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Make the most of your garden space by using the practice of succession planting. This is a simple way to use your space in the garden effectively. Succession planting can start when you plant the cool season veggies in late winter or spring and continue through the planting of summer yielding produce.
What is Succession Planting?
Planting in succession means planting at intervals. Stagger planting times by a week or two for a harvest that is smaller and more frequent. This helps eliminate those leftovers that may go bad before you can use them.
Growing fewer plants means taking up less space in the garden, allowing you to grow more crops. However, succession planting does not mean to plant as you harvest each crop. Take into account the number of weeks or months until maturity and plant so that you always have a ready harvest.
Begin with the cool season crops you plant first. Many have 60-day maturity times, so instead of planting three rows of radishes, plant one of radish, one of lettuce and one spinach. A week or two later, repeat the plantings.
You may also hold back some of your seedlings by withholding fertilizer and leaving them in the small container. Keep them watered until other like plants have a good growth spurt and then plant them into a permanent location. This manipulation of garden planting is an effective way to prevent waste and have a steady supply of fresh produce.
Replant cool season crops as harvesting makes space available in your garden. Remember to rotate crops as required by the family of vegetable or fruit you are growing. | <urn:uuid:4ccf077b-7592-45f2-a6b3-15d46e06a8b7> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.examiner.com/article/succession-planting-the-vegetable-garden?cid=rss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397111.67/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00195-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94895 | 316 | 3.203125 | 3 |
When in college, we learned about setting goals and were taught the acronym ‘SMART’ (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Based). Well, I’m creating a new acronym that should be used instead: ‘SMARTER‘ (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-Based, Economical, and Rewarding). Since goals are directly linked to your habits and, more often than not, requires changing your current habits in order to achieve your goal, you need to add ‘economical’ and ‘rewarding’ to the current mix.
A NEW MODEL FOR SETTING GOALS: ‘SMARTER’:
–Professor Phil Jones
Your goal must be ‘economical’ (meaning, are you willing to pay the price in order to achieve it?) Setting a goal means that you WILL be sacrificing something in order to achieve it. Spending less time with family and friends? Spending money for products, services or memberships necessary to achieve the goal? Time commitment? Not doing other leisure activities?
Also, if you read about how habits are formed and/or changed, you will see that in order to successfully change a habit, there MUST be a reward at the end. Giving yourself a reward once you have achieved the goal is a huge motivator and must be part of the equation. It will keep your eye on the prize at the end of the journey.
If more people thought about the sacrifices they will be making before they start their goal and also think about the reward they’ll get once completed, it will result in more people achieving their goals. Don’t just be smart when setting your goals, be smarter! | <urn:uuid:c4fbbf83-1622-4420-8c90-a0d30beeb94d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.theyearoflivingsabbatically.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397865.91/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00199-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93574 | 367 | 3.015625 | 3 |
|The poetry of reality|
|Extraordinary claims with|
|Hot from the|
Statistical significance is the measure of what statistical evidence there is to suggest an observed effect was due to the independent variable (what is being tested) rather than chance. A significant effect, therefore, is one which would most likely be observed in subsequent experiments - i.e., it's a real effect, not just a fluke. The easiest way to demonstrate significance is with a larger sample size, as it is less likely that a larger number of data points would conspire to be incorrect by chance.
The word "significant", in this sense, does not mean "large" or "important" as it does in the everyday use of the word. Statistically significant effects can, in fact, be very small indeed although larger sample sizes are required to demonstrate significance of smaller effects.
In frequentist statistical approaches, statistical significance often arises when reporting the results of hypothesis testing. An alternative hypothesis (that there is an effect) is favoured - and a null hypothesis (that there is not an effect) is rejected - if the experimental evidence shows a significant difference from the null hypothesis. If a significant difference is not present the null hypothesis remains favored and the alternative hypothesis is rejected, because there's a good possibility that the effect was just random.
A common misinterpretation of statistical significance is that "a lack of statistical significance" or "no significant difference" are synonymous with "not enough data to draw a conclusion." In fact, a non-significant result is a conclusion in favor of the null hypothesis -- there isn't enough evidence to throw it out and accept the alternative hypothesis. A better way of interpreting "non-significant" is "there's a good chance that the outcome was a random event, and we can't differentiate between two competing effects".
Similar abuse of statistics is when journalists or certain agenda pushers ignore the concept of significance entirely - leading to false information being given out to people. In 2005, a report commissioned by the UK government concluded that there had been "no significant increase in drug use in UK schools". Not content with the conclusion that "things aren't that bad, actually", a few newspapers jumped on the report and decided to draw their own conclusions. In their, frankly amateurish, search for something to data mine, they noticed that cocaine use in schools went from 1% to 2% - although these were rounded off for the summary, it was actually 1.4% and 1.9%, so a 35% increase, rather than a 100% increase. They had their smoking gun; despite what the government concluded, cocaine use had doubled, cocaine was flooding the playground and the government were covering it up. However, the government's conclusion was more accurate, because it took into account significance, clustering and the fact that the use of many different drugs had been polled. If you test many variables the chances of one of them showing a clear trend by chance increase, and so tests for significance have to be altered appropriately. Upon doing the actual maths, the results were actually very insignificant, essentially produced by accident and the random chance that the sample would have fallen on a cluster of individuals using drugs that wasn't representative of the whole sample.
Problems with statistical significance
In most statistical methods significance is defined by some threshold value, often referred to as the alpha value. This threshold value is set usually at 0.05 or less. This means that there is a less than five percent chance of getting the results by chance alone. There is nothing fundamentally magic about an alpha level of 0.05 yet after many generations of using it in analysis it seems to have taken on a certain magical value for many sciences. If a statistical test comes back with p=0.04 results are called significant and if p=0.06 they are called non-significant.
With this standard alpha level about 1 in 20 results should come back significant when there really is no effect. This does and can happen frequently so it is wrong to assume a good value means you're completely certain, it's still all about probability. In individual experiments that run many statistical tests this is a problem, if you run 40 tests about 2 of them will show an effect that is not really there. This is often referred to as a family wise error rate and is difficult to control for but some measures can be used. While it is easy to see this problem in a single set of experiments in a single paper the same phenomenon emerges if a bunch of single experiments are published in multiple papers. With the thousands of experiments run everyday all over the world a very large number of them will show a statistical significance when there really is no effect at all. Publishing biases in journals exaggerate this problem because journals rarely publish experiments that show only a non-effect (i.e., "failed" experiments), and are much more likely to publish papers that show an effect. So you wind up with a massive uncontrolled bias in the published papers towards showing statistical significance where there really is none.
(Ab)use in pseudoscience
This is one reason why picking out a single test in a single paper to make a point is meaningless. It is a common tactic in pseudoscience to search through thousands of papers to find that one result that's significant and makes their point. Real science must be accompanied by the preponderance of evidence, and experimental results need to be replicated repeatedly and reliably before they should be incorporated in the body of accepted knowledge. This is why scientific consensus is important and quacks and cranks that go against this consensus do not gain points by finding a single example in a paper that might support their claims.
The problems above are due mostly to the use of frequentist approaches to statistical analysis. There is a growing movement of scientists who are encouraging the use of Bayesian based statistics. Bayesian approaches are not subject to the same sort of systematic error propagation issues as frequentist approaches (however they are subject to their own unique sets of issues).
"P-value fishing" is a pejorative term for a statistical sleight of hand often abused by cranks and those with an agenda to push. There are two common ways to get a statistically significant result that doesn't mean much at all. The first is, in studies with a large number of variables, to run comparisons of all the variables and hope that something comes out significant. Proper methodology dictates that the experimenter choose which variables are being compared beforehand and to run post-hoc corrections on any further comparisons. In other words, just comparing as many variables as possible will eventually turn up a significant result, though it's likely to be statistical noise. The post-hoc correction calculates how many of these comparisons will be significant by chance and so if the post-hoc analysis comes up with equal to or fewer significant results than the correction allows for, it's still insignificant.
The second trick is to fish for p-values by cranking up the number of subjects until significance is achieved. Normally, it's good to have more subjects, however, the data should be interpreted in light of that. What often happens with a large subject pool is that even a slight difference in means will become significant even though the effect size is close to nothing. This is why it's important to look at the effect size in addition to the p-value.
Proposed solutions to the problems
Another approach has been to argue that statistics needs to lose its magical status in science as some sort of analogy to a proof, but rather needs to be seen as an argument. The p value of statistics are just one piece in the broader perspective and should be weighed against other types of evidence. Rather then assigning a magical threshold value, p values can be reported directly, allowing people to integrate them with other evidence in making their conclusions. If other evidence is weak maybe a p value of 0.05 is not convincing, or maybe if all the other evidence is strong a p value of 0.1 is good enough.
- What does it mean for a result to be "statistically significant"? Stats FAQ, George Mason University
- 9 circles of scientific hell, Neuroskeptic
- The Cult of Significance Testing, John D. Cook | <urn:uuid:ee184c09-a0a7-4da1-8154-0868564579b0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Statistical_significance&oldid=927078 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395613.65/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00153-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969348 | 1,674 | 3.609375 | 4 |
From Kansas Policy Institute.
Kansas Policy Institute presents the 2014-15 student weighted funding formula
By David Dorsey
The updated version of the formula that will be used by the Kansas State Department of Education to determine student weighting in the coming school year is presented below. This complex formula is the basis to adjust (increase) the number of “students” in a school district for state funding purposes.
Dissecting this complicated formula reveals those factors the state recognizes that require additional money.
- Up to 13 different factors decide what the “real” student count will be for a particular district*.
- Seven factors (at-risk, vocational ed, bilingual ed, high-density at-risk, new facilities, high enrollment, and virtual students weighting) are calculated using percentages of student enrollment.
- Four factors apply to all 286 districts. They include:
- at-risk students (those who qualify for free lunch)
- low or high student enrollment
- special education weighting
- The others vary in applicability from the vocational education weighting (267 districts in 2013-14) to declining enrollment weighting (2 districts in 2013-14).
Once all applicable factors are determined, the total weighted number of students is multiplied by the Base State Aid Per Pupil (BSAPP — $3,838 in 2013-14 and $3,852 in 2014-15) to calculate that part of the amount of state aid a district receives.
These weightings are no small affair. For example, in the Elkhart School District (USD218) last year, the weighting factors increased the student count from 502.6 (actual enrollment) to 1,668. 2, a 231.9% increase. In dollar terms, that increased Elkhart’s BSAPP funding by $4,473,573 from $1,928,979 to $6,402,552. That’s an effective BSAPP of $12,739! And that’s not an isolated case. Nearly half of Kansas’s 286 school districts realized at least a doubling of the effective BSAPP due to weighting.
People in the education establishment are quick to lament that BSAPP is down from the pre-recession figure of $4,400 in 2008-09 to the current $3,852 for the 2015 fiscal year. However, you never hear them speak of the all the weightings that significantly add to the dollars actually received. In fact, when all students statewide are included, the real BSAPP for 2013-14 was $6,640. In a recent Lawrence Journal-World article it was reported that Lawrence Superintendent Rick Doll said the district is still suffering from cuts in base state aid. According to Doll, “We are operating basically at about 1999 school funding levels.” That’s not even close to being accurate. According to KSDE, state funding per pupil in 1999 was $4,533. That figure rose to an estimated $7,052 per pupil for last school year. Local support has more than doubled since ’99 (from $2,238 to $4,809 per pupil). Likewise for federal support.
It is important to understand what a difference in the level of funding the weighting of students adds. Last school year, the weightings provided $1.3 billion over and above BSAPP to the state’s 286 districts. But some Kansas politicians, particularly those more interested in protecting institutions than serving children, and the education establishment don’t like to talk about that part of state aid to education. Instead, they like to focus only on the BSAPP figure. That’s why we hear statements made like Superintendent Doll’s.
If I were still a math teacher and they were my students, their homework assignment would be learn and understand this formula. And yes, it would be on the test.
*There is one change in the formula from the 2013-14 school year. The low-proficient, non-at-risk factor was removed during the 2014 legislative session. | <urn:uuid:c093c9bf-51a9-43fe-8dc3-fa24fd2558c3> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://wichitaliberty.org/wichita-kansas-schools/kansas-school-finance-formula-explained/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403823.74/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00172-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955464 | 850 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Floppy Eared Rabbits
Unlike other types of rabbits that have “normal” ears pointing to the sky, Floppy Eared rabbits as its name have very distinctive floppy ears, down to earth. Does it mean they are more realistic and pragmatic as pets? Probably… nobody knows their mind. Do you? :)
Widely known as Lop rabbits, they are very famous for pet rabbits as their personality normally gentle and calm. Typically looked muscled, solid and rounded body is the first impression on their appearance.
There are many types of Lop rabbits known today, which are all originated from English Lop. In fact, they are one of the oldest types of rabbits.
The smallest is Holland Lop that considered as dwarf rabbit, its weight is about 1.2 – 1.4 Kg only. Some peoples call it as Miniature Lop rabbit. This type is also considered as the smallest type of rabbit beside Netherland Dwarf.
A bit bigger, in small rabbit category there is American Fuzzy Lop, which is about 1.6 - 2 Kg in weight, followed by Mini Lop and Dwarf Lop which are about 2 – 2.5 Kg.
Less popular German Lop weight between 3 – 3.5 Kg. English Lop is large rabbit about 4 – 5 Kg. And, French Lop is the biggest Lop, more than 5 Kg considered as huge rabbit.
Back to Types of Rabbits
Return from Floppy Eared Rabbits to homepage | <urn:uuid:f3903d1e-f8a0-4401-9be7-a57032a7830e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.mypetrabbit.com/floppy-eared-rabbits.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403502.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00110-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982768 | 315 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Purse Seine Netting
(Courtesy of Scottish Executive)
2.12 Purse seiners capture large aggregations of pelagic fish that shoal in midwater or near the surface by surrounding these concentrations with a deep curtain of netting which is supported at the surface by floats (Figure 12).
Small lead weights on the underside of the curtain ensure that the leadline quickly sinks and the net is then pursed under the shoal by heaving on a wire or purseline (a) which runs through steel rings attached to the lower edge of the net.
When the gear is closed and fish can no longer escape the netting is hauled lengthways using a mechanised power block until the fish are packed tightly in the bunt, or last remaining section of the net to be hauled.
The fish are then pumped or brailed aboard the vessel. A large purse seine can be as long as 1 kilometre and 200 metres deep.
Purse seiners generally try to avoid bottom contact as the small mesh nylon netting is easily damaged. A purse seine is not strictly speaking a towed gear but the purseline wire, being probably the strongest subsurface component, could possibly foul and cause damage to underwater installations.
Typical (and maximum) values for pursing wire diameters are 26mm (28mm) of 6/24 fibre core construction although 6/26 dyeform compacted wires with both fibre and steel cores are also used.
Figure 12. Purse seine | <urn:uuid:33d2f31c-56e3-4335-8a63-2f3e6a8b817f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.eurocbc.org/page371.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395546.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00089-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93282 | 309 | 3.140625 | 3 |
Kuwait is a state of Asia in the northern Arabian peninsula on the coast of the Persian Gulf, southern Iraq. Its territory is completely deserted. The weather is very hot, with very little rainfall. There is agriculture and animal husbandry is poor. The subsoil is rich in oil companies that extract British, American and Japanese.
The whole economy is based on rights charges for allowing this exploitation. Kuwait City Al comes in the middle of the desert, it provides the necessary water a seawater desalination plant. Its port is frequented by large tankers from all countries. Its form of government is a monarchy, headed by an emir is holding the executive branch. Most of the people are Mohammedan.
The peak of Kuwait is characterized by very high temperatures and high humidity in summer, although a little milder on the coast. Kuwait is a country where it rains only occasionally, usually from November to March. Many times there are sandstorms.
Kuwait belongs to the Asian continent. It is located northeast of the Arabian Peninsula, along the Persian Gulf, and just south of the delta of the Shatt al-Arab.
The country is bordered to the north of Iraq, and Saudi Arabia to the south. But it should be noted that its borders were defined too late. Its terrain is very flat, rising only slightly when we entered the west side. This country has no river, and water comes out of some intermittent wadis.
Society Kuwaiti Kuwait is mostly due to the large influx of immigrants that have required workers its huge oil industry. Attempts to achieve a higher percentage of indigenous population have not been successful.
The religion followed in Kuwait is mostly Muslim, practiced by 85 per cent of the population. To distinguish among them Shiites, who comprise 30 percent, the Sunnis, who account for 45 percent. Furthermore, Christians, Hindus, Persians and other minorities comprising the remaining 15 percent.
Kuwait’s economy relies on oil, owns 10 percent of global reserves. This poses challenges for 90 percent of its GDP.
Kuwait is not an agricultural country and has to import all its food, except for fish.
The high earnings of Kuwait has made the government gives people very good social services. Besides their military expenditures per capita are the highest in the world.
Kuwait City is the capital of the State of Kuwait, and has a history of 300 years. The city was rebuilt after the Gulf War.
Kuwait has many places of artistic interest. The key is in the coast and the capital east of the country. The cultural traditions of its people are also an interesting artistic.
The air service is like in the rest of the Gulf states, convenient but expensive. Kuwait Airlines connects the capital with major cities in the world.
In Kuwait we eat Western-style dishes, food style ‘fast food’, Indian food and other Eastern countries.
The offer is limited in Kuwait City nightlife, but there are some local and cafes in which to enjoy moments of leisure.
In the bazaars you can find handicrafts and objects typical of the region, as well as articles of import.
Leisure and sport
Kuwait only issued business visas, so that tourism is not allowed. Therefore, the only recreation for which the traveler can enjoy will be those to which he invited his hosts.
No related posts. | <urn:uuid:937208f6-d24b-48e3-ae78-33465dc2c6ac> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.villadeayora.com/blog/kuwait-the-pearl-of-arabian/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396959.83/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00154-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962346 | 691 | 2.734375 | 3 |
Water is so vital to humans that without it, we would die in just a few days. Every cell and organ in our body needs water to work properly. I’m sure you’ve heard the general, “8 by 8“ rule – drink eight 8 ounce glasses of water each day. I’m going to explain why some people may need more than that and why properly hydrating your body is so important.
Water makes up about 60 percent of our body weight. It provides so many helpful, necessary functions:
- Helps regulate body temperature
- Lubricates and cushions joints
- Protects body organs and tissues
- Moistens tissues (those in your mouth, eyes and nose)
- Flushes out waste
- Helps prevent constipation
- Carries nutrients and oxygen to cells
- Flushes toxins out of vital organs
When your body isn’t getting enough water, it can become dehydrated and interrupt normal functioning, as well as cause you to lose energy. Have I mentioned drinking water helps you lose weight?
Even though our bodies are full of water, we need to replenish our supply. We lose water through perspiration, urinating, bowel movements and even breathing. How much we need to replenish is dependent on a few different factors:
- Health conditions or illness: you can lose quite a bit of fluid if you have a fever, vomiting or diarrhea. On the other hand, there are health conditions that cause your body to retain water and you may actually need to limit your fluid intake.
- Amount of exercise: if you are a physically active person, chances are you break a sweat frequently. Different types of exercise require different amounts of fluid to compensate for the fluid lost.
- Climate: your body is likely to lose fluid through perspiration when you are outside in hot or humid air. During cold months, your skin loses moisture because of indoor heat. Different altitudes can also have an effect on the way your body uses water.
- If you’re pregnant or breast-feeding: it is important for women who are pregnant to stay well hydrated and very important for women who are breast-feeding to increase their water intake for obvious reasons.
Drinking a glass of water is not the only way to stay hydrated – milk and juice can be good choices because they are made up of mostly water. There are foods that have high water content – lots of fruits and vegetables. According to the Mayo Clinic, the food we eat provides about 20 percent of our total water intake.
To make sure that you are staying well hydrated, drink a glass of water with each meal and between meals. Be sure to drink plenty of water before and after being physically active. The Centers for Disease Control says this is essential. When you actually feel thirsty, your body is telling you that you are on your way to dehydration. Again, you can consume other beverages to add to your fluid intake but be careful – Rethink Your Drink provides a great list of beverages and their corresponding calories. Contact your doctor or a registered dietician if you have any questions or concerns about your daily fluid intake. | <urn:uuid:d1babe26-83b5-4722-a153-baf5ead6b23d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.divinehomecare.com/water-vital-to-a-healthy-body/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397428.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00169-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958395 | 651 | 3.5 | 4 |
Michigan Elk: Past and Present
Michigan's native elk disappeared around 1875. Today's elk herd dates back to 1918, when seven western animals were released near Wolverine. From that reintroduction, the number of animals grew steadily to about 1,500 elk in the early 1960s. They reached the point where limited hunting was possible in 1964 and 1965.
During the late 1960s, several factors kept the elk herd below its biological potential for population growth, including reduced habitat quality. The herd also was hard hit by poaching. There were about only 200 elk in the winter of 1975.
In the late 1970s, renewed public interest in the elk herd was spurred by oil exploration in the Pigeon River area of the elk range. Reduced poaching losses, habitat improvement and successful management of hydrocarbon development resulted in an increase in elk numbers to 850 by 1984.
As the herd grew, problems also increased with forest and agricultural damage. To bring the herd in better balance with its natural food supplies and with the needs of landowners, elk hunting resumed in 1984. The last elk survey in January of 2014 estimated the herd to be at 668, which is within the population goal of 500-900. | <urn:uuid:fd5ab4d1-f370-48bb-8c33-7629972e8d16> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0,4570,7-153-10363_10856_10893-28275--,00.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403502.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00144-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975742 | 252 | 3.453125 | 3 |
ScienceAlerts.com adds Biological Sciences category – 06 Apr 2012
“ScienceAlerts.com, a Web 2.0 social network to discover and share scholarly content, has announced that the latest addition to this natural sciences website is the Biological Sciences Category. The new Biological Sciences category currently features 520,658 stories largely derived from 984 scientific biology publishing sources.
ScienceAlerts.com’s Biological Sciences Category covers life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, genetics, and distribution. This category also provides a Biological Sciences RSS feed to stay up to date with the latest research in this science discipline. One of the latest articles presents the interrelationship of mycophagous small mammals and ectomycorrhizal fungi in primeval, disturbed and managed Central European mountainous forests.
Besides the Biological Sciences category, ScienceAlerts.com contains an Agricultural Sciences Category which the cultivation and production of crops, raising of livestock, and post-harvest processing of natural products. ScienceAlerts.com’s Environmental Sciences Category covers the external physical conditions affecting growth, development, and survival of organisms, and their management while it’s Forestry Sciences Category presents the cultivation, maintenance, and development of forests. ScienceAlerts.com’s Geographical Sciences Category covers the physical characteristics of the earth including its surface features, and the distribution of life on earth, and that of the Health Sciences aggregates the effects of disease and medical treatment on the overall condition of organisms.
ScienceAlerts.com’s review process is partly automated and partly manual to rigorously ensure that only relevant content is featured on the site. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at ScienceAlerts.com is usually only minutes. ScienceAlerts.com includes a search feature to retrieve specific titles or keywords from its’ large database. In addition, it suggests up to ten related articles for each article selected.”
Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter, April 6, 2012 | <urn:uuid:34d658d1-b129-41df-9266-d0c85a4bd1a4> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://blogs.princeton.edu/newscitechseries/tag/environment/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397797.77/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00083-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.885516 | 421 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Back to articles
Access to water in the workplace, first of all, is an employee right, set out in the Workplace Health, Safety and Welfare Regulations 1992, where is states that
“1) There should be an adequate supply of wholesome drinking water;
2) It should be: a) readily accessible and b) conspicuous to members of staff;
3) There should be an adequate numbers of cups or drinking vessels (except for water fountains).”
Everyone knows that it’s important to drink water throughout the day to stay hydrated. The benefits of staying hydrated include improved health, concentration and general well-being. In the workplace, this can translate into reduced sickness absence, increased worker mental and physical performance. Conversely, just drinking caffeinated drinks and no water can actually dehydrate workers and lower employee performance.
How to tell if you’re dehydrated- symptoms include:
- Headaches & migraines
- Feeling light-headed
- Concentration difficulties
- Shorter attention span
- Information retention worsens.
These can all negatively effect employee performance, resulting in lower work standards and possibly an increased number of errors.
So now you know the importance of water, what do you do now?
If you don’t already, then actively encourage workers to drink more water- if not to replace caffeinated drinks, then at least to drink water alongside them. Then you need to supply easily accessible and clean water. The main method of doing this is by providing a water cooler prominently in the workplace. Water coolers provide a constant supply of fresh, cooled drinking water.
TheOfficeSuppliesSupermarket.com stocks water cooolers, plastic water cups, water bottle refills, a water sterilisation kit at the lowest online prices. Have a look at the great savings you can make today!
Posted: 15 September 2010 | <urn:uuid:74c8906a-99dc-4a20-9826-a2ab2426df77> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.theofficesuppliessupermarket.com/articles/drinking-water-at-work | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396875.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00075-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923358 | 390 | 2.546875 | 3 |
“While producers rely on records and metrics to evaluate their reproduction program, many factors—like nutrition, environment and health—directly contribute to an animal’s ability to conceive and maintain pregnancy,” says Joel Pankowski, manager, field technical services with Arm & Hammer Animal Nutrition.
Reproductive performance-robbing challenges like metritis remain a real issue for many dairies since incidence can be as high as 20 percent in some herds. Metritis carries significant economic consequences since each case can cost dairy producers as much as $354.1
Dairies committed to reproductive excellence know nutrition is a key driver of reproductive success. A sound nutrition program helps promote a healthy uterus during and after calving and enables cows to perform at their best, Pankowski says.
Recent research at the University of British Columbia shows that dairy cow feeding behavior during the early transition period is an indicator of metritis risk.2 Cows that developed metritis had lower dry matter intake (DMI) as early as two weeks prior to calving—or approximately three weeks before clinical signs of metritis. The researchers also found the incidence of metritis led to decreased production and 3.8-times greater culling risk.
“One proven tool to promote uterine health and greater immune function is a proactive nutrition approach through proper pre- and postpartum ration formulation with both Omega-3 and Omega-6 essential fatty acids (EFAs) for a better transition,” Pankowski explains.
University research3 showed feeding Omega-3 and Omega-6 EFAs in combination resulted in:
- A 66% reduction in cases of endometritis in the treatment group (19%) when compared to the control (56%). The study also showed fewer clinical metritis cases.
- Resumed cyclicity earlier with more ovulatory cycles by 60 days in milk.
- Fewer days to first service, services per conception and days open.
To ensure success, make transition management a priority. For instance:
- Keep pen moves to a minimum and avoid overcrowding.
- Watch DMI closely as diseases like metritis increase as DMI drops.
- Record major health incidents. Detect and treat problems early; prevention is best.
- Screen cows appropriately and set a herd baseline to monitor when disease incidence gets out of line.
Finally, set a foundation for better reproductive health with both Omega-3 and Omega-6 EFAs. “Work with your nutritionist to properly incorporate these EFAs into your rations,” Pankowski says. “Increase your commitment to enhancing reproductive performance through better nutrition.”
1 Overton M, Fetrow J. Economics of Postpartum Uterine Health, in Proceedings. 3rd Annual Dairy Cattle Reproduction Conference 2008;39-43.
2 University of British Columbia, Research Reports: Effect of metritis on intake, milk yield and culling risk. Vol. 12, No 1. Available at: http://www.landfood.ubc.ca/dairycentre/sites/www.landfood.ubc.ca.dairycentre/files/files/Research_Vol12-1.pdf Accessed April 6, 2012.
3 Bowen AJ. The Effects of Dietary Linoleic and Linolenic Acids on Reproductive Performance in Holstein Cows. [Master’s thesis]. Department of Animal Sciences, University of Arizona; 2008. | <urn:uuid:e1cfab91-1033-4d35-a28d-b76aba98f6a9> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.dairyherd.com/dairy-resources/Enhance-reproductive-performance-156927545.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395166.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00172-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914073 | 712 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Forty is the new 30, just like 30 is the new 20. With women living longer, healthier lives than ever before and remaining active into later years, it is natural that turning 40 is no longer a dreaded indicator of middle age but rather a time when women feel more satisfied, fulfilled, and confident about who they are.
However, as you turn 40, you realize that your body is no longer what it was five, 10, or 20 years ago. To ensure that you remain healthy in your 40's and beyond, it is time to incorporate some of the following health tips into your regular routine.
Screen for diseases
Early screening helps prevent many complications to your health. Getting screened for diabetes is recommended. In addition, screening for breast cancer and colon cancer are necessary, if there is a history of cancer in your family. Some doctors may offer additional advice about screening for diseases, based on their assessment of your health.
Incorporate dairy products in your diet
Dairy products are a rich source of calcium. Calcium, as you might be aware, is the building block of bones. Without adequate calcium intake, bones turn thin and brittle. This condition is known as osteoporosis. This condition is more common than you realize. If you are over the age of 40, you might want to ensure that your foods include more natural sources of calcium. Besides milk, yogurt is also a rich source of calcium and preferred by many women for its light, healthful characteristics. If you feel your diet lacks adequate calcium, you may talk to your doctor about supplements for calcium.
Managing hormonal change
For women, the chief aspect of their 40's is the changes in hormones that their body experiences. From hot flushes to menopause, there are a lot of things that your body is experiencing. If you are using contraceptives, you might want to talk to the doctor about their suitability. Some contraceptives are associated with greater risk of heart disease and you might want to find a replacement. You should also talk to your physician about ways to manage hormone changes better, if they are causing discomfort and problems.
One point that women often forget to account for is their mental health. A sound mind makes a healthy body. If you are under stress, you will find yourself sick more frequently. Moreover, it will be difficult for you to recover from illnesses. That is why managing stress levels is very important. Women in their 40's might have a lot of things going on in their lives, such as careers, teenaged children, and so on. You could try to rope in your family members to do some of the chores, so that you make more time for yourself. This will help you with your efforts at stress relief.
Staying healthy, mentally and physically, in your 40's, will help you prevent diseases, and also, help you look younger. Since younger looking skin and hair are the result of good health, it is important that you focus on your health for all around well being. | <urn:uuid:95302147-3544-4b89-8dcd-6e02d78d61db> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.examiner.com/article/health-tips-for-women-over-40?cid=rss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395546.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00064-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974701 | 611 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Regular readers know that a modern banking system is designed so that banks can function and support the real economy for years with negative book capital levels. This design makes banks capable of absorbing losses on the excesses in the financial system and protecting the real economy.
Governments bailing out banks ends the ability of a modern banking system to protect the real economy. It interferes with banks recognizing all of their bad debt exposures today. This occurs because the actual losses on the bad debt exposures could easily exceed the capacity of the government to inject funds into the banking system.
If the Greek government really wants to help the real economy, it would not bailout its banks. Rather, it would require the banks to recognize the losses on their bad debt exposures today and provide ultra transparency to prove it.
Regular readers know that ultra transparency and not bank book capital levels is the necessary condition for restoring trust in the banking system.
Finally, if the Greek government cared about its citizens, the Greek government would use the funds that would have been invested in the banks to support economic growth and social benefit programs.
Supporting businesses after five years of recession is a top priority for Greece, Prime Minister Lucas Papademos said.
“The government is trying to do everything possible to make sure that financial resources reach the real economy,” Papademos said at a conference in Athens today.
The country’s banks need to play an active role and take responsibility for making the economy move, he said.
The recapitalization of Greece’s banks is a “prerequisite” for this to happen.Recapitalizing banks is not a "prerequisite" for banks to play an active role in supporting the real economy.
Management of the US Savings & Loans during their crisis definitively ended the notion that positive book capital levels are necessary as a "prerequisite" for making loans. They made lots of loans to the real economy. | <urn:uuid:ee51581d-a2f6-4da9-888f-14358e747670> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://tyillc.blogspot.com/2012/04/if-greece-government-cared-about-its.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402746.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00162-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95008 | 394 | 2.671875 | 3 |
Achieve carryover of articulation skills while boosting curricular language. Students practice target phonemes embedded in academic topics in the therapy room and other school settings, and at home.
- Achieve carryover of r, s, th, l, sh, and ch
- Improve curricular language to meet IDEA guidelines
Written in the popular format of the Easy Does It series, this program has:
- detailed explanations of therapy techniques
- systematic lesson plans
- clear goals and objectives
- student practice activities and materials
- take-home activities
The activities target articulation of r, s, th, l, sh, and ch. Language skills are reinforced with content in:
- academic areas (e.g., math, science, geography)
- narrative text
- expository ext
The Therapy Manual provides goals and objectives and specific directions for activities. The Materials Book has 176 pages of corresponding student activities. Copy the student activity pages or print them from the FREE CD. Lesson topics such as Mummies, Music Careers, Recycling, The Gold Rush, and Equality keep students engaged. Learning formats vary from easy science experiments to taking opinion polls and using play money.
There are three types of activities:
- Controlled Carryover—Students practice activities in the therapy room and in another school setting with the SLP. The activities are also appropriate for students practicing correct sound production at the word and sentence levels.
- General Carryover at School—Students practice activities in the therapy room and in another school setting with the SLP. Then, the students practice the activities with other personnel in the school setting.
- General Carryover at Home—Students practice activities in the therapy room, then in another school setting, and finally independently in the home setting.
Extra helps include:
- family letter
- school personnel letter
- instructional sheets for family members and school personnel
- reproducible word, phrase, and sentence lists
Copyright © 2004
- A language-based approach to articulation therapy is useful for any client at the point in treatment where carryover of connected speech is the goal (Bernthal & Bankson, 2004).
- Speech-sound intervention should facilitate generalization of newly-acquired skills to a variety of listening, speaking, and literacy-learning contexts (ASHA, 2004).
- Activities reflecting real-life situations that use functional words facilitate generalization to other persons and settings (Bleile, 2004).
- Rather than wait until a client can successfully produce a sound at the sentence level, activities to generalize the sound across situations should be presented as soon as the client can produce the sound successfully in words (Bernthal, Bankson, & Flipsen, 2009).
Easy Does It for Articulation A Language Approach incorporates these principles and is also based on expert professional practice.
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (2004). Preferred practice patterns for the profession of speech-language pathology [Preferred Practice Patterns]. Retrieved February 26, 2009 from www.asha.org/policy
Bernthal, J.E., & Bankson, N.W. (2004). Articulation and phonological disorders. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Bernthal, J.E., Bankson, N.W., & Flipsen Jr., P. (2009). Articulation and phonological disorders: Speech sound disorders in children (6th ed.). Boston: Pearson.
Bleile, K.M. (2004). Manual of articulation and phonological disorders: Infancy through adulthood (2nd ed.). Clifton Park, NY: Delmar Learning. | <urn:uuid:c713b484-1923-487a-b5b9-546c0e6dcb43> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.linguisystems.com/products/product/display?itemid=10283 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396100.16/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00159-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.90039 | 747 | 3.671875 | 4 |
Ringing Rocks – Nature’s “Rock” Band
Ringing rocks are the rocks which ring when struck by a solid object as though it were a hollow metal. It still remains as one of the unsolved mysteries of the world. It is truly a remarkable phenomenon. These types of ringing rocks are located in a few pockets of the world, the most famous and significant being the “Ringing Rocks Park” or the “Stony Garden” located in Haycocks, Bucks County in South-eastern Pennsylvania, U.S.A. Another well-known site which shows this phenomenon is located in Western Australia in a place known as the “Bell Rock Range”.
It is certainly not some magic trick or a man-made illusion. So what is it? What is the secret behind these musical rocks? The answer is that there is no absolute proof of why they behave that way. Though it is a natural phenomenon, it has not yet received a fully satisfactory explanation. In this article we will look into the location, the paradoxes surrounding the area, the composition and the history behind this mystery of nature.
Ringing Rocks Park, Pennsylvania
It is a 128 acres park nested in the woods of Black Upper Eddy in Bucks County. It is located within a mile’s radius of the Delaware River near the New Jersey state line. Within this massive park lies an open field of boulders covering an area of seven acres and a depth of ten feet. These boulders are the ones which possess the weird quality of ringing whenever they are struck.
The other odd thing about this boulder field is that boulder fields are formed by collapsing mountain sides which would mean that the boulders would eventually settle down at the bottom of steep mountains or hills. But in this peculiar case, the boulders are found on the top of a hill. How did it get there?
These rocks are made of a material called Olivine Diabase which is basically a volcanic residue. Initially when the earth was formed, there was only one single piece of land called “Pangaea”. When the continents separated out, the stretching of the crust caused the magma from the upper mantle region to rise up and settle on the land. After many years of cooling, sedimentation and splitting up, they formed individual Diabase rocks in a cluster. The soil moisture present below the rocks helped the rocks to move downhill to their current position, a process known as “Solifluction”.
Interesting Fact: Although the composition of all the rocks in the boulder field is identical, only one-thirds of the rocks actually ring on being struck. The ones that ring are called “live” rocks and the ones that do not are called “dead” rocks.
Attempts to Decode the Musical Rocks
In 1890, Dr. J.J. Ott collected rocks of different pitches and played a few musical tones along with the pleasant valley band in a Historian’s meeting. From this innovative use for the rocks, Dr.Ott collected that the rocks need not be in their natural environment to ring neither do they have to be intact in the field.
Later in 1965, a geologist named Richard Faas of the Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania collected samples and conducted experiments and measurements using sensitive equipment. He gathered from his results that a single rock produces multiple waves of different frequencies. The sound we hear is the super-imposition of these waves. But he couldn’t find the physical mechanism that created these tones. Many physicists believe that this could be the cause of internal stresses between the crystal structures of the rock.
Supernatural and Extra-terrestrial Angles
When science couldn’t give the answers, people started tilting their heads towards the supernatural. People believed so due to the very low life existence near the boulder field. Flora and Fauna are as good as non-existent near the rocks. In fact, the ten feet thickness of the rocks causes the field to be hotter than the surrounding area therefore making it inhospitable. The other view that scientists examined was that the rocks were actually comets or meteorites that had crashed onto earth containing un-earthly elements.
Few people have claimed that the rocks mess with magnetic compasses. After research into this matter it was found that there weren’t any unusual activities surrounding the Ringing rocks pointing out disturbances in the magnetic fields, radio activity or any electromagnetic flux.
Another claim made by the Late Mister Ivan T. Sanderson was that a live rock which was big enough could give out an entire scale i.e., the entire Do, Re, Me, Fa, So, La, Te of music. Not exquisitely notable but this feature varies when different rocks are suspended and impacted. Sometimes the frequencies of the notes are out of the Human audible range (20Hz – 20,000Hz) making it inaudible to the human ear. This may be one of the reason why animals (insects, more specifically), which are sensitive to higher or lower frequencies tend not to live there.
Don’t write them off Just Yet
The ringing rocks are a mystery about which the public is not quite aware about, compared to other famous unexplained mysteries like the “Bermuda Triangle”. It is a simple yet mysteriously beautiful phenomenon which continues to haunt geologists who are keen for answers. We can hope that one day Science will find answer to this earth bound mystery. | <urn:uuid:43e4d229-a4d0-4eb5-91d3-4f612f49b6fb> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://readanddigest.com/ringing-rocks-natures-rock-band/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396872.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00193-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962951 | 1,130 | 3.15625 | 3 |
“I support women’s rights to vote and stand as MPs. But I also think they should be segregated at school and university. Both those opinions are based on religion,” says Dr Hassan Joha. Kuwaiti women cannot vote - and this summer they are now to be segregated at university. Dr Joha is a deputy in Kuwait’s National Assembly, one of the few elected legislative bodies in the region. He is a Shi’ite and describes himself as a moderate, independent Islamist. The Muslim Brotherhood also believes women should get the vote: yet its political arm voted against it. These examples show the contradictions - sometimes for political reasons, sometimes religious - that beset Kuwait’s Islamists.
In May 1999, while parliament was suspended, the emir decreed that women were finally to get the vote and be allowed to stand as MPs. The voting age was to be reduced from 21 to 18. Famously, parliament failed to ratify the decree. The liberal opposition proposed a new draft law. That, too, failed by two votes.
Paradoxically this reverse was the result of the democratisation process introduced by the ruling family, the Al Sabah. On one hand, government is appointed, with the Al Sabah entrenched in the ministries; on the other, there is a fine constitution and legal system, a vigorous and open press, and a parliament of 50 elected members (plus nominated ministers).
The Islamists, Shia and Sunni, became, at the last elections of 3 July 1999, the biggest single force in parliament, in which they hold 18 of the 50 elected seats. Six of these seats are held by Shia and the remaining 12 by Sunnis: five from the Islamic Constitutional Movement (ICM, al-haraka al-dustouriya al-islamiyya), the political front of the Muslim Brotherhood, three by Salafis (1) and four by independent Islamists.
These independents are mainly Bedouin. In the 1970s the emir gave the Bedouin citizenship, seeing them as an obedient counter to the powerful merchant class and its progressive, liberal allies, influenced by Arab nationalists and socialists. “The surprise was that they started to get educated,” says Dr Shamlan al-Essa, head of the political science department at Kuwait university, “and the government couldn’t control them any more. So it turned to the Islamists.” In their rise to political prominence, the Sunni Islamists have in turn used the Bedouin - still the most traditional elements of Kuwaiti society - as their main recruiting ground.
Dr Yaakub Hayati, a lawyer, Kuwait’s representative to the Gulf Cooperation Council (2), a Shi’ite but not an Islamist, says: “Kuwait is a religious society; it is conservative and traditional but not fanatical. Before oil we were seafarers who felt we were in the hands of God.” We are talking of less than a million Kuwaiti nationals, of whom two-thirds are Sunni and one third Shia. There are a similar number of foreigners, without citizenship; they do not yet figure in the debate.
Kuwait is still scarred by Saddam Hussein’s invasion in August 1990 and mindful of its liberation by the United States and its allies. Its links to the US are close - even the Islamists meet regularly with the US ambassador.
The Sunni Islamists have formed an Islamic bloc (kutla islamiyya) in parliament. The bloc joined with the Shia Islamists and others to condemn both September’s acts of terrorism and the US intervention in Afghanistan. September 11 affected Kuwait’s Islamists directly. The discovery that al-Qaida’s spokesman, Suleiman Abu Ghaith, was a Kuwaiti national was the main shock. But there were reports, too, of Kuwaitis in Afghanistan, and others being held in Guantanamo. In January Paul O’Neill, the US Treasury Secretary, came to Kuwait to close down sources of funding for al-Qaida (3). There was a crackdown on the Islamists’ unlicensed fund-raising activities, in particular the closure of hundreds of kurshk, kiosks used for Islamic fund-raising (4).
Events in Palestine temporarily removed the heat. Islamists and secular liberals suspended their differences, and the Islamists figured prominently at rallies and demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinian people (and Hamas) - though Kuwaitis have not forgiven Yasser Arafat for his backing of Saddam Hussein during the invasion, which caused the departure of most of the 400,000 Palestinians in Kuwait.
’Now they’re listening to the ulema’
Liberals welcomed the spotlight suddenly directed at the Islamists’ activities and new ministerial orders that funds for abroad were to be inspected by committees from various ministries. Dr al-Essa says: “For the first time the government is also looking at school text books and at what the ulema are saying in their Friday sermons.” He happily admits that he has been trying to obstruct the law introduced in 1996 by a coalition of Islamists to segregate the genders at Kuwait university. The law is to be implemented this summer. “It’s ridiculous; anyway we don’t have enough classrooms, labs or teachers.”
The government agreed to the bill for tactical reasons, failing to see the storm it would create. Girls make up 70% of the students - many boys go to universities abroad and, says Dr al-Essa, “The girls work harder; it’s the only way they can get out the house.” On the campus girls sit together, separate from boys, in the university’s stylish modern courtyard. Most girls wear long skirts, denim jackets, headscarves and lots of makeup; some, though, wear jeans or knee-length skirts and have long, uncovered hair. One girl, Leila, says shyly that she is against segregation, but then adds: “We’re not ready for it, we haven’t got the room or the teachers for separate classes.”
The Islamists want to widen the role of Islamic law (sharia), the basis of personal law in Kuwait. They have long called for an amendment to Article 2 of the constitution which states that sharia is “a main source of legislation” to have the article rephrased to read that sharia is “the source of legislation.” Now, according to Dr Ahmad al-Baghdadi, an expert on Islamic thought and professor at Kuwait university, they have switched their attention to Article 79: “No law may be promulgated unless it has been passed by the National Assembly and sanctioned by the Emir.” To this they seek to add “and according to the sharia”.
Nasser al-Sane, 46, is very Westernised (he has studied in the US and UK), friendly, informal, his hand outstretched to greet foreign women. Islamists in Kuwait can be identified by the length of their dishdashas, 25cm shorter than the norm. Many have given up the traditional heavy beard and moustache. Sane, a deputy for the ICM, agrees that the Islamists “would like to extend sharia to other areas, but we have to go slowly and pave the way.” The ICM is by far the best funded and most highly organised of the Islamist movements. Sane says: “We don’t want to box Islam in. We’re talking about banking, education, IT, health, the family.”
One financial institution is already run on Islamic lines, the Kuwait Finance House. The government helped it with a large loan, possibly more than $100m. Terms are easy, loans are interest-free, the appeal is clear. The Islamists are also seeking to get Kuwait’s political parties licensed. That is another constitutional matter, for they have not been written into the country’s legal system.
How are the Islamist forces distributed? The Shia seek to redress old inequalities; they want an apology for accusations that they constitute a fifth column, accusations that surfaced in the Iran-Iraq war. Those accusations abated as Shia showed their loyalty during Kuwait’s invasion a decade ago. They are less organised politically than the Sunnis, more varied in their shades of Islamism. In the political arena their alliances shift, according to the issue. Abdel Wahab al-Wazan, a liberal Shiite and former minister, says: “The Shia have been neglected. If they organised, they could have more than their present six MPs, though not the 15 that would reflect their geographical spread. Though we can agree on outside issues such as Palestine, it’s hard to agree on Islamic ones because we’re so divided.”
The Salafis are mainly concerned with ethical issues although they are present in the political arena. Their main group, the Islamic Salafi Grouping (al-tajamu al-islami al-salafi), has two parliamentary seats (including that of the Minister of Justice and Islamic Endowment). The minister’s wife is a practicing pharmacist. Yet he is against the women’s vote: “It will change our way of life. We don’t want to impose Islam on the country, as they did in Iran with the chador; we just want to encourage it.”
The Salafi Movement (al-haraka al-salafiyya), a split from the main movement, is better known as the “scientific Salafis”. The deputy of its one seat, Walid Tebtaba’i, talks of differences with the ICM “now healed”. He is referring to vituperative exchanges made public in the press. In return, Isa al-Shahin, secretary general of the ICM, speaks of links between the Salafis, whom he dismisses as “parallel to Wahhabis” (5), and the Taliban. Ismail Shati, a founder and board member of the ICM, elaborates further: “They are so poorly organised that anyone can join or leave, and every four or five years there are new splits in the movement; those who are now in Cuba [prisoners at Guantanamo] could easily come from one of those splits. They have extremists among them, it’s dangerous.”
The Muslim Brotherhood, which maintains a low profile, secretive existence in Kuwait, created the ICM in 1991. It was needed a new, political front. The Brotherhood was started in Kuwait by members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Ismailiya in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna. Al-Banna’s movement spread throughout the Arab world and beyond, and still claims an international precedence among local and national Brotherhood movements (6). The invasion of Kuwait proved disastrous for the Kuwaiti Brotherhood, causing a rift with the international movement, which tried to play a mediating role with Saddam Hussein.
Ismail Shati was at the heart of the dispute. “I stayed in Kuwait working with those of the Kuwaiti Brothers who stayed. We renamed the Brotherhood the Murabitoun (those who wait for the battle). It had military and social wings. The start of the dispute was the arrival of US troops. Prominent Brotherhood branches visited Baghdad and issued statements condemning the US presence in Kuwait in language that seemed to support Saddam. So we froze our membership of the Brotherhood.” Shati claims that the Kuwait Brotherhood still remains separate from the international Egypt-based Brotherhood “though they have started to attend their meetings.”
Though Shati’s personal confrontation with the international Brotherhood is well documented, there is widespread disbelief that the Kuwaiti Brotherhood has not rejoined the parent organisation. Indeed the Kuwaitis are thought to be funding it. Since the ICM and Kuwait Brotherhood share the same members, the secrecy of the Brotherhood contrasts strangely with the relative openness of the ICM.
Where does the government really stand in regard to the Islamists? How far-reaching is the investigation of the Islamists’ structures provoked by September 11? It is hard to know whether the measures taken against unlicensed funding activities have made any real difference. More importantly, Kuwait’s ruling family is at present more concerned with the succession of Emir Jabir al-Ahmad Al Sabah, who is over 70 and in poor health, than with running the country. The main question is whether the Al Sabah really mean to change the existing balance - one which they brought about themselves in their desire to divide and rule. It is perhaps easier to have the Islamists to deal with than secular liberals. | <urn:uuid:362bdcbd-4e25-4b51-99af-cd72f4ccceec> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://mondediplo.com/2002/06/04kuwait | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395620.56/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00095-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966339 | 2,640 | 2.6875 | 3 |
EDF Climate Corps fellow | May 16, 2013
“Knocking down a brick wall by yourself with your bare fists is next to impossible. But organize a team equipped with sledgehammers and a plan, and it gets a whole lot easier,” said Gwen Ruta in a Fast Company Op-Ed explaining the concept behind EDF Climate Corps.
This blog post is the 16th in a series, highlighting our team of ‘sledgehammers’ – the 2012 EDF Climate Corps fellows– and their plans for breaking down the barriers to energy efficiency at their host organizations.
