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Pennsylvania Truss Bridges: The longest of the truss bridge types that were used for America’s transportation system, but the rarely used. Or was it? This is the question that many researchers have been asking for many years, as many of them are compiling materials for bridge books, for even though statewide surveys were carried out at the earliest 20 years ago, questions about the credibility of the information has come up, which includes finding out how useful these bridges actually were, let alone how many of them were actually built in comparison to what was found in the research. Part of it has to do with the number of post cards and old pictures that people have found recently of old bridges that carry the signature design.
Developed and patented in 1875 for the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Pennsylvania Truss Bridge is similar to the Parker Bridge, because of its polygonal top chord, yet it has subdivided diagonal beams supporting the main diagonal beams. Furthermore, as seen in the photo of the now extant Orr Bridge in Harrison County (Iowa), diagonal beams cross not one but two panels at the center of the span. Pennsylvania trusses were used not only as single span crossings but also for wider river crossings as multiple spans, including those along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, many of which have long since disappeared. Reason for that is the fact that these bridges can range from 130 to 600 feet long, some even longer. While these bridges were used for that purpose, the danger was that of the pressure applied to the roadway, creating tension to the diagonal beams and upper chord, resulting in the failure of even one of the subdivided beams, and as a consequence, the failure of the entire structure. That is the reason why they were used rarely. Or were they?
This is where we look at the state of Iowa as the subject of debate. 20-25 years ago, a survey was conducted on Iowa’s truss bridges revealed that even though some Pennsylvania truss bridges were used for large crossings, like the Mississippi River crossings at Clinton and Muscatine, as well as the longest single-span crossing in the state at Greene (at 249 feet), the number of these bridges were rarely used in bridge building between 1880 and 1920. Seven bridges listed in the survey were examples of this bridge type, including the Thunder and Old Rusty Bridges in Spencer, the Bridgeport Bridge near Keokuk, one span of the multi-span Boone Bridge, the Rubio in Washington County, and the Berkheimer Bridge west of Humboldt, and the Orr Bridge. The Orr and Rubio Bridges have long since been removed. The Berkheimer Bridge currently holds the title as the longest bridge in the state, despite being closed to traffic between 2001 and 2005 for rehabilitation.
Yet two problems have come up that have the potential to refute the claim of its rare use on the state’s roads. The first one is the fact that at least three bridges surveyed have Pennsylvania truss types but have a flat lateral top chord, thus making them Camelback Pennsylvania trusses. This includes the Gochenour Bridge in Harrison County, and two bridges spanning the Cedar River in Mitchell County: the Otranto Bridge and the Deering Ford Bridge, the latter of which was replaced 15 years ago; the former is now privately owned and can be seen from its replacement bridge.
The other one, which is perhaps the biggest of the problems supporting the claim is the number of Pennsylvania truss bridges that had existed prior to 1970. Even though they were demolished before a HABS-HAER survey was conducted on the Greene Bridge in 1979, two years prior to its demolition and replacement, recent discoveries by a pair of pontists residing in Iowa reveal that more of these that existed, thus putting the historic survey’s claim in doubt. This is not only applicable to multiple-span bridges, but also and especially to the single-span bridges. Some examples supporting the claim include another Skunk River crossing at Brighton, east of the Rubio Bridge, the Second Street Bridge in Independence, The Lincoln Highway Bridge over the Wapsipinicon River in Clinton County, a Big Sioux River crossing near Canton, South Dakota, Ripley’s Bridge in Floyd County, and a Little Sioux River crossing at Sioux Rapids in Buena Vista County. With as many bridges of this kind along the Little Sioux River, one can even stretch the claim that the river may be the river with the highest amount of Pennsylvania trusses.
In addition to the argument supporting more Pennsylvania trusses built in Iowa, it is possible that other bridge companies may have contributed in its construction of Pennsylvania truss bridges. While it is true that the Clinton Bridge and Iron Works Company constructed the majority of these truss bridges, including the ones in Greene, Spencer, and west of Humboldt, other bridge companies, such as the Iowa Bridge Company of Des Moines, Chicago Bridge and Iron Works, and even the Canton Bridge Company in Ohio took a piece of the bridge building pie as well. If one adds the Gochenour and Orr Bridges to the list of unknown bridge builders, as they were imported into Iowa in the 1950s, then one can claim that other bridge companies tried to keep Clinton from monopolizing the bridge building industry in Iowa by building their own Pennsylvania truss bridges, even though surveys confirmed that Iowa BC and Chicago B and IWC constructed them.
The last one is the fact that Pennsylvania truss bridges were built well into the 1960s, for one can find two of these structures in Jackson County, spanning the Maquoketa River: one at Iron Bridge Road, and one on County Highway Z-34. It is possible that other bridges of that type built during that period can be found in Iowa as well, for these bridges were part of the standardized truss bridges, featuring riveted connections, that were introduced on Iowa’s highways beginning in 1914, although they were not used as often as the other truss bridge counterparts, such as the Pratt, Warren and Parker truss bridges.
All these claims lead to the following questions for the forum:
1. How many Pennsylvania truss bridges were actually built in Iowa between 1880 and 1960?
2. What other single span Pennsylvania truss bridges existed prior to 1970, besides the ones mentioned in the article? When and where were they built and who was the bridge builder?
3. Why were Pennsylvania truss bridges built beyond 1920 instead of the other truss types?
There are four ways to answer this question: One is directly through the social networking sites of Facebook and LinkedIn under the Bridgehunter’s Chronicles; the other is by leaving a reply in the comment section; the third option is via e-mail, and the fourth option is through the Historic Bridge Weekend, which takes place August 9-11 (please see the info here). There you can leave the info and photos in the Info and Photo Box, provided at the evening events or you can talk to the author directly, as he will be directing the conference in its entirety. The information will be used for the book project on Iowa’s Truss Bridges, which is ongoing as information is being collected as of present.
Pennsylvania truss bridges were a useful commodity on America’s roads, and to a certain degree, they still are today. Yet it remains questionable how many were really built and why they disappeared so rapidly, even though their lifespan was the same as any other truss bridge built between 1860 and the present- 70-120 years, pending on how they were used and how they were and still are maintained today.
Special thanks to Hank Zaletel and Luke Harden for digging out and submitting the photos, as well as allowing me to use the photos for this article.
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Jul 31, 2009
Scientists Glue Wii Remote Parts to Flying Lemurs sciencetech” />
A backpack using technology borrowed from the iPod and Nintendo Wii has helped scientists learn how an exotic animal flies.
Image by Nina Holopainen
The colugo, or flying lemur, is an animal found in the rainforests of Southeast Asia. It’s not technically a lemur, and in fact is a cousin of the primates that resembles a large flying squirrel.
The animals have large pieces of skin between their hands and their feet. The skin flaps, which can stretch out to the size of a doormat, allow the colugo to glide through the air.
Andrew Spence of the Royal Veterinary College has been studying the aeronautics of he colugo’s flight. He created a backpack to attach to the animals that could help record the specifics about their flight. The backpack used an accelerometer much like the one used in a Nintendo Wii controller and coupled it with a memory chip similar to an iPod. The backpack then could feel and record all the movements of the colugo wearing it.
The scientists installed the backpacks onto several adult colugos. Colugos are nocturnal animals, and so the team caught several of them while they rested during the day. They then shaved a patch off the animals’ back and glued the sensors on with surgical adhesive. It sounds a bit to me like a frathouse prank, but I’ve been assured this is legitimate scientific procedure.
The backpacks revealed that the animals can actually alter aerodynamic forces acting upon them, thereby reducing the injury risk when they land. Throughout their flight, colugos glide at a steady pace. Just before landing, however, they perform a special manoeuvre. This move, which essentially uses their “wings” like a parachute, quickly reduces the landing forces and spreads the force of landing out across all four of the animal’s limbs.
The scientists believe their work could be used to help aeronautical engineers. Spence said: “Despite being common throughout their natural range the Malayan colugo is quite poorly understood because it’s hard to measure things about an animal that moves around at night, lives 30 metres up a tree, and can glide 100 metres away from you in an arbitrary direction in 10 seconds. Our new sensing backpacks have given us an insight into the behaviour of these fascinating creatures.”
Info from Telegraph
If you want to find out all the latest cool science news, why not subcribe to our RSS feed?
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How do we learn to read? For many, picture books are the foundation of our reading skills. We look at the illustrations and follow the stories of Harry the Dirty Dog or the Very Hungry Caterpillar or Alexander and his Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. The drawings and paintings enhance the tales told in the text running along the bottom of the pages.
As we grow older, our reading material comes with fewer pictures. Perhaps encouraging us to use our own imaginations to add illustrations, or perhaps, believing that adult readers no longer need pictures with their stories.
There are authors out there who believe otherwise. And yes, they even write for adults.
Any grown-up reader wondering where the pictures are should page through these books, fiction and nonfiction and recall a time when words and pictures were an essential reading combination.
Jack Finney uses historic photographs and illustrations from Old New York to embellish the deft blend of romance, science fiction, and mystery in the classic 1970 illustrated novel, Time and Again . The plot: Advertising sketch artist Si Morley is sent back to the New York of 1882. The U.S. government is funding a secret time travel project and if Si can travel easily between time periods, the project’s directors are planning to use him to alter major world events that could cause his own demise, as well as that of the “old-fashioned girl” he’s fallen in love with. Finney finds woodcuts, tintype photos, and newspaper illustrations to capture a world that no longer exists – or does it?
Readers who want a spookier adventure in illustrations should pick up Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs. Vintage photographs of children in odd costumes, supposed ghostly apparitions, and unusual shadows and landscapes add to the quirky tale of a crumbling orphanage on a remote island off the coast of Wales. While exploring and researching the abandoned children’s home, Jacob begins to suspect the supposedly long dead inhabitants may still be alive. (Preview the first three chapters .)
An illustrated novel can also tell the story of a break-up. That’s what Leanne Shapton does in her highly original Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. Using photographs of ordinary, everyday objects, Shapton traces the course of a doomed relationship: how Harold and Lenore met, fell in love, and ultimately, parted ways. Readers in relationships will look at their own possessions in a different light.
It’s not uncommon to see illustrations in non-fiction, particularly memoirs, however, Amy Krouse Rosenthal structures her memoir like an encyclopedia. Her Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life has alphabetical entries that describe significant elements and situations in her life, such as deaths of loved ones and also mundane objects and places such as the car wash or sandwiches. Rosenthal also relies on reproductions of letters, notes, and official forms to supplement the idiosyncratic catalog of her life, observations, and conclusions.
What about you? What are your favorite illustrated books worth a thousand words -- and then some?
About the Author
Kaite Mediatore Stover is the Readers Services Manager at the Kansas City Public Library. She is a regular guest on KCUR's Book Doctors segment and moderator of The Kansas City Star’s FYI Book Club. She can tap dance, read tarot cards, and doesn’t bite.
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When Mary was only twelve years old, she left her parents and departed to Alexandria, where she lived a depraved life for seventeen years. Then, moved by curiosity, she went with many pilgrims to Jerusalem, that she might see the Exaltation of the venerable Cross. Even in the Holy City she gave herself over to every kind of licentiousness and drew many into the depth of perdition. Desiring to go into the church on the day of the Exaltation of the Cross, time and again she perceived a certain invisible power preventing her entrance, whereas the multitude of people about her entered unhindered. Therefore, wounded in heart by this, she decided to change her way of life and reconcile herself to God by means of repentance. Invoking our Lady the Theotokos as her protectress, she asked her to open the way for her to worship the Cross, and vowed that she would renounce the world. And thus, returning once again to the church, she entered easily. When she had worshipped the precious Wood, she departed that same day from Jerusalem and passed over the Jordan. She went into the inner wilderness and for forty-seven years lived a most harsh manner of life, surpassing human strength; alone, she prayed to God alone. Toward the end of her life, she met a certain hermit named Zosimas, and she related to him her life from the beginning. She requested of him to bring her the immaculate Mysteries that she might partake of them. According to her request, he did this the following year on Holy and Great Thursday. One year after this, Zosimas again went thither and found her dead, laid upon the ground, and letters written in the sand near her which said: "Abba Zosimas, bury here the body of wretched Mary. I died on the very day I partook of the immaculate Mysteries. Pray for me." Her death is reckoned by some to have taken place in 378, by some, in 437, and by others, in 522. She is commemorated also on the Fifth Sunday of Great Lent. Her life was recorded by Saint Sophronius of Jerusalem.
Reading copyright Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Brookline, MA, used by permission. All rights reserved.
The content on this page is under copyright and is used by permission. All rights reserved. These works may not be further reproduced, in print or on other websites or in any other form, without the prior written authorization of the copyright holder:
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New Delhi, 6 August 2015: To identify solution-oriented strategies to prevent and address violence against women and girls (VAWG) through effective engagement of men and boys, the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), with support from UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and University College London (through a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council) held a day-long consultation in New Delhi. The consultation brought together representatives from civil society organizations, government and academic institutions to reflect on existing efforts and interventions with respect to engaging men and boys, as well as to discuss issues specific to adolescents. Findings and recommendations that emerged from the day’s meeting will be presented to key policymakers in the Government of India and other development partners.
There is a growing consensus emerging among practitioners, scholars, and policymakers that ending gender-based violence requires the full participation of communities — and in particular, the increased participation of men and boys. Indeed, globally and in India, efforts to prevent gender-based violence increasingly include the proactive engagement of men and boys. This involvement can entail educating men and boys, fostering their awareness of gender-based violence, and nurturing their ability to cultivate non-violence and gender equity in their families, peer groups, communities, and at broader societal and policy levels.
A need for this kind of a tangible discussion has never been as relevant as it is now, as governments come together at the UN next month to adopt the world’s next global development agenda – the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
“The Outcome Document for the SDGs, the 2030 Agenda, stresses the importance of achieving gender equality and specifically calls on governments to eliminate discrimination and violence against women and girls. Within that context, there is a critical need to recognize the role of men and boys,” says Dr. Ravi Verma, Asia Regional Director for ICRW. “As Agenda 2030 is adopted and a monitoring framework is developed,” Verma said, “we will be pushing for indicators that track the engagement of men and boys in violence prevention programs and policies.”
Ms. Lalitha Kumaramangalam, Chairperson of the National Commission for Women, noted that “Nearly all institutions in India are still run by men – the police, judiciary, medical schools, politics, so unless we get these institutions on board, it will be very challenging to support the empowerment of women in our country. We need to discuss gender norms at all levels of society, and we need to do it early.”
Ms. Preeti Sudan, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Women and Child Development, called for more discussions like the one today, as well as more research. “Talking about what works to shift gender norms is important, but knowing how it works is even more important.”
About ICRW: For nearly 40 years, ICRW has been the premier applied research institute focused on women and girls. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., with regional offices in South Asia and Africa, ICRW provides evidence-based research to inform programs and policies that help alleviate poverty, promote gender equality and protect the rights of women and girls.
For more information, please contact:
00 1 202 742 1263
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Green Energy info for Earth Day
DOE Green Energy is your portal to green energy information from thousands of DOE-sponsored research and development projects. DOE Green Energy provides free access to over 30,000 full text technical reports and over 2,000 patents.
You can read about some of the latest research in advanced vehicle technologies with these highlighted reports from DOE Green Energy: Clean Cities 2011 Vehicle Buyer's Guide; Natural gas vehicles: Status, barriers, and opportunities; NREL Showcases Hydrogen Internal Combustion Engine Bus; RD&D Cooperation for the Development of Fuel Cell, Hybrid and Electric Vehicles within the International Energy Agency: Preprint; Hydrogen Filling Station (HFS). Also, remember Earth Day this year by learning about various forms of green energy; including solar, wind, bioenergy, geothermal, hydro electric and many more.
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This unit is specifically for grade 6 students as an alternative to the basal series used to teach Language Arts. As it is important to teach Language Arts, not in an isolated area, but in the content areas, and in order to acquire a full view of the personality of Benjamin Franklin, I believe, it is necessary to use an interdisciplinary approach including the areas of Music, Art, Science, History, and Geography. This unit using the Autobiography of “Benjamin Franklin” can be used in three areas: open discussion following readings relating to the topic of the day Science, History, etc., answering questions from the book, and mainly to have the children interpret Franklin’s style, ease of writing, and content using this to inspire, motivate, and guide the children to do more writing. This unit can be used in two different ways. You could use a thematic study approach incorporating all the areas at one time concentrating on Franklin, or by taking the unit in parts fitting it in to your curriculum when it coincides with the areas you are teaching. I would keep the Language Arts component together for a full six weeks. Finally, the State of Connecticut is taught in grade 6 and through the use of the Franklin book, the children will be able to interpret how it was to live in colonial times. Also, they will discover what was going on during that period and get a sense of Connecticut History by learning about a similar colonial life.
(Recommended for 6th grade Language Arts (primary), Science, History, Geography, Art, and Music)
Benjamin Franklin Colonial American History Reading Instruction Autobiography Basic Skills Writing
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|Bundesland: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern||Mecklenburg-West Pomerania|
Stralsund is situated at the southern coast of the Strelasund, a sound of the Baltic Sea separating the island of Rügen from the mainland. A bridge (the Rügendamm) and several ferry services connect Stralsund with the ports of Rügen As of 2005 the city had a population of about 58,700
Lübeck, which burnt Stralsund down in 1249. Afterwards the town was rebuilt with a massive city wall having 11 town gates and 30 watchtowers. In 1293 Stralsund became a member of the Hanseatic League. 300 ships flying the flag of Stralsund cruised the Baltic Sea in the 14th century. In the 17th century Stralsund became a theatre in the Thirty Years' War. General Albrecht von Wallenstein besieged the city in 1628 until Swedish troops came to Stralsund's aid and forced the general to retreat. After the war the Peace of Westphalia (1648) handed Western Pomerania, Swedish Pomerania and the city of Stralsund to Sweden. In the Great Northern War in 1715 King Charles XII of Sweden led the defence of Stralsund for a year against the united European armies. Stralsund remained under Swedish control until 1815, when the Congress of Vienna handed it over to Prussia. In 2002, the historic town centres of the cities of Stralsund and Wismar were listed as a World Cultural Heritage by UNESCO (see also list of other UNESCO heritage sites). After the re-unification of Germany in 1990, the prefix 'Hansestadt' was again added to the city's name.
The Marienkirche (St. Mary's Church) [left] was built some time before 1298
an is an example of the brick Gothic style prevalent in northern Germany. Between 1625 and 1647, it was the tallest building in the world at 151 metres tall.
The bell tower collapsed in 1382, and was rebuilt by 1478. In 1495, the steeple tower blew down during a severe storm, and was then rebuilt taller.
This was subsequently struck by lightning in 1647, and burned down, and was rebuilt as a baroque dome, which, completed in 1708, can be seen today.
The tower is currently 104 metres tall.
Glass no. 2361 [near left] shows the traject to Rügen, a ferry system for rail coaches. In 1878 Stralsund had been connected to the railroad from Berlin. The owners of the passenger ferries had filed a lawsuit against the traject because they feared a danger for their businesses. They received a compensation of 80,000 gold marks; with the money they purchased a paddlesteamer which remained in use until 1949. The railway traject from Stralsund to Rügen was opened in 1883. Originally, it had been planned for about 30,000 to 40,000 passengers per year, and two ships, the "Prinz Heinrich" and the "Rügen" were put into service. The ships were built as icebreakers to be used also in winter. Already in the first season, the traject transported some 90,000 passengers, so that already in 1889 a third ship, the "Stralsund", was put into service. After 1897, when the railway lines on Rügen were upgraded, two new trajects, the "Sassnitz" and the "Putbus", which each could carry 3 railway coaches, were added to the flotilla. Both in Stralsund and in Altefähr on Rügen two ships could be handled at the same time. Per day, two pairs of express trains ran between Berlin and Sassnitz. However, moving the trains on and off the ships was time-consuming. And although an additional traject from Sassnitz to Trelleborg in Denmark revived the business, it soon became obvious that a bridge between the mainland and the island of Rügen would be desirable. An initial project for bridge between Dänholm and Rügen was not carried out because World War I had broken out. Although in 1920 a further ship, the "Altefähr", was added, the ships did not have enough capacity to carry one train as a whole; each train had to be separated into two parts and was carried by two ships. In addition, the railway ferries between Warnemünde (today part of Rostock) and Gedser (Denmark), opened in 1904, and another one from Gdingen (now Gdynia, Poland) to Aarhus proved to be a severe competition. In 1929, some 185,000 passengers had to be carried to and from Rügen, necessitating up to 90 crossings per day. The preparations for the new project of a bridge acorss the Strelasund, the Rügendamm, finally began in 1930.
