (Because the installation pack has been packaged before, it can't contain Per1 library all we need. It can be solved by a GUI program of installer creating. )
If you have any questions, U can join our group to discuss. Google Group.
This software is free, so we do not take responsible for it.
If you have commercial request, you can connect us to get the technical suuport.
Our site: http://www.opener.asia
Our email: email@example.com
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Copyright (C) 2008 Opener tech Ltd. All rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
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BECAUSE THIS SOFTWARE IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE SOFTWARE, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE SOFTWARE "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE
ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE SOFTWARE IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE SOFTWARE PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL
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IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR
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Blacklegged tick (deer tick) life stages next to a metric ruler. The adult ticks (two ticks at the left) are approximately 1/8 of an inch long, while the nymph (third from left) is just under 1/16 of an inch.
High Risk Areas in Minnesota
A map that shows counties of highest Tick-borne risk in Minnesota.
Tick-borne Prevention Poster: Spray Before You Work or Play
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Tea Cake's real name is Vergible Woods. He meets the heroine Janie after she has had two less than fulfilling marriages. Tea Cake is twenty-five years old and is not wealthy, but he has an inner wealth that Janie has not encountered before. He possesses a knowledge of himself as a human being and a confidence that comes with knowledge and understanding of self. Janie and Tea Cake marry and return together to his community in Jacksonville, Tennessee.
Tea Cake is welcoming of Janie's involvement in the community as she makes a place for herself in it and their home becomes a community social center. Tea Cake teaches Janie to play checkers and disregards a traditional gender boundary and takes Janie with him fishing and hunting. He then teaches her to fish and hunt for herself. The dark spot in Tea Cake's behavior and mentality is that he hits Janie.
The end of their story together has an ironic twist. Tea Cake saves Janie from a rabid dog but in doing so is bitten himself. He contracts rabies. The disease progressed quickly and before they knew he had gotten rabies and could treat it, Tea Cake had already succumbed to irreversible symptoms. When fully rabid and irrationally mentally deranged, he attacks Janie to kill her and Janie has no option but to shoot him to protect herself.
The irony is that (1) Tea Cake received his death sentence, the bite, while rescuing Janie; (2) he could both beat her and rescue her; (3) she killed him with a skill he taught her and (4) the end result of his physical attacks on her was his death at her hands.
Some critics see Tea Cakes brutality toward Janie as confirmation of the innate male need to dominate women. Considering the ironic twist involved in Tea Cake's death, an opposing analysis can be made asserting that the author is showing the true light of male dominance over women through a symbolic judgment (the rabies bite) and execution (the killing shot), thus demonstrating that even the acts of teaching and saving Janie can not atone for nor overshadow physical brutality.
We’ve answered 327,984 questions. We can answer yours, too.Ask a question | <urn:uuid:64c5d3a5-f122-4b7b-8012-99527cb06322> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/how-can-you-describe-tea-cake-from-book-their-eyes-151617 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397797.77/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00075-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979326 | 459 | 2.515625 | 3 |
The two identical X-ray CCD cameras on board Astro-D are known as the Solid-state Imaging Spectrometers (SIS) and are being provided by a hardware team from MIT, Osaka University and ISAS. Each CCD camera head is based around four 420 x 422 pixel MIT Lincoln Laboratory CCD chips abutted side by side, with four preamplifiers, front-side illuminated. The pixels measure 27 x 27 microns^2, and the resistivity is 6500 Ohm cm; measured system readout noise levels of 3-4 electrons RMS are characteristic of the flight instruments. When cooled to a modest temperature of -50 degrees Celsius, a FWHM energy resolution of 2 per cent at 5.9 keV has been achieved. Using an approximately 100 micron thick depletion layer, the entire energy range from 0.4-12 keV can be covered, allowing the spectroscopic study of high-ionization lines from oxygen through nickel. The measured quantum efficiency (QE) at 6 keV is 80 per cent. The field of view of each camera is 22 x 22 arcminutes.
Since the SIS will be the first X-ray CCD instrument in orbit, its resistance to radiation damage will be fully established as the mission progresses. Protons are responsible for the majority of radiation damage and the effects depend critically on the proton energies. According to current estimates, the charge transfer efficiency (CTE) of the CCDs may begin to deteriorate significantly after 2-3 years, causing the energy resolution to degrade. This degradation will be position dependent as events which are closer to the read-out will be less severely affected. To reduce the damage rate, the SIS cameras are equipped with a combined aluminium-polyethylene shield. Software will also be able to correct for the change in CTE to some extent, although a portion of the response changes are ``irreducible". For observations of bright sources, however, the original energy resolution should be retained throughout the mission with a determinable reduction in QE.
Various modes are available for observing a source with the SIS, the choice depending on source brightness, the extent of the source and the time resolution desired. For an observation, two concurrent modes have to be set: the clocking mode, which determines how the CCD is read out, and the data mode, which determines how the charge cloud created by a photon is described. | <urn:uuid:4da187d0-8923-486b-bec5-ddde32b95b00> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/asca/asca_pdmp/node11.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783408840.13/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155008-00106-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928073 | 502 | 3.03125 | 3 |
The Heirloom Garden, surrounding the National Museum of American History, Behring Center, has a variety of plants that highlight the types that have been passed down from generation to generation.
Here are a few that are in bloom during the summer months.
Moonshine yarrowAchillea x ‘Moonshine’
What’s a new heirloom plant? Alan Bloom introduced this bright lemon yellow bloomer which is a cross between H. x ‘Taygeta’ and A. clypeolata in the 1950’s. This plant is very popular in American gardens today, and I expect that it might also be passed down from generations to come.
Butterfly weedAsclepias tuberosa (1690)
Full sun, Zone 3-9, 1’-2.5’ tall
Native Americans introduced the "weed" to early colonists as a medicinal plant. Asclepias tuberosa is also called pleurisy root in reference to a prior use of plant roots to treat lung inflammations. Robert Buist, author of The American Flower Garden Directory (1839), referred to butterfly weed as “one of our finest wildflowers”, particularly for dry places. Butterfly weed, like all milkweeds, is a host plant for Monarch butterflies. The caterpillars eat the leaves and ingest a toxic chemical that makes them unpalatable.
Alaska Shasta daisyChrysanthemum (Leucanthemum) x superbum ‘Alaska’
Full sun, Zone 4-9, 24”-36” tall
Horticulturist Luther Burbank owned a nursery and seed catalog business to support his obsession with plant experimentation. Mr. Burbank introduced over 800 new plants to horticulture, including the Shasta daisy he named after the California mountain. C. ‘Alaska’ was offered in Burbank’s 1904 catalog at a very steep $0.75 a piece.
DelphiniumDelphinium x belladonna ‘Cliveden Beauty’ (1931)
Sun/part shade, Zone 3-7, 36”-48” tall
Considered in the early 1900s to be the best blue flowers for border use and were often fashionably planted next to yellow flowers. This sky-blue beauty blooms in the spring in the Heirloom Garden. All parts are poisonous, so plant this out of reach of children and pets.
FoxgloveDigitalis purpurea (Pre-1600)
Full sun/part shade, Zone 4-8, 2’-5’ tall
Do the flowers look like fingers in a glove? Was the word “fox” once pronounced “folk” as in little folk or fairies? Reportedly, the dainty bells could empower one to recover children taken by naughty fairies, and the flowers could also rid one’s life of witches. Although highly poisonous, Digitalis is used as a medicines to improve the strength and efficiency of the heart, or to control the rate and rhythm of the heartbeat.
Eastern purple coneflowerEchinacea purpurea (1699)
Full sun/part shade, Zone 3-8, 2’-5’ tall
Echinacea is native to eastern North America and present to some extent in the wild in much of the eastern, southeastern and midwest United States. This coneflower is believed to have strong antibiotic and immune stimulating properties. The genus name is from the Greek echino, meaning hedgehog, an allusion to the spiny, brownish central disk.
Rose campionLychnis coronaria
Full sun, Zone 4-8, 2’-3’ tall
A member of the Carnation family (Caryophyllaceae). This species is an old favorite of gardeners; even Thomas Jefferson grew them in his gardens, and gave the earliest American citation of the plant in 1767.The thick woolly leaves of this species were once used as lamp wicks, which contributed to its Genus name—Lychnis—from the Greek word, lychnos, meaning lamp.
Love-in-a-mistNigella damascena (Pre-1700)
Full sun, Zone 2-11, 1.5’-2’ tall
A charming annual, each flower appears to sit on a bed of lacy ,misty foliage. Cultivated in English gardens in late 1500s. The flowers are popular in dried floral arrangements. The seeds of a close relative Nigella sativa, known as black onion seeds, are used in Indian and Middle Eastern breads and vegetable dishes.
Virginia spiderwortTradescantia virginiana (1629)
Part/full shade, Zone 4-9, 1.5’-3’ tall
A native plant long admired and medicinally used by some Native American tribes. Once believed to be an antidote for spider bites (wort means plant.) This wild garden plant gained favor in the eyes of horticultural authorities in the mid 1900s and became used as a border flower. | <urn:uuid:82923768-31a9-4bab-a3ca-33e58865b8b1> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.gardens.si.edu/our-gardens/heirloom-garden-summer.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397696.49/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00039-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917214 | 1,091 | 3 | 3 |
Natural Scoliosis Care Avoids Surgery or Braces
Scoliosis is well-known, but often not well-understood. Essentially, scoliosis is any sideways curvature of the spine: looked at from the side, the spine has a normal S-shaped curve from front to back, but from the back the spine should appear straight. A lateral curve is abnormal and a sign of scoliosis, which can have serious health consequences besides affecting appearance and posture. Early detection is important, and so is finding a natural solution that avoids uncomfortable scoliosis braces and dangerous scoliosis surgery. Read on to learn more.
The cause of scoliosis is often unknown (referred to as “idiopathic scoliosis“), though some cases may be congenital since scoliosis tends to run in families. Although scoliosis usually appears between the ages of 5 and 15, it probably begins earlier and is not detected until a growth spurt makes the curvature more noticeable. Spinal injury from the birth process, leg-length discrepancies, birth defects or genetic factors that have not yet been identified may all be related to scoliosis.
No one knows why girls are more likely to develop scoliosis than boys, but they seem to suffer from scoliosis at a rate at least twice that for boys. And adults can have scoliosis as well: most adult scoliosis is actually idiopathic or congenital scoliosis that went unnoticed or untreated in their adolescence, but some have a type of scoliosis referred to as degenerative scoliosis, which is likely related to osteoarthritis of the spine. Regardless of the scoliosis cause, something can be done to help.
Noticing scoliosis symptoms early is the key to preventing scoliosis from worsening. Signs to look for include:
- One shoulder higher than the other
- One hip higher than the other
- Shoulder blade protruding more on one side
- Uneven waistline
- Uneven shoe wear
- Clothes fitting unevenly
- Leaning to one side
Pain in the legs or back, along with fatigue, are often present – but these are normally disregarded as normal growing pains. If the curve continues to develop, the spine can also become twisted, causing the ribs on one side to become more prominent. In severe cases, scoliosis can also interfere with breathing and other organ functions.
Even if the curvature is not severe enough to affect a child’s general health, it is often a source of embarrassment and results in diminished self-esteem. Even a slight curvature can make a child’s clothes fit improperly or give her posture a decided lean, which can become magnified in the child’s mind and play havoc with her developing body image. A natural approach to scoliosis can help restore your child’s confidence.
Scoliosis treatment varies. Depending on the degree of curvature and the patient’s age, one of three options is generally recommended: do nothing (in cases of mild curvature), wear a scoliosis brace (for mild to moderate curvature when the child is still growing), or undergo scoliosis surgery (in moderate to severe cases).
If the child is nearly done growing and the curve is quite mild, it’s unlikely that it will progress further. But if he or she is still growing, the curve will likely worsen with each subsequent growth spurt. In the “do nothing” scenario, frequent X-rays are typically recommended to make sure the curve is not progressing. Repeated exposure to X-ray radiation is linked to many types of cancers.
Although today’s braces are made of molded polymer materials and worn under the clothes, unlike the bulky metal contraptions of the past, they are still uncomfortable (after all, they’re keeping the spine from moving in the direction it wants to move) and must be worn day and night. And even though they are minimally noticeable, kids believe that “everyone can tell, ” which further compounds their self-esteem problems.
Surgery involves “fusing” vertebrae of the spine together. Metal rods, wires or screws are used to hold the spine in place while the vertebrae are joining, and then are left in the body to hold the spine straight and prevent further curvature. Besides the risks inherent in any invasive procedure, fusing vertebrae together can result in other back problems in the future.
A fourth option is available for treating scoliosis, and it’s totally non-invasive, safe and doesn’t involve braces. Find out more about it here.
A Natural Approach to Scoliosis
Obviously, you want to do whatever’s necessary to protect your child’s health – and you want to help him or her develop a positive body image and good self-esteem. Fortunately, these goals are not mutually exclusive: you can do something about the scoliosis, without resorting to risky surgery or embarrassing braces. Chiropractic has had excellent success with scoliosis, and it’s safe, 100% natural and non-invasive.
You may have tried chiropractic yourself, but never realized it could work for scoliosis. Or you may be new to the idea of chiropractic. Either way, you’ll be happy to learn that chiropractic is safe for your child – even for newborns – and works with the body gently to restore proper alignment, rather than forcing the spine to straighten using steel rods. The application of precise chiropractic adjustments helps restore the spine’s natural alignment, helping the relevant muscles to strengthen and the posture to improve. Results vary and obviously cannot be guaranteed, but stopping the progression of scoliosis curvature and even eliminating the existing curvature are common results with chiropractic!
Chiropractic is a highly regulated, licensed health care field requiring advanced degrees as well as continuing education. Thanks to the following factors, chiropractic is the premier method of alternative health care in the world:
- It’s safe for patients of all ages: newborn to elderly
- It has no side effects or interaction issues
- It works with the body’s own healing abilities
- It’s effective!
And chiropractic is most likely offered by your insurance provider!
Don’t let your child’s scoliosis progress – call a ChooseNatural.com sponsoring chiropractor today to set up a consultation. The doctor will make you and your child feel comfortable, chatting about what’s going on in your child’s life as well as what you’ve both noticed about the scoliosis symptoms. Then he or she will examine your child thoroughly and explain the findings to you, answering any questions along the way and outlining the strategy for approaching your child’s scoliosis. Finally, specific chiropractic adjustments will be applied with the goal of restoring the spine’s normal structure and function.
Our ChooseNatural.com chiropractors are compassionate, caring professionals who understand your concern for your child – as well as your child’s own concerns – and there’s bound to be one near your home, work or school! Don’t wait another day to take action to find out what can be done about your child’s scoliosis.
Click here for a Choose Natural sponsor in your area.
Many people wonder if the backpacks kids carry can cause scoliosis. While there is no conclusive evidence to support this, the fact is that backpacks are dangerous to the development of your child’s spine and musculature. Tightened security measures have prompted many schools to eliminate lockers, forcing children to tote all of their schoolbooks around all day. Follow these backpack safety guidelines to reduce the risk of injury:
|What features are important?||The backpack should have two wide, padded shoulder straps, a waist strap and a padded back. It should be as light as possible to carry the intended load.|
|How should backpacks be worn?||Kids often sling a pack over one shoulder; this is one of the worst things they can do, as it forces the spine into a C-curve. Always wear the pack over both shoulders. The straps should be tightened so that the pack is close to the body and sits about 2″ above the waist. If they’re too loose, the weight of the pack will pull the child backwards, straining the back and the shoulders. The waist strap should be used, as it helps distribute the weight more evenly. And the loaded pack should never weigh more than 10 – 15% of the child’s body weight.|
|What if my child’s books weigh too much?||Try a rolling pack. Rolling packs are similar to rolling luggage in that they roll on wheels while being steered by an attached handle. Rolling packs often have optional straps, so the child can carry the pack when the load is not too great. Even if your child’s load is not excessive, a rolling back is a safer alternative.| | <urn:uuid:02a29bed-ec1b-4623-a518-68560e610857> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.choosenatural.com/scoliosis/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395613.65/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00097-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945287 | 1,914 | 3.40625 | 3 |
Chapter 7 : Human Experimentation
|Section 1. Case Presentation
CASE : Africa, Third World Countries and Experimentation
In 1995 the National Institute of Health and the Center for Disease Control sponsored clinical trials of medication to reduce the spread of the HIV. They sponsored experiments to determine an effective and least expensive treatment to prevent the spread of the HIV to newborns. The studies involved women in Africa, the Dominic Republic and Thailand. The women were not treated with medications known to be effective. Many children were born with HIV who might not have had that virus if the mothers were given the effective medications.
Issues: Standard of Care , Placebo, Informed Consent
CASE: Cold War Radiation Exposure Experiments
Experiments were done on human beings without their knowing about it or without being fully informed. Some of the subjects of these experiments were very young children. Read about the range of experiments and the government investigations and the new criteria and guidelines for such studies.
READ: U.S. RADIATION TESTING ON HUMANS by Tod Ensign and Glenn Alcalay
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments
CASE: Willowbrook Hepatitis Experiments
Researchers deliberately infected very young children with Hepatitis, a disease affecting the liver. Cases of this disease can range from mild flu like symptoms to permanent liver damage. The children were in a state institution in New York for the mentally retarded.
Child Research: Hepatitis Experiments at Willowbrook -CASE PRESENTATION- Summary,James Rowe, QCC, 2005
Willowbrook State School, located in Staten Island, is a school for retarded children, which in 1956, agreed to participate in a research experiment to determine the course of the hepatitis virus and whether or not gamma globulin (a protein complex which contains antigens to provoke the body to produce antibodies) could be used to inoculate children against the virus. Lead by Saul Krugman and Joan P Giles of the New York School of Medicine, Willowbrook was chosen due to the endemic nature of hepatitis at the institution, where practically all children would come down with the ailment before their first year was up. The experiment would consist of serum samples collected from the children before infection, during the incubation period, and after the infection was cured, and overall, seven hundred of the students were participated, after obtaining consent from the families which exceeded the standards of what was mandatory and was validated by many recognized institutions. Where no consent was given, there is no record of any child being subjected to the experiment. Moral quandaries, however, do arise when one considers that the research included the purposeful infection of several incoming students with the virus, justified on the grounds that they could go to extra lengths to protect the children purposefully infected, that hepatitis was mild in ages three-ten years of age (those who were purposefully infected), that the infection type was chosen to be milder than normal yet still protect the children against harsher forms, and that it was inevitable that these children would get the disease anyway, it having been virtually impossible not to. Further issues of ethical concern have been raised due to the fact that it was children who were part of the study, with many contending that only therapeutic, and not scientific, medical experiments ought to use children, whilst others contend that parents were blackmailed into consenting.