Name: Annie Downs
Host Organization: Smithsonian Institution
School: Georgetown Public Policy Institute, Georgetown University
Opportunity: The Smithsonian hired Downs to evaluate energy efficiency improvements related to museum lighting.
Barrier: Lighting a museum is an art form of its own. It means thinking not only about illuminating a space, but also about the qualities of light most of us do not consider – color, beam spread, consistency and lifespan. Furthermore, changing a light bulb in a museum full of delicate artifacts isn't easy. In the National Air and Space Museum, for example, electricians must work around historic airplanes and rockets whenever a bulb burns out.
Also, conservators are not just thinking about what you will see today, they’re thinking about what your great-grandchildren will see in 100 years. Every time art is exposed to light, it fades, so conservators must make the tough choice of how long to let a piece of art sit in a gallery before they need to remove it from the light.
Solutions Identified: Incandescent lights are no longer the only option, and the Smithsonian is leading a revolution in museum lighting. The leaps and bounds made by light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in recent years mean that designers have a new, more efficient tool to work with. As a result, it has already switched some of its galleries entirely to LED, and it has even bigger plans for the future. What it’s finding is that everyone comes out a winner.
Traditional incandescent lights have life spans that range from about 2,000 to 4,000 hours. Museum lights stay on almost all day, so light bulbs burn out quickly and need to be changed often. In comparison, LEDs last for up to 50,000 hours, so facilities staff only have to change them every twelve years.
Also, recent studies have shown that LED lights do not emit the damaging UV rays produced by other types of bulbs. That means that museum staff can worry less about light damage and more about putting together the perfect show.
Lastly, with over ten thousand lamps in a single museum, energy efficiency in lighting is a big deal for the Smithsonian. Galleries already retrofit with LED lights have shown energy savings of up to 75 percent.
Potential Savings: In total, the lighting retrofit projects Downs recommended to the Smithsonian could reduce its energy use by more than one million kilowatt hours annually, saving the institution more than $620,000 over five years.
Quote: “LED lighting shows real promise for museum maintenance and conservation efforts, while cutting costs and pollution.”
Name: Daniel Gonzalez-Kreisberg
Host Organization: Belk
School: Ross School of Business and School of Natural Resources and the Environment, University of Michigan
Opportunity: Gonzalez-Kreisberg was hired by Belk, a department store with over 300 locations across the southeastern United States, to work on lighting upgrades, heating and cooling system improvements and vending miser controls for beverage vending machines.
Barrier: A dynamic, growing company like Belk does not throw capital at just any project with a promising financial return. Instead, it focuses on the best opportunities. Belk departments and teams compete with one another to prove that their proposals will benefit the company's growth the most. Efficiency upgrades, particularly lighting, heating and cooling system upgrades, could significantly reduce facility operating costs. However, these projects are outside of Belk's core business strategy – as a retail company, the company's top priority is to sell more merchandise. Projects that improve sales are generally prioritized over those that reduce expenses.
Solutions Identified: In 2007, the Retail Industry Leadership Association established the Retail Sustainability Initiative and Belk soon signed on. This was not a commitment that Belk management took lightly, and the retailer soon supplemented an already successful recycling program by increasing efficiency in product packaging and private brand supply chains, designing its newest store to meet U.S. Green Building Council LEED standards and even adding solar panels to two stores and the Belk corporate offices. This commitment provided the opportunity for Matt Green, Belk’s Director of Facilities, Energy, and Support Services, to work with EDF Climate Corps fellows to identify and implement energy efficiency projects.
Quote: “At the locations I visited in its 300-store portfolio, I found forward-thinking property managers who understand the value of energy efficiency in their facilities. They are using the retail industry’s growing focus on sustainability to catalyze the energy efficiency investments they have long pushed for.”
About EDF Climate Corps
EDF Climate Corps (edfclimatecorps.org) taps the talents of tomorrow’s leaders to save energy, money and the environment by placing specially-trained EDF fellows in companies, cities and universities as dedicated energy problem solvers. Working with hundreds of leading organizations, EDF Climate Corps has found an average of $1 million in energy savings for each participant. For more information, visit edfclimatecorps.org. Read our blog at edfclimatecorps.org/blog. Follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/edfbiz and on Facebook at facebook.com/EDFClimateCorps.
About Environmental Defense Fund
Environmental Defense Fund (edf.org), a leading national nonprofit organization, creates transformational solutions to the most serious environmental problems. EDF links science, economics, law and innovative private-sector partnerships. For more information, visit edfbusiness.org. Read our blog at blogs.edf.org/business. Follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/EDFbiz. | <urn:uuid:893b5f7e-863a-4619-b5dd-e934a1d345a0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://edfclimatecorps.org/blog/2013/05/16/faces-edf-climate-corps-part-16 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394605.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00047-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934167 | 1,281 | 2.8125 | 3 |
CBSE solvedtest papers for class 9 Mathematics Summative Assessment-I (First Term). Review of representation of natural numbers, integers, rational numbers on the number line. Representation of terminating / non-terminating recurring decimals, on the number line through successive magnification.Rational numbers as recurring/terminating decimals. Explaining that every real number is represented by a unique point on the number line and conversely, every point on the number line represents a unique real number. Definition of nth root of a real number. Recall of laws of exponents with integral powers. Rationalexponents with positive real bases (to be done by particular cases, allowing learner to arrive at the general laws.) Rationalization (with precise meaning) of real numbers of the type (& their combination).
CBSE solved test papers for class 9 Mathematics Summative Assessment-I (First Term). Definition of a polynomial in one variable, its coefficients, with examples and counter examples, its terms, zero polynomial. Degree of a polynomial. Constant, linear, quadratic, cubic polynomials; monomials, binomials, trinomials. Factors and multiples. Zeros/roots of a polynomial / equation. State and motivate the Remainder Theorem with examples and analogy to integers. Statement and proof of the Factor Theorem. Factorization of cubic polynomials using the Factor Theorem. Recall of algebraic expressions and identities. Simple expressions reducible to these polynomials.
CBSE solved test papers for class 9 Mathematics Summative Assessment-I (First Term). History - Euclid and geometry in India. Euclid method of formalizing observed phenomenon into rigorous mathematics with definitions, common/obvious notions, axioms/postulates and theorems. The five postulates of Euclid. Equivalent versions of the fifth postulate. Showing the relationship between axiom and theorem. Given two distinct points, there exists one and only one line through them. (Prove) two distinct lines cannot have more than one point in common.
CBSE solved test papers for class 9 Mathematics Summative Assessment-I (First Term). (Motivate) If a ray stands on a line, then the sum of the two adjacent angles so formed is 180 degree and the converse. (Prove) If two lines intersect, the vertically opposite angles are equal. (Motivate) Results on corresponding angles, alternate angles, interior angles when a transversal intersects two parallel lines. (Motivate) Lines, which are parallel to a given line, are parallel. (Prove) The sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degree. (Motivate) If a side of a triangle is produced, the exterior angle so formed is equal to the sum of the two interiors opposite angles.
CBSE solved test papers for class 9 Mathematics Summative Assessment-I (First Term). (Motivate) Twotriangles are congruent if any two sides and the included angle of one triangle is equal to any two sides and the included angle of the other triangle (SAS Congruence). (Prove) Two triangles are congruent if any two angles and the included side of one triangle is equal to any two angles and the included side of the other triangle (ASA Congruence). (Motivate) Two triangles are congruent if the three sides of one triangle are equal to three sides of the other triangle (SSS Congruence). (Motivate) Two right triangles are congruent if the hypotenuse and a side of one triangle are equal (respectively) to the hypotenuse and a side of the other triangle. (Prove) The angles opposite to equal sides of a triangle are equal. (Motivate) The sides opposite to equal angles of a triangle are equal. (Motivate) Triangle inequalities and relation between 'angle and facing side' inequalities in triangles.
CBSE solved test papers for class 9 Mathematics Summative Assessment-I (First Term). The Cartesian plane, coordinates of a point, names and terms associated with the coordinate plane, notations, plotting points in the plane, graph of linear equations as examples; focus on linear equations of the type ax + by + c = 0 by writing it as y = mx + c and linking with the chapter on linear equations in two variables.
CBSE solved test papers for class 9 Mathematics Summative Assessment-I (First Term). Area of a triangleusing Heros formula (without proof) and its application in finding the area of a quadrilateral.
1. Linear equations in two variables Quick Link Recall of linear equations in one variable. Introduction to the equation in two variables. Prove that a linear equation in two variables has infinitely many solutions and justify their being written as ordered pairs of real numbers, plotting them and showing that they seem to lie on a line. Examples, problems from real life, including problems on Ratio and Proportion and with algebraic and graphical solutions being done simultaneously.2. QuadrilateralsQuick Link1. (Prove) The diagonal divides a parallelogram into two congruent triangles.2. (Motivate) In a parallelogram opposite sides are equal, and conversely.3. (Motivate) In a parallelogram opposite angles are equal, and conversely.4. (Motivate) A quadrilateral is a parallelogram if a pair of its opposite sides is parallel and equal.5. (Motivate) In a parallelogram, the diagonals bisect each other and conversely.6. (Motivate) In a triangle, the line segment joining the mid points of any two sides is parallel to the third side and (motivate) its converse.3. Area Of ParallelogramQuick Link1. (Prove) Parallelograms on the same base and between the same parallels have the same area.2. (Motivate) Triangles on the same base and between the same parallels are equal in area and its converse.4. CirclesQuick linkThrough examples, arrive at definitions of circle related concepts, radius, circumference, diameter, chord, arc, subtended angle.1. (Prove) Equal chords of a circle subtend equal angles at the center and (motivate) its converse.2. (Motivate) The perpendicular from the center of a circle to a chord bisects the chord and conversely, the line drawn through the center of a circle to bisect a chord is perpendicular to the chord.3. (Motivate) There is one and only one circle passing through three given non-collinear points.4. (Motivate) Equal chords of a circle (or of congruent circles) are equidistant from the center(s) and conversely.5. (Prove) The angle subtended by an arc at the center is double the angle subtended by it at any point on the remaining part of the circle.6. (Motivate) Angles in the same segment of a circle are equal.7. (Motivate) If a line segment joining two points subtendes equal angle at two other points lying on the same side of the line containing the segment, the four points lie on a circle.8. (Motivate) The sum of the either pair of the opposite angles of a cyclic quadrilateral is 180 and its converse5. ConstructionsQuick link1. Construction of bisectors of line segments & angles, 60, 90, 45 degree angles etc., equilateral triangles.2. Construction of a triangle given its base, sum/difference of the other two sides and one base angle.3. Construction of a triangle of given perimeter and base angles.6. Surface Areas and VolumesQuick linkSurface areas and volumes of cubes, cuboids, spheres (including hemispheres) and right circular cylinders/cones.7. Statistics Quick linkIntroduction to Statistics : Collection of data, presentation of data — tabular form, ungrouped or grouped, bar graphs, histograms (with varying base lengths), frequency polygons, qualitative analysis of data to choose the correct form of presentation for the collected data. Mean, median, mode of ungrouped data.8. Probability Quick linkHistory, Repeated experiments and observed frequency approach to probability. Focus is on empirical probability. (A large amount of time to be devoted to group and to individual activities to motivate the concept; the experiments to be drawn from real - life situations, and from examples used in the chapter on statistics). | <urn:uuid:8378e08e-c27a-4b55-9238-dac4fd34ee02> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://cbsemathstudy.blogspot.com/p/maths-class-ix.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393463.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00121-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.882685 | 1,808 | 3.65625 | 4 |
Rutherford B. Hayes - Rethinking indian policy
When Hayes was in the White House, the northeastern quarter of the United States was entering the period of its most rapid urban and industrial development. By contrast, the western half of the country was still being staked out. Settlement by ranchers and farmers inevitably meant clashes with nomadic Indians. The annihilation of Custer's regiment at the Little Big Horn dominated the news soon after Hayes's nomination for the presidency. His first year in office witnessed the defeat of the Sioux, mostly by starvation, and the long pursuit of Chief Joseph and his Nez Percé across a thousand miles of the northern Rockies in desperate flight toward refuge in Canada. The next fall the northern Cheyenne slipped away from the army in the Indian Territory in a futile effort to return to their ancestral hunting grounds.
Hayes and Secretary of the Interior Schurz inherited the policy of concentrating the western tribes on compact reservations, but soon came to believe that more humane methods of dealing with the Indians had to be found. Their sympathies were aroused in part by the disaster Schurz unwittingly inflicted upon the eight-hundred-member Ponca tribe. The Grant administration had, by mistake, given the agricultural Ponca's land in Dakota Territory to the Sioux. Schurz ordered the forcible removal of the Poncas to a small tract in the Indian Territory. Numerous members of the tribe died en route. Upon arrival at their strange destination, the survivors found both the climate and the land unsuitable. They, too, tried unsuccessfully to return home.
Genuinely committed to better treatment of Indians, Schurz appointed a commission to investigate the conduct of the Indian Bureau (now Bureau of Indian Affairs). The commission predictably found a pattern of cheating the Indians by unscrupulous agents, compounded by sloppy accounting and inadequate supervision. Schurz moved quickly to remedy the situation. He instituted a code of regulations for bureau employees, revised reporting and accounting systems, ordered unannounced inspections, and for the first time required traders to be licensed and bonded. Because Schurz was the most vigorous of the cabinet secretaries in implementing Hayes's civil service reforms, the caliber of bureau personnel improved. Schurz also supported the experiments in Indian education conducted at Hampton Institute by Richard Henry Pratt, which led to the establishment of the Carlisle Indian School in 1879. When opponents of the new peaceful emphasis sought to transfer the bureau back to the War Department, Schurz helped organize the coalition in the Senate that staved off the move. Thereafter the Interior Department was unquestionably preeminent in determining policies toward the Indians.
In 1881, Helen Hunt Jackson published her stirring protest against American mistreatment of the Indians, A Century of Dishonor . Her interest in the subject had first been awakened by the plight of the Poncas, and Schutz fared badly in her interpretation. Her criticism was largely undeserved. Schurz had long been in correspondence with many of the eastern humanitarians who preceded Jackson in their concern. In 1879 and 1880 he undertook two lengthy inspection tours of western reservations to ascertain firsthand what he was dealing with. But it was easier to see the shortcomings in federal policies than to know how to change them. Schurz deserves credit for initiating the process of reform. President Hayes supported him throughout and used his annual messages to Congress to lobby for Indian citizenship, individual farm ownership, and the education of Indian children in American methods of agriculture. Hayes and Schurz thus pointed the way toward the positive, nonexpropriatory aspects of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. At the same time, they did not foresee, and probably would not have understood, the negative effects of acculturation. | <urn:uuid:86cca1d8-c267-4af3-828f-fca6ecd85d21> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.presidentprofiles.com/Grant-Eisenhower/Rutherford-B-Hayes-Rethinking-indian-policy.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398869.97/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00028-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955733 | 757 | 3.046875 | 3 |
Honey is one of the best foods you can have in a long term survival situation. For this to be true, it has to be raw or at least relatively unprocessed. The carbohydrates in honey are divided fairly equally between glucose and fructose. The separated sugars bond with water instead of each other which help prevent the water molecules from being available to microorganisms which would otherwise spoil the honey.
The sugar separation also slows the rate which the body absorbs the calories; honey is absorbed at about 2 calories a minute while sucrose (table sugar) absorbs at 10 calories per minute. This equates to more sustained energy absorption, rather than the quick sugar-shock of conventional white sugar. Honey also contains a small amount of vitamins and minerals including riboflavin, niacin, B6, and zinc.
Honey is great for long term storage; as long as it is kept dry it can last forever. Edible honey has even been found inside Egyptian pyramids! Even if the honey crystallizes, it can be eaten in that form or reformed into honey by heating it with perhaps a little water. Historically, honey has been used to treat wounds and infections topically as it has antibacterial properties. Manuka honey is often used as it has a greater antibacterial effect.
2. Nutritional Yeast
Nutritional Yeast, also known as Brewer’s Yeast is a nutty flavored food and is packed with vitamins. Unlike regular bread yeast, you don’t use this for baking, but instead mix it with other foods as a vitamin supplement. Kal Nutritional Yeast is loaded with B vitamins as well as zinc and selenium. You can check out the entire nutritional profile here: http://www.vitacost.com/Kal-Nutritional-Yeast-Flakes The yeast is great when mixed with broth as snack or with fish or cheese. Long term storage would be an issue as the unopened cans only last about a year. For longer periods, the yeast would have to be packed with oxygen absorbers and sealed in either #10 cans or Mylar bags.
Good old fashioned Whole Wheat is one of the best foods you can store. With oxygen absorbers and Mylar bags, wheat can last for years if packed correctly. Whole wheat is a great source of fiber, carbohydrates, selenium, manganese, phosphorous, and magnesium. At 355 calories per cup, it’s also quite calorically dense.
4. Sunflower Seeds
Sunflower seeds are high in vitamin E as well as phosphorous and copper. In addition, their protein and unsaturated (good fat) content is relatively high.
5. Chia Seed
Chia seed is very high in calcium and phosphorous (which aids in calcium absorption, among other things). It’s also high in fiber, which in survival scenario would help balance out many of the low fiber food options available (anything from canned meat to fresh rabbit). Chia seed also helps with bloods sugar levels and contains lots of omega 3 oils.
One can of kippers has 15 grams of protein and 2 grams of omega 3 oils. They are also relatively lower sodium than many canned goods often purchased by survivalists (SPAM anyone?).The cans also store for significantly longer than most canned foods. I have some sitting around from almost a year ago and they are still good till sometime in 2014.
7. Lentils, Pinto and Black beans
These foods are all very high in fiber and protein, as well as supplying carbohydrates. Lentils are high in folate (folic acid) and iron while black beans are high in magnesium. The fiber is always good as it may counteract some of the effects of other foods in storage that don’t supply fiber (like MREs).
9. Peanut Butter
Peanut butter has lots of niacin, vitamin E, and protein. It has trace amounts of a variety of other nutrients as well. It’s one of those foods that is easy to prepare as well. Try looking for packets of peanut and even almond butter at health food stores. These work great for meals on the go.
9. Cayenne Pepper
Cayenne pepper, while not so much a food as a supplement is one of the best things to consume for most people (please consult a physician before taking any supplement). Cayenne reduces blood pressure and increases blood flow. It helps keep arteries clear and improves the immune system. Cayenne is great for the digestion and reduces appetite.
Okay, so I cheaped out here. MRE’s aren’t really a specific type of food; they are the military meals ready to eat. They are highly balanced and nutritious meals with loads of calories which will be necessary in any survival situation. They are also great for camping and hiking. The best places to get these is online, since local surplus stores often sell sub-par versions for much more than they’re worth. Check http://www.mreinfo.com/ for more information.
These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. | <urn:uuid:76587251-8a99-45f0-ac07-098318a1585e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.survivalize.com/top-10-best-survival-foods/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393997.50/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00156-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956473 | 1,067 | 2.703125 | 3 |
|For immediate use||
June 25, 2004 -- No. 336
Study: mothers’ fish consumption
can boost children’s development
By DAVID WILLIAMSON
UNC News Services
CHAPEL HILL -- When fish is not contaminated, moderate consumption of the protein-rich food source by pregnant women and young children appears to boost the children’s neurological development, a new study shows.
"Our research adds to the literature suggesting that fish contains nutrients that may enhance early brain development," said Dr. Julie Daniels, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health. "We can not say that we have proven that eating fish will have long-lasting effects in making people smarter since we have only looked at early development markers through an observational study."
More research is needed to corroborate the findings, Daniels said.
A report on the study appears in the July issue of the journal Epidemiology. Besides Daniels, authors are Drs. Matthew P. Longnecker of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Andrew S. Rowland of the University of New Mexico’s family and community medicine department and Jean Golding of the University of Bristol Institute of Child Health’s ALSPAC Study Team.
Conducted in Bristol, England, the research involved evaluating the association between mothers’ fish intake during pregnancy and their offspring’s early development of language and communication skills, Daniels said.
The team evaluated 7,421 English children born in 1991 and 1992. They studied the children since much has been learned about contaminants in fish, but little research has been done on the potential developmental benefits of eating fish, she said.
"We measured mothers’ and children’s fish intake by questionnaire," Daniels said. "Later, we assessed each child’s cognitive development using adaptations of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory at 15 months and the Denver Developmental Screening Test at 18 months."
Researchers also measured mercury levels in umbilical cord tissue for a subset of 1,054 children.
"We found total mercury concentrations to be low and not associated with neurodevelopment," she said. "Fish intake by mothers during pregnancy, and by infants after birth, was associated with higher mean developmental scores. For example, the adjusted mean MacArthur comprehension score for children whose mothers consumed fish four or more times a week was 72 compared with 68 among those whose mothers did not consume fish. While this may not be a major difference clinically, but the statistically significant results were consistent across related subtests that could be important across a large population."
Scientists found that there was a subtle but consistent link between eating fish during pregnancy and children’s subsequent test scores, even after adjusting for factors such as the age and education of the mother, whether she breastfed and the quality of the home environment.
The largest effect was seen in a test of the children’s understanding of words at age 15 months. Children whose mothers ate fish at least once a week scored 7 percent higher than those whose mothers never ate fish.
A similar pattern, although less marked, was seen in tests measuring social activity and language development. Developmental scores were also higher among children who also ate fish at least once a week before their first birthdays.
The study suggests that if a woman eats moderate quantities of fish -- about two to three servings per week, or 12 ounces, of non-contaminated species -- her child might benefit, the scientist said. There is no evidence that the more fish a woman eats, the higher that benefit would be.
"Women should definitely avoid shark, swordfish, king mackerel and tilefish, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration," Daniels said. "Those fish are higher on the food chain and have greater accumulation of pollutants."
Depending on the region where they are caught, many of the most commonly eaten fish are low in pollutants while still being high in critical long-chain fatty acids and other nutrients, she said. They include salmon, herring, pollock, canned light tuna and sardines.
Daniels said she is pursuing similar work in a group of U.S. children to confirm the results in other populations.
"We also need to follow the children longer to determine whether any benefits from fish intake are permanent or transient," she said.
Fish intake during pregnancy has the potential to improve fetal development because it is a good source of iron and long chain omega fatty acids, which are necessary for proper development and function of the nervous system, Daniels said. Fish, especially oily fish, is a dietary source of eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acids (DHA), which are important in the structural and functional development of the brain before birth and through a child’s first year. The concentration of DHA in fetal brain increases rapidly during the last three months in the womb.
The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, or ALSPAC, (also known as Children of the 90s) is a continuing research project based at the University of Bristol. It enrolled 14,000 mothers during pregnancy in 1991-2 and has followed the children and parents in minute detail ever since
Support for the study came from the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Department of Health, the Department of the Environment, DfEE, Nutricia and other companies, all in the United Kingdom.
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Note: Daniels can be reached at (919) 966-7096 or email@example.com
Contact: David Williamson, (919) 962-8596 | <urn:uuid:6d240e74-f9d7-4a98-9514-33f3c462ced3> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/jun04/daniels062404.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396106.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00158-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959508 | 1,170 | 3.078125 | 3 |
We are used to thinking about American’s interstate system beginning with the Eisenhower era’s creation of a national defense highway system in the 1950’s. A new book “The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways” by Earl Swift takes us back to 1919 and the singular man who became head of the Bureau of Public Roads in 1919 and stayed there for thirty-four years. The author celebrates the feats of engineering and policy that created the network of roads that lets people travel at a mile a minute.
At the same time, the author does not ignore the ills that are attributed to the interstate system, from the homogenization of regional cultures along the road to the fiscal realities of today: “It is so big, and its components so expensive, that maintaining the beast has become a real quandary. It represents a spectacular investment in a mode of transport that will wither without new fuel sources. It is clogged with rush-hour traffic that approaches the tie-ups it was intended, in part, to ease.” Washington Post book reviewer Jonathan Yardley notes: “The massive American system of limited-access roadways has proved to be both a blessing and a curse, but it is an engineering feat of breathtaking dimensions. ‘The greatest public works project in history,’ Earl Swift calls it in this engaging, informative book, ‘dwarfing Egypt’s pyramids, the Panama Canal, and China’s Great Wall.’” Read the rest of Yardley’s review here. | <urn:uuid:4b75f23e-19ba-4a01-9802-dd8e2f46645d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.ssti.us/2011/06/big-vision-big-roads-what-now/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391519.2/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00025-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945761 | 341 | 2.953125 | 3 |
OSHA Storage Cabinet Regulations forFlammable and Combustible Liquids(1910.106):
Regulation: 60 gallons for Class I and Class II liquids and 120 gallons for Class III liquids
Explanation: Overfilling flammable safety cabinets can pose a serious fire hazard because it increases the risk that containers could fall out when doors are opened, causing spills and releasing dangerous vapors. Additionally, some cabinets have specially designed ventilation features, which could be blocked off if cabinets are over capacity.
Regulation: Internal temperature cannot exceed 325⁰F during a standardized 10 minute fire test
Explanation:This regulation ensures that if a fire breaks out in the area where the flammable cabinet is located the liquids inside will not ignite before firefighters can respond to the emergency. Most flammable and combustible liquids have an auto-ignition temperature of 500⁰F or more, which means that at temperatures exceeding 500⁰F the vapors from flammable and combustible liquids can ignite without an ignition source. Setting the regulation standard at 325⁰F ensures that auto-ignition will not be achieved within the acceptable emergency response time of less than 10 minutes.
Regulation: Must be labeled “Flammable – Keep Fire Away”
Explanation: As a matter of public safety, obvious and consistent messaging must be used to identify the cabinet so that all fires (such as cigarettes, sparklers, portable grills, acetylene torches, etc.) are kept away from the flammable and combustible liquids contained inside.
Regulation: Bottom, top, door, and sides must be at least 18 gage (1mm) sheet metal and double-walled with at least 1.5 inches of air space
Explanation:The 18 gage specification ensures that the cabinet will be strong enough to support the weight of the containers of liquids inside. Specific metals are not outlined because some metals are more reactive than others so flexibility on metal composite within the regulations allows for customization based on which materials will be stored inside the cabinet. But regardless of whatever metal the cabinetis made of, the double-walled specification ensures that the liquids inside will be insulted against the heat. This air barrier acts as insulation in the same way that a thermos can keep hot or cold liquids inside at the proper temperature by containing them in a smaller unit molded inside a larger outer unit.
Regulation: Doors must have a 3 point lock and be at least 2 inches above the bottom of the cabinet
Explanation: A three-point lock ensures that the door or doors will close tightly, securing liquids safely inside. Raising the door off the bottom of the cabinet helps to safeguard against spills, making it likely that any liquid spillage inside will be contained within the unit.
While not required by OSHA, a highly beneficial feature to have on your flammable liquid storage cabinet is self-closing doors. Storage units can be outfitted with a fusable link that melts at 160⁰F, causing the door closing mechanism to release and close doors automatically in a fire situation.
For a full listing of all indoor and outdoor storage requirements please visit OSHA’s official page | <urn:uuid:0224bd7d-696e-450b-9da0-b4cb81be53ab> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://blog.standardshelving.com/2011/08/osha-flammable-storage-cabinet.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783404826.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155004-00071-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.887005 | 659 | 3.078125 | 3 |
A Salmonella outbreak linked to a homemade Mexican-style cheese made with raw milk has now sickened 25 people, nearly double the number reported last month.
According to Minnesota health officials, tests on the queso fresco confirmed the connection to the outbreak.
Heidi Kassenborg, director of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture's Dairy and Food Inspection Division, said the outbreak underscores the dangers of consuming unpasteurized dairy products.
"It only takes a few bacteria to cause illness. Milking a cow is not a sterile process and even the cleanest dairy farms can have milk that is contaminated. That's why pasteurization - or the heat treatment of milk to kill the harmful pathogens - is so important," Kassenborg said in a news release. | <urn:uuid:44ce2268-f5f4-4ddc-a95f-9130fa7d3698> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.dairyherd.com/dairy-news/Minn-raw-milk-cheese-outbreak-swells-to-25-208380291.html?source=related | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391634.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00029-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936658 | 156 | 2.78125 | 3 |
by GetEnglishLessons on 09/06/10 at 9:45 am
When we report what another person has said, we usually do not use the speaker’s exact words (direct speech), but reported (indirect) speech. Therefore, you need to learn how to transform direct speech into reported speech. The structure is a little different depending on whether you want to transform a statement, question or request.
Use these printable worksheets with students that are studying Indirect/ Reported Speech.
Reported Speech Statements Download Worksheet
ANSWER TO Reported Speech Statements
1. They said that that was their problem.
2. She said she had gone to the doctor the day before.
3. He said he was doing an exam the next day.
4. You said you would do that for me.
5. She said she was not hungry then.
6. They said they had never been there before.
7. They said they had been to Paris the week before.
8. He said He would have finished that by the next day.
9. He said he wouldn’t go to the party.
10. She said that it was very cold in there.
ANSWER TO Reported Speech Questions
1. She asked me where the bank was.
2. She asked me what time it was.
3. She asked me where Robert worked.
4. She asked me what time the buses left.
5. She asked me what time the stores closed.
6. She asked me how often the teacher went there.
7. She asked me where my friend was going.
8. She asked me where he had gone.
9. She asked me what time my friend had arrived.
10.She asked me when the classes finished.
ANSWER TO Reported Speech Requests
1. She told me to go upstairs.
2. He told me to close the door behind me.
3. He advised us not to be late.
4. She told him to stop staring at her.
5. He asked her not to be angry with him.
6. She told me to leave her alone.
7. She warned us not to drink and drive.
8. She told John to stop smoking.
9. They told her not to worry about them.
10. He asked me to meet him at the cinema.
Search for more:
Check out this chart with Place and Time word change for Indirect speech: | <urn:uuid:3ba28cea-3052-41af-98eb-548cb1d97f66> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.getenglishlessons.com/4514/reported-speech-printable-worksheets/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396945.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00177-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.990061 | 520 | 3.5 | 4 |
One of the barriers to the wholesale adoption of online learning is the difficulty in detecting and punishing cheating. Without teachers supervising their students directly, student dishonesty – especially in the form of having another person complete the assigned work – becomes much more complicated.
That isn’t to say that the possibility of academic misconduct has put the brakes on the growth of online learning entirely. On the contrary, according to the data provided by the Babson Survey Research Group, last year the number of college students who took at least one online course grew by more than 10%.
But anyone who has ever taken such a course admits that the format lends itself to cheating much more easily than a course taught traditionally, which typically includes taking supervised and proctored exams.
In online education, it’s easy for students to “collaborate” on tests in ways that wouldn’t be possible in the classroom, says Shannon Miranda, a senior at Ohio University who has taken three online courses in her college career.
“If the teacher schedules an exam, you can have a bunch of people in one room sharing textbooks and taking the test at the same time,” Miranda says. “I know friends who have taken an online test first so the next person can have all the right answers.”
For Connie Frazer, the director of online learning at The Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, dealing with cheating in an online course is just a part of dealing with academic dishonesty in a college setting. Technology provides just another front on the fight against this problem, but doesn’t fundamentally change the game.
For Sage, that means the problem created by technology could be solved by a more judicious application of the same.
While students can take tests together, the online system may change up questions or answers to ensure students can’t cheat. Also, answers to the tests aren’t revealed until every student in the course has completed all the questions.
“In our learning management system, you shuffle the questions and you shuffle the items within the questions,” Frazer notes. “When a student looks at a quiz, it doesn’t look anything like the quiz another student is taking. It’s hard to borrow from someone else.”
What makes it easier is the fact that “collaboration” isn’t the main problem when it comes to online cheating. Instead, according to Diane Johnson, students in online courses tend to disproportionately run afoul of the rules against plagiarism. Johnson, who is an assistant director of faculty services at St. Leo University in Florida, says that most of the plagiarism that anti-cheating programs detect is of an unintentional rather a malicious variety, and comes about because students aren’t skilled at either paraphrasing or citing. | <urn:uuid:d5bf4e20-0b59-44d2-b299-c4f3719cc5ee> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.educationnews.org/online-schools/cheating-remains-barrier-to-online-education-adoption/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397797.77/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00110-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955619 | 584 | 2.65625 | 3 |
From Science Daily
Teenaged boys from well-off Chinese families who say they are physically active and eat plenty of vegetables but few sweets are more likely to be overweight, according to a study led by researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC).
The study, published in the July 2011 issue of the American Journal of Health Behavior, is one of the first to examine how weight among Chinese adolescents relates to factors like sleep duration, physical activity, diet and general demographics. Most of what the research team found runs counter to Western trends.
"Findings from this large cohort of data on Chinese youth suggest that weight-related correlates might play different roles in Chinese culture than they do in Western cultures," said Ya-Wen Janice Hsu, Ph.D., M.P.H., research assistant at the Keck School's Department of Preventive Medicine and the study's first author. "This suggests that influences on obesity are society-dependent, and assumptions based on Western societies may not be applicable to Chinese populations."
As in the United States and Europe, teenagers in China who slept fewer hours and participated in more sedentary activities like watching television were more likely to be overweight, according to the study. But that's where the similarities end. Some of the disparities include:
In China, parents with more education and more money were more likely to have obese children, whereas the same circumstances are related to a lower body mass index in Western countries.
Chinese boys were more likely to be overweight than Chinese girls. In the United States, boys are just as likely as girls to be overweight.
Younger children in China were more likely to be overweight than older children. The opposite is true for youth in Western societies.
Chinese adolescents who reported frequent consumption of vegetables and infrequent intake of sweets and fast food were more likely to be overweight.
Frequent participation in vigorous physical activity among Chinese youth was related with greater odds of being overweight.
The analysis was based on 9,023 questionnaires submitted by randomly selected middle school and high school students in seven of China's most populated urban areas: Harbin and Shenyang in the northeast, Wuhan in central China, Chengdu and Kunming in the southwest, and Hangzhou and Qingdao in the coastal regions. The sample included students from high-, middle- and low-income neighborhoods.
Possible explanations for the East-West inconsistencies noted in the study include the fact that rice is a staple grain in the traditional Chinese diet and vegetables are often deep-fried and stir-fried (weight-related factors that were not measured by the study). Industrialization and rapid economic growth have also affected Chinese diets and physical activity levels. Food consumption has increased and junk food has become more readily available. On the other hand, physical activity has decreased as more people can afford cars, televisions and computers.
"The most interesting finding is overweight Chinese youth have higher social economic status," Hsu said. "One potential explanation is that the unhealthy lifestyle changes, driven by the rapid shifts in Chinese economic climate, are choices available primarily to the wealthier population. As the Chinese economy continues to grow, it is crucial to track these paradoxical relationships, which may or may not 'flip' to match relationships we now see in Western countries."
Because of the cross-sectional nature of the study, causality cannot be determined. And because the measures of physical activity and food consumption were self-reported, the data may be skewed (for example, overweight kids might have exaggerated their participation in vigorous activity and underreported their intake of sweets and fast food). To account for that, both subjective and objective measures of physical activity are being used in newer studies, said Donna Spruijt-Metz, Ph.D., associate professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School and the study's corresponding author. Spruijt-Metz's research focuses on pediatric obesity.
The study was conducted in the USC Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health and Sidney R. Garfield Endowment, and the USC Center for Transdisciplinary Research on Energetics and Cancer, funded by the National Cancer Institute, in collaboration with the School of Community & Global Health of Claremont Graduate University in San Dimas, Calif | <urn:uuid:90512aa5-7947-4d29-ba11-535c2eb3fe49> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://anabolicminds.com/forum/content/healthy-habits-linked-136/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398628.62/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00008-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967069 | 878 | 3.015625 | 3 |
The names of women are conspicuously absent from the lists of famous Canadian medical pioneers. During the 19th Century, while male physicians and surgeons were exploring new treatments and innovative medical procedures, Canadian women were struggling for the mere right to practice medicine. For them, acceptance into a medical school was a major achievement. The two women most responsible for breaking down the barriers and advancing medical training for women in Canada were Emily Stowe and Jennie Kidd Trout.
In 1875, Jennie Trout became the first woman licensed to practice medicine in Canada. Born in 1841, Jennie grew up on a farm near Stratford, Ontario. A quiet, reserved child, Jennie excelled in school. Upon graduation, she took one of the few career paths open to women and began teaching in a public school. She taught in Stratford until she married Edward Trout in 1865.
A lengthy illness occupied the next six years of Jennie Trout’s life, but when she recovered, she decided to take up a career in medicine. Jennie’s plans were encouraged by her husband, as well as by her longtime friend and mentor, Emily Stowe, who had been practising medicine in Toronto since 1867 although she was not licensed by the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Entering a Man’s World
During most of the last century professional medical practice was exclusively a male domain. Hospitals were designed for the poor, since wealthy people could afford home treatment. In most hospitals, nursing care was provided by nursing sisters, or nuns. In cases where lay women acted as nurses, they were treated as little more than servants, with no professional respect. Florence Nightingale’s campaign to create a nursing profession only began to have an impact in Canada late in the nineteenth century.
In this climate, it is not surprising that the male medical establishment was hostile to the idea of educated and paid female doctors. When the Toronto School of Medicine reluctantly allowed Jennie Trout and Emily Stowe to attend lectures, it was on the condition that they “make no fuss, whatever happened.” Plenty happened. Trout and Stowe were the only women in a lecture hall filled with men. Led by the lecturers themselves, the male students jeered at the women. Obscene sketches had to be white-washed from the walls four times in the course of the lectures.
Finally, Trout went to the United States for her medical education. She returned to Canada in 1875 with a medical degree from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.
Licensed to Practice
Back in Ontario, Jennie Trout passed an examination before the College of Physicians and Surgeons, who complimented Mr. Trout for having “such a talented wife.” Jennie Trout went on to practice medicine at Toronto’s Therapeutic and Electrical Institute until 1882, when poor health forced her to retire. Still, she did not abandon the work she had begun, and her next objective was to establish a college for the medical education of women in Canada. After a long campaign to gather support for the college, Trout had another fight to see that women could sit on the college’s board of governors. Finally, the Women’s Medical College at Kingston opened on October 2, 1883, partly supported by a large financial contribution from Trout herself. The heroic struggles of Jennie Kidd Trout – the quiet woman whose life’s aim transcended personal ambition – opened the door for the many Canadian women doctors who came after her. | <urn:uuid:9fdfee3a-e700-40ea-8f6d-2b8b30bf7a67> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://blog.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/blog/posts/historic-canadian-women-jennie-trout/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397111.67/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00140-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983483 | 722 | 4.15625 | 4 |
Bio-ethanol and biodiesel are being hailed by many as part of the solution to climate change, energy security and as an economic opportunity to develop domestic industries. Both North American and European jurisdictions are supporting biofuels, with some of them even requiring quotas for mixing biomass derived fuels with conventional gasoline or diesel. More often than not we have heard about the controversy around these issues: should we really use our agricultural land to cultivate biomass only to burn it afterwards, instead of growing food or other high value agricultural products? What about the energy balance of these processes? Do some of them even require more fossil fuels over their life cycle than what they displace when they are used in transportation?
As both residual biomass and land for energy crops is limited, it is worthwhile considering how to use it most efficiently. Our research team wanted to know: what are the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions one can obtain from biomass in various uses, and which ones should therefore be preferred? Adapting several existing studies examining life-cycle emissions of various biomass processing chains, we endeavoured to compare the emissions displaced by biomass-based fuels both on a per-ton, as well as on a per-hectare basis. It hadn't been done before, and the results were startling.
Energy Intensive Bio-Ethanol
Making automotive grade ethanol from biomass requires large amounts of energy, mainly due to the distillation process that is involved. Depending on whether residual biomass (waste) or bioenergy crops are used, varying amounts of energy are consumed and related emissions are created due to farming, fertilizer use, transportation, processing, and storage. Mainly due to the high energy demand of the distillation process, the energy balance of bio-ethanol from corn and wheat is barely positive - and for lignocellulosic feedstocks, such as straw or hay, it is negative. However, we found that GHG emission reductions will always be created. A negative energy balance shows that more than 50 percent of the biomass used in a process is used up on the way, i.e. if I put straw with a heating value of 100 MJ into the process, I may only get 40 MJ worth of ethanol, whereas the remainder of the energy is used up for various processing steps. However, as 100 percent of my input is biomass, no net GHG emissions result from oxidising this biomass. This means that one will still get emission reductions for the fossil fuels displaced by the climate-neutral biofuels. So the energy balance is not the best indicator for environmental performance, although it helps distinguish energy intensive biomass utilization pathways. Keep in mind, though, that biomass generally has far higher moisture contents than fossil fuels, such as coal, which means the energy inputs for drying will always mean that the biobased process is more energy intensive.
Which Ethanol Feedstock?
We examined wheat, straw, switchgrass, corn, corn stover and hay as ethanol feedstocks. Based on tons of input, their emission reduction benefits are very similar: about 0.5 tons of C02 per ton of biomass. However, when we compare the energy crops only, this picture changes: now high-yielding species, such as switchgrass, take the lead over wheat and corn. The math is relatively simple - switchgrass is assumed to yield about 11.5 tons of biomass per hectare, whereas wheat only yields 3, and corn about 7 tons. This means I can displace a lot of extra fuel per hectare simply because I grow a plant that gives me more biomass each year, thus more ethanol as well. What is the conclusion? You can always use residual biomass to make ethanol, but if you want to grow energy crops, look for the one that has the highest yield per hectare and therefore the highest amount of ethanol produced for the land you are setting aside for biofuel production.
Biodiesel - Go for Cooking Oil!
The results for biodiesel are very similar. Both canola/rape and soy - preferred crops to produce the vegetable oil used for biodiesel production - have very low yields per hectare (Canola: 1.3 tons per hectare). Consequently, alternative uses of agricultural land can result in much higher emission reductions. If farmland is used to grow biodiesel energy crops, the amount of land required to contribute to national emission reduction targets is multiplied as the crops simply don't yield a lot of oil. On the other hand, waste cooking oil or animal fat should be collected and used for biodiesel production wherever possible. In urban centers, the collection of yellow grease (another name for used cooking oils) is cost-effective and even now biodiesel can be had at a competitive price to conventional diesel in Ontario, albeit with some preferential tax treatment.
The report also looked at other options to use biomass: electricity generation, combined heat and power, and hydrogen were added to the analysis. What was learned is that we need to use biomass in applications where it displaces a high amount of fossil fuels. This means, for example, that burning biomass to make electricity, which then displaces low-emission sources, such as large hydropower, or even natural gas-based generation, is not a good option. This can be improved when efficiencies are increased in combined heat and power applications. On the other hand, displacing a transportation fuel or also coal, when biomass is co-fired in power stations, can yield significant emission reductions - up to about one ton of CO2 per ton of biomass invested for some of the applications.
It seems that the fixation of wheat and corn as ethanol feedstocks is mistaken, at least from a GHG perspective. Land set aside for bioenergy crops could be used much more efficiently if other crops were grown. In addition, trees or switchgrass can grow on marginal agricultural land and generally require less energy and water inputs than many other energy crops. The best land can thus still be used for food crops. If biomass residues are used, it is imperative to avoid electricity-only applications (apart from biomass co-firing in coal power stations), but to concentrate on combined heat and power wherever possible.
About the author...
Martin Tampier is an Associate with Envirochem Services, Inc. North Vancouver, British Columbia (www.envirochem.com). He holds a degree in environmental engineering from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. He is resident in Canada and is consulting government and industry in the fields of green power policy, climate change and emissions trading, and has published numerous articles in each area. Contact him at email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:637aa14e-d1dc-43ad-b578-ca219752893d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.energybulletin.net/print/1653 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395166.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00136-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94585 | 1,357 | 3.59375 | 4 |
One lesson: it’s not about them. lincoln never confused his mission with himself. He had the hide of a rhinoceros and a rare ability to set the past aside when turning former enemies into allies. His favorite expression, according to Hay, was “I am in favor of short statutes of limitations in politics.” To Lincoln, a grudge was a waste of resources. If a person could be useful, it mattered little whether he was friend or foe.
There is no better example than his decision in January 1862 to entrust leadership of the War Department to Edwin Stanton, a prominent Pennsylvania attorney. Years earlier, Lincoln had been retained as one of several lawyers helping defend a manufacturer of reaping machines against the powerful McCormick Co. in a patent dispute. Stanton was the star of the defense team, and he went to great lengths to humiliate Lincoln when the case went to trial. Calling him “that damned long-armed ape,” Stanton refused to seat Lincoln at counsel’s table. All that was forgotten when Lincoln went looking for a man brazen and hard enough to perform the thankless task of bringing order to the vast Union war machine.
Lincoln also teaches the lesson of patience. Hardly a day passed in 1862 without an exasperated lecture from someone about the need to take bold steps against both slavery and McClellan, yet Lincoln resisted. He needed to move gradually, to persuade himself and moderate voters of the North that he had exhausted all incremental steps. Even after he decided that the general must be fired and the slaves freed, he waited for the right political moment. His secretaries described this excruciating period. He “grew sensitive and even irritable,” wrote Nicolay and Hay. “Could no one exercise patience but himself?” The long wait for a victory with which to frame his Emancipation Proclamation was perhaps the most delicate interval of his presidency. Lincoln “was compelled to keep up an appearance of indecision which only brought upon him a greater flood” of demands for an answer, his aides wrote. “During no part of his Administration were his acts and words so persistently misconstrued.”
Anyone who thinks the risk of a gaffe is something new in the lives of Presidents should listen to Lincoln. Newspapers were so eager to bend his language to their own agendas that he learned to ration his speeches in self-defense and thus mastered the art of the extremely short yet powerful address—like the one at Gettysburg. As he said to a clamoring crowd in Maryland in October 1862, “In my present position it is hardly proper for me to make speeches. Every word is so closely noted that it will not do to make trivial ones.”
This painful interim was necessary because Lincoln understood that even in times of extreme polarization, the moderate center is the path to presidential success. Was then and is now. He offered an arresting metaphor one summer day in 1862, when a delegation of prominent New England abolitionists admonished him to take a stronger stand against slavery. After a long pause, he surprised his visitors by asking if they recalled “that a few years ago Blondin walked across a tightrope stretched over the falls of Niagara.”
Of course they remembered. Lincoln was referring to well-publicized stunts by the tightrope walker Jean-François Gravelet, who went by the name the Great Blondin. In 1859, Gravelet made a series of crossings over the roaring water. He pushed a wheelbarrow, stopped to cook an omelette, even carried his manager on his back. Lincoln visited Niagara Falls in 1848, and it left an indelible impression. Now the image of a man making his way along a 3-in. rope above such sublime and terrifying force struck Lincoln as a perfect metaphor for his own balancing act.
One of the visitors later recalled the President’s words: “Suppose,” Lincoln said, “that all the material values in this great country of ours, from the Atlantic to the Pacific—its wealth, its prosperity, its achievements in the present and its hopes for the future—could all have been concentrated and given to Blondin to carry over that awful crossing.” Suppose “you had been standing upon the shore as he was going over, as he was carefully feeling his way along and balancing his pole with all his most delicate skill over the thundering cataract. Would you have shouted at him, ‘Blondin, a step to the right!’ ‘Blondin, a step to the left!’ or would you have stood there speechless and held your breath and prayed to the Almighty to guide and help him safely through the trial?”
That reference to the nation’s achievements and hopes points to a final lesson from that fiery year. Even as he felt his way along the tightrope, Lincoln always kept his eye—and the eyes of the public—on the shore beyond. Americans have always been a future-oriented people, and our most admired Presidents have been the ones who painted tomorrow in bright colors, no matter how grim the today. Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan: all were heirs to Abraham Lincoln, who sat down late in 1862, after an election setback, with his armies stalled and his party on the verge of revolt, and penned a detailed description of a future of unrivaled prosperity and national influence—a future that came true.
“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope on earth,” he wrote in his unforgettable conclusion to that message. Perhaps it is strange that anyone could sound such a trumpet at such a time and have a strife-torn people believe it. But if the descendants of those people were to give up on that vision a century and a half later, in their own hour of strife, well, that would be even stranger.
Adapted from Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year, by David Von Drehle, published by Henry Holt | <urn:uuid:2c92185f-88a9-4f84-8653-96fd5258827c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://nation.time.com/2012/10/25/lincoln-to-the-rescue/3/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403823.74/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00011-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981025 | 1,271 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Railroads and the Birth of the Modern Office
If the small office of a textile merchant would be administratively overwhelmed by expanding trade, imagine the problems for the new railroad companies. For the first time in American business, the financial investment in an enterprise was too large for one owner or even for a small group of owners. Hardly a mom-and-pop company, the railroad was a multimillion-dollar corporation of stockholders and bankers that had to supervise hundreds of employees and its investment.
Railroads employed conductors, ticket sellers, engineers, construction workers, accountants, clerks, and payroll officers. Their employees were distributed across the country, serving the entire transportation network and offices along the way. Administering this corporation profitably meant developing not only an entirely new system of organization but also a vast interoffice communication system.
The stockholders and board members could not run the railroad's day-to-day operations. Instead, full-time employees were needed to make decisions and supervise the monies and staff necessary to keep the corporation profitable. The railroad needed men who were willing to and capable of acting like owners for the owners without any chance of ever being owners. The railroad needed managers just as much as it needed rails and boxcars and a reliable and safe transport system to sell. Coordinating the movement of people and goods, maintaining roundhouses, rail line, and stations, and making a profit were now the manager's job.