The Rügendamm [left] which connects Stralsund with the island of Rügen was built in 19331937. It actually consists of three parts: The Ziegelgrabenbrücke (133 m) crosses the waters of the Ziegelgraben between Stralsund and the small island of Dänholm. The Rügendamm crosses the Dänholm isle and extends into the Strelasund. The Rügendammbrücke (2,540 m) finally bridges the Strelasund between Dänholm and Altefähr on Rügen. The bridge was opened for railroad traffic in October 1936, the opening for road traffic followed in May 1937. The total length of the Rügendamm is In May 1945 the Rügendam was blown up by the retreating SS troops. The first train could pass the Rügendamm again in 1947. In the 1960s and 1990s numerous parts of the steel constructions were replaced.
Construction works for a completely new Strelasund crossing began in 2004 and were completed in October 2007. The new crossing is one of the longest bridge constructions in Germany. The total length is 4,100 metres, the central Strelasund bridge has a length of 2,831 metres. The two pylons have a height of 128 metres, the central span has a height of 42 metres above the water.
[Text in part adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stralsund]
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Saturday, August 22, 2009
Many diabetics and people who are concerned about weight gain drink diet soda in order to keep their svelt figures. However, it is increasingly a concern about the toxicity of NutraSweet on your body's cells. We've all heard about formaldehyde and it's uses in embalming the dead. Well, as it turns out NutraSweet aka Aspartame has increasingly been shown in research
to turn into formaldehyde in the cell. While in the cell, aspartame turns into formaldehyde and embalms the cell while damaging the DNA in the cell. In further research, the early claims that the aspartame is easily eliminated by the body had been found to be "patently false" scientists finding that the aspartame turned formaldehyde
is actually very difficult to eliminate from the body, hence building up in your cells leading to cellular damage.
In the past few years we have heard more about how aspartame is an excitotoxin to the nervous system leading to headaches and ADD and hyperactive kids
and adults. But now we are learning just how toxic formaldehyde is to the body and how in recent studies there is a definite link between aspartame turned formaldehyde and the individual's risk of brain tumors, lymphoma and leukemia. My work in environmental medicine and helping people detoxify from their environment has found that we are constantly being exposed to chemicals such as formaldehyde in places such as new furniture and clothing stores. What none of us need is our body's producing our own internal source of formaldehyde.
So buyer beware of the diet soda you are so addicted to. Also, a number of Sugar-free products contain NutraSweet or aspartame including gums and diabetic foods. Some good natural alternatives are things like Xylitol or maltitol (caution that too much of it during a day will lead to extreme diarrhea...something you only want to experience once in your life). Stevia is a sweet tasting herb that can be added to drinks to sweeten the flavor. Ultimately, reducing your own taste for sweet drinks is a huge benefit for your health. Get used to drinking water or iced tea, plain. As many of you see, there are many obese people drinking "diet" sodas leading to further cravings for sweets and carbs and leading to weight gain. Increasing your protein intake during the day will balance your blood sugar and reduce your craving for sweets.
Ultimately, I know, having helped hundreds of people with changing diets and bad habits that one of the most difficult habits to break is that diet soda habit. It makes people crazy and very grumpy. But it must be done for your own lifelong health. All you parents out there, make sure you don't get your kids started on diet sodas. It can end up being a life long addiction like cigarettes and smoking, difficult to break!
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The largest Jewish community of Indian Jews is that of the Bene Israel. Earlier the Bene Israel lived in the villages of west Maharashtra in the Konkan coast. In the nineteenth century they started moving to the cities, mainly to Bombay (now called Mumbai) and to other cities among them Pune, Ahmadabad and Karachi which is now part of Pakistan. From 1950 onwards they started immigrating to Israel. The Bene Israel community was completely isolated from most of the other Jewish communities of the world. They are known as Bene Israel because thats how they called themselves. The Bene Israel believe that their forefathers arrived in India before the destruction of the second temple. The accepted version is that their forefathers were sailing in a commercial ship from the Land of Israel to India. The ship wrecked near the coast of Konkan. From the ship survived 14 people, seven men and seven women. They swam towards the land and arrived at the village called Navgaon. All their belongings drowned in the sea. The dead bodies of the others from the ship were buried in the village. The survivors somehow managed to settle in the village and started working in agriculture and oil producing which later on became their main profession. As time passed the descendants of the survivors forgot Hebrew and their religious tradition. But they carried out some of the Israeli tradition.
The Bene Israels observed Sabbath (Saturday) and abstained on this day from any work. They circumcised their sons on the eighth day after birth. They didnt eat fish which didnt had fins and scales. They observed a few Israeli festivals and called them by Indian names, but until their association with other Jewish communities they werent aware of the Hanukkah festival and the ninth of Ab fast. These two traditions became part of Jewish tradition after the destruction of the second Temple and therefore the belief that the Bene Israels forefathers arrived in India before the destruction of the second temple. On each religious occasion such as marriage; circumcision or death the Bene Israelis used to recite the Shema verse.
The Bene Israel community grew and they became a guild or an Indian caste with the profession of oil pressers. They left their first village, Navgaon, and dispersed to other villages and towns in the coast of Konkan becoming the oil producers and oil pressers of their respective villages. From the names of the villages and towns; like Roha, Pen, Pali or Ashtam; they derived their surnames like Rohekar; Penkar; Palkar; Ashtamkar and such others. The Bene Israels used to abstain from any work on Saturday (which wasnt an acceptable feature in India) and were therefore called Shenwar Teli meaning Saturday oil pressers.
According to Bene Israel tradition, somewhere between 1000 AD to 1400 AD a Jewish merchant, David Rahabi, arrived in west India. The Bene Israels believe that Rahabi was Moses Maimonides (a very respected Jewish scholar also called Rambam) brother. Rahabi was surprised to find this Bene Israel community which followed some Jewish traditions and festivals. He decided to enlighten them with all the Jewish traditions. He chose three men from the Bene Israel community and taught them Talmud and other Jewish books. These three people became to be known as Kaji (meaning judge in Arabic) and were religious and social leaders of the Bene Israel community. And so, it is believed, began the revivification of the Bene Israel Jews towards Judaism. Later on in the eighteenth century Cochini Jews and other Jewish communities also began to associate religiously with the Bene Israel Jews.
A very important non-Jewish community that had an impact on the Bene Israel was the Christian missionaries. In the eighteenth century many Christian missionaries came to India. Some of them had anthropological interest in India. They began with their own theories about the origins of Bene Israel and other researchers including the Bene Israel themselves also began theorizing the origins of the Bene Israel. Different researchers came to different conclusions. Among the theories there were a few which came to conclusion that the Bene Israels forefathers arrived in India before the destruction of the second Temple and this is because the Bene Israel (meaning children of Israel) did not call themselves Jews (In the narrow sense the Jews are descendants only from the two of the twelve tribes of Children Of Israel, Yehuda and Benjamin) . For the same reason others concluded that the Indian Bene Israel are from the Lost Tribes which are the ten tribes (of the twelve tribes of the Children Of Israel) whom the Assyrians exiled from the Land Of Israel in 800 BC and what happened of them is not known (and are therefore called Lost Tribes) . Others concluded that the Bene Israel originate from the tribes of Zvulun and Asher and thats because the Bene Israel engaged in the profession of oil pressing which is believed to be the profession popular among the tribes of Zvulun and Asher. Other reasons that support the theory that the Bene Israel Jews are in India for over 2000 years is the fact that they werent aware of the main Jewish tradition which evolved in Judaism between 200 BC to 300 AD. Others concluded that the Bene Israel are Jews who came to India from Arab countries at a much later period, somewhere around the seventh century AD. And there are other theories, among them is that the Bene Israel arent at all of Israeli origin.
With the revival of Judaism among the Bene Israel by David Rahabi, he selected three men to be the religious leaders of the community and called them Kaji. These Kajis fulfilled all the religious jobs of the community. The Kajis profession was hereditary. From the eighteenth century the Bene Israel developed contact and communication with other Jewish communities especially with the Cochini Jews who lived in the southern part of India the present state of Kerala and with Jews from Iraq and Yemen. The contacts and communication with the Yemen Jews started when Bene Israels, who were soldiers in the Indian-British army, were posted at Aden in Yemen. The Bene Israel in Aden had their prayer hall in Aden and later on brought Yemenite Jewish cantors to India and so adopting the Yemenite style of praying (Because of the Yemenite way of praying some researchers wrongly presume that the Bene Israel originate from Yemen). In the first synagogues of the Bene Israel Jews the cantors were mainly Yemenite or Iraqi or Cochini. After the cantors, the Bene Israel began to bring to India Jewish circumciser and butchers from Yemen and so the Kajis lost their traditional position as head of the community.
Yemenite cantor listens while a Bene Israel blows the shofar
The Bene Israels have a few Jewish customs almost unique only to them. The community members almost in every thanksgiving ceremony maintain a ritual called Malida. Malida is a home ritual in which the men sit around a plate full of roasted rice, fruits, spices and flowers. In this ceremony they sing songs praising the Lord. In the main song they also praise Prophet Elijah as the precursor of the Messiah. The Bene Israel legend also narrates of two occasions when Prophet Elijah visited them and returned to heaven. The first occasion occurred immediately after the arrival of Bene Israel to the coast of Konkan. On this occasion he revivified the unconscious Bene Israels who swam to the beach from the sea. The second occasion occurred at a much latter period. At this visit the Bene Israel believe, Prophet Elijah also left a footprint from where he rose to heaven. In this place in the village of Khandala near Alibag (there is also a tourist town by the same name near Pune in Maharashtra and thats a different place) the Bene Israels used to have religious rituals. Another custom unique to the Bene Israel was abstaining from eating beef. The majority of Indians are Hindus. The Hindus believe that cow is sacred and therefore to maintain good relations with their Hindu neighbors they abstained from eating beef and instead eat mutton. Another custom of the Bene Israel inspired by their Hindu neighbors was, not remarrying of widows and not maintaining the levirate marriage (a Jewish custom which commands marriage between the widow and her dead husbands brother if the man dies childless) . The Bene Israels were also less strict about the Kosher laws. They didnt keep two complete sets of kitchen utensils but only two sets of cooking utensils.
The Bene Israels divide their community into two groups. Gora and Kala. Gora (meaning white) are majority in the community and their both parents are of Jewish religion. Kala (meaning black) is the smaller group whose father is of Israeli origin but mother is non-Jewish. These two groups use to pray together but the Goras didnt accept the Kalas as complete Jews and didnt mingle with them, nor did they marry with them. The Goras also didnt allow the Kalas to hold the Sefer or to blow the Shofar.
The first Bene Israel synagogue built by Samuel Divekar in 1796. Divekar with other Bene Israels served as a soldier of the British in India. In one of the wars against the kingdom of Mysore in south India, he with other British Indian soldiers was captured. The King of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, was a Muslim. He used to execute the captured soldiers, but when his mother heard of the Bene Israel captives, she begged her son to spare the Bene Israel soldiers because the Bene Israel are referred to in the holy Muslim Koran as the Chosen People of the Almighty. Many claim that if the Bene Israels had called themselves Yehudi (Jew) and not Bene Israel they would have been executed because the Koran looks negatively at Jews but in more positive way at the Bene Israels. After being spared Samuel Divekar decided to thank the Lord by building a synagogue. Later on more synagogue were build by the Bene Israels in India. There was even a Reform Jewish synagogue built in 1925. Among the synagogues, the synagogue in the town of Panvel (near Mumbai) is considered special and sacred where it is believed, prayers are fulfilled.
Until the twentieth century the Bene Israels referred to themselves as Bene Israels or Israels and not as Jews. In the twentieth century they slowly began to refer to themselves as Jews but normally they used to refer to themselves as Bene Israel and to the Jews from Arab countries who settled in India (Baghdadi Jews) as Yehudi. In some of the birth certificates and other legal documents of the early twentieth century their religion was specified as Bene Israel and not Jew. Many Indians (non-Jewish) of west Maharashtra even today refer to Jews as Bene Israel or Israel and not as Jew.
The Bene Israel as a community werent a powerful influential community in their local areas but there were among them some who advanced to high ranks in the armies of local rulers. Some of them also got land from the local rulers as a prize for their services. After the British arrived to India, many Bene Israels joined the British forces in India and fought for the British Empire in their different wars around the world. Later on the Bene Israels adopted the profession of building contractors and other new modern professions that emerged in India such as office clerks, law, modern medicine and other professions. There were some Bene Israels who reach to high positions of judges, lawyers, doctors, institute managers and administrative or other high ranking officers in government services.
The Bene Israels population at their height was perhaps 30000 in India and that was in the 1950s. Proportionally they werent even 0.01% of the Indian population. Since the 1950s most of the Bene Israel have immigrated to Israel, and some to English speaking countries like Australia and England. Today in India there are less than 5000 Bene Israels, most of them live in Thana a suburb of Mumbai (Bombay).
India's Bene Israel by Shirley Isenberg. A Comprehensive Inquiry and Sourcebook:-Even though this book isn't always available at Amazon.This is the book for those interested in the Bene Israel community. This book has lot of information about the Bene Israel community and also about Jewish culture and history. In this book you will also find information about Indian society.
Orle-Israel Synagugue, Nandgaon
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DOCTORS ARE TRAINED TO IDENTIFY DISEASES by where they are located. If you have asthma, it’s considered a lung problem; if you have rheumatoid arthritis, it must be a joint problem; if you have acne, doctors see it as a skin problem; if you are overweight, you must have a metabolism problem; if you have allergies, immune imbalance is blamed. Doctors who understand health this way are both right and wrong. Sometimes the causes of your symptoms do have some relationship to their location, but that’s far from the whole story.
As we come to understand disease in the 21st century, our old ways of defining illness based on symptoms is not very useful. Instead, by understanding the origins of disease and the way in which the body operates as one, whole, integrated ecosystem, we now know that symptoms appearing in one area of the body may be caused by imbalances in an entirely different system.
If your skin is bad or you have allergies, can’t seem to lose weight, suffer from an autoimmune disease or allergies, struggle with fibromyalgia, or have recurring headaches, the real reason may be that your gut is unhealthy. This may be true even if you have NEVER had any digestive complaints.
There are many other possible imbalances in your body’s operating system that may drive illness, as well. These include problems with hormones, immune function, detoxification, energy production, and more. But for now, let’s take a deeper look at the gut and why it may be at the root of your chronic symptoms.
Symptoms Throughout the Body Are Resolved By Treating the Gut
Many today do have digestive problems including reflux or heartburn, irritable bowel, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, and colitis. In fact, belly problems account for over 200 million doctor’s visits and billions in health care costs annually. But gut problems cause disease far beyond the gut. In medical school, I learned that patients with colitis could also have inflamed joints and eyes and that patients with liver failure could be cured of delirium by taking antibiotics that killed the toxin-producing bacteria in their gut. Could it be that when things are not quite right down below, it affects the health of our entire body and many diseases we haven’t linked before to imbalances in the digestive system?
The answer is a resounding yes. Normalizing gut function is one of the most important things I do for patients, and it’s so simple. The “side effects” of treating the gut are quite extraordinary. My patients find relief from allergies, acne, arthritis, headaches, autoimmune disease, depression, attention deficit, and more—often after years or decades of suffering. Here are a few examples of the results I have achieved by addressing imbalances in the function and flora of the gut:
- A 58-year-old woman with many years of worsening allergies, asthma, and sinusitis who was on frequent antibiotics and didn’t respond to any of the usual therapies was cured by eliminating a worm she harbored in her gut called Strongyloides.
- A 52-year-old woman who suffered with daily headaches and frequent migraines for years, found relief by clearing out the overgrowth of bad bugs in her small intestine with a new non-absorbed antibiotic called Xifaxin.
- A six-year-old girl with severe behavioral problems including violence, disruptive behavior in school, and depression was treated for bacterial yeast overgrowth, and in less than 10 days, her behavioral issues and depression were resolved.
- A three-year-old boy with autism started talking after treating a parasite called Giardia in his gut.
These are not miracle cures but common results that occur when you normalize gut function and flora through improved diet, increased fiber intake, daily probiotic supplementation, enzyme therapy, the use of nutrients that repair the gut lining, and the direct treatment of bad bugs in the gut with herbs or medication.
A number of recent studies have made all these seemingly strange reversals in symptoms understandable. Let’s review them.
Research Linking Gut Flora and Inflammation To Chronic Illness
Scientists compared gut flora or bacteria from children in Florence, Italy who ate a diet high in meat, fat, and sugar to children from a West African village in Burkina Faso who ate beans, whole grains, vegetables, and nuts.(i) The bugs in the guts of the African children were healthier, more diverse, better at regulating inflammation and infection, and better at extracting energy from fiber. The bugs in the guts of the Italian children produced by-products that create inflammation, promote allergy, asthma, autoimmunity, and lead to obesity.
Why is this important?
In the West, our increased use of vaccinations and antibiotics and enhancements in hygiene have lead to health improvements for many. Yet these same factors have dramatically changed the ecosystem of bugs in our gut, and this has a broad impact on health that is still largely unrecognized.
There are trillions of bacteria in your gut, and they collectively contain at least 100 times as many genes as you do. The bacterial DNA in your gut outnumbers your own DNA by a very large margin. This bacterial DNA controls immune function, regulates digestion and intestinal function, protects against infections, and even produces vitamins and nutrients.
Can bacteria in the gut actually affect the brain? They can. Toxins, metabolic by-products, and inflammatory molecules produced by these unfriendly bacteria can all adversely impact the brain.
When the balance of bacteria in your gut is optimal, this DNA works for you to great effect. For example, some good bacteria produce short chain fatty acids. These healthy fats reduce inflammation and modulate your immune system. Bad bugs, on the other hand, produce fats that promote allergy and asthma, eczema, and inflammation throughout your body.(ii)
Another recent study found that the bacterial fingerprint of gut flora of autistic children differs dramatically from healthy children.(iii) Simply by looking at the by-products of their intestinal bacteria (which are excreted in the urine—a test I do regularly in my practice called organic acids testing), researchers could distinguish between autistic and normal children.
Think about this: problems with gut flora are linked to autism. Can bacteria in the gut actually affect the brain? They can. Toxins, metabolic by-products, and inflammatory molecules produced by these unfriendly bacteria can all adversely impact the brain. I explore the links between gut function and brain function in much greater detail in my book, The UltraMind Solution.
Autoimmune diseases are also linked to changes in gut flora. A recent study showed that children who use antibiotics for acne may alter normal flora, and this, in turn, can trigger changes that lead to autoimmune disease such as inflammatory bowel disease or colitis.(iv)
The connections between gut flora and system-wide health don’t stop there. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that you could cure or prevent delirium and brain fog in patients with liver failure by giving them an antibiotic called Xifaxan to clear out bugs that produce toxins their poor livers couldn’t detoxify.(v) Toxins from bacteria were making them insane and foggy. Remove the bacteria that produce the toxins, and their symptoms clear up practically overnight.
Even obesity has been linked to changes in our gut ecosystem that are the result of a high-fat, processed, inflammatory diet. Bad bugs produce toxins called lipopolysaccardies (LPS) that trigger inflammation and insulin resistance or pre-diabetes and thus promote weight gain.(viii)
It seems remarkable, but the little critters living inside of you have been linked to everything from autism to obesity, from allergy to autoimmunity, from fibromyalgia to restless leg syndrome, from delirium to eczema to asthma. In fact, the links between chronic illness and gut bacteria keep growing every day.