Issues: Informed Consent, Information, Coercion
CASE: New York State Psychiatric Institute- 1993-1996 violent males and fenfluramine
Criminal Neurotransmitter Studies and Children-CASE PRESENTATION- Summary,James Rowe, QCC, 2005
In 1993 and 1998, three experiments at the New York State Psychiatric Institute were conducted on nearly one hundred boys aged 6-11, all from New York City, many Black or Hispanic, who shared an older sibling being legally charged with a delinquent behavior. These boys were further selected via court records and interviewing both mother and child to determine boys who had experienced “adverse rearing practices”. In exchange for consent, the mothers were given $125 dollars upon going to the aforementioned institute and allowing their children to be injected with a small amount of the drug fenfluramine, after which they’d be given a blood test to determine whether or not the level of neurotransmitters fluctuated in order to see if there might be a link betwixt neurochemical markers and violent behavior. Those opposed to this experiment have brought up three main points, namely, that the drug was unsafe due to its usage in the diet-pill “fen-phen” which was taken off the market after heart-valve damage was discovered to occur in some users, that it was racist due to the majority of Blacks and Hispanics, and that the mother may have essentially been bribed due to her generally low-income situation. Supports counter that the dosage was miniscule, given once, and that there is no reason to suggest that it was unsafe at those levels, that race was not an issue, and that the mother was not bribed at all.
CASE: Baby Fae 1984
A transplant of a baboon heart into a newborn child. The case raised many issues. Was it an experiment or therapy ? Was it the only measure available to save the baby?
READ: Case of Baby Fae
CASE: Use of Morally Tainted Information (Nazi Data)
Nazis and Medicine -CASE PRESENTATION- Summary,James Rowe, QCC, 2005
Pernkopf Anatomy, a nearly universally esteemed book on the subject of anatomy, has become a matter of controversy due to the Nazi-connections of its authors and that there is a possibility, although unverified, that the cadavers were taken from Holocaust victims. In November 1996, a letter was written to The Journal of the American Medical Association, which even asked that the University of Vienna make some attempt to determine the sources of the cadavers. Written by Howard A. Israel and William E. Seidelman, the letter brought to the forefront a pressing issue of modern medical ethics, namely, whether or not the source of the information, be it moral or immoral, ought to be considered. Views vary, with one camp saying that it is paramount to sanctioning evil acts to allow for morally tainted information to be used, whilst others assert that to waste medical research is to take no good from a potentially horrible situation, and thus to essentially assure that the victims suffered and died in vain.
READ: Nazi Data: Dr. Mengele
Proceed to the next section of the chapter by clicking here> next section.
© Copyright Philip A. Pecorino 2002. All Rights reserved.
Web Surfer's Caveat: These are class notes, intended to comment on readings and amplify class discussion. They should be read as such. They are not intended for publication or general distribution.
|Return to: Table of Contents for the Online Textbook| | <urn:uuid:f5b332f1-c898-42da-883f-2d42c70663d9> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/MEDICAL_ETHICS_TEXT/Chapter_7_Human_Experimentation/Case_Presentation.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396147.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00200-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96083 | 1,429 | 3.140625 | 3 |
Summary: Just as everyone has a different learning style, teachers too approach the task from different perspectives. There are five basic teaching perspectives or styles: transmission, apprenticeship, developmental, nurturing, and social justice. The acronym BIAS is useful to describe the beliefs, intentions, assessments, and strategies associated with each perspective. The authors present a hypothetical 1-week rotation in plastic and reconstructive surgery in which a student encounters instructors who embody the five basic teaching perspectives. By presenting these perspectives, the authors introduce valuable teaching techniques that can benefit all those charged with the education of learners along the spectrum from premedical to continuing education venues. Educational objectives include the following: (1) explain and illustrate different approaches to effective teaching in plastic surgery; (2) introduce readers to the Teaching Perspectives Inventory as a means of determining their primary teaching style; and (3) argue for a “plurality of the good” in teaching. | <urn:uuid:67596837-ecb5-447e-8934-4785416b918f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://journals.lww.com/plasreconsurg/Abstract/2012/06000/Teaching_Plastic_Surgery_from_Different.37.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397428.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00177-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934352 | 188 | 2.921875 | 3 |
The multiple paths leading to the pyramid reflect on both a multidisciplinary
approach and the importance of including diversity in conducting scientific research.
The pyramid reflects on “elements” forming a greater whole. The numbers in the back
of the pyramid reflect on our love for mathematics and quantitative assessment.
History of HWDs in ODALab
Funding Highlights (≥500K)
The 1990s The ODALab was created in 1994 when funded by the ONR to investigate depth perception in head-worn displays (HWDs). The research focused on Augmented Reality (AR), with in addition to depth perception studies, the development of hardware for AR such as head-worn displays (HWDs) and tracking probes.
In 1999, the M.I.N.D. Labs and ELF-France Acquitaine provided together the funding required for the development of our first Head-mounted Projection Display (HMPD) and the first most compact projector at the time was designed that can be worn on the head with 6g per eye lenses.
We created content for displays especially in the area of medical imaging and military training - see our MEDIA for the knee-joint video as part of the Virtual Reality Dynamic Anatomy (VRDA) tool – A project first funded by the NIH/NLM as a FIRST AWARD from 1997-2002.
The early 2000’s, the Research in the ODALab expanded to include research in optical imaging, such as in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). This area of research has bloomed to an active area of research in the ODALab where we focus on instrumentation development for high lateral-resolution imaging across extended depth-of-focus via Bessel Beam Imaging and Gabor Domain Optical Coherence Microscopy (GD-OCM).
The 2010’s - Recently, research in the ODALab, driven by critical needs, among others, in the applications of AR and medical research has started focused efforts in non-imaging optics, and optical design, fabrication, and testing of freeform optics.
Several national and international sponsors, collaborators and industrial partners participate in the research efforts. Governmental support is given through grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Health (NIH), the NYSTAR Foundation, STRICOM, the US Army Research Office, and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and private Foundations. Finally many industrial partners have committed to join force with the ODA Lab.
Today, we are partnering with Medical Centers to conduct research related to the Upper Airways [MD Anderson Cancer Center Orlando], the Human Eye [URMC], Skin [URMC], and the Oral Cavity [URMC]. | <urn:uuid:c95fa007-5f28-4f3e-8458-8709119d8285> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.odalab-spectrum.org/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398075.47/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00132-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.907728 | 567 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Typically on Earth, days usually have a temperature maximum somewhere after lunch, and a minimum during the night. But for Mars, things are pretty different:
“We see a temperature maximum in the middle of the day, but we also see a temperature maximum a little after midnight,” said Armin Kleinboehl of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who is the lead author of a new report on these findings.
Temperatures swing as much as 32 degrees Celsius (58 Fahrenheit) in this odd, bipolar type of climate – as detected by the orbiter’s Mars Climate Sounder instrument.
Global changes in wind, temperature and pressure repeating each day or fraction of a day are called atmospheric tides. Unlike oceanic tides, which are caused by gravity, atmospheric tides are caused by variation in heating between day and night. Earth has atmospheric tides as well, but they produce very little difference in the lower atmosphere. When there’s one cycle repeating throughout the day, it’s called diurnal; when it happens twice a day, it’s called semi-diurnal.
“We were surprised to find this strong twice-a-day structure in the temperatures of the non-dusty Mars atmosphere,” Kleinboehl said. “While the diurnal tide as a dominant temperature response to the day-night cycle of solar heating on Mars has been known for decades, the discovery of a persistent semi-diurnal response even outside of major dust storms was quite unexpected, and caused us to wonder what drove this response.”
But why does this happen? Kleinboehl and his team have found the answer in the water-ice clouds of Mars. The Martian atmosphere has water-ice clouds for most of the year. During daytime, equatorial clouds at 10-30 km from the ground absorb infrared light emitted from the surface during daytime. These clouds are very thin, and relatively transparent – this absorbtion is enough to heat the middle atmosphere each day. The observed semi-diurnal temperature pattern, with its maximum temperature swings occurring away from the tropics, was also unexpected, but has been replicated in Mars climate models when the radiative effects of water-ice clouds are included.
“We think of Mars as a cold and dry world with little water, but there is actually more water vapor in the Martian atmosphere than in the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere,” Kleinboehl said. “Water-ice clouds have been known to form in regions of cold temperatures, but the feedback of these clouds on the Mars temperature structure had not been appreciated. We know now that we will have to consider the cloud structure if we want to understand the Martian atmosphere. This is comparable to scientific studies concerning Earth’s atmosphere, where we have to better understand clouds to estimate their influence on climate.”
Via NASAEnjoyed this story? Like ZME Science on facebook: | <urn:uuid:0b0c7c37-533d-43b4-9469-033f7f695003> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.zmescience.com/science/geology/mars-water-thermal-pattern-13062013/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397797.77/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00194-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955988 | 610 | 4.25 | 4 |
The image reveals dramatic ridges and valleys of dust, serpent-head "pillars of creation," and gaseous filaments glowing fiercely under torrential ultraviolet radiation. The region is on the edge of a dark molecular cloud that is an incubator for the birth of new stars.
The high-energy radiation blazing out from clusters of hot young stars is sculpting the wall of the nebula by slowly eroding it away. Another young cluster may be hidden beneath a circle of brilliant blue gas.
In this approximately 100-light-year-wide fantasy-like landscape, dark towers of dust rise above a glowing wall of gases on the surface of the molecular cloud. The seahorse-shaped pillar at lower, right is approximately 20 light-years long, roughly four times the distance between our sun and the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
Obama's birthplace? Nooooo... Much better:
In commemoration of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope completing its 100,000th orbit during its 18th year of exploration and discovery, scientists aimed Hubble to take a snapshot of a dazzling region of celestial birth and renewal. Hubble peered into a small portion of the Tarantula nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074. The region is a firestorm of raw stellar creation, perhaps triggered by a nearby supernova explosion. It lies about 170,000 light-years away and is one of the most active star-forming regions in our local group of galaxies.
Do you get the feeling that the gentleman from NASA that wrote this really really likes stars.....? | <urn:uuid:a2f03aa9-8785-466b-834c-056dfa09ca40> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://rightwingsparkle.blogspot.com/2008/08/so-cool.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398516.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00145-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927831 | 316 | 3.09375 | 3 |
rcirc is an Emacs IRC client.
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a multi-user chat protocol. Users communicate with each other in real-time. Communication occurs both in topic channels which are collections of many users, or privately, with just one other user.
Copyright © 2006–2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with the Front-Cover Texts being “A GNU Manual”, and with the Back-Cover Texts as in (a) below. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.
(a) The FSF’s Back-Cover Text is: “You have the freedom to copy and modify this GNU manual.”
|Fighting Information Overload|
|Hacking and Tweaking|
|GNU Free Documentation License|
Detailed Node Listing
|Internet Relay Chat|
|Getting started with rcirc|
|Useful IRC commands|
|Fighting Information Overload|
|Hacking and Tweaking|
|Skipping /away messages using handlers|
|Using fly spell mode|
|Changing the time stamp format|
|Defining a new command|
|Reconnecting after you have lost the connection|
This chapter contains a brief introduction to IRC (Internet Relay Chat),
and a quick tutorial on
|• Internet Relay Chat:|
|• Getting started with rcirc:|
1.1 Internet Relay Chat
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of instant communication over the Internet. It is mainly designed for group (many-to-many) communication in discussion forums called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication.
Contrary to most Instant Messenger (IM) systems, users usually don’t connect to a central server. Instead, users connect to a random server in a network, and servers relay messages from one to the next.
Here’s a typical example:
When you connect to the Freenode network
http://freenode.net/), you point your IRC client at the
irc.freenode.net. That server will redirect your client
to a random server on the network, such as
Once you’re connected, you can send messages to all other users
connected to the same network, and you can join all channels on the same
network. You might join the
#emacs and the
channels, for example. (Typically, channel names begin with a hash
Once you have joined a channel, anything you type will be broadcast to all the other users on the same channel.
If you want to address someone specifically, for example as an answer to a question, it is customary to prefix the message with the nick followed by a colon, like this:
deego: fsbot rules!
Since this is so common, you can use TAB to do nick completion.
1.2 Getting started with rcirc
Use the command M-x irc to connect using the defaults. See Configuration, if you want to change the defaults.
Use C-u M-x irc if you don’t want to use the defaults, e.g., if you want to connect to a different network, or connect to the same network using a different nick. This will prompt you for four things:
- IRC Server
What server do you want to connect to? All the servers in a particular network are equivalent. Some networks use a round-robin system where a single server redirects new connections to a random server in the network.
irc.freenode.netis such a server for the Freenode network. Freenode provides the network “for the Free and Open Source Software communities, for not-for-profit organizations and for related communities and organizations.”
- IRC Port
All network connections require a port. Just as web servers and clients use port 80 per default, IRC uses port 6667 per default. You rarely have to use a different port.
- IRC Nick
Every users needs a handle on-line. You will automatically be assigned a slightly different nick if your chosen nick is already in use. If your
alex, and this nick is already in use, you might for example get assigned the nick
- IRC Channels
A space separated list of channels you want to join when connecting. You don’t need to join any channels, if you just want to have one-to-one conversations with friends on the same network. If you’re new to the Freenode network, join
#emacs, the channel about all things Emacs, or join
#rcirc, the channel about
When you have answered these questions,
rcirc will create a server
buffer, which will be named something like *irc.freenode.net*,
and a channel buffer for each of the channels you wanted to join.
To talk in a channel, just type what you want to say in a channel buffer, and press RET.
If you want to paste multiple lines, such as source code, you can use C-c C-c to edit your message in a separate buffer. Use C-c C-c to finish editing. You still need to press RET to send it, though. Generally, IRC users don’t like people pasting more than around four lines of code, so use with care.
Once you are connected to multiple channels, or once you’ve turned you attention to other buffers in Emacs, you probably want to be notified of any activity in channels not currently visible. All you need to do is switch channel tracking on using M-x rcirc-track-minor-mode. To make this permanent, add the following to your init file:
Use C-c C-SPC to switch to these buffers.
This is the reference section of the manual. It is not complete. For
complete listings of
rcirc features, use Emacs built-in
|• rcirc commands:|
|• Useful IRC commands:|
2.1 rcirc commands
This is a list of commands that you may use in
rcirc. It is not
complete. For a complete listing, press C-h m in an
In addition to using regular Emacs key bindings, you can call them by
typing them into an
For instance, instead of using the command C-c C-j to join a new
channel, you may type this in an
rcirc buffer, and press RET:
This is why you cannot start a message with a slash. You will have to precede the command with a space, or rewrite your message in order to send it to a channel.
Many commands take parameters. IRC commands usually ignore string delimiters. Neither quote nor double-quote have special meanings in IRC.
/nick "alex schroeder"
This will try to change your nick to
"alex. Usually this will
fail because the double quote character is not a valid character for
These commands are case insensitive.
If a command isn’t known by
rcirc, it will simply be sent along to the
server. There is a list of some useful commands like that in the next
- C-c C-j
This joins a channel such as
#emacs. On most networks, anybody can create new channels. If you want to talk with some friends, for example, all you have to do is agree on a valid channel name and join that channel. (Also
- C-c C-p
This leaves the current channel. You can optionally provide a reason for parting. When you kill a channel buffer, you automatically part the corresponding channel. (Also
/part you are too weird!.)
- C-c C-r
This changes your nick to some other name. Your nick must be unique across the network. Most networks don’t allow too many nick changes in quick succession, and have restrictions on the valid characters in nick names. (Also
- C-c C-w
Gives you some basic information about a nick. This often includes what other channels people are on. (Also
- C-c C-q
Starts a one-to-one conversation with another person on the same network. A new buffer will be created for this conversation. It works like a channel with only two members. (Also
- C-c RET
This sends a single message to a nick. Like with C-c C-q, a new buffer is created, where the response from the other party will show up. (Also
/msg nickserv identify secret.)
- C-c C-x
This disconnects from the server and parts all channels. You can optionally provide a reason for quitting. When you kill the server buffer, you automatically quit the server and part all channels. (Also
2.2 Useful IRC commands
As mentioned, if a command isn’t known by
rcirc, it will simply be sent
along to the server. Some such commands are available on nearly all IRC
servers, such as:
This sets your status as “being away” if you provide a reason, or sets your status as “being back” if you do not. People can use the C-c C-w command to check your status. Example:
Typical IRC servers implement many more commands. You can read more about the fantastic world of IRC online at the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) help archive.
These are some variables you can change to configure
rcirc to your
This variable contains an alist of servers to connect to by default and the keywords parameters to use. The keyword parameters are optional. If you don’t provide any, the defaults as documented below will be used.
The most important parameter is the
:channelsparameter. It controls which channels you will join by default as soon as you are connected to the server.
Here’s an example of how to set it:
(add-to-list 'rcirc-server-alist '("otherworlders.org" :channels ("#FUDGE" "#game-design")))
By default you will be connected to the
This describes which channels to join when connecting to the server. If absent, no channels will be connected to automatically.
This variable is used for the default nick. It defaults to the login name returned by
(setq rcirc-default-nick "kensanata")
This variable contains the default port to connect to. It is 6667 by default and rarely needs changing.
This variable contains the default user name to report to the server. It defaults to the login name returned by
user-login-name, just like
This variable is used to set your “real name” on IRC. It defaults to the name returned by
user-full-name. If you want to hide your full name, you might want to set it to some pseudonym.
(setq rcirc-default-full-name "Curious Minds Want To Know")
This variable is an alist used to automatically identify yourself on networks. Each sublist starts with a regular expression that is compared to the server address you’re connecting to. The second element in the list is a symbol representing the method to use, followed by the arguments this method requires.
Here is an example to illustrate how you would set it:
(setq rcirc-authinfo '(("freenode" nickserv "bob" "p455w0rd") ("freenode" chanserv "bob" "#bobland" "passwd99") ("bitlbee" bitlbee "robert" "sekrit")))
And here are the valid method symbols and the arguments they require:
Use this symbol if you need to identify yourself as follows when connecting to a network:
/msg nickserv identify secret. The necessary arguments are the nickname you want to use this for, and the password to use.
Before you can use this method, you will have to register your nick and pick a password for it. Contact
nickservand check out the details. (Using
/msg nickserv help, for example.)
Use this symbol if you need to identify yourself as follows if you want to join a particular channel:
/msg chanserv identify #underground secret. The necessary arguments are the nickname and channel you want to use this for, and the password to use.
Before you can use this method, a channel contact must tell you about the password to use. Contact
chanservand check out the details. (Using
/msg chanserv help, for example.)
Use this symbol if you need to identify yourself in the Bitlbee channel as follows:
identify secret. The necessary arguments are the nickname you want to use this for, and the password to use.
Bitlbee acts like an IRC server, but in fact it is a gateway to a lot of other instant messaging services. You can either install Bitlbee locally or use a public Bitlbee server. There, you need to create an account with a password. This is the nick and password you need to provide for the bitlbee authentication method.