As demand for the railroads' services increased, more and more managerial employees were hired and a hierarchy of managers took its place on the corporate organizational chart. Owners and board members soon had little say in the operation of the railroads. They may have set fiscal policy, but their employees in offices throughout the country put the policy into practice and ran their company. By 1840 or 1850, management was a permanent part of the railroads' organization, and managers began to think of railroading as a lifelong career with chances for advancement. This was the beginning of modern business and its offices.
Mid-level managers oversaw central offices, supervising bookkeepers and clerks. These offices kept in close contact with each other by telegraph and daily mail carried by the trains. The mid-level managers reported to top managers, who reported to the board of directors.
By the 1880s, this organization and hierarchy would be duplicated by Western Union, the banking industry, and insurance companies. These businesses, like the railroads, were big, complex, geographically dispersed, and responsible for huge amounts of money not owned by one person or family. Their success was replicated by large manufacturers, importers, and chain stores. The railroads' administrative organizations had successfully proved that they could increase productivity, volume, and profits. Every other large business followed their example.
By the turn of the century, business administration was a profession. Harvard, Wharton, and the University of Chicago were already offering MBAs (master's degrees in business administration).
contact email@example.com with any questions or comments | <urn:uuid:ddd0b317-c0d1-4ad6-9936-7e624e6aa3b1> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://learning.si.edu/educators/lesson_plans/carbons/railroads.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396945.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00078-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979525 | 617 | 3.171875 | 3 |
Villagers in Diyun, a farming hamlet in India's remote northeast state of Arunachal Pradesh, wake up to the crack of dawn. They peep out of their huts and look at the sky. With clear weather, they set out for work.
It's just another routine day for the villagers - tilling on their farms and running household chores. Not many are aware of the fact that it is World Refugee Day. That's ironic because 80 per cent of this village, which houses 500 families, belongs to a refugee community, the Chakmas.
Since 2001, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has marked World Refugee Day on June 20 to draw attention to the plight of all those forced to leave home. According to the UN refugee agency, there are 42.5 million refugees in the world. The Chakmas of Arunachal Pradesh make up only a tiny percentage of that figure - which is perhaps the reason why their story is forgotten.
According to the East-West Centre Washington, about 100,000 Chakmas, a tribal group from the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, fled erstwhile East Pakistan between 1964 and 1969 for two reasons - communal violence and displacement.
A minority Buddhist tribe, they faced oppression on grounds of religion and ethnicity at the hands of the East Pakistan government. (Religious and ethnic persecution of tribal groups in the Chittagong Hill Tracts continues to this day.) Secondly, the construction of the Kaptai hydroelectric dam rendered many thousands of Chakmas landless.
As a result, 35,000 Chakmas migrated to Arunachal Pradesh that borders China and Myanmar. Hemantolal Chakma's family was among those who left in search of refuge. The 48-year-old farmer from Diyun was a toddler when he undertook the arduous journey.
"I don't remember anything from those days. But my mother and father told me that it was very tough. Our land had submerged under water because of the dam. We were stranded without any possessions and had to leave. We entered India through Mizoram and settled here in Arunachal Pradesh. I hear it was very difficult in those days. No food to eat, no shelter," he says.
Refugees: Quick facts
- According to the UN, a refugee is someone who is "outside the country of his nationality" due to fear of being persecuted "for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion".
- As of last year, there were 15.2 million refugees in the world.
- One of every four refugees originates from Afghanistan.
- Pakistan hosts the most refugees of any country, with 1.7 million. Iran has an estimated 887,000 refugees, and Syria has about 755,400.
Source: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Hemantolal lives with his wife in a thatched hut. There's no furniture in their dimly-lit home. One corner of their single-room hut functions as a kitchen and another as sleeping area. "This is how a poor person's house looks," he apologises.
Although he's lived most of his life within these four walls, Hemantolal doesn't feel at home here. "It's a sorry state of affairs. I don't have any rights in this place. I can't vote, I can't call myself a citizen," he explains.
Like Hemantolal, most Chakmas in Arunachal Pradesh have been denied Indian citizenship or refugee status despite having migrated legally, with valid migration certificates issued by the government of India. Moreover, after signing an agreement with Bangladesh in 1972, the government of India accepted all responsibility for the Chakmas who migrated before March 1971.
Twenty years later, the central government declared that the Chakmas have a legitimate claim to Indian citizenship. However, in April 2004, the state government granted voting rights only to 1,500 Chakmas, leaving 50-60,000 of them still stranded.
Apart from the lack of legal rights, the Chakmas also face discrimination on a daily basis. Sanjay Chakma, 35, who was born in India, regrets belonging to his tribe. "Sometimes I am sad that I was born a Chakma. I wonder why I am one. The other tribes in the region view us with such disdain. We are humans too, but we are denied the rights of humans," he says.
Sanjay says that many of his friends and acquaintances have been assaulted in broad daylight by members of other tribes. "You will hear cases of Chakmas being beaten up in public places. There is an image of Chakmas being criminals, doing wrong things. There's not always an element of truth in it. We don't get respect at work place. We have no other option but to endure how we are treated," he says.
"Most of us have no proof that we exist. Isn't it easy to erase records that never existed?"
- Sanjay, a Chakma man
The South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre (SAHRDC) has not only accused the state government of Arunachal Pradesh of human rights abuses against the Chakmas but also of denying educational and employment opportunities to them.
"In September 1994 the Government began a campaign of school closings, burnings, and relocations which has effectively denied the Chakmas their right to education under international law," the SAHDRC says. Even today, studies point out that schools in Chakma-dominated areas have an abysmal student-teacher ratio of 300:1.
Sanjay lives with his wife and three kids. Five-month-old Joshua is Sanjay's youngest son. It's a lazy afternoon and Joshua is crawling on the floor. Sanjay points to him worriedly and says he isn't sure of what his son's future has in store. "I haven't been able to get a birth certificate for him. The authorities make it very difficult to legally register newborn Chakmas," he says.
Sanjay claims to have made repeated rounds to the local registration office in Diyun district to acquire a birth certificate for Joshua. "There are two days in the week to register for birth certificates. Every time I went to the office on these days, they would send me back and ask me to return again. After many attempts, I got tired of it," he says.
Sanjay thinks it is a deliberate attempt by the state government to deny the Chakmas an identity. "Most of us have no proof that we exist. Isn't it easy to erase records that never existed?" he says, adding, "I'm surprised you know about us. Nobody has bothered to find out."
Members belonging to other tribes in the region accuse Chakmas of criminal activities. Shivumso Chikro, who belongs to the Mishmi tribe, is an assistant professor of history at a college in the state's capital of Itanagar. He believes that the Chakmas should have legal rights but also expresses his apprehensions.
"The Chakmas are involved in a lot of criminal activities. They have expanded their territories. They have taken over land that belongs to other tribes and inhabited them. They should live in the land that has been allotted to them and not take over other people's land," Shivumso says.
He goes on to cite a close encounter: "Where my grandmother lives, there are also some Chakmas residing. One night she got looted by some Chakma miscreants who took away her traditional silver jewellery and everything she had. How do you justify that?" he asks, agitated.
The state government of Arunachal Pradesh seems to share Shivumso's fears. An academic paper published in 1996 says: "The government officially notes the Chakmas' ‘propensity towards crimes and other anti-social activities.'
Hoping against hope
|Bimal Kanthi Chakma is fighting for Chakmas' rights to contest elections [Felix Gaedtke/Al Jazeera]
The Chakmas are still hopeful of a better future. Two years ago, a parliamentary committee set up by the Indian government vowed to look into their citizenship issue. Bimal Kanthi Chakma, an executive member of the Committee for Citizenship Rights of Chakmas of Arunachal Pradesh (CCRCAP), says they are now in negotiations with the state and central governments.
"I hope that the dialogue will be fruitful. Right now only a very few of us have voting rights. But this right has to cover many more people. We are also fighting to have the right to contest elections here," Bimal Kanthi says. He refrains from sharing more thoughts on the issue, fearing it will affect the outcome of the negotiations.
On being asked by Al Jazeera what progress had been made on the Chakma citizenship issue in the past 60 years, the state government gave no comments. It therefore remains unclear when the negotiations will have an outcome that will decide the fate of thousands of Chakmas.
As part of its World Refugee Day project, the UNHCR is running a campaign titled "No one chooses to be a refugee". The Chakmas in Arunachal Pradesh know little about the campaign, but there's no doubt that it matches their sentiment.
Source: Al Jazeera | <urn:uuid:2d4a50ef-6016-426c-ae09-78295d73b077> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/06/20126207955292695.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392159.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00124-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977407 | 1,928 | 3.234375 | 3 |
View Full Version : problems
01-06-2008, 02:23 PM
hi again what can cause distortion and what are the methods of controling them, also what effects can welding on different materails, aslo what are the sources of weld defects
01-06-2008, 03:26 PM
these are massive subjects (especially the effects of welding on different materials). you'll get far more responses if you ask specific questions- the general infomation you're asking about can all be found in a book or via google
google 'welding distortion' and have a read. here's one to get you started... http://www.welding-advisers.com/Welding-distortion.html
for distortion control methods google 'neutral axis + welding', 'backstepping + welding'
compared to mild steel, stainless has poor thermal conductivity and high coefficient of thermal expansion. as a result this material will distort more readily than mild steel. google 'stainless + thermal conductivity + welding' and you'll find articles like this... http://www.key-to-steel.com/Articles/Art97.htm
have a good read, try googling different terms and THEN ask specific questions about anything you don't understand- you'll get far more responses and most will probably be helpful
01-06-2008, 03:37 PM
ah right i will try that
cheers for advice
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Auditory Processing Disorders
An individual with APD is unable to attend to, discriminate, recognize, or understand auditory information and therefore, has trouble making sense out of what is heard. APD does not describe a single deficit, but encompasses a variety of functions. It is important to point out that individuals with APD may have normal hearing sensitivity, i.e. sounds are loud enough to hear, but the individuals are unable to successfully use auditory information. | <urn:uuid:e0cf2995-e546-4a66-8bfd-4690192c6f81> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.healthyhearing.com/content/articles/Glossary/Other/7812-Auditory-processing-disorders | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398075.47/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00009-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949477 | 92 | 3.203125 | 3 |
Born: September 17, 1815; Christiania, Norway
Died: August 11, 1868; Christiania, Norway
Halfdan Kjerulf was a late bloomer; music education was primitive in his hometown of Christiania (now Oslo) when he was a child, so he prepared for a career in law. In 1839, however, well into his twenties, he suffered a serious illness, went to Paris to recuperate the next year, and finally had access to an abundant musical culture. Shortly after Kjerulf's return to Norway late in 1840, his father and two siblings died, so he supported hisRead more family by abandoning his legal studies to take work as a journalist. But he was also composing during this period, and the autumn of 1841 saw the publication of his first works, a set of songs. He studied music theory in his spare time, and in 1845 began conducting a male students' choir and a male vocal quartet. Not until 1848 did he begin taking formal lessons in composition; his teacher, Carl Arnold, helped him win a travel grant to study in Copenhagen (with Niels Gade) and then in Leipzig. Back home in 1851 he set himself up as a full-time piano teacher, and began writing a great deal of music in small forms. His compositions earned him a medal from King Carl XV in 1863 and membership in the Swedish Royal Academy of Music two years later.
As a song composer, Kjerulf found inspiration in the works of Schubert and Schumann, but also, significantly, in Norwegian folk music, mainly in his settings of Norwegian texts. He also wrote about 40 works for male chorus (stemming from his conducting work with such groups), plus about 60 choral arrangments; the total still doesn't quite match his output of about 120 solo songs. His solo piano output includes character pieces and folk arrangements, both establishing a model for Edvard Grieg to follow and improve on. Kjerulf wrote a comic opera, but otherwise avoided music for large ensembles or in large forms (symphonies, quartets). Read less | <urn:uuid:54c377a7-904e-495e-9fb4-8303eb3a3f40> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/albumList.jsp?name_id1=6373&name_role1=1&bcorder=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403826.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00155-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987492 | 436 | 2.984375 | 3 |
The difference is in how the plastic is colored. In the past, batches of each color were ordered in set colored pellets and molded into bricks. Now milky-white semi-transparent pellets (the basic color of abs) have color added to them during the molding process. It is much like having a paint color mixed for you at a hardware store. Several problems with bricks have occurred in the past few years. Bricks without enough base color are partially translucent. Heat and the size of the element effects the final color. This is why a dark blue 1x1 plate is much darker than a 1x8 dark blue brick. Certain colors such as white, light bley, dark bley, etc are often not consistent.
Why did LEGO make the change? My opinion is that it allows them to always have the colors they need, speeds up the production process, and reduces operating costs. Production of a set is not held up if they are low on color x pellets. Unfortunately, I do believe the old process usually had more consistent colors. Even in the past, colors did not always match (especially red) and hues changed slightly from year to year. Color changes where not as noticeable as they are today. | <urn:uuid:65287152-730d-49dc-990d-424c5e00756e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.fbtb.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=20421 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397636.15/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00124-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977343 | 249 | 2.9375 | 3 |
If the closest planet in the Solar System to the Sun was able to support life (as we understand it) this is what our homeworld would look like to them — a double planetary system (or more likely as perceived, a binary star) — from even our closest approach to them, 48 million miles away. So according to Mercurians, we are not a pale blue dot but instead a nearby, very bright, double-dotted neighbor. Ray Villard writes on Discovery News:
I never cease to be humbled and amazed when I see our Planet Earth reduced to a pinpoint when photographed from elsewhere in the solar system. So far, our planet-roaming spacecraft have taken tourist snapshots of Earth as seen from Mars, Saturn, and beyond Pluto’s obit.
But this latest view from NASA’s MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) spacecraft is a jaw-dropper. For the first time we see Earth — in astronomical parlance — as a fully illuminated superior planet 114 million mile outward from Mercury. Earth really looks like a double star because the moon is snuggled up next to it.
If in some parallel universe Mercury had intelligent life, its science equivalent of Galileo would have cataloged Earth as a “double planet,” because our moon is so comparatively large next to Earth.
Read More: Discovery News
Latest posts by ralph (see all)
- Fats Domino Has A Really Awesome Couch - Nov 8, 2012
- You Are Still Being Lied To: Howard Zinn’s “Columbus and Western Civilization” - Oct 8, 2012
- If ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ Was Marketed Today (Video) - Jul 27, 2012 | <urn:uuid:6efab1eb-293d-4477-be98-6462734425b8> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://disinfo.com/2010/08/planet-earth-as-seen-from-planet-mercury/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783400572.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155000-00201-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928697 | 369 | 3.53125 | 4 |
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Bob Henson • September 14, 2013 | Even after the rains finally abated on Friday, I found myself struck by how the waterlogged air in Boulder felt oddly, almost eerily tropical. This only put an exclamation point on the weirdness of the week and its events. Four days of rainfall across Colorado’s Front Range produced massive flooding that’s marooned thousands of people, inundated many key roads, and damaged countless homes and businesses.
Just how rare was this event? Was it a 100-year flood, or something bigger (or smaller)? As always, the answer depends on exactly what you’re looking at, and exactly where.
There’s no doubt that the rains in and near my hometown were truly historic, as evidenced by data from Boulder’s official weather station.
Part of the NOAA cooperative observing program, this station has been located at the NIST/NOAA campus in south Boulder since 1990. Boulder’s weather history actually extends much further back, to 1893, including the catastrophic 1894 flood that devastated central Boulder (more on that one below).
The weather station was moved several times over that 97-year period, and observations weren’t kept as rigorously as today, so there are some missing data—though it’s unlikely an event as titanic as this week’s would have gone unobserved.
Between 00Z Thursday 9/12 (6 PM Mountain Daylight Time on Wednesday) and 00Z Friday 9/13, a total of 9.08” was measured at the official Boulder site. From 6 PM Monday 9/9 through 6 PM Friday 9/13, the grand total was a whopping 14.71”.
Update (Sept. 18): As of Mon. AM 9/16, Boulder has officially measured 17.15" for the past week and 30.12" for the year, making 2013 the city's wettest year on record.
Two things that helped make this rainfall historic are breadth and duration. Colorado can get much higher rainfall rates for brief periods and over small areas. One pocket of Fort Collins, Colorado, received more than 10 inches in less than six hours on July 28, 1997, leading to deadly flash floods there. However, it’s much harder to get the atmosphere to produce near-constant rain in large amounts for three-plus days across most of the semiarid High Plains and adjoining foothills of the Front Range.
Another unusual aspect is timing. Before now, the 10 heaviest single-day rains in Boulder history had all occurred between early April and early August. Interestingly, this week’s deluge followed a week-plus of record heat across much of the West that felt more like midsummer than September. Then the hot dome of upper-level high pressure shifted north and east, while a large but weak upper low set up shop across the western United States. With the main jet stream located well north into Canada, this pattern stayed in place for most of the week.
The immense amount of water that fell arrived at upper levels via a plume of deep moisture that surged northward from the tropics. At lower levels, the pattern drove moist air from the Great Plains toward the foothills, where it was forced upslope (see map). Together, these features blanketed the Front Range with the soggiest air mass ever recorded at Denver in September, as measured by radiosondes (weather balloons launched twice daily that sense the amount of water vapor through the depth of the atmosphere).
The transition from intense heat to heavy rain, and the weather features shown in the map, are similar to conditions more typical in July and August as part of the North American Monsoon pattern. They’re not so typical for September.
Engineers often refer to NOAA’s Atlas 14 to find frequency estimates: how often to expect precipitation of a given intensity and duration. Russ Schumacher (Colorado State University) used the atlas to calculate frequency estimates for the rains observed in the critical 48-hour window from 6 a.m. MDT Wednesday to 6 a.m. Friday. In doing so, Schumacher found that a large chunk of Boulder County and parts of several other state counties passed the 1000-year recurrence threshold.
This doesn’t mean that such a rainfall would literally be expected once every thousand years, like clockwork. Rather, it’s a statement of probability: a 1000-year rainfall has a 0.1% chance of occurring in any given year. Such values shouldn’t be taken as gospel—there are important caveats, including the hard-to-model behavior of the most extreme events—but they do suggest how truly noteworthy this week’s rains were.
“I think everyone who lives along the Front Range has known of the potential for a rain event that would produce ‘the next big flash flood’,” says Schumacher. “But I don't think anybody imagined that when it came it would cover such a large area and last so long.”
As for the floods themselves, it’s a bit more complicated to discern their precise rarity. For example, changes in the built environment—how streams are channeled, where parking lots replace fields, and so forth—affect how a flood moves through a watershed. So an identical weather event a century ago might produce a much different flood than the same event today.
One of the main tools for measuring flooding is river gauges that monitor streamflow height. Scientists use the long-term records from these sites, along with models of the topography, meteorology, and hydrology of the surrounding watershed, to extrapolate the potential height of worst-case floods. As with the rainfall example above, the results are probabilistic: a “100-year flood” has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year, a 25-year flood has a 4% chance, and so on.
Near downtown, Boulder Creek—as measured just west of Broadway by a U.S. Geological Survey gauge—crested at an impressive 7.78 feet on Thursday evening, with an estimated flow of about 5,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). That’s the highest water observed downtown since the record flood of May/June 1894, when flows were estimated at more than 11,000 cfs and large swaths of downtown were inundated. That 1894 event saw lower precipitation amounts than were observed in much of Boulder County this past week, but the rains were accompanied by major runoff from snowmelt. In contrast, this week’s rains fell on a parched, snow-free landscape—at least one saving grace.
Why were some of the floodwaters in and near town apparently more extreme than those observed in downtown Boulder? Rainfall isn’t uniform across a region, so a given flood might be more extensive at one point along a river or creek, or in one part of town, than elsewhere. This week’s torrents included pulses of intense downpour embedded in steadier rain, so many smaller tributaries—engorged by these pulses—flowed into roads, homes, and yards where residents had never encountered such water before.
One can’t observe an event like this without reflecting on the longer-term, larger-scale picture. As a Climate Central article notes, one of the hallmarks of recent climate change in the United States and many other regions is a shift toward rain and snow being concentrated in more intense bursts, often with longer dry spells in between.
These trends, predicted by climate models, make physical sense. A warmer atmosphere can carry more water vapor, so when conditions are ripe for heavy precipitation, there’s more to work with. Slow-moving weather features also boost the odds of a prolonged event like this one, so researchers are continuing to investigate how and whether atmospheric blocking features will change in a future climate.
This week’s amazing deluge—which has affected neighboring states as well, including Kansas and New Mexico—should serve as an excellent candidate for an attribution and detection study. Through such work, scientists can use computer models to see how often similar events occur, both with and without the presence of greenhouse gases produced by human activity. It’s then possible to estimate how much the odds of such an event have been changed by fossil fuel use.
Even when researchers find that a given type of disaster has become more likely, a rare event is still going to be rare—and it can occur without any help from greenhouse gases. That’s why researchers have warned for decades about Colorado’s inherent vulnerability to flash floods. One of those researchers is geographer Eve Gruntfest, now at the National Science Foundation. Her landmark analysis of the Big Thompson disaster (see PDF), which killed 139 people on July 31, 1976—the evening of Colorado’s centennial day—resulted in the “climb to safety” signs now common across the region.
The late Gilbert White (University of Colorado) and his decades of research into flooding and safety are honored by a memorial marker at Boulder Creek and Broadway, showing the heights that floods of various return periods would reach. This week’s water appears to have risen above the 50-year level and topped out somewhere not too far from the 100-year mark.
When might the 500-year level be hit? It’s only a matter of time—though nobody can say exactly how much.
Update (Sept. 23): It now seems the water may not have gone much past the 50-year level on the Gilbert White memorial, which would be roughly consistent with the flow indicated on the Boulder Creek hydrograph above. If I find a photo or a citable source, I'll add it here.
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research under sponsorship by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings and conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. | <urn:uuid:ab1d5fe5-d955-451b-96ce-3aea2b83c993> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/perspective/10250/inside-colorado-deluge | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397565.80/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00112-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958869 | 2,107 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Member Article: The Battle of Pinkie Cleugh
by Kai Isaksen
As we enter 2014, the 700th-year anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn and the year of the referendum on Scottish independence from the United Kingdom, it may be appropriate to look back at other battles fought between the Scots and the English.
Throughout the centuries, the two nations have fought several epic battles – some well-known like Bannockburn, Flodden, and Cullodden – and others more obscure to the general public, but no less fascinating from a historical point of view.
One such forgotten battle was the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, fought close to the town of Musselburgh, just east of Edinburgh, in 1547.
Many historians have argued that the outcome of the battle had no political consequences and that this may well be why the battle has been largely forgotten outside historical circles.
However, historians also tend to agree that the battle was indeed significant, in that it can be argued to be the first modern battle on British soil, a battle featuring the first real combined arms operations (as we define it through modern eyes), using infantry, cavalry and artillery, as well as naval bombardment, in a coordinated and mutually supportive way on the battlefield.
Member Article: Prelude to Disaster: The Siege of Mazagan, 1562: Portuguese Policy and Pyrrhic Victory in 16th Century Morocco
by Comer Plummer
It was a pleasant day of early spring in Lisbon and King Sebastian I of Portugal and the Algarve was making the most of it, bounding about the gardens of the Ribeira Palace. His elfish form disappeared momentarily behind the hedges and then into the shadows of the King's Tower before popping out again, diminutive rapier in hand, the shock of copper hair tussled. Normally, the sights and sounds of the Tagus River and nearby shipyard would have been the boy's primary diversions, but this day was different. Today, there were a thousand imaginary enemies at hand, and the King was determined to slay them all. The host was a Moorish one, godless savages and unruly fighters, and he was the crusading King Manuel I, the one they called The Fortunate, under whose rule the empire reached its zenith. Over 40 years after Manuel's death the country still bore his stamp, right down to the late Gothic architecture, a florid mélange of Italian, Spanish, and Flemish accents to traditional Portuguese style. Manueline, they called it.
As Sebastian leapt by, parrying and lunging, gardeners looked up, revealing weathered faces and furtive looks that were strangely servile and prideful. As the boy rounded the west side of the palace, that facing the river, he came upon knights and men-at-arms milling about the entrance. Recognizing their assailant, the men threw up their arms in mock surrender, sending the scowling boy off in search of another encounter. Usually, the eight-year old King was only permitted so much of this nonsense, but, under the circumstances, he was allowed to indulge. News from Morocco had everyone in a state of excitement.
Member Article: The Sharif and the Sultan of Fishermen: Mohammed ash-Shaykh, the Rise of the Saadians, and the Emergence of Modern Morocco
by Comer Plummer
It was in Constantinople, perhaps in 1558, or even years later, that on a certain
day a weathered basket containing the rotten head of Mohammed ash-Shaykh toppled
from the ancient Walls of Theodosius. It had hung there for a long time. Just how
long, no one quite remembered. It tumbled into the refuse that collected along the
base, a forgotten memento, uninteresting to even the wild dogs that scavenged there.
Such a spectacle was, for the era, both callous and insipid. Eventually, it would
become a dubious distinction for a Moroccan sovereign. In the final analysis, it
might be described as a nadir that underscored an audacious life.
Ninety Five Theses and the Revolution that followed
by Thomas Leckwold
Martin Luther's Ninety Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences was
nailed to the castle church in Wittenberg, in now modern day Germany, on October
31, 1517. This document was a protest that strongly criticized the practice of selling
indulgences of the Roman Catholic Church, known here after as the Church. The document
was a challenge to church authority that set forth events that permanently changed
the religious, political, and social factors of central Europe, and led to a series
of wars using the pretext of faith, and the role of the Church in the political
structure of Western Europe. Luther's document was not meant to be a call to revolution,
but the social conditions, and economic factors, along with religious convictions
did set in motion a revolution and subsequent conflicts in central Europe.
Cairo’s Fortress on the Mountain
by David W. Tschanz
Cairo residents call it the Qal'at al-Jabal, the Fortress on the Mountain, or just al-Qal'ah, the Fortress. The rest of the world simply calls it “The Citadel.” For nearly a millennium it has stood as a silent sentinel, residence, and symbol of power.
Standing on its battlements, and looking westwards provides a view of over 4500 years of architectural marvels from the mosque of Sultan Hasan, just below to the Pyramids of Giza across the Nile. From atop this fortress the awesome sweep of history is a vivid reality. It is a view that must have given even the sultans who ruled from here, cause to reflect.
Member Article: Armenian Warriors, Japanese Samurai
by Dr. Armen Ayvazyan
Armenian historiography contains considerable information about ancient and medieval Armenian military ideology.
In the works of fifth century historians Pavstos Buzand and Movses Khorenatzi, the commands and legacy of the Armenian
sparapets (commanders in chief) to their successors articulate in detail the obligations and responsibilities of
Armenian warriors. Their norms of conduct share striking similarities with the system of values of the Japanese samurai
codified during the 16th to 18th centuries, as well as with later medieval West European chivalry of the eight to 14th
“Fight and offer your life for the Armenian World just as your brave forefathers did, consciously sacrificing their lives for this Homeland…”
Member Article: Byzantine Military Pragmatism vs. Imperial Prejudice: Possible Reasons for Omitting the Armenians from the List of Hostiles in Maurice’s
by by Dr. Armen Ayvazyan
The problem of the various images of the Armenians in Byzantium has already become the subject of numerous, if sketchy, historical investigations and remarks. As a rule, students of this subject have focused on the images of those Armenians who resided beyond Armenia proper in the Byzantine capital and peripheral provinces as either newly-arrived immigrants or old-established inhabitants. Consequently, the shaping of the images of the Armenians in Byzantine Empire was appropriately sought and analyzed in such spheres as ecclesiastical differences between Armenian and Greek Churches, the ethnic peculiarities of everyday life as well as the rivalry in the imperial court between the Armenians and Greeks, the two major ethnic components of Byzantine elite. In contrast, this essay aims to analyze the Byzantines’ image of the Armenians of Armenia, that is, those who continued to live in and exercise military and political authority over their homeland. Accordingly, this study focuses on the geopolitical determinant in the construction of Armenian images in the imperial strata of Byzantine society.
Member Article: Lusty Stukeley: Deceiver of Princes
by Comer Plummer
The day was Monday, August 4, 1578. Sir Thomas Stukeley stood in his armor on the plain of Ksar el-Kebir, in the heart of the Kingdom of Fez, with the hosts assembling for battle around him. He had collected himself by then, having shed the ordeal of the previous night, with its discomforts and frustrations. He would have been calm and reflective, as only experienced soldiers could be at such times. Thomas probably knew that he was playing his final card. In a life of twists and turns the climactic moment had at last arrived. There was no maneuvering out of it. He was adrift among forces beyond his control. At last, on this battlefield, his destiny would be decided.
Member Article: Constantinople - The Citadel at the Gate
by Comer Plummer, III
The art of fortification is a clear reflection of our past. It bears witness to our roots as a race of mutually hostile
societies, and impresses upon us the determination of a people to defend themselves.
It has existed ever since man first came to realize the value of natural obstacles to his common defense, and evolved
as he sought to invoke his own methods to fully exploit this advantage. The building of barriers rapidly evolved from
the simple mud parapets and mountain top abodes of the Neolithic Age to the construction of linear and point stone
obstacles of the Bronze Age, best represented by the Hittite capital of Hattusas.
Member Article: The Battle of Poyang Lake
by Joshua Gilbert
In late August 1363 AD the two main contenders for control of China,
Zhu Yuanzhang and Chen Youliang, faced off on Poyang (also called Boyang)
Lake, the largest freshwater body of water in China.
In the end Zhu Yuanzhang would win the battle and go on to found one of
China’s greatest dynasties: the Ming.
Member Article: Apocalypse Then: The
Battle of the Three Kings
by Comer Plummer
Don Sebastian, the twenty-four-year-old King of Portugal, rose early on the
morning of August 4, 1578. He was restless as they dressed him under the silken
tent in new armor, over which was applied a leather tunic to guard against the
heat of the Sun. Outside, the din of the camp was building as the army too
girded for battle. On the hills facing them, the Moroccan army was also
Member Article: The Emergence of Seapower in the Yuan Dynasty
by John J. Trombetta and Steven C. Ippolito
John Keegan views the Mongolian war-making polity as a fusion of the "horse
and human ruthlessness[.]" The great khans, Chinggis, Ogodei, Mongke, and
Khublai Khan, gathered the martial energies of the steppe nomad in the quest
for Empire, and released them like so many dogs of war upon Asia, Europe,
China, Korea, the Middle East of Persians and Arabs, and Japan. Results were
startling: extraordinary political changes that reworked the map of the
thirteenth century Asia, and a transformation of war in the Asian steppe
"making it for the first time," in the view of Keegan, "'a thing in
Member Article: The Hundred Years War: An Analysis of the Causes and Conduct of the Longest
by Patrick J. Shrier
The Hundred Years War between England and France from 1337-1453 is best viewed
as a series of interconnected wars with the same basic objective instead of as
one long war. There was not continuous fighting during the period nor did
England and France keep armies constantly in the field, rather it was almost a
game between the two countries with clearly defined rules as to when to fight
and when to rest. The period was marked by many truces some for just a season
and some lasting years. The most striking thing when one studies the wars of
the period is how the English army was almost invariably superior to the French
in capabilities yet somehow the English managed to lose the war.
Member Article: The Muslim Horde's Easy Invasion of Iberia
by Robert C. Daniels
After a short foray in July of 710 AD, Muslim forces from North Africa invaded
the Christian Iberian Peninsula (modern day Spain and Portugal) in the spring
of 711, and within two years, with the exception of the extreme northwestern
portion of the peninsula, had successfully overpowered and conquered the
Visigothic Christian realms of Iberia. Not only did it take the Frankish
forces under Charles Martel to stop the Muslim horde at the battle of Poitiers
in 732 from further intrusions into Western Europe, it would take nearly eight
centuries for the Iberian Christians to re-take the peninsula from the Muslims.
Member Article: The Orin War
by Joshua Gilbert
The Onin War, (so called because it occurred in the regnal year Onin 1), was
the catalyst that sparked the century long period of Japanese history known as
the Sengoku Jidai, the "Age of the Country at War". What began originally as a
dispute between a father and his son-in-law, became an eleven year war that
trashed the once great city of Kyoto and sparked an era of bloodshed that
remains famous to this day.
The Onin War began because of the weakness of one Shogun. In 1464, Ashikaga
Yoshimasa, the 8th member of the Ashikaga clan to hold the title
Seii-Taishogun, and a man renowned for his focus on tea parties and poetry,
wanted to retire but had no son. He decided to instead make his younger
brother, Yoshimi, his heir. However Yoshimi was a Buddhist monk, so the Shogun
had to first drag his brother out of the monastery in order to make him his
Member Article: The Battle of Shrewsbury
by John Barratt
By the beginning of the 15th century, the English longbowman was one of the
most effective killing machines in Western Europe. For over half a century he
had dominated the battlefields of France and Northern Spain, winning for
England’s Plantagenet monarchy an extensive continental domain. The battle of
Shrewsbury, described by a contemporary writer as “the sorry bataille of
Schrvesbury between Englysshmen and Englysshmen”, witnessed the dawn of a new
and more terrible era in English warfare, when, for the first time in a major
engagement, the English longbowman turned their deadly power against each
other. It was a foretaste of the bloodbath which would follow half a century
later in the Wars of the Roses, and would also provide William Shakespeare with
the inspiration for one of his greatest plays - King Henry IV Part One. | <urn:uuid:fee88bc8-26a2-4cc3-b014-97771121132b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/medieval/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396224.52/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00166-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954255 | 3,136 | 2.890625 | 3 |
The liberalization of the global trade, and the fact that the consumers in the
industrialized countries are more and more demanding food to be not only
economical, but also healthy, tasty, safe and sound in respect to animal
welfare and the environment, are changing the so far quantity-oriented food
production, guaranteeing the nutrient supply for a nation, into an international
quality-oriented food market, where commodities, production areas, production
chains and brands compete each other.
The competitiveness of food production will soon be more dependent
on the reliability of the safety and the quality of the food and acceptability
of the production procedures than on quantity and price.
In contrast to the quantity-oriented markets that are often subsidized
and producers can always sell everything they produce, quality-oriented
markets are market-driven.
Thus, apart from the steady increase of the national and international
standards for food safety and public health, there is a growing influence
of the consumer's demands (often completely ignorant of agriculture) on the
animal production, its allied industries, advisers, consultants and food
All of this means that the agricultural supply of food production is facing
remarkable changes in the years to come, which is both challenge and opportunity
for food animal producers, packing plants and meat processors as well as for the
The paper describes the foreseeable changes and their implications on
livestock production and which on- and off-farm measures need to be developed
and implemented in vertically coordinated supply chains rather than on single farms.
THE NEED TO IMPROVE FOOD SAFETY AND TO IMPLEMENT QUALITY ASSURANCE FROM FARM TO TABLE
(The Example of Meat)
In countries that have implemented a consistent mandatory meat inspection, this
classical harvest food safety procedure and the more and more stringent rules
for post-harvest food safety measures improving the hygiene standards during
slaughter, meat processing, storage and distribution have led to a remarkable
decline of meat related food-borne diseases in man. However, although meat
inspection and food hygiene have been regarded as sufficient to guarantee safe
meat over almost 100 years, new approaches to food safety and meat quality are
becoming necessary. There are five major reasons for this need:
1.) Despite the generally recognized achievements in making food safer over
the decades with the mandatory meat inspection and the principles of food
hygiene being the most successful means in protecting the consumer against
food-borne health risks, there are still deaths due to food-borne disease
in man, e.g. 9000 deaths per year in the USA. Furthermore, the consumer's
confidence in the safety of food is decreasing:
It is true that meat has never been as safe as today, but the
perception of the risks due to meat is that there are more risks
to human health then ever. This general recognition is highly
supported by the media. The urban consumer does not differentiate
between commodities or diseases so that reports on
BSE and E. coli O:157 H:7 do not only have an adverse impact on
beef, but on meat in general. The concerns with food safety in meat
focus mainly on pathogens, antimicrobial and chemical residues, and hormones.
2.) Modern agriculture is contributing to the increase of drug-resistant
pathogens in humans, and, thus often being attacked by the medical society and
consequently by the public:
The latest and most serious attack is that of the Director General of the
World Health Organization (WHO), who stated in his Word Health Report
1996: "....Making matters worse are modern types of food production.
Antimicrobials are used in meat production to increase growth, but not
usually in sufficient amounts to kill microbes. Drug-resistant bacteria
are then passed through the food chain to the consumer".
3.) Food safety issues can easily become non-tariff trade barriers and are
increasingly used as marketing tools, nationally and internationally:
Nationally: Advertisements for meat use food safety concerns more and more
often e.g. the grocery chain "Whole Foods Market" in several major cities of
the USA advertises: "....Our fresh meat and meat products come from animals
raised naturally without hormones and antibiotics...." It is obvious that
such statements create new consumer demands and increase the distrust in meat
without any safety or high-quality "label".
Internationally: Trade barriers that prevent national meat industries
from getting access to international markets are more and more based on
food safety concerns. The Danish salmonella control program throughout
the Danish pork industry is successfully used to increase the pork export from Denmark.
4.) The consumer has the tendency to ask more and more for fresh and
naturally raised (organic) products:
The tendency "back to the farmers' markets" results in the increasing
consumption of food that is not or less processed than branded products
with several processing procedures (cleaning, food additives such as
preservatives, canning, packaging etc.) prior to marketing. The more
fresh or organic the food is, the more is the consumer dependent on
the absence of pathogens and contaminants in or on the raw material.
5.) The traditional mandatory meat inspection still is indispensable,
but unable to control and prevent the emerging food-borne pathogens that
nowadays pose risks to human health:
In the days of the so-called classical zoonoses, diseases such as
tuberculosis and brucellosis caused both clinical diseases that could be
recognized at farm level and lesions that could be recognized during meat
inspection at slaughter. The emerging pathogens of today such as Salmonella,
Toxoplasma, Trichinella, Campylobacter and Yersinia are only detectable through
targeted monitoring systems, since they do neither cause clinical symptoms in
affected animals nor lesions that could be helpful to recognize contaminated carcasses.
FOOD SAFETY AND QUALITY APPROACH
As outlined above, the majority of the real and perceived reasons for the
increased concerns with the safety and quality of meat apply to the pre-harvest
area of the food production chain. Furthermore, it is true that the harvest food
safety measures (inspection and removing carcasses unfit for human consumption
from the food chain) is assuring the consumer's protection, but they do not prevent
the major safety-related defects in the slaughter pig, i.e. they are only quality
control at the end of the on-farm production phase.
Industries with long experiences in growing competition initially
used quality control to cope with increasing quality standards. The
needs to produce and sell high quality products and increase the
efficiency of the production process, however, has led to the development
of quality assurance systems along production chains. The difference between
quality control and quality assurance can be explained as follows:
Quality control is the evaluation of a final product prior to its marketing,
i.e. it is based on quality checks at the end of a production chain aiming at
assigning the final product to quality categories such as "high quality",
"regular quality", "low quality" and "non-marketable". Since, at the end of
the production chain, there is no way to correct production failures or
upgrade the quality of the final product, the low-quality products can
only be sold at lower prices and the non-marketable products have to be
discarded. Their production costs, however, had been as high as those of
the high and regular quality products. Thus, quality control has only a
limited potential to increase the quality and efficiency of a multi-step production procedure.
Quality Assurance, in contrast to quality control, is the implementation of
quality checks and procedures to immediately correct any failure and mistake that
is able to reduce the quality of the interim products at every production step.
Thus, the desired high quality of the final product is planned and obtained by conducting:
Standard Operating Procedures (SOP's) that guarantee the desired quality of the
interim products at every production step.
If an entire production chain is following a written
description (handbook) of all SOP's along the entire production chain, the demands for a
Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) are met.
The management approach to long-term success through customer satisfaction,
based on the participation of all members of an organization (suppliers included)
in improving processes, products, services and the working culture is called:
Total Quality Management (TQM).
Examples for quality control versus quality assurance in the area of food safety are:
the testing of carcasses for residues is quality control, the implementation
of residue avoiding production procedures at farm level is quality assurance;
the testing of meat products for salmonella prior to their marketing and
consumption is quality control, the implementation of on- and off-farm salmonella-reducing
measures as standard operating procedures is quality assurance.
In food production, where the safety of the produced food has the
ultimate priority in the framework of quality, the
Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) system is the internationally recognized
system to help assure safe food production. HACCP emphasizes prevention in the avoidance of
food safety problems. HACCP combines common sense with an evaluation of risks to identify the
points along the food production chain, where possible hazards may occur, and then to strictly
manage and monitor these points to make sure the process is in control. The HACCP system is
made up of three parts:
1.) The identification of hazards, and the determination of the severity of
the hazard and risks. These are risks associated with growing, harvesting,
processing, distributing, preparing and/or using a raw material or food product.
Hazard usually means the contamination, growth or survival of microorganisms
related to food safety or spoilage. A hazard can also include dangerous chemical
contaminants or foreign objects (glass or metal fragments). Risk is the estimate of
how likely it is that the hazard will occur.
2.) The determination of critical control points (CCP) required to control
the hazard. A critical control point is a location, practice, procedure or
process which can be used to minimize or prevent unacceptable contamination,
survival or growth of food-borne pathogens or spoilage organisms, or introduction
of unwanted chemicals or foreign objects.
3.) Establishment and implementation of monitoring procedures to determine
that each CCP is under control. Monitoring systems must be able to effectively
determine if a CCP is under control. Corrective action must be defined to be used
when a CCP monitoring point shows that the system is out of control.
Before developing an HACCP plan for a production procedure, the establishment
of SOP's and GMP's is indispensable. Only the combination of these principles
provides the possibility to have the correctness and the high standard verified.
Verification is the procedure that provides the guarantee to any customer and to
the public that the product in question is of the quality the producer is claiming,
since it has been produced according to a production procedure that is based on specific
GMP and HACCP principles that are documented in a handbook. If the verification is performed
by independent agencies, bodies or companies that are accredited by nationally or
internationally approved quality assurance organizations, the procedure becomes a
Certification procedure. There are several systems, one of the leading internationally
approved certification procedures is DIN ISO 9000 (9001 - 9004).
All this means that the traditional mandatory meat inspection and the
classical post-harvest food safety measures have a limited potential
for further major improvements of the safety and quality of meat.
Therefore, additional measures must be taken:
1.) Pre-harvest food safety programs implementing the rules of GMP
and the HACCP concept at farm level from breeding to the slaughterhouse
gate have to be added to the existing harvest and post-harvest HACCP programs.
Quality assurance systems throughout the entire food production chain are the
precondition for any certification procedure.
2.) Governmental food safety programs and market-driven food safety/quality
programs must be coordinated.
It is obvious that the potential impact of pre-harvest food safety
measures based on the HACCP concept is different depending on the
nature of the addressed defect or pathogen. There are different
areas in which the defect or pathogen enters the food production
chain and the possibility to reduce the risk in question by proper
handling and/or cooking prior to consumption are different. In the
case of residues, on- and off-farm residue avoidance programs are the
only opportunity of prevention, since there is no pre-consumption
procedure that reduces the residue-associated risks to human health.
In contrast, proper handling and freezing and/or cooking of the final
product reduces the risks due to pathogens, but pre-harvest risk-reduction
programs can either prevent the contamination of the carcass (Trichinella and Toxoplasma)
or remarkably contribute to minimizing the pathogen-associated risks
(Salmonella, Campylobacter, Yersinia, Listeria).
Therefore, the targets for intervention measures in the food chain
should be prioritized as follows:
1.) On-farm residue avoidance programs with consistent record keeping,
proper drug use, storage and extended withdrawal times. In general,
an overall reduction of antimicrobial substances used in agriculture
both for medical and production purposes is necessary. Off-farm residue
programs via GMP and HACCP programs in the supplying feed mills aiming
at the prevention of cross-contamination and proper labeling.
2.) On- and off-farm programs to develop Trichinella-and Toxoplasma-free
herds, regions, areas and countries with a well-coordinated cooperation
between packers, producers, veterinary officers and practitioners, and epidemiologists.
3.) On-farm salmonella reduction programs with a statistically justified monitoring,
either bacteriologically or serologically, of the salmonella load of the animals
supplied for slaughter. Research is still needed to evaluate the risk factors for
the introduction of salmonella into herds, to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness
of Salmonella-reducing measures. It is also still necessary to evaluate to which extend
the recommended pre-harvest salmonella-reducing measures contribute to a measurable
Salmonella reduction in the final product.
4.) On-farm programs to reduce the introduction of Yersinia enterocolitica,
Campylobacter jejuni and Listeria monocytogenes. However, more research on the
prevalence of these pathogens in swine herds and on the feasibility of control measures is needed.
To reliably decrease the food-borne health risks and to improve the consumer's
confidence in food of animal origin, pre-harvest food safety programs should
consist of three elements:
1.) Implementation of GMP and HACCP programs aiming at reducing food-borne
risks to human health at farm level.
2.) Implementation of monitoring and surveillance programs at slaughter
to determine the frequency of the introduction of food-borne health risks
into the food chain identifying the farms of origin and mechanisms to develop
incentives for the farming community to reduce these risks. This element is,
as a rule, the "trigger" and "modulator" of any pre-harvest food safety program.
3.) Implementation of a certification procedure involving independent agencies
and persons such as accredited veterinarians and quality consultants.
THE IMPLICATIONS OF PRE-HARVEST FOOD SAFETY AND QUALITY ASSURANCE
The role of the livestock producer is changing from just raising animals to
being an indispensable part of the food production chain that supplies a
product that is the basis for the production of a wholesome, safe and high
quality food product. The food animal practitioner's former focusing at
treating diseased animals, then at herd health and productivity will change
to focusing at supporting the livestock producer to provide slaughter animals
with quality properties that meet the demands of slaughter-houses and meat processors,
wholesalers, retailers and finally the consumer. Along with a consistent herd/flock
health management, the food animal veterinarian will more and more be involved in
on-farm pathogen control and on-farm residue avoidance programs, monitoring systems
and verification procedures.
To take advantage of this development, it is necessary to introduce
epidemiological methods for data collection, processing and analyzing
into the daily work of the food animal veterinarian. The implementation
of information feedback systems is needed to have the management tool at
hand that combines data from the slaughter plant (disease-related lesions,
quality deficiencies, and monitoring results) with on-farm data on animal
health and residues (mortality, morbidity, pathogens, and drug use) and on
the performance of the herds of origin.
Once such an information system has been implemented, it is quite easy
to deal with any additional food safety/quality data set to address
problems such as animal welfare improvement, e.g. the porcine stress
syndrome and transport and/or environmental protection measures, e.g.
data on antimicrobials in manure and the nutritional use of heavy metals.
Producing animals for the production of certified high quality and safe
food products will make the livestock producer a competitive, publicly
accepted and appreciated component of the food production chain. The
food animal veterinarian will play an active role in the process of guiding
animal production into becoming a transparent and high quality supply of food production chains.
The implementation of pre-harvest food safety programs using information
feedback systems will be the major tool to prevent any negative impact of
food safety problems on a country's export of food. First, the probability
of food-borne risks to human health through meat produced from animals using
a pre-harvest food safety approach is lower. Second, if food safety concerns
are misused as non-tariff trade barriers, any food production chain using a
science-based and transparent pre-harvest food safety program, is much more
defensive than the traditional livestock production. Without consistent data
on the entire production chain, it is almost impossible to deliver scientific
evidence that the production in question is following the standards and guidelines
of the FAO/WHO Codex Alimentarius Commission and the OFFICE INTERNATIONAL DES EPIZOOTIES
(O.I.E.). However, if it can be proven that the production of the refused food is meeting
the internationally approved standards, the "Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and
Phytosanitary Measures" - appendix of the Marrakesh Agreement that established the World
Trade Organization in April 1994 - will protect the exporting country against the unfair
or unjustified use of food safety concerns as non-tariff trade barriers.
The major characteristics of modern food production systems that are organized
as described above are:
1.) vertically coordinated supply chains provide distinct market
segments with defined (branded) food products;
2.) any food product is traceable throughout the production chain up to the
farm of origin; and
3.) the use of pre-harvest food safety and quality assurance programs with
third-party certification allows the livestock producer to offer shared liability
in case of safety or quality deficiencies. | <urn:uuid:03251ded-fd21-4ce7-ad94-0c48e24ca16a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://agriculture.de/acms1/conf6/ws3qual.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399522.99/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00054-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919896 | 4,085 | 2.96875 | 3 |
The ‘mathematical formula’ you mention gives the volume of the object but says nothing whatsoever about the shape, which is what you need.
I haven't used WorldEdit, but from the example formula and the wiki documentation, the formula is a boolean expression evaluated over every block in the relevant area. The question the formula is answering is, for every block at some position (x,y,z), is that block part of the object you want to create?
In order to use this you need the inequalities which define shapes. For example, a sphere of radius 5 has the inequality
r <= 5, but WorldEdit gives you x,y,z and not r so you must use the formula for Euclidean distance to compute the radius yourself:
sqrt(x^2+y^2+z^2) <= 5 or equivalently
x^2+y^2+z^2 <= 5^2.
The torus formula they give works by computing the xy plane distance from a circle
0.75-sqrt(x^2+y^2) and then squaring that and
z^2 to obtain the 3-dimensional distance from
that circle, then comparing that against the desired radius. (All of these can be thought about as applications of the Pythagorean Theorem — two coordinate axes are the adjacent and opposite sides of a right triangle, and distance is the hypotenuse — but the torus example is complicated by effectively using cylindrical coordinates.)