So what can you do to keep your gut flora balanced and your gut healthy, and thus overcome or avoid these health problems?
Five Steps to a Healthy Gut (and a Healthy Body)
Follow these five simple steps to begin re-balancing your gut flora:
- Eat a fiber–rich, whole foods diet—it should be rich in beans, nuts, seeds, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables, all of which feed good bugs.
- Limit sugar, processed foods, animal fats, and animal protein—these provide food for unhealthy bugs.
- Avoid the use of antibiotics, acid blockers, and anti-inflammatories—they change gut flora for the worse.
- Take probiotics daily—these healthy, friendly flora can improve your digestive health and reduce inflammation and allergy.
- Consider specialized testing—such as organic acid testing, stool testing (new tests can look at the DNA of the bacteria in your gut), and others to help assess your gut function. You will likely have to work with a functional medicine practitioner to effectively test and treat imbalances in your gut.
And if you have a chronic illness, even if you don’t have digestive symptoms, you might want to consider what is living inside your gut. Tending to the garden within can be the answer to many seemingly unrelated health problems.
Please leave your thoughts by adding a comment below—but remember, we can’t offer personal medical advice online, so be sure to limit your comments to those about taking back our health!
To your good health,
Mark Hyman, MD
(i) De Filippo, C., Cavalieri, D., Di Paola, M., et al. 2010. Impact of diet in shaping gut microbiota revealed by a comparative study in children from Europe and rural Africa. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 107(33): 14691–6
(ii) Sandin, A., Bråbäck, L., Norin, E., and B. Björkstén. 2009. Faecal short chain fatty acid pattern and allergy in early childhood. Acta Paediatr. 98(5): 823–7.
(iii) Yap, I.K., Angley, M., Veselkov, K.A., et al. 2010. Urinary metabolic phenotyping differentiates children with autism from their unaffected siblings and age-matched controls. J Proteome Res. 9(6): 2996–3004.
(iv) Margolis, D.J., Fanelli, M., Hoffstad, O., and J.D. Lewis. 2010. Potential association between the oral tetracycline class of antimicrobials used to treat acne and inflammatory bowel disease. Am J Gastroenterol. Aug 10 epub in advance of publication.
(v) Bass, N.M., Mullen, K.D., Sanyal, A., et al. 2010. Rifaximin treatment in hepatic encephalopathy. N Engl J Med. 362(12): 1071–81.
(vi) Weinstock, L.B., Fern, S.E., and S.P. Duntley. 2008. Restless legs syndrome in patients with irritable bowel syndrome: response to small intestinal bacterial overgrowth therapy. Dig Dis Sci. 53(5): 1252–6.
(vii) Pimentel, M., Wallace, D., Hallegua, D., et al. 2004. A link between irritable bowel syndrome and fibromyalgia may be related to findings on lactulose breath testing. Ann Rheum Dis. 63(4): 450–2.
(viii) Cani, P.D., Amar, J., Iglesias, M.A., et al. 2007. Metabolic endotoxemia initiates obesity and insulin resistance. Diabetes. 56(7): 1761–72.
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Definitions of straight
a. - A variant of Strait, a. 2
superl. - Right, in a mathematical sense; passing from one point to another by the nearest course; direct; not deviating or crooked; as, a straight line or course; a straight piece of timber. 2
superl. - Approximately straight; not much curved; as, straight ribs are such as pass from the base of a leaf to the apex, with a small curve. 2
superl. - Composed of cards which constitute a regular sequence, as the ace, king, queen, jack, and ten-spot; as, a straight hand; a straight flush. 2
superl. - Conforming to justice and rectitude; not deviating from truth or fairness; upright; as, straight dealing. 2
superl. - Unmixed; undiluted; as, to take liquor straight. 2
superl. - Making no exceptions or deviations in one's support of the organization and candidates of a political party; as, a straight Republican; a straight Democrat; also, containing the names of all the regularly nominated candidates of a party and no others; as, a straight ballot. 2
adv. - In a straight manner; directly; rightly; forthwith; immediately; as, the arrow went straight to the mark. 2
n. - A hand of five cards in consecutive order as to value; a sequence. When they are of one suit, it is calles straight flush. 2
v. t. - To straighten. 2
The word "straight" uses 8 letters: A G H I R S T T.
No direct anagrams for straight found in this word list.
All words formed from straight by changing one letter
Browse words starting with straight by next letter
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Pop quiz: Who made the following observation? "At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of [black America] is the deterioration of the [black] family. It is a fundamental weakness of [black Americans] at the present time." Each year, I pose this question to my undergraduate students. Most will guess George Bush, Bill Cosby, Al Sharpton, or Bill Clinton. This is not surprising, given their age. More telling is their perception that such a view might come from the political left or right. It reveals just how commonplace the link of family-race-poverty is in the American mindset.
But there is a little trickery going on: Replace "black" with "Negro" and change the date to 1965. The correct author is Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He wrote these words as part of a policy brief to help President Lyndon Johnson understand the distressed social conditions in urban ghettos. "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" leaked to the press and created a firestorm of controversy with its contention that a "tangle of pathology" engulfed black America.
The so-called "Moynihan Report" brought about a new language for understanding race and poverty: Now-familiar terms like pathology, blame the victim, and culture of poverty entered American thought as people debated whether Moynihan was courageously pointing out the causes of social ills or simply finger-pointing. Moynihan forced a nation to ask, "Is the culture of poor blacks at the core of their problems?"
This question continues to haunt us, and Moynihan's arguments about black culture still preoccupy and divide academics. (The January 2009 issue of the Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science is dedicated to a critical reappraisal of his report.) Coming from a liberal democrat, the senator's discussion of race was remarkably bold and straightforward: Unemployed black men were "failures"; female heads of households ("matriarchs") threatened black masculinity; blacks needed help from "white America." One wishes social scientists would write with such conviction today, even at the risk of simplifying complex social processes.
The wider disputes the Moynihan Report set in motion are anything but ivory-tower squabbles. Liberals charged that the senator's theory gave ammunition to right-wing arguments for diminished government support of anti-poverty programs. They watched, with growing helplessness, as a crescendo of Republican voices began invoking Moynihan's writings to defend reduced funding for Head Start, job training, adult literacy, and welfare. Simply put, conservatives argued that blacks needed to change their behavior before money could do any good.
In this way, a deep American schism was born. Liberals believed that black poverty was caused by systemic racism, such as workplace discrimination and residential segregation, and that focusing on the family was a form of "blaming the victim." Conservatives pointed to individual failure to embrace mainstream cultural values like hard work and sobriety, and intact (read: nuclear) families. It's like Yankees vs. Mets, and for 40 years there has been no middle ground. (That the current generation of college students might not necessarily share this polarized view may augur an important shift in the years ahead.)
In this standoff, along comes the eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson, whom I studied with at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, promising to transcend the polarizing discourse on race in American society. (Sound familiar?) Wilson claims his analysis in his new book, titled More Than Just Race, will bridge the two worlds and create a new, more enlightened way for Americans to talk about race (heard this one before?)—but he is well aware that won't happen without controversy.
It is fitting that the most famous contemporary sociologist has decided to address the most significant policy issue of our time. Anything but shy, Wilson has devoted his career to wading into contentious debates that have enormous social implications for the way we understand race and inequality in America. In the wake of the civil-rights era, as black politicians bemoaned the persistence of discrimination in America, Wilson published The Declining Significance of Race(1978). He used evidence of a rising black middle class to argue that race alone can't explain the plight of black Americans. He was shunned in black intellectual circles but won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. His subsequent study of inner-city poverty, The Truly Disadvantaged(1987), challenged conservative and liberal dogma regarding poverty alleviation. In it, Wilson made the case that the focus should be on promoting work opportunities and alleviating poverty concentration rather than simply fighting racism or promoting punitive policies. After President Clinton called the book a must-read, Wilson's critics on both sides quickly ran over to his side.
More Than Just Race, which draws on Wilson's earlier research as well as more recent studies, is yet more proof of his willingness to ignore political and academic pieties and his will to make social science relevant to the public. Wilson wants to explain inner-city behavior—such as young black males' disdain for low-wage jobs, their use of violence, and their refusal to take responsibility for children—without pointing simplistically to discrimination or a deficit in values. Instead, he argues that many years of exposure to similar situations can create responses that look as if they express individual will or active preference when they are, in fact, adaptations or resigned responses to racial exclusion.
Consider a young man who works in the drug economy. Doing so doesn't mean he places little if any value on legitimate work. Employment opportunities are limited in the man's racially segregated neighborhood. There are few neighbors and friends who have social connections to employers, and most of the good jobs are far away. To complicate matters, many of his friends and neighbors are probably connected to the drug trade. Survival and peer pressure dictate that the man will seek out the dangerous, illegal jobs that are nearby, even while he may prefer a stable, mainstream job. Delinquent behavior? Certainly, but more than likely a comprehensible response to lack of opportunity.
One could apply the same logic to teenage pregnancy, another all too common feature of inner-city life. The political left and right both argue that the prospect of welfare payments can motivate young women to have children—conservatives point to delinquent values, while liberals deem this a response to lack of income. Apply Wilson's "socialization" lens, and learned behaviors take priority over economic need: Young women achieve both personal identity and social validation in their community by entering into motherhood. They join others whose lives are similarly defined by early parenting. The receipt of welfare helps them contribute to the household while placing them on a surer moral footing than those who fail to bring income into the home.
Wilson does more than argue for the rationality of such behaviors. The actions of both the young man and the teenage mother are "cultural," he suggests, because they follow from the individual's perceptions of how society works. These perceptions are learned over time, and they create powerful expectations that can lead individuals to act in ways that, to the outside world, suggest insolence, laziness, pathology, etc. In this way, Wilson's framework seeks to find individual agency in contexts of dire economic hardship.
Wilson describes this process succinctly: "Parents in segregated communities who have had experiences [with discrimination and disrespect] may transmit to children, through the process of socialization, a set of beliefs about what to expect from life and how one should respond to circumstances. … In the process children may acquire a disposition to interpret the way the world works that reflects a strong sense that other members of society disrespect them because they are black."
If you think you're at a disadvantage (however justified or unjustified that belief may be), you internalize your status, such that your low expectations become as durable an obstacle as the discrimination you might be facing. This is why people (of any race and social class) turn down assistance: The simple belief that help is futile can be a powerful deterrent to social change.
What Wilson argues may sound obvious and even a bit like Psychology 101, but there is a deeper motivation to his writing. Wilson appreciates Moynihan for shedding light on ghetto poverty. But by focusing on the capacity of the poor to act rationally and thoughtfully, Wilson wants us to get off the victimhood bandwagon that followed Moynihan. In his view, neither defending the victim nor blaming the victim is very helpful in moving us forward.
Moynihan was also not altogether hopeful that black family patterns—which he traced to a legacy of slavery—might change, although, to be fair, his report was not intended as a primer on poverty-alleviation strategy. Wilson's history is more recent, and his optimism is apparent: Three generations of black ghetto dwellers have been relying on welfare and sporadic work and doing so in isolation from the mainstream. It is folly to believe that some distinctive behavior, values, or outlooks have not arisen as a consequence. Whereas Moynihan seemed at pains to point out "pathology" in the black community, in Wilson's work, the recognition functions almost like confession: Let us face the truth, so that we may finally bring forth change.
The book stands to have a powerful impact in policy circles because it points to the elephant in the room. Wilson knows it is difficult to engineer cultural change. We can train black youths, we can move their families to better neighborhoods, etc., but changing their way of thinking is not so easy. Evidence of this lies in the many "mobility" programs that move inner-city families to lower-poverty suburbs: Young women continue to have children out of wedlock and, inexplicably, the young men who move out return to their communities to commit crime! These patterns flummox researchers and, according to Wilson, they will continue to remain mysterious until we look at culture for an answer.
Critics will complain that Wilson himself has little to offer in terms of policy recommendations. But More Than Just Race contains some clues as to where he may be headed. He emphasizes the advantages of "race neutral" programs. Wilson knows that Americans and their elected leaders are more likely to support initiatives that are not identified with poor blacks. And in this economy, there is no shortage of disadvantaged Americans—white or black—who require employment assistance and supportive services. He is also partial to addressing joblessness first, despite his insistence that culture matters (and that behaviors don't change as quickly as policymakers wish). Wilson repeatedly points to the benefits that jobs programs and vocational training have on the cultural front. Stated somewhat crudely, increasing employment will reduce the number of people who might promote or even condone deviant behavior. Change might not occur overnight, and it may not be wholesale, but it will take place.
Wilson advised the Obama campaign, and it is likely that his combination of race-neutral social policies and "jobs-first" agenda will be attractive to our president. Perhaps after addressing the financial mess, terrorism, the Iraq war, "AfPak," education, health care, and the climate, the administration will turn its attention to domestic poverty. However long that takes, it is alas safe to predict that ghetto poverty will still be a pressing national problem.
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Writing a book called _A Nation of Farmers_ and arguing for Jeffersonian democracy brings you, sooner or later, bang hard up against the question of slavery. And it is not possible to address that question either by eliding the problem of slavery, as many of Jefferson's advocates do, or by claiming, as many anti-agrarians do, that Jefferson's slave holding makes the whole question of agrarian society so irrevocably tainted that it cannot be useful to us any longer. That is, Aaron's and my opinion is that the only answer we can come up with is to go towards this vexed question full steam ahead.
Jefferson made quite a number of statements arguing that independent farmers were the best candidates for democracy. He claimed in "Notes on the State of Virginia," "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of god, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. " Speaking slightly less effusively, he went on to say in a 1785 letter to John Jay, "Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, & they are tied to their country & wedded to its liberty & interests by the most lasting bands."
His opposition to Alexander Hamilton's plan to create large state supported financial institutions and move towards industrialization represents one of the great philosophical battles at the founding of our nation. Henry Cabot Lodge famously called it the founding debate of our society. And it would be easy for agrarians to see Hamilton, and Hamiltonianism as the bad guy - that is, Hamilton supported the notion of concentrating wealth in the hands of an elite, and moving the nation towards trade and manufacturing.
But the undercurrent of their debate, less popularly considered, was slavery. Hamilton was an abolitionist who regularly attended New York Abolition Society meetings. He believed that manufacturing was the only alternative to an agrarian slave society - wage labor, he felt, would end slavery. Jefferson, of course, was a plantation owner and slave holder. That he was ambivalent about slavery and at times worked for its overturn does not erase that at times, he also supported it, and he had no desire, to see, as Hamilton did, African-Americans working alongside white people in independent agriculture or factories. Jefferson imagined that freed slaves would be sent to Africa or Haiti, rather than they would grow independently alongside white people.
Roger Kennedy, in his Book _Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause_ argues that in fact, Jefferson's agrarianism struggled with two conflicting impulses, and ultimately operated to reinforce slavery in our society. Jefferson's agrarianism, he argues, wasn't quite what it seemed to be. While independent, largely self-sufficient farmers with good educations and a great deal of civic engagement were a norm in the North, the South was largely divided between white, wealthy plantation owners, and small backwoods farmers, mostly illiterate, who Jefferson regarded with a great deal of distaste. When Jefferson claimed, for example, "Ours are the only farmers who have read Homer" he was not, in fact, referring to the Southern Scots-Irish self-sufficient farmers of his region, but to Northern farmers (who had a 100% literacy rate in the Colonial period by some accounts, higher than it would ever be again), or plantation owners.
Kennedy makes a compelling case that Jefferson's vision of agrarianism, which included the slave plantations, enabled westward expansion, and the subjugation of the Native population - he does a fascinating analysis of the rate at which plantation owners destroyed their soils, almost three times the rate of non-slave holding southern farmers and five times the rate of Northern farmers, and argues that Jefferson's rhetoric, and the Louisiana Purchase, were predicated on a notion of ever expanding slavery, and the depletion of the soil.
This is a compelling critique, and to Kennedy's enormous credit, it is a nuanced critique. He does not claim that Jefferson cynically manipulated the plantation owner vote, so much as argue that Jefferson both believed in the notion of independent farmers and was unable to bring about the society he imagined.
Here, I think, is the beginnings, not of a rehabilitation of Jefferson, but of a way of thinking about agrarianism and slavery. Because it would be foolish to argue, as Thom Hartmann does in his book _What Would Jefferson Do?_, that Jefferson figures largely as a helpless opponent to slavery. Hartmann, whose arguments are otherwise well taken seems to belong to the category of Jeffersonian advocates who rehabilitate him by only looking at the anti-slavery writings. But to do so is to ignore the fact that Jefferson's legacy to us was more than just his principled objections - it was his practices.
That is, to find a way towards Jeffersonianism, we must not erase slavery, but face it. One of Hartmann's own arguments, however, directs us usefully to the urgent larger question. That is, Hartmann argues that instead of eliminating slavery, the US merely moved it elsewhere. I think Hartmann is wrong to use this argument to defend Jefferson. He says,
"Yet how many of us would willingly free our slaves? I'm typing these words on a computer containing many parts made in countries where laborers are held with less freedom and in conditions worse than those of Jefferson's slaves." Hartmann has a point, but also recognizes that this is a rationalization - Jefferson did more than simply hold slaves, he enabled slavery on a large, public scale. This argument does not work as a defense of Jefferson.
But it does give us a useful direction to point our own analysis at - that is, if we are to imagine, as Hamilton did, as many anti-agrarians have since, that the debate between industrialization and agrarianism can come down to the question of slavery, we need to ask, how good has industrial society been at freeing its slaves. That is, do we have fewer slaves right now than we did in an agrarian society? How many slaves are there in the world today?
When you add up the numbers, the results are surprising. At present, according to the UN, the world has 27 million literal slaves - that is, people who are presently held as slaves, owned as objects, and treated like them. Add to that 218 million child laborers, which UNICEF documents are almost always forced laborers. Then add 100 million adult women prostitutes (the child prostitutes are included in the previous number) who according to the UN committees on human trafficking can be said to lack control over their lives, bodies and earnings, and the minimum of 400 million poor workers who live in conditions of effective slavery, either in debt to the company store or given a choice between starvation and working in unsafe, dangerous conditions for virtually no money, and we end up with between half and 2/3 of a billion people on this planet in slavery, or effective slavery. That means that one out of every 10 to 13 people on the earth is enslaved or as near as to make no difference.
This figure is almost certainly too low, however - these are estimates, and low estimates in many cases. For example, at least 300 million women worldwide engage in prositution of one sort or another throughout the world, and it stretches the imagination to conceive that the 200 million that the UN does not consider to be effectively enslaved are all fully willing participants who simply chose prostitution as their career. Nor does this figure include involuntary military conscripts all over the globe, many of whom (including a substantial number of children), are used for forced labor or cannon fodder in conflicts all over the world. In _The Age of Extremes_ Eric Hobsbawn estimates that there are more than 200 million involuntary conscripts at any given time, worldwide.
The child labor figures are hotly disputed - for example, the International Textile, Garment and Leather Worker's Union estimates that 250 million children, more than half under the age of 14, are at work in clothing and textile manufacture alone (Naomi Klein, _No Logo_). Since these constitute only about half of the UNICEF figures, that would raise the estimate up dramatically, towards one billion people in slavery, at least 1/3 of them children. Far more than half are female - because women are often poorer than men, less well educated and more likely to be encumbered by children, they are diproportionately likely to end up in sweatshops, domestic service, or in the sex trade from lack of other options.