Later, you will tell Bitlbee about your accounts and passwords on all the other instant messaging services, and Bitlbee will log you in. All
rcircneeds to know, is the login to your Bitlbee account. Don’t confuse the Bitlbee account with all the other accounts.
3 Fighting Information Overload
This is the section of the manual that caters to the busy person
online. There are support channels with several hundred people in
them. Trying to follow a conversation in these channels can be a
daunting task. This chapters tells you how
rcirc can help.
Most people want a notification when something is said on a channel they have joined, particularly if they have been addressed directly. There is a global minor mode that will do this kind of tracking for you. All you need to do is switch it on using M-x rcirc-track-minor-mode. To make this permanent, add the following to your init file:
When other people say things in buffers that are currently buried (no window is showing them), the mode line will now show you the abbreviated channel or nick name. Use C-c C-SPC to switch to these buffers.
If you prefer not to load
rcirc immediately, you can delay the
activation of this mode:
(add-hook 'rcirc-mode-hook (lambda () (rcirc-track-minor-mode 1)))
If you’ve joined a very active support channel, tracking activity is no longer useful. The channel will be always active. Switching to active channels using C-c C-SPC no longer works as expected.
The solution is to mark this channel as a low priority channel. Use C-c C-l to make the current channel a low-priority channel. Low priority channels have the modeline indicator “LowPri”. C-c C-SPC will not switch to low priority channels unless you use the C-u prefix.
If you prefer a channel to never show up in the modeline, then you have to ignore it. Use C-c TAB to ignore the current channel.
The most important command available to the discerning IRC user is
/ignore. It’s the big equalizer online: If people aggravate
you, just ignore them.
This is of course a crude all-or-nothing solution. Fear not,
rcirc offers alternatives: You can “brighten” your buddies
and “dim” certain other nicks that you don’t want to ignore
This command toggles the ignore status of a nick, if you provide one. If you don’t provide a nick, the command lists all the nicks you are ignoring. All messages by ignored nicks are—you guessed it—ignored. Since only “operators” can kick people from channels, the ignore command is often the only way to deal with some of the more obnoxious fellows online. Example:
This command toggles the bright status of a nick, if you provide one. If you don’t provide a nick, the command lists all the “brightened” nicks. All messages by brightened nicks are—you guessed it—brightened. Use this for your friends. Example:
This command toggles the dim status of a nick, if you provide one. If you don’t provide a nick, the command lists all the “dimmed” nicks. All messages by dimmed nicks are—you guessed it—dimmed. Use this for boring people and bots. If you are tracking channel activity, messages by dimmed nicks will not register as activity. Example:
On a busy channel, you might want to ignore all activity (using C-c TAB) and just watch for certain keywords. The following command allows you to highlight certain keywords:
This command toggles the highlighting of a keyword, if you provide one. If you don’t provide a keyword, the current keywords are listed. Example:
In busy channels you might not be interested in all the joining, parting, quitting, and renaming that goes on. You can omit those notices using C-c C-o.
You can control which notices get omitted via the
rcirc-omit-responses variable. Here’s an example of how to
omit away messages:
(setq rcirc-omit-responses '("JOIN" "PART" "QUIT" "NICK" "AWAY"))
Notice that these messages will not be omitted if the nick in question
has recently been active. After all, you don’t want to continue a
conversation with somebody who just left. That’s why
checks recent lines in the buffer to figure out if a nick has been
active and only omits a message if the nick has not been active. The
rcirc considers is controlled by the
4 Hacking and Tweaking
Here are some examples of stuff you can do to configure
|• Skipping /away messages using handlers:|
|• Using fly spell mode:|
|• Scrolling conservatively:|
|• Changing the time stamp format:|
|• Defining a new command:|
|• Reconnecting after you have lost the connection:|
/away messages using handlers
The IRC protocol specifies how certain events are signaled from server
to client. These events have numbers and are dealt with using so-called
handlers. You can override existing handlers by exploiting the naming
convention adopted for
Here’s how to stop
rcirc from printing
rcirc doesn’t define a 301 handler, you don’t need to
rcirc before defining the handler:
(defun rcirc-handler-301 (process cmd sender args) "/away message handler.")
4.2 Using fly spell mode
The following code activates Fly Spell Mode
(add-hook 'rcirc-mode-hook (lambda () (flyspell-mode 1)))
See Flyspell mode in The GNU Emacs Manual, for details.
4.3 Scrolling conservatively
IRC buffers are constantly growing. If you want to see as much as
possible at all times, you would want the prompt at the bottom of the
window when possible. The following snippet uses a local value for
scroll-conservatively to achieve this:
(add-hook 'rcirc-mode-hook (lambda () (set (make-local-variable 'scroll-conservatively) 8192)))
See Scrolling conservatively in The GNU Emacs Manual, for details.
4.4 Changing the time stamp format
rcirc-time-format is the format used for the time stamp. Here’s
how to include the date in the time stamp:
(setq rcirc-time-format "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M ")
4.5 Defining a new command
Here’s a simple new command,
/sv. With it, you can boast about
your IRC client. It shows how you can use
define new commands.
We’re waiting for the definition of this command until
rcirc is loaded
defun-rcirc-command is not yet available, and without
rcirc loaded, the command wouldn’t do us much good anyway.
(eval-after-load 'rcirc '(defun-rcirc-command sv (arg) "Boast about rcirc." (interactive "i") (rcirc-send-message process target (concat "I use " rcirc-id-string))))
4.6 Reconnecting after you have lost the connection
If you’re chatting from a laptop, then you might be familiar with this problem: When your laptop falls asleep and wakes up later, your IRC client doesn’t realize that it has been disconnected. It takes several minutes until the client decides that the connection has in fact been lost. The simple solution is to use M-x rcirc. The problem is that this opens an additional connection, so you’ll have two copies of every channel buffer, one dead and one live.
The real answer, therefore, is a
(eval-after-load 'rcirc '(defun-rcirc-command reconnect (arg) "Reconnect the server process." (interactive "i") (unless process (error "There's no process for this target")) (let* ((server (car (process-contact process))) (port (process-contact process :service)) (nick (rcirc-nick process)) channels query-buffers) (dolist (buf (buffer-list)) (with-current-buffer buf (when (eq process (rcirc-buffer-process)) (remove-hook 'change-major-mode-hook 'rcirc-change-major-mode-hook) (if (rcirc-channel-p rcirc-target) (setq channels (cons rcirc-target channels)) (setq query-buffers (cons buf query-buffers)))))) (delete-process process) (rcirc-connect server port nick rcirc-default-user-name rcirc-default-full-name channels))))
Appendix A GNU Free Documentation License
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc. http://fsf.org/ Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document free in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.
This License is a kind of “copyleft”, which means that derivative works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense. It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft license designed for free software.
We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software, because free software needs free documentation: a free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the software does. But this License is not limited to software manuals; it can be used for any textual work, regardless of subject matter or whether it is published as a printed book. We recommend this License principally for works whose purpose is instruction or reference.
- APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
This License applies to any manual or other work, in any medium, that contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it can be distributed under the terms of this License. Such a notice grants a world-wide, royalty-free license, unlimited in duration, to use that work under the conditions stated herein. The “Document”, below, refers to any such manual or work. Any member of the public is a licensee, and is addressed as “you”. You accept the license if you copy, modify or distribute the work in a way requiring permission under copyright law.
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The “Invariant Sections” are certain Secondary Sections whose titles are designated, as being those of Invariant Sections, in the notice that says that the Document is released under this License. If a section does not fit the above definition of Secondary then it is not allowed to be designated as Invariant. The Document may contain zero Invariant Sections. If the Document does not identify any Invariant Sections then there are none.
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The Document may include Warranty Disclaimers next to the notice which states that this License applies to the Document. These Warranty Disclaimers are considered to be included by reference in this License, but only as regards disclaiming warranties: any other implication that these Warranty Disclaimers may have is void and has no effect on the meaning of this License.
- VERBATIM COPYING
You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially, provided that this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License. You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute. However, you may accept compensation in exchange for copies. If you distribute a large enough number of copies you must also follow the conditions in section 3.
You may also lend copies, under the same conditions stated above, and you may publicly display copies.
- COPYING IN QUANTITY
If you publish printed copies (or copies in media that commonly have printed covers) of the Document, numbering more than 100, and the Document’s license notice requires Cover Texts, you must enclose the copies in covers that carry, clearly and legibly, all these Cover Texts: Front-Cover Texts on the front cover, and Back-Cover Texts on the back cover. Both covers must also clearly and legibly identify you as the publisher of these copies. The front cover must present the full title with all words of the title equally prominent and visible. You may add other material on the covers in addition. Copying with changes limited to the covers, as long as they preserve the title of the Document and satisfy these conditions, can be treated as verbatim copying in other respects.
If the required texts for either cover are too voluminous to fit legibly, you should put the first ones listed (as many as fit reasonably) on the actual cover, and continue the rest onto adjacent pages.
If you publish or distribute Opaque copies of the Document numbering more than 100, you must either include a machine-readable Transparent copy along with each Opaque copy, or state in or with each Opaque copy a computer-network location from which the general network-using public has access to download using public-standard network protocols a complete Transparent copy of the Document, free of added material. If you use the latter option, you must take reasonably prudent steps, when you begin distribution of Opaque copies in quantity, to ensure that this Transparent copy will remain thus accessible at the stated location until at least one year after the last time you distribute an Opaque copy (directly or through your agents or retailers) of that edition to the public.
It is requested, but not required, that you contact the authors of the Document well before redistributing any large number of copies, to give them a chance to provide you with an updated version of the Document.
You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you release the Modified Version under precisely this License, with the Modified Version filling the role of the Document, thus licensing distribution and modification of the Modified Version to whoever possesses a copy of it. In addition, you must do these things in the Modified Version:
- Use in the Title Page (and on the covers, if any) a title distinct from that of the Document, and from those of previous versions (which should, if there were any, be listed in the History section of the Document). You may use the same title as a previous version if the original publisher of that version gives permission.
- List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this requirement.
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- Preserve all the copyright notices of the Document.
- Add an appropriate copyright notice for your modifications adjacent to the other copyright notices.
- Include, immediately after the copyright notices, a license notice giving the public permission to use the Modified Version under the terms of this License, in the form shown in the Addendum below.
- Preserve in that license notice the full lists of Invariant Sections and required Cover Texts given in the Document’s license notice.
- Include an unaltered copy of this License.
- Preserve the section Entitled “History”, Preserve its Title, and add to it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page. If there is no section Entitled “History” in the Document, create one stating the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as stated in the previous sentence.
- Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document for public access to a Transparent copy of the Document, and likewise the network locations given in the Document for previous versions it was based on. These may be placed in the “History” section. You may omit a network location for a work that was published at least four years before the Document itself, or if the original publisher of the version it refers to gives permission.
- For any section Entitled “Acknowledgements” or “Dedications”, Preserve the Title of the section, and preserve in the section all the substance and tone of each of the contributor acknowledgements and/or dedications given therein.
- Preserve all the Invariant Sections of the Document, unaltered in their text and in their titles. Section numbers or the equivalent are not considered part of the section titles.
- Delete any section Entitled “Endorsements”. Such a section may not be included in the Modified Version.
- Do not retitle any existing section to be Entitled “Endorsements” or to conflict in title with any Invariant Section.
- Preserve any Warranty Disclaimers.
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|Jump to:||C R T|
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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U W Y
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U W Y | <urn:uuid:96bd0b14-c875-41a4-8f63-913feb6def25> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/rcirc.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398216.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00014-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.870383 | 9,651 | 2.59375 | 3 |
4.8.2 Weak Shear and Amplification Bias Near Radiosources
Bartelmann & Schneider (1993a, b) definitely confirmed the correlation found by Fugmann (1990) between radio-sources from the 1-Jy catalog and the distribution of galaxies from the Lick catalogue. They also found a strong correlation with the IRAS catalog (Bartelmann & Schneider 1994) which they interpreted as a lensing effect on distant radio sources by foreground dark matter overdensities associated with the distribution of galaxies. The correlation is observed on 10 arcmin. scales and its strength is rather compatible with that expected from cluster-mass systems. If such dark matter inhomogeneities are distributed on large scales, they could magnify and, in exceptional cases, split images of distant radio-sources and quasars. A few overbright objects or unexplained multiply-imaged quasars could be such lensed systems. The interpretation of Bartelmann & Schneider may have found a first spectacular confirmation through the measurement of an almost circular weak shear near the field of Q2345+007 by Bonnet et al. (1993). It is interpreted as gravitational distortion by a cluster-like system of matter. This explains the large angular separation of the quasar pairs. Although no distant cluster is visible so far on the deepest CCD images, the result is reinforced by the observation of an arc with a center of curvature exactly at the center of the shear field. And to some extent, the detection of an arc in the field of the double quasar Q2345+007 (Bernstein et al. 1993) is almost comparable, although the deflecting galaxy has been clearly seen.
Furthermore, by observing the weak gravitational shear in the vicinity of a selected sample of radio-sources and quasars at a redshift of about 1 (the mean redshift of background sources), we could try to test the Bartelmann & Schneider hypothesis. The best observational strategy is to preselect the brightest objects both in the optical and at radio wavelengths in order to benefit from the possible double magnification bias suggested by Borgeest, Linde & Refsdal (1991). This would significantly increase the probability that the selected source is really a magnified object. If a dark cluster-mass is responsible for the magnification, we could measure a weak shear in the field of the radio-sources and quasars (7 x 7 arcmin for available CCDs at CFHT) with an amplitude of about 10-2. This would provide a direct proof that the correlation observed by Bartelmann & Schneider is a lensing effect!
In summary, the possibility of measuring the weak shear around bright isolated galaxies, compact groups of galaxies and clusters or large scale inhomogeneities could allow us to directly investigate the mass spectrum of the largest gravitational systems of the universe from their lensing effects. Therefore, this new gravitational lensing topic should play a major role in the understanding of the formation of large scale structure and the distribution and possible nature of the dark matter. | <urn:uuid:21780910-e2ee-4847-a508-6eb7f6074171> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Mellier/Mellier4_8_2.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394605.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00092-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916043 | 630 | 3.09375 | 3 |
Originally Posted by Wikipedia
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC (18 March 1893 – 4 November 1918) was a British poet and soldier, one of the leading poets of the First World War. His shocking, realistic war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare was heavily influenced by his friend Siegfried Sassoon and sat in stark contrast to both the public perception of war at the time, and to the confidently patriotic verse written earlier by war poets such as Rupert Brooke. Some of his best-known works—most of which were published posthumously—include "Dulce et Decorum Est", "Insensibility", "Anthem for Doomed Youth", "Futility" and "Strange Meeting". His preface intended for a book of poems to be published in 1919 contains numerous well-known phrases, especially "War, and the pity of War", and "the Poetry is in the pity".
He was killed in action at the Battle of the Sambre a week before the war ended. Ironically, the telegram from the War Office announcing his death was delivered to his mother's home as her town's church bells were ringing in celebration of the Armistice when the war ended.
It's Remembrance Day this week and I urge everyone to read this. It depicts the war so vividly that you'll find it hard to hold back the tears. Please post here if you see any formatting errors, mistakes or would just like me to tweak a bit!
With thanks to:
- For creating the foundation of this upload, which you can find here
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive
- For providing the text necessary for the corrections to the above
This work is assumed to be in the Life+70 public domain OR the copyright holder has given specific permission for distribution. Copyright laws differ throughout the world, and it may still be under copyright in some countries. Before downloading, please check your country's copyright laws. If the book is under copyright in your country, do not download or redistribute this work.
To report a copyright violation you can contact us here | <urn:uuid:e68ffd4f-b815-4250-a958-a9408d7e5e14> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1201792&postcount=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403502.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00007-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963472 | 426 | 3.171875 | 3 |
Underdevelopment and Poverty in Africa Need to be Countered to Reduce Disaster Vulnerability
The UN special humanitarian envoy for the Horn of Africa, Kjell Magne Bondevik, has urged governments and aid agencies to address the issues of underdevelopment and poverty, which exacerbate people’s vulnerability during natural disasters, such as the prolonged drought that has destroyed the livelihoods of millions of people in eastern Africa.
An estimated 8 million people in the Horn of Africa are in need of humanitarian assistance because of the extended drought. A large share of the estimated 25 million pastoralists the Horn of Africa have lost all or most of their livestock due to lack of water and pasture. Given the magnitude of livestock losses, full recovery will likely take years or even decades.
Although recent rainfall in some of the hardest hit areas had mitigated effects of the drought, precipitation had led to flooding, loss of already weakened livestock, hindered access to affected populations, and increased the risk of waterborne diseases.
- Djibouti is experiencing its fourth consecutive year of drought, and its population's capacity to cope has been seriously eroded due to widespread poverty and lack of resources.
- Ethiopian pastoralists affected by the drought told Bondevik that they most desired recognition and appreciation of their lifestyle.
- Eritrea is trying to reduce its dependence on humanitarian aid. The number of NGOs working in the country has shrunk from 37 to 13, and in July 2005, the U.S. Agency for International Development—Eritrea’s largest donor of food aid—was asked to stop operations.
- In war-scarred Somalia, Bondevik stressed the importance of improving security to enable humanitarian agencies to reach those affected by drought, but he urged the international community to stop regarding Somalia as merely a failed state and to acknowledge reconciliation and rebuilding efforts.
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, “Horn of Africa: Invest in Development to Reduce Drought Vulnerability - UN Envoy,” IRIN News, 2 May 2006. | <urn:uuid:7d424a71-cf4d-44e1-975e-8e362615ecbb> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4366 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403825.35/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00162-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945551 | 415 | 3.03125 | 3 |
A Comprehensive Health Care Information Resource
Stop letting your skin care worsened
your Eczema conditions
HOME > ABOUT ECZEMA
Eczema is a general term for skin inflammation which has symptoms of dryness, severe itchiness and sometimes flaking and redness. This skin condition is very itchy and may cause disruption in activities and even disrupt sleep.
Dermatitis may also be another term for eczema and can be used interchangeably. There are severe forms of eczemas where there is skin flaking and terrible itching. If not treated, eczema can result to skin lesions and possible skin infection due to persistent scratching.
The specific cause of eczema is unknown although there are a number of factors that can cause dermatitis. Eczema may be found in just a small patch of skin or in a much larger area of the body.
As mentioned, the specific cause of eczema is unknown but there have been many factors related to the incidence of eczema. Here are some possible causes:
• Eczema is also related to allergic reactions of the body and can be associated with the body’s reactions to allergen as seen in asthma and hay fever.
• Irritating substances that come in contact with the skin may also cause eczema. These substances can be soaps, detergent powder, chemical based cleaners and engine oils.
• There are also substances that may cause severe allergic reaction to the body and in turn can be possible causes of eczema. These substances are often found on common products like plastics, leather and rubber.
• Young babies often get a form of infantile eczema which is found below their chins. This is usually caused by wetness from dribbling.
• Gravitational eczema is a form of eczema caused by the appearance of varicose veins.