There's really too much to say about how to do this for a single question; you'll have to find your own source for mathematics information, but the relevant subject is algebraic geometry. You may also find material on constructive solid geometry (CSG) useful, but a lot of discussions of that focus on the boolean-operations aspect (which you may want for more complex shapes) rather than the inequalities defining individual shapes.
However, you did specifically ask about making triangles. A triangle is a two-dimensional shape, so I'll show you a prism (extruded triangle) instead. These sorts of shapes which have only flat sides can be defined in a simple way: think about taking an infinite volume of stone, slicing it along some plane, and throwing away half. Each such plane is a linear equation (rather, linear inequality for our purposes) and we can just write a logical and:
x > -5 && x < 5 && y > -5 && z > -5 && x + y <= 0
This will create an 10×10×10 object which looks like a right triangle in the yz plane. The first two parts give it a limited extent in the x direction (WorldEdit probably has some limit on this anyway), the next two are the straight sides of the triangle, and the fifth is the sloped side.
A general linear inequality looks like
a*x + b*y + c*z <= d
where a, b, c, and d are some numbers you choose. With this you can define any flat surface you want, but it'll take a small amount of study to understand how. Note that every condition in the above formula has this form, if you set some of a,b,c,d to zero; for example, the fifth condition has a=0, b=1, c=1, d=0.
Questions of the form ‘How do I write an inequality for this solid shape?’ may be on topic at Mathematics Stack Exchange, but I recommend you consult available references first.
One thing to note is that formulas for three-dimensional objects are often given as equations which define the surface of a shape, whereas you want an inequality defining the interior. But, given the surface it may be possible to derive the interior. For example, Wikipedia says:
An implicit equation in Cartesian coordinates for a torus radially symmetric about the z-axis is
This formula is identical to WorldEdit's example except that it has
= r^2 instead of
< r^2; just try doing similar alterations to equations you find. (If you get the direction of the inequality wrong, you will convert everything but your shape into stone; I hope WorldEdit has good undo.) | <urn:uuid:5c7c880d-4f11-459c-a044-99bb548d9bc2> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/47384/how-to-construct-a-g-command-with-worldedit-in-minecraft | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783404382.73/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155004-00110-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926421 | 882 | 2.921875 | 3 |
Malacañang PalaceEdit profile
The Malacañan Palace, commonly known simply as Malacañang, is the official residence and principal workplace of the President of the Philippines. Located at 1000 J. P. Laurel Street, San Miguel, Manila, the house was built in 1750 in Spanish Colonial style. It has been the residence of every Philippine head since Rafael de Echague y Berminghan. During the American period, Governors-General Francis Burton Harrison and Dwight F. Davis built an executive building, the Kalayaan Hall, which was later transformed into a museum.
Originally a summer house by Spanish aristocrat Don Luis Rocha, the house was sold to Colonel Jose Miguel Formente, and was later purchased by the state in 1825. Since 1825, Malacañan Palace became the temporary residence of every Governor-General. During the Spanish–American War, Malacañan Palace became the residence of the American Civil Governors, with William Howard Taft being the first American Governor resident. During the American period, many administrative buildings were constructed and Malacañan Palace was refurbished. Emilio Aguinaldo, the first Philippine President, was the only head of the state who did not reside in Malacañan Palace, instead residing in his own home, the Aguinaldo Shrine, located in Kawit, Cavite. The palace was seized by rebels several times, starting from the People Power Revolution, the 1989 coup attempt, where the palace was bombed by T-28 Trojans, the 2001 Manila riots, EDSA II and the May 1 riots.
The palace has been the residence of eighteen Spanish Governors-General, fourteen American Civil Governors and later all the President of the Philippines after independence, with the exception of Emilio Aguinaldo.
In Philippine politics, "Malacañang" has become a metonym for the presidency, the executive branch and the government.Etymology
The official etymology from the 1930s says that the name comes from a Tagalog phrase "May lakan diyan", which means "There is a nobleman there", as it was the home of a wealthy Spanish merchant before it hosted the Nation's chief executive. The Spanish themselves, on the other hand, say that the name came from the term "Mamalakaya," referring to the fishermen who once laid out their catch on the river bend where the Palace now stands. A more mundane claim is that the Palace actually got its name from the street where it was located, the Calzada de Malacañan.
The Rocha family cherish a legend that would have the word “Malacañan” as directly attributable to Luis Rocha himself. In a 1972 interview conducted by Ileana Maramag, Antonio Rocha related that his illustrious ancestor would take siesta in the house that he had built and that the Sikh watchman would hush noisy passers-by. Malakí iyán or “he is a big man” he would say, gesturing towards the house at the sleeping tycoon who would not be amused at being prematurely roused. In this way, the house and its immediate area came to be named.
Malacañan is on the right bank of the Pasig River, and there is a Tagalog word referring to “of the right,” which is malakánan. The river is somewhat long and meandering, with a correspondingly lengthy right bank. However, the river at Malacañan divides around the Isla de Convalecencia as it does nowhere else along its course. Hence, the need to make a distinction between left and right would seem to be most relevant at this very place. Perhaps then, Malacañan’s origin is as a point of reference in the lively and ancient traffic on the water of the Pasig river
Whatever its origin, the word Malacañang is indisputably Tagalog. Because the Spanish language avoids using "-ng" as the final sound of a word, the word Malacañang was Hispanicized into Malacañan. The Spanish version of the name was maintained during the American occupation of the Philippines from 1898 until 1946, despite the fact that "-ng" as a final sound is very familiar in the English language. "Malacañan" remains to this day an official English name for the Palace. However, during the presidency of Ramon Magsaysay in 1953, the Philippine government changed the name to Malacañang: Residence of the President of the Philippines in honour of Palace's historical roots.
Starting in 1986, during the presidency of Corazon Aquino, the distinction was made between Malacañan Palace as the designation for the official residence of the President, and Malacañang as shorthand for the Office of the President of the Philippines. The restoration of the designation Malacañan Palace was reflected in official stationery, and signage, including the backdrop for press briefings and conferences featuring the Pasig River façade of the Palace. In practice, official documents personally signed by the President of the Philippines bear the heading Malacañan Palace, while those delegated to subordinates and signed by them bear the heading Malacañang.History
The Spanish Captains-General (before the independence of New Spain, from which the Philippines was directly governed) and then the Governors-General of the Philippines originally resided in the walled city of Intramuros, Manila, until an earthquake leveled the Palacio del Gobernador (Governor's Palace) in 1863. At this point, Malacañang Palace, a summer home originally built in 1750 by Spanish aristocrat Don Luis Rocha, then subsequently sold to Spanish Col. Jose Miguel Formente in 1802, and then purchased by the state in 1825, became the temporary residence of the Governors-General. Governor-General Rafael de Echague y Berminghan, previously governor of Puerto Rico, was therefore the first Spanish governor to occupy Malacañang Palace.
When the Philippines came under American rule following the Spanish-American War, Malacañang Palace became the residence of the American Governor-General. In 1900, William Howard Taft became the first American Civil Governor resident. The palace was expanded, and an Executive Building was added by Governors-General Francis Burton Harrison and Dwight F. Davis. The complex reverted to the President of the Philippines upon the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth on November 15, 1935. President Manuel L. Quezon became the first Filipino resident of Malacañang Palace (President Aguinaldo lived in his house in Cavite and took office at Barasoain Church); since then it has been the President's official residence. After his inauguration on December 30, 1953, President Ramon Magsaysay issued an Executive Order formally changing the name from "Malacañang Palace" to "Malacañang: Residence of the President of the Philippines." The new nomenclature rapidly caught on and was maintained until informally abandoned during the Marcos administration. During the administration of President Corazon Aquino, for historical reasons, government policy has been to make the distinction between "Malacañan Palace", official residence of the President and "Malacañang", Office of the President.
The Palace was made famous as the home of President Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, who were its longest residents, from 1965 to 1986. As First Lady, Mrs. Marcos oversaw the reconstruction of the Palace to her own extravagant tastes, including the former San Miguel Brewery Buildings which was demolished upon expansion, paving way to a park near the San Miguel Church. Following a student uprising that nearly breached the Palace gates in the early 1970s, martial law was declared, and the complex was closed to the public. When President Marcos was deposed in 1986, the Palace complex was stormed by the local populace, and the international media subsequently exposed the excesses of the Marcos family, including Mrs. Marcos' infamous collection of thousands of shoes.
After the People Power Revolution, the Palace was reopened to the public and was converted into a museum. Presidents Aquino and Fidel Ramos lived in nearby Arlegui Mansion but held government affairs in the Executive Building. After the Second EDSA Revolution, security in the Palace was tightened due to attempts against the government. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo resided again in the Palace and was known for founding the Malacañan Museum (formerly Kalayaan Hall). Aquino's son, President Benigno Aquino III currently resides in Bahay Pangarap, a nearby villa beside the Pasig River while keeping the Palace open to the public.The Palace Halls
Official visitors to Malacañan use the Entrance Hall. Its floor and walls are of beige Philippine marble. Straight ahead are the doors to the Grand Staircase leading to the state reception rooms. On the left is the Palace chapel. The passage on the right leads to Heroes Hall.
The doors leading to the Grand Staircase depict the Philippine legend of Malakas (Strong) and Maganda (Beautiful), the first Filipino man and woman who emerged from a large bamboo stalk, according to Philippine mythology. The present resin doors were installed in 1979, replacing wrought iron and painted glass doors from the American period depicting Lapu Lapu and the other Mactan chieftains who felled Magellan.
A pair of lions used to stand guard on each side of the doors to the Grand Staircase. The lions were originally at the vestibule of the Ayuntamiento Building in Intramuros. They were apparently discarded during the 1978-79 renovations. Wooden benches dating back to the American Regime that were in the Hall were transferred to the private entrance that lead directly to the living quarters of the Palace.Heroes Hall
From the Entrance Hall, one walks through a mirrored passage hung with about 40 small paintings of famous Filipinos painted in 1940 by Florentino Macabuhay.
The adjoining large room was originally the Social Hall, intended for informal gatherings. It was renamed Heroes Hall by First Lady Eva Macapagal, who commissioned Guillermo Tolentino to sculpt busts of national heroes.
In 1998, the National Centennial Commission installed three large paintings specially commissioned for the place. The one in the vestibule is by Carlos Valino, while the two others are by a group of artists headed by Karen Flores and Elmer Borlongan.
The painting in the vestibule is chronologically the second of the three, depicting events of the Propaganda Movement (Marcelo H. Del Pilar, Jose Rizal, etc.) and the Philippine Revolution from the formation of the Katipunan by Andres Bonifacio, the sewing of the Philippine flag, the Proclamation of Independence at Kawit, and the Malolos Congress. At Heroes Hall itself are the other two paintings.
As one enters from the vestibule, the painting on the left shows key events from the earliest times (arrival of the ancient Filipinos and the Manunggul Jar) through Lapu Lapu and the death of Magellan, the Muslim resistance to Spanish rule, the Basi Revolt, and Gabriela Silang, to the 1872 martyrdom of the priests Gomez, Burgos and Zamora.
The painting on the right begins with the Battle of Tirad Pass and Gregorio del Pilar and other events of the Filipino-American War, the Independence Movement under Osmena and Quezon, events of the Japanese Occupation, and the Presidents of the Philippines all the way to the Marcoses, President Corazon Aquino, and President Ramos.
The Hall, as large as the Ceremonial Hall directly above, received a mirrored ceiling in 1979 and for the rest of the Marcos era was used not only for meetings and informal gatherings but also for state dinners in honor of visiting Heads of State.
Among the distinguished visitors entertained in this Hall by the Marcoses were the President of Mexico, the Prime Minister of Thailand and Princess Margaret of the United Kingdom. Dinner was usually followed by a cultural presentation, after which formal toasts were offered by the President and the guest of honor.Grand Staircase
Past the Malakas and Maganda doors of the Entrance Hall is the Grand Staircase, made of the finest Philippine hardwood and carpeted in red. Its walls are made of tiny pieces of wood, assembled to simulate sawali panels. These were put up in 1979 replacing stucco and hardwood panels. At the top of the stairs is the landing that serves as vestibule to the Reception Hall.
The Spanish and American Governors General and Philippine Presidents and their visitors used this staircase. (Or, to be precise, the staircase that used to be there before the Marcos reconstruction.) There is a story that Jose Rizal's mother, Doña Teodora Alonzo Mercado, went up these stairs on her knees to beg then Governor General Camilo Polavieja for her son's life. The staircase is narrower than it used to be.
A legacy of the Spanish regime are unsigned portraits of Spanish conquistadors Hernando Cortes, Sebastian del Cano, Fernando Magallanes, and Cristobal Colon, hung at the balcony around the stairs. At the end of the balcony a magnificent harvest scene by Fernando Amorsolo hangs.
A large painting of the Nereids (sea nymphs) by noted Spanish artist Joaquin Sorolla, donated by Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, noted San Francisco social and civic leader, of the Hawaii and California sugar Spreckels, used to hang in place of the Luna. A case of Marcos war medals, subsequently alleged to be fake, took its place towards the end of the Marcos Regime. The case continued to be on display, empty, for some years thereafter.
On the left as one reaches the top of the stairs, is the famous 'The Blood Compact,' still in its original carved frame. It was painted by Juan Luna in 1886 and given to the government in return for the artist's scholarship in Spain. The painting shows the Spaniard Miguel Lopez de Legaspi and the Bohol Raja Sikatuna drinking wine with drops of their blood. The model for Sikatuna (the helmeted man shown from behind at left) was Jose Rizal and the model for Legaspi (the Spaniard seated facing the viewer) was Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera, Luna's uncle in law. Turning right, one sees the grand vista that is the length of the Reception Hall and the width of the Ceremonial Hall beyond.
The door on the left leads to the private quarters of the Presidential families. This wing contained the private dining and living rooms and two guest suites, used for meetings and waiting rooms in 1986-2001 when Presidents Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos lived in the Arlegui Guest House and President Estrada lived in the Premier Guest House. President Arroyo and her family live in this wing. The door straight ahead leads to a corridor that surrounds the inner court within the private quarters.Reception Hall
Visitors assemble in this impressive room prior to a program or state function at the Ceremonial Hall beyond, or while waiting to be received by the President or the First Lady at the Study Room or the Music Room on the left, or before entering the State Dining Room on the right.
This room was the largest of the Palace before the 1979 renovation. Old photographs show President and Mrs. Manuel L. Quezon receiving guests close to the top of the Grand Staircase at New Year's Day 'at home' and other affairs. A Rigodon de Honor, a formal dance of Spanish Regime origin, would begin Balls, giving the most important couples present the opportunity to show off clothes and jewelry. Some ladies in that bygone era wore ternos only once.
Easily the most outstanding feature of the Reception Hall are the three large Czechoslovakian chandeliers bought in 1937. These have always been treasured and during the Second World War, were carefully disassembled prism by prism and hidden for safekeeping. They were taken out and reassembled after the war.
Official portraits of all Philippine Presidents are on the walls, from Emilio Aguinaldo, President of the Malolos Republic, to Benigno Aquino III, painted by Fernando Amorsolo, Garcia Llamas and other noted artists. The portrait of President Arroyo first hung in this hall was photograph taken by Rupert Jacinto. That of President Ramos is unique on three counts - it is on a narra plank rather than on canvas, the likeness as well as the decorations along the sides are painstakingly singed on the wood and it was a gift of the artist, Gaycer Masilang, a prisoner serving a life sentence.
An elaborate ceiling was installed in the 1930s, carved by noted sculptor Isabelo Tampingco who depicted vases of flowers against a lattice background. Large mirrors, gilt sofas and armchairs, and Chinese bronze pedestals holding plant and flower arrangements decorate the Hall. The Tampingco woodwork was curved and in some eyes gave the room a coffin shape. This is supposedly why in the 1979 renovation, the Tampingcos were replaced with two facing balconies.Ceremonial Hall
This room, the largest in the Palace today, is also known as the Ballroom, used for state dinners and large assemblies, notably the mass oath takings of public officials begun by President Ramos. The upholstered benches are lined up for guests on such occasions. When the room is used for state dinners, the benches are removed and round tables set in place. Orchestras sometimes play from the minstrels' galleries at two ends of the hall.
Three large wood and glass chandeliers illuminate the Hall. Carved and installed in 1979 by the famous Juan Flores of Betis, Pampanga, the chandeliers are masterpieces of Philippine artistry in wood.
The Hall used to be much smaller and was in effect merely an extension of the Reception Hall. It had a coved ceiling similar to those of old Philippine homes, and glass doors opening to verandahs on three sides overlooking the Pasig and Malacañan Park. Many an al fresco party was held here, with round tables set on the azoteas and verandah for dinner and the Ceremonial Hall, doors thrown open, cleared for dancing. Fireworks lit the skies promptly at midnight from the Park across the river at New Year's Eve parties. The azoteas, verandas and the intimate pavilion in the middle were combined in 1979 into the present enormous Ceremonial Hall.
A recurring Palace ritual is the presentation of credentials when a new Ambassador arrives. During the Marcos Administration and prior to the 1979 renovation, new Ambassadors presented their credentials in an impressive ceremony. A flourish of trumpets accompanied the arriving Ambassador as he mounted the Grand Staircase and marched the full length of the Reception Hall. The yellow-gold curtains to the old Ceremonial Hall were parted to reveal the President standing alone at the far end, with members of the Cabinet lined up on the left. The Ambassador presented his documents of credence to the President, who handed them to the Foreign Secretary. The President then delivered his welcome speech and offered a champagne toast to the head of state of Ambassador's home country. The Ambassador then delivered his response, offered a toast to the President, and after small talk, left in another burst of trumpets.
Presidents Corazon Aquino and Ramos were less formal, receiving new Ambassadors in the Music Room without ceremony. The old rituals were revived by President Estrada, when an arriving diplomat disembarked from his car at General Solano Street and boards what is called a chariot, a luxurious open jeep where the occupant stands on a red carpet holding onto a stout bar while progressing up J.P. Laurel Street to the Palace grounds. He received military honors in the garden outside the main entrance and to fanfare, is escorted up to the Reception Hall. He marched through two columns of guards in gala uniform to present his credentials to the waiting President.State Dining Room
The State Dining Room is used mainly for Cabinet Meetings. In the past, this was where Presidents dined with state guests and official visitors. A long adjustable table could accommodate up to about fifty guests. The President would sit at the center of the table and the First Lady across from him. The best glass (Irish Waterford and French St. Gobain) and china (Limoges and Meissen) were brought out on special occasions. The chandeliers are Spanish, from the Ayuntamiento de Manila as are the gilded mirrors that seem have been here since the Spanish Regime. When Emilio Aguinaldo was captured in Palanan, Isabela he was jailed in what is today the State Dining Room.
Before the 1935-37 renovations, this room was the ballroom of the Palace. It was also where General Emilio Aguinaldo was kept prisoner after his capture by the Americans.
One of the most dramatic scenes in Palace history occurred here. In The Good Fight, President Quezon wrote that "in April 1901, I had walked down the slopes of Mariveles Mountain, a defeated soldier, emaciated from hunger and lingering illness, to place myself at the mercy of the American Army." Suffering from malaria, he was also instructed to verify that Aguinaldo had in fact been captured. In Quezon's words,
... I was ushered into the office of General Arthur MacArthur, the father of the hero of the Battle of the Philippines. ... ... told General MacArthur in English what I had said in Spanish, namely, that I was instructed by General Mascardo to find out if General Aguinaldo had been captured. The American General, who stood erect and towered over my head, raised his hand without saying a word and pointing to the room across the hall, made a motion for me to go in there. Trembling with emotion, I slowly walked through the hall toward the room hoping against hope that I would find no one inside. At the door two American soldeiers in uniform, with gloves and bayonets, stood on guard. As I entered the room, I saw General Aguinaldo the man whom I had considered as the personification of my own beloved country, the man whom I had seen at the height of his glory surrounded by generals and soldiers, statesmen and politicians, the rich and the poor, respected and honored by all. I now saw that same man alone in a room, a prisoner of war! It is impossible for me to describe what I felt, but as I write these lines, forty-two years later, my heart throbs as fast as it did then. I felt that the whole world had crumbled; that all my hopes and dreams for my country were gone forever! It took me some time before I could collect myself, but finally,I was able to say in Tagalog, almost in a whisper, to my General: Good evening, Mr. President.
Two paintings dominate the room. The larger is a fiesta scene by National Artist Carlos Botong Francisco - a pair of tinikling dancers, a serenade, churchgoers, boatmen, and other vignettes of rural life.. Commissioned for the Manila Hotel, it originally hung in one of the Hotel lobbies but was transferred to Malacañan in 1975. The other painting is an early Amorsolo rural scene.
The room was widened and a mirrored ceiling installed in 1979. Previously, there was a long dining table at center and the decorations consisted of heavy crimson velvet curtains, large gilded mirrors and elaborate chandeliers.
Beyond is a smaller room, just as long but narrower than the dining room. Intended for Cabinet meetings and film showings, the room proved rather small and was rarely used as such. The room, called the Viewing Room, was more frequently used to hold buffets for people meeting in the State Dining Room. Another 1979 innovation, this occupies what was a verandah overlooking the Palace driveway and garden.Rizal Room
Formerly known as Study Room, this was where Presidents from Quezon to Marcos and then Ramos received their daily stream of callers. There is a large chandelier from the 1935-1937 renovations. President Arroyo made it into a conference room with the Council of State table of the Commonwealth as centerpiece, until she finally restored the room to its original function. The room today has been restored to its traditional function as the President's office. Of interest is the presidential desk used by all the Presidents from Quezon to Marcos (Marcos had an ornately carved top added to the desk in 1969). President Arroyo restored the use of the desk since most of her predecessors, including her father, used it.The Music Room
Room usage changed over the years. A bedroom during the American period, it was turned into a library and reception room during the Commonwealth; after the War, it eventually became the Music Room. First Ladies customarily received callers in this room. A Luna masterpiece, 'Una Bulaquena' hangs above the grand piano. 'A Cellist,' painted by Miguel Zaragoza, hangs as its pendant across the room above the sofa. The wall niches now hold Chinese trees and flowers made of semi precious stones, where there used to be Guillermo Tolentino sculptures representing the different fine arts and later, large Ming and Ching porcelain vases. A supposed Michelangelo, a stone head, was once here.
Mrs. Marcos decorated the room in mint green. She would sit on the antique French sofa and the visitors on the armchairs. On rare occasions, small concerts were held here, featuring famous Filipino and foreign musicians.
The room immediately behind the Music Room was fixed up by Mrs. Marcos as her office. It later became President Fidel Valdes Ramos' private office. The room beyond it was originally a small sitting room and was converted by President Joseph Ejercito Estrada into his own office. President Arroyo decided also to use the room as her office at first. Today the room is used by the President to receive visitors.Private Quarters
The Palace has always been impressive, particularly the grand reception rooms. Presidents' families have not always been happy, however, over the domestic concerns of bedroom size, privacy, closet space, ventilation, color scheme, and so on.
Each new presidential couple took their pick of the available bedrooms, each President frequently avoiding the bedroom of his predecessor. A President with many children or grandchildren usually had problems, particularly when a foreign head of state arrived, expecting to be invited to stay in the Palace such as when Indonesian President Sukarno visited President Quirino shortly after the war.
The Pasig River, cleaner in the 19th century, had by the 1970s developed a foul odour and became the breeding ground for mosquitoes. The series of renovations and repairs of a century resulted in unstable floors and leaky roofs. Allegedly paranormal activity was also reported as occurring in the Palace, including one that some identified to be the long deceased valet of President Quezon, who occasionally ministered to favored guests.
With three grown children, leaky roofs, noisy air conditioners, and cramped space, the Marcos family decided to expand the Palace in 1978. As with most renovation projects, one thing led to another until the entire façade of the Palace towards J.P. Laurel Street was pushed forward, as were other sections. The bedrooms of President and Mrs. Marcos were enlarged and suites were built for their children Ferdinand, Jr., Imee, Irene, and their niece Aimee. The private living room was expanded and the entire private quarters generally added to or enlarged resulting in the present-day structure.
The rooms are large and impressive, furnished expensively and equipped with central air conditioning and air filters, but are not quite the stupendous rooms that 'in comparison make Versailles Palace look like a hovel,' as a foreign observer declared. The Spanish Period Malacañan probably centered on the small, open-roofed inner court that leads to all areas of the private quarters.
Many personalities have stayed at Malacañan over the years. It is recounted that the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, dropped by in the 1920s to play polo. Another guest in April 1901 was Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, who was taken to the Palace for a few weeks after his capture at Palanan, Isabela. American and Asian Presidents have stayed at Malacañan on visits to Manila.
The rooms opening to the Grand Staircase were the Dining and Living Rooms and Guest Suites of the Marcos period. These became meeting rooms during the Ramos and Estrada administrations and reverted back to being the private quarters of the Presidential Family under President Arroyo.
Reception Room. This was the Family Dining Room of Presidential families until the 1979 renovation. It used to have a magnificently carved ceiling, coffered in the Filipino-Spanish style. The famous painting of Fabian de la Rosa, 'Planting Rice,' used to hang on one wall. Other paintings, notably those by Fernando Amorsolo, were here and in the adjoining room.
The room beyond was used by the Marcos family variously as Private Living Room and a chapel and then became Meeting Room No. 1 in the Corazon Aquino, Ramos and Estrada presidencies. A large Botong Francisco painting of dancers is on one wall. Brought from the Manila Hotel, this artwork is pair to the one in the State Dining Room.
Suites. Bedroom suites (one baptized by Mrs. Marcos as the King's Room and another the Queen's Room) open from the former private dining room, between which is a small skylit room that used to be a courtyard. These are furnished with large canopied beds, gilded wardrobes and the like. The King's Room leads to the balcony over the main entrance, from which Pope John Paul II blessed a waiting crowd during his 1981 Philippine visit and which President Arroyo confides was her bedroom as the young daughter of President Diosdado Macapagal.
Discotheque. A third floor, added in 1979, has a roof garden and discotheque. Reached by elevator, the disco is immediately above President Marcos' bedroom. It was complete with strobe and infinity lights, fog equipment, and the latest in music equipment. A wide waterfall-fountain plays on the terrace outside the disco and steps lead up to a rooftop helipad. It has apparently been disused since 1986. During the Macapagal-Arroyo administration, it was renovated into a Music Hall.Mabini Hall
It began as the Budget Building with the creation of the Budget Commission (now the Department of Budget and Management) in 1936. After World War II, it housed, for a time, the Supreme Court, as the Ayuntamiento de Manila had been destroyed during the Battle for Manila in February, 1945. In the postwar years it was later expanded on either side to form a greatly enlarged Administration Building containing the majority of administrative offices in the Palace compound. Plans to demolish it and build a high rise building in its place after it was gutted in a fire in 1992 were completely dropped due to budgetary constraints. President Fidel V. Ramos supervised its reconstruction as a spartan but well-ventilated and lit office complex, and renamed it Mabini Hall.
It is the current Administration Building. A New Executive Building was also built by President Corazon Aquino in 1989. Additionally there are other, smaller buildings. Across the river is Malacañan Park, which contains a golf course, recreation hall, park, billets for the presidential guard, as well as a Commonwealth-era presidential resthouse (Bahay Pangarap), which serves as the current residence of President Benigno Aquino III.Administration and Executive Buildings
The central portion of the Administration Building or Mabini Hall, the large structure on the left upon entering Gate 4, was built shortly before the Second World War for the Budget Commission. It was enlarged after the war, with wings on both sides and top floors added. It houses the Office of the Executive Secretary, some units of the Department of Budget and Management, and offices of Presidential Assistants and Advisers. Some offices in this building, particularly those of the Office of Media Affairs, were invaded by an unruly mob on the evening of February 25, 1986, during the storming of Malacañang that capped the 'People Power Revolution.' The Old Executive Building or Kalayaan Hall, elegant with its high arched windows, was constructed in 1920 and enlarged over the years until 1939. The Building held the Office of the Press Secretary and other offices on the ground floor till early in the Arroyo administration. Maharlika Hall is on the second floor, a large room used for socials and meetings. An elegantly paneled office on the second floor used to be the President's Executive Office until President Marcos began to use the Study Room (now Rizal Room) of the Palace itself. Until 1972, the second floor was a warren of offices, including those of the Executive Secretary and the Vice President. This was where former United States President Dwight Eisenhower worked here as a Major in the U.S. Armed Forces and military adviser to the Commonwealth government. On the other side of the Palace grounds, beyond the President's Residence is the New Executive Building, christened 'Borloloy Building' by columnist Luis Beltran at the time it was refurbished. This was the administration building of San Miguel Corporation until bought by government. Mmes. Ramos and Estrada, as well as various Presidential Assistants and Advisers held office in the building. Across the street is a Spanish colonial period house, adapted to office use as the 'Ugnayan Building.'The Presidential Study
It is the official office of the President, equivalent to the United States' Oval Office of the White House. It is currently on the second floor of the Palace itself, while the old Executive Office at Kalayaan Hall (the old Executive Building) has been renamed the Quezon Room. The desk is the presidential desk in use since the Commonwealth of the Philippines, when the official desk of the American governor-generals was brought to the United States; it was used by all presidents from Quezon to Marcos (officially until 1978, then in his private study), restored by President Ramos, used by President Joseph Estrada, and restored once more by President Arroyo.New Executive Building
In 1936, President Manuel L. Quezon first proposed the purchase of the nearby San Miguel Brewery as additional office space. President Ferdinand E. Marcos initiated plans to transform it into an integral part of the Palace. However, it was under President Corazon C. Aquino that its reconstruction and refurbishing as the New Executive Building took place. Its architectural elements deliberately pay homage to the Palace of the Third Republic. Its utilitarian nature, however, made possible much needed additional administrative space, although its newness and lack of proximity to the Palace led to the resumption of the use of the Palace itself by Aquino’s successors, starting with President Fidel V. Ramos. Currently, it houses the Office of the Presidential Spokesperson, Presidential Communications Development and Strategic Planning Office, Presidential Communications Operations Office, and the Malacañang Press Briefing Room.Kalayaan Hall
The Renaissance-revivalist architecture of Kalayaan Hall, now the oldest part of the Palace, combines the histories of the American, Commonwealth, and Second and Third Republics, on the grounds of the picadero pavilion of the Spanish period. It once glittered with Romblon marble embedded into the concrete of its façade, but subsequent coats of white paint since the 1960s have obscured this. Kalayaan Hall is today one of the most intact pre-war public buildings in the Philippines and has withstood the test of time, serving as link between the old and the new. The precast ornamentation, elaborate wrought iron porte-cochere and balconies, the loggias and high cellings ideal for the circulation of air under tropical conditions, all created a building of imposing appearance. For generations, the executive functions of the Philippine state were conducted in this building. The main hall at the second floor of Kalayaan Hall was once the location of the guest bedrooms during the American era, and then of offices for the Office of the President during the Commonwealth. In 1968, it was cleared and renovated to form a large room called Maharlika Hall. It became the site for State Dinners and Citizens’ Assemblies during the Marcos administration. It was from the front west balcony of this hall that President Marcos took his last public oath of office and delivered his farewell speech on February 25, 1986. It was subsequently used as the Office of the Press Secretary until 2002, when it was transformed into the main gallery of the Presidential Museum and Library, with parts of the old state dining table in the center, as well as the Gallery of Presidents, which is composed of objects and memorabilia – including clothing, personal effects, gifts, publications and documents – pertaining to the fifteen persons who have held the Presidency.The Malacañang Museum
The Malacañang Museum is the official repository of memorabilia of the President of the Philippines it located in Kalayaan hall. It features exhibits and galleries showcases the heritage of the Presidents beginning from Emilio Aguinaldo to Benigno Aquino III, as well as the artwork and furniture from the Palace collections. It is located inside the Malacañang Palace’s Kalayaan Hall, the old Executive Building built in 1920The Former Presidential Museum
The Quezon, Osmena, Roxas, Quirino, Magsaysay, and Garcia Rooms of the Presidential Museum under the Ramos and Estrada administrations occupied the suites formerly allotted to the Marcos children (Ferdinand, Jr., Imee and Irene) which open from the inner court corridor. Most of these rooms were added in 1978 when the J.P. Laurel front of the Palace was moved forward.
The first in the series was the Magsaysay Room, furnished as the entrance lobby to the private quarters. The Garcia Room was a game room, containing chess sets that President Garcia owned and which were lent by his family. These and the other President's rooms included portraits, furniture and memorabilia on loan from the President's families.
The former bedroom of Ms. Imee Marcos had a beautiful antique gilded arch made by Isabelo Tampingco, carved to represent a coconut tree complete with fruit and leaves. Shelves held her collection of 19th century French porcelain dolls. At one time, now Senator Ferdinand 'Bong Bong' Marcos lived elsewhere and used his room to practice golf. Nets were hung on all walls to catch flying balls.
Laurel Room. The Marcoses made this room into a library with bookcases on all sides. It was used to exhibit memorabilia of President Jose P. Laurel.
Aguinaldo Room. Furnished as a dining room with the Malolos Congress table borrowed from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and an original flag used during the Philippine Revolution (captured by an American soldier and returned, decades after, by his descendants), this room was at one time the Marcos Family Chapel. Antique and modem religious images were arranged around the room, including figures of the Child Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Blessed Lorenzo Ruiz. There was an exquisite silver altar frontal, probably dating from the 18th century. President Marcos had numerous devotions, including one to Blessed Martin de Porres.
The Ramos Room. The dressing room of Mrs. Marcos adjoined her bedroom and has windows opening to the garden and J.P. Laurel Street. Together with the large walk-in vault for valuables, it is now used to display Ramos memorabilia.
The Marcos Room. The room contains Marcos memorabilia, including a whiteboard on which is drawn a map of Camp Crame, evidently used in February 1986 to devise or present a plan to attack the Enrile-Ramos forces. This was the bedroom-sitting room of Mrs. Marcos. Almost as large as that of President Marcos', it had a large bed with pina cloth bedspread and cushions. From the canopy was hung a mosquito net, arranged in Spanish Regime style. A railing surrounded the bed, reminiscent of the state bedrooms at European palaces. There was an Austrian Bosendorfer grand piano, regarded as among the best concert pianos in the world. A similar piano was at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.
The bathroom (not open to visitors) is accented in green malachite, the bathtub surrounded by a mural of Olot Beach in Mrs. Marcos' native Leyte province. Concealed doors lead to a walk-in safe that once contained Mrs. Marcos' fabled jewels and to a staircase leading to the ground floor room that contained Mrs. Marcos' clothes and accessories, including ternos and the much publicized 3,000 shoes (actually 1,500 pairs). The Quezon bedroom was on this site.
The Macapagal and Estrada Room. Memorabilia of President Macapagal and exhibits on President Estrada were exhibited in this large room, formerly the bedroom of President Marcos. With windows to the Palace garden and the Pasig River, the room used to have a large bed with an elaborate headboard and a round canopy that held a mosquito net. The Palace, ironically, needed mosquito nets - it must have been tough to catch even one in such large and high rooms. A desk, video equipment and medical paraphernalia completed the room's furnishings. President Marcos apparently liked to have his grandchildren sleep with him in this room, on mattresses laid out on the floor.
The en suite bathroom (closed to visitors) is large, its bathtub surrounded by a mural of Paoay Lake which is near President Marcos' native Batac. The view is the same as that seen from the Presidential Rest House, 'Malacañang ti Amianan' or Malacañang of the North.
The Corazon Aquino Room. This was the Marcos Family Dining Room, with a kitchen alcove behind a sliding screen. Mrs. Marcos liked to cook and frequently did so in this kitchen for family members and close friends. With numerous family recipes, she liked to improvise. Bacalao was a favorite.Bonifacio Hall
The first major change after the imposition of martial law was the transformation in 1975 of the servant’s quarters to what would become known as the Premier Guest House. The building would become the temporary residence of the Marcos family in 1975, when repairs were made to the Palace after a fire, and during the rebuilding of the Palace in 1978 and during the refurbishing and repair of the Palace in the remaining years of the Marcos presidency. President Corazon C. Aquino used this building as her office from 1986 to 1992. The Ramos administration relegated this building to secondary status despite its integration into the New Executive Building. It was renovated in 1998 as a residence for President Joseph Estrada and his family. In 2003, President Gloria Macapagal– Arroyo renamed this building Bonifacio Hall in honor of its plebeian roots. It presently houses the private office of President Benigno S. Aquino III.The Premier Guest House
The glass fronted building across the garden from the Palace's main entrance has a checkered history. Originally built by the American Governors General as servants' quarters to screen off Malacañang from the brewery (San Miguel) next door, the building was remodeled into the Premier Guest House in 1975, for use during the IMF-World Bank Boards of Governors Meeting. The Marcoses lived there while the main Palace was being reconstructed in 1978-79, again after a Palace fire in 1982, and when the air purification system was being improved in 1983.
Presidents Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos held office in the building. Unknowingly, President Corazon Aquino's office was the bedroom of President Marcos at the time that Ninoy Aquino met an untimely end in 1983. It became Presidential office and residence under President Estrada. His and Mrs. Estrada's bedroom was on the second floor, where Pres. Marcos' bedroom and President Corazon Aquino's office were. Pres. Estrada's office was on the ground floor.
The front of the building facing the garden is a two-story high reception area, with a staircase in the center that leads to the corridor above. The President's office was on the ground floor, near the stairs. On the floor above were bedrooms and the family dining room.Palace Guesthouses
There were various other guesthouses in addition to the Premier Guest House.
One is located on Arlegui Street half a block away, a remodeled and enlarged 1930s mansion owned by the Laperal family. It later housed the Japanese Embassy, the National Library and the Presidential Economic Staff, one of the agencies that was later merged with another to constitute the present National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA). Mrs. Marcos doubled the size of the mansion when it was converted to a guesthouse; it now has two towers where it used to have one. Presidents Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos lived here during their terms of office.
Two Spanish Regime houses on Gral. Solano Street were bought by the Marcoses in the 1970s and remodeled also into guesthouses and office of the Marcos Foundation.
The Goldenberg Mansion (so called after the previous owners) was informally referred to by Mrs. Marcos as the 'big antique.' A historic structure built by the Eugster family (probably Spaniards long returned to Spain) about a hundred years ago, it was the office of the Marcos Foundation, a cultural heritage structure. It was a combination residence and shampoo factory when bought by the Marcoses and exquisitely restored by Architect Leandro Locsin in 1971.
It held Mrs. Marcos' collection of excavated porcelain and pottery, Ban Chieng prehistoric pottery from Thailand and Filipiniana book rarities, and treasures such as a statue from Angkor and Chinese jade furniture.
The Teus house next door was purchased and converted to a guesthouse in 1974, under the supervision of decorator Ronnie Laing. It has a large living-dining area that held a display of antique European silverware (since sold at auction), including some by famous 18th and 19th century silversmiths Paul de Lamerie and Paul Storr. Much of these were apparently given to the Marcoses on their silver wedding anniversary.Gardens
The extensive grounds of Malacañang comprise one of the few parks in Manila, with tropical shrubbery, century old acacia trees, and even a balete or two. The acacias are festooned with the cactus like 'Queen of the Night.' The broad lawns, lush trees and greenery indicate how Manila may have been when it was less populous and times were more leisurely.
The public garden now known as 'Freedom Park' fronts the Administration and Executive Buildings. It has statues symbolizing the four freedoms (religion, expression, want and fear), that were brought to Malacañang from the Manila International Fair of the 1950s. The statues were long forgotten at the cogon field that Rizal Park then was, when First Lady Eva Macapagal retrieved them. An Art Deco fountain of the 1930s still plays near the main Palace entrance. Cannon and lampposts dating from the Spanish Regime accent odd corners.
There is a little mosque by the river, beside the Premier Guest House, built for a state visit by Libya President Ghadaffi, who never arrived. A bamboo teahouse, built in 1948 as a rest house, no longer exists, but it used to be by the river, near where the swimming pool now is.
Malacañang Park, across the river, adjoins the Mabini Shrine and the former quarters of the Presidential Security Command and of the National Intelligence and Security Agency. The Park used to be rice fields and grasslands of Pandacan, since the 1930s developed to its present form. It boasts a Recreation Hall, a small golf course and 'Pangarap,' a guesthouse where Dona Josefa Edralin Marcos lived for some time. The first tee of the golf course is at the main Palace grounds. A golfer is expected to clear the Pasig, to hole no. 1 on the other side.
Featured in Malacañang legends is the large balete at the main entrance and its reputed resident capre. Usually lit with capiz globes, it is hung with multicolored star lanterns at Christmas. Just once, it was lit with thousands of flickering fireflies, captured in some distant town where fireflies still abounded and released as a grand ephemeral gesture of a present for the then First Lady.Malacañang Park and the Bahay Pangarap
Malacañang Park was created when rice fields on the south bank of the Pasig River across from the official residence of the President of the Philippines were acquired on orders of President Manuel L. Quezon in 1936-1937. Intended as a recreational retreat, the main features of the planned complex for the park were three buildings: a recreation hall used for official entertaining, a community assembly hall for conferences with local government officials, and a rest house directly opposite the Palace across the Pasig River which would serve as the venue for informal activities and social functions of the President and First Family.
The buildings constructed by the Bureau of Public Works were the product of designs by Architect Juan Arellano and Antonio Toledo. The prewar park contained, in addition to the rest house, community assembly hall, and recreation hall, a putting green, stables, and shell tennis courts.
President José P. Laurel had the putting green expanded into a small golf course after an assassination attempt on him in Wack-Wack golf course. The existing gazebo in the golf course dates to the Laurel administration.
President Manuel Roxas further improved the golf course in Malacañang Park as well as maintaining a truck garden as part of the food self-sufficiency program of his administration.
During the administration of President Ramon Magsaysay An estero was filled in joining the properties of Malacañang Park and the Bureau of Animal Industry, as part of a GSIS housing project for presidential guards and other workers.
The Park grounds were refurbished through the efforts of First Lady Eva Macapagal in the early 1960s. She renamed the rest house Bahay Pangarap (House of Dreams). In the subsequent presidency of Ferdinand E. Marcos, Malacañang Park became increasingly identified with the Presidential Guards. It was during the Marcos administration that the Bureau of Animal Industry building became the headquarters of the Presidential Guards (today as the Presidential Security Group). Gen. Fabian Ver gained jurisdiction over some of the historic buildings, including the recreation hall, which became (and remains) the PSG gymnasium, and the community assembly hall which was turned into the presidential escorts building.
Under President Fidel V. Ramos, the Bahay Pangarap was restored and became the club house of the Malacañang Golf Club (the old Club House had become the residence of President Marcos’ mother, Mrs. Josefa Edralin Marcos). Restoration was supervised by Architect Francisco Mañosa at the initiative of First Lady Amelita Ramos and inaugurated as the New Bahay Pangarap on March 15, 1996 as an alternate venue for official functions in addition to recreational and social activities.
In 2008, the historic Bahay Pangarap was essentially demolished by Architect Conrad Onglao and rebuilt in contemporary style (retaining the basic shape of the roof as a nod to the previous historic structure), replacing, as well, the Commonwealth-era swimming pool and pergolas with a modern swimming pool. It was inaugurated on December 19, 2008 by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo at a Christmas reception for the Cabinet. Administrative Order No. 251, issued on December 22, 2008, placed the administration of Bahay Pangarap under the Internal House Affairs Office of the Office of the President of the Philippines.
Malacañang Park has always been a recreational park, and is not a military facility. The facilities and area of the PSG are distinct from the demarcation of Malacañang Park (see attached map, circa January 23, 1940, soon after its completion, delineating Malacañang Park, including Bahay Pangarap).
President Benigno S. Aquino III thus becomes the first President of the Philippines to make Bahay Pangarap his official residence, although previous presidents have stayed there. Despite living at his private residence at the start of his term, he has since occupied the house as of August, 2010.Malacañang Grounds
Laperal Mansion or the Arlegui Guest House. The Laperal Mansion is located along Arlegui Street. When World War II broke out, it served at one point as the residence of the speaker of the National Assembly established by the Japan-sponsored Second Philippine Republic who happens to be Benigno Aquino Sr., the grandfather of current Philippine president Benigno Aquino III. It also served as the chancellery of Germany in the country when it was still under Nazi rule. When the war ended, it served for a short while as the National Library. It may be around the postwar era that the Laperal family got to acquire the property but in 1975, they got kicked out of the property by presidential security as the Marcos government confiscated it for “security reasons”. Now property of the Office of the President, the house became the office of the Presidential Economic Staff (precursor of today’s National Economic Development Authority) before First Lady Imelda Marcos decided to expand the house to grander proportions in order for it to become a guesthouse.
Then People Power Revolution erupted in 1986 ousting former president Ferdinand Marcos, Corazon Aquino assumed the position of the presidency. As a symbolic gesture, she refused to live in Malacañang as her predecessors have; she chose to stay in the Arlegui Guesthouse instead. Her successor, Fidel Ramos, followed suit and also made Arlegui his residence. During Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s term, the house became the Office of the Press Secretary.
Legarda Mansion was built in 1937 by Doña Filomena Roces Y de Legarda, the Legarda house was one of the first art deco houses built in Manila. In this house, Alejandro Legarda (son of Doña Filomena) lived with his wife Ramona Hernandez, and their four children. Doña Ramona was well-known for her lavish parties, the Legarda house is a tribute to Doña Ramona (Moning), as it houses La Cocina de Tita Moning, a fine dining restaurant that aims to recreate the wonderful parties of Manila’s most elegant era, using heirloom recipes of the Legardas, served on antique china, glassware, and silverware. The living room with paintings by Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo and Juan Luna, Don Alejandro’s collection of antique radio equipment, a dressing room showcasing the memorabilia of the Legarda women, and the dining room where banquets are held.
Goldenberg Mansion built sometime around the 19th century by the Eugster family. served as home of the Spanish Navy Admiral and the Spanish Royal Navy Club from 1897-98. When the Americans arrived, the house served as the home and headquarters of the US Military Governor Arthur MacArthur, father of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. This also served as the session floor of the Philippine Senate for its historic first session in 1916. Later on, it was bought by cosmetics manufacturer Michael Goldenberg (hence its name) and was eventually bought by the Philippine Government under the Marcos regime in 1966.
National Artist and Imelda Marcos’s favorite architect Leandro Locsin did the restoration of the house which became the home of a lot of antique furniture, pottery, and books from here and other parts of the world. Until now, it is still used occasionally for official functions. It’s a shame though that access to this place is restricted and not many get the opportunity to see artifacts like Chinese jade furniture, European chandeliers, rare Filipiniana books, even a prehistoric Thai pottery piece to name a few. If you’ve been to Malacañang Museum and have marvelled at the treasures there, what more if one gets to see what’s inside the Goldenberg Mansion.
Teus House. Nothing much is known about it except that it was bought by the Marcos government around the same time and was converted into a guesthouse in 1974. A well-known Manila decorator named Ronnie Laing supervised the interior design of the mansion and when the Marcoses’ silver wedding anniversary was celebrated in 1979, the anniversary gifts coming from friends were kept in this house. Some of these gifts can still be found in the house. Unfortunately, we cannot be able to view these treasures due to restrictions in place, as with the other Office of the President-owned houses in the area.
Valdes Mansion along San Rafael St. in San Miguel, near the Plaza Aviles/Freedom Park. Unlike the aforementioned mansions, it has not been as much preserved from the looks of it. Nevertheless, it currently serves as one of the offices of the Palace security.
Presidential Broadcast Staff Radio Television Malacañang (PBS-RTVM) was organized in 1986 following the peaceful EDSA revolt. Before 1986, the organization that existed was Radio-Television-Movies, and adjunct of the National Media Production Center which was based in Malacañang. In 1987, Executive Order No. 297 dated 25 July 1987 was signed and issued by President Corazon C. Aquino, creating the Office of the Press Secretary and cites under Section 14 (Attached agencies) the creation of the Presidential Broadcast Staff (Radio-Television Malacañang).
Executive Order No. 297 designates PBS-RTVM as the entity with the sole responsibility and exclusive prerogative to decide on policy / operational matters concerning the television medium as it is utilized for the official documentation of all the President's activities for news dissemination purposes and video archiving.
PBS-RTVM is involved in television coverage and documentation, and news and public affairs syndication of all the activities of the President, either live or delayed telecast, by national or local, government or private collaborating networks
San Miguel Church was constructed in 1630s as an act of gratitude by a Spanish governor-general who had miraculously escaped death on a military campaign. The church also ministered to Japanese Christians fleeing persecution under the Tokugawa Shogunate, and since many of these exiles belonged to the samurai, or the warrior class, the church was dedicated to Saint Michael. The present church, notable for the beautiful symmetry of its twin bell towers, followed the model of European Baroque architecture. | <urn:uuid:6eb396eb-16fb-4f9d-baad-ff43f39f7d2d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://openbuildings.com/buildings/malacanang-palace-profile-18876 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397865.91/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00171-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970019 | 12,388 | 2.984375 | 3 |
A Brief History of Calvary Church
Pre-history of the Golden Area
The valley where Golden sits at the mouth of Clear Creek Canyon is said to have been occupied by Native Americans, predominately Utes and Arapahoes, for over a thousand years. When news of the discovery of gold near Central City traveled back across the plains in 1859, it drew men and women who wanted to make their fortunes in the diggings and others who stood a better chance of making a fortune catering to miners’ needs.