Some may protest that those adults who are not literally enslaved shouldn't be included here. For example, adult sweatshop workers. I'll conceed that their conditions aren't quite the same as slavery. But res ipsa loquitor - that is, the thing speaks for itself. This is testimony taken from a single sneaker plant (producing Nikes and Adidas in 1998 in El Salvador,
"...12 hour days in hot, unventilated conditions. Workers are given backless wooden benches from which to work. Cushions are not allowed. Supervision is brutal, with constant verbal abuse aganist those who do not keep up the required pace, physical violence and sexual harassment. Permission is required to drink water or use the batrhoom. The drinking water is not purified and comes from the cistern into which the toilet empties. No toilet paper is available and the toilets are filthy. Male supervisors come into the women's toilets regularly to harass the women back to work. Talking is not allowed. Workers leaving the plant are subject to humiliating body searches. Workers are expected to work when they are sick. One or two days pay is deducted for any visit to the clinic. Women are made to undergo monthly pregnancy tests which they have to pay for themselves. Pregnant workers are fired instantly. In some plants superivisors give depo-provera contraceptive injections to women who are told they are getting anti-tetanus jabs." ("Labour" by Mark O'Brien in _Anti-Capitalism_ ed. Bircham, Charlton)
Both effective and literal slaves have little control of their own lives. They are subject, in the literal sense of the word, to the whims of their masters. They experience physical violence, control of the full range of their lives including sexual activity. They are subject to degradation and told that they deserve their conditions. They are not free to leave or to stop their work, and often do their work under the terror their families will be harmed, or that their children will starve to death.
As historian Kenneth Stampp, writing of American slavery points out, "the predominant and overpowering emotion...in the majority of slaves was neither love nor hate, but fear." (Stampp, _The Peculiar Institution_). Those who live in constant fear of their bosses or masters are always slaves.
And who are they enslaved to? Well, directly speaking, they are enslaved to pimps, factory owners, industrial farmers, large companies, mining corporations, private entrepreneurs, local warlords, private slaveholders in countries that largely turn a blind eye to this sort of thing (including our own - there have been a number of high profile liberations of effectively enslaved immigrants in domestic service, garment factories and agriculture in the US, and that's almost certainly only the tip of the iceberg).
But, of course, the economy moves up the chain - who motivates these slave owners to enslave people? Sometimes human beings are the only thing there is left to traffic in. Sometimes slaves merely serve the evils of their immediate society. For example, the nation of Mauritius outlawed slavery only last year.
But often, their work and its proceeds moves up the economic food chain, and the people who profit are us.. That is, the appetites of people rich enough to travel around the world seeking out prostitutes (there are many of these trips advertised in the US and other rich nations for business people and men who can't have sex with children as easily here), the appetites of people who want cheap coffee and bananas, the appetites of people who want cheap t shirts, diamonds, energy and oriental rugs.
That is, most of the work we enslave people to do is work that the rich world directly or indirectly benefits from. Our cheap bananas come from the Ecuadorian plantation where whole families, including children, are so indebted to the "company store" that they can never hope to do anything else. And you and I eat their bananas. We wear the fancy sneakers, put the diamonds on our fingers, burn the Nigerian oil in our cars, decorate our homes with the labor of small children. We do not benefit from every slave, and responsibility exists all down the line, but it is also true that the economic function of slavery is to make masters rich.
Still, we might overall say we're doing pretty well with abolitionism, if we compare ourselves to the past. After all, the best guess is that maybe 1 in 10 people are enslaved, but in Ancient Athens, it was almost 1-1, and in the American south, in most plantation regions, slaves outnumbered free white people by between 2-1 and 10-1.But if you look at the society as a whole, Ancient Greece at the height of its slaveholding was about 4 free people to every slave and the US in 1850 had about 2.5 million slaves and just over 23 million people (Meltzer, _Slavery: A World History_. That is, in 1850, America as a whole had about the same percentage of slaves that we have right now worldwide.
If we recall that much of Northern Industrialism profited from slavery, turning cotton into cloth in the mills of Massachusetts, for example, the percentages are surprisingly similar. That is, the basis of rich society rests, roughly speaking, on the backs of about the same number of slaves that 19th century American wealth did. We're doing better than ancient Greece, but that's not saying much. We've not so much abolished slavery as offshored it, as Hartmann rightly observes.
So one answer to the question of whether agrarianism is irretrievably bound up in slavery would be to say yes - but no more so than industrialism. Both are slave societies. In one, we see our slaves, in another, we hide them, so that we can feel righteous, and not be confronted with their suffering.
Looked at in this like Jeffersonian agrarianism is no better - and no worse - than industrialism, which of course, depends on colonialism and enslaved labor. So the question becomes, how would we get out of slavery altogether, in either system - that is, which system can best be adapted to be truly slave free?
There's one kind of slavery we haven't included, but probably should, our energy slaves.
These slaves aren't people, of course, although they too come with a moral freight that we might want to consider, as millions of our slaves in the poor world, besides their horrible lives, now are in increased danger of death because of our warming the planet.
Equally importantly, fossil fuels have enabled most rich world denizens to live their lives as though they have slaves - not just far away slaves making their clothing and growing their coffee, but in the house slaves to do things like wash their dishes, carry them places they want to go, and cook their food. I'm not sure if James Kunstler coined the term "energy slaves" but it is a useful way of thinking about our lives now - that denizens of the rich world are living like slaveowners of prior days, dependent on fossil fuels and a good bit of globalized distance to seperate us from the ugly name.
It is certainly true that we shouldn't look on energy slaves with the same degree of horror we look on human slavery. But it is also the case that we might look on a lifestyle that requires human slaves and the equivalent amount of non-renewable energy with the same repugnance one might look at the lives of southern plantation owners. Because when the non-renewable energy runs out, we'll have created a generation of people who lack the essential skills, the physical fitness and the mindset to do their own work. The future of people trained only to be masters is not bright - either they remain rich, and do evil by enslaving more people to compensate for their diminishing resources (think what we're doing to the Iraqi people to get their oil), or they do quite badly indeed when they first have to pick up the work they have so long avoided.
Because, of course, the work that isn't easily mechanized, the work we can no longer afford to fuel - the manufacture of clothing is notoriously part of this - is still done by people. If we estimate, as Kunstler does in _The Long Emergency_ that the average rich world denizen uses fossil energy as the equivalent of 40 or more human laborers, and then add in the 1 in 10 actual slaves, it turns out that the world is actually using a much higher percentage of human labor or human equivalent labor without actually paying the real price for it - that is, without paying a fair and living wage, or the full, unexternalized costs of our fossil fueled "slaves." It also means that we have more slaves than anyone in history, broadly construed.
Now there's an obvious connection between slavery and fossil fuels, and a number of wise people have pointed out that it is no accident that the abolitionist movements of the 19th century arose at precisel y the same time as industrialization - just as machinery began to reduce the sheer numbers of bodies required to make and do things, it became possible in many senses to really imagine a society without slaves. The dualism we Americans all learned about in high school, the industrial north vs. the slave owning, agricultural south only tells part of the story.
Which brings me, of course, to the real question. Is it possible for human beings to imagine a society in which no one is enslaved to anyone else and we also don't burn fossil fuels? In which human beings cannot be commodified? Is it possible to imagine a low-input world in which there are no slaves? To some degree, of course, we can build renewable energies that allow us (and in an ideal world, more of the world's populace) to retain some of our energy slaves. But the larger issue of abolitionism must take center stage as we do this - that is, it is not enough to say "when we have all the power we need, we'll free our slaves" because, of course, that day never comes. The only choice is the choice of abolitionism itself, to acknowledge that it will cost us something to give up such a profoundly immoral structure, and that we will do it anyway, because it is right.
Last year at the Community Solutions Conference, someone asked me about the dangers of going back to a slave society in the absence of fossil fuels, and the question has haunted me since. I said then that we were still a slave society, and that we had to undo both evils - both fix the broken infrastructure in a society that can't imagine life without infinite cheap energy and also eliminate our slaves. But my answer has struck me as woefully insufficient ever since. How, after all, do we disengage from slavery? How do we face a future with less energy that doesn't lead to a permanent, huge, underclass of people, on whom a few people's wealth depends entirely? Because in that situation, the rich must always fear the poor, and have every incentive to reduce them to slavery.
Neither capitalism (which institutionalizes the disparities that encourage slavery and depends on reducing the value of human labor and resources, ideally to nil) nor communism (which outright controls humans and their labor) can provide us with an economic model. Fortunately, these are hardly our only choices. But it should remind us that the traditional dichotomy between these two "poles" and discourse in which there is nothing between or beyond Marx and Smith is a false one, designed to distract us with only a few choices. That both our "choices" lead to the enslavement of peoples should, I think, be sufficient to dismiss them.
Gandhi's Swaraj or "self-rule" movement offers one piece of the puzzle for a life without slavery. The notion that self-rule contained elements of political, economic and social theory meant that the system did not compartmentalize labor in ways that enabled slavery. It is a difficult system, because it places enormous faith in the independent good will of individuals, for, as Gandhi put it, "In such a state (where swaraj is achieved) everyone is his own ruler. He rules himself in such a manner that he is never a hindrance to his neighbour" - and yet, all deeply democractic systems depend on precisely that faith, that trust that ordinary people can and should hold in their hands the most essential details of our lives. It is Utopian, of course, but in the best sense. As Gandhi himself said, "It may be taunted with the retort that this is all Utopian and, therefore not worth a single thought... Let India live for the true picture, though never realizable in its completeness. We must have a proper picture of what we want before we can have something approaching it"
The idea that democracy can be separated out from the way we earn our livings or treat our soils is false, and Jefferson was right articulating this. The idea that we can also seperate out our agrarian ideology from its history of racism and slavery is also false - we cannot erase the inconvenient parts of our history, or minimize them. But what we can do is create our own sort of Swaraj, and take the complex legacy of our agrarianism, and make it into something else.
How might this come about? Well, a nation made up not of plantation owners, but of true small farmers might be able to do so. A distributist model, a la Chesterton, in which most of the land is held by very small farmers, is a potential beginning. And in fact, we have already done much of the inconvenient work of chopping up land and putting small houses on it - we call it suburbia, and most suburban lots come with a piece of land, perhaps not quite sufficient to sustain a family, but often enough to render them independent of a host of created needs, and able, because of that independence, to make their choices based not on their fears and dependencies on corporate entities, but from a dispassionate consideration of what is best for the society as a whole. Small suburban farmers cannot need slaves - their land is too small to require them. Intensive agricultural techniques mean that small lots can come close to supporting a family, or do so entire. It isn't necessary to take seriously the distributist's focus on biological family units here - we can create these "family" structures in other ways, and imagine cooperative ownerships that work in concert with distributism.
The question, of course, is how larger agriculture will be enacted. Reallocation of fossil fuels means that we are unlikely to require literal slaves to produce our food for a long time, during which our job is to create such a loathing for notion of holding either immediate or distant slaves that we would no more consider it than we would consider eating human flesh.
As for the rest - the simple fact is that industrial agriculture depends on our willingness to buy its products. The ethanol boom depends on our willingness and dependence on gas. Industrial corporate farms depend on our willingness to buy their products. Stuart Staniford has recently demonstrated that industrial agriculture will remain profitable under the current model long into the future, and that it is likely to starve millions or even billions of people in the biofuels rush. All of which is best answered that markets alone are only as powerful as the people who accept their parameters. Industrial agriculture could remain powerful - unless we do not allow it to be. And then, the question becomes only what should take its place.
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Islet Meaning and Definition in Dictionary
Definitions from Wordnet 2.0
- a small island
Definitions from Wiktionary
- a small island
Would you like to add your own explaination to this word 'Islet'?
Wikipedia Meaning and Definition on 'Islet'
- Islet: eyelet. For the Welsh indie band, see Islet (band). For human anatomy, see Islets of Langerhans. An islet is a very small island. As suggested
- Boğsak Islet: (Turkish: Boğsak Adası) is a Mediterranean islet in Mersin Province, Turkey. The 7 hectares (17 acres) islet is located 200 metres (660 ft) off shore
- Sue Islet (Queensland): Warraber (Sue Island) is the middle island of The Three Sisters, Torres Strait 100 km North East of Thursday Island Queensland, Australia in the Vigilant
- Harilaid (islet): Harilaid (Swedish Hares, formerly Gräsö) is small uninhabited island in Estonia. It lies about 4 kilometres west of the island of Vormsi. It should not
- Boundary Islet: Boundary Islet, historically known as North East Islet, is a Hogan Group islet of less than two hectares (4.9 acres) that straddles the border of the
- List of Cyprus islets: This is a list of islets of Cyprus. Ayios Georgios (Yeoryios), islet located in the Akamas peninsula Aspro, islet located in the Karpasia peninsula Dhemoniaris
- Skull Islet: Skull Islet is a small islet just off the shore of South Pender Island in British Columbia. It is on the east side of Bedwell Harbour. Skull Islet is part
- Gros Islet: Gros Islet (English: Large Island) is a community located near the northern tip of the island country of Saint Lucia. Originally a quiet fishing village
- South East Mutton Bird Islet: to be confused with South West Mutton Bird Islet. South East Mutton Bird Islet is a steep unpopulated islet located close to the south-western coast of
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Scientists at Stanford University have built ant-sized radios that could one day help track patients' temperatures, turn on coffee makers in the morning and prevent forgery.
A Stanford engineering team has built a radio, equipped with sensors, computational units and antennas one-tenth the size of Wi-Fi antennas, that is able to gain all the power it needs from the same electromagnetic waves that carry signals to its receiving antenna. No batteries are required.
These radios, which are designed to compute, execute and relay commands, could be the key to linking gadgets together in the increasingly popular idea of the Internet of Things.
Today's radios generally are the size of a quarter, according to Amin Arbabian, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford and a researcher on the radio project. These new radios are much smaller. They're 3.7 x 1.2 millimeters.
That's the size of an ant.
Radios that small could be added to everything from $100 bills to medical gauze, Band-Aids and home appliances. At just pennies per radio, that means a myriad of products could easily and cheaply become part of a linked network.
"This could be very important," Arbabian told Computerworld. "When you think about the Internet of Things, you're talking about needing a thousand radios per person. That counts all the radios and devices you'd need around you in your home and office environments. With 300 million people in the U.S., we'd have 300 billion radios."
A Bluetooth-type radio works fine for smartphones but is too big and expensive to connect most of the objects in users' lives.
"We needed the cost and size to go down, and you need scale," said Arbabian, who began working on the project in 2011. "Do you want to put something the size of a Bluetooth radio on a Band-Aid? It's too big. It costs a lot. The technology we have today for radios doesn't meet any of these requirements."
He explained that a tiny radio with a temperature sensor could be put on a bandage or piece of adhesive that's applied to every patient that enters a hospital. The radio and its sensor would enable the medical staff to continuously track every patient's temperature, a key health indicator, effortlessly and cheaply.
Sensors also could be used to measure air quality, to track medications from the manufacturer to the end user and to even keep track of tools and supplies in an operating room. For instance, Arbabian noted that a radio, encased in bio-safe material, could be attached to gauze or medical tools. With them, everything in an operating room could be tracked to ensure that nothing is left inside the patient at the end of surgery.
The radios also could be attached to every day products inside the home, including appliances, doors and windows.
One radio sensor may detect that a door has opened and someone has entered the room. That radio could connect with others that might switch on a coffee maker or turn on the air conditioning.
Radios are simple devices. Each one has a tag ID number built into it, Arbabian explained. When contacted, the radio will respond with its identifying number and its location. Along with sensors and a receiving, as well as a transmitting, antenna, the radio also carries a basic computational unit. Much less sophisticated and complex than, say, an Intel Pentium processor, this chip can handle only about five or six instruction sets but consumes very little power.
The Stanford team designed each piece of the radio, down to the computer chip.
The radio range is limited to about two to three meters. Arbabian said he could double the range but would need to double the size of the radio to do it.
"There's a tradeoff there," he added. "If you want five meters, you might make it twice the size. The bigger it is the longer the range. The smaller it is the shorter the range."
Because the research team has a framework for the radio's design, Arbabian said it's fairly simple for them to take it from one dimension to another.
The team already has been contacted by a few semiconductor manufacturers about the technology.
"Were not that far off. It's almost ready," said Arbabian. "We might need six months to refine some components. We need more time for some added features, like extra sensors. We have the foundation so it's not a difficult addition."
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Founding Fathers explained Second Amendment’s origin
The Constitution of the United States is not a “dynamic” document, subject to the whims of a 21st century government, unless it is amended in accordance with the process described in Article V of the Constitution, which the Supreme Court has twice reaffirmed with respect to the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
Presidents can’t simply sign an executive order, and voila’, the Constitution is magically amended. To amend the Constitution takes overwhelming majority support, because the Founding Fathers knew that governments would be tempted to bypass the amendment process, when the Constitution hindered them from assuming more power from the people.
Obama stated in his inaugural address, “But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.” Then amend the Constitution, Mr. President.
It takes a two-thirds vote of both Houses of Congress or a Constitutional Convention of two-thirds of the states and ratification by 3/4th of the states (38 of 50). The Founding Fathers didn’t want 21st century governments or any future government to easily change their thoughtful and reasoned work.
George Washington stated,
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates.”
“But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.” (farewell address) “A free people ought not only to be armed but disciplined…”
No one is arguing that there can’t be a civil debate on the Constitution’s Second Amendment, however, many of the Founding Fathers wrote the amendment to ensure the new republic wasn’t able to do what the British Parliament had done in England.
The Founding Fathers were called traitors and seditionists by England. In the 21st Century, Americans call them patriots. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Syria and Egypt are proof of what the Founding Fathers feared about governments, where the only weapons the Syrians and Egyptians have to defend themselves are rocks, sticks and stones!
Thomas Jefferson –
“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”
George Mason –
“Forty years ago, when the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised … to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually…”
James Madison – (Federalist Papers #46),
“Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.. (where) ..the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”
“…To these (federal troops attempting to impose tyranny) would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands.”
Patrick Henry – During Virginia Ratification Convention 1788,
“The great object is, that every man be armed … Everyone who is able may have a gun. Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.”
Noah Webster (Served in Revolutionary Army, Printed dictionary; a federalist),
“Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed….”
“Little more can reasonably be aimed at with respect to the people at large than to have them properly armed and equipped.” (Federalist Papers #29)
Zacharia Johnson (delegate to Virginia Ratifying Convention),
“The people are not to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them.”
My point is these patriots knew about tyranny in Europe. The American government may never assume that role, but it isn’t sedition to want to defend oneself against all enemies, both foreign and domestic.
The signers of the founding documents lived and died based on principals of liberty and fought against the tyranny of Britain. Many today do not trust government bureaucrats and they have a right to defend themselves against tyranny, regardless the tyrant.
Background checks may prevent some guns from getting into the wrong hands, but registration of gun purchases and existing gun registration might provide the means of government to bypass the Constitution in the case of martial law, for instance.
But the bottom line dictates that gun-control laws will not affect the criminals, only those who obey the laws of the land, including the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
Americans should heed the wisdom, experience and the legacy passed down to the 21st Century by our Founding Fathers, who gave us the right to keep and bear arms and no one, including the government, should infringe on those rights under the guise of “gun violence”.
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What happened when the hurricane ran across thousands of offshore wind turbines? It sounds like a climate scientist's idea of a joke, but a new study has found that offshore wind farms could protect coastal cities by slowing hurricane winds and reducing storm surge.
The spinning turbine blades of offshore wind farms can sap a hurricane's strength by slowing the rotating winds in the outer edge of the rotating storm—an action that leads to smaller waves and eventually slows the wind speeds of the entire hurricane. Simulations have shown that such effects could have significantly dampened the impact of real-life hurricanes Sandy, Isaac and Katrina, according to a new paper detailed in the 26 February 2014 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change.
"We found that when wind turbines are present, they slow down the outer rotation winds of a hurricane," said Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, in a news release. "This feeds back to decrease wave height, which reduces movement of air toward the center of the hurricane, increasing the central pressure, which in turn slows the winds of the entire hurricane and dissipates it faster."
Jacobson worked with his colleagues at Stanford and the University of Delaware to simulate hurricane collisions with tens of thousands of offshore wind turbines, based on a computer model that can account for air pollution, energy, weather and climate. They then ran simulations based on the real-life cases of Hurricane Sandy's impact on New York in 2012, Hurricane Isaac's strike on New Orleans in 2012, and Hurricane Katrina's devastating blow on New Orleans in 2005.
In Katrina's case, an array of 78 000 wind turbines off the coast of New Orleans slowed simulated wind speeds by 130 kilometers per hour and decreased storm surge by up to 71 percent. In Isaac's case, the same array of turbines could have decreased peak wind speeds by up to 92 kph and reduced storm surge by up to 60 percent.