There may be other causes of this debilitating skin condition and it is very important therefore to consult a doctor regarding diagnosis and appropriate treatment specific for your eczema cause.
Preventing eczema attacks often involve avoiding objects or substances that causes eczema. Taking antihistamines may also decrease eczema attacks. Apply ointments or creams that increase moisture on skin. A soap substitute is often advised for patients with highly sensitive skin and severe cases of eczema, for example The DermCare System, specifically for people with Eczema and Dermatitis. For more details about DermCare System, read Zenmed® Review.
If you have been diagnosed with contact dermatitis, it is essential to know what kind of substance irritates your skin more and avoid contact as much as possible. Use protective clothing such as aprons, gloves or mask when dealing with chemicals or substances at work.
Never self medicate when it comes to eczema and always follow your doctor’s advice especially when managing your symptoms.
Although there may be several known causes of eczema the main symptoms of this skin condition are still the same. A person with eczema usually have skin itching and redness of the affected area. There may be blisters that appear that may burst when scratched.
Skin folds are not immune to eczema and these areas may have the worst symptoms like severe itchiness and redness. It is impossible to resist scratching skin affected by eczema and this often results to bursting of the skin lesions and possible skin infection. Frequent scratching often makes the skin crusty and moist.
If left untreated eczema symptoms may become worse. Intense scratching may develop as well as lead to skin damage and infection.
There is currently no cure for eczema but over time, experts have found treatments that were significant in reducing symptoms of this skin condition.
1 Antihistamines are often prescribed by your doctor to control your allergies. Careful not to drive or operate machinery while on antihistamines since most cause drowsiness and sleepiness.
2 Moisturizers are also advised by your doctor to help replenish your skin’s moisture and prevent subsequent scaling and itching.
3 A topical steroid is also advised by your doctor to control your skin’s allergic reaction thus reducing inflammation and reduce itching. Your doctor will advice the appropriate strength of topical steroid for your specific condition.
4 Antibiotics are often prescribed to control skin infection. Lesion can be infected over time due to scratching and rubbing and thus a topical or oral antibiotic cream is advised.
5 Herbal or home remedies can also be used to control eczema symptoms. These treatments range from the use of essential oils, tars and also mentholated creams and rubs.
A skin specialist or a dermatologist is the ideal person to diagnose and treat eczema symptoms. There are great advancements in controlling eczema that he might use like immunosuppressant medications and the most recent advancement in the treatment of this skin condition, ultra violet light treatment. | <urn:uuid:4a297cb5-43f9-4b8c-a921-d080cdefb39e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.10hairloss.com/eczemastreatment/about-eczema.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399428.8/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00195-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949985 | 1,024 | 3.25 | 3 |
A craft cannot be learned by reading alone; practice is also necessary. To learn best, you need a well-defined task at an appropriate level of difficulty. Python Practice Projects is such a collection of problems, each designed to straddle the line between toy example and production system.
All too often the answer to, "What is a good project for learning programming?" is "Whatever interests you." Not too helpful eh?
Here is a set of practice problems that you can really sink your teeth into. These are stretch problems. Don't expect them to be easy. The links below contain your project starter kit. Each problem was selected for both learning value and availability of high quality reference implementations.
As each problem gets fleshed out, I'll move them from Practice Project Ideas into the Detailed Practice Projects section.
What are you waiting for? Get Coding!
Detailed Practice Projects
Other Python Project Ideas
- Web Stack
- HTTP Library
- Syntax Highlighter
- Text Editor
- Regular Expression Engine
- HTML Parser | <urn:uuid:a045f53b-5f05-4036-a1a7-24214c963c83> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://pythonpracticeprojects.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393442.26/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00050-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929618 | 215 | 2.609375 | 3 |
- Word Combinations (adjective)
|part of speech:
||bitterly mocking; derisive; scornful.
Addressing the police detective in a sardonic tone, the suspect said, "You can't prove a thing, and you know it."
- derisive, mocking, sarcastic, scornful
- similar words:
- acerbic, contemptuous, cynical, disdainful, mordant, wry
||acid, acrid, incisive, quizzical, satirical, vicious
||sardonically (adv.), sardonicism (n.) | <urn:uuid:0aa72a33-c110-4c07-b59e-b074ee05c175> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.wordsmyth.net/?rid=36554 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403502.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00047-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.717205 | 125 | 2.53125 | 3 |
A fractal is a geometric object that retains its complexity under any level of magnification. Many fractals are self-similar in that the fractal image is infinitely repeated on a smaller scale as one "zooms" into the object. The most famous of the fractal objects is the Mandelbrot Set named after its discoverer, Benoit B. Mandelbrot. As you can see in the accompanying images, the Mandelbrot Set, a bug-shaped object, appears again and again as one magnifies the image.
Fractals are not simply an abstract geometric concept. Fractals appear everywhere in nature: from the irregular shape of a coastline to the outlines of trees, clouds, and mountains. The application of fractal geometry to science and physics has allowed mathematicians and physicists to describe phenomena that had, until recently, eluded description.
Fractals have also been used in image processing. Mathematician Michael F. Barnsley has applied fractal mathematics to the compression of digital photographs and video images. Because of their beauty, fractals are a popular source of computer art as well.
Ready to explore your own fractals? Great. Use the Java applet below.
This applet is generously provided by James Henstridge. | <urn:uuid:a020cd5e-b828-4884-856a-d0a8404a7b2e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.cakm.org/Course%20Technology/26748-8/tutorial.08/case3/fractal.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396538.42/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00200-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940654 | 261 | 3.296875 | 3 |
Are you suffering from Alzheimer's disease?
Alzheimer's disease is a degenerative disorder that affects the brain and causes dementia (cognitive and intellectual deterioration), especially late in life. It was named for Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915), a German neurologist who described it in 1907.
However, I believe that Alzheimer's disease existed in different description since the time of human race came to this world. The disease does not mean only for old aged people but all ages from young to old.
Symptoms of Alzheimer's disease varies widely and some may not be noticeable especially for young children especially teens. Although Alzheimer's disease is not a normal part of the aging process, the risk of developing the disease increases as people grow older.
Alzheimer's disease takes a devastating toll, not only on the patients, but also on those who love and care for them. Some patients experience immense fear and frustration as they struggle with once commonplace tasks and slowly lose their independence. Family, friends, and especially those who provide daily care suffer immeasurable pain and stress as they witness Alzheimer's disease slowly take their loved one from them.
The onset of Alzheimer's disease is usually very gradual. In the early stages, Alzheimer's patients have relatively mild problems learning new information and remembering where they have left common objects, such as keys or a wallet. In time, they begin to have trouble recollecting recent events and finding the right words to express themselves. As the disease progresses, patients may have difficulty remembering what day or month it is, or finding their way around familiar surroundings. They may develop a tendency to wander off and then be unable to find their way back. Patients often become irritable or withdrawn as they struggle with fear and frustration when once commonplace tasks become unfamiliar and intimidating. Behavioral changes may become more pronounced as patients become paranoid or delusional and unable to engage in normal conversation.
Doctors and scientists claim that brains of patients with Alzheimer's have distinctive formations, abnormally shaped proteins called tangles and plaques that are recognized as the hallmark of the disease, and these are related to memory. Tangles are long, slender tendrils found inside nerve cells, or neurons. Scientists have learned that when a protein called tau becomes altered, it may cause the characteristic tangles in the brain of an Alzheimer's patient.
In healthy brains, tau provides structural support for neurons, but in Alzheimer's patients this structural support collapses.
According to my study, it is not true. These distinctive formations of proteins are the byproducts caused by energy force of the electric static therapy from outer surface of the body. It is also not true according my research that people with a family history of Alzheimer's disease are more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease.
The causes of Alzheimer's disease remain a mystery among doctors and scientists of the world. According to doctors, Alzheimer's disease is only positively diagnosed by examining brain tissue under a microscope to see the hallmark plaques and tangles and this is only possible after a patient dies.
Isn't this a crazy way of diagnosis? As I mentioned previously, the hallmark plaques and tangles are the byproducts caused by the disease. Why can you not prevent to have such byproducts before you suffer from the disease? As a result, physicians rely on a series of other techniques to diagnose probable Alzheimer's disease in living patients. The physician also asks about the patient's family medical history to learn about any past serious illnesses, which may give a clue about the patient's current symptoms. As I mentioned, it is caused by the electric static therapy waves.
According to physicians I know, there is no known cure for Alzheimer's disease, and treatment focuses on lessening symptoms and attempting to slow the course of the disease. Drugs that increase or improve the function of brain acetylcholine, the neurotransmitter that affects memory, have been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease.
Called acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, these drugs have had modest but clearly positive effects on the symptoms of the disease. These drugs can benefit patients at all stages of illness, but they are particularly effective in the middle stage.
This finding corresponds with new evidence that low acetylcholine levels in patients with Alzheimer's disease may not be present in the earliest stage of the illness. Evidence shows that there is inflammation in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, which may be associated with the production of amyloid precursor protein. Studies are still underway by scientists of the world. | <urn:uuid:fdac75a4-3367-4d60-bc17-78b74d77184d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://mesinterapielektrik.blogspot.com/2010/02/dr-health-9000-vs-alzheimerpenuaan.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393093.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00156-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957051 | 925 | 2.96875 | 3 |
California was more than just a destination for grizzled mine workers looking to capitalize on the Gold Rush of the 1800s. It was also a destination for former slaves to begin new lives and earn economic freedom. However, under pressure from pro-slavery advocates from the South, a fugitive law was passed on this day in 1852, upending the lives of freed slaves throughout the state.
Although California was part of the Union and no longer a federal state, it was assumed that under the rules of the Constitution, freed slaves could enter without fear of capture as slavery was now outlawed. However, a southern politician that sat on the state’s assembly fought for a law that would retroactively name slaves who entered the state as fugitives.
These so-called “fugitive slave laws” were brazen attempts to return escaped slaves in other Southern states to their masters.
Ohio State University history professor Stacey Smith wrote extensively about the law in her 2013 book “Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction” and detailed the struggles of Carter Perkins, Robert Perkins, and Sandy Jones, three former slaves from Mississippi who headed to California. The trio amassed a small fortune in their time mining for gold in 1851, but a year later, their lives would change.
Ms. Smith writes:
Within less than a year of statehood, however, White southern-born politicians began to agitate for legal protections for masters who had taken their bondpeople into California when it was still a federal territory.
Led by assemblyman Henry Crabb, a pro-slavery Whig from Tennessee, these southerners asserted that the federal territories were the common property of all American citizens. Echoing the arguments of the Slave South’s most vocal spokesman, John C. Calhoun, they insisted that the U.S. Constitution guaranteed slaveholders the right to travel with their slave property in to any federal territory.
Neither Congress nor territorial governments could close slavery out of the territories. They therefore argued that California’s new antislavery constitution could not deprive masters of slaves who they brought before official statehood in September of 1850. Crabb and his southern-born allies in the pro-slavery branch of California’s Democratic Party pushed for a state fugitive slave law that would allow masters to hold the slaves who they had brought to California before statehood and take them back to the South. Any enslaved person who resisted this process would be criminalized as a fugitive slave.
Charles Perkins, who originally brought the trio of slaves with him to assist in mining as their former owner, was not successful in his mining efforts and left the slaves in California as he returned home. At the time, Charles struck an informal emancipation deal with the slaves, which stated that if they worked for one of Perkins’ friends for six months, they would be free to go. Operating under this assumption, the workers never thought that their freedom would be in any jeopardy.
But the Fugitive Slave law passed on April 15, 1852, and they were soon snatched from their homes by Green Perkins, a cousin of Charles Perkins.
After their capture, Robert Perkins, Carter Perkins, and Sandy Jones had the support of Sacramento’s small but vocal Black community and hired a White antislavery attorney, Cornelius Cole, to represent the men in court. Despite pro-slavery protests and threats to the judge, Cole was able to get the case tried in the state’s Supreme Court.
The high court ruled in favor of the law, however, and the deportation process began.
Smith says that the men allegedly escaped from their captors when a boat they were on made a stop in Panama. The fate of the three men has largely gone unknown and the Perkins slave case has been used as a benchmark of American History of the 1800s in recent times. | <urn:uuid:4026b326-3d50-4151-818f-b120a79daa71> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://newsone.com/3004849/fugitive-slave-act-california/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396887.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00119-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977659 | 805 | 4.28125 | 4 |
Town of Porter Historian Suzanne Simon Dietz will host a reception during the Holiday in the Village celebration Saturday, Dec. 14, in the Porter Historical Museum, located in the Red Brick School Village Center, 240 Lockport St., Youngstown. Visitors will have an opportunity to view the new display highlighting the town's bicentennial celebration.
In addition to working with Karen Noonan of the Town of Porter Historical Society, the two have completed research documenting the town's residents in 1813 and created a map of early settlements in Porter from 1800-29. While much has been written about the burning of Lewiston Dec. 19, 1813, Noonan points out that, until recently, little attention had been paid the burning of homes in the Town of Porter by British soldiers late in December 1813. "First they razed the small hamlet of Young's town, named after land owner John Young, then later in the month the soldiers moved along the lake shore burning homes and taking male prisoners back to the fort," says Noonan. "The soldiers traveled as far as 18 Mile Creek in what now is the Town of Newfane, burning a mill located on the creek which was considered an important military objective."
She adds a map of the area in the early 1800s and a booklet, "Early Town of Porter Residents 1800-1829," which provides a detailed list of those who lived in the town will be released Dec. 19, when students from Lewiston- Porter, Wilson, Stella Niagara and the Tuscarora Elementary Schools take part in an education program at Old Fort Niagara and Youngstown as part of Old Fort Niagara's bicentennial commemoration of the British attack. | <urn:uuid:45e0873b-4dcc-461f-a166-c858c15f75ef> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.wnypapers.com/news/article/current/2013/12/13/113942/new-bicentennial-display-in-youngstown | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393093.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00145-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967228 | 342 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Spider Pictures, Pictures of Arachnids, Facts, and Information
Pictures of spiders and other arachnids, including scorpions, with detailed information.
The arachnid family includes over 100,000 known species including spiders, scorpions, harvestmen, ticks, solifugae, and mites. Most of those species are terrestrial, but a few live in marine environments. Nearly all arachnids have eight legs, whereas insects only have six. The difference in the number legs is the most common way that people decipher insects from arachnids, but you can also distinguish them by remembering that arachnids never have antennas or wings.
Arachnids are mostly carnivorous and feed on pre-digested bodies of small animals and insects. Some arachnids use venom to kill their prey. Unlike other animals, which digest their food with acids once they are in their stomach, arachnids spit their digestive juices on their prey to break them down before they ingest them. Other arachnids, such as ticks and mites, are parasitic and feed off of the blood of other animals.
Some arachnids, such as spiders, lay eggs after mating. Conversely, scorpions and a few other species give birth to live young.
The most famous arachnids, spiders, make an amazing silk that they can use to make webs to catch their prey, spin their prey to restrain it, climb, make burrows, and hold sperm for short amounts of time. Some species of spider can even use threads of their silk to help them glide through the air!
Opiliones, also known as daddy longlegs, do not make silk or have venom. They gained their nickname from their very long legs. Some species have a leg span of 6 inches! They are completely harmless to humans and feed on plants, scavenge some decaying animals, and fecal matter. | <urn:uuid:d4445510-2144-49fa-afdb-780cf346e262> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.northrup.org/photos/spider/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395346.72/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00129-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968254 | 398 | 3.1875 | 3 |
Collecting a Gas by Water Displacement
The drawing on the right represents a general chemistry lab apparatus used for generating and collecting gases. A gas is generated by a chemical reaction in the flask, travels through the delivery tube, and rises into the collection tube.
The collection tube has been filled with water, then inverted into the pan of water. Atmospheric pressure pushing down on the water in the pan will keep the water in the tube from coming out.
As the gas rises in the collection tube, its pressure pushes the water out (displacement).
This apparatus allows the experiment to provide three important quantitative measurements of the gas in the collecting tube: volume, temperature, and pressure.
- Gas volume can be directly measured if there are graduations on the collecting tube. If there are no marks, make a pencil mark on the tube where the gas stops pushing the water out. After the experiment, fill the tube to this line with water, then transfer the water into a graduated cylinder.
- The assumption can be made that the temperature of the gas is the same as the water through which it bubbled.
- Pressure is a little more complicated. When the water levels inside and outside the collection tube are the same, the pressure of the gas inside the tube is exactly that of atmospheric pressure. Atmospheric pressure can be obtained from a class barometer or from a local weather Internet site.
The complication is this: any gas collected "over water" contains water vapor (another gas). Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures states that; the total pressure of any mixture of gases is equal to the sum of the individual pressures exerted by each gas.
To get the pressure of the collected gas, the water vapor pressure must be subtracted from the total. Chemical reference books provide charts for the vapor pressure at all temperatures. A basic water vapor pressure table is provided here. | <urn:uuid:3f173626-eb97-465b-8bdf-77ce13011d77> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://crescentok.com/staff/jaskew/ISR/chemistry/displacekey.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396029.85/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00028-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.897636 | 380 | 4.0625 | 4 |
Major Section: ACL2-BUILT-INS
Make-ord is the ordinal constructor. Its use is recommended instead of
cons to make ordinals. For a discussion of ordinals,
For any ordinal,
alpha < epsilon-0, there exist natural numbers
n, positive integers
x1, x2, ..., xn and ordinals
a1 > a2 > ... > an > 0 such that
alpha > a1 and
alpha = w^(a1)x1 + w^(a2)x2 + ... + w^(an)xn + p. We call
a1 the ``first
x1 the ``first coefficient'', and the remainder
(w^(a2)x2 + ... + w^(an)xn + p) the ``rest'' of alpha.
(Make-ord fe fco rst) corresponds to the ordinal
(w^fe)fco + rst. Thus the first infinite ordinal,
(make-ord 1 1 0)and, for example, the ordinal
(w^2)5 + w2 + 7is constructed by:
(make-ord 2 5 (make-ord 1 2 7)) .
make-ord is used rather than
cons is that it
allows us to reason more abstractly about the ordinals, without
having to worry about the underlying representation.
To see the ACL2 definition of this function, see pf. | <urn:uuid:d3ba57c4-9b31-4790-a90e-d1162626bde3> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/v6-2/MAKE-ORD.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392099.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00009-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.753297 | 317 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Chapter 2 Estuary management
Many of the issues identified in the Introduction highlight the need for a strategic framework for estuarine planning and management activities (Figure 2.1). This chapter:
- Provides the context for much of the work seeking to identify change, providing an explanation for several drivers;
- Discusses the importance of strategic estuarine management and regulation, and the need for considering sustainable development of an estuary;
- Provides information on ways in which a management framework can be developed to integrate legislation, human impact, natural variability and system response.
- Identifies frameworks developed for the purpose stated above.