Golden City is Born
Golden City, as it was then called, was settled mainly by pioneer businessmen who provided supplies and other services to miners and their families. These men and their families not only played an important role in the history of Colorado but also were instrumental in building Calvary Church. Several of these pioneers would serve also as members of its first vestry: George West, William A.H. Loveland, and Edward L. Berthoud.
Religion Comes to Golden
The first Golden religious service, in June 1859 in the Ford brothers’ gambling tents, was a great success, with the entire town population attending. They sat on whiskey kegs and sang best-loved hymns played on a little melodeon brought across the plains by ox teams.
As one of the first Christian missionaries to visit Golden, Episcopal priest Fr. John Kehler had an influence on the residents, holding the first Episcopal service in the spring of 1860. Fr. Kehler had arrived even before the Colorado territory was formed, and he organized the Church of St. John in the Wilderness in Denver, now the cathedral of the diocese.
In 1861 Bishop Joseph C. Talbot was consecrated Bishop of the Northwest or, as he termed it, “Bishop of the All Out Doors.” Finding five families of Episcopalians in the population of 100, he preached in Golden and confirmed a mother and daughter.
Golden Builds Calvary Church
In April 1867 Episcopalians in Golden learned that Bishop George Maxwell Randall, the new missionary Bishop of Colorado and Parts Adjacent, had big plans to build a fine church edifice on the town square. William Loveland donated the three lots for the new church, an individual gave $1,000 toward building materials, and a subsequent donation of $1,750 made by a woman from St. John’s Church in Elizabeth, New Jersey, completed the cost of the structure. Bishop Randall laid the church’s cornerstone on September 23, 1867, and newspaper accounts described the building as “the finest church in the territory.” The stained glass window above the altar depicting the second coming, and the windows at the back of the church came as gifts to the new little mission church from friends in Boston. The original floor was not made of wood but of various colors of tile made by the Golden City Pottery, and the first organ was donated by the Mite Society, a local women’s organization.
The church’s bell tower was added in 1870, and the Guild Hall (the attached small room with the fireplace and rooms above) was built in 1902. In 1909, Adolph and Louisa Coors and their daughter Bertha donated $600 to the church to repaint the interior and to install the present pews and choir stalls. Shortly thereafter, the north windows of the nave were replaced with stained glass, and the sanctuary was added. The parish hall and classrooms above were built in 1954.
The parish commissioned architects in 1964 to design an ultra-modern church building to be built south of the 1867 building, but the plans never became a reality. The current structure, although outgrown by the congregation, is a cherished building which has been placed on the National Historic Register.
A larger multipurpose building (the Great Hall) was finished in 2000 on adjacent property. Both the Great Hall and the Historic Church are used for regular worship.
The School of Mines Connection
On June 11, 1866, when the newly-consecrated Bishop Randall arrived in Golden, he noted immediately the lack of higher education facilities in Colorado. He soon planned a university that would include a school of mines to support the local industry, a secondary school (a “seminary”), and a school of theology. Appreciating Bishop Randall’s effort, the territorial legislature appropriated $3,872 for a special building, and Jarvis Hall was erected on the present site of the Lookout Mountain School.
In 1874, a bill was introduced in the legislature to deed the school to the territory, making it a Colorado educational institution. The faculties of Jarvis Hall and Matthews Hall (the theological school) moved to Denver, and the Colorado School of Mines relocated to its present campus.
Calvary Church in the Community
Calvary’s first rector, William Lynd, opened a combined grade school and high school to educate any member of the community, and so began a long history of Calvary’s involvement with the Golden community. In the 1960s, Calvary’s Episcopal Church Women founded the Christian Action Guild, now located on 14th Street, an ecumenical effort to distribute food, clothing, and other assistance to the poor in the area. Calvary presently hosts the Golden Rescue Fund and the Jefferson County Restorative Justice Center.
A Holy Place
Bishop George Randall wrote the following in a series of lectures in 1858: “When a worshipper enters the Church, he feels he is entering the house of God. There is to him a sanctity pertaining to it, which does not attach to any other place, since, when consecrated to the worship of God, it is ‘separated from all unhallowed, worldly, and common uses.’ He takes off his hat when he enters the door, and he does not put it on again until he passes out the door…On taking his seat, he bows his head and silently invokes God’s blessing.”
All who enter Calvary's buildings are invited to do the same. Please feel welcome to sit and pray or join us for worship.
Calvary's Historic Church is the oldest Episcopal church structure in Colorado that is still used for weekly worship.
From the past to the present…
Calvary Church remains
Faithful to Jesus Christ
Faithful in holy worship
Faithful to the Word of God
Faithful stewards of all that God has given us
Faithful servants to one another and to the community
About the Stained Glass Windows...
Please click here to read Through Glass, Darkly:
The Stained Glass of Calvary Episcopal Church by Pat Killian.
About the stencils…
The ongoing interior work of the church constitutes an interpretive restoration of historic ecclesiastical ornament. The designs are drawn from the late 19th century English/American aesthetic movement.
The goal is to wed appropriate period ornament to the architectural elements of the church, thereby allowing the interior to attain an historical and architectural unity. The four painted figures behind the altar area Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene.
To tour the church…
When it is locked, inquire at the church office on Arapahoe street midway between 13th and 14th streets. | <urn:uuid:7cd9eef0-6ec6-4c37-878a-621c2a4a1d23> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.calvarygolden.net/history | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403823.74/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00153-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97165 | 1,518 | 3.125 | 3 |
IBM’s many innovations within the field of epidemiology have led to more successful disease prevention and better overall patient care. The company’s history of working to further understand infectious diseases stretches back to the 1950s, when IBM punched cards played a supporting role in testing American medical researcher Jonas Salk’s vaccine for polio.
At the time, polio—a highly infectious, incurable disease that invades the nervous system—was one of the most feared diseases in industrialized countries, paralyzing thousands of children each year. In the largest medical experiment in history, the Salk vaccine was tested on 1.8 million children throughout the US—generating 144 million data points, all captured on IBM punched cards. Salk’s vaccine proved to be a winner, and within two years of its development, annual polio cases in the US had shrunk from 35,000 in 1953, to 5600 in 1957.
Today, through its advances in predictive modeling, public health information exchange and supercomputing, IBM continues to help governments, researchers and public health organizations around the world prepare for—and respond to—disease outbreaks.
Open source disease modeling with STEM
Developed collaboratively by IBM’s Almaden, Haifa and Watson labs, the Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM) is an open source tool that has the capabilities to forecast and analyze the possible spread of infectious disease, such as bird flu, dengue fever, the H5N1 virus and others. It allows users to create spatial and temporal models of emerging infectious diseases, helping researchers and public health officials simulate the spread of disease across time and space, and allowing them to assess the likely impact of preventive measures. STEM can estimate, for example, how soon after the first case of a new influenza appears in San Francisco, California, it will peak in Mexico City, as well as data points such as the total number of potential disease outbreak cases.
STEM users can access the tool’s main components—the core representational framework, graphical user interface, simulation engine, disease model computations and various data sets—as separate plug-ins to build on existing models or create new ones. The data sets describe the geography, transportation systems and population for the world's 244 countries and dependent areas down to administrative level two—equivalent to the county level in the US— for most countries. Its compatibility with the standards-based interoperable healthcare infrastructure developed by IBM, Health Information Exchange (HIE), allows it to query clinics, hospitals, labs and other public health information sources for real-time data about the health of a population.
Shared clinical surveillance data with PHIAD
A scalable network that uses Health Information Exchange (HIE) technology and standards for the exchange of public health information, the Public Health Information Affinity Domain (PHIAD) enables clinics and labs to electronically share clinical surveillance data with public health officials for up-to-the-minute infectious disease outbreak detection. Developed by IBM researchers collaborating at the Almaden Research Center and Haifa Research Lab, PHIAD provides a web-based end-user application, and is coded to work across proprietary systems and geopolitical boundaries for truly borderless application.
Fueling collaborative disease detection in the Middle East
Development of PHIAD began in 2008 as a collaborative project with the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Middle East Consortium on Infectious Disease Surveillance (MECIDS), a program that facilitates collaboration between Israel, Jordan and Palestine to prevent and respond to infectious disease outbreaks. Using its standards-based public health information exchange network as the foundation, IBM worked with MECIDS to customize a solution that would allow consortium members to share information, statistics and anecdotes electronically and to analyze data collaboratively and in real time. The project, which depended on a high level of partner collaboration, overcame significant political tensions and illustrates how regional disease surveillance—and equal disease prevention tools for all—are possible even in areas where there is entrenched political discord.
Curbing H1N1 in Mexico
IBM and Mexico’s Ministry of Health worked jointly to develop new models of H1N1’s spread using STEM and PHIAD when swine flu cases in Mexico City reached pandemic proportions in 2009 and 2010. Mexican health officials and IBM researchers were able to determine the “reproductive rate” of the flu—the number of secondary cases each single infected case will cause in a population with no immunity—and the likely effect of health policy decisions. For example, STEM showed that the city’s social distancing measures, which included shuttering restaurants and schools at the height of the outbreak, cut the flu’s reproductive rate by 22 percent. The project was a milestone in the Mexican government’s efforts to improve public health through the sophisticated modeling that STEM offers. | <urn:uuid:f609cb67-e4b3-42ea-bc4e-ac0fe109bdc8> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/trackingdiseases/transform/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391634.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00092-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930137 | 987 | 3.421875 | 3 |
Best Places to Star Gaze
Our list of spots to view all the clusters, meteorites and constellations you can see with your bare eyes
Winter is always the best time of year for stargazing. Skies are generally dry and clear, and light pollution is toned down. A clear night without moonlight makes for ideal star gazing, so new moons and crescent moons are optimal for viewing the heavens.
Of course you can warm up some hot cocoa or brew up a pot of coffee and huddle in your backyard with your family, friends or roommates—but for a truly out-of-this-world experience, head out and high. Any mountain where you can get away from smog and ambient light or into some wide open spaces (the more wide open, the better—like, say, the desert or out in the middle of the ocean). And, in general, the higher the altitude, the better the view.
Here are some of the country’s greatest spots for seeing all the shooting stars, meteorites, clusters and sparkling brilliance the night sky has to offer.
Big Bend National Park
They don’t sing that song (“the stars at night/are big and bright/…deep in the heart of Texas,”) for nothing. On a clear night, at Big Bend National Park, you can see 2 million light years away and 2,000 stars will be visible to the naked eye. Located in southwest Texas, Big Bend (on the border of Mexico and the Rio Grande) is remote and infrequently cloudy.
Bryce Canyon National Park
“The Dark Rangers” may sound like a crew you’d find at a comic-book convention but, really, it’s Bryce Canyon’s own special force of park rangers and volunteer astronomers focused on preserving the sanctuary of natural darkness.
On a clear night, 7,500 stars are visible to the naked eye at this unique “cave without a ceiling,” as it’s sometimes fondly called. In fact, the Annual Astronomy Festival takes place in May, featuring an annular “ring” solar eclipse.
Cape Hatteras National Seashore
The Outer Banks, North Carolina
With over 70 miles of barrier islands in a rural area, the Outer Banks is one of the most ideal places on the east coast to become engulfed by the awesome night scene. The National Seashore even offers a summer evening program called “Night Lights” that not only explores the heavens but also the ocean’s stars: bioluminescent plankton that sparkles and “glows in the dark” along the shoreline.
Lewis and Clark National Forest
Great Falls, Montana
The Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, with the Central Montana Astronomy Society, hosts a monthly Star Party at its facility. They set up this stargazing experience with large telescopes and explanations of all celestial observations. The event occurs on Friday evenings closest to the new moon, subject to weather.
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park
Big Island, Hawaii
When you’re on any Hawaiian island, the thing to remember is that you’re really standing on a big rock way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean—they say there are more stars here than there are grains of sand. Weather can be iffy on the more lush islands, but an overnight trip to the Big Island’s often arid Hawaii Volcanoes National Park may be just the ticket for an optimal star gazing experience. Park rangers will give you a star chart to go by.
By Christina Scannapiego | <urn:uuid:1fd4c17a-c7e8-4028-a9e7-c96ec6201dfc> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.visittheusa.se/sv-se/usa/experiences/recreation-gov/14-best-places-to-star-gaze.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396147.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00047-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.898853 | 760 | 2.765625 | 3 |
Why kids ditch youth sports
Kids join youth sports programs in droves -- and drop out in droves. Twenty million to 30 million 6- to 18-year-olds participate in youth sports programs, but around 80 percent opt out by the age of 12.
Coaching and the "fun factor" contribute to this attrition rate, say Indiana University coaching experts. Kids join such programs largely to have fun -- and they drop out when it's no longer fun. Pressure and competition need to take a back seat to the development of fundamental skills and enjoyment.
"In this country, we often use a 'warm body approach' in youth sport coaching," said David Gallahue, dean of IU Bloomington's School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation and co-author of Understanding Motor Development: Infants, Children, Adolescents, Adults (McGraw Hill, 2006).
In other words schools and recreation programs in the U.S. frequently resort to taking what they can get, often turning to well intentioned but ill prepared parents with little or no coaching experience to work with young athletes. Countries such as Canada, Australia and Great Britain require youth coaches to have certain levels of certification. If no certified coaches are available, no teams are created.
Coaches and parents should take as much pressure off of the kids as possible, because undue pressure can drive young athletes away from the sport prematurely.
"Parents and coaches should not attempt to live out their own fantasies and shortcomings through their children," said track and field expert Phillip Henson, who helps coordinate the coaching minor degree program in HPER's Department of Kinesiology. "The primary purpose of youth sports is to have fun."
Gallahue, who has advised USA Gymnastics and U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association on coaching education, and Henson, who directed the field events at the 1996 Olympic Games, offered the following suggestions to parents and coaches:
- Parents should look for the narrowest age range possible, with two-year spans being preferable. Kids who are closer in age get along better. They have similar physical, social and cognitive development levels, although their skill levels could vary widely.
- Very few sports require athletes to specialize before the age of 10 to be really good. For sports such as gymnastics, figure skating, diving and alpine skiing, early specialization may be a plus. Just about everything else requires no such early specialization, Gallahue said.
- The primary focus in youth sports should be on developing skills, not just on competition. Children do not automatically acquire basic skills such as swimming, throwing, bouncing and balancing -- skills that can lead to more specific sport skills, such as throwing a baseball or dribbling a basketball, Gallahue said. They need the time and space to practice, as well as quality instruction and positive encouragement. The bulk of youth sports, even at the middle school and high school levels, should focus on developing skill and tactics, he said, with a growing proportion of the time devoted to actual competition. In the early years, for example, 80 to 90 percent of the practice time should be devoted to skill development, with this decreasing to 40 to 60 percent in the later years.
- Helping children find success is key to making youth sports fun. Parents and coaches should help kids set realistic goals -- such as achieving a personal best -- that do not hinge on winning or losing a match.
- Children should not be treated like miniature adults.
- Attempt to take as much pressure off of the children as possible. This includes pressure to win, or to "be the best." Value needs to be placed on the needs of the children not the performance.
- New coaches can find coaching resources at Human Kinetics (http://www.humankinetics.com/), a publisher of sports and physical activity media. | <urn:uuid:6d6e18e2-653b-41ac-ad54-16aecd03300b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://newsinfo.iu.edu/web/page/normal/3885.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397749.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00195-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96339 | 787 | 2.796875 | 3 |
Scientists have discovered a new feature on the "Pacman" nebula, a gaping mouth and a set of sharp-looking teeth.
The Pacman nebula, officially known as, NGC 281, earned its nickname due to its resemblance to the 1980's video game character, Pac-Man.
When NASA begun viewing the dust and gas clouds of the nebula through visible-light telescopes, scientists noted that "the large star-forming cloud appeared to be chomping its way through the cosmos," in the shape of Pac-Man; however, when viewed in infrared light, the nebula seems to have a "large set of lower teeth," NASA reported.
NASA discovered the alternate view of the Pacman nebula, before completing its mission at the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, a sky-mapping observatory, in Feb. 2011.
Nebulas serve as nurseries for premature stars. As per photos taken by WISE, the nebulas "teeth" seem to be pillar like areas where new stars are forming, scientists detailed.
According to astronomy website, Space.com the "teeth" were cause by radiation and wind from larger, more mature stars within the nebula that have blown gas and dust away.
The remaining material, still protecting younger stars have taken the form of these teeth-like pillars.
The cluster of young stars is called IC 1590 and can be seen in the center of the "mouth" of the Pacman nebula.
According to astronomy website, Astronomy.com, the red dots in the photo are the youngest stars still forming in cocoons of dust throughout the nebula.
The Pacman nebula is 130 light-years wide and is located 9,200 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. | <urn:uuid:0440426d-ac50-4150-8c1f-8b26e34b1f83> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.christianpost.com/news/pacman-nebula-grows-teeth-chomps-way-through-cosmos-photo-59721/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391519.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00100-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941988 | 374 | 3.5 | 4 |
Fri Feb 1, 2013, 02:19 PM
Redfairen (1,276 posts)
Endangered Species Act Protection Proposed for Wolverine
Source: eNews Park Forest
In accordance with a historic agreement with the Center for Biological Diversity, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today proposed Endangered Species Act protections for American wolverines in the contiguous United States. The fierce, solitary hunters once roamed a large swath of the mountainous West, from Colorado to the Sierra Nevada in California and north through Washington and Montana. Today they are limited to Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and a single animal in California. Their dependence on persistent spring snowpack for denning makes them severely threatened by climate change.
“The wolverine has a reputation for killing prey many times its size, but it’s no match for global climate change, which is shrinking spring snowpack across the West,” said Noah Greenwald, the Center’s endangered species director. “I’m glad wolverines are finally getting the protection they need to survive, but if we’re going to save the wolverine and countless other wildlife species, as well as the world we all depend on, we need to take immediate steps to substantially and quickly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.”
The Center has been working for protection of wolverines since 1995, including participating in litigation with allies to overturn a negative finding made by the Bush administration, resulting in it being placed on the candidate list. In 2011 the Center reached a settlement agreement requiring the Fish and Wildlife Service to make protection decisions for 757 species, including the wolverine, which was required to get a decision this fiscal year. A total of 54 species have received final protection under the agreement. The wolverine is the 64th species proposed for protection with final protection expected within 12-months.
“Our settlement agreement is moving protection forward for dozens of plants and animals that have been waiting for decades,” said Greenwald. “From the iconic wolverine to the unusual Ozark hellbender, some of America’s rarest and most unique creatures are benefitting from this agreement.”
Read more: http://www.enewspf.com/science/science-a-environmental/40046-endangered-species-act-protection-proposed-for-wolverine.html
7 replies, 2351 views
Always highlight: 10 newest replies | Replies posted after I mark a forum
Replies to this discussion thread
Endangered Species Act Protection Proposed for Wolverine (Original post)
|Wait Wut||Feb 2013||#2|
Response to Redfairen (Original post)
Fri Feb 1, 2013, 02:26 PM
Wait Wut (8,492 posts)
Please tell me I'm not the only one that thought of THE Wolverine before I read this?
Now that I've gotten that figured out, I had no idea they were endangered. Feisty little buggers, but fascinating. Glad to hear that someone is looking out for them. | <urn:uuid:57d7fc1d-9ff5-465c-b14d-6d9dd6a08e09> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014387575 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394987.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00071-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.910354 | 644 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Perhaps I went about it incorrectly...
Follow Math Help Forum on Facebook and Google+
So ab = 12. I figured this out by removing the exponents from both sides, knowing that the bases on both sides would become equal; seeing that this is math, magic isn't allowed.
So I ask, what are the intermediary steps between: that math allows?
Originally Posted by Hellbent So I ask, what are the intermediary steps between: that math allows? What you did is correct! Magic isn't allowed, but intuition is. We compare the bases: if ,
then , and . It's purely deductive. (It's the same way we compare the coefficients of polynomials).
Last edited by TheCoffeeMachine; December 30th 2010 at 02:11 PM.
Originally Posted by Hellbent Hi,
Perhaps I went about it incorrectly... Since and are positive integers,
which is a multiple of 432 and is also an integer.
Multiples of 432 are
We have a hit.
Last edited by Archie Meade; January 1st 2011 at 04:55 PM.
View Tag Cloud | <urn:uuid:50374aaf-0ca4-4b99-a452-4208a6df3779> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://mathhelpforum.com/algebra/167115-finding-value.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403825.35/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00024-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959604 | 233 | 3.03125 | 3 |
In December 1941, Adolf Hitler threw a Christmas Party for his fellow Nazis. It was a lavish affair, in which the Nazi Party's top officials, statesmen, and generals gathered before a massive Christmas tree to feast and exchange presents with hundreds of jackbooted S.S. cadets in attendance.
In surviving pictures taken by the Führer's own personal photographer, Hitler appears somewhat dour and maybe a little sad to be at this event, as if he feels out of place despite his importance, and no wonder: What holiday could be less suited to the sentiments of that genocidal, warmongering dictator than a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of a Jew?
Yet despite the expression on his face, Hitler sits in these pictures as a conqueror, not just of continental Europe, but also of Christmas—a holiday than in just six years, he managed to redesign into a potent propaganda tool.
It wasn't easy. Back during World War II, Germany's population was predominantly Christian. Then as now, Christmas was a popular holiday to celebrate among Germans; in fact, the modern-day Christmas tree actually traces its roots back to the Rhineland in the 16th century. Christmas was too important to Germans for the Nazis to get rid of, yet it represented everything that Hitler despised: the Christian ethic of peace on Earth. He couldn't get rid of it, but he could try to make it his own.
A propaganda article from 1937 entitled New Meanings For "Inherited Customs" shows the considerable mental aerobics that the Nazis had to go through to turn Christmas into a holiday they could broadly support. Christmas is traditionally viewed as a "holiday about a theoretical peace for all humanity,"—an interpretation should be rejected, the article said. (It is hard, after all, to wish peace to all men when you are simultaneously drafting up plans to shove millions of them into gas chambers.) Realizing this, the article's author said that Germans should instead present Christmas as a "holiday of actual domestic national peace," a peace which could presumably only be facilitated by getting rid of enemies of the state such as Jews, gypsies, communists, and homosexuals.
Hitler's propaganda war on Christmas by no means ended there. He also set out to get the "Christ" out of Christmas. Unlike in English, Christmas is called Weihnachten in German, so the actual name of the holiday did not require modification to suit the goals of an anti-clerical Führer. Even so, the Nazis preferred a different name for Christmas: Rauhnacht, the Rough Night, which had a tantalizing hint of violence to it.
But many of the trappings of Christmas are inherently religious, right down to the purported event being celebrated: the birth of Jesus Christ. Luckily for Hitler, Germans had celebrated the winter solstice long before Christianity came to the country. It was fairly easy for Nazi propagandists, therefore, to reclaim Weihnachten as a pagan holiday in which the longest days of winter were marked by gift-giving and a festival of lights.
Songs that mentioned Jesus, like Silent Night, were rewritten with new lyrics espousing the benefits of National Socialism by none other than chief Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler, one of the masterminds of the Holocaust. At the height of Nazi Christmas revisionism, any mentions of the Savior were replaced with mentions of the "Savior Führer."
Jesus had been taken care of, but Santa Claus was not so easily forgotten. Tracing his roots to St. Nicholas of Myra, a fourth-century Greek Christian bishop from Turkey, Santa was both explicitly Christian and very definitely not Aryan. Even so, Santa was so beloved that not even the Nazis felt that they could wage a war against him. Instead, they changed his name. Nazis argued that the white-robed and gray-bearded figure who came to people's houses and gave them gifts on Christmas Day was really the pagan god Odin. Christians had merely stolen him, but now he had been reclaimed.
Other aspects of Christmas had to change, too. Although the modern Christmas tree is an explicitly German invention, the star that is traditionally placed on the top represented a problem for Nazis: either it is a six-pointed star, and becomes the Star of David, or it's a five-pointed star, and resembles the red star of Communism. Ideologically, neither would do. Instead, the Nazis encouraged revelers to place a swastika, a German sun wheel, or a sig rune (the lightning-shaped symbol used in the emblem of the SS) atop their trees instead.
Christmas tree decorations also changed. In general, ornaments became a lot more warlike, and it was not uncommon to hang replica grenades and machine guns on your Christmas tree during the Nazi years. But they also became increasingly jingoistic. Surviving ornaments from the Nazi era include silver balls emblazoned with mottos such as "Sieg heil!" red bulbs covered in swastikas, and tchotchkes shaped like Iron Crosses and eagles. There are even ornaments that are just tiny metal Hitler heads (complete with mustache). To his credit, though, even Hitler didn't like these, leading to laws to prevent Nazi symbols from being misused for Christmas kitsch.
By 1939, just six years after Hitler came to power, Christmas had been totally transformed into a tool of Nazi propaganda. A contemporary article asserts that "when we celebrate a German Christmas, we include in the circle of the family all those who are of German blood, and who affirm their German ethnicity, all those who came before us and who will come after us, all those whom fate did not allow to live within the borders of our Reich, or who are doing their duty in foreign lands amidst foreign peoples."
"We cannot accept that a German Christmas tree has anything to do with a crib in a manger in Bethlehem," wrote the Nazi propagandist Friedrich Rehm in 1937. He added, "It is inconceivable for us that Christmas and all its deep soulful content is the product of an oriental religion."
Yet Hitler's redesign of Christmas didn't last long. As the Allies advanced, by 1944, worrying about the Christian influences on Christmas was the least of the Nazis' problems, and the holiday was rebranded as a day of remembrance for those who had been lost in the war.
1944 was also the year of last Nazi Christmas. Just four months later, the Führer was dead, and while a few of Himmler's hymns were briefly sung in post-war Germany, the survivors of the war did with Hitler's Christmas what they did with every other idea the Nazis had come up with: denounced it and buried it.
Perhaps that's what explains the strange, sad expression on Hitler's face, sitting there at a table with all his thugs on Christmas, 1941. Maybe he has seen the ghost of Christmas future. | <urn:uuid:278b10e8-34be-4c54-8978-b297d20e418a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.fastcodesign.com/3024022/how-hitler-redesigned-christmas | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395548.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00059-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975148 | 1,447 | 3.15625 | 3 |
New target to prevent drug-induced liver damage identifiedPublished On: Thu, Sep 8th, 2011 | Biochemistry | By BioNews
US scientists have identified a key protein that could protect against drug-induced liver disease and acute liver failure.
Acetaminophen, more commonly known as Tylenol, helps relieve pain and reduce fever. The over-the-counter drug is a major ingredient in many cold and flu remedies as well as prescription painkillers like Percocet and Vicodin.
Doctors at the Keck School of Medicine of USC have identified a protein ‘Sab’ on the mitochondria of liver cells in mice that, when silenced, protects against liver toxicity usually associated with excess doses of acetaminophen.
Researchers have long believed that acetaminophen was converted into toxic metabolites that, in excess, overwhelm liver cells, causing them to die.
In the current study, the scientists silenced Sab in mice, which did not affect the metabolism of acetaminophen but successfully prevented liver injury.
They also tested the effect on liver injury caused by apoptosis — silencing Sab protected the liver in that case, too.
The study has been published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. | <urn:uuid:512bb23f-cd80-40b6-bbba-d58fd766274f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://news.bioscholar.com/2011/09/new-target-to-prevent-drug-induced-liver-damage-identified.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402479.21/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00120-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949681 | 248 | 3.046875 | 3 |
|Scientific Name:||Romulea multisulcata|
|Species Authority:||M.P.de Vos|
|Red List Category & Criteria:||Vulnerable B1ab(iii)+2ab(iii) ver 3.1|
|Assessor(s):||Raimondo, D. & Helme, N.|
|Reviewer(s):||Smith, K. & Matlamela, P.|
The species is restricted to seven localities in the Bokkeveld Mountains, Gifberg flats and Namaqualand at Hondeklip Bay in South Africa. Its extent of occurrence is 7,500 km2 and it has an area of occupancy of less than 10 km2 (small vernal pools). The vernal pool habitat of this species is being degraded by trampling and grazing by stock animals and agriculture. It is listed as Vulnerable.
|Range Description:||This species is endemic to South Africa (Northern and Western Cape Provinces) (Cook 2004). Bokkeveld Mountains, Gifberg flats and Namaqualand at Hondeklip Bay. Found only in seasonal pools which are dry in summer, on plateau of the Bokkeveld Mountains east of Vanrhynsdorp. Described from seasonal pools on the Bokkeveld Mountains near Nieuwoudtville in the Northern Cape Province but known also from the foot of the nearby Gifberg-Matsikamma massif, in the Western Cape, and from the coastal flats near Hondeklip Bay in central Namaqualand (Manning and Goldblatt 2001).
At the time of revision this geophyte was only known from the Bokkeveld escarpment east of Vanrhynsdorp. It has, however, since been collected near Hondeklip Bay in the Namaqualand rocky hills.
Known localities (South African National Biodiversity Institute 2007):
1) Van Rhynsdorp, road to Gifberg, in pool. (Manning 2002) / Van Rhynsdorp in seasonal pool (Helme 1997). Less than 60 plants.
2) Van Rhynsdorp just S.E. of Mauwerskop (Oliver 1974)
3) Van Rhynsdorp in flat clay pool, Randkraal towards national road (Snijman 1986)
4) Calvinia, Nieuwoudtville in vlei (Glen 1994)
5) Calvinia, between Van Rhyns Pass and Nieuwoudtville (De Vos 1968)
6) Between Menzieskraal and Nieuwoudtville (Markötter 1933)
From Manning and Goldblatt 2001:
7) 15 km E of Hondeklipbaai (Le Roux 1980)
|Estimated area of occupancy (AOO) - km2:||<10(habisvernalpoolseach<2ha)|
|Lower elevation limit (metres):||50|
|Upper elevation limit (metres):||200|
|Range Map:||Click here to open the map viewer and explore range.|
|Population:||Specific to vernal pools. Seeds are not adapted for long distance dispersal as they drop into the water. Many vernal pools do not have this species occurring in them indicating that dispersal is limited.
Estimated total population size: >10,000;
Estimated number of locations: seven;
Estimated number of subpopulations: seven known but a few more likely;
Overall populations decline (past): no;
Overall population decline (current): no
Estimated current localities:
|Current Population Trend:||Stable|
|Habitat and Ecology:||Vernal pools. Grows in seasonal pools which are dry in the summer months. The surrounding vegetation is either Namaqualand Broken Veld or Dry Mountain Fynbos or Western Mountain Karoo Veld.|
Habitat being degraded due to heavy grazing and trampling of plants floating in shallow pools, observed by Helme at Vanrhysdorp subpopulation and by Raimondo at some Nieuwoudtville subpopulations. Agriculture is also posing a low to moderate level threat as some farmers plough up these seasonal pools. This has occurred in Nieudoutville in 2005, but it is not general practice as crops do not grow well in seasonally inundated areas (D. Raimondo pers. comm. 2006). P.Goldblatt and J.Manning (pers. comm. 2005) also state that mining is a potential threat.
The specialized habitat requirements of this species may result in it becoming more threatened.
|Conservation Actions:||Habitat and site management and protection is required as well as restoration of sites for increasing species suitable habitat. Population trends should also be monitored . Finally, legal protection measures for this species and its habitat should be put in place.|
|Citation:||Raimondo, D. & Helme, N. 2010. Romulea multisulcata. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2010: e.T185211A8367625. . Downloaded on 28 June 2016.|
|Feedback:||If you see any errors or have any questions or suggestions on what is shown on this page, please provide us with feedback so that we can correct or extend the information provided| | <urn:uuid:f8af1909-a516-4cd1-8aaa-0f0ede11a3c9> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/185211/0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396459.32/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00169-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.822824 | 1,154 | 2.625 | 3 |
Los Angeles, California - A team of materials scientists at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science is exploring ways to create tough ceramics, a long sought-after class of materials that would be exceptionally hard, capable of withstanding extremely high temperatures and less prone to corrosion than metals, but still have the ability to become dented or deformed without fracturing - a property called ductility. In other words, a ceramic that bends but doesn’t break.
The researchers focused on compounds called transition-metal carbides whose atoms are held together by three types of chemical bonds - ionic, covalent and metallic. The combination of the three bonds, researchers believe, is what makes these materials tough. To validate that hypothesis, the team performed compression tests on single crystals of two transition-metal carbides, zirconium carbide and tantalum carbide, inside a transmission electron microscope.
They observed that the crystals deformed - that is, they changed shape without cracking - at room temperature. This showed that the crystals’ size and orientation play an important role in the materials’ mechanical behavior.
"Ultra–high-temperature ceramics are highly desirable in aerospace and other industries where durable structural components are required to maintain their strength and stability at elevated temperatures,” said Suneel Kodambaka, associate professor of materials science and engineering. “Transition-metal carbides are attractive for these applications because they are very hard and do not melt until they reach very high temperatures.”
Materials scientists use the term “hardness” as a measure of a material’s resistance to mechanical pressure, and the property can be measured in units called Pascals. The hardness of transition-metal carbides exceeds 20 gigapascals; in comparison, steel measures about 1 to 2 gigapascals. And transition-metal carbides melt at temperatures above 6,300 degrees Fahrenheit; steels generally melt at around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Despite these favorable qualities, these ceramics are more brittle compared to steels at room temperature,” Kodambaka said. “Our studies showed how their crystals slip, an atomic-scale process that controls malleability, at room temperature. These results could help engineer the microstructures of ceramic components to tailor their mechanical properties.”
Today, high-strength metallic alloys are generally preferred to ceramics in machinery like aircraft engines and turbines and in and structural applications like nuclear power plants. Using ductile ceramics would significantly boost the components’ performance and durability. The researchers also suggest that the new ceramics hold promise for use in miniature mechanical components, for example in micro- and nano-electromechanical systems, and flexible-yet-strong and radiation-resistant foils for use in solar sails, which are used to propel spacecraft.
According to the study, ductile ceramics could be developed based on transition-metal carbides and possibly transition-metal nitrides, which have similar structures. Additional research is needed to understand the atomic-scale mechanisms that affect plasticity in these materials.
The research was published as an invited feature article in the Journal of the American Ceramics Society. The paper’s lead author was Sara Kiani, who received her doctorate at UCLA while studying with Jenn-Ming Yang, professor of materials science and engineering, and UCLA Engineering’s associate dean of international initiatives and online programs.
The research was funded by the Aerospace Materials for Extreme Environments Division, part of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. | <urn:uuid:77c6b465-dddd-418a-8b97-8f26c68fbf54> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.imperialvalleynews.com/index.php/news/california-news/4590-governor-brown-announces-appointments-6-18.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393332.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00165-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931627 | 743 | 3.734375 | 4 |
Relying solely on process in the manufacturing of the ideas that are core to the practice of software development is not enough.
When it comes to getting people smarter, there is a fundamental misconception in play in the corporate world.
Understanding the messages we accept regarding technical proficiency plays an important role in the making of great software.
It's not about lines of code. It's about a code of conduct that encourages contributions to the community.
Getting an idea from conception to implementation can be a disheartening experience in any company.
One of the hardest things to do in life is to express your ideas to another person. While good communication skills are a 'nice to have' for most human interaction, when it comes to making software, they're crucial.
How to use Critical Conversation Cards to review and improve an idea under consideration with the help of a moderator.
Using Critical Conversation Cards can be a step toward bringing predictability and efficiency to design and review sessions. | <urn:uuid:e6f669fb-dac2-416b-ba6c-8f4fd0903e07> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.devx.com/author/Bob-Reselman-91220.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396100.16/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00030-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.901483 | 196 | 2.578125 | 3 |
An article in “Albany Kid” by Tara Bloyd, Edna Kearns’ great granddaughter, is spreading the word to a younger audience about the exhibition of the suffrage campaign wagon used by Edna Buckman Kearns currently underway at the NYS capitol in Albany, NY.
A Brooklyn wagon company donated the wagon to the state woman’s suffrage movement in 1913. Considerable information about the wagon and its use for grassroots activism during the suffrage movement has been presented on Suffrage Wagon News Channel over the past two years.
The article in “Albany Kid” highlights the exhibit underway at the state capitol honoring New York State’s extraordinary women as represented in many arenas, including suffrage. The exhibit’s in the Hall of Governors in the state capitol and is part of an ambitious program by NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo to make more public space available for educational and historical exhibits. The exhibit runs through April and possibly into May. | <urn:uuid:9b8057b8-6e78-4c34-8381-92cac6b62413> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://suffragewagon.wordpress.com/2012/03/28/grandmother-edna-kearns-suffrage-wagon-on-exhibit-in-albany-ny/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=18b5244a97 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398516.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00068-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9605 | 207 | 2.890625 | 3 |
A recent Gizmodo article indicates a scientist named Ron Fouchier genetically engineered an airborne-communicable version of the avian flu virus (H5N1). It seems the reason an avian flu pandemic hasn't already hit is because the virus is communicated physically. You have to be in the general area of the virus and touch something infected. This makes it much more difficult to spread. This is fortunate, because according to the article, the fatality rate of the avian flu is about 50%.
Dr. Fouchier has altered the avian flu virus, making it communicable via aerosolized methods, like a sneeze, a cough, or more chillingly, suspension in a gas. The truth is something like this escaping into the wild isn't that complex; all you would have to do is infect a handful of willing martyrs and send them out into the population hopping the globe until they collapsed. By the end of their journey, the pandemic would be in full effect, reaching the furthest corners of the globe. Of the remaining 50% who survive, we can assume that a significant number of those people would be recovering from the illness as well. It is a grim picture. If the flu itself was 50% fatal, you could expect greater than 50% total fatalities among humans from incidental deaths. I wouldn't be surprised if less than 25% of humanity remained alive after such a pandemic; this is very similar to the scenario outlined in Stephen King's The Stand.
Dr. Fouchier wants to have an open discussion with the scientific community to share his discovery so we can be better prepared to handle the inevitable global pandemic that will occur. This is causing a fair amount of concern among the scientific community; in fact, the discussion reminds me of the debate between open source and closed source philosophies. This shouldn't be much of a surprise considering we're dealing with virtually the same thing in either case: intellectual property and software coding. The only difference is that this software is wet, non-digital, and it has a 50% chance of killing you if it ever escapes.
It is easy for IT professionals to have academic arguments when the thing that is on the line is the security of an OS platform. I think most of us understand that security implications of having insecure code in critical installations could be as devastating to a society as the H5N1 virus, but the visual lacks the vivid imagery of Stephen King's Captain Trips spreading rapidly across the globe leaving a pile of 3.5 billion corpses behind it. Unpatched code leads to Russian hackers destroying a pump in a city water works (or maybe not). It is easy to visually extrapolate what a genetically engineered flu with a 50% kill rate results in, but it is harder to get your mind around the significance of foreign hackers being able to damage and disrupt municipal water supplies.
I'm not surprised that Dr. Fouchier feels compelled to release his information into the scientific community, and I have no doubt that he is doing so out of the most noble of motivations: a genuine desire to assist and help society to prepare for and overcome such an event. I'm even willing to bet that the systems on which Dr. Fouchier engineered his super-flu were probably running on the Temple of the Penguin. You don't do research like this on Windows, right?
So let's be honest about this: We're talking about releasing the code that describes how to make an avian super flu that can be distributed through aerosolized methods and has a predicted 50% global fatality rate in a FOSS-type scenario so that the many-eyes method can prepare to respond to such an illness. This is really where the boots hit the pavement for seeing how far an individual supports the idea of the many-eyes model. If Dr. Fouchier and the group of scientists who support his direction are right, then disclosure of this information may save billions of lives. If they're wrong, it is possible that 1 out of ever 2 members of TechRepublic may no longer be around to argue the merits of open source vs. closed source in the not too distant future. If there is any justice, I'll be among the fatalities, and the FOSS advocates will be left to weep in the ruins knowing I was right all along. I want the epitaph, "I told you FOSS sucked" on the memorial marker erected near the mass grave where I'll be buried.
If this information is released into the public domain, some fringe group of fanatics will try to create it and release it into the wild in a James Bond plot to destroy society as we know it. It doesn't necessarily have to be Islamic fundamentalists, either. I'd be as afraid of fringe Greens (i.e., ecologists and earth scientists) who would like to reset society to a manageable "hunter/gatherer" population living in harmony with natural ecosystems. There are people in the green movement who think a radical and rapid 50% decline in the earth's population might not be such a bad thing. The idea of PETA, ELF, or Greenpeace getting a hold of this information isn't very comforting, either. The sad truth is that while there aren't any real superheroes in life, there are real super-villains.
Moving forward with this starts a race between those trying to develop a vaccine, and those who would like to spread such a virus throughout society, and it seems to me that all the work has already been done on making the illness easily weaponized and distributed. The lunacy of moving forward with this plan seems to illustrate the faults of open-source security. You know the disease will break out and be spread intentionally once the recipe is released. The response is to get as many people working on the cure as quickly as possible so that we can minimize the impact once the disease is in the wild, hoping to mitigate the damage and minimize collateral damage from the disclosure.
So, am I right? Is there really no difference in this and the FOSS many-eyes model of security, or is there some critical difference I'm missing here? If you're an advocate of the FOSS model, do you support Dr. Fouchier's desire to release this information for peer review among the scientific community, or do you feel that it is brash, grossly irresponsible, and far more likely to disrupt the progress of society than the Large Hadron Collider? The odds are 50/50 that you'll survive if this disease gets out and I'm right. Are you willing to stand behind a FOSS-style disclosure facing those kinds of odds? Let us hear your opinion in the forum.Also read:
- Debate Persists on Deadly Flu Made Airborne (The New York Times)
- U.S. Says Details Of Flu Experiments Should Stay Secret (NPR)
- When it comes to bird flu, nature is the greatest bioterrorist (The Guardian)
Donovan Colbert has over 16 years of experience in the IT Industry. He's worked in help-desk, enterprise software support, systems administration and engineering, IT management, and is a regular contributor for TechRepublic. Currently, his professional role is as a Linux support engineer for a fast-growing Linux/FOSS consultancy group. You can follow him @dcolbert on Twitter or his personal blog, located at http://donovancolbert.blogspot.com. | <urn:uuid:c7f6b0bc-6351-4f26-aac2-f74fc3c7e789> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/geekend/foss-is-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393332.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00003-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961756 | 1,519 | 2.75 | 3 |
Results of IELTS
How Can You See Your IELTS Results
The IELTS (International English Language Testing System) is a standardized test that is designed to evaluate a test taker's ability and proficiency in the English language. People who aspire to live, study, work or migrate to an English speaking country are required to take this test and prove competencies in English through the achievement of the required score. The test has four parts of Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening. Each and every part of the test plays a crucial role towards your results. You should ensure thorough preparedness in all parts of the test if you wish to achieve a high score. Each test taker receives one copy of the results which he should keep safe and secure. All necessary information about the result is available on the official website at http://www.ielts.org/test_takers_information/getting_my_results.aspx. You will find explanations below that will help you understand how you can see your result and what information it would convey.
- Allottment of Scores
- The Information Your Score Report Delivers
- Receiving the Score Report at Your Address
Each of the four parts of Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening are allotted points on score band of 1-9 points. Each of these scores will then contribute to your points on the overall score band. The overall score band also ranges between 1-9 points. Points reported on the score report as whole bands or half bands. This means that your result could report either a whole number or a decimal number. For instance you could have a whole band score of 7.0 or you could achieve a half band score of 7.5. More information about score bands and the hierarchy of competency they symbolize is available at http://www.ielts.org/test_takers_information/getting_my_results/my_test_score.aspx.
There are fours parts of information delivered to you on your score report. The first part gives you your individual score for each of the four parts of the test. The second part of information tells you your overall score which is a combination of all the individual scores you achieved on the test. The third piece of information is if you have completed the test you appeared for and the fourth part displays your photograph along with your first language, nationality and date of birth. To read more about the same visit http://www.ielts.org/test_takers_information/getting_my_results/getting_my_results.aspx.
The test's results are sent to students' addresses through post thirteen days after they have taken the test. A student should ensure that he stores his test results with caution as you can not obtain a duplicate copy. You can have your scores automatically sent to five universities for free. Additional copies of your scores would cost a nominal administration fee. To read more information about receiving your results visit http://www.ielts.org/test_takers_information/getting_my_results/getting_my_results.aspx. Be sure to read about the score bands and what each of them stands for. They are a direct representation of a test taker's performance on the test. Reading about them will help you interpret the information that is provided to you.
You should note that your test scores are valid for up to two years. Some universities may ask you to re-take the test. Test results have in-built measures that prevent anybody from making a duplicate or fake copy. Institutions also have access to an online database which allows them to cross-check the authenticity of a student's IELTS result. Many students choose to re-sit the test. Information about re-sitting the test is available at http://www.ielts.org/test_takers_information/getting_my_results/resitting_the_test.aspx. It gives you tips and guidelines that you should consider before you book another test date. | <urn:uuid:76ac61e2-a8d4-4fdd-8dce-5a9dd98cb4aa> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.testpreppractice.net/IELTS/ielts-results.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391766.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00121-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923621 | 823 | 3 | 3 |
Polydimethylsiloxane, sounds tasty doesn’t it? Domino’s Pizza, McDonald’s, and Wendy’s certainly seem to think so. The chemical has been stirring up some controversy recently due to its appearance in fast-food menu items. It belongs to a group of polymeric compounds commonly referred to as silicones, and applications of the chemical range from contact lenses and medical devices to shampoo and conditioners (making the hair shiny and slippery), caulking, heat resistant tiles, polishes, cosmetics, silly putty, and plenty more.
The FDA approved chemical is classified as “non-toxic” even though it is non-biodegradable and its commercial use in breast implants has decreased due to “safety concerns.” Under section 176.200, polydimethylsiloxane is listed as a defoaming agent which is an acceptable additive to food:
|Sec. 176.200 Defoaming agents used in coatings.|
|The defoaming agents described in this section may be safely used as components of articles intended for use in producing, manufacturing, packing, processing, preparing, treating, packaging, transporting, or holding food, subject to the provisions of this section.(a) The defoaming agents are prepared as mixtures of substances described in paragraph (d) of this section.(b) The quantity of any substance employed in the formulation of defoaming agents does not exceed the amount reasonably required to accomplish the intended physical or technical effect in the defoaming agents or any limitation further provided.(c) Any substance employed in the production of defoaming agents and which is the subject of a regulation in parts 174, 175, 176, 177, 178 and 179.45 of this chapter conforms with any specification in such regulation.
(d) Substances employed in the formulation of defoaming agents include:
(1) Substances generally recognized as safe in food.
(2) Substances subject to prior sanction or approval for
Surprisingly, the FDA also approved formaldehyde as a preservative for anti-foaming agents. Formaldehyde is recognized as a carcinogen by the CDC.
Domino’s Pizza lists the ingredient in their breadsticks, cheese bread, as well as in their “garlic butter oil,” commonly used on most of their pizzas. McDonald’s lists polydimethylsiloxane as an additive in their cooking oils, meaning that their infamous McNuggets and french fries are saturated in the chemical. Wendy’s also uses the ingredient in their cooking oils. The FDA states that anti-foaming agents are “generally recognized as safe in food,” but the term “generally” is an elusive one at best. The question begs, why is the FDA approving food additives such as polydimethylsiloxane and formaldehyde when the substances frequently find industrial uses?
Material Data Safety sheets state that polydimethylsiloxane (or dimethicone for short) degrades to formaldehyde under higher temperatures, a concern due to the chemical’s use in fast-food cooking oils. Another MSDS revealed dangers associated with fires/explosions and polydimethylsiloxane, which can generate formaldehyde as a by-product of oxidative thermal decomposition at temperatures greater than 150 degrees C.
In 2006, The Milkweed released a report in their monthly magazine which singled out Leprino Foods, the main manufacturer and supplier of cheese for Pizza Hut, as using polydimethylsiloxane as an anti-foaming agent for their cheese. Leprino sent a letter in response stating that they received the patent for using the chemical but that “many practices are often claimed in patents, but are not utilized commercially.”
The use of polydimethylsiloxane provides yet another example of a “trusted” governing body letting the public down by the unethical regulation of our food. As time goes on I trust we will see more of the corruption behind the FDA being exposed. In the meantime, do yourself a favor and avoid the aforementioned fast food choices. It is clear there is a war being enacted on our health, and ultimately the only person who can save you is you.
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||December 3, 2001
GSA Release No. 01-62
BOULDER, Colo. Highlights from the Geological Society of America's November issue of GEOLOGY include a new "curveball" of evidence to the Snowball Earth hypothesis, findings about magma coming from the Earth's mantle in the Arctic Gakkel Ridge eruption, details about the discovery of Canada's oldest shelly fossils, decreased solar forcing as a trigger for a cooling event during the early Holocene, vertebrate extinctions during the Permian-Triassic as found in South Africa's Karoo Basin, and nutrient-triggered bio-erosion in the Palliser Formation of western Canada. Summaries of these articles and others, as well as a summary of the science article from the December issue of GSA TODAY, are provided below. Please discuss articles of interest with the authors before publishing stories on their work, and please make reference to GEOLOGY or GSA TODAY in stories published. Contact
Ann Cairns for copies of articles
and for additional information or assistance.
- Carbon isotopic composition of Neoproterozoic glacial carbonates as a test of paleoceanographic models for Snowball Earth phenomena
Martin J. Kennedy et al. Department of Earth Science, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0423, USA. Pages 1135-1138.