Other simulation runs found that even bigger arrays of 272 000 turbines or even 543 000 turbines—located offshore of Cuba and stretching from Florida to Texas—could have dropped Katrina's wind speeds by 158 kph and reduced storm surge by up to 79 percent.
An array of 112 000 turbines stretching from New York City to Washington D.C. could have slowed Sandy's peak winds by 130 kph and decreased storm surge by up to 21 percent. A larger array of 414 000 turbines along most of the U.S. East Coast could have dropped Sandy's wind speeds by almost 141 kph and decreased storm surge by up to 34 percent.
The huge wind farms would do more than just slow down the hurricanes. The largest wind turbine arrays could have extracted up to 2.65 terawatts of peak power from Hurricane Sandy and up to 1.18 terawatts of peak power from Hurricane Katrina—peak power representing the most power extracted at any time during the simulations.
Such simulations suggest that huge wind farms have an edge over traditional coastal city defenses because they slow both wind speeds and decrease storm surge. By comparison, seawalls can only stop storm surge. The cost of building seawalls can also run between $10 billion and $40 billion per installation, whereas expensive wind farms could pay for themselves through energy generation over time.
Hurricane damage to the huge arrays of wind turbines is a risk, Jacobson said. But he pointed out that current wind turbines can stand up to wind speeds of 180 kph within the range of category 2 or 3 hurricanes. And the presence of the huge wind farms could help prevent hurricanes from ever building up to superstorm wind speeds. (The study assumed the wind turbines had a cut-out speed of 180 kph in most of the simulation runs to prevent damage to the turbines.)
Huge arrays of offshore wind turbines remain a far cry from today's reality when the U.S. has yet to build any offshore wind farms. But the new study raises the possibility of hurricane protection as added incentive for building offshore wind farms. Policy planners could consider storm protection as the cherry on top of wind power's known benefits involving renewable power generation, national energy security and the reduction of the human impact on climate change.
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Work Chess set
Department of Decorative Arts: Middle Ages
"Saint Louis" chessboard
© 1993 RMN
The "St Louis" chess comes from the Crown collection, but the tradition attributing it to Louis IX of France is certainly mistaken. This set, made of rock crystal and smoked quartz, was in fact created in the late fifteenth century in Germany (the board) and France (the pieces). Extensively altered over the centuries, it nevertheless remains a fine example of the artistic inventiveness of the fifteenth century and of the magnificence of the French Crown collection.
A chess set of crystal, quartz, and silver
The board is composed of thirty-two squares of rock crystal alternating with thirty-two squares of smoked quartz, all cased in silver. Each square of rock crystal is backed with a silver foil bearing a silver flower with red enamel petals and green enamel leaves. Similarly, each square of quartz is backed with a black foil adorned with a gilt silver flower with leaves of silver. These flowers are thus visible through the opaque squares. Half of the pieces, which are not all original, are carved from rock crystal (the white pieces), and the other half (the black pieces) from smoked quartz. Each piece is six-sided, carved from a single block and mounted in gilt silver.
A chess set within a chess set
Arranged around the periphery of the board's sixty-four squares are eight small compartments covered with rock crystal lids. Inside are little boxwood figurines, both civilian and military, seated, standing or on horseback. Painted red or blue, they seem to echo the chessmen. On two of the sides, the tiny figures occupy the squares of a reduced chessboard of white and black metal. Each of these sixteen-square boards is framed by two bouquets of silver flowers on a ground of imitation greenery, which also appears inside two other compartments containing soldier figurines represented in a forest. The military figures are modeled on German soldiers of the late fifteenth century, suggesting that the board was made in southern Germany.
The chess set: modifications and history
In 1791 the sides of the board were still embellished with gilt copper on a ground of blue enamel. Now the sides are plated with a stamped silver frieze of foliage added in the nineteenth century. The corners rest on the heads of chubby winged cherubs in gilt bronze dating from the seventeenth century. Added in the eighteenth century, these may be of Italian workmanship. Royal inventories often listed chess sets made of semi-precious stones. The presence of the little boxwood figures links this set with others listed in inventories as belonging to the Palais du Louvre. This set was listed in the inventory of the collections of Gabrielle d'Estrées (1573-99), and later in the gem collection of Louis XIV under number 31. As one piece was lost, Louis XVIII gave the set to his first valet de chambre, Thierry de Ville-d'Avray.
"Saint Louis" chessboard
Late 15th century and 17th century
Rock crystal, cedar, gilded silver, gilded bronze
H. 6.50 cm; W. 43 cm
Former Crown collection; loaned by the Musée de Cluny
Anne de Bretagne
The Louvre is open every day (except Tuesday) from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
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| 0.935494 | 726 | 2.796875 | 3 |
Liver disease is the cause of a
considerable burden of illness across the European Union (EU), investigators
report in The Journal of Hepatology.
The authors calculate that 170,000 deaths each year are attributable to liver
cirrhosis, with 47,000 of these caused by liver cancer. The main causes of
liver disease were excess alcohol consumption, viral infections and obesity,
all of which are “amenable to prevention and treatment”.
The international team of investigators set
out to establish a clear understanding of the prevalence and incidence of liver
disease and its causes across the EU. They identified 260 separate studies
focusing on liver disease in EU countries. All were published in the past five
Data gathered by the World Health Organization (WHO) showed that 2% of all
mortality in the EU each year, some 170,000 deaths, was due to liver cirrhosis.
The regions with the greatest cirrhosis-related mortality were south-eastern
and north-eastern Europe. However, the authors noted that there has been a
significant increase in recorded mortality attributable to cirrhosis in the UK
and Ireland over the past ten years.
Liver cancer, principally hepatocellular
carcinoma, caused 47,000 deaths annually. In 2008, incidence of liver cancer
among men and women was 11 and 4 per 100,000 persons respectively. Incidence of
death due to liver cancer was lowest in the Netherlands and highest in Italy.
Excess alcohol consumption was identified
as the main cause of liver-related death. Indeed, the authors note “Europe is
the heaviest drinking region in the world in terms of alcohol consumption”. In
France, 69% of cases of liver cancer were attributed to heavy drinking. The
incidence of alcohol-related liver mortality varied considerably, from a low of
3 per 100,000 persons in Latvia to 47 per 100,000 in Hungary.
However, health promotion initiatives in
Norway and Sweden show that the burden of alcohol-related liver death can be
reduced. Nevertheless, the investigators write “the burden of liver disease
attributable to the harmful use of alcohol is significant compared to other
aetiologies. Moreover, the burden of general health, social and economic
related issues related to alcohol consumption is substantial.”
Viral infections were also identified as a
major cause of liver disease.
Incidence of hepatitis A virus ranged from
0.55 to 1.5 per 100,000 persons. However, epidemics of hepatitis A were
responsible for transient 10-fold increases in incidence in some countries,
including the Czech Republic and Latvia in 2008. Mini-epidemics of hepatitis A
were also observed in some specific populations, and in 2002-03, an outbreak of
the infection in Finland which was initially localised to people injecting drugs,
spread to the general population.
In most cases, illness caused by hepatitis
A is mild and transient. More serious is hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection.
Annual incidence of HBV across the EU
ranged from 0.2 cases per 100,000 in Iceland to 11.2 cases per 100,000 in
France. The mortality rate due to HBV was 2.5 per 100,000 in France, with a
similar incidence observed in Spain.
But there was also some good news. Vaccine
campaigns and other health promotion initiatives meant that the rate of new HBV
infections was falling in most countries. Despite this, the authors expressed
concern that many HBV infections are undiagnosed.
Annual incidence of hepatitis C virus (HCV)
in the EU was estimated to be 6.19 infections per 100,000 persons, with
prevalence of the infection varying from 0.13% to 3.25%. Injecting drug users
were shown to have the highest burden of disease, with prevalence reaching 60%
in France. In Italy, 82% of injecting drug users seeking treatment were found
to have HCV.
Between 10 and 20% of people with
chronic HCV infection develop liver cirrhosis and 7% progress to liver cancer.
The investigators note that “patients diagnosed with hepatitis C show increased
morbidity, higher hospital admission rates and mortality rates three times
higher than that of the population.” The treatment costs of HCV are also
highlighted by the authors, who believe “patients now chronically infected with
HCV will represent a heavy disease burden in the coming years”.
Hepatitis Delta virus (HDV) can only infect
patients who also have HBV. It is associated with a more
aggressive disease course and poorer outcomes. The highest prevalence is seen
in Africa, Brazil, eastern and Mediterranean Europe, the Middle East and parts
of Asia. Prevalence of HDV co-infection among HBV-infected patients in the EU
varied between about 4% and 7%, but much higher rates were seen in individuals
who were migrants from regions where the infection is endemic.
The growing European obesity problem was
also shown to be contributing to the burden of liver disease in the EU.
Approximately 50% of adults in the EU are overweight or obese, a risk factor
for the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). A Romanian
study found that a fifth of adults had NAFLD, and prevalence among patients
with type-2 diabetes has been recorded as high as 70%. Several studies in different
EU settings showed that NAFLD was associated with a significant increase in
“The data reviewed in this study clearly
demonstrate the significant burden of liver disease in Europe,” conclude the
authors. “Liver disease associated mortality in this region is at least
comparable with other diseases that are considered to be of major public health
concern.” They hope their findings will “be the impetus for the design and
implementation of strategies that will ameliorate this problem and ultimately
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Earhart symbolizes the fascination that aviation held for Americans in the 1920s and 1930s. Like Charles Lindbergh, she became a national celebrity because of her exploits in the air. Her modest demeanor and short, tousled hair made her a perfect heroine for a media-conscious age.
Earhart’s entire life had a certain restless quality. By 1928, she had found a calling of sorts as a social worker in Boston who flew in her spare time. When New York publisher George Palmer Putnam asked if she wanted to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic, she readily agreed. The June 1928 flight from Newfoundland to Burry Port, Wales, made her an instant celebrity, although she was quick to note that she had been merely a passenger, ‘a sack of potatoes,’ who kept the log. When she soloed the Atlantic in 1932, another first for women, she proved to the world and, more important, to herself that 1928 had not been a fluke.
After the 1928 flight, Earhart turned her hobby of flying into a paying career. As a lecturer, author, and airline industry vice president, she preached her message that flying would soon be an accepted part of everyday life. Many of her widely publicized flights-the 1932 transatlantic crossing, her 1935 solo from Hawaii to California, the 1937 round-the-world attempt-hastened the introduction of commercial air routes. Her career was managed by Putnam, whom she married in 1931 in what was as much a business relationship as a love match. Earhart kept her own name professionally and made no plans to have children. She continued to identify herself publicly with feminism and served as the first president of the Ninety-Nines, an organization of women pilots.
Amelia Earhart had a poet’s appreciation of flight, and she flew because she wanted to, which to her individualistic mind-set was the best reason of all. She was delighted when Purdue University, where she had served as aviation consultant and counselor on careers for women since 1935, presented her with a Lockheed Electra so advanced she dubbed it ‘the flying laboratory.’ Now she could fulfill her ambition to fly around the world. The first attempt in March 1937 ended prematurely when her plane crashed on takeoff in Hawaii. A second attempt began two months later, now following a west-to-east direction. On July 2, 1937, during the hardest leg, a 2,556-mile segment from New Guinea to a tiny speck in the mid-Pacific called Howland Island, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared.
The circumstances of Earhart’s ‘popping off’ (her matter-of-fact phrase) have been a source of speculation ever since. Was she on a spy mission for Franklin Roosevelt? Did she land on a desert island and become a Japanese prisoner? The weight of evidence suggests that her plane ran out of fuel somewhere near Howland Island and sank quickly. But given the aviator’s hold on the popular imagination, the search for Amelia Earhart continues.
The Reader’s Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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Skip to Content
Home > Patients & Visitors > Health Library > Cognitive Development, Ages 12 to 24 Months
The brain grows dramatically through the second year of life. Around
12 months, toddlers develop a new ability to remember experiences that occurred
a few hours or even a day earlier. Toddlers often demonstrate this new ability
by repeating a recalled experience, such as throwing a ball or stacking blocks,
at a later time. Changes in the brain allow a toddler between 18 and 24 months
of age to think in more complex ways, such as recalling events that occurred
days earlier. The older toddler begins playing pretend. For example, he or she may give a teddy
bear a "drink" from a cup or let the bear "talk" on the phone. These toddlers are also
beginning to understand symbols (for example, that words can stand for
Toddlers also begin to see connections between events. For example,
when they open a music box, they know they will hear a song. Or when they throw
a ball, they know it will bounce. They'll probably throw their dolls, food, and
many other objects to see if they'll bounce too.
At 18 months, toddlers have developed a greater understanding of the
world outside of home. Toddlers begin to develop a sense of self, the ability
to see themselves as separate from others. They can now imagine a threat and
often go through a period of clinging to parents and being fearful of
ByHealthwise StaffPrimary Medical ReviewerSusan C. Kim, MD - PediatricsSpecialist Medical ReviewerLouis Pellegrino, MD - Developmental Pediatrics
Current as ofAugust 21, 2015
Current as of:
August 21, 2015
Susan C. Kim, MD - Pediatrics & Louis Pellegrino, MD - Developmental Pediatrics
To learn more about Healthwise, visit Healthwise.org.
© 1995-2015 Healthwise, Incorporated. Healthwise, Healthwise for every health decision, and the Healthwise logo are trademarks of Healthwise, Incorporated.
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North Kansas City Hospital
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Herschel Opens Up the Cool Universe
Oct. 11 & 12
The Herschel Space Observatory, launched on May 14, 2009, is designed to carry out astronomical observations at wavelengths from ~1mm to 100 microns. This region of the spectrum, between radio waves and heat radiation, is a unique probe of the “cool” universe, that is, of objects at temperatures between a few degrees and 100 degrees above absolute zero. This includes material out of which new stars are forming in locations ranging from distant galaxies to nearby cold clouds of gas. To carry out these observations, Herschel has the largest precision telescope launched for astronomy, and three very sensitive instruments. Among many projects, Herschel has followed the “water trail” – observing this molecule in a wide range of sources ranging from giant molecular clouds to protoplanetary disks around young stars to comets in the solar system. This talk will present some of the highlights of Herschel observations and describe how they are changing our picture of how new stars and planets form.
Dr. Paul Goldsmith
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Basic functions of prisons
The basic functions of prisons today are as follows:
i. Social isolation and confinement, i.e., to isolate an offender from society because he has proved to be a threat to its organisation, stability, and cohesion, and to keep him out of circulation and so securely confined that his deviation from law does not disturb the peace of mind of the man in the street.
ii. Repentance, i.e., to keep an offender in an isolated place where he could ponder over the consequences of his wrong deeds.
iii. Punishment and deterrence, i.e., to inflict some pain and suffering, on an offender (i.e., some punishment) for violating legal norms, so that criminals should be worse off than the poorest of honest citizens; law-abiding individuals must be satisfied that law-breakers are penalised and they are being protected against the threat of recidivism; and members of society may be deterred from committing crimes.
iv. Protection, i.e., protecting community from criminals by marking out persons who violate laws and stigmatising them so that others are warned against them. J Criminal = Deviance + Prosecution + Stigma
v. Reformation, i.e., to change offender's values, motivations, attitudes and perceptions and to resocialise him and restore him to community.
But are these functions shared by the prison personnel with the law-framers? If yes, what means do they adopt to accomplish these purposes? Why is there split between the managing and the managed groups, i.e., between the inmates and the prison staff?
It is because of the stereotyped hostile and antagonistic attitude towards each other, or because of the inefficiency and incompetence of the staff, or because the staff has to function within a structure of limited freedom and formally prescribed framework of social distance which restricts their initiative for new programmes of reformation?
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Sources of C. gattii
Where does C. gattii live?
C. gattii lives in the environment, usually near trees and in the soil around trees.1,2 The fungus primarily lives in tropical and sub-tropical areas of the world, particularly Australia and Papua New Guinea, and also in parts of Africa, Asia, Europe, Mexico, and South America.1,2 It also lives in mainland British Columbia, Vancouver Island, and the United States Pacific Northwest (Oregon and Washington). C. gattii may also live in other areas of the U.S. such as California and the Southeastern U.S., because a few people from these parts of the U.S. have gotten C. gattii infections without traveling outside of these areas.3
Life cycle of C. gattii
C. gattii infections are not contagious. Humans and animals can become infected with C. gattii after inhaling airborne, dried yeast cells or spores from the environment. C. gattii travels through the airway and enters the lungs. The body’s temperature allows C. gattii to transform into its yeast form, and the cells grow thick outer layers to protect themselves. The yeasts then divide and multiply by budding. After infecting the lungs, C. gattii can travel through the bloodstream to infect other areas of the body, such as the central nervous system.
Click here for the PDF version of image [PDF - 1 page] for printing.
I’m worried that C. gattii is in the environment near my home. Can someone test the trees or soil to find out if the fungus is there?
No, in this case, testing the environment for C. gattii isn’t likely to be useful. A sample that tests positive for Cryptococcus doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a source of infection, and a sample that tests negative doesn’t necessarily mean that the fungus isn’t there. Also, there are no commercially-available tests to detect C. gattii in the environment. Testing environmental samples for C. gattii is currently only done for scientific research.
Species of Cryptococcus and genetic types of C. gattii
The genus Cryptococcus contains over 30 species, but two species, Cryptococcus neoformans and Cryptococcus gattii, cause nearly all cryptococcal infections. Cryptococcus gattii used to be called Cryptococcus neoformans var. gattii, but it was determined to be a separate species from C. neoformans in 2002.4 C. neoformans and C. gattii tend to affect different patient populations. C. neoformans most often causes meningitis in people who have HIV infection or who are otherwise immunocompromised. C. gattii affects healthy people as well as people who have weakened immune systems, and it usually infects the lungs, the central nervous system, or both.
There are four known molecular types of C. gattii: VGI, VGII, VGIII, and VGIV. Type VGII can be further divided into the molecular subtypes VGIIa, VGIIb, and VGIIc. The different molecular types of C. gattii can be found in different parts of the world. Most C. gattii infections in British Columbia, Canada and the U.S. Pacific Northwest are caused by the molecular type VGII, but VGI is the most common type in Australia and Papua New Guinea.2 VGII appears to mostly cause lung infections, whereas the other types usually cause meningitis in people who don’t have any prior medical problems; however, scientists are still learning about the differences between the types of C. gattii.
- Springer DJ, Chaturvedi V. Projecting global occurrence of Cryptococcus gattii. Emerg Infect Dis. 2010 Jan;16(1):14-20.
- Harris J, Lockhart S, Chiller T. Cryptococcus gattii: where do we go from here? Med Mycol. 2011 Sep 22.
- Harris JR, Lockhart SR, Sondermeyer G, Vugia DJ, Crist MB, D'Angelo MT, et al. Cryptococcus gattii Infections in Multiple States Outside the US Pacific Northwest. Emerg Infect Dis. 2013 Oct;19(10):1621-7.
- Kwon-Chung KB, T; Fell, JW; Diaz, M. Proposal to conserve the name Cryptococcus gattii against C. hondurianus and C. bacillisporus (Basidiomycota, Hymenomycetes, Tremellomycetidae). Taxon. 2002;51:804-6.
- Page last reviewed: December 16, 2015
- Page last updated: December 16, 2015
- Content source:
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Posted by Ann on Monday, February 22, 2010 at 8:26pm.
Draw and label a rectangle whose area is represented by the following expression; (x+1) (x+5). Then write an equivalent expression in expanded form.
I have absolutly no clue how to do that. :/
- 8th Grade Math - Damon, Monday, February 22, 2010 at 8:30pm
label the width x + 1
label the length x + 5
area = (x+1)(x+5)
x^2 + 6 x + 5
- 8th Grade Math - ram the great, Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 7:32pm
retard its 5 stupid kids these days always looking for help back in my
- 8th Grade Math - gadis, Saturday, February 27, 2010 at 8:28am
(x+1) and (x+5)
x+1+x+5 = 180
2x+6 = 180
2x=180 - 6
- 8th Grade Math - Anonymous, Wednesday, March 10, 2010 at 8:10am
how do you talking like that to your own students i guess you are a bad teacher and suck
- 8th Grade Math - no name, Wednesday, March 10, 2010 at 8:11am
how do you talking like that to your own students i guess you are a bad teacher and suck!!!