The nature conservation importance of estuaries has already been noted and within the UK, this is reflected in the fact that some 76% of the area in estuaries has some form of European nature conservation designation (Townend, 1997). Estuaries are also highly productive and play an important role in the food chain. At the same time, conurbations that have developed alongside estuaries are often low lying and prone to flooding. The defences that now protect these areas inevitably constrain the estuary and, in the face of sea level rise, potentially limit the way in which the estuary can respond. Equally, as a trading nation, 84% of UK imports and exports pass through ports in estuaries (Townend, 1995). Continued growth, the development of shipping and the greater emphasis being placed on short-sea shipping to improve the inter-modal transport balance mean that there are pressures for ports to expand and develop new facilities. As with flood defence this has the potential to constrain the future evolution of the natural estuary system.
The problem is made more complicated by the very nature of estuary systems. Within an estuary, form and process are inextricably linked and there are no obvious dependent and independent variables, or clear cause-effect hierarchies. For example, although the size and shape of an estuary channel is a response to tidal processes, the tidal discharge is itself dependent on the channel morphology, since this determines the tidal prism . This interdependence means that changes in one part of the system can cause responses elsewhere in the estuary. It follows that a strategic approach to estuary management must consider the estuary as a whole, managed within the spatial context of river/estuary/sea.
Changes such as reclamation, dredging and the removal of flood storage areas by the introduction of flood defences, all alter the dynamics of the system. Ironically schemes to protect fresh water habitats at the margin of estuaries are progressively having the same effect. Many of these anthropogenic changes can be likened to various geological features that occur within estuary basins (such as variations in the underlying bed formation, some areas being relatively soft and erodible and other areas being hard and more resistant). Both serve to apply constraints on how the estuary can evolve. As the estuary adjusts to these various constraints, particular features within the estuary, such as the extent or position of intertidal, saltmarsh, sandbanks, etc, will also change. It is important to recognise that the estuary will adjust to the imposed constraints, both natural and anthropogenic. Consequently there is little point in seeking to define what the “natural” estuary system would look like. The central question for management is, rather, whether any changes that are imposed will alter particular estuary features, that we value, in a way that we consider unacceptable?
This inevitably leads to the question of sustainability and some determination of what we are seeking to sustain. The guiding principle stated in the Bruntland Commission’s report (WCED, 1987), is now well known and succinctly encapsulates the ultimate objective:
“We must meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”
Put simply it is a case of passing the baton in a relay race, always mindful of the fact that if you drop the baton you are disqualified from the race!
There are of course many perspectives on how this can be achieved. One common way of summarising the different views is in terms of ecological, social and economic systems (Steeley, 1995). Thus ecological sustainability relates to maintaining biodiversity (McCann, 2000), social sustainability seeks to improve the lot of the majority whilst maintaining political stability (Young, 1990) and economic sustainability concerns maintaining (ideally growth of) local, national and world economies (Schumacher, 1974; Perrings et al., 1997).
The socio-political initiatives, which led to the four main agreements at the Earth Summit in Rio , have in many senses been paralleled by similar shifts in outlook within the scientific community. This change in outlook was hinted at by Prigogine (1980) and was elegantly summarised by Sherman (2000), as set out in Table 2.1. Some further discussion of sustainability and its scientific context can be found at the end of this chapter.
Systems that are complex, non-linear and continually adapting to changes in their environment are now central to scientific thinking. This in turn is progressively being reflected to our approach to policy formulation and management and is particularly appropriate when working in a coastal or estuarine context because of the highly dynamic nature of these systems.
|Old view||New view|
| Focus on species
Short term response
Humans outside system
⇒ Multiple scales
⇒ Long term change
⇒ Humans integral
⇒ Sustain productivity
|Source: (Sherman, 2000)|
In general, legislation seeks to regulate specific activities or operations. In some countries these are grouped in a way that recognises the integrity of a geographic region (e.g. the coastal zone), whereas elsewhere the approach tends to be sectoral. An example of the former is the two acts in the US specific to estuaries, namely the Estuary Protection Act (1968) and the Estuary Restoration Act (2000). However, the more typical approach is sectoral, where the range of activities regulated with respect to estuaries is likely to include:
- Flood defence works, construction of hard defences and managed realignment;
- Habitat creation, including foreshore recharge;
- Disposal of dredged material;
- Maintenance, capital and aggregate dredging;
- Expansion of existing port facilities, or new port development;
- Vessel traffic, navigation issues;
- Marina development, harbour expansion, slipway development;
- Pipelines, outfalls, intakes, freshwater abstraction;
- Bridge development;
- Barrier / barrage development, alteration of position of tidal limit;
- Generation of tidal power, wind power;
- Development on floodplains;
- Removal of structures;
- Fisheries, trawling; and
- Recreational use.
These are no different to the range of issues recognised to be components of Coastal Zone Management (CZM), for which there is now a substantial literature. This provides a useful introduction to how government policy drives legislation and establishes the framework and obligations that the various institutions have to implement (Townend, 1994). The type of institutional framework adopted varies from one country to another (UNOETB, 1982; Salm & Clark, 1984; Carter, 1988; Sorensen & McCreary, 1990; Vallega, 1992) ranging from complete state control to non-existent or speculation led management, as described in Table 2.2. Even within Europe, there is a diverse range of national laws affecting the management of the coast, where the source of the common law (Roman, Scandinavian or German) and public ownership of the shore and sea bed are characteristic features, but still vary between countries (Gibson, 1999).
A particular characteristic is the frequent distinction between laws that apply to the land and those that apply to the sea, which often hinders the adoption of an integrated approach. Most coastal (including estuaries) planning law is concerned with land use whereas the sea is treated as a national resource and administered by central government (Gibson, 1999). In a similar vein, the laws are typically sectoral, reflecting divisions similar to those listed above, and again this can be difficult to accommodate in an integrated approach.
|Government framework||Voluntary framework|
|Centralised Decision Making||All embracing legislation with a statutory coastal zone and specific decision making agencies.||Voluntary or non-governmental organisations (NGO's) and pressure groups police coastal management practice.Voluntary or non-governmental organisations (NGO's) actively involved in practical coastal management (often supported by pressure groups)|
|Lead agency established to co-ordinate individual agencies that have a responsibility for activities or resources in the coastal zone.|
|Coastal zone recognised but not established as a statutory zone with agencies directed to co-ordinate activities through the planning process, in order to take account of coastal zone needs.|
|Inter-agency co-ordination at national and local level, often through co-ordinating councils or commissions. In many cases these have no statutory or executive decision making powers.|
|Devolved Decision Making||Coastal zone not recognised in legislation and individual agencies make decisions without any formal framework for co-operation.|
One important complication that applies to coasts and estuaries is the interplay of different tiers of legislation. There are a range of treaties and conventions established at an international level that define the laws of the sea (UNCLOS ) and control such things as pollution (MARPOL ) and fisheries (ICES ). These work in conjunction with laws drawn up at a supra-national or federal level. Thus there are European Directives and Regulations that apply to the member states of the European Union (e.g. Habitats Directive, 1992 and Water Framework Directive, 2000), much as federal legislation applies to the states that make up the United States (e.g. Coastal Zone Management Act, 1972). There are then national or state laws that that provide more specific controls and, sometimes, local byelaws to take account of local circumstances.
Legislation to a large degree determines the management questions relevant to estuaries, including planning and consents procedures. When preparing development proposals or examining options to adapt to ongoing natural changes, it is important to have a sound appreciation of the legislation and regulation that is likely to apply and hence govern what is currently permissible (versus what would require some change to the institutional framework; a notoriously time consuming and difficult process). These can usefully be drawn together to provide an overview of the relevant legislation, as was done in the EMPHASYS project (Cottle et al., 2000), and updated within the EstSim project (ABPmer, 2007).
The EMPHASYS review of the legislation pertinent to estuaries was updated for the EstSim project in light of the rapidity at which some legislation changes and new EU directives become significant and / or are transposed into UK law.
Future changes to legislation that will be relevant to estuary management include the UK Marine Bill White Paper, the draft Climate Change Bill and the Heritage Protection White Paper, both issued for consultation in March 2007; the Planning Reform White Paper and the Energy White Paper, both issued for consultation in May 2007, and in February 2007 Natural England issued advice to the Government for legislation providing improved access to the coast of England. In Wales, the Welsh Assembly Government announced its plans in June 2006 to improve public access to the Welsh coastline.
EU Directives that may have an impact on coastal and estuarine management in the future include the Environmental Liability Directive (Directive 2004/35/EC), which is defined as ‘environmental liability with regard to the prevention and remedying of environmental damage’. This Directive must be transposed into UK law during 2008. The Directive is aimed at the prevention and remedying of environment damage, specifically damage to habitats and species protected by EC law, damage to water resources, and land contamination which presents a threat to human health. It would apply only to damage from incidents occurring after it comes into force and is based on the polluter pays principle, i.e. polluters should bear the cost of remediation of the damage they cause to the environment, or of measures to prevent imminent threat of damage.
Within estuaries, legislation influences management decisions being made at a number of stages; it overarches the assessment process and provides context to the decision-making process. For example, if the activity falls under the Strategic Assessment Directive, a Strategic Environment Assessment (SEA) will be triggered at the outset of a plan or project. Therefore the legislative context must be considered throughout the management process; once the nature, scale and extent of change have been determined, legislation can then be considered with specific reference to the parameters affected.
Legislation relevant to morphological change in estuaries can be divided into three categories:
- Legislation regulating an activity or operation within an estuary system that modifies existing physical processes;
- Legislation regulating operations that may result in the construction or removal of features that are part of the morphological estuary system; and
- Legislation protecting or conserving morphological features or the processes that maintain such features, either as features in their own right or as part of the system that requires their functioning.
Some legislation underpins all others, including the Strategic Environment Assessment Directive 2001/42/EC mentioned above, and the proposed Marine Bill, released as a Government White Paper in March of this year (Defra, 2007). Also relevant is the Water Framework Directive (WFD), which came into force in 2000 and is in the process of being implemented in England and Wales, by the competent authority, the Environment Agency.
Legislation can place considerable constraints on activities within estuaries, and provide a constantly changing impact on management of estuaries. Some legislation affects all sectors, such as the SEA Directive and Habitats Directive, whereas some legislation is applicable to limited activities or sectors within the estuary. However, there is a move towards more holistic estuary management both within existing and new legislation.
The dynamic nature of the coastal environment requires an adaptive approach in management frameworks. This approach has led to frameworks being proposed, which are modelled on a cycle with a continuous feedback process. This has been thoroughly explored from a theoretical perspective in relation to sea management (Vallega, 1992) and much of this can be adapted for use in estuaries. In an institutional context, the pressure-state-impact-response model has been suggested as a means of identifying key issues for environmental management (Figure 2.2) (Turner et al., 1998).
Nested within this high level framework, more specific frameworks have been proposed to address some of the issues found on the coast (Townend, 1990; Townend, 1992; Capobianco et al., 1999) and in estuaries (Barham, 1997; Pontee & Townend, 1999b; Townend, 2002) . For instance, when considering the morphological response of an estuary, it is possible to consider two approaches, Figure 2.3; Townend (2002) considered that there are two parallel strands for the assessment of management actions; one strand which considers the resource to be developed or protected and requires the estuary as a whole to be included; and a second strand which considers how the estuary reacts to changes and how this might impact on user interests within the estuary.The EstSim project found that management actions by estuary users may be at the strategic level, such as the development of a CHaMP, or at the local level, such as the location and impacts of a land-drainage outfall. There are a variety of estuary management questions or actions that can be relevant to the whole estuary or to separate components of the estuary, depending on the manager and their interests (ABPmer, 2007).
An end-user consultation exercise carried out within the EstSim project resulted in a series of management questions, presented here:
General legislative questions:
- How will each of the proposed and adopted legislative measures impact on existing uses and activities within an estuary? (Here proposed and adopted legislative measures include, for example, the WFD, Floods Directive).
- What impact will there be on estuary morphology as a result of above?
The Floods Directive has been set up in order to limit damage to human health, the environment and infrastructure caused by flooding. The directive has been set up so that each member state will adopt a long-term planning framework in order to reduce flood risk. Part of the approach includes assessing the risk of flooding and creating flood risk maps.
Specific questions relating to climate change:
- How will climate change affect forcing factors, including tidal range, storm intensity and frequency, wave heights and direction, within an estuary?
- How will climate change affect existing uses and activities within an estuary?
- How will climate change affect the individual estuary components?
- e.g. for ports, how will access to docks be affected?
- What impact will there be on habitats?
- What changes will there be to sedimentation patterns and supply?
Specific management questions, related to an activity and legislation:
- How will an activity affect the ecological status of an estuary (under the WFD)?
- How will an activity affect sedimentation patterns / habitats (under the Habitats Regulations, WFD, Floods Directive)?
- How will an activity affect flood risk (under the Floods Directive)?
- What will the cumulative impacts be of activities within the estuary (under the SEA Directive, WFD)?
These main issues can be thought of under the Drivers – Pressures – State – Impact – Response framework, where a management question to be tested will affect the Response of the estuary. Table 2.3 effectively interprets the information derived from the questions above in terms of the Drivers – Pressures – State – Impact – Response framework (Socio-Economic Modelling) to derive a series of management question scenarios, under the three main drivers for estuary management currently: climate change, flood and coastal erosion risk management and development pressures. Each of these drivers has a pressure or limiting factor in the form of the relevant legislation or planning process, including the Habitats Regulations, SMPs, the WFD and the SEA Directive.
The state under each scenario can be thought of as the geomorphic state of the whole estuary, or of certain components, such as the habitat area. The impacts are those that the driver and pressure exert on the state, for example, the impact of sea level rise on habitats designated under the Habitats Regulations within an estuary; the response of the estuary to a SMP policy such as ‘hold the line’, or the impact on the estuary system of a development, such as a barrage or bridge.
The system response can be predicted using the approach encapsulated in the cause-consequence model in Figure 2.4, which refers to a process of identifying causes of change at a number of spatial and temporal scales, determining the system response, and hence predicting the consequences, again at various spatial and temporal scales. Presently, there is no one model that provides the response component. Rather, there are a whole range of analytical and numerical tools that collectively provide a basis for making an assessment (Pontee & Townend, 1999a; EMPHASYS Consortium, 2000) . The limitations of this tool box and in particular the ability to inform the management process is one of the key drivers for further research (Townend, 2002).
|Climate Change||Habitats Regulations||Habitat area / balance.||Impact of sea level rise on designated habitats||Recreate or protect habitats through management of the estuary|
|Climate Change||Habitats Regulations
|State of individual estuary components.||Sensitivities of each component of estuary system||Manage / monitor change in estuary components.|
|Flood and coastal erosion risk management||Chosen Shoreline Management Plan policies, (Habitats Regulations)||Estuary geomorphic state, habitat area / balance, sedimentation / erosion.||Response of estuary to the SMP policies||Manage estuary in line with appropriate policies and monitor; review policies as required.|
|Development: individual impacts||WFD , consenting / licensing process||Estuary geomorphic state, habitat area / balance, sedimentation / erosion.||Impact on system as a result of development / ability of system to respond.||Control development within estuary in line with policies and legislation.|
|Development: cumulative impacts||SEA Directive||Estuary geomorphic state, habitat area / balance, sedimentation / erosion.||Cumulative impact on system as a result of multiple developments.||Control development within estuary in line with policies and legislation.|
As noted in the main text, there are many different perspectives of sustainability, reflecting the interaction of ecological, social and economic systems within the universal environment. Each individual system has established ways of operating. The parts that make up a particular system are able to interact and each system has a means of passing information or capital to successors. In an ecological system, reproduction is used to ensure that genetic information is passed from one generation to the next. Similarly, societies use communication to convey information and this also enables good “ideas” and knowledge (memes ) to be passed on. Economic systems also transfer information and assets, giving rise to trade between individuals, companies and nations. Hence each of these systems has a form of capital, be it genes in the ecosystem, memes in a society, or assets within an economy.
Each of these systems makes use of the environment and indeed consumes some of the inherent resources of that environment (sunlight, minerals, etc). There is therefore a complex web of feedback loops within individual systems and between the systems (Figure A.1). Overlaps between each of the systems represent shared objectives, such as conservation (socio-ecology), farming (eco-ecology) and employment (socio-economy). Sustainability will be maximised by seeking to maximise the degree of overlap between the systems.
In terms of maintaining a constant capital, Turner has argued that weak sustainability is the simple sum of these components and allows unlimited substitution between systems (Turner et al., 1998). In contrast, strong sustainability requires the natural capital of the ecological system to be maintained, whilst at the same time maintaining the sum of the whole.
It is worth noting that each of these systems is driven by the short-term need to survive. This may give rise to internal conflicts, leading to individual losses (e.g. the collapse of a business), or external conflicts causing losses in one of the other systems (e.g. over exploitation of a resource). What is more, long-term survival is no guarantee of sustainability. For instance the collapse of a business may result in a more sustainable business taking its place, or it may be one component of the demise of an industry. The same is true within ecosystems and societies. Consequently it is essential to recognise that there are a range of spatial and temporal scales implicit in any given view of sustainability.
It may be tempting to assume that the sum of local actions equals the global whole. This reflects cultural heritage and in particular the dominant influence of Newtonian thought for some 300 or more years. Classical dynamics implies that given a definition of the system at some point in time, the past, present and future would be predictable. If nothing else this suggests that science provides only a view of the world “illusions” must always be sought. Newtonian physics underpins determinism, which has of course given rise to much of what supports modern technological lives, but suggests nothing about the irreversible nature of so many processes. It has man as an external observer to an idealised system. In recent decades this has begun to be unravelled as irreversible non-equilibrium processes are explored. The observer is now an integral part of the system, Figure A.2. The system exists due to random fluctuations giving rise to irreversible changes and the creation of what Prigogine (1980) called dissipative structures, (to reflect the juxtaposition of order and dissipation of energy). The observer, and life in general, are just such dissipative structures. Elsewhere these have been called complex adaptive systems, to draw attention to the tendency of systems to become more complex whilst adapting to the surroundings. The simple leads to the complex. This in turn produces diversity, which provides a greater opportunity for systems individually or collectively to adapt to change (Gell-Mann, 1995).
European sites comprise Special Protection Areas for birds and Special Areas of Conservation for habitats and species.
The volume of water that moves in and out on each tide.
The Rio declaration on environment and development; the framework convention on climate change; the convention on biological diversity; and Agenda 21.
United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea.
Convention for the prevention of pollution of the sea from ships.
International Council for the Exploration of the Seas.
See Framework for estuary shoreline management plans, ABPmer, 2003.
See Cause-consequence model, ABPmer, 2003.
Water Framework Directive.