- The Snowball Earth hypothesis of P.F. Hoffman and colleagues proposes that during times of especially widespread glaciation ca. 600-750 Ma, the surface ocean became completely covered with ice, resulting in the mass extinction of marine life. The prospect that such events occurred more than once is intriguing for its implications about Earth's climate system and the possibility that snowball conditions acted as evolutionary bottlenecks, preventing the appearance of complex organisms. The authors test this idea by measuring the ratio of the carbon isotopes 13C and 12C within carbonate sediments that precipitated during ice ages in the supposedly ice-covered ocean. This ratio preserves a record of the ocean's organic productivity. According to the snowball Earth hypothesis, during times of exceedingly low productivity, the isotopic ratio ought to have approached mantle values of ~-5 to -6 per mil. The new data, obtained from multiple locations on three continents and for two different ice ages, show that the isotopic ratio is actually enriched with respect to 13C, dropping off sharply to negative values only after the end of each glacial event. These data challenge the core of Hoffman et al.'s hypothesis, and call for a different explanation for observed carbon isotopic trends. One possibility is that the post-glacial values reflect the widespread destabilization of methane hydrates, as proposed earlier this year by the authors.
- Seismic character of volcanic activity at the ultraslow-spreading Gakkel Ridge
Maya Tolstoy et al. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, NY 10964-8000. Pages 1139-1142.
- Beginning in January 1999, an ~7 month period of intense seismic activity was observed on the ultraslow-spreading Gakkel Ridge in the Arctic ocean, with earthquake magnitudes as high as 5.4 and a total of 252 events recorded on global seismic networks. Analysis of these data, and sonar images from the U.S.S. Hawkbill suggest that the seismicity was associated with a seafloor eruption. This marks the first time an eruption has been observed at an ultraslow-spreading ridge. The event was unprecedented in duration and magnitude for a mid-ocean ridge eruption and indicates a negative power-law relationship between these parameters and spreading rate. The triggering of large events on the bounding-wall faults suggests that magma for this eruption may have been tapped directly from the mantle.
- High-resolution analyses of an early Holocene climate event may imply decreased solar forcing as an important climate trigger
Svante Björck et al. Lunds Universitet, Department of Quaternary Geology, Lund University, SE-223 63 Lund, Sweden. Pages 1107-1110.
- Early Holocene lacustrine, tree-ring, ice-core, and marine records reveal that the Northern Hemisphere underwent a short cooling event ca. 10 k.y. The event coincides with a distinct Holocene thermohaline disturbance recognized in the North Atlantic Ocean. The authors found that the onset of the cooling coincides with an exceptionally distinct rise in Be-10 flux. This rise was most likely caused by markedly decreased solar forcing; the resultant question is: can such cooling be triggered by solar wind variations and changes in UV-radiation?
- Namacalathus-Cloudina assemblage in Neoproterozoic Miette Group (Byng Formation), British Columbia-Canada's oldest shelly fossils
Hans J. Hofmann Redpath Museum and Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Eric W. Mountjoy, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 2A7, Canada. Pages 1091-1094.
- Animals with shells first appeared ~550 Ma, before the Cambrian Period. They are represented by thin, tubular and globular fossils millimeters to centimeters in size, which were originally described from Namibia. The newly found occurrence in western Canada extends their known range halfway around the globe; it also provides additional insight into the diversity of life at a time prior to the explosive evolution in the Cambrian, and assists in the correlation of rock sequences between distant areas. The Canadian fossils are preserved in shallow-water, stromatolitic limestone that was left relatively unaltered.
- Anatomy and origin of carbonate structures in a Miocene cold-seep field
Ivano W. Aiello et al. Departments of Ocean Sciences and Earth Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, California, 95064, USA. Pages 1111-1114.
- Structures that occur in 8 Ma sedimentary rocks (Miocene age) in Santa Cruz, California, are identical to structures that are formed on the present seafloor at sites where natural gas flows from sediments into the overlying ocean water. In recent years, submarine gas seepage has been recognized as a widespread phenomenon that may affect the chemistry of ocean water. The California structures are among the most completely exposed fossil seep sites known, and they provide unusually clear insights into the manner in which gases and fluids flow from sediments on the seafloor into the ocean.
- Bunger Hills, East Antarctica: Ice free at the Last Glacial Maximum
Damian B. Gore et al. Department of Physical Geography, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, 2109, Australia. Pages 1103-1106.
- Bunger Hills, located on the coast of East Antarctica, was previously thought to have been covered by more than a half mile of ice during the Last Glacial Maximum 20 ka, a time when ice sheets covered much of Canada and the northernmost United States. However, new research using a technique known as Optically Stimulated Luminescence, which can date when quartz grains are buried and shielded from sunlight, has revealed that instead of being covered by a half mile of ice, the 100-square-mile Bunger Hills were much as they are today. This finding is at odds with the current understanding of Antarctic ice sheet characteristics during the Last Glacial Maximum, and forces a reconsideration of where the ice was distributed at that time.
- Cosmogenic 3He and 10Be chronologies of the late Pinedale northern Yellowstone ice cap, Montana, USA
Joseph Licciardi et al. Department of Geosciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331, USA. Pages 1095-1098.
- New results suggest that the age of the last major advance of the northern Yellowstone ice cap occurred 16.5 k.y., or several thousand years earlier than previously considered. The ice cap then underwent rapid deglaciation so that by ca. 14 ka, it had largely disappeared.
- Nutrient-triggered bioerosion on a giant carbonate platform masking the postextinction Famennian benthic community
Arndt Peterhänsel and Brian R. Pratt, Department of Geological Sciences, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7N 5E2, Canada. Pages 1079-1082.
- The 365-million-year-old Palliser Formation of western Canada constitutes one of the largest carbonate platforms (150,000 cubic kilometers of limestone) to have ever developed on Earth. The authors' study revealed that a large part of the limestone particles have been destroyed by bioeroding microorganisms, thereby concealing the true diversity and abundance of skeleton-secreting sedentary fauna in this postextinction community. Profound changes in the biosphere at this time, such as increased soil formation accompanying the spread of deep-rooting seed plants, may have resulted in a disturbance of the ecological balance in inland seas. Analogous to modern tropical environments, enhanced nutrient mobilization and riverine nutrient flux originating from areas colonized by land plants in the north of the continent (today's Canadian Arctic) may have caused the proliferation of bioeroders on the Devonian western Canadian shelf. The dominant bioclasts identifiable after the alteration process are sea lily fragments (crinoids), and it is likely that the broad Palliser platform was characterized by meadows of these filter feeders. The authors conclude that the effects of these destructive processes are often overlooked, and poorly fossiliferous, fine-grained limestones may hide a more prolific and diverse community than is initially apparent. In addition, the degree of particle obliteration by bioerosion may serve as a proxy for nutrient availability in shallow carbonate environments.
- Evidence of organic structures in Ediacara-type fossils and associated microbial mats
Michael Steiner, Technische Universität Berlin, 13355 Berlin, Germany, and Joachim Reitner, Georg-August-Universität, Institut und Museum für Geologie und Paläontologie, Goldschmidtstrasse 3, 37077 Göttingen, Germany. Pages 1119-1122.
- The authors investigated organic remains from late Precambrian Ediacara fossils. The remains of colonies of bacteria, some of which may have been sulfur-oxidizing and /or myxobacterial, show that they formed biofilms in close relationship with larger, possibly metazoan organisms. The main portions of the biofilms are preserved as pyrite formed by sulfate reduction and have a wrinkle structure called "elephant skin." In addition to the Ediacara biofilms, other larger prokaryotic structures were described and interpreted.
- Rooted Brooks Range ophiolite: Implications for Cordilleran terranes
Richard W. Saltus et al. U.S. Geological Survey, Denver, Colorado 80225, USA. Pages 1151-1154.
- With the acceptance of the plate tectonics theory in the 1970s, geologic interpretation style was transformed. More and more often, rocks that were difficult to correlate tectonically with neighboring rocks were assumed to be out of place, and in many cases were postulated to have traveled great distances from their places of tectonic origin. For example, many packages of dark igneous (mafic) rocks throughout the western Cordillera have been interpreted as displaced pieces of oceanic crust. In this paper the authors examine gravity and magnetic data that show that one such package of mafic rocks, located in the Noatak region of the western Brooks Range, Alaska, is deeply rooted within the crust. In addition, the authors suggest that these rocks may have geologic affinities to the neighboring crustal rock section. Therefore, they argue that these rocks are not far-traveled as previously interpreted. They speculate that other appropriate analogs elsewhere in the western Cordillera may not be far-traveled either.
- Sediment and rock strength controls on river incision into bedrock
Leonard S. Sklar and William E. Dietrich, Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720-4767, USA. Pages 1087-1090.
- Rivers cut vertically through solid rock, making valleys and ultimately wearing away entire mountain ranges. How quickly this happens is generally thought to depend on how much water rivers carry, how steep they are, and the strength of the underlying bedrock. New theories suggest that the amount and size of the sediment that rivers carry also strongly influence how quickly they cut through rock. In a series of unique experiments, using rock taken from a wide variety of rivers, the authors show that sediment can either increase erosion rates by providing abrasive tools or inhibit erosion rates by burying and insulating underlying bedrock from the erosive forces of the flow. Furthermore, the experiments show that large sediment grains are more efficient at eroding rock than smaller grains, because small grains tend to travel suspended in the water column and impact the riverbed less frequently. Experimental erosion rates were also compared to rock strength measurements to reveal, for the first time, a quantitative relationship between rock strength and rock resistance to erosion. These findings suggest new ways of understanding how climate, tectonic uplift, and erosional processes interact to create the topography of Earth's surface.
- Pattern of vertebrate extinctions across an event bed at the Permian-Triassic boundary in the Karoo Basin of South Africa.
Roger M.H. Smith, Division of Earth Sciences, South African Museum, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa, and Peter D. Ward, Department of Geological Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. Pages 1147-1150.
- The extinction of vertebrates around the Permian-Triassic boundary has long been regarded as a gradual event occurring over hundreds of thousands to millions of years. The authors' new field investigations of fluvial strata in the central and southern Karoo Basin of South Africa have revealed the presence of an event bed coinciding with a mass extinction of terrestrial fauna and flora. This occurs within a sedimentary sequence that is marked by a reddening of floodplain mudrocks and a change from high- to low-sinuosity river channel systems. The authors show that the pattern of vertebrate taxa disappearing below this boundary, and the subsequent appearance of new taxa above the boundary, are consistent with a relatively sudden, possibly catastrophic event that lasted 50 k.y or less.
- Thick-Structured Proterozoic Lithosphere of the Rocky Mountain Region
Ken Dueker, Huaiyu Yuan, and Brian Zurek, University of Wyoming
- This paper provides a fundamentally new image of earth's mantle beneath the Rocky Mountains and leads to new insights into both how continental lithosphere was assembled in the Precambrian and how the old assembly structures have influenced subsequent tectonism, including ongoing reorganization of small-scale convection in the asthenosphere. It presents two especially important results. (1) The chemical lithosphere under the Rockies is still very thick (>200 km) in spite of the fact that the thermal lithosphere is thinning due to younger tectonism related to the present North American plate margin. Thus, we can study the process of thinning of lithosphere and we find that the old anisotropies are very important in controlling melt migration and the beginnings of asthenospheric convection as lithosphere is converted to asthenosphere. 2) One of the main paleosutures of the Rockies, the Cheyenne belt suture between Archean and Proterozoic lithospheres, has a north-dipping, high-velocity zone under it that the authors interpret to be a paleosubduction zone. This offers an important reinterpretation of the collision process involving flipping subduction zones during accretion of arcs into the growing North American continent. Together, these data are an important step in better understanding the evolution of the continental lithosphere in North America.
To view the abstracts for these articles, go to: www.gsajournals.org.
To obtain a complimentary copy of any GEOLOGY article, contact Ann Cairns. | <urn:uuid:c94e9f23-304f-41ea-a61f-a8c0a5fc6ce4> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.geosociety.org/news/pr/01-62.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397795.31/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00140-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922505 | 3,399 | 3.1875 | 3 |
In 1892, owner Andrew Carnegie and his plant manager Henry Clay Frick decided to break the steelworkers union at the Carnegie Steel Company plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Frick locked out the steelworkers and hired 300 armed guards from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to protect non-union strikebreakers. When the Pinkertons arrived on barges, armed steelworkers defeated them in a bloody pitched battle. Later, however, the state militia supported Carnegie, and the strike—along with the union—was broken. The National Police Gazette portrayed the July 6, 1892, fight between striking workers and Pinkerton strike-breakers on the Monongahela River. A national weekly directed to male readers, many of whom were workers, the Police Gazette occasionally covered labor conflict, expressing sympathy toward strikers while also exploiting the more sensational aspects of the events.
Source: National Police Gazette, July 23, 1892—Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. | <urn:uuid:bd35a167-1b26-492a-a0cf-6f0e7088bb9a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6768/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783400572.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155000-00120-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946852 | 195 | 3.859375 | 4 |
McASKILL, ANGUS, farmer, businessman, and “Cape Breton Giant”; b. in 1825 on Harris in the Hebrides, Scotland, one of 13 children of Norman McAskill and Christina Campbell; d. a bachelor on 8 Aug. 1863 at Englishtown, N.S.
About 1831 Angus McAskill immigrated with his family to Cape Breton where his father was seeking better economic opportunities. Norman McAskill settled on a 100-acre farm on the south side of St Ann’s Harbour in a district called “Englishtown” because its inhabitants “had not the Gaelic.”
For a few terms Angus McAskill attended the one-room school run by Alexander Munro, a graduate of King’s College, Aberdeen. McAskill was no larger than other children as a boy, but he kept growing. At 14 he became known as St Ann’s big boy or Gille Mor, and he continued to grow in his 20s until he became so tall that his father lifted the roof of the family home and raised the ceilings of the kitchen and living room. Angus worked with his father and brothers on the family farm. He was also a fisherman. In a pioneer community which admired strength and had many strong men he was called “the big giant” and was remembered because he could carry a 60-foot beam on his shoulder, set a 40-foot mast into a schooner, throw a man weighing 300 pounds over a woodpile 10 ft high and 12 ft wide, pull the bow off a fishing dory when a crowd of fishermen hauled back on the stern as a joke, and lift grindstones as easily as sugar lumps. Fortunately he had a “mild and gentle manner,” and was always helpful.
Crop failures in 1847 and 1848 caused economic depression in Nova Scotia, and induced Angus to accept the offer of a visitor to St Ann’s to go on a tour as a curiosity. In July 1849 he toured Lower Canada and in 1850 the United States. When he reached his full growth his agents reported his height as 7 ft 9 in., his weight 425 pounds, his shoulders 44 in. wide, and the palm of his hand 8 in. wide and 12 in. long. In 1863 he was wearing boots 17 1/2 in. long. He had deep-set blue eyes and a musical, if somewhat hollow voice. Despite his huge size he was perfectly proportioned.
In 1852 and 1853 he was exhibited in the United States and may have appeared at P. T. Barnum’s museum in Philadelphia or New York; in 1853 the giant toured the West Indies and Cuba. Descriptions of his presentation to Queen Victoria, however, are apocryphal. McAskill was often involved in wagers over his weight-lifting ability. The story of one of these wagers is often told. Some bystanders on a pier in New Orleans or New York bet that he would be unable to lift an anchor weighing about 2,700 pounds. He lifted it and walked with it on his shoulder. However, in replacing it on the pier, his grip slipped and the anchor dropped pinning him beneath it.
The giant returned to St Ann’s about 1854 with a “snug fortune” and bought farms and a grist mill from some of those who had emigrated to New Zealand with the Reverend Norman McLeod. He is said to have established salmon fishing on a commercial basis at St Ann’s. He also operated a general shop at Englishtown in a building he had erected to suit his size, and where he did much of his business by barter. McAskill died after a lingering illness which local doctors described as “brain fever.”
The Giant McAskill and Highland Pioneers’ Centennial Museum at the Gaelic College of Celtic Folk Arts at St Ann’s perpetuates his memory and contains some clothing and furniture used by the giant.
PANS, RG 1, 449/52C, census of 1838; RG 20, C, nos.55, 56. Victoria County Court of Probate (Baddeck, N.S.), 1863, A24 (letters of administration and inventory of the estate of Angus McAskill). Acadian Recorder, 15 Aug. 1863. Novascotian, 7 Oct. 1850, 11 April 1853, 17 Aug. 1863. Yarmouth Herald (Yarmouth, N.S.), 14 Nov. 1850. P. R. Blakeley, Nova Scotia’s two remarkable giants (Windsor, N.S., 1970). W. A. Deacon, The four Jameses (Ottawa, 1927), 123–49. J. D. Gillis, The Cape Breton giant; a truthful memoir (Halifax, 1926). Albert Almon, “The Cape Breton giant . . . ,” Cape Breton Mirror (Glace Bay, N.S.), January 1952, 12–14; February 1952, 12–13; March 1952, 12–13. | <urn:uuid:b5cd4a8f-66c3-4ad8-8cd2-02606533beb8> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mcaskill_angus_9E.html?revision_id=3286 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391519.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00128-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982087 | 1,071 | 2.65625 | 3 |
noun[mass noun] Philosophy
An ethical theory which regards ethical and value judgements as expressions of feeling or attitude and prescriptions of action, rather than assertions or reports of anything.
- There's little indication of the available range of ethical theories, from crude emotivism to Platonic realism, from McDowellian objectivism to virtue theory.
- If so, simple emotivism of the sort described is refuted because the sincerity conditions for making the judgement require the motivation not present in the amoralist.
- The logical positivists who dealt with ethics put forward a view called emotivism.
- Example sentences
- Whether this is sufficient to count such theories as emotivist or non-cognitivist is open to dispute, but many proponents of such views do call themselves non-cognitivists and emotivists.
- He put forward an emotivist theory of ethics, one that he never abandoned.
- Spinoza gave what would now be called an emotivist theory of moral judgement.
For editors and proofreaders
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Definition of emotivism in:
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Comments that don't adhere to our Community Guidelines may be moderated or removed. | <urn:uuid:f8f0080e-811e-43c1-86ea-4187095191fb> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/emotivism | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402746.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00156-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924422 | 264 | 3 | 3 |
What Will It Take to End Child Abuse Fatalities in the United States?
In recent months, Americans have been inundated with news about child abuse tragedies. Several high profile cases have made national headlines, including the Casey Anthony trial in Florida, the Marchella Pierce case in New York City, and the gruesome story of Nubia Barahona in Florida that detailed serious injuries inflicted on the child’s twin brother. Unfortunately, the list goes on.
In the United States, a child is abused or neglected every 36 seconds, and, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), only 40% of abused children with substantiated cases receive services. More alarming is the number of child fatalities that result from abuse and neglect – with researchers believing there are nearly seven child abuse and neglect deaths every day in America—some 2,500 per year.1
The unfortunate truth about child abuse and neglect deaths is how common they are. Yet the scope of the problem attracts little attention from our national leaders or the national media, who tend to focus on the details of individual cases rather than the systemic issues that often allow these tragedies to occur. Even during April, which is declared National Child Abuse Prevention Month each year by the president, organizations and individuals dedicated to ending child abuse and neglect continue to experience difficulties raising the awareness necessary to bring about needed improvements.
Every day, the media tell horrible stories of abused or neglected children who have suffered at the hands of a perpetrator, oftentimes a trusted relative or friend. The media and other commentators on the stories often start by trying to decide where the finger of blame should be pointed: Was law enforcement to blame? Was it the child welfare agency’s fault? While the focus is on who should take the blame for the avoidable deaths of so many children, little attention goes to addressing what systemic changes need to be made.
Instead of pointing fingers, the real questions should be, what national strategies must be instituted for change to take effect in child protective services across the country, and how can child abuse deaths be prevented?
The NASW is involved because social workers understand firsthand the need for a bigger and broader response to child abuse from the general population, as well as from teachers, doctors, nurses, recreation staff, and neighbors who see children who are at risk every day.
In 2009, the NCECAD brought together child welfare experts from across the country at the Summit to End Child Abuse and Neglect Deaths in Washington, DC. This three-day Summit resulted in a list of recommendations for the child welfare system and the agencies with which the systems interact. Included in the recommendations were expanded prevention services for at-risk families; attention to workforce issues, including decreasing high caseloads and increasing the qualifications of child protection workers; a national strategy for better coordination of law enforcement and child protective services; changes to the current confidentiality laws associated with child abuse and neglect deaths; and increased funding for child protective services on a national level.
With the goal of seeing their recommendations implemented, the NCECAD has worked for the last year and a half to raise awareness on a national level and garner attention from Congress. On April 5, the coalition cohosted a congressional staff briefing on Capitol Hill to provide information on child abuse deaths. The coalition’s celebrity spokesperson, Tamara Tunie, an actress on the TV program Law and Order: SVU, delivered a petition containing the signatures of more than 8,000 Americans asking for a hearing on the issue. During the briefing, Congressman David Camp (R-MI), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, announced that he would call for a hearing on child abuse fatalities to be held early this summer.
What Will It Take to Decrease Child Fatalities?
Joan Levy Zlotnik, PhD, ACSW, director of the NASW’s Social Work Policy Institute, says that “underresourced child protection agencies are challenged today because families’ needs for services are increasing just as states are cutting back on funding for services. Prevention and early intervention are critical.”
The NCECAD asserts that American children should be safe in their own homes regardless of where they live. States also count and report child abuse data differently, leaving the actual number of abused children and child abuse- and neglect-related fatalities unknown.
However, a factor positively impacting the safety of children within a jurisdiction is the implementation of protocol ensuring that civil and criminal proceedings are closely coordinated. The combined professional knowledge of multidisciplinary teams, which bring together social workers, law enforcement, prosecutors, child protection services, and other child advocacy experts, leads to better outcomes for child victims and higher prosecution rates. Unfortunately, these teams are often restricted in what they can share by confidentiality laws.
The coalition recommends the federal government, led by the U.S. Department of Justice and HHS, adopt a model protocol that ensures law enforcement and child protection services are working together to achieve a common goal. This coordinated effort should include information sharing that is currently hindered by restrictive confidentiality laws. Originally intended to protect living child victims from publicity, confidentiality laws have become a hindrance to professionals working to save children. In addition, these strict laws often result in a lack of public understanding of child abuse and neglect fatalities.
Although each of the recommendations mentioned above contributes to the end goal of decreasing child abuse and neglect deaths, it will be impossible to make a true impact without necessary funding for child protective services. Current levels of federal spending are far below the level needed to protect all children at imminent risk of harm, with $3 billion to $5 billion in additional funds required to ensure that all reports of child abuse receive a response and provide families with necessary public health and social services for at-risk children.
If federal funding expands, states should ensure that child protective workers and other frontline personnel have decreased caseloads and more opportunities for training. This, in turn, would lead to an overall enhancement of the field and greater professional retention. In consideration of expanded federal spending, states should be required to adopt national standards drawn from existing best practices and policies for protecting our children.
The U.S. government must develop a broad national strategy for curbing child abuse deaths. The coalition is currently calling for a National Commission on Child Abuse Deaths in America.
As April draws to a close, keep child abuse prevention a priority all year long and visit the NCECAD website at www.endchildabusedeaths.org to learn more about the problem and what the public can do to assist and save our children from avoidable deaths. Social workers can help the coalition’s efforts by being advocates for child abuse prevention efforts in their community. They can also help respond to sensational news stories that oversimplify issues surrounding a child’s death. Grassroots education is critical to system reform.
— Kimberly Day, MSW, is coordinator of the National Coalition to End Child Abuse Deaths. | <urn:uuid:2b599323-0f2f-4032-ace7-21fd17453e74> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/exc_042911.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397565.80/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00184-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941794 | 1,419 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Previous chapter: Buran
Above: A fully assembled Energia rocket with a flight-worthy Buran orbiter (in background) and components of its first stage (in foreground) were mothballed in Baikonur, until the roof collapse of the assembly building destroyed this unique hardware.
Different versions of the Energia rocket:
Base Energia rocket (two booster stages) tech dossier:
Energia development cooperation:
Energia development chronology:
1976 Dec. 12: The Chief Designer at NPO Energia approves the preliminary design concept of the Energia-Buran system.
1976 Dec. 18: The Military Industrial Commission of the Soviet of Ministers of the USSR finalised the industrial team involved in Energia-Buran development.
1977 July: Concil of Chief Designers and Scientific-Technical Council of the Ministry of the General Mashine Building (NTS MOM) approved the addendum to the prelimanry design of the Energia-Buran system.
1977 Nov. 21: The Soviet government issued a decree detailing major stages and activities in the development of the Energia-Buran system.
1978 March: The industry completed the techninical project for the Energia-Buran development.
1979: A full-scale mockup, designated EUK13, of the Energia rocket is was assembled in the processing building at Site 112 in Baikonur. It included a core stage, a strap-on booster stage and an interface launching platform.
1982 January: Minister of General Mashine Building appointed B. I. Gubanov as a head of Energia-Buran development.
1982 Jan. 6: The first test flight of the VM-T aircraft carrying Energia rocket's hydrogen tank externally.
1982 December: The processing personell in Baikonur conducted experimental assembly of the test version of the Energia rocket designated 4M.
1987 May 15, 21:30 Moscow Time: The first Energia super booster (Number 6SL) is launched from Site-250 in Baikonur carrying a Polyus military payload. The rocket performed flawlessly, however, Polyus orbital maneuvering system fired in the opposite direction due to the control system problem causing the payload to fall in the ocean.
1988 November 15, 06:00:02 Moscow Time: The Energia super booster carrying unmanned Buran reusable shuttle blasted off from Baikonur. 206 minutes or two orbits later, the Buran automatically landed at the Yubileiniy airfield at Site 251 in Baikonur.
1993: The Energia project is discontinued with five vehicles still available, including two at the launch site and remaining at TsSKB Progress in Samara.
2002: Components of the Energia rocket are destroyed in the roof collapse in Baikonur.
Next chapter: Energia-M rocket
Page author: Anatoly Zak; Last update: September 4, 2014
All rights reserved
The Energia rocket with the Polus "battle station" is being loaded on its transporter-erector in preparation for the launch in May 1987. Copyright © 2001 RussianSpaceWeb.com
The Energia rocket with the Polus is being installed on the launch pad at Site 250 in preparation for the launch in May 1987. Copyright © 2001 RussianSpaceWeb.com
A fully-assembled Energia booster with the Buran reusable spacecraft sits mothballed in the assembly building Number 112 in Baikonur. Copyright © 2001 Anatoly Zak
View of the tail section of the Energia's core stage with four main engines. Copyright © 2001 by Anatoly Zak
A fully-assembled Energia-Buran system is rolled out from the assembly building integrated with a platform, which provides all interfaces between the vehicle and the launch complex. Copyright © 2000 Anatoly Zak
The main engines of the Energia's core stage. Four engines were powering the Energia rocket. A single engine would be sued in Energia-M version of the vehicle. Copyright © 2000 Anatoly Zak
The RD-170 engine powered the first stage of the Energia rocket. Click to enlarge: 300 by 400 pixels / 56K Copyright © 2005 Anatoly Zak
A scale model of VM-T Atlant aircraft designed to transport the elements of the Energia-Buran system. The aircraft was converted from Myasishev's 3M startegic bomber. In shown configuration the aircraft carries hydrogen tank of the Energia's core stage. Copyright © 2001 Anatoly Zak | <urn:uuid:e37c0301-a304-46ae-b2aa-a4cd4613be48> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.russianspaceweb.com/energia.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402479.21/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00179-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.902866 | 957 | 2.75 | 3 |
Gregorian chant takes it name from Pope St. Gregory the Great.
Although the tradition proclaims him as the composer of chant,
historical scholarship shows rather that he served as the great
link between the early Church and the Middle Ages. As such, he
symbolizes the chant of the churches in Rome, which spread to
England and to Gaul in the seventh and eighth centuries.
With the impetus of Charlemagne (768-814) and his Carolingian
renaissance, musicians created new and more elaborate chants. The
early development is difficult to trace because all the music was
handed on as an oral tradition; nothing was written down even
though the repertoire for the Mass and the Divine Office comprised
well over 2,000 pieces.
Types of Chant
This music can be divided into three types, marked by the degree
of difficulty. Simple chants allowed the whole congregation to
participate, and some could easily reach back before Gregory,
perhaps even to the music of the synagogue.
More complex are the antiphons for lauds and vespers. Still,
they are not too difficult for a monastic community with members of
varying skills. The "O" antiphons for Advent belong to this second
Finally, solo cantors or small groups of trained musicians would
sing the complex or melismatic chants for the propers of the Mass.
These complex chants are built of structural notes that are linked
by an elaborate interlacing of notes, not unlike the Celtic knots
found in the art of theBook of Kells. The effect is a kind of
During the ninth century, a system of notation developed to
assist the cantors. Unlike modern notation, which indicates pitch
and rhythm, this system of dots and lines sought to preserve the
nuances of the oral performance. As time passed, memory faded, and
it became necessary to indicate pitch, and so the four-line staff
developed with its square notation.
The new system lacked nuance; one grouping of square notes stood
for five or more different signs in the old system. The free rhythm
and modal system were also losing ground. The development of
polyphony demanded strictly measured time, and the major and minor
keys dominated. The tradition was obscured, if not lost
Modern study has sought to recover the lost oral performance.
The scholarship begins at Abbey of Solesmes with the collecting and
copying of texts. The question of rhythm has occupied much of the
Saint Meinrad Chant
While some have argued for a metric approach, the Solesmes
school has emphasized the natural word rhythm as the basis for
chant. Dom Eugène Cardine of Solesmes, with his students at Musica
Sacra in Rome, has documented this fundamental principle across the
manuscript tradition. This work has opened the way to recovering
the nuance of the medieval chant.
Fr. Columba Kelly, OSB, director of the Saint Meinrad Gregorian
Chant Schola, did his doctorate under Dom Cardine. The music on
Saint Meinrad's Advent/Christmas and Lent/Easter CDs reflects that
study in two ways.
The interpretation of the Latin chant seeks to recreate the
vitality of the chant recorded in the earliest manuscripts. The
English chant that Fr. Columba has created is grounded in English
word accent and the natural word rhythm of the language. The result
is strangely modern: modal, free rhythm music. | <urn:uuid:83ee02d8-f001-48af-b561-7dd8a286891a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://saintmeinrad.edu/the-monastery/liturgical-music/history-of-chant/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395620.56/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00193-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938215 | 735 | 4.125 | 4 |
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Iranians overthrow the Shah, 1977-79
Agitation in Iran was visible by May 1977 in predominantly intellectual circles. A group of lawyers—upset by the government’s interference in the judiciary—drafted a strongly worded manifesto chronicling the legal abuses that had occurred under the Shah’s regime. Poets formed a Writers’ Association to call for an end to censorship and the activity of SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police. A National Organization of University Teachers began fighting for academic freedom while university and seminary students called for academic freedom in the schools.
Leading up to the beginning of the Iranian Revolution, Iranians had grown increasingly disillusioned with the Shah. Many Iranians were upset by the Shah’s administration because, even in the wake of a national oil boom, wealth was unequally distributed. Initially, protestors wanted to reestablish 1906-1909 laws that created a constitutional monarchy. The 1906 Constitution required the Shah to adhere to the laws of Islam and to gain the approval of the Parliament (majlis).
In the first phase of the revolution, much of the nonviolent resistance arose from the creativity of the students. When banned from holding demonstrations, University of Tehran activists stood in silence in front of their library, quietly agitating for freedom of speech. The students also targeted U.S. President Nixon because of his military support of the Shah; they dribbled basketballs on the path of the Nixon-Shah motorcade, an allusion to a popular photograph circulating of Fidel Castro playing basketball.
The National Front party, which had earlier opposed Western domination of the oil industry, was revived in late 1977 by Dr. Karim Sanjabi and called on the Shah to hold free and fair elections, restore the constitution of 1905, respect freedom of speech, free political prisoners, and allow for an independent Iran in foreign affairs. Sanjabi and the two other leaders of the National Front—Foruhar and Bakhtiyar—also accused the Shah of wrecking the economy by neglecting agriculture. By the end of 1977, professionals and students had created organizations, written manifestos, and sent letters to the Imperial Palace, but had not mobilized the support of the nation.
A turning point came on January 7, 1978. A government editorial in a newspaper accused anti-regime clerics of working with communists and the Ayatollah Khomeini of licentious behavior and of being a British spy. In Qum, the headquarters of the ulama (clergy), seminaries and bazaars closed in protest and the ulama staged a protest meeting, articulating their goals as calling for dissolution of the single party and peaceful release of political prisoners. Qum’s 4,000 theology students, in the meantime, initiated street protests but were quickly shut down by the police, who killed two students in the clash.
Khomeini seized this opportunity to congratulate the Qum clergy on their peaceful opposition while he called for more demonstrations. The more religiously affiliated cleric Shari’atmadari called on the country to mourn the students killed in the traditional Islamic manner: forgoing work and attending mosque services on the fortieth day anniversary. This process caused three upheavals to occur in 40-day cycles.
On February 18, 1978, peaceful demonstrations occurred in twelve cities on the fortieth-day anniversary of the death of the Qum students. In Tabriz, after a police officer shot a teenage protestor, angered demonstrators began to attack particular kinds of property that symbolized either the Pahlevi state (police stations and Resurgence party offices) or un-Islamic values (luxury hotels and liberal movie houses). After two days, the military intervened to quash the uprising, which had been the largest public protest since 1963.
Forty days later, on March 29, attendees of a commemorative religious service in Yazd were energized by the words of a fiery preacher, who inspired them to take to the streets shouting “Death to the Shah.” The police again shut down the street protest by firing at the crowd, precipitating a three-day crisis that killed over 100.
Again, Khomeini and Shari’atmadari encouraged Iranians to attend services forty days later, on May 10. On that date police violently repressed demonstrations in 24 towns, with violence escalating noticeably in Tehran and Qum, where troops broke into the homes of religious leaders and killed theology students taking sanctuary there.
Before the next round of fortieth-day services the regime took increasing action; it used the secret police SAVAK to intimidate leaders of the secular opposition while abandoning a few of its most criticized policies and issuing apologies. The regime made economic reforms to cut inflation. These small concessions were enough to temporarily pacify the public, who supported a contented Shari’atmadari rather than Khomeini, who still agitated for overthrow of the Shah.
A major shift occurred in June 1978 when the urban poor and working class people joined what had previously been an upper-middle class movement. Government measures to control inflation had caused an economic recession that affected urban employment. Workers went on industrial strikes throughout the summer, demanding health insurance, bonuses, and wage increases. When employees of Tehran’s electrical system and water system stopped working, they shut down the city. Workers organized demonstrations in Ifsahan, where the government declared martial law and shot down the demonstrators.
In August, a fire burned down a movie theater with several hundred people trapped inside, and mourners blamed SAVAK even without decisive evidence.
Fearful of another series of forty-day cycles, the Shah made more concessions: allowance of all parties to campaign in the next election was given, amnesty for hundreds of political prisoners was granted, and a new premier Sharif Emami—who would be far more willing to negotiate with the oppositional religious establishment—was appointed.
Sharif Emami came to an agreement with opposition leaders for the celebration of Eid al-Fitr (the feast at the end of Ramadan). He issued demonstration permits in exchange for the protestors’ agreement to demonstrate in a prescribed area and avoid personal attacks on the Shah in their slogans. The feast passed without repression, although 5,000 students staged a sit-in, 700 oil workers went on strike, and countless more Iranians protested in the street.
Despite the opposition leaders’ efforts to dampen the militancy of the demonstrations, the protestors increased their level of enthusiasm and radicalism over the next few days. On September 8 the Shah declared martial law in Tehran and other cities and ordered the killing of any demonstrators who refused to disperse. The blood-letting became known as “Black Friday” and drew the attention of the U.S. government, the Shah’s chief ally. President Jimmy Carter issued a statement backing the Shah. The mass of Iranians drew a different conclusion from the day on which helicopter gun-ships hovered above unarmed Iranians packed into city squares, raining bullets upon them. A critical mass of Iranians reached the conclusion that a full revolution was the only answer.
A wave of strikes in late 1978 shut down the Iranian economy, with peaks on October 6 (when Khomeini was expelled to Paris) and October 16 (the fortieth day after Black Friday). Strikers expanded their articulated goals to encompass political turnover, the abolition of SAVAK, the return of Khomeini, and the end of martial law. Strikers brought bazaars, schools, government ministries, and the oil industry virtually to a standstill.
This proved to be the tipping point for the Shah, whose country’s economy was supported almost entirely by oil.
In December, a giant wave of demonstrators shouted, “God is Great” from their rooftops. When the demonstrators descended to the streets they were rolled over by tanks, marking the first of several bloody clashes between protestors and police that month.
As a concession the Shah appointed former opposition-leader Bakhtiyar as Prime Minister. This was not enough; the campaigners forced the Shah to leave Iran in mid-January. Prime Minister Bakhtiyar dissolved the oppressive infrastructure of the state, including SAVAK. Under continued pressure he invited back Khomeini, who, upon his February 10, 1979 arrival in Qum, publicly denounced Baktiyar’s conciliatory regime and consolidated power in the Revolutionary Council.
Iranians celebrated the victory by embracing soldiers in the street and stuffing flowers in the barrels of their rifles. Despite the hostile slogan of “Death to the Shah,” the Iranians had just led one of the largest nonviolent revolutions in history. | <urn:uuid:a2bd120a-952f-42d8-9c19-a4b3285b6287> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/iranians-overthrow-shah-1977-79 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398216.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00046-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960078 | 1,786 | 2.921875 | 3 |
Gebel al-Mawta (Mountain of the Dead)
The Mountain of the dead is a hill side full of tombs which were unknown to 19th century explorers. The huge limestone structure was developed during the 26th Dynasty and during the Ptolemaic period, and apparently was well known to locals. During WW II when the battles around Siwa were raging, they often hid in the tombs, and for monetary consideration, often sliced sections of the walls off for soldiers as souvenirs, but the Romans also plundered the tombs and often reused them.
There remains a number of interesting tombs. These include:
The Tomb of Si-Ammon, who was a rich Greek and who's tomb dates to the 3rd century BC. Here, there is a image of Nut, with a halo of sycamore leaves (just to the right of the entrance.) There is also an image of Si Amun himself making offerings to Egyptian gods.
The Tomb of Miso-Isis, which is unfinished, but retains the owner's skull.
The Tomb of Niperpathot, with inscriptions and drawings using apparently the same red ink currently used by Siwan pottery artisians.
The Tomb of the Crocodile, which includes a painting of a crocodile.
Who are we?
Tour Egypt aims to offer the ultimate Egyptian adventure and intimate knowledge about the country. We offer this unique experience in two ways, the first one is by organizing a tour and coming to Egypt for a visit, whether alone or in a group, and living it firsthand. The second way to experience Egypt is from the comfort of your own home: online. | <urn:uuid:85ea9767-4f04-4e5d-9895-9d08800154c7> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.touregypt.net/mawta.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399425.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00054-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976152 | 348 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Major test of web-based warning system that's built up since SARS.
Avian flu virus: Creative Commons.
Just before 7:30 on the morning of Sunday, March 31, I opened my laptop, checked my mail, and found a note from Google Alerts saying two people in Shanghai had died of bird flu.
But this was not the H5N1 bird flu I've been blogging about for eight years; this was something called H7N9. Influenza has many different strains -- so-called "swine flu" is H1N1 -- but this was the first time anyone had ever been infected with this strain, much less died of it.
This kind of story doesn't happen often in the strange online world of Flublogia, where people share news of diseases outbreaks, public-health problems, and the medical consequences of political decisions. The last time was almost exactly four years ago, when H1N1 came out of nowhere as an aggressive and fast-spreading disease that turned into a pandemic.
That one email about H7N9 effectively hijacked my blog. Hours earlier, I'd been covering dengue, the novel coronavirus out of Saudi Arabia, malaria, and the mysterious appearance of thousands of pig carcasses in Shanghai's Huangpu River -- disastrous for the people involved, but nothing out of the ordinary.
This was different, even if only three people had contracted this kind of flu and two of them had died. That was how H5N1 had started in Hong Kong back in 1997, with a disease we'd never seen suddenly sickening and killing people. Once again a virus had figured out how to infect a "naive" population. Like Aztecs facing smallpox, we have no immunity to H7N9.
Early warning under pressure
The outbreak also reminded everyone of SARS, which in 2003 had come out of China and swept from a Hong Kong hotel corridor right into Toronto. That wasn't a flu; it was a coronavirus, and since last summer a novel coronavirus has been popping up in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and as far north as Germany and Britain.
So the appearance of this new virus was of instant interest to the global health community, and it was also a major test of the worldwide early-warning system that has emerged since H5N1 and especially since SARS.
In 1997, the web was a primitive medium; no one knew where anything was, and browsers offered a random website if you didn't know where you wanted to go. By 2003, blogs were providing a lot of guidance. I discovered that some were dealing entirely with SARS -- and doing so far faster and more thoroughly than the newspapers and TV could.
By the time I started my blog H5N1 in 2005, as an attempt to educate myself, the blogosphere was enormous and still growing. I found myself part of a community of interest -- experts, journalists, and laypersons like myself -- willing to share information. That community has grown ever since, greatly enhanced by Twitter.
Everyone understood back then that networks like Flublogia could play a part in gathering and disseminating information about disease outbreaks. But would they do so reliably?
Some of the early flu forums fell apart in personal feuds. Some bloggers were manifest cranks, looking forward to the next pandemic as if awaiting the Rapture. Others assumed that any government would suppress the truth, and sometimes they were right. China had famously done so for weeks about SARS, and the UN still tries to evade responsibility for bringing cholera to Haiti in 2010.
A snap quiz in communication
So here was a snap quiz on what governments and the blogosphere could do, whether in cooperation or in conflict, to determine the nature of a new disease and to inform the world about it. So far, we all seem to be passing the quiz.
The Chinese authorities have come in for criticism over their slowness to report H7N9; the first cases in Shanghai started in mid-February when an very old man and his two old sons came down with what seemed like pneumonia. The old man and one son died, but only the father was eventually confirmed to have H7N9. The surviving son has reportedly refused to be tested again.
By the time other cases began to turn up, in March, they were scattered across a wide stretch of eastern China -- not just Shanghai, but a city in nearby Anhui province and several other cities in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces. It understandable, then, that the Chinese health experts took a while to recognize what was happening, and then reported it some six weeks after the first case in mid-February.
Since then, however, the reports seem to have been coming reasonably promptly. Dr. Jody Lanard, a U.S. expert in crisis communication, has criticized the Shanghai authorities for "mega-confident over-promising" about fighting H7N9. But she praises the Chinese Centres for Disease Control "for early reporting and non-over-reassurance." She also notes an "astonishing" Xinhua editorial with a "bold critique … I assume this is being done with the blessing of the government."
Others have not been so complimentary; the South China Morning Post has published a compendium of media reports from across China that generally criticize the official response.
Hazards of the echo effect
Apart from offering insights into modern China's public health system and press freedom, the online response to H7N9 also shows itself to be far from perfect. Someone tweeted on April 6 that a person from China had arrived infected in Hoboken, NJ, of all places. Cooler heads on the #H7N9 hashtag quickly stomped it out, but it showed how easily nonsense can compete with fact.
More serious, from my point of view, was the "echo effect": Stories go out all over the world and are published everywhere from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires. But by the time aggregators like NewsNow and Google News display them, many are already out of date.
Flublogia obsesses over the very latest reports and the most recent case and death counts. So which story is correct -- the one with five deaths or the one with six? I finally put together a timeline of cases, just to keep the story straight in my own mind. But it means daily or twice-daily updates, plus endless vigilance about the dateline of every story.
Working with the grownups
More encouragingly, the online media have been increasingly accepted by those I call the "grownups" -- the virologists, epidemiologists, and experts in agencies like WHO and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. This is true even of the Chinese CDC; though its English-language page is often out of date, its Chinese H7N9 coverage is pretty current and open to Google Translate's rough efforts. WHO is tweeting its H7N9 announcements even before posting them on its website, and WHO media head Gregory Härtl is a frequent tweeter as well.
This is a remarkable change from the days of SARS and even of H1N1, when such agencies showed a bureaucratic fear of the web in general and social media in particular. Like their political masters, the bureaucracies fear embarrassment more than any pandemic, but they are now willing to get out there and make their case in 140 characters or less.
I suspect they are beginning to realize that in the social media their expert status is enhanced, not threatened; a solid, factual tweet will be re-tweeted around the world before the rumour can get its boots on.
Similarly, mutual support is developing between bloggers and mainstream journalists; our posts and tweets often tip them off to new stories and information sources, and their stories give us much-needed context and background -- and sometimes correction.
We do not have a technofix for the threat of future pandemics, but we do have a better structure for alerting the world's public health systems -- and the publics they serve. It's rewarding to be part of it, and very much worth the occasional shock on an early Sunday morning. | <urn:uuid:740b44ed-beb0-4d70-98e3-3f699dd0f449> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2013/04/08/Viral-Virus/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402479.21/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00163-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972807 | 1,698 | 2.59375 | 3 |
> When real number b < 0, then b^(m/n) = (b^m)^(1/n) and b^(m/n) = > (b^(1/n))^(m) hold, if m/n is reduced to lowest terms. > > That's why calculators operations are defined (only when x >= 0) for > (x^(1/n))^m, (x^m)^(1/n), and not for x^(m/n). The user takes it from there > with the absolute value key (and split domains for functions). > > In a similar conundrum, (-8)^(1/3) is not equal to (-8)^(2/6).
I think they are equal. (If not, what's the difference according to you?) | <urn:uuid:ec491463-7399-43e7-975e-c2ae00a1317e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=32967&messageID=108036 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392099.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00084-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.912395 | 181 | 2.5625 | 3 |
hi guys! i need help on calculating about the time differences in 24hour format!! A program that reads in start time, end time then output the time difference!!
example: Enter Start time: 2355
Enter End time : 0005
Time difference is 10min
I have no idea how to do that!! I understand I can take end time to minus the start time, however that don't give me the time differences!! | <urn:uuid:c01ef291-b52b-4ee1-880d-5d66af239704> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.java-forums.org/new-java/33383-help-calculating-time-different-print.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396887.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00103-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.910526 | 88 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Caffeine Linked to Lower Skin Cancer Risk
Still, Best Protection Is Minimizing Sun Exposure
No Link to Risk of Other Skin Cancers continued...
With another 10 years of follow-up, though, he and his colleagues might observe a difference in squamous cell cancer risk between the highest and lowest levels of caffeine consumption, Han says.
Caffeine intake was not associated with a lower risk of melanoma, the deadliest and least common of the three major types of skin cancer. There were only 741 cases of melanoma among the study participants.
Decaf coffee was not associated with a lower risk of skin cancer, so, Han says, "most likely we think [reduced skin cancer risk] is due to caffeine."
Mouse studies in which the animals received caffeinated water to drink have also linked the compound to a lower risk of skin cancer, says Han, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women's Hospital.
And other studies in which caffeine was applied to the skin of mice have also found a connection to a lower skin cancer risk. The mouse studies have shown that caffeine promotes the elimination of skin cells damaged by ultraviolet light before they have a chance to develop into tumors.
"I'm not recommending people drink coffee only because of this paper," Han says, although he noted that other studies have shown that the beverage is linked to a decreased risk of diabetes, certain cancers, and Parkinson's disease. Linked is a key word with this type of research. Although this type of study can show a strong association between caffeine and skin cancer, it cannot prove cause and effect.
And, Han says, he's not advising that people drink coffee and then bake at the beach. The best way to prevent skin cancer is to minimize exposure to ultraviolet light from the sun or tanning booths, he says.
A Little Caffeine With Your Sunscreen?
Because topical caffeine reduces the risk of skin cancer in mice, should you expect to see a line of "Coffee-tone" sunscreen products any time soon? Some pricey sunscreens already list caffeine among their ingredients.
"It's not been studied carefully," says Allan Conney, PhD, a toxicology professor at Rutgers who's conducted research into the relationship between topical and oral caffeine and skin cancer in mice. "We've been trying to interest some of the major companies to put caffeine into products and do some studies."
Adding caffeine to sunscreen wouldn't be difficult, Conney says, but no company has yet expressed willingness to invest the time and money into clinical trials required to convince the FDA to allow a claim of reduced skin cancer risk.
Han's study appears in Cancer Research. | <urn:uuid:22db525f-9052-487b-abe3-82de28560b04> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.webmd.com/melanoma-skin-cancer/news/20120702/caffeine-linked-to-lower-skin-cancer-risk?page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397565.80/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00035-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965426 | 552 | 2.96875 | 3 |
Biofuels made from the leftovers of harvested corn plants are worse than gasoline for global warming in the short term, a study shows, challenging the Obama administration’s conclusions that they are a much cleaner oil alternative and will help combat climate change, reports the Associated Press via WashingtonExaminer.com
A $500,000 study paid for by the federal government and released Sunday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change concludes that biofuels made with corn residue release 7 percent more greenhouse gases in the early years compared with conventional gasoline.
While biofuels are better in the long run, the study says they won’t meet a standard set in a 2007 energy law to qualify as renewable fuel.
The conclusions deal a blow to what are known as cellulosic biofuels, which have received more than a billion dollars in federal support but have struggled to meet volume targets mandated by law. About half of the initial market in cellulosics is expected to be derived from corn residue.
The biofuel industry and administration officials immediately criticized the research as flawed. They said it was too simplistic in its analysis of carbon loss from soil, which can vary over a single field, and vastly overestimated how much residue farmers actually would remove once the market gets underway.
“The core analysis depicts an extreme scenario that no responsible farmer or business would ever employ because it would ruin both the land and the long-term supply of feedstock. It makes no agronomic or business sense,” said Jan Koninckx, global business director for biorefineries at DuPont.