- 8th Grade Math - Anonymous, Monday, December 6, 2010 at 2:43pm
THE LENGTH of a rectangular field is 6 m less than twice the width. the perimeter is 312 m. find the length of the field
Answer This Question
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Mange is a type of parasitic infestation that happens in the skin of the animals. The similar infestation in the skin of man is called as demodicosis and it causes skin irritations and dog dry skin. Mange is most commonly found in the dogs. It is generally referred as dog mange. The mites live in the dog’s hair follicles and in the skin (differ because of the type of mites). It is hard to detect the infestation as well as the treatment is also difficult. It is important to consult a veterinarian. In rare cases, when the mange is in advanced level it sucks the blood of the animal.
The Symptoms of the mange:
The following are the symptoms that can be seen in the infected dog.
Itchiness: The dogs will scratch themselves a lot due to itchiness as well as always havibg dog dry skin. It is one of most common symptoms. When they scratch so much, their skin will have many red sores. This means that the problem is complicated.
Loss of hair: The mites burrow themselves into the body parts and affect the dog. In those parts, there will be a greater loss of hair and those parts will show the red sores. It means it is affected by dog mange. A quality dog shampoo can also help cure dog mange.
Dryness: When due to hair loss, the skin of the dog is exposed and we will have to check it. If there is extreme dryness and wrinkles, then it means that your dog is affected due to mange and you will see quite a bot of dogs dry skin.
Odor: As the mites infect them so much, there will be itchiness in a greater scale. This will make the mites to spread and the odor of the dog changes. The odor will be similar to athlete’s foot.
Sores: There are sores and redness all over the body. There are also blisters in the skin. These are symptoms of the mange. At this point, it is best to take your dog to the veterinarian doctor and have mange treatment.
Treatment of dog dry skin and mange:
The treatments of the mange are discussed here.
The mange treatment is given when the dogs have the mange infestation. The veterinary doctor gives the first aid and treats the mange. The mange is easily curable. If it is not cured by ordinary treatments, then the doctor chooses some types of aggressive treatments. The treatment has weekly injections. The injections are of Ivermectin and it has to be given for 4 weeks. The Shetland sheep dogs and the old English dogs do not tolerate this type of injection. These types of dogs are given multiple dips of the insecticides sulfur and the paramite in the affected the areas. The veterinary doctor also prescribes some shampoos for controlling the dandruff and dog dry skin. Cortisone is one of the dandruff relief shampoos. It lessens the itchiness.
Prevention of the mange:
Some of the ways in which the mange can be prevented are listed below.
Feed your dog with a healthy diet to ensue its proper maintenance of health. The diet should be rich in fiber as well as vitamin content. The fiber and vitamin will help the dogs to improve their immune system.
Thanks for reading about dog mange.
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Domestic violence harms everyone's kids
Each year, between 10 and 20 percent of schoolchildren in the United States are exposed to domestic violence. According to psychologists, such exposure can lead to aggressive behavior, decreased social competence, and diminished academic performance. A majority of parents and school officials believe that children who are troubled, whatever the cause, not only demonstrate poor academic performance and inappropriate behavior in school, but also adversely affect the learning opportunities for other children in the classroom. A nationally representative survey by Public Agenda found that 85 percent of teachers and 73 percent of parents agreed that the “school experience of most students suffers at the expense of a few chronic offenders.”
Understanding whether troubled children in fact generate spillover effects in school is important for two reasons. First, the existence of substantial spillovers caused by family problems such as domestic violence would provide an additional compelling reason for policymakers to find ways to help troubled families. Second, because many education policies change the composition of school and classroom peer groups, it is important to understand how such changes may affect student achievement. For example, a common concern regarding the ongoing push to “mainstream” emotionally disturbed students in regular classroom settings is that doing so may undermine the performance of other students. Similarly, the tracking of students into classrooms based on ability or academic performance may group disadvantaged children with the most disruptive students. The validity of these concerns hinges on whether and how classroom exposure to troubled peers affects student achievement and behavior.
Credibly measuring negative spillovers caused by troubled children has been difficult. Most data sets do not allow researchers to identify troubled children. Even when such students are identified in the data, it is difficult to determine if a disruptive child causes his classmates to misbehave or if his classmates cause him to be disruptive, what scholars of peer effects call the “reflection problem.” In addition, troubled children are likely to attend the same schools as other disadvantaged children. One must rule out the possibility that the disruptive student and his classmates misbehave due to some common unobserved factor.
We overcome these problems in this study by utilizing a unique data set in which information on students’ academic achievement and behavior is linked to domestic violence cases filed by their parents. This data set allows us to identify troubled children more precisely than we could by using conventional demographic measures. Moreover, we can identify children who are troubled for specific family reasons and not because of their peer group. This allows us to measure peer effects free from the reflection problem, providing a rare opportunity to test the notion that even one “bad apple” impedes the learning of all other students.
Our results confirm, first, that children from troubled families, as measured by family domestic violence, perform considerably worse on standardized reading and mathematics tests and are much more likely to commit disciplinary infractions and be suspended than other students. We find also that an increase in the number of children from troubled families reduces peer student math and reading test scores and increases peer disciplinary infractions and suspensions. The effects on academic achievement are greatest for students from higher income families, while the effects on behavior are more pronounced on students who are less well-off. The results of our analysis provide evidence that, in many cases, a single disruptive student can indeed influence the academic progress made by an entire classroom of students.
In our study, we use a confidential student-level data set provided by the school board of Alachua County in Florida. This data set consists of observations of students in the 3 rd through 5th grades from 22 public elementary schools for the academic years 1995–96 through 2002–03. The Alachua County school district is large relative to school districts nationwide, with roughly 30,000 students; in the 1999–00 school year, it was the 192nd largest among the nearly 15,000 districts nationwide. The student population in our sample is approximately 55 percent white, 38 percent black, 3.5 percent Hispanic, 2.5 percent Asian, and 1 percent mixed race. Fifty-three percent of students were eligible for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program.
The test-score data consist of reading and mathematics scores from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the Stanford 9, both nationally normed exams. Reported scores indicate the percentile ranking on the national test relative to all test-takers nationwide. Because the reading and math results are so similar, we use a composite score calculated by taking the average of the math and reading scores. The average student in our data scored at the 53rd percentile, or just above the national norm.
Yearly disciplinary records, which include incident type and date, are available for every student in our sample. Incidents are reported in the system if they are serious enough to require intervention by the principal or another administrator. We focus on three behavioral outcomes from these records: the probability the student was involved in a disciplinary incident, the total number of disciplinary incidents per student, and the probability the student was suspended. In a typical year, 18 percent of the students in our data set were involved in a disciplinary incident, the average student was involved in 0.56 incidents, and 9 percent of students were suspended.
We gathered domestic violence data from public records information at the Alachua County courthouse, which included the date filed and the names and addresses of individuals involved in domestic violence cases filed in civil court in Alachua County between January 1, 1993, and March 12, 2003.Cases are initiated when one family member (typically the mother) petitions the court for a temporary injunction for protection against another member of the family (most often the father or boyfriend). Students were linked to cases in which the petitioner’s first and last name and the first three digits of the residential address matched the parent name and student’s residential address in the annual school record. In that way, we were able to identify the set of students who could be matched to a domestic violence case from1993 to 2003. In total, 4.6 percent of the children in our data set were linked to a domestic violence case filed by a parent, split equally between boys and girls. Sixty-one percent of these children were black, while 85 percent were eligible for subsidized school lunches.
Students linked to a domestic violence case performed at lower levels academically and were more likely to have been involved in a disciplinary incident than other students in the district. Boys exposed to domestic violence, for example, performed at the 37th percentile academically, as compared with the 52nd percentile for boys who were not exposed. Forty-three percent of boys exposed to domestic violence were involved in a disciplinary incident, as compared with 25 percent of boys who were not exposed. Girls exposed to domestic violence performed at the 41st percentile academically and 19 percent of them were involved in a disciplinary incident, as compared with the 55th percentile and 11 percent for girls who were not exposed to domestic violence (see Figure 1).
Measuring Peer Effects
Our main analysis examines the impact of troubled children on their peers. We assume there is no feedback loop in which a student’s peers cause the domestic violence in the household. This assumption appears reasonable, as none of the most likely determinants of domestic violence can plausibly be caused by an elementary school child or her peers.
To overcome the bias that results from self-selection into peer groups, our main analysis compares cohorts of students in the same grade at the same school in different years. For example, we compare the 3rd graders in a given school this year with the 3rd graders in the same school last year to see whether the cohort with more students exposed to domestic violence had higher or lower student achievement. Restricting the comparisons to students attending the same school ensures that any effects we observe reflect the impact of troubled students and not the fact that schools with more such students differ in unobserved ways from other schools. We measure peer domestic violence at the cohort level (that is, across all students in a grade at a school) as opposed to the classroom level due to the possible sorting of students into classrooms according to their achievement and behavior. We also adjust for differences among students in a large set of individual characteristics—most importantly whether particular students had been directly exposed to domestic violence—but also race, gender, subsidized lunch status, and median zip code income.
Our results indicate that troubled students have a statistically significant negative effect on their peers’ reading and math test scores. Adding one troubled student to a classroom of 20 students results in a decrease in student reading and math test scores of more than two-thirds of a percentile point (2 to 3 percent of a standard deviation). The addition of a troubled peer also significantly increases misbehavior of other students in the classroom, in effect causing them to commit 0.09 more infractions than they otherwise would, a 16 percent increase. These are effects that could accumulate over time if the same students are repeatedly exposed to troubled peers.
These average effects also mask a few interesting differences across student groups. We find that troubled peers have a large and statistically significant negative effect on higher income children’s math and reading achievement, but only a small and statistically insignificant effect on the achievement of low-income children. However, we find the opposite pattern for disciplinary outcomes. The presence of troubled peers significantly increases the misbehavior of low-income children, but does not increase the disciplinary problems of higher-income children (see Figure 2).
Results of examining the differential effects of peers from troubled families by race and gender show relatively large negative and statistically significant test-score effects on white boys and statistically insignificant effects on black boys, black girls, and white girls. Adding one troubled peer to a classroom of 20 students reduces white boys’ reading and math scores by 1.6 percentile points and black boys’ reading and math scores by 0.9 percentile points (the effects on girls are negligible). Troubled peers increase disciplinary problems for all subgroups except for white girls. The effects are largest for black girls. One troubled peer added to a classroom of 20 students increases the probability that a black girl commits a disciplinary infraction by 2.2 percentage points (an increase of 10 percent over what would otherwise be the case).
Finally, we examined whether troubled boys affect their peers differently than do troubled girls. Across all outcome variables, both academic and behavioral, the negative peer effects appear to be driven primarily by the troubled boys, and these effects are largest on other boys in the classroom. The results indicate that adding one troubled boy to a classroom of 20 students decreases boys’ test scores by nearly 2 percentile points (7 percent of a standard deviation) and increases the probability that a boy will commit a disciplinary infraction by 4.4 percentile points (17 percent). Apparently, troubled boys generate the strongest adverse peer effects, and other boys are most sensitive to their influence.
Testing Key Assumptions
Of critical importance to our method is the assumption that students are not systematically placed into or pulled out of a particular grade cohort within a school depending on the domestic violence status of the student or his peers. For example, if parents who really value education were more likely to pull their children out of a cohort with a particularly high proportion of peers from troubled families, such nonrandom selection would cause us to erroneously attribute lower performance to the presence of the troubled peers.
We performed several additional analyses to probe the robustness of our results to this critical assumption. As a first test for nonrandom selection of students into or out of particular schools and cohorts of students, we examined whether peer family violence appears to have an effect on cohort size or student characteristics such as race, gender, and income. In the absence of nonrandom selection, we expect to find no correlation between these characteristics and the peer family violence variables. This is indeed what we find.
Next, we noted that some parents may be more likely than others to put their children in private schools or move to a different school zone because of a particularly bad cohort, but that parents may be less likely to pull one child out of the school due to a particularly bad cohort when that child has a sibling in the same school. When we calculated peer effects only on children with siblings in the school, the results were essentially the same as those for the full sample.
One might also be concerned that some families are, for some reason, unable to remove their children from cohorts with a large number of troubled peers. To check this potential cause of nonrandom selection, we calculated results based only on comparing students to their siblings. We found that the sibling in the cohort with more children from troubled families has lower test scores and more disciplinary problems. These within-family results are roughly two-thirds the size of the estimates for the full sample, but the differences between the two sets of results are not statistically significant.
For a final check, we added controls for a full set of cohort-level variables, including race, gender, participation in the federal subsidized lunch program, and median zip code income. These variables control for any potential changes in cohort characteristics not captured by our full set of individual controls in the main analysis. In addition, this allows us to examine whether the presence of children exposed to domestic violence is merely a proxy for other peer characteristics, such as family income. The results indicate that the negative peer effects are not likely driven by observable factors, such as family income, that are correlated with domestic violence.
Collectively, these tests provide strong evidence that our findings are not the result of families changing schools in response to the number of children from troubled families in their child’s grade at an assigned school.
In addition to knowing how children from troubled homes affect their peers through interaction with their cohort at school, one may also wish to know the precise way in which the troubled families cause the peer effects. This is a particularly challenging task given that researchers have consistently found, as we have, that domestic violence is correlated with other negative family characteristics, such as poverty, unemployment, low levels of education, and substance abuse. While we cannot conclusively attribute the effects found to the causal effect of domestic violence per se, we can exploit the timing of the domestic violence filings to provide suggestive evidence of whether the negative spillovers are due to domestic violence or some other factor correlated with it.
Specifically, we examine whether the negative spillovers associated with children from troubled families are smaller after the parent files the case than before the case is filed. Survey research shows that on average, violence had occurred in the family for more than four years prior to the reporting of the incident. However, 87 percent of the respondents indicated that the reporting of the incident “helped stop physical abuse.” Consequently, if domestic violence itself is causing the negative spillovers on the child’s classmates, then we would expect the spillovers to be smaller when the parent of the peer had already filed for the injunction against domestic violence.
To investigate whether exposure to domestic violence is the potential mechanism through which the spillovers occur, we constructed two peer domestic violence variables: reported and as yet unreported violence. By definition, reported domestic violence means that the petition for the injunction was filed before the student test was taken and unreported domestic violence signals that the filing occurred after the test date.
We find substantially larger effects for the proportion of peers with unreported domestic violence (that is, those whose parents had not yet filed for the injunction) than for those with past domestic violence. For example, the test-score effects for troubled boy peers on boys are statistically insignificant for reported violence, while they are large and highly significant for unreported violence. The larger peer effects for unreported domestic violence suggest that the violence in the home may itself be playing a role in driving the effects. However, we remain cautious with this interpretation, as we have no direct information regarding the details of the family environments for students in our sample.
Our findings have important implications for both education and social policy. First, they provide strong evidence of the validity of the “bad apple” peer effects model, which hypothesizes that a single disruptive student can negatively affect the outcomes for all other students in the classroom. Second, our results suggest that policies that change a child’s exposure to classmates from troubled families will have important consequences for his educational outcomes. Finally, our results provide a more complete accounting of the social cost of family conflict. Any policies or interventions that help improve the family environment of the most troubled students may have larger benefits than previously anticipated.
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Fish, tuna, white, canned in water, without salt, drained solids
220 calories in one can of tuna fish, 41 grams of protein.
Tuna fish are truly a nutrient-dense food. An excellent source ofhigh quality protein, tuna are rich in a variety of important nutrientsincluding the minerals selenium, magnesium, and potassium; the Bvitamins niacin, B1 and B6; and perhaps most important, the beneficialomega-3 essential fatty acids. Essential fatty acids are so namedbecause they are essential for our health but cannot be made by thebody; they must therefore be obtained from foods. Cold-water fish liketuna are a rich source of the omega-3 essential fats, a form ofessential fatty acids in which the standard American diet is sorelydeficient. (The other form of essential fatty acids, the omega-6s, areplentiful in a variety of commonly consumed oils such as corn andsafflower oil. In fact, the omega-6s are so plentiful in the typicalAmerican diet that too much omega-6 is consumed in proportion toomega-3s--an imbalance that promotes inflammation, thus contributing tovirtually every chronic disease in which inflammation is a keycomponent.)
Omega-3 fatty acids provide a broad array of cardiovascularbenefits. Omega-3s benefit the cardiovascular system by helping toprevent erratic heart rhythms, making blood less likely to clot insidearteries (which is the ultimate cause of most heart attacks), andimproving the ratio of good (HDL) cholesterol to potentially harmful(LDL) cholesterol. And, as mentioned above, omega-3s reduceinflammation, which is a key component in the processes that turncholesterol into artery-clogging plaques. In a recent population-basedprospective study, modest consumption of tuna was actually found to beassociated with lower risk of death from ischemic heart disease inindividuals 65 years and older.
Tuna is also a very good source of vitamin B6, which, along with folic acid,lowers levels of homocysteine. Homocysteine, an intermediate compoundproduced during the methylation cycle, is directly damaging to arterywalls, and elevated blood levels of homocysteine are considered animportant risk factor for atherosclerosis.
Increases Heart Rate Variability-A Measure of Heart Muscle Function
Yet another way in which consuming fish rich in omega-3 fats, suchas tuna, promotes cardiovascular health is by increasing heart ratevariability (HRV), a measure of cardiac function, in as little as threeweeks, according to a study published in the April 2005 issue of Chest.
By providing greater variability between beats, the marine omega3 fatty acids, EPA and DHA, reduce the risk of arrhythmia and/or suddendeath.
Researchers from Atlanta, GA, Boston, MA, and Cuernavaca,Mexico, took the HRV of 58 elderly patients every other day for twomonths to establish an HRV baseline for each participant. For the next11 weeks, half of the study participants took a daily 2 gram supplementof fish oil and the other half took a daily 2 gram supplement of soyoil.
Patients in both groups experienced a significant increase inHRV, with those who took fish oil achieving a greater increase in ashorter time period. Patients who received fish oil experiencedincreased HRV within the first 2.7 weeks, whereas it took 8.1 weeks fora significant increase in HRV to be seen in the group taking soy oil.
On the other hand, while none of the study participantsexperienced significant negative side effects, 41% of participants inthe fish oil group reported belching, compared to 16% in the soy oilgroup.
"Our findings contradict the current belief in the medicalcommunity that increasing the intake of omega-3 fatty acids producesonly long-term cardiac benefits," said the study's lead author,Fernando Holguin, MD, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA."In fact, our study group showed improvements in heart function in aslittle as two weeks.""Studies like this demonstrate that there are additional approaches wecan take to protect ourselves from heart attacks," said Paul A. Kvale,MD, FCCP, President of the American College of Chest Physicians. "It'sexciting to see the potential for omega-3 fatty acids in improvingheart function when it complements a healthy lifestyle of exercising,maintaining a healthy weight, and getting eight hours of sleep." We'dadd eating healthful foods to this proactive list. Rather than pop adaily pill, we'd rather enjoy a daily "dose" of delicious tuna, salmon or soyfoods. For recipes certain to not only increase your heart rate variability but also your delight in eating, click Recipes.
Just Two Servings of Omega-3-rich Fish a Week Can Lower Triglycerides
Triglycerides are a form in which fat is carried in yourbloodstream. In normal amounts, triglycerides are important for goodhealth because they serve as a major source of energy. High levels oftriglycerides, however, are associated with high total cholesterol,high LDL (bad) cholesterol and low HDL (good) cholesterol), andtherefore, with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.In addition, high triglycerides are often found along with a group ofother disease risk factors that has been labeled metabolic syndrome,a condition known to increase risk of not only heart disease, butdiabetes and stroke. (Metabolic syndrome is the combined presence ofhigh triglycerides, increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, excessweight, and low HDL (good) cholesterol.)
|Less than 150 mg/dL||Normal|
|500 mg/dL||Very High|
*Note: Triglycerides are most accurately measured after an 8-12 hour fast.