The concept that ideas evolve in the same way as genes (Dawkins, 1989). | <urn:uuid:32d193be-d0d6-48b4-b635-8fedc513c793> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.estuary-guide.net/guide/chapter2_estuary_management.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398873.39/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00128-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928178 | 5,244 | 3.546875 | 4 |
Atomic spectroscopy has experienced remarkable growth and diversity in the past few years, making it more difficult for analysts to keep up with developments in the field. Atomic spectroscopy is not one but three techniques: I) atomic absorption, 2) atomic emission, and 3) atomic fluorescence. The first two are the most common and widely used techniques. The linear relationship between the amount of light absorbed or emitted and the amount of species of interest is called the Beer-Lambert Law. It can be used to find unknown concentrations by measuring the light emitted or absorbed.
1) Atomic Absorption is the process where vaporized atoms absorbs light and is measured.
The basic instrument for atomic absorption requires a light source, an atom source, a monochrometer to isolate the specific wavelength of light, a detector, some electronics to treat the signal, and a data display. The light source is usually a hollow cathode lamp.
2) Atomic Emission is a process in which the light emitted by excited atoms or ions is measured.
The basic instrument for atomic emission is similar to atomic absorption except that it has no primary light source. The critical component in emission is the atomization source because it must provide all the energy to excite as well as atomize the atoms. Previously many sources were tried but the ICP eliminates most all problems associated with past emission sources. This has revolutionized the utility of atomic emission spectroscopy.
The ICP is an argon plasma maintained by the interaction of an RF field and ionized argon gas. The ICP can reach temperatures around 10,000 K with sample temperatures between 5,000 and 8,000 K. These temperatures allow complete atomization of elements thus minimizing chemical interference effects.
In ICP-MS, the function of the Mass Spectrometer is similar to that of the monochrometer in Atomic Absorption or ICP Emission systems. In ICP-MS, rather than separating light into wavelengths, the mass analysis separates the ions from the ICP according to their mass/charge ratio. The ICP-MS combines the multielement capabilities and broad linear range of ICP with the exceptional detection limits of graphite furnace AA.
There are four techniques normally Suited for analytical determinations and they are:
1) Flame Atomic Absorption
2) Graphite Furnace Atomic Absorption
3) Inductively Coupled Plasma Emission
4) Inductively Coupled Plasmal Mass Spectrometry
clear understanding of the analytical problems and the capabilities provided
by the different techniques is necessary. Some important criteria for selecting
a particular technique include 1) detection limits, 2) analytical working
range, 3) sample throughput, 4) cost, and 5) ease of use.
Without adequate detection limit capabilities, lengthy preparation may be required prior to analysis. Typical detection limits for the major atomic spectroscopic techniques are shown in Table 1. Generally, the best detection limits are attained using ICP-MS and Graphite Furnace Atomic Absorption as shown below.
Analytical Working Range
The analytical working range is just the concentration range over which the quantitative results can be obtained without having to recalibrate the system (the linear relationship between amount of light measured and concentration).
For the GFAA there is approximately 2 order of magnitude for its working range where the ICP-AES has a 5th order of magnitude as its working range and the ICP-MS has a 6th to 8th order of magnitude as its working range.
Element AA Hydride GFAA Emission ICP-MS Element AA Hydride GFAA Emission lCP-MS
Ag 1.5 0.05 1.5 0.003 Mo 45 0.2 7.5 0.003
Al 45 0.3 0.006 Na 0.3 0.05 6 0.05
As 150 0.03 0.5 30 0.006 Nb 1500 5 0.0009
Au 9 0.4 6 0.001 Nd 1500 0.002
B 1000 45 3 0.09 Ni 6 0.8 6 0.005
Ba 15 0.9 0.15 0.002 Os 120
Be 1.5 0.02 0.09 0.03 P 75000 320 45 0.3
Bi 30 0.03 0.6 30 0.0005 Pb 15 0.15 30 0.001
Br 0.2 Pd 30 2 1.5 0.003
C 75 150 Pr 7500 <0.0005
Ca 1.5 0.03 0.15 2 Pt 60 5 30 0.002
Cd 0.8 0.02 1.5 0.003 Rb 3 0.08 0.003
Ce 15 0.0004 Re 750 30 0.0006
Cl 10 Rh 6 30 0.0008
Co 9 0.4 3 0.0009 Ru 100 3 6 0.002
Cr 3 0.08 3 0.02 S 75 70r
Cs 15 0.0005 Sb 45 0.15 0.4 90 0.001
Cu 1.5 0.25 0.003 Sc 30 0.3 0.02
Dy 50 0.001 Se 100 0.03 0.7 90 0.065
Er 60 0.0008 Si 90 2.5 5 0.7
Eu 30 0.0007 Sm 3000 0.001
F 10000 Sn 150 0.5 60 0.002
Fe 5 0.3 1.5 0.45 Sr 3 0.06 0.075 0.0008
Ga 75 15 0.001 Ta 1500 30 0.0006
Gd 1800 0.002 Tb 90 <0.0005
Ge 300 15 0.003 Te 30 0.03 1 75 0.01
Hf 300 0.0006 Th <0.0005
Hg 300 0.009 1.5 30 0.004 Ti 75 0.9 0.75 0.006
Ho 60 <0.0005 Tl 15 0.4 60 0.0005
I 0.008 Tm 15 <0.0005
In 30 45 <0.0005 U 15000 35 <0.0005
Ir 900 7 30 0.0006 V 60 0.3 3 0.002
K 3 0.02 75 1 W 1500 30 0.001
La 3000 1.5 0.0005 Y 75 0.3 0.0009
Li 0.8 0.15 1.5 0.03 Yb 8 0.001
Lu 1000 <0.0005 Zn 1.5 0.3 1.5 0.003
Mg 0.15 0.01 0.15 0.007 Zr 450 1.5 0.004
Mn 1.5 0.09 0.6 0.002
All detection limits are given in micrograms per liter and were determined using elemental
standards in dilute aqueous solution. All detection limits are based on a 98% confidence
level (3 standard deviations).
Atomic absorption and ICP emission detection limits were determined using
instrumental parameters optimized for the individual element. ICP
emission detection limits obtained during multielement analyses will typically be within a
factor of 2 the values shown.
Cold vapor mercury detection limits were determined with a FIAS-200 flow injection
system with amalgamation accessory. Hydride detection limits were determined using a
MHS-10 Mercury/Hydride system. Fumace AA (Model 5100 Pc with 5100 ZL Zeeman
furnace Module or Model 4100 ZL) detection limits were determined using STPF conditions
and are all based on 20 microliterL sample volumes and use of a L'vov platform.
ICPMS detection limits were determined using an ELAN 5000. Letters following an ICP-MS
detection limit value refer to the use of a less abundant mass for the determination as
follows:a-C 13 b-Ca 44 c-Fe 54, d-Ni 60, e-S 34, f-Se 82
Sample throughput is the number of samples which can be analyzed or elements to be determined per unit
time. Analyses near the limit of detection or where absolute precision is required are more time consuming
than other less demanding analyses.
GFAA is basically a single element technique because of the need ~ thermally program the system
to remove solvent and matrix components prior to atomization. The GFAA has a relatively low sample
throughput where a typical determination (single burn) requires 2-3 minutes per sample per element.
ICP Emission is a true multielement technique with exceptional sample throughput. IC? emission
systems typically can determine l~80 elements per minute in individual samples. For few elements the ICP
is limited by the time needed to equilibrate the plasma which is typically 15-30 seconds (0.25-0.5 minutes)
ICP-MS has the same multielement capabilities and time requirements as IC? but can get much
better detection limits like those in GFAA.
To run one sample by GFAA it takes 4 minutes to precondition the graphite tube, 8 minutes to calibrate
using a four point calibration method. Another 8 minutes are taken up by internal analysis checks and
blanks. that is 22 minutes just for calibration without any complications. To analyze the unknown sample
takes 2-3 minutes providing it is in the right working range or it will need to be diluted which takes still
more time. And to do eight elements it will take approximately 4 hours (240 minutes). On the ICP it takes
10 minutes to calibrate, in a typical case 23 elements, and then l minute per burn but all 23 elements are
determined simultaneously. That is a total of 11-12 minutes. That is 20 times faster and there is three times
Instrumentation for single element atomic spectroscopy (flame AA and GFAA) is generally less costly than
that for the multielement techniques such as ICP and ICP-MS as the former are less complex systems There
is cost differentials among instruments for the same technique. Instruments which offer versatility frequently
offer a greater degree of automation than that of the basic instrument. Cost of the instrument is only one
issue to look at regarding the total cost of what the data determines. Other things may include cost of down
time, the value of real time data in solving critical excursions, cost of sample delivery. and cost of
Ease of Use
Other comparison criteria for analytical techniques include ease of use, operator skill level, and availability
of documented methodologies.
GFAA applications are well documented. GFAA has exceptional detection
limit capabilities but
with a limited working range. Sample throughput is less than that of other atomic spectroscopy techniques.
Operator skill requirements are more than minimum expertise to obtain best results, especially on the more
difficult samples we encounter.
ICP Emission is the best overall multielement atomic spectroscopy
technique with excellent
sample throughput and very wide analytical range. Good documentation is available for numerous
applications. Operator skill requirements are intermediate.
ICP-MS is a relatively new technique with exceptional multielement
capabilities at trace and
ultratrace concentration levels. Isotopic determinations can also be performed on the ICP-MS. Good basic
documentation for interferences exists. Application documentation is limited but growing rapidly. ICP-MS
requires operator skill similar to those for ICP and GFAA.
Most often the selection of technique is based on analyte concentrations, flame AA and ICP emission are favored
for moderate to high levels while graphite furnace AA and ICP-MS are favored for low levels. ICP and
ICP-MS are multielement techniques favored where large numbers of samples are to be analyzed. | <urn:uuid:39787453-3c22-448c-9b96-f121990e2821> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://woodrose.tripod.com/AtomicSpectroscopy.htm | 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 | 0.856681 | 2,492 | 3.75 | 4 |
A Mandrake, also known as Mandragora, is a plant which has a root that looks like a human (like a baby when the plant is young, but maturing as the plant grows). When mature, its cry can be fatal to any person who hears it.
Mandrakes are part of the second-year Herbology curriculum at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. In the 1992-1993 school year, the school's growth of Mandrakes served the additional purpose of making a Restorative Draught to revive all those who had been Petrified during the Chamber of Secrets openings.
Description and traits
Whenever unearthed, the root screams. The scream of a mature Mandrake when it is unearthed will kill any person who hears it, but a young Mandrake's screams will usually only knock a person out for several hours. When Hogwarts students study Mandrakes in Herbology class, Pomona Sprout had the students wear earmuffs to protect their ears from the Mandrake's cries.
Mandrakes not only resemble humans, but also have similar behaviours to them. In the 1992-1993 school year, the Mandrakes, at one point of time, became moody and secretive, which indicated that they were reaching adolescence. Later on, they threw a loud party, which is comparable to humans when they are teenagers. Hagrid also mentioned the Mandrakes having acne. Mandrakes are fully matured when they start moving into each others pots. When matured, Mandrakes can be cut up to serve as a prime ingredient for the Mandrake Restorative Draught, which is used to cure those who have been Petrified.
A Mandrake's scream is very similar to (if not the same as) a banshee's scream, which is also fatal.
The (European) Mandrake plant has been used since ancient times as a medicinal plant and has a tradition associated with magical activities. It is a member of the nightshade family. It contains hyoscyamine, scopolamine, and mandragorin. Medically, it has been used as a pain killer and a sedative. It was used in ancient times for surgery. An overdose, though, can be fatal.Because of its roots' shapes resembling humans, it has been used in magical operations, and as a supposed aphrodisiac. There are variations on the plant, Mandragora Offininarum being the most usual form, with the smaller Mandragora autumnalis having the same properties. Some folk traditions call the latter (M. autumnalis) variety as "Womandrake" in distinction to M. Officinarum as "Mandrake." A third variant, Mandragora turcomanica, is a nearly extinct and very rare variety, found mostly in Turkey and a few areas of Iran. M. turcomanica is distinguished from M. autumnalis by having larger fruit.
In the Western Hemisphere, another plant, Podophyllum petaltum, is called the American Mandrake. The American Mandrake is unrelated to the European variety, and has fewer medical applications. It, too, is poisonous.
Behind the scenes
- In LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4, mandrakes can be found throughout the castle and grounds and can be used to break glass objects. Also the player can make it sing as an extra (cheat code).
- In the Game Boy Color version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the "Mandrake Root" item does not resemble the babies seen in other versions, and in fact looks more like a leaf than a root, suggesting the item is merely misnamed.
- Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (video game) (Heard) (Mentioned only)
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (First appearance)
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (film)
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (video game)
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (video game)
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mentioned as mandrake leaves)
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (video game)
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (video game)
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
- Harry Potter: A Pop-Up Book
- LEGO Harry Potter: Building the Magical World
- LEGO Harry Potter: Characters of the Magical World
- The Wizarding World of Harry Potter
- Harry Potter LEGO Sets
- LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4
- Harry Potter for Kinect
- Harry Potter Trading Card Game
- Wonderbook: Book of Spells
- Harry Potter: The Character Vault
- Harry Potter: The Creature Vault
Notes and references
|Professors: Herbert Beery · Pomona Sprout · Neville Longbottom|
|Textbooks: Flesh-Eating Trees of the World · Goshawk's Guide to Herbology · Magical Water Plants of the Mediterranean · One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi · Winogrand's Wonderous Water Plants|
|Hogwarts class: Herbology Award · Herbology Lesson Cup · Herbology Race Cup · Herbology Store|
|Hogwarts greenhouses: One · Two · Three · Four · Five · Six · Seven · Professor's Office|
|Herbologists: Herbert Beery · Miranda Goshawk · Elladora Ketteridge · Beaumont Marjoribanks · Nepali wizard · Phyllida Spore · Tilden Toots · Hadrian Whittle · Sir Winogrand · Selina Sapworthy|
|Plants Studied: Bouncing Bulb · Bubotuber · Devil's Snare · Fire Seed Bush · Mandrake · Mimbulus Mimbletonia · Puffapod · Screechsnap · Self-fertilising shrub · Snargaluff · Spiky Bush · Spiky Prickly Plant · Umbrella Flower · Venomous Tentacula · Walking plant · Whomping Willow · Wild rice| | <urn:uuid:c32f1a01-9118-4dab-914f-fa556a51b0a5> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Mandrakes?interlang=all | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397695.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00200-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.907655 | 1,257 | 3.078125 | 3 |
Folic Acid Side Effects
While most people do not experience problems when taking folic acid, problems may occur if you take high doses of the vitamin. It is also possible to develop an allergic reaction while taking it. If taken in high doses, side effects of folic acid may include stomach cramps, gas and bloating, diarrhea, and problems sleeping.
Folic acid usually does not cause significant side effects in most people, especially when taken at normal dosages. However, it can sometimes cause serious side effects, especially when taken at higher dosages.
(This article covers many, but not all, of the possible side effects with folic acid. Your healthcare provider can discuss a more complete list of folic acid side effects with you.)
Taking high doses of folic acid, more than 1 mg (1000 mcg) a day, can "mask" a vitamin B12 deficiency. This means that folic acid can correct anemia caused by vitamin B12 deficiency (making the deficiency hard to detect or diagnose), but it does not stop the nerve damage caused by the vitamin B12 deficiency.
Very high doses have been reported to cause the following side effects:
- Abdominal (stomach) cramps
- Gas and bloating
- Problems sleeping
- Irritability, excitability, or hyperactivity
- Bitter taste in the mouth
- Zinc deficiency
- Psychotic behavior
- Seizures (typically in people who already have a seizure disorder).
Early studies suggest that high doses of folic acid might actually increase the risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, or age-related cognitive problems. A normal folic acid dosage does not seem to be associated with such problems.
Even though folic acid is added to a wide variety of foods in the United States, some people may be allergic to it. Seek medical attention right away if you develop any signs of an allergic reaction, such as:
- An unexplained rash
- Swelling of the mouth or throat
- Difficulty breathing or swallowing. | <urn:uuid:237512ee-4675-407b-958e-67f00562ba2e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://pregnancy.emedtv.com/folic-acid/folic-acid-side-effects.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394987.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00178-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923998 | 418 | 2.5625 | 3 |
« more RISD stories
Designing the Ultimate User-Friendly Kitchen
In an unprecedented partnership between academia and industry, more than 100 RISD students in Architecture, Interior Architecture and Industrial Design set out to challenge 50-year-old assumptions about residential kitchens, an everyday example of poor design.
Spurred by the knowledge that routine kitchen tasks force people to bend, stoop, reach and lift—repeatedly compensating for weak design in uncomfortable ways—the team began with research. Making a succession of dinners together in typical kitchens, they used careful time/motion studies to document how inefficiencies in kitchen design require more than 400 discrete steps to make a simple dinner. Ultimately, the goal was to redesign the kitchen environment and help as many potential users as possible function independently—from the young to the old.
During the course of their research, students literally deconstructed existing elements of the kitchen, debunking the myth of the kitchen triangle as they blew apart stoves, refrigerators and dishwashers. They tested existing standards for work heights and reach, researching human factors, demographics and trends. Through their ergonomic studies, they developed the parameters of a key concept they called the “comfort zone”—the area within easy reach for each individual.
A series of studios generated thousands of innovative blue-sky ideas: a utility mouse, continuous wet surfaces, pop-up dishwashers, grey water irrigation systems, countertop waste channels, toe-kick suction, electronic consumption tracking, built-in retractable appliance cords, misting bays, steaming bays, retractable burners and more. In the end, the team conceived of its Universal Kitchen as a “kit of parts,” with interchangeable modular components for refrigeration, cooking, water delivery and storage.
Over the course of the five-year project, various leaders in the industry provided support, including Kohl, Frigidaire and Maytag. After presenting two prototypes at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s 1998 show Unlimited by Design, RISD sold exclusive rights to its Universal Kitchen to Maytag Corporation.
The Principles of Universal Design
tags: innovation, Industrial Design, Interior Architecture, partnerships + collaborations, research, STEAM | <urn:uuid:647f6a3f-9c97-40a0-a26f-4aa73952d15c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.risd.edu/Designing_Ultimate_User-Friendly_Kitchen/?dept=4294967974 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395620.9/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00131-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921883 | 460 | 3.109375 | 3 |
OCEAN SURFACE WIND SPEEDS RETRIEVED FROM DSMP SATELLITES (1)
W. H. Gemmill, L. D. Burroughs, and V. M. Gerald
The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellite series are polar orbiters. The series started in 1987,and the Defense Department attempts to have three of the satellites in orbit at any given time. Wind speed data at 20m above the sea surface is derived from a 7 channel passive microwave sensor (SSM/I) and have been available to NCEP since the early 1990s. At present there are three DMSP satellites (f11, f13 & f14) in orbit. The SSM/I measures "brightness temperatures" from the ocean surface and intervening atmosphere from seven channels. From these brightness temperatures ocean surface wind speed, columnar water vapor, columnar liquid water, rain rate, sea surface temperature and sea-ice concentrations can be derived. These channels are 19 Ghz (H, V), 22 GHZ (V), 37 GHZ (H, V) and 85 GHZ (H, V) where H is the horizontal polarization, V is the vertical polarization. Each satellite provides data that cover a wide swath (1400 km) with a spacing and footprint resolution of 25 km. Table 1 presents a summary of the characteristics of the SSM/I specifications. The global distribution of data for a six hour period is shown in Fig. 1.