Read the full article on Washington Examiner here.
UPDATE (1:44 pm EST, 4/21/2014): Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) responds:
From RFA press release titled “New Stover Study is Deeply Flawed and Out of Step with Current Science”: A new study published in Nature Climate Change that argues biofuels from corn residue (stover) may be worse for the climate than gasoline is deeply flawed and contradictory to current science. It shows a complete lack of understanding of current farming practices.
Commenting on the study, Bob Dinneen, President and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA), said, “The study’s methodology is fundamentally flawed and its conclusions are highly suspect. The results are based on sweeping generalizations, questionable assumptions, and an opaque methodology. The authors offer no robust explanation for why their findings contradict other recent, highly regarded research. Ultimately, this paper should be seen for what it truly is – a modeling exercise of a hypothetical scenario that bears no resemblance to the real world.”
Dinneen goes on to highlight several key areas of contention with the Liska et al study. “Stover removal rates are currently in the 10-25% range, which well documented research demonstrates is sufficient to replenish soil. But this study assumes 60-70% stover removal, a level that nobody believes is sustainable.”
“This study lacks sophistication and contradicts without explanation a larger highly–regarded, credible body of science. Other recent studies have examined the carbon impacts of using corn residue for bioenergy. For instance, an analysis conducted by the University of Illinois and Argonne National Laboratory showed 30% residue removal resulted in no additional direct or indirect carbon emissions. Furthermore, it showed certain levels of corn stover can be removed without decreasing SOC. Initial results from research at South Dakota State University showed that SOC levels remained constant from 2008-2012 in a harvest system with relatively high residue removal rates.”
Dinneen concluded, “Last week there was a study suggesting the carbon impact of fracking may be 1,000 times greater than previously thought. Curiously, that report was largely ignored by the media. Folks need to stop manufacturing scenarios to make biofuels look bad, and begin focusing on the true carbon menace – oil.”
More detailed information on RFA’s points of contention with this study can be found here. | <urn:uuid:f114dd09-152b-4f88-9375-b8f1bc6fe78c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.croplife.com/management/fed-study-ethanol-worse-for-environment-in-short-term-than-gasoline/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396872.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00116-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944267 | 836 | 2.671875 | 3 |
A publication of the Archaeological Institute of America
(Richard Hewitt Stewart/National Geographic Society)
Construction of vast solar farms in the deserts of southeastern California is threatening to permanently erase prehistoric Native American sites. Critics charge that while the need for new sources of renewable energy is a clear national priority, the rush to build solar infrastructure in order to qualify for tax breaks has led to inadequate archaeological testing and evaluation of sites in the way of planned solar arrays. The region's famous Blythe Geoglyphs, still a destination for Native American pilgrims, will not be directly affected by the development, but the rich archaeological landscape of which they are a part will be altered forever.
More Sites Under Threat 2010 | <urn:uuid:1ebd40c2-f981-4072-bdd9-0c1355c2e2c4> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://archive.archaeology.org/1101/topten/threat_california.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393463.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00197-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.893583 | 142 | 3.046875 | 3 |
This is SCIENCE IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English. I'm Katherine Cole. And I'm Bob Doughty.
This week, we will tell about the science of tornadoes. Tornadoes have been observed in many parts of the world. But the storms are most often found in the United States.
Tornado season has begun in the United States. Violent storms struck several parts of the country last week. The National Weather Service said there were ten reports of tornadoes across the central and southern Plains states last Thursday.
A tornado is a violently turning tube of air suspended from a thick cloud. It extends from a thunderstorm in the sky down to the ground. The shape is like a funnel: wide at the top, narrower at the bottom.
Tornadoes form when winds blowing in different directions meet in the clouds and begin to turn in circles. Warm air rising from below causes the wind tube to reach toward the ground. Because of their circular movement, these windstorms are also known as twisters.
The most severe tornadoes can reach wind speeds of three hundred twenty kilometers an hour or more. In some cases, the resulting paths of damage can stretch more than a kilometer wide and eighty kilometers long.
With a tornado, bigger does not necessarily mean stronger. Large tornadoes can be weak. And some of the smallest tornadoes can be the most damaging. But no matter what the size, tornado winds are the strongest on Earth. Tornadoes have been known to carry trees, cars or homes from one place to another. They can also destroy anything in their path.
Tornadoes have been observed on every continent except Antarctica. But experts say they are most commonly seen in the United States. On average, eight hundred tornadoes are reported nationwide each year.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps records of tornado sightings. It says tornadoes kill eighty people and injure one thousand five hundred others nationwide in an average year.
Tornadoes are observed most often in the central part of the United States, where the land is mostly flat. The area where the most violent tornadoes usually happen is known as “Tornado Alley.” This area is considered to extend from north central Texas to North Dakota.
Tornadoes can happen any time of the year. But most happen from late winter to the middle of summer. In some areas, there is a second high season in autumn.
Tornado seasons are the result of wind and weather patterns. During spring, warm air moves north and mixes with cold air remaining from winter. In autumn, the opposite happens. Cold weather moves south and combines with the last of the warm air from summer.
Tornadoes can strike with little or no warning. Most injuries happen when flying objects hit people. Experts say the best place to be is in an underground shelter, or a small, windowless room in the lowest part of a building.
People driving during a tornado are told to find low ground and lay flat, facedown, with their hands covering their head. People in the path of a tornado often just have minutes to make life-or-death decisions.
The deadliest American tornado on record was the Tri-State Tornado of March eighteenth, nineteen twenty-five. It tore across Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. About seven hundred people were killed.
A "tornado outbreak" is often defined as six or more tornadoes produced by the same weather system within a day. But the outbreak of April third and fourth, nineteen seventy-four, set a national record. It is remembered as the "Super Outbreak." One hundred forty-eight tornadoes struck during a twenty-four-hour period. More than three hundred people were killed and nearly six thousand others injured.
One tornado that was especially destructive hit Xenia, Ohio. The sound you are about to hear comes from the website www.xeniatornado.com. It is one man's recording of the tornado moving closer.
No two tornadoes look exactly the same. And no two tornadoes act the same way.
Even a weak tornado requires the right combination of wind, temperature, pressure and humidity. Weather experts can identify these conditions. And, when they observe them, they can advise people that tornadoes might develop. But they are not able to tell exactly where or when a tornado will hit. Tornado warnings still depend in large part on human observations.
Usually a community will receive a warning at least a few minutes before a tornado strikes. But each year there are some surprises where tornadoes develop when they are least expected.
The tornado reporting system involves watches and warnings. A tornado watch means tornadoes are possible in the area. A tornado warning means that a tornado has been seen. People are told to take shelter immediately.
Yet tornadoes can be difficult to see. Sometimes only the objects they are carrying through the air can be seen. Some night-time tornadoes have been observed because of lightning strikes nearby. But tornadoes at night are usually impossible to see.
Tornadoes that form over water are called waterspouts. But tornadoes cover a much smaller area than hurricanes, which form over oceans.
Tornadoes can be measured using wind speed information from Doppler radar systems. Tornadoes usually travel in a northeasterly direction with a speed of thirty-two to sixty-four kilometers an hour. But they have been reported to move in other directions and as fast as one hundred seventeen kilometers an hour.
In the United States, the force of a tornado is judged by the damage to structures. Scientists inspect the damage before they estimate the severity of a tornado. They measure tornadoes on the Enhanced Fujita scale or the EF scale.
Ted Fujita was a weather expert who developed a system to rate tornados in the nineteen seventies. The EF scale is a set, or collection, of wind estimates. They are based on levels of damage to twenty-eight different kinds of structures and other objects. Tornadoes that cause only light damage are called an EF-zero. Those with the highest winds that destroy well-built homes and throw vehicles great distances are called an EF-five.
Some people make a sport out of watching and following tornadoes. They are called tornado chasers or storm chasers. Their work can be seen in the extreme weather videos that are increasingly popular on television and on the Internet.
Some chasers do it just because it is their idea of fun. Others do it to help document storms and warn the public. Still others are part of weather research teams.
Recently, an international team of scientists completed a tornado research project called VORTEX2. More than one hundred researchers traveled throughout America’s Great Plains in two thousand nine and two thousand ten. They used weather measurement instruments to collect scientific information about the life of a tornado. The goal of the project was to examine in detail how tornadoes are formed and the kinds of damage they cause.
A film about the VORTEX2 project opened at some theaters in the United States last month. The film includes never before seen images of tornadoes. To safely capture up-close film footage of tornadoes, some project participants traveled in a seven-ton, armored tornado intercept vehicle directly into tornadoes as they formed.
The National Weather Service says the United States gets more severe weather than any other country. For one thing, it is also bigger than most other countries. And it has many different conditions that create many different kinds of weather.
There are seacoasts and deserts, flatlands and mountains. The West Coast is along the Pacific Ocean, which is relatively calm. The East Coast is along the Atlantic Ocean, which is known for its hurricanes. These strike mainly the southeastern states.
Perhaps you would like to compare the older versions of this story with this one.
This SCIENCE IN THE NEWS was written by Brianna Blake. June Simms was our producer. I'm Bob Doughty. And I'm Katherine Cole. Read and listen to our programs at voaspecialenglish.com. And if you have a science question, send it to firstname.lastname@example.org. We might answer it on our program. Join us again next week for more news about science in Special English on the Voice of America. | <urn:uuid:5b7271eb-ef0f-4f6b-b62d-d5d0ac1928ac> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.manythings.org/voa/things/7037.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392159.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00026-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957343 | 1,695 | 4.09375 | 4 |
An example of to soothe is to rock a crying baby to sleep.
- to make calm or composed, as by gentle treatment, flattery, etc.; appease; mollify
- to allay or relieve (pain, an ache, etc.); assuage
Origin of sootheMiddle English sothen ; from Old English sothian, to bear witness to, prove true ; from soth: see sooth
verbsoothed, sooth·ing, soothes
- To calm or placate (a person, for example).
- To ease or relieve (pain, for example).
Origin of sootheMiddle English sothen, to verify, from Old English s&omacron;thian, from s&omacron;th, true; see es- in Indo-European roots.
(third-person singular simple present soothes, present participle soothing, simple past and past participle soothed)
- To keep in good humour; wheedle; cajole; flatter.
- To restore to ease, comfort, or tranquility; relieve; calm; quiet; refresh.
- To allay; assuage; mitigate; soften.
- (rare) To smooth over; render less obnoxious.
- To calm or placate someone or some situation.
- To ease or relieve pain or suffering.
- (intransitive) To temporise by assent, concession, flattery, or cajolery.
- (intransitive) To bring comfort or relief.
From Middle English sothen (“to verify, prove the validity of"), from Old English sÅþian (“to verify, prove, confirm, bear witness to"), from Proto-Germanic *sanþÅnÄ… (“to prove, certify, acknowledge, testify"), from Proto-Indo-European *sont-, *sent- (“being, true"). Cognate with Danish sande (“to verify"), Swedish sanna (“to verify"), Icelandic sanna (“to verify"), Gothic [script?] (suthjan), [script?] (suthjÅn, “to soothe"). See also sooth. | <urn:uuid:9015a64e-2591-4fa0-8a73-95e15f37fa1f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.yourdictionary.com/soothe | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397795.31/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00167-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.79091 | 482 | 2.75 | 3 |
Shingles causes a painful, blistering skin rash. Almost 1 out of 3 people in the United States will develop shingles during their lifetime. Your risk of shingles increases as you get older. If you are age 60 or older get vaccinated against shingles.
Shingles, also known as herpes zoster, causes a painful, blistering skin rash that can last 2 to 4 weeks. For some people, the pain can last for months or even years after the rash goes away. This pain is called postherpetic neuralgia or PHN. It is the most common complication of shingles. The risk of shingles and PHN increases as you get older.
People have described pain from shingles as excruciating, aching, burning, stabbing, and shock-like. It has been compared to the pain of childbirth or kidney stones. This pain may also lead to depression, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, loss of appetite, and weight loss. Shingles can interfere with activities of daily living like dressing, bathing, eating, cooking, shopping, and travel. Shingles can lead to eye complications that can result in vision loss.
Older Adults & Shingles
Adults age 60 or older are more likely to—
- get shingles
- experience severe pain from the disease
- have postherpetic neuralgia
You can protect yourself against shingles. Talk with your doctor or pharmacist about the shingles vaccine.
What Causes Shingles?
Shingles is caused by the varicella zoster virus (VZV), the same virus that causes chickenpox. After a person recovers from chickenpox, the virus stays dormant (inactive) in the body. For reasons that are not fully known, the virus can reactivate years later and cause shingles.
How Common is Shingles?
Almost 1 out of 3 people in America will develop shingles during their lifetime. Nearly 1 million Americans experience the condition each year. As you get older, you are more likely to get the disease. About half of all shingles cases occur in people age 60 years or older.
Is Shingles Contagious?
Shingles cannot be passed from one person to another. However, a person with shingles can transmit VZV to others. A person who gets infected with VZV for the first time will develop chickenpox, not shingles.
Disease of the Week App
"Want to know more about shingles? Download CDC's mobile app now. See "Disease of the Week," highlighting disease facts and prevention tips. Find "Shingles" and take the quiz to test your knowledge of shingles!"
How Can You Reduce Your Risk of Getting Shingles?
Vaccination is the only way to reduce your risk of shingles and PHN. CDC recommends adults age 60 or older receive a single dose of shingles vaccine. Zostavax® is the only shingles vaccine currently available. It is available by prescription from a healthcare professional. Talk with your doctor or pharmacist if you have questions about the shingles vaccine.
People who have a weakened immune system may have to wait to get vaccinated, or should not get vaccinated at all. See Who Should NOT Get the Vaccine.
CDC does not have a recommendation for routine use of shingles vaccine in people 50 through 59 years old. However, the vaccine is approved by FDA for people 50 and older.
- About Shingles
- Shingles (Herpes Zoster) Vaccination
- Shingles Vaccine Information Sheet
- Podcast: Herpes Zoster: Who's at Risk and Who Should be Vaccinated [4:35 minutes]
- Prevention of Herpes Zoster: Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) (15 May 2008/57 (Early Release);1-30).
- Page last reviewed: August 5, 2015
- Page last updated: August 5, 2015
- Content source:
- National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Division of Viral Diseases
- Page maintained by: Office of the Associate Director for Communication, Digital Media Branch, Division of Public Affairs | <urn:uuid:3f8bee32-8607-47e3-b4cf-367de2cc8a56> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.cdc.gov/features/shingles/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396945.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00107-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930661 | 893 | 3.03125 | 3 |
Monday, March 8, 2010
This house, at 2077 Campus Drive, in South Euclid, is the first porcelain enamel house in the world. It was built by the Ferro Corporation in 1932 as an experimental model home. The architect was Charles Bacon Rowley.
Enameled steel or porcelain enamel was a new product in the late 1920s and early 1930s, used primarily for appliances like stoves. Ferro built this house to showcase some other potential applications. The design was said to be fireproof, which was a major selling point, used extensively in the promotion of this residence.
This structure has tremendous historic significance. It was a major new idea in both housing and manufacturing, in a city that was still an industrial giant. While this wasn't indicative of where we have headed in residential construction, it was influential. Another house made of steel was completed in Solon soon after. Ferro built, with Rowley as architect, this well documented house for the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1933, based on a similar design. Others tried their hand at this building material. After World War II, Lustron, of Columbus, Ohio, built prefabricated steel enamel homes and shipped them nationwide.
This house has been altered considerably, with a new roof, replacement windows, and changes to the chimneys. Most significantly, the enameled exterior has been covered with vinyl siding. | <urn:uuid:f6dc2c9b-7b02-44da-b8e6-e0bbd707b042> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.clevelandareahistory.com/2010/03/worlds-first-porcelain-enamel-house.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397865.91/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00062-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975972 | 296 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Fitness for One and All Home Page
Vegetarianism and the Bible
By Gary F. Zeolla
NOTE: This article was revised and expanded for a chapter in the book God-given Foods Eating Plan. See the book for further details on the Biblical evidence and for scientific research that shows meat can and should be included in a healthy eating plan.
There are some who teach that the Bible teaches human beings should follow a vegetarian diet. This can be seen in some books on nutrition and the Bible. Also, some vegetarian and animal rights groups will proclaim that the Bible teaches vegetarianism or even that Jesus was a vegetarian as a means of furthering their agendas.
By "meat" in this article is meant all kinds of flesh foods, like red meat (beef), poultry, and fish.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture verses are taken from The New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publisher, 1982.
The Book of Genesis
Those who claim the Bible teaches vegetarianism base their theory on the following verses from the Book of Genesis:
29And God said, "See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food" (1:29).
9And out of the ground the LORD God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. ... 16And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat" (2:9, 2:16).
"And you shall eat the herb of the field." (3:18).
The claim is these verses describe God's "original" or "ideal" diet for human beings. And these verses only give human beings permission to eat plant foods. No animal foods are included. Such a diet is known as a "vegan" diet and is even more restrictive than a standard vegetarian diet, which usually includes eggs and dairy foods (more specifically called a ovo-lacto-vegetarian diet).
And if one stops reading here, that would be an appropriate interpretation. However, there are 1182 chapters in the Bible. And it is simply faulty exegesis (method of interpreting the Bible) to base a theory on just three chapters while ignoring the other 1179 chapters. All of what the Bible teaches on a subject should be considered. This is where many go wrong on this subject.
So what else does God have to say on this subject? The next passage that addresses the issue of food occurs after the flood.
God tells Noah and his family:
3"Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs" (9:3).
So after the flood, God definitely gives permission to humans to eat "every moving thing that lives." This would include meat. But why the change? This is hard to say. It could have something to do with the changed environment after the flood, or maybe some change in human physiology that occurred at that time. Remember, before the flood people lived over 900 years. So "something" happened.
Now, some vegetarian advocates claim this "something" was the very eating of meat; that this change in diet somehow caused human beings to go from living over 900 years to today's usual less than a century. But if this is all it was, then we should see today's vegetarians living to be 900 years old, or least a few hundreds years, but this, of course, is not happening. The "something" was much more fundamental.
The point is, God knew what He was doing. Maybe a vegan diet was "ideal" before the flood, but if it were still the ideal diet for human beings after the flood, He would not have given us permission to eat meat. This would have God telling us it is okay to do something He knows will harm us, but this is totally out of character for God. A more logical conclusion is God knew that in the post-flood world, human beings would be better off eating meat, and so He gave us permission to do so.
In fact, it seems God had planned for this change when he instructed Noah about the bringing of animals into the ark.
1Then the LORD said to Noah, "Come into the ark, you and all your household, because I have seen that you are righteous before Me in this generation. 2You shall take with you seven each of every clean animal, a male and his female; two each of animals that are unclean, a male and his female; 3also seven each of birds of the air, male and female, to keep the species alive on the face of all the earth" (7:1-3).
Noah is often pictured as taking two of every animal into the ark, but in fact, it was only of "unclean" animals that two were taken. For "clean" animals, seven of each was to be taken. But why the "extra" five for clean animals?
One reason would be for sacrifices (see Gen 8:20). But another very possible reason is that these would be the animals that people would now be eating. So their populations needed to expand faster than that of unclean animals that would not be eaten. And in fact, it seems that hunting very quickly became a valued activity:
8Cush begot Nimrod; he began to be a mighty one on the earth. 9He was a mighty hunter before the LORD; therefore it is said, "Like Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD" (10:8,9).
So shortly after God gave permission to eat meat, Nimrod was noted for his hunting abilities. In the genealogy list in Genesis 10, no other person is given special recognition for his skill in a particular activity. So the people of the time seem to have found the eating of game meat to be so prized as to want to give special recognition to those who were especially skilled at hunting.
1Then the LORD appeared to him [Abraham] by the terebinth trees of Mamre, as he was sitting in the tent door in the heat of the day. 2So he lifted his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing by him; and when he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them, and bowed himself to the ground, 3and said, "My Lord, if I have now found favor in Your sight, do not pass on by Your servant. 4Please let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. 5And I will bring a morsel of bread, that you may refresh your hearts. After that you may pass by, inasmuch as you have come to your servant." They said, "Do as you have said."
6So Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah and said, "Quickly, make ready three measures of fine meal; knead it and make cakes." 7And Abraham ran to the herd, took a tender and good calf, gave it to a young man, and he hastened to prepare it. So he took butter and milk and the calf which he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree as they ate (18:1-7).
Three men appear to Abraham. Apparently, one of these was the LORD Himself, possibly a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ. The other two were apparently angels (see Gen 19:1). And Abraham's reaction was to prepare them a special meal. And this meal included the preparing of a calf. And this meat was then given to the three men, and they ate it.
So Abraham had a calf slaughtered for food, and God Himself and two angels ate the meat. So it would seem that neither Abraham, the angels, and most importantly God Himself were vegetarians. If in fact a vegetarian diet were God's "ideal" diet for people then God would be setting a rather poor example by eating meat Himself.
Abraham later fathers Isaac. And Isaac marries Rebekah, who becomes pregnant. The story then continues:
24So when her days were fulfilled for her to give birth, indeed there were twins in her womb. 25And the first came out red. He was like a hairy garment all over; so they called his name Esau. 26Afterward his brother came out, and his hand took hold of Esau's heel; so his name was called Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them. 27So the boys grew. And Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field; but Jacob was a mild man, dwelling in tents. 28And Isaac loved Esau because he ate of his game, but Rebekah loved Jacob (25:24-28).
So once again we see someone singled out for his skills at hunting. And very obviously Isaac was not a vegetarian as he partook of Esau's game meat. In fact, his love of game meat later caused some problems. The story is told in chapter 27. It is too lengthy to quote here, but basically, Isaac tells Esau to hunt some game for him and he will then bless him. But Rebekah overhears and has Jacob disguise himself as Esau and has him bring meat to Isaac. And thus, Jacob steal Esau's blessing.
So the eating of meat is central to stories involving Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So none of these patriarchs appear to have been vegetarians. Even the LORD Himself and angels eat meat. So the eating of meat was done as a matter of course of life. This is simply what would be expected given God's decree after the flood. There is no hint that God expected people to remain vegetarians.
So just the reading of the rest of Genesis would show that the Bible does not teach vegetarianism. But there's much more.
The Book of Exodus
Next we will investigate the second Book of the Bible, Exodus.
1Now the LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, 2"This month shall be your beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you. 3Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying: 'On the tenth day of this month every man shall take for himself a lamb, according to the house of his father, a lamb for a household. 4And if the household is too small for the lamb, let him and his neighbor next to his house take it according to the number of the persons; according to each man's need you shall make your count for the lamb. 5Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats.
6Now you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month. Then the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it at twilight. 7And they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and on the lintel of the houses where they eat it. 8Then they shall eat the flesh on that night; roasted in fire, with unleavened bread and with bitter herbs they shall eat it. 9Do not eat it raw, nor boiled at all with water, but roasted in fire -- its head with its legs and its entrails. 10You shall let none of it remain until morning, and what remains of it until morning you shall burn with fire. 11And thus you shall eat it: with a belt on your waist, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. So you shall eat it in haste. It is the LORD's Passover'" (12:1-11).
These are God's instruction to Moses in preparation for the first Passover prior to the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt. And this ceremony was not to be done just once:
14"So this day shall be to you a memorial; and you shall keep it as a feast to the LORD throughout your generations. You shall keep it as a feast by an everlasting ordinance" (12:14).
So God commands that Jews keep this ceremony in perpetuity. And what was central to the Passover? The eating of lamb. And it should be noted that this was not just a permission; it was a direct command by God to the Jews. They are to eat lamb. It was not an option. So once a year, all Jews were to eat lamb. As such, it simply would be impossible for a Jew to be a vegetarian. They are commanded to eat meat at least once a year.
Moreover, it should be noted the number of lambs that would be slaughtered for this ceremony-one lamb per household or at least per two households. Now the number of Israelites exiting Egypt is debated, but most authorities believe it was at least one million. So for each household or two to have a lamb would require the slaughtering of probably tens of thousands of lambs.
And again, this was not done once, but continued on down through the centuries. By the time of Christ some authorities estimate that as many as one million lambs were slaughtered for Passover. So when some animal rights groups claim that God disapproves of the slaughter of animals for food, they seem to ignore the fact that millions upon millions of lambs have been slaughter throughout the centuries due to God's direct command in regards to just this one ceremony.
2Then the whole congregation of the children of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. 3And the children of Israel said to them, "Oh, that we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and when we ate bread to the full! For you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger." …
11And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 12"I have heard the complaints of the children of Israel. Speak to them, saying, 'At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall be filled with bread. And you shall know that I am the LORD your God.' "
13So it was that quails came up at evening and covered the camp, and in the morning the dew lay all around the camp. 14And when the layer of dew lifted, there, on the surface of the wilderness, was a small round substance, as fine as frost on the ground. 15So when the children of Israel saw it, they said to one another, "What is it?" For they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, "This is the bread which the LORD has given you to eat. (16:2-3,11-15).
This episode was when God first gave the Israelites manna to eat. But note that before the manna, God provided quails to them for food. So God Himself provided meat for His people. Also note that the Israelites fondly remember the "pots of meat" that had while still in Egypt.
13"Thou shalt not kill" (20:13; KJV).
Animal rights groups will sometimes try to quote this commandment to show that God disapproves of the killing of animals for food. But if this were the case, then this verse would be contradicting all of the verses cited above. Moreover, the word "kill" here is better translated as "murder" as can be seen in the NKJV and just about any other modern-day Bible version. This commandment regards the unjustified killing of another human beings. There is nothing in the context to indicate it is referring to animals; all of the Ten Commandments are referring to the actions of human beings towards God or other human beings.
1"And this is what you shall do to them to hallow them for ministering to Me as priests: Take one young bull and two rams without blemish …
31" And you shall take the ram of the consecration and boil its flesh in the holy place. 32Then Aaron and his sons shall eat the flesh of the ram, and the bread that is in the basket, by the door of the tabernacle of meeting. 33They shall eat those things with which the atonement was made, to consecrate and to sanctify them; but an outsider shall not eat them, because they are holy (29:1,31-33).
In Exodus 29, the LORD instructs Moses as to how Aaron and his sons are to be consecrated to be priests before Him. As part of this consecration, Aaron and his sons are to kill, boil, and eat one of the consecrated rams. So once again, God commands the killing and eating of an animal as part of a religious ceremony.
So in the Book of Exodus, God provides meat for His people to eat, and He commands the eating of meat as part of two different ceremonies.
Limitations on Animal Foods
4"But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood" (Gen 9:4)
31"And you shall be holy men to Me: you shall not eat meat torn by beasts in the field; you shall throw it to the dogs" (Exodus 22:31).
17This shall be a perpetual statute throughout your generations in all your dwellings: you shall eat neither fat nor blood" (Lev 3:17; see also Lev 7:23,24).
46"'This is the law of the animals and the birds and every living creature that moves in the waters, and of every creature that creeps on the earth, 47to distinguish between the unclean and the clean, and between the animal that may be eaten and the animal that may not be eaten'" (Leviticus 11:46,47).
Throughout the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), God places limitations on the eating of meat. The blood must be drained from the meat, the cover or outer fat of the meat must not be eaten, animals that are found dead should not be eaten, and only clean animals should be eaten.
There are sound health reasons for each of these limitations. These reasons are discussed in depth in Chapter Six of my Creationist Diet book, so I will not pursue the discussion here. But the important point here is, God gave these limitations as He assumed people would be eating meat. Moreover, if the very eating of meat itself were somehow wrong, God could have just forbid the eating of meat, and that would have been that. But instead, He tells us the healthiest way to go about consuming meat.
"you may eat as much meat as your heart desires"
15"However, you may slaughter and eat meat within all your gates, whatever your heart desires, according to the blessing of the LORD your God which He has given you; the unclean and the clean may eat of it, of the gazelle and the deer alike. 16Only you shall not eat the blood; you shall pour it on the earth like water.
17"You may not eat within your gates the tithe of your grain or your new wine or your oil, of the firstborn of your herd or your flock, of any of your offerings which you vow, of your freewill offerings, or of the heave offering of your hand. 18But you must eat them before the LORD your God in the place which the LORD your God chooses, you and your son and your daughter, your male servant and your female servant, and the Levite who is within your gates; and you shall rejoice before the LORD your God in all to which you put your hands. 19Take heed to yourself that you do not forsake the Levite as long as you live in your land.
20"When the LORD your God enlarges your border as He has promised you, and you say, 'Let me eat meat,' because you long to eat meat, you may eat as much meat as your heart desires. 21If the place where the LORD your God chooses to put His name is too far from you, then you may slaughter from your herd and from your flock which the LORD has given you, just as I have commanded you, and you may eat within your gates as much as your heart desires. 22Just as the gazelle and the deer are eaten, so you may eat them; the unclean and the clean alike may eat them" (Deut 12:15-22).
This passage is absolutely damaging to the idea that that the Bible teaches vegetarianism-"you may eat as much meat as your heart desires." How much clearer could God have been? But to be sure we don't miss it, God repeats this statement in some form three times (verses 15,20,21).
Now in this context, God does give some limitations. If the meat is part of the tithe that is given to the LORD, it must be eaten in the area where the tabernacle was located ("before the LORD"). And again, the restriction on the eating of blood is repeated. But God places no restrictions on the amount of meat that may be eaten-"you may eat as much meat as your heart desires."
Note also that God refers to animals from the herd and flock and to gazelles and deer. So God approves of eating both domesticated animals and game animals.
Part Two of this article will look at the attitude of additional prominent figures from the Old Testament towards the eating of meat. It will then move to the New Testament and investigate the relationship of Jesus and the apostles to the eating of meat.
The above article was posted on this site June 3, 2005.
It was first published in my Darkness to Light email newsletter,
published through my Christian Darkness to Light Web site.
Nutrition: Nutrition and the Bible
Text Search Alphabetical List of Pages Contact Information
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How are you going to celebrate Earth Day? How about exploring nocturnal animals and hosting your own shadow puppet show? We did all of that with our Green Kids Crafts Discovery Box!
We received a Nocturnal Animals Discovery Box packed with 4 different eco-friendly crafts. Even the box looked fun and my children were so excited to get started.
First, we got our shadow puppets ready for the puppet show and talked about which animals were nocturnal.
They were surprised to learn that kangaroos are mostly nocturnal. My daughter picked out the owl right away because she knew that animal was.
Next we turned the lantern craft into a group project. We discussed the bees and moths on the lantern and how they can be nocturnal.
The lantern came with a flame-less candle light and looked so pretty in the dark.
Finally we tried the stuffed owl. It was a little hard for my eldest daughter to make the legs with the rubber bands, so I helped out.
Our box also came with a bonus craft. Reusing an old plastic bottle from the recycling bin, we made a glow-in-the-dark firefly!
Even more activities and craft ideas were included in the Nocturnal Animals Activity Guide that I downloaded from the link on the back of my activity card.
As you can see in the video below, my children loved their Discovery Box and would have played with it for hours if I’d let them! It was a great Earth Day activity; to teach and learn all about the animals in our world.
About Green Kid Crafts
Green Kid Crafts delights over 10,000 kids across North America each month with fun, creative and eco-friendly craft and STEM activities (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), delivered right to their door through the company’s subscription program! Every month’s Discovery Box is packed with 3-4 unique and engaging activity kits designed to foster a child’s creativity and confidence while helping to raise the nation’s next generation of creative leaders.
For kids ages 3-10, their award-winning products celebrate creativity and activates thinking, questioning, inquiring, and original creation. Each month brings a new theme; past themes have included Mad Scientist, Nocturnal Animals, Around the World, Outer Space, and Feathered Friends.
Green Kid Crafts is a mom-owned, green company founded by Penny Bauder, a mom of two and an environmental activist from Alaska. Her program has won a variety of awards including Dr. Toy’s Best Green Products of 2013, PTPA Seal of Approval, a recommendation from Parents’ Choice, MACT Excellence and MACT Green Awards and Red Tricycle’s Award for Most Awesome Subscription Service.
An Earth Friendly Company
Green Kid Crafts is certified carbon neutral, Green America Approved, a member of 1% for the Planet, and has won numerous awards and designations for its responsible business practices. You can also read more about their “eco ingredients” online.
Subscriptions are available in month-to-month, 3, 6 and 12 month durations, and also make great gifts! Subscriptions start at just $16.95 / month, and sibling subscriptions are also available. The company also offers single Discovery Boxes, Creativity Kits, Science Kits, and Birthday Party activities and favors.
Hurry! Expires 4/30
How to Make a Shadow Puppet Theater
This was my kids’ favorite part of the whole night! We made our own shadow puppet theater under the dining room table. Covering the table with a white sheet and resting the light pen that came in our Green Kid Crafts box on a stool, the kids played for an hour.
They took turns putting on a show and experimenting with the shadows. You can see a clip of their shows below!
Green Kid Crafts Giveaway!
In celebration of Earth Day, Green Kid Crafts are giving away a 3 month subscription to this award winning program! Just enter the rafflecopter below!
More Chances to win!
I’ve partnered with Contest Patti to bring you another chance to win a 3 month subscription! You can read her review here. The giveaway is open to the US residents aged 18+ only. It starts on 04/09/14 at 0001 PST and ends 05/12/14 at 2359 PST. Enter using the form below. | <urn:uuid:41e4bb8b-e9cb-4127-8fbb-11e133229712> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.trueaimeducation.com/celebrate-earth-day-green-kids-crafts/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395613.65/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00197-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94829 | 925 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Sabha Ka Khel!
Learn in fun about Gandhiji, Nehruji, Sarojani Naidu struggle for freedom
Author: Subhadra Kumari Chauhan > Submitted by: Ramnaresh Tripathi, National Book Trust, India
Subhadra Kumari Chauhan (1904-1948) was an Indian poetess famous for her emotionally charged Hindi songs. She was born in a village called Nihalpur in Allahabad District. After her marriage to Thakur Laxman Singh of Khandwa in 1919, she moved to Jabalpur. She joined the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1921 and was the first woman Satyagrahi to court arrest in Nagpur. She was jailed twice for her involvement in protests against the British rule. She has authored a number of popular works in Hindi poetry. Her most famous composition is Jhansi Ki Rani, an emotionally charged poem describing the life of Rani Lakshmi Bai. The poem is one of the most recited and sung poems in Hindi literature. This and her other poems, Veeron Ka Kaisa Ho Basant, Rakhi Ki Chunauti and Vida, openly talk about the freedom movement. They are said to have inspired great numbers of Indian youth to participate in the Indian Freedom Movement.
Subhadra Kumari Chauhan writes in the Khariboli dialect of Hindi, in a simple, clear style. Apart from poems of heroism, she has also written poems for children. She also wrote some short stories based on the life of the middle class. She died in 1948 in a car accident. An Indian Coast Guard ship has been named after her.
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The Wye Grist Mill is located in the Town of Wye Mills, on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The Wye Grist Mill has been nearly continuously grinding grain since 1682, and produced flour that fed George Washington's Continental army during the American Revolutionary War.
Discover the long and rich history of the oldest commercial operation in Queen Anne's and Talbot Counties (the county boundaries run through the mill).
Watch the waterwheel turn the heavy millstones as they grind grain, with millers explaining the milling process.
Explore our exhibits - featuring over 325 years of the food processing technology used here.
Father of the Industrial Revolution
The 3rd United States patent, granted in 1790 and signed by then President George Washington, was granted to Oliver Evans for his process to automate grist mills.
Oliver's invention allowed grist mills to produce a higher quality flour - with much lower labor expenses.
The Wye Grist Mill was one of the first mills to be automated with the Evans process, still in use today at the Wye Grist Mill.
Oliver Evans also invented the high pressure steam engine, and was the first to design and build a wheeled vehicle powered by an engine.
More Oliver Evans History
WE ARE OPEN TODAY, SATURDAY JUNE 11, BUT CLOSED SUNDAY JUNE 12. VOLUNTEERS ARE TRULY NEEDED IF YOU HAVE A PASSION OF HISTORY !
The Wye Grist Mill is open from May to mid-November.
Monday thru Saturday
Open from 10:00 to 4:00.
Open from 1:00 to 4:00
Are the first and third Saturday of each month from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. Millers demonstrate the traditional stone grinding process.
A $2 donation per person is suggested. | <urn:uuid:725be543-ec78-4f8f-ba79-39b2b376d7ea> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://oldwyemill.org/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395548.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00068-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944821 | 378 | 2.890625 | 3 |
By Jerry Wilkinson
According to geologists, two millions years ago the world experienced
creatures called our first ancestors. The earth was beginning a cooling
period this time due to under water volcanic upheavals creating a land
bridge we call Central America. Before this the two continents we call
North and South America were separate islands. This new bridge or dam
disrupted an almost unimpeded water exchange between the Pacific and
Atlantic Oceans resulting in a huge build up of ice at each polar
regions - the Ice Age. A better term would be the glacial age as
ice masses extended far below the polar caps. Caution should be used as
"ice age" has been used for every prolonged cooling period. The most
intense was probably about 800 million years ago when it is said most
of, or the
entire, earth was covered with ice. Global temperature is not static.
Fast forwarding, with the coming of the Wisconsin Ice Age (80,000 >
12,000 years ago) and the
accompanying falling sea levels a
land bridge (Bering) was formed across the Bering Sea and Alaska
(45,000>15,000 years ago). It is generally believed that Asian
hunter-gatherers migrated with domestic animals to North America. DNA
evidence supports a North American familial relationship with the
To the south of the mainland of Florida is the skeleton of an ancient and a not-so-ancient coral reef. Generally, only the parts above the water are thought of as the Florida Keys, but the entire platform evolved while under water. There are about 882 charted islands beginning with Miami Beach created by marine sea life.
These islands were referred to as "cayos" by the early Spanish travelers and map makers. The English generally used the word "kay" or "cay" for small islands. Somehow this became "Key" for us Americans. The first specific written use of "key" being used for our islands that I have is lawsuit for a shipwreck in 1744 which was before the Revolution. There is probably more to the derivation than this. For example the word "cay" is pronounced 'key' by the English.
The Florida Keys can be categorized based on their geology. The upper-Upper Keys or northern Keys (Miami-Dade County) are sedimentary in nature. These begin at the northern boundary with Virginia Key and pass southwestward to about Soldier Key and are generally sediments on top of a foundation of a more solid layer of rock. The surfaces of these islands are not rock-hard as the remainder of the Keys. A note that Virginia Key was named in the U.S. Coast Survey of 1849 by F.G. Gerdes who stated that it had only existed "twn or twelve" years. This would be after Florida became a U.S. Territory in 1821.
From Soldier Key southward are the non sedimentary Keys classified as High Coral Keys, Low Coral Keys and the Oolite Keys. There is not a clear dividing line but the Upper and Middle Keys are of Key Largo Limestone which are the peaks of once live coral forests. These were once live, thriving and dense forests of many corals and other marine organisms - flora and fauna. As one would expect the coral forests were of various densities and heights; however, they are of less height the farther south one goes except for Key West. These have heights from 10 to 18 feet. The Low Coral Keys are from five to 10 feet. As the glaciers reformed taking water from the ocean, sea level dropped, the coral forests died and collapsed into islands we now live on.
The Lower Keys was a huge shallow sandy and oolite shoal traversed with many channels. Oolite is compacted small egg shaped deposits of calcium carbonate and in this area lays on top of Key Largo Limestone. Big Pine Key signals the beginning of the Oolite Keys.
Human history begins with geography and migration. Geography defines possible physical places to live, and we migrate to the geographic locations that serve our needs. Many geographic locations are the result of internal upheavals of the earth's crust, or lack thereof. The newer geological structures of the Florida Keys, however, were created by marine life.
I do not believe we know the complete process, but it is said that there was an ancient reef about 500 million years ago. During the Pleistocene Epoch (2-3 million years ago) shifting sands formed massive shoals over the ancient geologic ocean bottom.
The tops of these sand shoals were shallow enough for photosynthesis from sunlight to allow corals to grow. Corals do not significant grow is waters deeper than 40 feet - there is not enough sun light. The "corals" are carnivorous animals with hard skeletons that eat other small organisms. Actually, the coral animal is called the "polyp" and its outer skeleton is "coral." It is of the phylum Coelenterata (hollow sac) and the class Anthozoa (flower animal). These coral polyp growths formed on top of the sandy shoals. If conditions are right, corals can grow forests under water just as trees do on land. As they die the calcium carbonate skeletons accumulate as do leaves and branches of forests. Unlike trees whose leaves and branches are organic and decay (rot), the skeletons of the corals remain and form piles which when large enough become an island. At that time the water level is estimated to have been about 20 or more feet higher than it is now. This was the beginning of the not-so-ancient (today's) coral reef; albeit, under water.
Principal reef building corals were the elk horn, stag horn, brain and star corals. They were the architects and builders. The spaces in between these large corals were filled in by many other calcium carbonate organisms and plants. These include sea fans, mollusks, corals debris, et cetera; however, the most prolific is a relatively unnoticeable green algae called "Halimeda."
The entire mass is solidified and cemented together by the many calcium carbonate precipitates. There are a host of other organic and inorganic calcium carbonate sources, including the sea water itself. Therefore, the deepest layer was the ancient ocean bottom with layers of sand on top of it and a new coral reef building layer by layer on top of that.
Nature's climate pendulum is constantly swinging between warm and cold spells (glacial and inter-glacial periods.) For some unexplained reason, about 100,000 to 125,000 years ago the earth's temperature began cooling form one of its very warm periods and the two polar ice caps began to grow. This warm period is an interglacial period and this particular is know as the Sangamon period. The increased ice in the polar caps very slowly removed fresh water from the oceans. As a result, the ocean level dropped, the living reefs began to die, and, with time, became completely exposed - Voilia, the Keys appeared. As the sea waters fell, the shoreline moved outward and more land mass was exposed.The ocean level is thought to have fallen as much as 300 to 450 feet at its lowest levels. The high seawater level occurred about 125,000 years ago, the low was about 20,000 years ago and the outer reefs went under water about 6,000 years ago. This shown in the drawing at the right: The blue is Florida 125,000 before present (BP), the pink Florida 26,000 BP and the gray is today. What today we call the Keys were the very high points of a very wide penisular.
At the 20,000BP time most of the Keys were connected together and part of terresterial Florida with savanna type plant and animal life. There are several connations to this scenario and you can derive more: 1) The living part of the outer reef we know today is no older than 6,000 BP and probably less. 2) Most likely the Keys were not populated 20,000 BP, but even 6,000 years ago one could have walked and inhabited the outer reefs; therefore, could explain why we do not find very very old remains of inhabitants. 3) Organtic material on the Keys can be 20,000 years or more in age. Please left-click on the image to enlarge and use the back green arrow to return here.
Editorializing, I concur with this as to my knowledge there is little
evidence that the Keys have human kitchen middens older that 3,000
years ago. This is often abbreviated as BP meaning 'Before Present.'
The state archeologists estimate the Key Largo Calusa Campground
midden's last occupation was 1,000 AD to 1300 AD. The archaeological
site number is '8Mo26.' I believe most of us believe that there were
much earlier occupants here and if so, they would have been along the
water's edges which would have been where the underwater reef is today.
Their middens were long ago destroyed by water actions, hurricanes,
etc. It is generally thought that the falling of the sea level made a
land bridge in the
Bering Sea and humans crossed over from Asia to the North
American continent - a commonly used date is 20,000 BP. It is
conjecture when humans first inhabited Florida, perhaps 10,000BP and
added conjecture of whether the inhabitans came from the north or the
Previously I used the word pendulum; therefore, more or less 20,000 BP the polar caps began to slowly melt (CO2 began increasing) as it is doing now (2013), the sea water begin rising. With the passing of time, the coral crust was again covered with water 20 t0 30 feet above 20,000BP level. As the sea level rose, it spilled over the outer reef from the east and filled today's Hawk Channel and Florida Bay was flooded by the Gulf from the west. New corals began to grow where conditions were right. The Keys became separated from mainland of Florida. I am suggesting that we are still in this warming period - nothing new - we are just waking up.
Strong local water currents of tidal and storm actions washed back and forth cutting channels at lower passages. The colder, saltier and nutrient-richer Florida Bay water flowed through and impeded new coral growth wherever it touched the live corals.Because the Upper Keys were higher and generally longer than the Lower Keys, there were fewer channels for water to flow through and impede coral growth. That is the reason there are more and shallower outer reefs in the Upper Keys. This effect can be easily seen on a map. The flow was so significant that the Lower Keys are aligned more north and south than the Upper Keys. It was so killing that very little coral has grown west of Key West in the last 6,000 years.
The fossilized layer of this coral growth is known as Key Largo
a name given by geologists for this type of limestone formation. The
and Middle Keys are primarily of Key Largo Limestone although it lays
the oolitic formations to the north and south.
Coral rock is a generalized word to define the aggregate of the "corals" and all of the other calcium carbonate-producing organisms. Splendid examples can be seen at the walls of the Marvin D. Adams Waterway, or the Windley Key Quarry (see photo). The Lower Keys and Miami-Dade area are of oolite (both are called Miami Oolite). Below the oolite is Key Largo Limestone.
As time passed, well defined islands evolved and mature botanical growth flourished. The water levels continued to rise and formed and reformed channels. Wind, birds and water carried in botanical life that slowly took root and grew. These plants and newly arrived animal life lived their life cycles on the islands. Rich soil was formed from the decayed organic material.
Hurricanes, fires (organic soil will burn) and clearing by settlers, including us, have considerably thinned the once rich soil. Some original soil has been covered by fill obtained by dredging of canals that makes it appear even less evident.
North American Indians, and possibly other native groups, migrated to these fertile islands. The islands are peppered with habitation midden sites waiting to be scientifically studied. A huge mound of coral rock, known locally as the Key Largo Temple Mound, and a burial mound on Lignumvitae Key beckon credentialed archaeologists to reveal their history.
Geologists are certain that as the polar ice melted, Hawk Channel changed from dry or damp land to swamp land and finally as it is today. Florida Bay was the Everglades of yesteryear and the Everglades area was a savanna. This means that early Paleo-Indians could have walked or waded out to the present reef some six to seven thousand years ago. If so, these early Paleo, or Archaic, Indian village sites that might have existed are now under water. In November 2002, Mel Fisher under-water archaeologists found an underwater forest near the site of of the Henrietta Maria slave ship about 35 miles off of Key West. It appears to be a burned forest of prehistoric pine land and radiocarbon cones and wood were dated as 8,400 years old. Albeit no human remains have been found, it does indicate that a habitat was available had humans been there. I predict more evidence will be discovered where there is sand to cover the artifacts.
As a comparison date, this would have been some 3,000 years before the earliest Mesopotamian Cities that have been carbon test dated.
Going back to the formation of soil, it was evidently very good. The type of vegetation also had to be of the type that could anchor itself to withstand the wind and water. So prolific and mature were the trees that the Keys served as an important source for lumber in the early times. James Grant, the first English governor of East Florida, sent Captain Benjamin Barton to the Keys in 1763 to stop Bahamians from cutting large quantities of mahogany and other valuable timber.
As late as 1849, U.S. Coast and Geodetic Surveyor F. H. Gerdes stated in his report on Key Largo: "At the lower pt. of Whalton's Cove or about 7 miles from the upper pt. of the Id. [island] is an elevation, named Basin Hill, 90 ft. high, according to Capt. Barnet and Blunt's chart. " (Whalton's Cove is west of there the early light ship was moored and Capt. John Whalton would row/sail to shore for fresh water or maintain his garden.) We know that the surface elevation is about 15 feet there today. Gerdes went on to explain that he also thought the 90 feet included the trees as "the elevation does not appear to be near 90 ft." One of the Keys north of Ocean Reef is named "Palo Alto" which could be translated as "tall wood."
In historical times the outer and patch reefs have been growing upward, almost keeping pace with the rise in sea water. As previously stated, outer reef growth is especially evident in front of the longer Upper Keys, which have held back the coral-killing currents of Florida Bay.
None of these changes in sea level happened rapidly. In geologic time, 1,000 years is just a blink of the eye. Sea level is not static; it has been rising and falling since the beginning of time. For example, three recent sea level peak heights were about 120,000, 80,000 and 30,000 years ago. The one that completely covered the Keys sand shoals well enough for significant coral growth on their highest points was 120,000 years ago.
The Navy had been recording specific tide and sea levels at Key West for decades. Using that data as a reference, some experts believe that the sea level has been rising an average of about 2 feet every 1,000 years. Almost all agree that it has been rising, but others believe that the rate of rise has been less. This generally is thought to be caused by global warming due to a decrease in the ozone layer. Instead of the 8,000-year average of 3.5 inches per 100 years, in 1989 it was reported to be 15 inches per 100 years at Key West. Will the future ocean begin to fall again, or will the pendulum keep swinging and raise the water another 20 feet to inundate south Florida up to about Sebring in central Florida?
At this rate and without other changes, in about 1,300 years the water
will have risen about 16 feet (5 meters). Only one small point in Key
Lignumvitae Key, Windley Key and a ridge on Key Largo and Plantation
will remain dry at high tides. An argument against this extreme is that
there have been smaller undulations of sea level since the large one
30,000 years ago. These are estimated at 8,000 to 6,700; 4,300 to
2,800 to 2,000 and 1,600 to 1,200 years before present. The argument
an extreme increase is the effect of man and the ozone layer called
I have prepared a separate web page to present discussion and
professional charts of rising water in the Keys. If interested please CLICK HERE and use back arrow to return.
In geological time the sea levels are constantly changing.