In this 6-month study involving 142 overweight men and womenwith high triglycerides, subjects were divided into 5 groups, one ofwhich served as a control group, 2 of which ate 2 servings of fish highin omega-3s while also replacing their normal household fats with fathigh in sunflower (Group 1) or canola oil made from rapeseed (Group 2),and 2 of which ate 2 weekly servings of white fish while also replacingtheir normal household fats with ones high in sunflower (Group 3) orcanola oil made from rapeseed (Group 4).
Canola oil also provides some omega-3 fats, with anomega-6:omega-3 ratio of 2:1, while sunflower oil contains omega-6, butno omega-3 fats.
At the end of the study, triglyceride levels had dropped 6.6%in the omega-3-rich fish groups combined. Triglycerides droppedmost-10.4%-in those consuming omega-3-rich fish and canola oil. Inthose eating omega-3-rich fish and sunflower oil, triglycerides dropped2.8%.Bottomline: A healthy way of eating that incorporates at least 2 weeklyservings of fish and other food sources of omega-3 fats, such asflaxseed or canola oil, may significantly lower triglyceride levels.Replacing normal household fats with flaxseed oil, in which the ratioof omega-6:omega:3 fats is 1:4, might result in an even larger drop intriglyceride levels.
Stroke PreventionA recent study showed that eating fish lowers the risk of certain typesof strokes. The study, which involved almost 80,000 nurses during a15-year period revealed that those women who ate fish 2 to 4 times perweek had a 27% reduced risk of stroke compared to women who ate fishone a month. Eating fish five or more times per week reduced the riskof certain strokes 52%.
A meta-analysis of eight studies published in the July 2004 issue of Strokeprovides further support that eating fish is protective against strokein men as well as women. Eating fish, such as tuna, as little as 1 to 3times per month may protect against ischemic stroke (a stroke caused bylack of blood supply to the brain, for example, as a result of a bloodclot), suggests
Data on nine independent groups participating in eightdifferent studies found that, compared to those who never consumed fishor ate fish less than once per month, risk of ischemic stroke dropped:
- 9% in those eating fish 1 to 3 times per month
- 13% in those eating fish once per week
- 18% in those eating fish 2 to 4 times per week
- 31% in those eating fish 5 or more times each week
Protection Against Atrial Fibrillation (Heart Arrhythmia)Eatingtuna that's broiled or baked, but not fried, may reduce risk of atrialfibrillation, the most common type of heart arrhythmia, especially inthe elderly, according to a Harvard study published in the July 2004issue of Circulation.In the 12-year study of 4,815 people 65 years of age or older, eatingcanned tuna or other broiled or baked fish 1 to 4 times a weekcorrelated with increased blood levels of omega-3 fatty acids and a 28%lower risk of atrial fibrillation. Eating broiled or baked fish 5 timesa week lowered risk even more- a drop in atrial fibrillation risk of31%.
Eating fried fish, however, provided no similar protection. Not only isfried fish typically made from lean fish like cod and Pollack thatprovide fewer omega-3 fatty acids, but in addition, frying results inthe production of damaged, free-radical-laden fats in the fish as wellas the frying oil.
In further research to determine if the omega-3 fats found in fishoil were responsible for fish's beneficial effects on the heart'selectrical circuitry, Dariush Mozaffarian and colleagues from HarvardMedical School analyzed data on fish intake and electrocardiogramresults from 5096 adults, aged 65 or older, who were enrolled in theCardiovascular Health Study from 1989-1990.
Eating tuna or other broiled or baked fish at least once a weekwas associated with lower heart rate (-3.2 beats/minute) and a 50%lower likelihood of prolonged ventricular repolarisation (the period oftime it takes the heart to recharge after it beats, so it can beatagain), compared to those consuming fish less than once a month.
Consuming 1 gram/day of omega-3 fatty acids from fish wasassociated with 2.3 beats/minutes lower heart rate and a 46% lower riskof prolonged ventricular repolarisation.Eating fish at least 5 times per week was associated with an evenhealthier heart rhythm. However, eating fried fish (typically sold inthe U.S. as fish burgers or fish sticks) was not associated withincreased blood levels of omega 3 fats or any beneficialelectrocardiogram results. In fact, a previous study led by the sameresearcher (Mozaffarian, Am J Cardiol 2006 Jan) found that while eatingbaked or broiled fish was linked to a slower but more powerful heartbeat and lower blood pressure, eating fried fish was associated withheart muscle motion abnormalities, a reduced ejection fraction, lowercardiac output, and higher blood pressure. Since irregular heart beatsare a major precipitating factor in sudden death due to cardiac arrest,promoting a healthy heart rhythm by eating baked or broiled-notfried-fish several times a week makes very good sense. Happily, as ourrecipes, such as 15 Minute Asian Tuna show, it's a quick, easy and most importantly, delicious prescription.
Eating Fish Daily Provides Substantially More Protection against Heart Attack
While as little as a weekly serving of fish lowers risk of ischemicstroke, enjoying a daily serving omega-3-rich fish, such as tuna,provides significantly greater reduction in the risk of coronary heartdisease than eating fish even as frequently as a couple of times aweek, show the findings of a study published in the January 17, 2006issue of Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association.
Researchers in Japan followed 41,578 men and women aged 40 to59, none of whom had cardiovascular disease or cancer when the studybegan, from 1990-1992 to 2001. Food frequency questionnaires completedat the beginning of the study and in 1995, provided information onweekly fish intake, which was analyzed for omega-3 content.
When individuals whose fish consumption was in the topone-fifth of participants at 8 times per week were compared to thosewhose intake was in the lowest fifth at once per week, they were foundto have a 37% lower risk of developing coronary heart disease and a 56%percent lower risk of heart attack.
When the effect of omega-3 fatty acid intake on cardiovascularrisk was analyzed, coronary heart disease risk was lowered by 42% amongthose whose intake was the highest at 2.1 grams per day or morecompared to those whose intake was the lowest at 300 milligrams perday. Those whose intake of omega 3s was in the top fifth received a 65%reduction in the risk of heart attack compared to those whose omega 3intake was lowest.
The authors theorize that daily fish consumption is highlyprotective largely due to the resulting daily supply of omega-3 fattyacids, which not only reduce platelet aggregation, but also decreasethe production of pro-inflammatory compounds called leukotrienes.Lowering leukotrienes reduces damage to the endothelium (the lining ofthe blood vessels), a key factor in the development of atherosclerosis."Our results suggest that a high fish intake may add a furtherbeneficial effect for the prevention of coronary heart disease amongmiddle-aged persons," note the study's authors.
Fish, Fruit and Vegetables Protective against Deep Vein Thrombosis, Pulmonary Embolism
Deep vein thrombosis is a dangerous condition in which blood clotsdevelop in the deep veins of the legs, thighs or pelvis, causingswelling and pain. An embolism is created if a part or all of the bloodclot in the deep vein breaks off from the site where it was created andmoves through the venous system. If the clot lodges in the lung, a veryserious condition, pulmonary embolism, arises.
Fortunately, a healthy way of eating offers significantprotection, as demonstrated by a prospective study over 12 years thatinvolved almost 15,000 middle-aged adults. While those eating the mostred and processed meat doubled their risk of deep vein thrombosis(DVT), those in the upper 3 quintiles of fruit and vegetable intake hada 41-53% lower risk of DVT. And those eating fish, such as tuna, atleast once each week were found to have a 30-45% lower DVT risk.(Steffen LM, Folsom AR, et al.,Circulation)Practical Tip: For protection against deep vein thrombosis, increaseyour consumption of fruit and vegetables; eat fish at least once aweek; and decrease consumption of red and processed meats.
Special Cardiovascular Protection for Postmenopausal Women with Diabetes
Eating omega-3 rich fish, such as tuna, at least twice each weeksignificantly reduces the progression of atherosclerosis inpostmenopausal women with diabetes, suggests a Tufts University studypublished in the September 2004 issue of the American Journal ofClinical Nutrition.
The three year study included 229 women with atherosclerosis,42% of whom also had diabetes. Although new atherosclerotic lesionswere seen in all the women, regardless of fish intake, those whoconsumed 2 or more servings of fish per week had significantly fewerlesions-especially if at least one serving was chosen from those highin omega-3 fatty acids, such as tuna, salmon, mackerel or sardines.
Women with diabetes eating less than 2 servings of fishexperienced an average 4.54% increase in stenosis (thickening andrestriction) in their arteries, compared to an average increase of only0.06% in women eating 2 servings of any fish per week.
In diabetic women eating less than 1 serving of omega-3-richfish per week, stenosis increased 5.12% compared to a 0.35% increase inthose who ate 1 or more servings of omega-3-rich fish each week.
Eating fish rich in omega-3s is so beneficial because these fats:
- lower the amount of lipids (fats such as cholesterol and triglycerides) circulating in the bloodstream
- decrease platelet aggregation, preventing excessive blood clotting
- inhibit thickening of the arteries by decreasing endothelialcells' production of a platelet-derived growth factor (the lining ofthe arteries is composed of endothelial cells)
- increase the activity of another chemical derived fromendothelial cells (endothelium-derived nitric oxide), which causesarteries to relax and dilate
- reduce the production of messenger chemicals calledcytokines, which are involved in the inflammatory response associatedwith atherosclerosis
Omega 3s Help Prevent Obesity and Improve Insulin ResponseSalmonis particularly beneficial not just for women with type 2 diabetes, butfor men with this condition as well, due to its high content of omega 3fats.
Research presented December 2004 at the 6th Congress of theInternational Society for the Study of Fatty Acids and Lipids suggeststhat while saturated fats appear to promote weight gain, the omega 3fats found in cold water fish, such as tuna, reduce the risk ofbecoming obese and improve the body's ability to respond to insulin.
The reason why? The omega 3 fatty acid, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA)stimulates the secretion of leptin, a hormone that helps regulate foodintake, body weight and metabolism, and is expressed primarily byadipocytes (fat cells).
EPA, an Omega-3 Fat found in Tuna, Reduces Inflammation
A recently identified lipid (fat) product our bodies make from EPA,called resolvins, helps explain how fish oils' provide theiranti-inflammatory effects on our joints and improve blood flow.
Resolvins, which have been shown to reduce inflammation inanimal studies, are made from EPA by our cellular enzymes, and work byinhibiting the production and regulating the migration of inflammatorycells and chemicals to sites of inflammation.Unlike anti-inflammatory drugs, such as aspirin, ibuprofen and theCOX-2 inhibitors, the resolvins our bodies produce from EPA do not havenegative side effects on our gastrointestinal or cardiovascular systems.
Fish and Whole Grains Highly Protective against Childhood Asthma
According to the American Lung Association, almost 20 millionAmericans suffer from asthma, which is reported to be responsible forover 14 million lost school days in children, and an annual economiccost of more than $16.1 billion.
Increasing consumption of whole grains and fish could reducethe risk of childhood asthma by about 50%, suggests the InternationalStudy on Allergy and Asthma in Childhood (Tabak C, Wijga AH, Thorax).
The researchers, from the Dutch National Institute of PublicHealth and the Environment, Utrecht University, University MedicalCenter Groningen, used food frequency questionnaires completed by theparents of 598 Dutch children aged 8-13 years. They assessed thechildren's consumption of a range of foods including fish, fruits,vegetables, dairy and whole grain products. Data on asthma and wheezingwere also assessed using medical tests as well as questionnaires.
While no association between asthma and intake of fruits,vegetables, and dairy products was found (a result at odds with otherstudies that have supported a link between antioxidant intake,particularly vitamins C and E, and asthma), the children's intake ofboth whole grains and fish was significantly linked to incidence ofwheezing and current asthma.
In children with a low intake of fish and whole grains, theprevalence of wheezing was almost 20%, but was only 4.2% in childrenwith a high intake of both foods. Low intake of fish and whole grainsalso correlated with a much higher incidence of current asthma (16.7%).compared to only a 2.8% incidence of current asthma among children witha high intake of both foods.
After adjusting results for possible confounding factors, suchas the educational level of the mother, and total energy intake, highintakes of whole grains and fish were found to be associated with a 54and 66% reduction in the probability of being asthmatic, respectively.
The probability of having asthma with bronchialhyperresponsiveness (BHR), defined as having an increased sensitivityto factors that cause narrowing of the airways, was reduced by 72 and88% when children had a high-intake of whole grains and fish,respectively.Lead researcher, CoraTabak commented, "The rise in the prevalence ofasthma in western societies may be related to changed dietary habits."We agree. The Standard American Diet is sorely deficient in thenumerous anti-inflammatory compounds found in fish and whole grains,notably, the omega-3 fats supplied by cold water fish and the magnesiumand vitamin E provided by whole grains. One caution: wheat may need tobe avoided as it is a common food allergen associated with asthma.
Protection against Sunburn
Another benefit of omega-3s anti-inflammatory effects may be theirability to protect our skin against sunburn, and possibly, skin cancer.
Although our increased susceptibility to skin cancer is usuallyblamed on damage to the ozone layer, dietary changes over the last 75years, which have resulted in excessive consumption of omega-6 fattyacids and insufficient consumption of omega-3 fats, may also be causinghuman skin to be more vulnerable to damage from sunlight.
Research by Dr Lesley Rhodes, Director of the Photobiology Unitat the University of Manchester, UK, suggests that eating moreomega-3-rich fish, such as tuna, could lessen the inflammation inducedby UV-B radiation and help prevent not only the damaging effects ofsunburn, but possibly skin cancer as well.
In a paper published in January 2005 in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology,Rhodes explored the ability of omega-3s to protect epidermal and dermalskin cells against UV-B-induced triggering of tumor necrosisfactor-alpha, a molecule that induces the production of thepro-inflammatory cytokine, IL-8. Both EPA and DHA significantlysuppressed TNF-?-induced IL-8 secretion-by 54% in the case of EPA and42% by DHA.In an earlier one of Dr Rhodes studies, published in the May 2003 issueof Carcinogenesis,42 healthy volunteers were given a measured dose of ultraviolet light,then divided into two groups. One group was given a daily 4 gramomega-3 fish oil supplement, while the other group received olive oil.After three months, when their responses to ultraviolet light wereagain measured, the skin cells of volunteers receiving fish oilexperienced significantly less DNA damage, leading Rhodes to suggestthat increasing consumption of omega-3-rich fish might reduce skincancer in humans.
Grumpy Teenagers? Tuna May Help Reduce Hostility and Protect Hearts
Feeling really grumpy? Eating more cold water fish such as salmon,tuna, or sardines may help. A study published in the January 2004 issueof the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition found astatistically significant relationship between consuming fish rich inomega-3 fats and a lower hostility score in 3581 young urban white andblack adults. Those with the highest intake of omega 3 fats had only a10% likelihood of being among those with the highest hostility scores.Eating any fish rich in omega 3 fats compared to eating no omega-3-richfish was also found to drop subjects' chances of being hostile by 12%.One reason this finding is important: hostility has been shown topredict the development of heart disease, and the young adults in thisstudy were already also enrolled in the CARDIA (Coronary Artery RiskDevelopment in Young Adults) study-a study that is examining how heartdisease develops in adults.
In addition to tuna's omega-3s, the seleniumit contains is a necessary component in one of the body's mostimportant antioxidants--glutathione peroxidase--which is critical for ahealthy liver, the organ responsible for detoxifying and clearingpotentially harmful compounds such as pesticides, drugs, and heavymetals from the body. Selenium also helps prevent cancer and heartdisease.
Eating even small amounts of fish may protect against ovarian anddigestive tract cancers. A total of 10,149 cancer patients with 19different types of cancer and 7,990 controls were included in a recentstudy conducted in Spanish hospitals. The researchers determined thateating more fish correlates with a reduced risk of certain cancers.Fish eaters had less cancer in the ovaries, pancreas, and all parts ofthe digestive tract including the mouth, pharynx, esophagus, stomach,colon and rectum.Eating fish rich in omega-3 fatty acids, suchas tuna, may also help protect against breast cancer, suggest animaland lab culture studies published in the November 2005 issue of the International Journal of Cancer.
In the animal experiments, mice were fed diets rich in eitheromega-3 (fish oil) or omega-6 (corn oil) fatty acids after which breastcancer cells were implanted. Three weeks later, tumor volume and weightwas significantly lower in mice on the omega-3 rich diet.In the lab culture experiments, when cells were treated with DHA orEPA, sphingomyelinase activity increased by 30-40%, and breast cancercell growth dropped 20-25%.
Why? Dietary fatty acids are incorporated into cell membranes, and thetype of fatty acids dictates how a cell responds and grows. Researchersfound that omega-3 fatty acids affect cell growth by activating anenzyme called sphingomyelinase, which then generates the release ofceramide, a compound that induces the expression of the human tumorsuppressor gene p21, which ultimately causes cancer cell death.
Lower Your Risk of Leukemia, Multiple Myeloma, and Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma
Fishermen have, in epidemiological studies, been identified ashaving a lower risk of leukemia, multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkinlymphoma, an occupational benefit that researchers thought might be dueto the fact that they eat more fish.Now, a Canadian study published in the April 2004 issue of Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Preventionsuggests that persons whose diet includes more weekly servings of freshfatty fish have a much lower risk of these three types of cancer. Datadrawn from a survey of the fish eating habits of 6,800 Canadiansindicates that those consuming the most fatty fish decreased their riskof leukemia by 28%, their risk of multiple myeloma by 36%, and theirrisk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma by 29%. Overall, frequent eaters of fattyfish reduced their risk for all forms of lymphomas by 30%.
Some of the cancer protective effects of fish, such as tuna, maycome from its being a great source of omega 3 fatty acids, which havethemselves shown impressive anticancer effects, especially important inprotection against breast cancer. Recent in vitro (test tube) evidencesuggests that this beneficial effect is related to the fact that whenomega-3s are consumed in the diet, they are incorporated into cellmembranes where they promote cancer cell apoptosis via severalmechanisms including: inhibiting a pro-inflammatory enzyme calledcyclooxygenase 2 (COX 2), which promotes breast cancer; activating atype of receptor in cell membranes called peroxisomeproliferator-activated receptor (PPAR)-ã, which can shut downproliferative activity in a variety of cells including breast cells;and, increasing the expression of BRCA1 and BRCA2, tumor suppressorgenes that, when functioning normally, help repair damage to DNA, thushelping to prevent cancer development.
Tuna and Other Fatty Fish Highly Protective against Kidney Cancer
Consumption of fatty fish, such as tuna, offers significantprotection against renal cell carcinoma, the most common form of kidneycancer, suggests evidence presented in a 15.3-year epidemiologicalstudy involving 61,433 women who participated in the SwedishMammography Cohort Study (Wolk A, Larsson SC, JAMA).
Renal cell carcinoma (RCC), the 10th most common form of cancerwith a male:female ratio of 5:3, accounts for more than 80% per cent ofall kidney cancers. Although an earlier review of prospective cohortstudies (MacLean et al, JAMA) did not support the hypothesis that fish consumption is protective, the authors of the new JAMAstudy point out that virtually all the other studies on the subject,including MacLean's, did not take into account whether the fishconsumed were fatty or lean fish.(Fatty fish contain 20 to 30 timesmore omega-3 (DHA and EPA) than lean fish, which provide 3-5 times morevitamin D.)
When this distinction was considered, the researchers foundthat those who consumed one or more serving of fatty fish each week hada 44% decreased risk of RCC compared with those who consumed no fattyfish.
Plus, those who reported long-term consumption between thebeginning of the study and the 10-year follow-up had a dramatic 74%lower risk.
In contrast, no association was found between consumption oflean fish or other seafood and incidence of RCC.Wolk notes,"Our results support the hypothesis that frequentconsumption of fatty fish may lower the risk of RCC, possibly due toincreased intake of fish oil rich in EPA and DHA, as well as vitamin D."