2. ALGORITHM DEVELOPMENT
A number of algorithms or transfer functions have been developed which convert the various SSM/I channel brightness temperatures into surface wind speed. Goodberlet et al. (1989) developed a single linear algorithm (GSW) for use on a global basis. This algorithm as designed and tested met the specified speed accuracy criteria (2 m/sec over the range of wind speeds between 3 and 20 m/sec), but under rain free and low moisture conditions. The accuracy of wind speeds retrieved using this algorithm deteriorates rapidly in areas where rain and heavy cloud cover occur. Wind speeds are flagged as such which leave large areas of no retrievals in active weather regimes (storms or frontal regions). These areas are very regions where wind information is critical. Further, the algorithm was developed on the basis of match ups with buoys where there were almost no wind speeds above 18 m/s. As a result, there is large uncertainty at high wind speeds above 15 m/s. Petty (1993) added a water vapor correction to the linear algorithm. This data is available in real-time through the Shared Processing Center of the U.S. Navy.
Neural networks (NNs) were selected as an alternative method to estimate surface wind speed from the SSM/I brightness temperatures. The NN approach corresponds to a very general nonlinear model for the transfer function, and does not require any a priori knowledge about the particular form of the input/output relationship. The current version of the NCEP NN algorithm (OMBNN3) is a multi-variate algorithm (Krasnopolsky et al., 1996, 2000) which retrieves ocean surface winds, columnar water vapor, columnar liquid water and SST based on brightness temperatures from 5 SSM/I channels. Application of NN algorithm has led to an improvement in wind speed retrieval accuracy for clear conditions by approximately 20%; for higher moisture/cloudy conditions, the improvement
Table 1. Satellite ocean surface wind specifications for
|Type||Polar Orbiter (~102 min/orbit)|
|Areal Coverage||Twice Daily (one ascending and one descending orbit)|
|Receptors||7 microwave channels|
|Frequency Bands||19(H, V), 22(V), 37(H, V), 85(H, V) gHz, where H is horizontal polarization and V is vertical polariztion|
|Number of Data Cells||64|
|Cell Footprint (km)||40|
|Wind Height (m)||20|
|Range of Wind Speeds (m/s)||3 - 25|
|Speed Accuracy||±2 m/s up to 20 m/s and ±10% above 20 m/s|
|Direction Accuracy||not applicable|
|Algorithm used||GWS and OMBNN3|
was far greater when compared to the GSW algorithm, and there was an improvement in high wind speed retrievals (> 15 m/s) as well. The increase in areal coverage, due to improvement in accuracy, was about 15% on average and higher in areas with active weather systems (see Fig. 2). Further, the interpretation of the three variables together can provide a rather detailed synoptic description of the weather over the ocean (Gemmill and Krasnopolsky, 1999).
The accuracy of SST was not sufficient to be used as an output variable in itself since the SSM/I channels are not suitable for SST. But, there was enough SST signal in the brightness temperatures to contribute positively to the improvement of the wind speeds.
Statistics presented in Table 2 show RMS errors for different wind speed algorithms. Biases were similar at -0.5 m/s (GSWP) to -0.3 m/s (OMBNN3). NN algorithms obviously outperform all other algorithms in terms of standard deviations. OMBNN3 For the total performance over a wide range of wind speeds and weather situations, the OMBNN3 results appear to be the best in terms of bias, standard deviation, and for high wind speeds.
Table 2. Statistics for the operational wind speed algorithms: GSWP, and OMBNN3 for clear and clear plus cloudy conditions (in parentheses) for SSM/I satellite instruments matched with 15,000 buoy observations.
|Algorithm||Bias (m/s)||RMSE (m/s)||Wind > 15 m/s
|GSWP(2)||-0.2 (-0.5)||1.8 (2.5)||(2.7)|
|OMBNN3(3)||-0.2 (-0.3)||1.5 (1.7)||(2.3)|
Based on the improved performance of OMBNN3, ocean surface wind retrievals were incorporated into GDAS at NCEP in April 1998 (Yu et al., 1997).
3. PRODUCT DISSEMINATION
These data are presently on the Internet at http://polar.wwb.noaa.gov/winds four times a day for the Northeast Pacific and Northwest Atlantic with panels for SSM/I neural network ocean surface wind speeds (Gemmill et al., 2000), columnar water vapor, and columnar liquid water data along with ERS2 wind vector data, ship and buoy data, and a sea level pressure analysis (see Fig. 3).
These data are expected to become operational in late March 2000. They will be issued 4 times a day and contain 6 hours of data centered on the synoptic hours. They will include the following information:
1) Satellite ID
9) Ocean surface (20m) wind speed
10) Columnar water vapor
11) Columnar liquid water
The issuance times will be approximately 0400, 1000, 1600, and 2200 UTC. Global data from all the currently operational DSMP satellites will be included. Currently, there are 3 operational satellites (f11, f13, and f14) in polar orbit. The orbit times are approximately 102 minutes with two orbits per day over any given area (one ascending and one descending) per satellite. Each satellite covers a swath of 1400 km with a spacing and footprint resolution of 25 km.
Gemmill, W. H. and V. M. Krasnopolsky, 1999: The Use of SSM/I Data in Operational Marine
Analysis, Wea. and Forecasting, 14, 789-800.
Goodberlet, M. A., C. T. Swift, and J. C. Wilkerson, 1989: Remote sensing of ocean surface winds
with the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager, J. Geophys. Res., 94, 14,547- 14,555.
Krasnopolsky, V. M., W. H. Gemmill, and L. C. Breaker 1996: A new transfer function for SSM/I based on an expanded neural network architecture. Tech Note, OMB Contr. No. 137, National Centers for Environmental Prediction, Washington, DC 38pp.
Krasnoplosky, V. M., W. H. Gemmill, and L. C. Breaker, 2000: A Multi-Parameter empirical algorithm for SSM/I Retrievals. Can. J. Remote Sensing. In press.
Petty, G. W., 1993: A comparison of SSM/I algorithms for the estimation of surface wind, Proc. Shared Processing Network, DMSP SSM/I Algorithm Symposium, Monterrey, CA.,8-10 June, 1993.
Yu, T.-W., M. D. Iredell, and D. Keyser 1997: Global data assimilation and forecast experimentsusing SSM/I wind speed data derived from a neural network algorithm. Wea. and Forecasting, 12, 859-865.
FIGURES - Click on each image for larger scale image
Figure 1. SSM/I wind speed coverage from satellite F13 for January 13, 2000 for the six hour period from 0300 to 0900 UTC.
Figure 2. Comparison of coverage between GSW and OMB NN for 2 DSMP satellites. Upper leftGSW for f10; upper right OMB NN for f10; lower left GSW for f13, and lower right OMB NN for f13.
Figure 3. Satellite and other data available on the Internet: upper left - SSMI Wind Speed, uppercenter - SSMI Liquid Water, upper right - SSMI Water Vapor, lower left - Ship Winds, lower center - ERS2 Winds, and lower right - Surface Pressure Analysis.
1. OMB Contribution Number -
2. Petty (1993)
3. Krasnopolsky et al. (1996) | <urn:uuid:67a8bc1e-159d-434e-a3f9-5b857c52091e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/tpb/467text.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397744.64/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00183-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.844095 | 2,169 | 3.203125 | 3 |
From the plant to the cup
The coffee plant
Rubiacee (Jasmin, Chinaroot, gardenia, etc.)
Tropical and equatorial regions
Warm climate and humidity
Temperature ranging from 15 to 30 °C (59 to 86 °F)
Volcanic soils rich in nitrogen
The plant can grow to a height of 12 meters (40 feet), but cultivated plants are pruned when they reach 6.5/9.5 ft to make harvesting easier
20 - 30 years
ANNUAL YIELD PER PLANT
Approx. 900g (1.9 lb) of green coffee
FRUIT (SIMILAR TO A CHERRY)
It turns from green to red or yellow when fully ripe
Coffee ripening depends on the rains, so flowers, ripe and unripe berries can all be found at the same time on any one plant.
Selective picking involves workers passing from plant to plant, hand-picking only the bright red ripe cherries, one by one. This method is expensive, but the quality of green coffee is excellent. It is the best method, but also the most labour-intensive and time consuming.
The entire crop is harvested in one go. This can be done either by machine or by hand. In both cases, all of the cherries are stripped off of the branch in one go.
Each coffee blend has its own roasting cycle which produces a roasted coffee with a special colour and a unique flavour.
410 - 466 °F (210 - 230°C)
Cold air or water
Contact (Hot air) convection
- Green coffee loses moisture and its colour changes from green to yellow.
- Chemical and physical changes in coffee, turning it from yellow to brown.
- Production of aromas and achievement of the required roasting level.
Finally, coffee is ready for you to enjoy! | <urn:uuid:07fd1e64-6595-4cd5-ba0e-9b21a1fe8d51> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.delonghi.com/en-ca/products/coffee-espresso/coffee-culture/coffee-production-process | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783408840.13/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155008-00082-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.886483 | 396 | 3.34375 | 3 |
Decomposers and food chains
Organic matter is recycled in an ecosystem by decomposers. Decomposers are organisms such as bacteria and fungi that break down the organic matter in the dead bodies of plants and animals. As the decomposers feed from the dead animals, they break down the organic compounds into simple nutrients. These simple nutrients are returned to the soil and can be used again by the plants. The energy transformation chain begins again.
Decomposers are nature's recyclers as they break down the organic matter found in the dead bodies of plants and animals. The term 'organic matter' refers to the matter that comes from living organisms. Decomposers are chiefly the micro-organisms such as bacteria and fungi in the form or yeasts and moulds that break down bodies of dead organisms and release compounds that can be used by producers. Some of these compounds include nitrogen, phosphorus and magnesium. There are more than 100 000 different types of decomposer organisms.
Bacteria and fungi produce chemicals, called enzymes that digest dead material. The digested material then provides a food source for other organisms in the soil. This makes the role of a decomposer extremely important in an ecosystem. Without them, organic matter would pile up on the ground and plants would not receive the required nutrients necessary for their survival. The decomposing process greatly increases the nutrient-load of an ecosystem which allows for greater biodiversity.
See Image 1
Biodiversity refers to the number of different species in a community. High biodiversity is when many different species of plants and animals live together. Low biodiversity refers to communities with a small number of different species. A community with high biodiversity is more able to survive changes in the environment as there are alternative food sources. If one species of plant dies out in a community with high biodiversity, there still should be another plant species that the herbivores and omnivores can eat in its place.
Scavengers are also important in an ecosystem. A scavenger is an animal, bird or insect that feeds on dead or decaying matter. They are useful to the ecosystem as they feed on and break down the remains of dead animals and plants. Any remains left behind by the scavengers are then broken down even further by decomposers.
Scavengers include vultures, blowflies, wedge-tailed eagles and foxes. Many large carnivores that hunt regularly such as hyenas and lions will also scavenge if necessary and given the chance.
See Image 2
Other organisms that perform similar roles to decomposers and scavengers are the detrivores. A detrivore is a plant or animal that feeds on the organic remains or other organic debris from other organisms. They recycle detritus, which is decomposing organic material and return it to the food chain.
Earthworms, millipedes, woodlice and dung beetles are examples of detritus feeders. Earthworms eat the rotting plant leaves and other debris and help to aerate and mix the soil. Other detritus feeders such as dung beetles eat faeces, which often contain considerable nutrients. Some of the detritus that is consumed by the detrivores may already have been partially or fully decomposed by decomposers.
See Image 3 | <urn:uuid:c43e20be-003d-40f4-934f-6f69ac7b7c8a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.skwirk.com/p-c_s-4_u-200_t-560_c-2087/decomposers-and-food-chains/nsw/science/ecology/interactions | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403825.35/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00126-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940658 | 674 | 4.15625 | 4 |
Tuesday, 03 12, 2013
Data provides information to local early childhood councils for community planning
FRANKFORT, Ky. – For the first time, school districts can use county-specific data profiles to understand how many children in their communities are ready for kindergarten, thanks to the 2013 Early Childhood Profiles released today by the Governor’s Office of Early Childhood.
These county-by-county reports show readiness indicators like communications skills and physical well-being for children entering school. The reports are designed to provide each county with data to assist in developing local strategies to assure that every child in their community enters kindergarten properly prepared to learn and succeed.
“A child’s earliest years play a critical role in future achievements,” said Gov. Steve Beshear. “It’s vital that we all work together to strengthen the foundation of education and development for our youngest citizens. This tool can help communities assure that every child in the Commonwealth gets the best possible start in life.”
The profiles contain results from the kindergarten screener pilot launched in 109 school districts in 2012. It also provides information about participation in publicly funded preschool, Head Start and child care. The reports include information about the quality and availability of child care and the education of the early childhood workforce.
Finally, demographic data is provided representing key indicators of possible barriers to success for young children and their families, as well as participation in public health and social service programs that can help.
“We believe that what gets measured gets done,” said Terry Tolan, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Early Childhood. “It is our hope that this compilation of data will create local dialogue and inform local action to improve early childhood outcomes.”
According to Tolan, the Early Childhood Profile can help change the conversation in each community in Kentucky so that every child will enter school ready to succeed; every parent will know what their child needs to be ready for school; and every community will come together in support of their youngest children.
The Early Childhood Profile was created in partnership with the Kentucky Center for Education and Workforce Statistics, the Kentucky Department of Education, the Education and Workforce Development Cabinet and the Cabinet for Health and Family Services.
The 2013 Early Childhood Profiles can be accessed at http://kidsnow.ky.gov/School%20Readiness/Pages/profiles.aspx.
For more information on early childhood education, visit http://kidsnow.ky.gov. | <urn:uuid:b2b2a42b-c97d-4978-804e-c01deb1b4e51> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://kentucky.gov/Pages/Activity-Stream.aspx?viewMode=ViewDetailInNewPage&eventID=%7BD1C14967-4E4A-44DA-9AAB-51E122A4B648%7D&activityType=PressRelease | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397748.48/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00147-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926711 | 514 | 2.90625 | 3 |
Delaware environment: Seeing trees as sustainable
he Great Cypress Swamp once covered as much as 60,000 acres in Delaware and nearby Maryland.
Today the great swamp totals about 12,000 acres.
But even at its diminished size, it remains among the largest contiguous forests left on the Delmarva Peninsula.
From the air, there is a massive swath of green among the puzzle pieces of farmland that connect southern Sussex County and nearby Worcester County, Md.
"The only thing people have here is land and beauty," Pete Martin said more than two decades ago. "And beauty doesn't give them any money."
These days, Martin has a another take on making beauty pay: With artful harvesting, the trees can help sustain efforts to restore the massive forest.
"The swamp is a work in progress," said Martin, swamp manager for Delaware Wild Lands, the conservation organization that owns and manages some 11,000 acres that remain of the swamp.
Delaware Wild Lands has embraced sustainable forestry and has started to selectively harvest some of its trees -- mostly mature loblolly pines -- and investing the money in reforestation and other projects at the massive holding near Gumboro.
Though Delaware Wild Lands is a leader in sustainable forestry, the state is taking up the cause.
Forests still cover about 27 percent of the state, said Sam Topper, state forest conservationist.
"It's still a large part of Delaware," he said.
Delaware Wild Lands is part of a growing group of landowners that practice sustainable forestry. The nonprofit's initiative differs from some other sustainable forest operations because they have been through an audit and are certified by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, a nonprofit organization that recognizes sustainable forest management that promotes water quality, biodiversity, wildlife habitats and critical forest areas.
The initiative estimates that 10 percent of forests worldwide are certified as sustainable. State forestry officials are moving toward sustainable management but they haven't been through an audit that would lead to certification. Maryland took sustainable forestry a step further in 2009 with the passage of a Sustainable Forestry Act that created a Sustainable Forestry Council.
Three generations of landowners reshaped the Great Cypress Swamp. They rerouted rivers, cut down trees and drained the land. A series of natural and man-made fires, starting in 1782, further changed the landscape.
One of those fires, in 1782, burned for months, destroying at least 3,000 acres of bald cypress in a scene that was "grand and terrific, the whole city of Philadelphia in flames would give you but a faint idea of this tremendous conflagration," according to an account that appeared 15 years later in the American Universal Magazine.
The forest was so dense people got lost there. The last bear known in Delaware was reportedly killed in the swamp in the early 1900s.
In 2000, A. Scott Andres, a senior scientist and hydrologist with the Delaware Geological Survey, released findings that disclosed a unique formation at the swamp.
In geologic time, the swamp isn't that old.
It formed about 22,000 years ago in a fresh-water, cold-climate marsh and boreal forested swamp.
Organic matter started building up and a cold wind blew in silt, clay and sand from nearby dunes and surrounding high ground. More sediment washed in with runoff from streams.
Thin sheets of sand likely spread during times when the land thawed.
Conditions began to change about 10,000 years ago as the climate warmed, forming a temperate-forested swamp, bog and flood plain.
There was more erosion and movement of organic-rich sediment to the fresh-water swamp. Today, it's considered the northernmost Southern forest on the East Coast.
In the 1938 book "Delaware: A Guide to the First State," the swamp was described as the great "Delaware Everglade."
The swamp once included massive stands of bald cypress -- trees that were harvested and turned into shingles, buckets and siding. Those trees have been largely depleted by woodsman, who then moved on to the stands of Atlantic white cedar. Farmers drained the bogs to create farmland.
By the time preservation efforts took hold, there was plenty to do.
Over the years, Martin has tried to replant bald cypress stands within the swamp. What he found was that other trees -- pines and sweet gums -- beat out the once-common native cypress.
As part of the sustainable initiative, Wild Lands is now trying to re-establish Atlantic white cedar.
The efforts are part of a comprehensive approach to forest management on the property.
The first project, in the summer of 2006, was a harvest of 52 acres designed to demonstrate four different harvesting strategies: standard thinning, 50 percent to 60 percent harvest, 80 percent harvest and an eight-acre clear-cut. In the sections of partial cutting, they retained uncut "habitat islands."
Profits from the timber sales are reinvested in restoration projects, habitat enhancement projects, as well as replanting and property maintenance activities.
"It's a renewable resource," State Forester Mike Valenti said. "There's a lot you can do if you manage your forests."
The pines in lower Delaware and the hardwoods farther north make Delaware's forests unusual.
"There are a lot of healthy forests left in the state," Valenti said.
Some of the softwoods go to wood chips and pulp and some to lumber.
In Kent and New Castle counties, hardwoods dominate the forests and some trees produce lumber that is high-quality, furniture-grade, he said.