Land from the Sea by John Edward Hoffmeister, 1974; Geology of the
Keys by Eugene A. Shinn, Oceanus, 1988 and Paleoshorelines, Reefs, and
a Rising Sea: South Florida, U.S.A. by Barbara H. Lidz and Eugene A. | <urn:uuid:bac394fe-0a39-4223-9030-cd67f225fbe5> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.keyshistory.org/keysgeology.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397748.48/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00112-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965824 | 3,705 | 3.390625 | 3 |
Soap companies donít seem to think soap really gets people, or dishes, clean. About half the liquid soaps they sell in the United States are fortified with bacteria-killing chemicals.
Soap companies say an abundance of evidence shows that these products kill more germs than ordinary soap does. Thatís debatable, but itís not even the point. Thereís no benefit to killing germs unless the result is less illness. And there is no good evidence that antimicrobials protect peopleís health. And increasing evidence suggests they may help make germs more powerful.
Over the next year, soapmakers will have to either prove their germ-killing products are safe and effective or else take them off the market, the Food and Drug Administration has ruled. This mandate comes decades later than it should have; the FDA first drafted the order 35 years ago. It took a lawsuit from the Natural Resources Defense Council to force the agencyís hand. Still, it is the right move.
The research so far suggests that soapmakers have an uphill climb to meet the FDAís demand. In a 2007 survey of multiple studies, not a single one of four trials showed a significant reduction in illness symptoms in households that used antimicrobial soap.
The survey also cast doubt on the idea that these products are superior germ killers. In five of nine studies, those who washed with an antimicrobial had significantly fewer bacteria on their hands. Yet in four of those trials, the biocide used was two to 10 times as concentrated as is typical in consumer soaps. In the fifth study, the reduction in bacteria was achieved only when volunteers washed their hands for 30 seconds 18 times a day.
To continue selling antimicrobials, the soap industry will also have to address new indications that some of these products may be harmful.
The most common agent in antimicrobial soaps is triclosan, a chemical that is structurally similar to thyroid hormones and has been shown in animal studies to alter hormone regulation. Other studies suggest that triclosan and the related agent triclocarban may contribute to antibiotic resistance in bacteria that cause disease in humans. More than 2 million people fall ill with antibiotic-resistant infections in the U.S. each year, and at least 23,000 die. Research has shown that triclosan can enter the food chain through wastewater. Itís become so ubiquitous, 72 percent of Americans have triclosan residue in their urine.
These are hardly risks worth taking, absent strong evidence that antibacterial soaps make people healthier. If soap companies canít prove their products work, the FDA should ban them. | <urn:uuid:ed0538e9-6bf5-4821-9574-396348e7205e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.news-herald.com/opinion/20131226/editorial-big-soaps-claims-dont-yet-hold-water | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783408840.13/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155008-00041-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958657 | 538 | 3.0625 | 3 |
Apply for Social Security Benefits at age 18
What is SSI?
Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is a Federal assistance program designed to provide income to aged, blind, or disabled people who have limited assets with which to support themselves.
The SSI program is managed by the Social Security Administration (SSA), but financed by the general tax fund. Because the program is not financed by Social Security taxes, there are no work requirements necessary to qualify for SSI.
When a person age 18 or older applies for SSI, the Social Security Administration also determines whether s/he may be eligible for Social Security Disability benefits. These benefits are provided to people who meet the same stringent disability standards that apply to SSI, and who have "insured status". Insured status depends on the person or a particular family member having worked and paid into the Social Security system through the FICA payroll tax for a period of time. There are three types of Social Security Disability benefits: (1) Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which is based on the individuals' own earnings history, and may be awarded to people at least 18 years old, (2) Childhood Disability Beneficiary (CDB), which may be awarded to a person who is at least age 18, has been disabled since before age 22 and whose parent (who worked and paid into Social Security) is retired, disabled or deceased, and (3) Disabled Widows/Widowers Benefit (DWB), for people age 50 or older whose deceased spouse paid into Social Security.
A person who receives $693/month or less from Social Security Disability benefits may often qualify for a small SSI check as well. SSI provides automatic eligibility for Medical Assistance. Social Security Disability provides Medicare, but only after a two-year waiting period.
Try to schedule your interview with Social Security to take place immediately after your child turns 18. You may want to call before the child’s birthday, however the interview will not be able to take place until the child is 18. A person may not have more than $2000 in assets to be eligible for SSI. Adjustments may have to be made five years prior to age 18. Be sure to alert other family members not to give large gifts of money or stocks directly to your young adult directly or in their wills.
It may also be appropriate to collect monthly room and board from your young adult who will receive SSI and continue to live with you at home because this will establish a pattern of their paying a portion of their benefits towards monthly rent in preparation for them moving into their own housing. | <urn:uuid:ed4bc4d6-f8d6-40de-ad7b-52518636cd95> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.pathfindersforautism.org/ages/13-17/funding/apply-for-social-security | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399117.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00141-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965302 | 529 | 2.59375 | 3 |
As your local water provider, we have a responsibility to protect your water supply and help ensure the health, safety and economic vitality of our community. We carefully monitor several factors, including levels of our reservoirs, snowpack and forecasted stream flow.
As of June 2, 2016
Current reservoir levels
System wide, total water storage is at 80 percent of capacity, which is 4 percent above average (1981 through 2010).
- In May, the average temperature was below average, as measured at the airport.
- Precipitation for the month was above average.
- The Drought Monitor shows drier conditions have moved out of Colorado.Drought Monitor shows drier conditions have moved out of Colorado.
- The frequent precipitation kept demands low for May.
- The colder temperatures in the mountains have delayed runoff.
- We currently have 2.8 years of demand in storage.
- We are monitoring streamflow, demand and storage to assess the water supply situation.
- Currently, the Water Shortage Ordinance is set at Stage 1 Voluntary Restrictions, which means customers are asked to continue to use water wisely.
See the full report.
||70 percent (1981 to 2010 avg. 73 percent) percent (1981 to 2010 avg. 73 percent)|
||89 percent (1981 to 2010 avg. 87 percent)|
||82 percent (1981 to 2010 avg. 82 percent)|
How does Colorado Springs Utilities determine that we are in are in a drought?
There are a variety of factors used to determine when we are in a drought including: long range forecasts, storage levels, snowpack, operational constraints, soil moisture and others. If total system storage is projected to be below 1.5 years of demand in storage on April 1 then the results are reported to the City Council with a recommendation for implementation of water shortage response measures.
How do we determine what Water Shortage Ordinance stage we are in?
Our water supply staff create a forecast of water storage levels. If the forecast shows that storage will get below our risk tolerance threshold of one year of demand in storage, experts estimate how much water savings will be needed to keep us at or near that threshold. Each stage of drought response has a corresponding estimate of expected water savings associated with it. We set the Water Shortage Ordinance stage by matching the amount of savings needed with the amount of savings expected from the various stages.
(Click on image to enlarge or for more information from NOAA.) | <urn:uuid:e0fae21d-2c45-44cd-829a-d4185f60666f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://www.csu.org/Pages/water-outlook-r.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398869.97/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00056-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939896 | 504 | 2.515625 | 3 |
The Chocolate Touch
by Patrick Skene Illustrated by Margot Apple
Reviewed by McKenzie L. (age 7)
McKenzie L. is a student in Mrs. Weidemann's 2nd Grade through 3rd Grade Class
John Midas loved chocolate so much that he found a coin and he bought a chocolate. There was only one chocolate and that chocolate was a magic one. He ate it and after that everything that he touched with his mouth turned to chocolate. His pencil turned to chocolate and his trumpet turned to chocolate. He even ate his gloves because they turned into chocolate. Will he ever get rid of this chocolate touch? Read this book to find out!
I liked this book because it was a good story. My favorite part was when John went to the doctor and he broke the doctor's spoon. I like this part because it was funny. I would like to have the chocolate touch too, even though all that stuff happened. I'd keep it and I wouldn't tell anybody!
I recommend that you read this book because it makes you think. I like this about the book. Fifth grade and up should read it. | <urn:uuid:701de672-b29b-468a-8d87-4976c8f03542> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://spaghettibookclub.org/review.php?review_id=3618 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403826.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00132-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.993097 | 232 | 2.65625 | 3 |
- Historic Sites
Inventing The Interview
It emerged just a century and a half ago as an unrespectable reporter’s gimmick but came to dominate newsgathering
October 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 6
The rise of the interview coincides with the rise of newspaper reporters as relatively autonomous workers eager to achieve an occupational identity. Reporters in the late nineteenth century came to identify with one another across newspapers (in addition to identifying with their own employers). Other professionalizing changes in news writing occurred in the same era. There was a shift from a fairly informal address from a reporter to an editor (“The sky was blue and air was clear when I set off to the Capitol this morning ...”) to a thirdperson professional address to the reader (“Rep. Jones today introduced a path-breaking spending measure ...”). Chronologically presented news gave way to a summary lead and inverted pyramid structure that required the reporter to make judgments about what aspects of an event mattered most. Journalists began to be less relayers of documents and messages and more interpreters and explainers. The summary lead and the interview enlarged the reporter’s field of action and sphere of discretion. They helped make him or her a visible public type, even occasionally a celebrity. The interview especially demonstrated—to the audience, to the editor, to other journalists, and to other sources—not that the reporter speaks truth to power but that the reporter speaks close to power.
Over time interviewing became less the occasion for a separate feature article and more a routine technique incorporated into most news stories. After first appearing in the unusually democratic culture of the mid-nineteenth-century United States, it grew up to offer a novel mechanism for public watchfulness over the powerful. This intimate surveillance, especially suited to a democratic society, was by the 1930s well institutionalized, but it could never shed its contradictions—including the vulnerability of the reporter to the source, of the source to the reporter, and of the public to both. | <urn:uuid:54be9ae4-1133-4c56-a8f0-5d064d9ce609> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.americanheritage.com/content/inventing-interview?page=3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395992.75/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00201-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953928 | 408 | 2.984375 | 3 |
That night Mickey was nowhere to be found, nor his little fellow-servant either. Where could they be? Their master sent people to search for them; but no one had seen them. It seemed strange indeed, that a boy who had been so kindly treated, and who had seemed as happy as Mickey, should run away. The good missionary and his children were in great grief, fearing that some accident had befallen the lads.
But when the time came to take the bread out of the oven, they began to suspect why Mickey had gone away. They saw some one had stolen large pieces of bread. They said, “Perhaps it was Mickey who stole the bread, and perhaps he is ashamed, and so he has run away.” What a pity it was that Mickey did not come, and confess his fault; he would have been pardoned and restored to favor. Even a good boy may fall into a great sin; but then he will own it, and ask forgiveness, both of God and man. Still Mickey was not like those hardened boys who robbed Mr. Eyre, for he was ashamed.
Month after month passed away, but no Mickey appeared. The missionary feared that the boy would never return, but live and die amongst his heathen countrymen.
One day, however, he was told that a man was at the door, who wanted to speak to him.
“Who is he?” inquired the missionary.
“A schoolmaster, sir,” replied the servant.
“And what does he want?”
“He has brought with him some native boys, and he wants you to come out and see them, and speak a few words to them about their Saviour.”
The missionary gladly consented to go out to behold so pleasing a sight, as a school of native boys. As soon as he appeared, several young voices called out, “Mickey no come.”
The missionary was surprised, and inquired of the boys, “What do you mean? where is Mickey?”
“Mickey no come,” repeated the boys. “He too much frightened.”
“Why is he afraid?” asked the missionary.
“Because he steal de bread,” replied the boys.
The missionary now began to look around, and soon espied Mickey, trying to hide himself behind a fence. He called him; but Mickey, instead of coming, went further off. Two or three boys then ran towards him, and attempted to bring him back, but Mickey resisted.
The missionary then went into the house hoping that the trembling culprit, seeing he was gone, would come out of his hiding-place.
Very soon he was told, that Mickey was standing with the other boys at the door. Then the good missionary appeared again. Looking kindly at Mickey, he said, “Why did you run away?”
“Because me steal de bread; me very sorry.”
The missionary held out his hand to the sorrowful offender, saying, “I forgive you, Mickey.” The boy eagerly seized the kind hand, and holding it fast, and looking earnestly up in the missionary’s face, he said, “When me steal again, you must whip me—and whip me—and whip me—very—very much.” Again the missionary assured the boy he had entirely forgiven him—and then Mickey began to jump about for joy. | <urn:uuid:dfda2e0f-e0c6-4102-b2ab-d32380d3e592> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.bookrags.com/ebooks/13011/123.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397748.48/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00074-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.990609 | 732 | 2.5625 | 3 |
The Nippur Bowls - Incantation Bowls (circa 600 CE)
Found in Nippur, Babylonia, these bowls contain some of the most lengthy and explicit references to Lilith up to this point. Of the 40 bowls which were excavated, 26 explicitly mentioned the figure of Lilith, and at least three of these bowls contain sketches of Lilith as their central image (Pereira 53). While the date was originally placed at 500 CE, 600 CE is the more currently accepted date (Montgomery 28, Patai 225). The bowls were used mostly by Jews, a detail which is substantiated by the fact that an important Jewish colony was located in Nippur during the sixth century and also by some of the "incontrovertible evidence" contained within the bowls themselves (Patai 225). As Raphael Patai points out, these bowls are particularly important, for "while the Talmud contains the views of the learned elite about Lilith, these bowls show what she meant for the simple people. It is surprising to see to what extent the sages and the quacks shared the fear of Lilith and the belief in her evil nature" (225).
As a whole, the texts of these bowls are "magical incantations against various forms of illness and demons" (Periera 52). The ones which feature Lilith, however, give enough additional information as to provide a synopsis of how the "simple people" viewed her during this time. Says Patai: "It appears that Lilith was regarded as the ghostly paramour of men and constituted a special danger for women during many periods of their sexual life cycle: before defloration, during menstruation, etc. A mother in the hour of childbirth and her newborn babe were especially vulnerable, and therefore had to be protected from the Liliths" (225). It would appear, therefore, that two of the strands of Lilith have joined together at this point: child-slayer and succubus.
It is beneficial to quote the text of a bowl, illustration #2, where Lilith appears naked and wingless with long loose hair, chained ankles, prominent breasts, and strongly marked genitals. This text, which appears in various scholarly sources in a number of slightly differing translations, appears below in Patai's translation:
You are bound and sealed, all you demons and devils and Liliths, by that hard and strong, mighty and powerful bond with which are tied Sison and Sisin. . . . The evil Lilith, who causes the hearts of men to go astray and appears in the dream of the night and in the vision of the day, who burns and casts down with nightmare, attacks and kills children, boys and girls -- she is conquered and sealed away from the house and from the threshold of Bahram-Gushnasp son of Ishtar-Nahid by the talisman of Metatron, the great prince who is called the Great Healer of Mercy . . . who vanquishes demons and devils, black arts and mighty spells and keeps them away from the house and threshold of Bahram-Gushnasp, the son of Ishtar-Nahid. Amen, Amen, Selah. Vanquished are the black arts and mighty spells, vanquished the bewitching women, they, their witchery and their spells, their curses and their invocations, and kept away from the four walls of the house of Bahram=Gushnasp, the son of Ishtar-Nahid. Vanquished and trampled down are the bewitching women, vanquished on earth and vanquished in heaven. Vanquished are the constellations and stars. Bound are the works of their hands. Amen, Amen, Selah. (229)
This text demonstrates clearly that Lilith's guises of child-slayer and succubus were linked at this point, at least in the cultures of the lay-people.
- "Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree"
- The Lilith Relief
- Isaiah 34:14
- Testament of Solomon
- The Talmud
- The Nippur Bowls
- The Alphabet of Ben Sira
- Book of Raziel
- The Zohar
- Hebrew Amuletic Tradition | <urn:uuid:7b9b46dd-e22b-4f3b-b187-9137ea247a9a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://feminism.eserver.org/theory/papers/lilith/nippur.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398516.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00148-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960182 | 875 | 2.921875 | 3 |
Muslims believe that during the first night of Ramadan God began to reveal the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). The Quran is the Muslim holy book. Many figures that appear in the pages of the Old Testament, such as Moses and Abraham, are in the Quran, as are Jesus Christ and his mother, Mary. The holy book contains laws for serving God as well as rules for living and conducting business.
The month of Ramadan, which begins on Tuesday, July 9, this year, is the holiest month and the ninth on the Islamic lunar calendar.
During the 30 days of Ramadan, Muslims fast completely during daylight hours. Fasting to Muslims is defined as abstaining from eating, drinking and sexual intercourse from dawn until sunset. Muslims prepare for the fast with a light meal before dawn and eat an evening main meal at sunset.
Besides giving up all food, liquid, tobacco or sex during the month of fasting, they must also abstain from lying, cheating, back-biting, gossip, false witness and other bad habits. During the month of fasting, people put food and other distractions aside to concentrate on building a closer relationship with God.
Some people may say when we start the fast that we hate it, but by the end of the month we hate to end it. If people fully understood all the blessings that can come to them during Ramadan, they would wish that Ramadan lasted all year.
Each celebration of Ramadan should make Muslims draw so much closer to God that it becomes more natural to put aside the bad habits people are consciously trying to refrain from during Ramadan. Muslims should be better people this year than they were last year from Ramadan.
Before dawn during Ramadan, Muslims are encouraged to meet with God for special prayers. We wake up early and perform prayers. We can enjoy the quiet and give that special time to God. It gives us a special sweetness. Then we eat a light meal.
There are physical benefits of fasting. The body can cleanse itself during the fast, and people can lose weight. But the spiritual benefits are even more long-lasting.
Fasting is practiced in the Jewish and Christian faiths as well.
During Ramadan, Muslims are encouraged to perform acts of charity. Those excused from the fast include people who are sick or traveling and women who are pregnant or nursing. They may make up their days after Ramadan or pay a ransom to the poor.
In contrast to the Christian belief that grace will open the gates of heaven, Muslims believe they must earn their way on the Day of Judgment with good deeds. They believe that the good deeds they perform during Ramadan are multiplied and that God will honor their prayers and supplications in a very blessed way during Ramadan.
Besides the physical discipline and spiritual growth Ramadan fosters, Muslims believe it helps them understand the poor in a more tangible way. Feeling hunger helps Muslims identify with the poor better than a sermon or a lecture can.
Each Muslim must be responsible for feeding one poor person during Ramadan. Historically, Muslims have sent donations through established worldwide charities to help take care of poor families in countries such as Palestine, Sudan, Somalia and many other parts of the Muslim world.
This year, the shadow of genocide in Syria hovers over Ramadan. We can be in deeper prayer to help us establish peace on Earth.
For me and my family, this will be our first Ramadan in Augusta and we pray that we enjoy it. Amen. | <urn:uuid:b1e34ad4-e089-4bca-af01-e08645a0e4a8> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://chronicle.augusta.com/life/your-faith/2013-07-03/celebration-ramadan-draws-muslims-closer-god | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396027.60/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00129-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968934 | 697 | 3.28125 | 3 |
Mushroom Genome Could Assist In Biofuel Production and Carbon Management
19 July 2007
|Agaricus bisporus. Source: University of Warwick|
Researchers at the University of Warwick are coordinating a global effort to sequence the genome of the mushroom Agaricus bisporus—also known as the table or button mushroom. A better understanding of the mushroom’s genome could assist in the creation of biofuels, support the effort to manage global carbon, and help remove heavy metals from contaminated soils.
The Agaricus mushrooms are highly efficient secondary decomposers of plant material such as leaves and litter, breaking down the material that is too tough for other fungi and bacteria to handle.
How Agaricus it does this, particularly how it degrades lignin, is not fully understood. By sequencing the full genome of the mushroom, researchers hope to uncover exactly which genes are key to this process. That information will be useful to scientists and engineers looking to maximize the decomposition and transformation of plant material into biofuels.
The mushroom also forms an important model for carbon cycling studies. Carbon is sequestered in soils as plant organic matter. Between 1–2 gigatonnes of carbon per year are sequestered in pools on land in the temperate and boreal regions of the earth, which represents 15–30% of annual global emissions of carbon from fossil fuels and industrial activities. Understanding the carbon cycling role of these fungi in the forests and other ecosystems is an important component of optimizing carbon management.
Several Agaricus species are also able to hyper-accumulate toxic metals in soils at a higher level than many other fungi. Understanding how the mushroom does this improves prospects of using such fungi for the bioremediation of contaminated soils.
Agaricus bisporus is one of the most widely cultivated mushrooms, with annual world-wide production of 2 million tonnes with a value of £3 billion (US$6.1 billion). The genome research will also benefit growers and consumers through identification of improved quality traits such as disease resistance.
The University of Warwick’s horticultural research arm Warwick HRI will co-ordinate provision of genetic materials to the Joint Genome Institute in California for sequencing, will organize analysis of the sequence data and act as curator of the mushroom genome.
The other partners in the international project team are: DOE Joint Genome Institute USA, University of Bristol, USDA Research at University of Wisconsin, Southeast Missouri State University, Clark University, Sylvan Inc USA, Institut für Forstbotanik der Universität Göttingen, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Public University of Navarre, Penn State University, Plant Research International Wageningen and Universiteit Utrecht.
Agaricus bisporus has around 35 megabases of genetic information coding for an estimated 11,000 genes. The researchers expect to have a 90% complete genome within 3 years.
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|First Proof of Ferromagnetic Carbon|
Although it has long been suspected that carbon belongs on the short list of materials that can be magnetic at room temperature, attempts to prove that pure carbon can be magnetized have remained unconvincing. However, using a proton beam and an advanced x-ray microscope at the Advanced Light Source, a multinational team of researchers from the SSRL, the University of Leipzig, and the ALS finally put to rest doubts about the existence of magnetic carbon.
Ferromagnetism is an “ordering phenomenon” in which the spins of neighboring electrons are coupled together such that they point in the same direction. If the temperature of the sample is elevated above a certain point, called the “Curie-temperature,” however, the disorder caused by the thermal motion of the atoms takes over and destroys the magnetic ordering. In fact, many different materials show ferromagnetic behavior at low temperatures, below 5 Kelvin for example, but only iron, cobalt, nickel and some alloys are useful ferromagnets above room temperature and can be manufactured in large quantities. The key challenge of showing that a clean carbon sample can exhibit ferromagnetism has thus lingered.
A particularly promising approach to making carbon magnetic emerged from a group led by Pablo Esquinazi at the University of Leipzig, Germany, in 2003. They irradiated clean carbon films with an intense proton beam focused to a tiny spot of 2 mm diameter. The proton irradiation caused small distortions in the carbon lattice, which in turn caused electron spins on neighboring atoms to align parallel and order ferromagnetically. The SSRL and ALS researchers collaborated with the Leipzig group and built upon this approach, studying proton-irradiated samples using scanning transmission x-ray microscopy (STXM) at ALS Beamline 11.0.2. Their studies revealed the carbon sample’s intrinsic magnetism.
The STXM microscope addresses the magnetic properties of different elements in a sample by using x-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) in x-ray absorption (XAS). In STXM, an incident x-ray beam is focused on the sample by a “zoneplate” lens, and the intensity of the transmitted x rays is measured on the detector. The sample is simultaneously scanned perpendicular to the beam, ultimately yielding a full field-of-view image. The absorption of x rays is strongly enhanced when their energy is chosen to excite a core-level electron into an empty valence state. These core-level resonances appear at characteristic photon energies for different elements, revealing information about element distribution in an unknown sample. In addition to elemental specificity, the transmission of circular polarized x rays at the resonance depends on the presence and direction of a ferromagnetic moment (XMCD). It is therefore possible to obtain information about the magnetism of the sample as well. A thin sample of carbon (t = 200 nm) was irradiated with a focused proton beam, leaving behind a magnetic ring. The images acquired using STXM at the carbon, iron, cobalt, and nickel resonances revealed that the magnetic ring only appears at the carbon resonance and not the others. The detected magnetic signal was very small, so only the use of a modern scanning transmission x-ray microscope at a state-of-the-art x-ray source providing x-ray beams of high brilliance with variable polarization made it possible to observe these tiny effects. These results underline the crucial importance of modern x-ray science and instruments in basic research.
Harnessing the magnetic properties of carbon could one day revolutionize a range of fields from nanotechnology to electronics. Magnetic carbon nanodevices could be built one atom at a time, leading to miniaturized machines and lightweight electronics. Magnetism, which forms the basis of information storage and processing in computer hard drives, could be employed in novel ways in tomorrow's electronic devices.
Research funding: U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences (BES); the German Research Foundation (DFG); and the European Union.
Publication about this research: H. Ohldag, T. Tyliszczak, R. Höhne, D. Spemann, P. Esquinazi, M. Ungureanu, and T. Butz, "π-Electron ferromagnetism in metal-free carbon probed by soft x-ray dichroism," Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 187204 (2007). | <urn:uuid:df24e993-bece-4591-bc3b-de487e08412f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www-als.lbl.gov/index.php/component/content/article/211-first-proof-of-ferromagnetic-carbon.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393533.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00184-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.912053 | 942 | 3.625 | 4 |
ALTHOUGH the genome is the starting point for human life, we should view it as a source of possibility rather than as a constraint. Many fear that individuals’ genetic information will be used against them, and these concerns should be taken seriously. Insurers are pushing for the right to use genetic test results in deciding whether or not to issue policies. If permitted by law, insurers and employers could make genetic testing a prerequisite for issuing policies or offering jobs. We should oppose such discrimination.
And since people continue to suffer from cancer, heart disease, senile dementia and other diseases, newspaper headlines such as “Miraculous gene code could eradicate all disease” will only lead to disappointment.
Still, our recently acquired genetic knowledge is enormously valuable to the twin fields of biology and medical research. That is why it is so important to complete a definitive version of the preliminary human genome sequence - the draft version’s release was celebrated worldwide on 26 June 2000 - and to give researchers access to the data without delay. The sequence will be completed sometime next year and should become a permanent scientific archive and reference tool.
The genome will undoubtedly have a huge impact on people’s choice of diet and lifestyle. In Western societies this will be a major marketing opportunity: I fear that people will begin choosing restaurants according to their genotype.
In all likelihood we will develop new drug treatments for hard-to-treat diseases over the next decade. For example, Mike Stratton’s cancer team at the Sanger Centre is currently screening tumours to see how they differ genetically from normal tissues. In many cases it is still easier to kill a cell than to cure it. Genome information may help drugs find targets on cancer cells and destroy cells selectively, leading to fewer side-effects and better remission rates.
Genome sequencing is a major step forward for our knowledge of the human body at the molecular level. Yet we are only in the early stages. We still do not know what most of the genes look like, nor do we know when or where they are expressed as proteins. The genome by itself does not provide answers to any of these questions. Nevertheless, the information is available to everyone as a resource tool. The next step is to track down all the genes, determining their significance, their location and how their control signals work.
In November 1995 Stratton’s team at the United Kingdom-based Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) found a mutation in one of their breast-cancer gene “families”, apparently connected with the BRCA2 gene. The region containing that gene had just been sequenced at the Sanger Institute, and within two weeks the ICR team had not only confirmed the discovery but found five more mutations. Stratton moved fast to publish the findings in the international weekly scientific journal Nature, keeping them secret from his colleagues until the last minute. But despite his efforts, some information reached Utah-based Myriad Genetics Inc in the United States, which then located the gene. Myriad’s chief scientific officer, Mark Skolnick, then filed a patent application - on the day before the ICR paper was published.
With the threat of commercialisation looming, the ICR moved to patent the mutations it had discovered. At the same time, Myriad used its own patent applications to claim rights to the BRCA2 gene as well as to the entire BRCA1 gene, which Myriad’s scientists were the first to clone. Myriad set up a commercial diagnostic laboratory, and once its patents were granted, the company threatened legal action against any other United States laboratory using either gene for breast cancer screening. This meant that Myriad had the only lab that could perform such screening, at a cost of nearly $2,500 per patient. The company also had the right to grant licences to other labs to carry out simpler procedures at a cost of $200 per test.
One of Myriad’s tests focused on a mutation discovered by the ICR affecting the BRCA2 gene, commonly found among Ashkenazi Jews from central and eastern Europe. “The Ashkenazi A mutation was the framework for our original paper,” says Professor Stratton. “Myriad is claiming a fee for a mutation that we discovered.” As an Ashkenazi Jew, Stratton found this especially galling.
By claiming proprietary rights to the diagnostic tests for the two BRCA genes and charging for the tests, Myriad is adding to total health-care costs. Even worse, once scientists really understand how the BRCA1 and 2 mutations cause tumours to grow, they might be able to devise new therapies. But because of its patents, Myriad has exclusive marketing rights.
Throughout the formidable task of sequencing the human genome, we were faced with the question of research-related proprietary rights. Although the full impact of Myriad’s aggressive approach was unclear in 1995, it was clear where a focus on commercial profit and patents would lead. What was needed was a commitment from the international sequencing community to make all genome information publicly available and not to parcel it out via individual deals between companies and researchers.
How to manage the data?
We decided to hold an international meeting to hammer out a strategy deciding who would do what, and how to manage the data. The UK selected Bermuda, close to the US, as the site of the meeting. This was our introduction to the world of international politics. The meeting was extremely constructive, since it was the first opportunity for researchers to compare notes freely. We were forced to work together because nobody at that time could complete the sequencing alone. Everyone arrived with pieces of paper stating their intentions to sequence a particular region of the genome, and during the meeting we resolved the overlapping claims.
At that time there was no mechanism for loading preliminary data into public databases, which were set up for finished data only. Even in raw form, the human genome sequence data obtained from our machines might prove useful to other researchers seeking to localise genes or to check hypotheses. As we had done with the nematode (1), we made all of our data available electronically from our own sites at the Sanger Institute, so that people could download information and do with it as they saw fit (2). We merely asked them to recognise that the data was preliminary and to acknowledge us as the source in any publications.
The principle of data availability had to be endorsed at the Bermuda meeting or else mutual trust would have been impossible. At first I thought it unlikely that everyone would come to an agreement. Several of those present, including Craig Venter of the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) (3), already had links to commercial organisations and might oppose the idea of giving everything away to the public, with nothing in return. But as I stood at the white board, scribbling away, erasing and rewriting, we eventually came up with a statement. The Wellcome Trust - a medical research charity and the Sanger Institute’s main financial backer - still has a photo of that handwritten statement with its three bullet points:
Automatic release of sequence assemblies larger than 1 kb (preferably within 24 hours).
Immediate publication of finished annotated sequences.
Aim to make the entire sequence freely available in the public domain for both research and development in order to maximise benefits to society.
While Bob Waterston of St Louis’s Washington University and I were drafting the statement together with our colleagues, another colleague, Michael Morgan, was meeting with representatives from the funding agencies to secure support for our initiative. What I had written on the board, with minor modifications, became known as the Bermuda principles, and these have since served as the benchmark for publicly funded large-scale sequencing projects.
The principles of accessibility and on-the-spot release mean that anyone in the international biological community can use the data and ultimately turn them into new inventions that are eligible for patents. But when the raw sequence is released publicly, it will be unpatentable. It promised well that so many people came to share a vision of the genome sequence as the heritage of humanity, as stated in Article 1 of the universal declaration on the human genome and human rights, which emerged from Unesco’s general conference in 1997.
The 20th century saw a split between the sciences and the humanities. Many no longer perceive science as a manifestation of culture. One reason is that science has become increasingly equated with technology; in many quarters technological development represents science’s sole purpose. Scientists are encouraged to capitalise on their discoveries commercially, regardless of the social consequences.
A discovery, not an invention
The genome sequence is a discovery, not an invention. Like a mountain or a river, the genome is a natural phenomenon that existed, if not before us, then at least before we became aware of it. I believe that the Earth is part of the common good; it is better off not owned by anyone, even though we may fence off small parts of it. But if an area proves important because it is especially scenic or is home to some rare species, then it should be protected in the public interest.
To be sure, there will always be arguments concerning the balance between private and public lands and how they should be used. The human genome is an extreme example. We all carry our personal copies of the genome, and each portion of it is unique. You cannot say that you own a gene because you would then own one of my genes as well. And you cannot say that we can share our individual genes because we need every single one of our genes. A patent may not grant literal ownership of a gene but it does specifically bestow the right to prevent others from using that gene for commercial purposes.
Placing legal or proprietary restrictions on genes should be confined strictly to current applications or to inventive steps. Someone else may choose to work on another application and may thus need to have access to the same gene. Inventing human genes is impossible. So every discovery relating to genes - their sequence, functions and everything else - should be placed in the pre-competitive arena. After all, one goal of the patent process is to stimulate competition. The most valuable gene-related applications are often far removed from the first easy steps. So this is a matter of science, not just a matter of principle.
In March 2000 Maryland-based Human Genome Sciences Inc (HGSI), a company set up alongside TIGR in 1992, announced that it had been granted a patent on the CCR5 gene, which encodes a receptor on the surface of cells. When HGSI initially applied for its patent it did not know how this receptor functioned. While the patent was pending, a group of publicly funded researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) discovered that some people with CCR5 gene defects were resistant to infection with the AIDS virus (HIV). CCR5 appeared to be one of the gateways the virus uses to invade cells. As soon as they found out about the NIH discovery, HGSI confirmed the role of CCR5 through experiments and obtained the patent. HGSI asserted its proprietary rights to use the CCR5 gene for any purpose and then sold licences to several pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs and vaccines.
But who took the inventive step? Was it the company that made a lucky match with the right gene? Or was it the researchers who determined that HIV-resistant individuals had a defective gene?
William Haseltine, HGSI’s chief executive officer, argues that patents stimulate progress in medical research, and that the CCR5 patent may well lead to a new drug or vaccine for HIV. But a survey of researchers at US university labs found that many of them have been deterred from working on particular gene targets, fearing that they might have to pay hefty licence fees (or royalties) to companies or risk lawsuits (4).
The patent question
The US recently clarified its guidelines on granting gene patents to provide a somewhat tighter definition of utility - use must now be “substantial, specific and credible”. But the guidelines still allow sequences to be patented since they can be used as probes to detect genes responsible for various diseases. The European patent directive, approved by the European parliament in 1998, states that a sequence or partial sequence of a gene is only eligible for a “composition of matter” patent when it can be replicated outside the human body (in vitro), for example copied in bacteria, as we do for human genome sequencing.
This argument has always seemed absurd to me. The essence of a gene is the information it provides - the sequence. Copying it into another format makes no difference. It is like taking a hardback book written by someone else, publishing it in paperback and then claiming authorship because the binding is different.
The number of applications for gene patents on humans and other organisms has now passed the half-million mark, and several thousand such patents have been granted. Nevertheless, the issue of gene patents remains complex and confused. The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) still maintains that a gene discovery is patentable. Until the recent changes, the USPTO granted patents even for partial gene fragments whose only claimed utility was as gene probes. The European Patent Office remained unconvinced about gene patents until the European Union issued its 1998 biotechnology patent directive, which explicitly permitted the patenting of gene sequences. Several EU member states, including France, are opposed to the EU directive, while other EU members, such as the UK, maintain a more neo-liberal line on patenting so that their biotechnology industries remain competitive with those in the US.
I realised long ago that trying to reach an equitable solution using moral or even legal arguments was doomed to failure. The best way to prevent the sequence being carved up by private interests was to place it within the public domain so that, in patent office jargon, as much as possible became “prior art” and thus unpatentable by others. The international sequencing consortium, while working on the human genome project, succeeded in doing just that with respect to the raw sequence data. Now we are raising the bar by placing as much information as possible about the annotated gene sequence and gene function in the public domain.
Some have proposed drawing a patent line between life and non-life. While agreeing with the concerns, and with the urgent need for a value other than a commercial one to be placed on living things, I think there is no case for this particular line. Because the chasm that previously existed between the biological and the chemical is closing, such a distinction will not be sustainable. We should not be patenting whole life forms, such as transgenic mice or cotton plants - and not just because they are living organisms. A sounder reason is this: we did not invent these organisms, only the specific modification that made the mice susceptible to cancer or the cotton resistant to pests.
The future of biology is strongly tied to that of bioinformatics, a field of research that collects all sorts of biological data, tries to make sense of living organisms in their entirety and then makes predictions. If this data is freely accessible, bioinformatics will allow experimental biologists to complement the work of other researchers and to connect with them. If we wish to move forward with this fascinating endeavour, which will undoubtedly translate into medical advances, the basic data must be freely available for everyone to interpret, change and share, as in the open-source software movement. The situation is too complex for a piecemeal approach, with limited amounts of data released at a time and with a single entity holding the access keys.
The saga of the human genome project proves that publicly financed science is extremely effective because it is so intensely competitive. The project’s success also refutes the widespread notion that only private industry is capable of carrying out large-scale research. | <urn:uuid:9a675ec2-7e18-4746-b94d-fed35df2707d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://mondediplo.com/2002/12/15genome | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397749.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00062-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961633 | 3,259 | 2.796875 | 3 |
During the 19th century a growing number of Scottish appeals, together with some Irish appeals following the 1801 Act of Union with Ireland, increased the judicial burden on the House of Lords.
Several minor reforms, including the Court of Session Act 1808, did not significantly reduce this workload, although in 1812 an Appeal Committee was established in order to consider preliminary points of procedure and petitions for leave to appeal on paper ("in forma pauperis").
The Standing Orders of the House were also amended to allow judicial business to be taken three days a week, which increased the number of appeals heard from 21 in 1812 to 81 in 1813-14. By 1820 the backlog began to grow once more.
In 1822 the Earl of Liverpool, the Prime Minister, set up a Lords select committee to examine its right to consider judicial appeals. This recommended lay Members of the House (those without judicial experience), appointed on a rota system, should consider appeals five days a week. These reforms were approved by the House in early 1824 and gradually the backlog of cases eased and the conduct of judicial business improved. | <urn:uuid:a7384f94-34c2-464e-8605-9753ee94bab6> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/houseoflords/judicialrole/overview/furtherreform/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391519.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00124-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971658 | 227 | 3.53125 | 4 |
Something was dreadfully wrong in the American colonies.
All of sudden after over a century and a half of permitting relative self-rule, Britain was exercising direct influence over colonial life. In addition to restricting westward movement, the parent country was actually enforcing its trade laws.
Writs of assistance, or general search warrants, were granted to British customs inspectors to search colonial ships. The inspectors had long been charged with this directly but, until this time, had not carried it out. Violators did not receive the benefit of a trial by jury; rather, they were at the mercy of the British admiralty courts.
Worst of all, the British now began levying taxes against American colonists. What had gone wrong?
The British point of view is not difficult to grasp. The Seven Years' War had been terribly costly. The taxes asked of the American colonists were lower than those asked of mainland English citizens. The revenue raised from taxing the colonies was used to pay for their own defense. Moreover, the funds received from American colonists barely covered one-third of the cost of maintaining British troops in the 13 colonies.
The Americans, however, saw things through a different lens. What was the purpose of maintaining British garrisons in the colonies now that the French threat was gone? Americans wondered about contributing to the maintenance of troops they felt were there only to watch them.
True, those in England paid more in taxes, but Americans paid much more in sweat. All the land that was cleared, the Indians who were fought, and the relatives who died building a colony that enhanced the British Empire made further taxation seem insulting.
That the colonists, black and white, born here are freeborn British subjects, and entitled to all the essential civil rights of such is a truth not only manifest from the provincial charters, from the principles of the common law, and acts of Parliament, but from the British constitution, which was re-established at the Revolution with a professed design to secure the liberties of all the subjects to all generations.
– James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, 1764
In addition to emotional appeals, the colonists began to make a political argument, as well. The tradition of receiving permission for levying taxes dated back hundreds of years in British history. But the colonists had no representation in the British Parliament. To tax them without offering representation was to deny their traditional rights as English subjects. This could not stand.
The Stamp Act of 1765 was not the first attempt to tax the American colonies. Parliament had passed the Sugar Act and Currency Act the previous year. Because tax was collected at ports though, it was easily circumvented. Indirect taxes such as these were also much less visible to the consumer.
The colonies were plagued by a shortage of legal British currency. To offset the problem, the colonies began printing their own Bills of Credit. These notes were not regulated, not backed by hard silver or gold currency, and their use and value varied depending on where they were issued. The result was confusion compounded by fear due to the erratic colonial economy. To assuage anxious British merchant-creditors, Parliament passed the Currency Act on September 1, 1764.
Essentially, the Currency Act gave Parliament control of the colonial currency system. It abolished the Bills of Credit altogether and put the colonists at a further economic disadvantage in their trade relations with British merchants.
WHEREAS great quantities of paper bills of credit have been created and issued in his Majesty's colonies or plantations in America, by virtue of acts, orders, resolutions, or votes of assembly, making and declaring such bills of credit to be legal tender in payment of money: and whereas such bills of credit have greatly depreciated in their value, by means whereof debts have been discharged with a much less value than was contracted for, to the great discouragement and prejudice of the trade and commerce of his Majesty's subjects, by occasioning confusion in dealings, and lessening credit in the said colonies or plantations: for remedy whereof, may it please your most excellent Majesty, that it may be enacted; and be it enacted by the King's most excellent majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, in this present parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, That from and after the first day of September, one thousand seven hundred and sixty four, no act, order, resolution, or vote of assembly, in any of his Majesty's colonies or plantations in America, shall be made, for creating or issuing any paper bills, or bills of credit of any kind or denomination whatsoever, declaring such paper bills, or bills of credit, to be legal tender in payment of any bargains, contracts, debts, dues, or demands whatsoever; and every clause or provision which shall hereafter be inserted in any act, order, resolution, or vote of assembly, contrary to this act, shall be null and void.
– excerpt from the Currency Act of 1764
When Parliament passed the Stamp Act in March 1765, things changed. It was the first direct tax on the American colonies. Every legal document had to be written on specially stamped paper, showing proof of payment. Deeds, wills, marriage licenses — contracts of any sort — were not recognized as legal in a court of law unless they were prepared on this paper. In addition, newspaper, dice, and playing cards also had to bear proof of tax payment. American activists sprang into action.
IN CONGRESS IN NEW YORK
The members of this Congress, sincerely devoted, with the warmest sentiments of affection and duty to His Majesty's Person and Government, inviolably attached to the present happy establishment of the Protestant succession, and with minds deeply impressed by a sense of the present and impending misfortunes of the British colonies on this continent; having considered as maturely as time will permit the circumstances of the said colonies, esteem it our indispensable duty to make the following declarations of our humble opinion, respecting the most essential rights and liberties of the colonists, and of the grievances under which they labour, by reason of several late Acts of Parliament.
Lastly, That it is the indispensable duty of these colonies, to the best of sovereigns, to the mother country, and to themselves, to endeavour by a loyal and dutiful address to his Majesty, and humble applications to both Houses of Parliament, to procure the repeal of the Act for granting and applying certain stamp duties, of all clauses of any other Acts of Parliament, whereby the jurisdiction of the Admiralty is extended as aforesaid, and of the other late Acts for the restriction of American commerce.
– "Resolutions of the Stamp Act Congress," 1765
Taxation in this manner and the Quartering Act (which required the American colonies to provide food and shelter for British troops) were soundly thrashed in colonial assemblies. From Patrick Henry in Virginia to James Otis in Massachusetts, Americans voiced their protest. A Stamp Act Congress was convened in the colonies to decide what to do.
The colonists put their words into action and enacted widespread boycotts of British goods. Radical groups such as the Sons and Daughters of Liberty did not hesitate to harass tax collectors or publish the names of those who did not comply with the boycotts.
Soon, the pressure on Parliament by business-starved British merchants was too great to bear. The Stamp Act was repealed the following year.
The crisis was over, but the uneasy peace did not last long. | <urn:uuid:aa85fad6-eb1d-4853-9bac-61c6a7e72880> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.ushistory.org/US/9b.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397562.76/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00111-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97796 | 1,535 | 3.90625 | 4 |
The 24°C (75°F) is the temperature below which the film should be maintained when stored for long periods of time. That is why many film photographers store their bulk film in a refrigerator. It will not harm the film to shoot it in conditions warmer than 24°C, but it will degrade it to store it in higher temperatures for extended periods.
The 27° is a reference to an alternate system of designating film speed known as DIN (named after the organization that defined the standard: Deutsches Institut für Normung). Each 3° in the DIN system equates to a doubling of sensitivity. DIN 30° would equate to ASA 800, while DIN 24° would equate to ASA 200. ASA 400 and DIN 27° are just two different ways of expressing the same sensitivity to light. Although the old logarithmic DIN component is no longer widely used, both it and the old arithmetic ASA component are included in the ISO standard. Digital camera manufacturers seem to stay strictly with the arithmetic scale (Hey, ISO 204800 sounds more impressive compared to ISO 6400 than DIN 54° does compared to DIN 39°). From Wikipedia:
The ISO system defines both an arithmetic and a logarithmic scale. The arithmetic ISO scale corresponds to the arithmetic ASA system, where a doubling of film sensitivity is represented by a doubling of the numerical film speed value. In the logarithmic ISO scale, which corresponds to the DIN scale, adding 3° to the numerical value constitutes a doubling of sensitivity. For example, a film rated ISO 200/24° is twice as sensitive as one rated ISO 100/21°. | <urn:uuid:4fdc170e-02a1-429d-95f5-c355a8d9076e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/40934/what-does-the-temperature-specification-on-a-roll-of-film-refer-to/40937 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395166.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00110-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914085 | 342 | 3.34375 | 3 |
Today marks Sir Walter Scott‘s 240th birthday. Born in 1771 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Scott would become one of the greats of English-language literature and a national Scottish hero. Scott entered university at age 12 and began his law studies at age 18. After becoming a lawyer, he married in 1797 and had five children, four of which survived him. He began his writing career in 1796 by translating several German ballads into English. In 1802, he published a collection of English and Scottish folk ballads which he had collected and compiled from along the Scottish border. From then on, he regularly produced novels and poetry until his death in 1832. His works include Rob Roy, The Lady of The Lake, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, and, my personal favorite, Ivanhoe.
A number of quotations from Sir Walter Scott’s works survive today as well known sayings. For example, “oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive”, is a quote from Scott’s Marmion. And of course, most patriots and nationalists will be familiar with the opening lines of Sir Walter Scott’s This Is My Own, My Native Land:1
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.
Scott’s poem Bonnie Dundee was put to song and is still used as the “regimental march by several Scottish regiments in the British Army”.2 Additionally, it was adapted by the Confederates during the War Between the States and was quite popular with the Confederate cavalry (see below). | <urn:uuid:d72121cb-9ea4-44ba-b64a-4b30743d1147> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://faithandheritage.com/2011/08/sir-walter-scott/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394937.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00158-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971235 | 507 | 2.84375 | 3 |
An announcement from the FTC last week will mark a significant change for the lighting industry. Consumer packaging of incandescent, compact fluorescent, and LED light bulbs will be required to have a new “Lighting Facts” label. The label will be similar to the Department of Energy’s Lighting FactsCM label, and the requirement will go into effect mid-2011.
If consumer packaging requirement changes don’t sound like a big deal to you, read on. With this ruling, the FTC will effectively transform the way people buy light bulbs. For years, people have purchased a light bulb largely based on number of watts. For a super bright light, a consumer would simply buy one with a higher wattage.
With lower-efficiency bulbs like CFLs and LEDs, watts are becoming less relevant. Technically, watts measure the amount of power consumed – not how much light it outputs. Light output is actually measured by lumens.
The new energy efficient light bulbs bring lumens into the picture. An LED recessed downlight uses just 11-12 watts of power, but it produces around 600 lumens of light. That light level is the equivalent of a 40 to 60 watt incandescent. Clearly, there’s no way to judge an energy-efficient light by its wattage.
With the new FTC ruling, consumer packaging of light bulbs will highlight lumen levels rather than watts. Since lower-efficiency bulbs are being phased out beginning in 2012, this couldn’t come at a better time. The FTC commented on the change:
While watt measurements are familiar to consumers and have been featured on the front of light bulb packages for decades, watts are a measurement of energy use, not brightness. As a result, reliance on watt measurements alone makes it difficult for consumers to compare traditional incandescent bulbs to more efficient bulbs…
The DOE also has a Lighting Facts label, but it is more geared toward retailers, wholesalers, lighting designers, and energy efficient programs to evaluate products. The new FTC label will be for consumers.
How quickly do you think consumers will adapt to the new labels? Do you think this is a necessary change for energy efficient lighting? Please comment below! | <urn:uuid:411f440b-6e47-45b8-8c4d-dabfe153f2bf> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://blog.pegasuslighting.com/2010/07/never-judge-a-light-by-its-wattage/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393997.50/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00092-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927143 | 451 | 2.828125 | 3 |
"In the summer of 1861, Confederate Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s forces captured large quantities of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad rolling stock near Harper’s Ferry, 40 miles north. To reach the Manassas Gap Railroad line in Strasburg, the equipment had to be pulled by horses and mules up the Valley Turnpike from Martinsburg. Fourteen locomotives and almost a hundred cars were brought here and then used throughout the Confederacy.
Signal Knob, the northern end of Massanutten Mountain, can be seen in the distance from here. During the war, it served as an observation and signaling station from which the Confederates observed Union positions and directed the opening attack of the Battle of Cedar Creek on October 19, 1864. "
March 24, 2010
This Civil War Trails marker stands by the Strasburg Museum near the railroad tracks. Here's an excerpt:
The marker also discusses the pottery industry in Strasburg. Read the rest of the text on HMDB.org. | <urn:uuid:59a524f1-77ed-4b1b-b236-bb1bc49249aa> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://webcroft.blogspot.com/2010/03/marker-civil-war-strasburg.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396459.32/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00199-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957128 | 217 | 3.484375 | 3 |
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