But one concern among state forestry officials is that few large lumber mills remain in Delaware to buy the wood. One large sawmill just outside Seaford in nearby Maryland closed in recent years.
Valenti said the state owns some 18,000 acres of forestland and has been selectively harvesting small amounts of timber to help offset its operating expenses.
Another concern, he said, is that although there is a lot of forestland remaining in Delaware, about a third of it is not high-quality timber. At Blackbird State Forest, for instance, there is a stand of white pine that isn't of especially high quality, he said.
The state recently rejected bids to harvest it because the profit was too low.
Meanwhile, at the Cypress Swamp, Martin periodically checks on his new plantings of Atlantic white cedar.
Tiny pine and gum seedlings are starting to poke through the dark soil.
He reaches down and plucks out the competition.
The cedars don't even reach his knees.
"With this," he said, "there's no such thing as instant gratification." | <urn:uuid:f5a320b3-8ee2-491d-9cfc-6769b3efbcff> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://forestindustries.eu/content/delaware-environment-seeing-trees-sustainable | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403502.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00024-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96576 | 1,386 | 3 | 3 |
Another term for apraxia.
- The seven-year-old child suffers from dyslexia, dyspraxia and attention deficit disorder, and his mother says she is furious at the way he was treated.
- The Oaklands unit is also open to those with more serious learning difficulties like dyspraxia and dyslexia.
- They have built ‘a delightful, heartening oasis for average to bright children hindered by dyslexia or dyspraxia, who require an intimate, industrious and caring environment.’
Early 20th century: from Greek dus- 'bad or difficult' + praxis 'action'.
Words that rhyme with dyspraxiaapraxia
For editors and proofreaders
Definition of dyspraxia in:
What do you find interesting about this word or phrase?
Comments that don't adhere to our Community Guidelines may be moderated or removed. | <urn:uuid:5725b893-449e-4f28-afa4-8e158c2907f5> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/american_english/dyspraxia | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393997.50/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00117-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921376 | 195 | 3.59375 | 4 |
William Whewell and Palaetiology
The Darwin-L discussion group was established to promote the reintegration of the palaetiological sciences. The term “palaetiology” was coined in 1837 by English philosopher, historian, and educator William Whewell (1794–1866) to refer to those sciences which have as their object the reconstruction of the past based on the evidence of the present. Whewell’s two exemplary palaetiological sciences were geology and comparative philology, but he recognized that many different disciplines had palaetiological divisions. The term “palaetiology” never became popular (probably because it is almost unpronounceable), but Whewell’s recognition of the unity of the palaetiological sciences was one of his most important contributions to the philosophy of science.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives us these details on the word:
palaetiology. rare. Also palaitio-. [(for *palae-aetiology), f. Gr. palaios ancient + aetiology; after palaeontology.] Used by Whewell for the application of existing principles of cause and effect to the explanation of past phenomena.
1837 Whewell Hist. Induct. Sc. XVIII. III. 481 The sciences which treat of causes have sometimes been termed aetiological..; a portion of that science on which we are about to enter, geology, has..been termed paleontology, since it treats of beings which formerly existed. Hence combining these two notions, the term palaetiology appears to be not inappropriate, to describe those speculations which thus refer to actual past events, but attempt to explain them by laws of causation.
So palaetiological a., of, belonging to, or using the methods of palaetiology; palaetiologist, one who investigates or treats of a subject in a palaetiological way.
1837 Whewell Hist. Induct. Sc. XVIII. III. 486 Palaetiological sciences..undertake to refer changes to their causes. Ibid. 487 The tendencies [etc.]..which direct man to architecture and sculpture, to civil government, to rational and grammatical speech..must be in a great degree known to the palaetiologist of art, of society, and of language, respectively. 1840—Philos. Induct. Sc. (1847) II. 464. 1859 Max Mueller Sc. Lang. Ser. I. ii. (1864) 29 Dr. Whewell classes the sciences of language as one of the palaitiological sciences.
Whewell wrote extensively about the nature and scope of palaetiology in both his History of the Inductive Sciences and his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. Here is a short extract:
As we may look back towards the first condition of our planet, we may in like manner turn our thoughts towards the first condition of the solar system, and try whether we can discern any traces of an order of things antecedent to that which is now established; and if we find, as some great mathematicians have conceived, indications of an earlier state in which the planets were not yet gathered into their present forms, we have, in pursuit of this train of research, a palaetiological portion of Astronomy. Again, as we may inquire how languages, and how man, have been diffused over the earth’s surface from place to place, we may make the like inquiry with regard to the races of plants and animals, founding our inferences upon the existing geographical distribution of the animal and vegetable kingdoms: and thus the Geography of Plants and of Animals also becomes a portion of Palaetiology. Again, as we can in some measure trace the progress of Arts from nation to nation and from age to age, we can also pursue a similar investigation with respect to the progress of Mythology, of Poetry, of Government, of Law.… It is not an arbitrary and useless proceeding to construct such a Class of sciences. For wide and various as their subjects are, it will be found that they have all certain principles, maxims, and rules of procedure in common; and thus may reflect light upon each other by being treated together. [William Whewell, 1847. The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, second edition. London: John W. Parker. Volume 1, pp. 639–640.]
He also argued that the palaetiological sciences were particularly suitable for undergraduates to study as a component of a general liberal curriculum:
I have ventured to give reasons why the chemical sciences (chemistry, mineralogy, electrochemistry) are not at the present time in a condition which makes them important general elements of a liberal education. But there is another class of sciences, the palaetiological sciences, which from the largeness of their views and the exactness of the best portions of their reasonings are well fitted to form part of that philosophical discipline which a liberal education ought to include. Of these sciences, I have mentioned two, one depending mainly upon the study of language and the other upon the sciences which deal with the material world. These two sciences, ethnography, or comparative philology, and geology, are among those progressive sciences which may be most properly taken into a liberal education as instructive instances of the wide and rich field of facts and reasonings with which modern science deals, still retaining, in many of its steps, great rigour of proof; and as an animating display also of the large and grand vistas of time, succession, and causation, which are open to the speculative powers of man.
There has been a good deal of historiographic work on Whewell, some of which mentions in passing his concept of palaetiology. One particularly noteworthy paper is M.J.S. Hodge’s “The history of the earth, life, and man: Whewell and palaetiological science” which appeared in William Whewell: A Composite Portrait (Menachem Fisch and Simon Schaffer, eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 255–288).
A number of writers following Whewell adopted the term “palaetiology,” but it never became widespread. The English philologist William Winning used it enthusiastically in his Manual of Comparative Philology (1838), quoting extensively from Whewell’s original text:
I have called this work “A Manual of Comparative Philology, in which (1) the affinity of the Indo-European languages is illustrated; and (2) applied to the early history of Europe, Italy, and Rome.” To denote the object pointed out in the first division of my title-page, the term Comparative Philology, which is now getting into common use, is a suitable and happy expression: it is not so, however, with respect to the second division. In entering upon the early history of Italy, it becomes quite necessary, besides the affinity of languages, to take into consideration monuments of art, customs, government, religion, and the general style of civilization. The name, therefore, of Comparative Philology, is not sufficiently comprehensive for the science treated of in this work; the subject, in its whole extent, belongs rather to the class of sciences which have lately been called Palaetiological; and of which Geology is, at present, the best representative.
“By the class of sciences here referred to,” says Mr. Whewell, who introduced the term Palaetiological, “I mean to point out those researches in which the object is, to ascend from the present state of things to a more ancient condition, from which the present is derived by intelligible causes. The sciences which treat of causes have sometimes been termed aetiological, from [Gr. aitia], a cause: but this term would not sufficiently describe the speculations of which we now speak; since it might include sciences which treat of permanent causality, like mechanics, as well as inquiries concerning progressive causation. The investigations which we now wish to group together, deal, not only with the possible, but with the actual past; and a portion of Geology has properly been termed palaeontology ([Gr. palai, onta]), since it treats of beings which formerly existed. Hence, combining these two notions ([Gr. palai, aitia]), the term palaetiology appears to be not inappropriate, to describe those speculations which thus refer to actual past events, but attempt to explain them by laws of causation. Such speculations are not confined to the world of inert matter: we have examples of them in inquiries concerning the monuments of the art and labour of distant ages; in examinations into the origin and early progress of states and cities, customs and languages; as well as in researches concerning the causes and formations of mountains and rocks, the imbedding of fossils in strata, and their elevation from the bottom of the ocean. All these speculations are connected by this bond, that they endeavour to ascend to a past state of things, by the aid of the evidence of the present.—Again, we may notice another common circumstance in the studies which we are grouping together as palaetiological, diverse as they are in their subjects. In all of them we have the same kind of manifestations of a number of successive changes, each springing out of a preceeding state; and in all, the phenomena at each step become more and more complicated, by involving the results of all that has preceeded, modified by supervening agencies. The general aspect of all these trains of change is similar, and offers the same features for description. The relics and ruins of the earlier states are preserved, mutilated and dead, in the products of later times. The analogical figures by which we are tempted to express this relation, are philosophically just. It is more than a mere fanciful description, to say, that in languages, customs, forms of society, political institutions, we see a number of formations superimposed upon one another, each of which is, for the most part, an assemblage of fragments and results of the preceeding condition. Though our comparison might be bold, it would be just if we were to say, that the English language is a conglomerate of Latin words, bound together in Saxon cement; the fragments of the Latin being partly portions introduced directly from the parent quarry, with all their sharp edges; and partly pebbles of the same material, obscured and shaped by long rolling in a Norman or other channel. Thus the study of palaetiology in the materials of the earth, is only a type of similar studies with respect to all the elements, which, in the history of the earth’s inhabitants, have been constantly undergoing a series of connected changes.” [Winning’s footnote 8: “Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences, vol. iii. p. 481.”]
Perhaps Philology, and the connected archaeological subjects, are not yet sufficiently advanced to constitute collectively, under an appropriate name, a complete and uniform member of the Palaetiological class of sciences; and I have therefore retained the more common and intelligible phrase, Comparative Philology, though in a more extended sense than exactly belongs to it. From want of some general title, Fr. Schlegel has named his treatise, which is one of the earliest works in this department of Palaetiology, ‘An Essay on the Language and Philosophy of the Hindoos;’ which he has divided into three books, on Language, Religion, and Polity. My object in the present Work is to perform for Italy and the West, the same kind of task which he has executed for India and the East; and to induce others to enter upon the same path. May Palaetiology, on the higher theme of Man, obtain as numerous and scientific inquirers as she already possesses on the subject of the earth! [William B. Winning, 1838. A Manual of Comparative Philology, in which the Affinity of the Indo-European Languages is Illustrated, and Applied to the Primeval History of Europe, Italy, and Rome. London: J.G. & F. Rivington. Pp. 12–15.]
Michael Kenney on Darwin-L (30 October 1993) pointed out a use of the term by Andrew Jackson Davis in The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind (1847). Kenney described Davis as “an American progressivist mystic who delivered his so-called revelations while in magnetic trance; later he became one of the major philosophical figures in the Spiritualist movement. The ‘Revelations’ is a cogmogony based on a teleological reading of contemporary physical and biological science which attempts to establish that the ultimate goal of the Universe is indefinite progress toward total harmony in the human and natural worlds. It reads like an odd melange of Lyell, Herbert Spencer (‘matter and motion’ get great play), and popular knowledge of electromagnetism.” Indeed it does:
It is the office of palaetiological sciences to set forth general truths in the departments of astronomy, geology, anatomy, physiology, &c., all as in perfect harmony with each other, and as forming a general and undeniable proof of the united chain of existences, and binding the whole together as one grand BOOK.… From this Book properly interpreted, should be derived the text of every sermon. In this, true theology has its foundation; and the teachings of this should constitute the only study of the theologian. By collecting palaetiological facts, then these things are gradually developed; and thus is unfolded the actual demonstration of original design, uniformity of motion and progression, and the consequent adaptation of means, to produce ultimates.—And thus is displayed the principle of Cause, Effect, and End, commencing at the foundation of, and operating through, Nature. [Andrew Jackson Davis, 1847. The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind. New York: S.S. Lyon and W. Fishbough.]
Chauncey Wright, a nineteenth-century American philosopher of science, spoke about common interpretive problems in the palaetiological sciences in a negative review of Herbert Spencer’s writings on evolution:
It was Mr. Spencer’s aim to free the law of evolution from all teleological implications, and to add such elements and limitations to its definition as should make it universally applicable to the movement of nature. Having done this, as he thinks, he arrives at the following definition: “Evolution is a change from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity through continuous differentiations and integrations.” But teleology is a subtile poison, and lurks where least suspected. The facts of the sciences which Dr. Whewell calls palaetiological, like the various branches of geology, and every actual concrete series of events which together form an object of interest to us, are apt, unless we are fully acquainted with the actual details through observation or by actual particular deductions from well-known particular facts and general laws, to fall into a dramatic procession in our imaginations. The mythic instinct slips into the place of the chronicles at every opportunity. All history is written on dramatic principles. All cosmological speculations are strictly teleological. We never can comprehend the whole of a concrete series of events. What arrests our attention in it is what constitutes the parts of an order either real or imaginary, and all merely imaginary orders are dramatic, or are determined by interests which are spontaneous in human life. Our speculations about what we have not really observed, to which we supply the order and most of the facts, are necessarily determined by some principle of order in our minds. Now the most general principle which we can have is this: that the concrete series shall be an intelligible series in its entirety; thus alone can it interest and attract our thoughts and arouse a rational curiosity. [Chauncey Wright, North American Review, April 1865; reprinted in Philosophical Discussions, 1877, pp. 70–71.]
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|"The design, by architect Edwin Francis, is unique in its interesting
combination of organic, futuristic, and art modern elements that reflect
not only its time period but illustrate an adaptation to its western, mountain-top
setting" Leslie Wildeson, State Historic Preservation Office.
Dream is Built
When constructed between 1939 and 1941, the Crest House was the highest
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A New Beginning
In 1992, the Arapaho National Forest began to stabilize the remains and
convert the Crest House into an observation platform. Now, the "Castle in
the Sky" is a place of contemplation for visitors to Mount Evans. | <urn:uuid:4df491be-2414-4ca9-9ae1-769af3abaae1> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.mountevans.com/MountEvansCom/Mount-Evans-AreasCrestHouse.HTML | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395621.98/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00170-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932693 | 230 | 2.8125 | 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.
2010 January 4
Explanation: What does a comet nucleus look like? Formed from the primordial stuff of the Solar System, comet nuclei were thought to resemble very dirty icebergs. But ground-based telescopes revealed only the surrounding cloud of gas and dust of active comets nearing the Sun, clearly resolving only the comet's coma, and the characteristic cometary tails. In 1986, however, the European spacecraft Giotto became one of the first group of spacecraft ever to encounter and photograph the nucleus of a comet, passing and imaging Halley's nucleus as it approached the sun. Data from Giotto's camera was used to generate this enhanced image of the potato shaped nucleus that measures roughly 15 kilometers across. Some surface features on the dark nucleus are on the right, while gas and dust flowing into Halley's coma are on the left. Every 76 years Comet Halley returns to the inner solar system and each time the nucleus sheds about a 6-meter deep layer of its ice and rock into space. This debris shed from Halley's nucleus eventually disperses into an orbiting trail responsible for the Orionids meteor shower, in October of every year, and the Eta Aquariids meteor shower every May.
Authors & editors:
Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply.
A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U. | <urn:uuid:dcafe42a-093e-4c35-bdd3-c69050c2be46> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.phys.ncku.edu.tw/~astrolab/mirrors/apod_e/ap100104.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396106.71/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00120-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92856 | 317 | 4.09375 | 4 |
A contemporary middle grade story about confronting bullying and prejudice
Danny Bigtree's family has moved to Brooklyn, New York, and he just can't seem to fit in at school. He's homesick for the Mohawk reservation, and the kids in his class tease him about being an Indian—the thing that makes Danny most proud. Can he find the courage to stand up for himself?
“A worthy, well-written novella.” —Kirkus Reviews
“This appealing portrayal of a strong family offers an unromanticized view of Native American culture, and a history lesson about the Iroquois Confederacy; it also gives a subtle lesson in the meaning of daily courage.” —Publishers Weekly
"With so many Native American stories set in the misty past, it's great to read a children's book about an Iroquois boy who lives in the city now. Bruchac weaves together the traditional and the realistic as Danny's ironworker father tells stories of his people's history and heroes, stories that give Danny courage to confront his schoolyard enemies and make friends with them.” —Booklist
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Rent Eagle Song 1st edition today, or search our site for other textbooks by Joseph Bruchac. Every textbook comes with a 21-day "Any Reason" guarantee. Published by Puffin Books.
Need help ASAP? We have you covered with 24/7 instant online tutoring. Connect with one of our tutors now. | <urn:uuid:f1f8260b-bb8a-48f2-a414-f285ab01a243> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.chegg.com/textbooks/eagle-song-1st-edition-9780141301693-0141301694 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396455.95/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00105-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966173 | 313 | 2.796875 | 3 |
Occupations in Broadcasting
Broadcasting, or “mass communication,” consists of radio, television, satellite, webcasts and all sorts of evolving channels designed to reach people all over the world. Careers range from sports announcer to set designer to video editor and more. Filmmaking is a specialized aspect of broadcasting. Whether you view films in a theater, on TV, or via Netflix, filmmaking consists of three phases:
- Preproduction – preparatory phase during which scripts are written, financing is secured, cast and crew are hired, and locations are selected.
- Production – this phase includes everything related to filming, such as lighting and sound set ups, selection of camera angles, scene rehearsals, and recording of video and audio.
- Postproduction – film footage is edited, sound/visual effects are added, and audio tracks are mixed and then combined with film footage.
Actors, producers and directors are the most readily identified occupations associated with broadcasting and filmmaking, but the behind-the-scenes workers are equally important and numerous. This table includes information about a selected few.
You can get started in these occupations with a CTE Pathway. For example, check out Radio Broadcasting Technician, Television Broadcasting Technician, Digital Media, and Travel and Tourism. For more information on these occupations and others, visit UtahFutures, and check out the Occupational Outlook Handbook.
“After taking a CTE course, TV Broadcasting and Digital Media, I took interest in filming and editing short commercial clips for our school, which is what motivated me to look into the film production field. The CTE courses I have taken gave me an idea of what is expected for such a career. It also taught me how to work with various programs and to be able to adjust to the different technology. Without taking these CTE courses I probably would not have discovered my new interests in digital media, which motivated me to choose the career and degree I now strive for. . .The CTE courses I took opened new opportunities for me and has broadened my horizon in ways I could have never expected.” says Kristine Bucasas, 2013 graduate of Wasatch High School, CTE Scholarship recipient, and future film producer/editor. | <urn:uuid:2c16e603-b446-4d8b-a536-bbcf22d93ed2> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.utahcte.org/blog/occupations-in-broadcasting/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402746.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00053-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961859 | 456 | 2.75 | 3 |
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