Reduce Risk of Macular Degeneration
A diet high in omega-3 essential fatty acids, especially from fishsuch as tuna, offers significant protection against both early and lateage-related macular degeneration (AMD), show two studies published inthe July 2006 issue of the Archives of Opthalmology.
In age-related macular degeneration, the area at the back of theretina called the macula, which controls fine vision, deteriorates,resulting in central vision loss and even blindness. AMD is the leadingcause of blindness in people over 50, affecting more than 30 millionpeople worldwide.
In the first study, Brian Chua and colleagues in Sydney,Australia, utilized data from the Blue Mountains Eye Study, whichenrolled 3,654 men and women aged 49 and older between 1992 and 1994.Dietary questionnaires completed by 2,895 participants at the beginningof the study provided information on fatty acid intake.
Participants among the top one-fifth in terms of omega-3-richfish consumption had a 42% lower risk of early AMD compared to thosewhose fish intake placed them in the lowest fifth. Enjoyingomega-3-rich fish at least once a week provided a a 42% reduction inrisk for early AMD.
Eating omega-3-rich fish at least three times a week was associated with a 75% reduction in late AMD.
In the second study, Johanna M. Seddon and colleagues at theMassachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Harvard Medical School, Boston,looked at modifiable and protective factors for AMD among elderly maletwins enrolled in the National Academy of Sciences-National ResearchCouncil World War II Veteran Twin Registry. Of the 681 twins examined,222 were found to have intermediate or late stage AMD, and 459 twinshad no signs of AMD.
Current smokers had a 1.9-fold (almost double) increased riskof AMD. Even past smokers' risk was highly elevated-a 1.7 increasecompared to men who never smoked.
Eating more fish, however, greatly reduced AMD risk. Among themen whose fish consumption put them among the top 25% of dietaryomega-3 fatty acid intake, risk of AMD was 45% lower compared to thosewith the lowest fish / omega-3 intake.
Eating fish at least twice a week reduced AMD risk by 36%compared to those who ate less than one serving of fish per week.The authors noted that AMD is highly preventable simply by following ahealthy lifestyle: "About a third of the risk of AMD in this twin studycohort could be attributable to cigarette smoking, and about a fifth ofthe cases were estimated as preventable with higher fish and omega-3fatty acid dietary intake."
Fend Off Dry Eyes
Dry eye syndrome (DES) afflicts more than 10 million Americans.Artificial tears offer only temporary relief. Expensive prescriptiondrugs promise help, but at the cost of potentially serious sideeffects.
Could Mother Nature provide a cure? Yes, suggests research published in the October 2005 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition involving nearly 40,000 female health professionals aged 45-84 enrolled in the Women's Health Study.
Researcher Biljana Miljanovic, MD, MPH, and colleagues atBrigham and Women's Hospital looked at whether essential fattyacids-the omega-3 fats (found in high amounts in cold water fish andflaxseeds), and the omega-6 fats (found in red meat, safflower,sunflower, soy and corn oils)-play a role.
They do. Women whose diets provided the highest amounts ofomega-3 fatty acids had a 17% lower risk of dry eye syndrome comparedwith those consuming the least of these beneficial fats.
In contrast, a diet high in omega-6 fats, but low in omega-3s,significantly increased DES risk. Women whose diets supplied a highratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids had a 2.5-fold higher risk ofDES syndrome compared to those with a more balanced intake of fattyacids.
Researchers specifically looked at eating tuna fish- a main source of omega-3 fatty acids in the American diet.
Compared with women eating less than one 4-ounce serving of tuna a week:
- Women who ate 2 to 4 servings of tuna per week had a 19% lower risk of DES.
- Women eating 5 to 6 servings of tuna per week had a 68% lower risk of DES.
"These findings suggest that increasing dietary intake of omega-3fatty acids may reduce the risk of dry eye syndrome, an important andprevalent cause of ocular complaints," Miljanovic and colleaguesconclude.In addition to tuna fish, omega-3 fatty acids are richly supplied byother fatty fish (such as salmon, mackerel, halibut, sardines, andherring), flaxseeds and flaxseed oil. Due to concerns about mercurylevels in tuna, to lower your risk of DES we recommend enjoying avariety of cold-water fish and adding flaxseeds and flaxseed oil toyour Healthiest Way of Eating.
Protect against Alzheimer's and Age-related Cognitive Decline
Research published in the August 2004 issue of the Journal ofNeurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry indicates regular consumption ofniacin-rich foods like yellowfin tuna provides protection againstAlzheimer's disease and age-related cognitive decline.
Researchers from the Chicago Health and Aging Projectinterviewed 3,718 Chicago residents aged 65 or older about their diet,then tested their cognitive abilities over the following six years.Those getting the most niacin from foods (22 mg per day) were 70% lesslikely to have developed Alzheimer's disease than those consuming theleast (about 13 mg daily), and their rate of age-related cognitivedecline was significantly less.
The significant amounts of the omega-3 fatty acid, DHA(docosahexaenoic acid) found in cold-water fish, such as tuna, may alsotranslate into protection against Alzheimer's disease. In a paperpublished in the September 2004 issue of the journal Neuron,researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles School ofMedicine reported that a diet rich in DHA reduced the impact of a genelinked to the development of Alzheimer's disease.Using mice bred to have genetic mutations that cause lesions typical ofAlzheimer's, the researchers found that those fed a diet containingomega-3-rich fish did not develop the expected memory loss or braindamage. In contrast, mice fed safflower oil, which is low in theomega-3 fats and high in the omega-6 fatty acids, showed signs ofsynaptic damage in their brains that closely resemble those of peoplewith Alzheimer's.
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Causes of color change in malaia and color changing garnets on Apr 9 2009, at 08:55 in Colour change garnet
<![CDATA[Malaia is name given to garnets orange to pinkish orange to red in color which do not match the color and gemological properties of any of the other more well known varieties of garnet. (Some authors spell it Malaya garnet
Indeed, the word malaia means prostitute or out of the family in Swahili. Primarily composed of spessartite
and pyrope, the color and gemological properties occur in a range which can overlap with grossularite, rhodolite
, and pyrope.
Some of them may change color under daylight and incandescent lighting and these stones are more commonly and collectively known as Color Change Garnets
. It is thought that the color change is due to the presence of vanadium or chromium in trace amounts. Our own observations indicate that color change could also be influenced by the needle like inclusions of rutile or actinolite which are common in the color changing stones but less apparent in the stones that don’t change color.
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A man named Allen Spencer
By: Brenda Collins Dillon
Allen Spencer was born April 18, 1817 at or near Keister,on the Greenbrier River, WV. He was the third child of James and Elizabeth Haptonstall Spencer.
As a young man Allen served as a bodyguard for Fransis Ludington, who owned a large acreage north of Frankfort,WV. The Ludington'swere a wealthy slave holding family. Mr Ludington kept several bags of gold coins in a dresser drawer in his bedroom where Allen slept on a pallet between his employer's bed and the door. One day one of themoney bags was missing and Mr. Ludington hotly accused Allen of stealing it, but it was later found where it had fallen beneath the drawers.
One summer Mr. Ludington decided to sell some of his slaves, and his foreman was instructed toget them ready for the jorney. He took his black snake whip from it's peg on the wall and rounded up the boys and girls who were 16 to 18 years of age and started over the road to Cincinnati to be taken down the Mississippi River to be sold. The screaming youngesters were given no time totake leave ofthe whip. Allen was so hurt by this inhuman treatment that he yelled tothe slave driver, "Something terrible will happen to you". The slaves were sold but on the way back the foreman was taken ill with a dread disease called "Black Death" and choked with his tounge protruding from his mouth.
On December 31, 1846 Allen married Polly Clendenin Knapp. Early in 1847 they began life in their new home on Fork Mountain near the presant town of Richwood,WV.These early pioneer settlers were a sturdy hardworking people. They cleared the land, grew their food , made their clothes, traded for their needs. If they were poor they never knew it. On his farm of 200 acres, Allen and Polly reared 10 children, six sons and four daughters.
Allen Spencer was a energetic man and devoutly religious.He believed firmly in the power of prayer. His sons told their children about these experiences of how prayers were answered. One autum Allen needed seedwheat to complete the fall sowing. He knew that his good friend and neighbor, Allen McClung, who lived on the other side of Cold Knob, some 25 miles away, had plenty, so he sat out to get a couple bushels. However, Allen had no money so he took with him his trusty rife in hopes to get a deer or something in which to trade for the wheat seed. He did not get anything but when he rode up to his friends house the friend came out and invited him to get off his horse and spend the night.He also said "I have some wheat seed which I wish to give you."
In the dark days of the Civil War, Allen would go into the woods to pray, where he could be alone with God. Once he came in from his prayers so happy he was shouting. His wife Polly ask why he was so happy. He said, " God has just revealed to me the end of the war" It came soon after according to the revelation.
How truly greatful, we, his descendants are, for the Christian heritage. God grant that we may live according to the example which he sat for us.
When Allen died his body was laid to rest on the hill in what is now South Richwood, on the farm of his son Ben.When Cherry River Boom and Lumber Company bought the farms of the Spencer brothers the bodies buried there were removed to the little church cemetery on Hinkle Mountain.
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By Lina Fedriko, Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation
For Brooklyn Daily Eagle
As a society we strive towards gender equality in all aspects of life, from work to home environments, and lately, even in cases where equality is detrimental to health. It has become more apparent that the gap in the levels of alcohol use, especially binge drinking, between men and women has been narrowing. Unfortunately, the narrowing gap is contributing to alcohol-related deaths, chronic diseases and mental health issues.
Excessive alcohol use is more frequent in the 18-24 age group, but studies show that excessive alcohol consumption for women in their 30s and 40s is also common. Whether it’s becoming a coping mechanism for a hectic family life or stressful job, which may lead to an after-work drinking habit, women are increasingly becoming affected by alcohol consumption and the consequences are often complex and dire.
Alcohol products are increasingly designed to appeal to women, which is leading to an increase in usage across the country and the world. A recent study in the UK links a rise in alcohol-related deaths in women to, "the late night drinking culture, following the easing of licensing laws, together with cheap drink – especially wine – play a big part, they say, as does industry marketing and promotion."
The statistics are just as alarming in the United States, where excessive drinking results in 23,000 deaths in women and girls each year. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports one in eight U.S. women binge drink several times a month and close to one in five women between the ages of 25 to 44 report binge drinking in NYC.
Lastly, and a very important fact, women process alcohol more slowly than men. This puts women at an increased risk for alcohol-related harms such as liver disease, breast cancer, heart disease, sexually transmitted diseases and unintended pregnancy.
The Partnership for a Healthier Brooklyn at Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corp in Brooklyn has been working diligently to raise awareness around harms of excessive alcohol use in women and all communities of Brooklyn. The Partnership encourages communities to pause and observe the impact alcohol is having in our lives.
Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation
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What is administrative distance?
Administrative distance (AD) is an integer from 0 to 255 that rates the trustworthiness of routing information received on a router from a neighboring router. The AD is used as the tiebreaker when a router has multiple paths from different routing protocols to the same destination. The path with the lower AD is the one given priority.
What are the three classes of routing protocols?
- Distance vector
- Balanced hybrid
What is the AD for each of the following?
- Directly connected interface 0
- Static route 1
- EIGRP 90
- IGRP 100
- OSPF 110
- RIP 120
- External EIGRP 170
- Unknown 255
How do distance vector routing protocols function?
Also known as Bellman-Ford-Fulkerson algorithms, distance vector routing protocols pass complete routing tables to neighboring routers. Neighboring routers then combine the received routing table with their own routing table. Each router receives a routing table from its directly connected neighbor. Distance vector routing tables include information about the total cost and the logical address of the first router on the path to each network they know about.
How do distance vector routing protocols keep track of any changes to the internetwork?
Distance vector routing protocols keep track of an internetwork by periodically broadcasting updates out all active interfaces. This broadcast contains the entire routing table. This method is often called routing by rumor. Slow convergence of distance vector routing protocols can cause inconsistent routing tables and routing loops.
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en
| 0.910933 | 305 | 2.96875 | 3 |
UNICEF preventing deaths among growing camp populations
Earthquake relief effort: Preventing deaths among growing camp populations
It is reported that two children exposed to the winter cold have already died of pneumonia. Sadly, it is always children who are the most vulnerable ones.
Clean water and good hygiene are vital to survival
UNICEF Health Officer Tamur Mueenuddin is witnessing firsthand the growing problem in Muzaffarabad. “The hygienic situation is fairly deplorable, so I would have to say that water and sanitation is our main priority right now,” he said.
“Children are malnourished, viral infections are rampant. They begin often with acute upper respiratory syndrome and sometimes the viral infections will include diarrhoea infections as well.”
The struggle against disease takes place on several fronts. A vital part of the effort is providing clean water. When the October quake destroyed the water system around Muzaffarabad, UNICEF immediately began installing makeshift water tanks in the camps and digging pit latrines.
Only 64 per cent of needed funds received
Education is also essential. Displaced families who had never seen a latrine before are educated about their use. Children are taught to wash their hands with soap and water regularly. These simple things are crucial for maintaining health and preventing more deaths.
Training the Pakistan Army in camp management has also become a UNICEF priority. Now, local military officials regularly survey the camps, with an eye for the water, sanitation, and nutrition needs of the population.
But as the number of displaced people in the camps continues to grow, so do their needs for shelter, water, sanitation, nutrition, and health care. More resources are needed to sustain and expand the relief effort. The UNICEF emergency appeal has currently received only 64 per cent of the total amount needed, which is $93 million.
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en
| 0.965248 | 389 | 3.15625 | 3 |
CHAP. VIII. LAUGHTER. 197 clapped her hands, and the colour mounted to her cheeks." On other occasions she has been seen to stamp for joy.2 Idiots and Imbecile persons likewise afford good evi- dence that laughter or smiling primarily expresses mere happiness or joy. Dr. Crichton Browne, to whom, as on so many other occasions., I am indebted for the results of his wide experience, informs me that with idiots laughter is the most prevalent and frequent of all the emotional expressions. Many idiots are morose, pas- sionate., restless, in a painful state of mind, or utterly stolid, and these never laugh. Others frequently laugh in a quite senseless manner. Thus an idiot boy, incapa- ble of speech, complained to Dr. Browne, by the aid of signs, that another boy in the asylum had given him a black eye; and this was accompanied by " explosions of laughter and with his face covered with the broadest smiles." There is another large class of idiots who are persistently joyous and benign, and who are constantly laughing or smiling.3 Their countenances often exhibit a stereotyped smile; tlieir joyousness is increased, and they grin, chuckle, or giggle, whenever food is placed before them, or when they are caressed, are shown bright colours, or hear music. Some of them laugh more than usual when they walk about, or attempt any muscular exertion. The joyousness of most of these idiots cannot possibly be associated, as Dr. Browne remarks, with any distinct ideas: they simply feel pleasure, and express, it by laughter or smiles. With imbeciles rather higher in the scale, personal vanity seems to be the commonest cause of laughter, and next to this, pleasure arising from the approbation of their conduct. 2 F. Lieber on the vocal sounds of L. Bridgman, * Smith- sonian Contributions,' 1851, vol. ii. p. 6. 3 See, also, Mr. Marshall, in Phil. Transact. 1864, p. 526.
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<urn:uuid:44a0b3bf-eece-4052-b882-d9a1acde7dce>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://www.archive.org/stream/TheExpressionOfTheEmotionsInManAndAnimals/TXT/00000204.txt
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en
| 0.961576 | 436 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Using the Maclaurin series for e^x, substitute 5x for the x. Then solve the equation and simplify.
Answer 2: C
Just like in question 1, use the Maclaurin series for e^x to solve this problem. Instead of substituting, multiply the whole equation by x and solve.
Answer 3: C
Find the values of f(a), f'(a), f''(a), and so on, until there is only a value (no more variables to plug a into). Put these values into the Taylor series, but remember to add in the (x - 2) terms!
Answer 4: C
Again, find the values of f(a), f'(a), and so on. Because cos(x) is an oscillating function, use the Maclaurin series for cos(x) to create the Taylor series expression.
Answer 5: A
Knowing that 1/x is the derivative of ln(x), simply take the derivative of each term in Maclaurin series for ln(x), and then create an expressions for each general term.
Answer 6: D
The third-degree Maclaurin series polynomial includes the terms n = 0, 1, and 2. Plug in the n values into the Maclaurin series for sin(x), and then simplify to find the first three terms. Remember to watch your positive and negative signs!
Answer 7: B
Plug the n values into the Maclaurin series for cos(x), but remember to include the terms (x - 8) to make it a Taylor series.
Answer 8: A
Try to change the Maclaurin series into a similar series, in this case cos(x). By knowing how to manipulate the problem, an x can be taken out to make the function xcos(x).
Answer 9: D
Knowing the general expression for a Maclaurin series, all that is needed is the n and a value, then plug that into the expression.
Answer 10: C
Use the fifth-degree Maclaurin series polynomial for e^x to calculate this value. Plug in the x value for each x in the series and calculate. Be sure to round to the appropriate number of decimal places.
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://taylormaclaurinseries.weebly.com/mc-solutions.html
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en
| 0.87034 | 482 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Irish Americans (Irish: Gaedheal-Mheiriceánaigh) are an ethnic group comprising
Americans .... While many Irish did stay near large cities, countless others were
part of westward expansion. ......
European Emigration to the U.S. 1851 - 1860. Map depicting European
emigration to the U.S. 1851-1860. Although the Irish potato blight receded in
1850, the ...
Many of the first emigrants from Ireland came to work upon the Erie Canal and ...
from their cottages and forced to emigrate -- most often to North America. ... Irish
women did find work as domestics, stereotyped as "Biddies," short for Bridget.
Established working class America resented the Irish laborers who would work
for ... Many of these families had come off the Mayflower in the 1600's. ... the war
did not change the opinion of the Irish for most Americans in the late 19th century.
BRIA 26 2 The Potato Famine and Irish Immigration to America .... But the vast
majority of immigrants who came between 1845 and 1855 did survive the journey
Find facts and timeline of Irish Immigration to America for kids. ... Why did people
want to leave Ireland and why did they want to move to America? ... Laws were
repealed in the 1790's and Catholic Irish were able to immigrate to America.
A brief history of Irish immigration to America from 1846 to the early 20th ... At this
time, when famine was raging in Ireland, Irish immigration to America came from
two ... But when boom times turned down, as they did in the mid-1850s, social ...
Feb 13, 2008 ... In the century after 1820, 5 million Irish immigrants came to the United States. ...
native-born Americans, known as nativists, who denounced the Irish for their
social ... And why did Irish Catholic immigrants send their children to ...
Irish-Catholic immigrants came to America during colonial times, too, and not all
Irish-Catholic immigrants were poor. For example, wealthy Charles Carroll ...
May 28, 2016 ... Why The Irish Left Their Homeland. You see Dunseverick Harbour in the image
above. Many local people began their long emigration trail ...
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<urn:uuid:5fc0a7b7-f13f-484f-afb2-c8d625c81844>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://www.ask.com/web?q=Why+Did+the+Irish+Come+to+America%3F&o=2603&l=dir&qsrc=3139&gc=1
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en
| 0.934424 | 477 | 3.421875 | 3 |
Players of backgammon, bridge, and bingo might feel a keen camaraderie with the prosperous Parisians of the 1700s whose sumptuous world is brought to life in the current exhibition Paris: Life & Luxury. The well-coiffed elite of the time relished a good card game.
“Games in the 18th century were played on all levels of society, for all different reasons and age groups,” Charissa Bremer-David, curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the Getty Museum and the exhibition’s co-curator, told me.
Salons during the reign of Louis XV, between 1723 and 1774, were packed with a well-heeled set who loved card games—often played using decks illustrated with portraits of the kings of France. Wealthy European outside the kingdom, who imitated French fashion and design, also adopted this addictive diversion.
Gaming in the 18th century was a way of advertising a healthy surplus of disposable income. Among aristocrats, gaming was an indication of status, rank, wealth and class. It was also a family affair. The upper echelons of French society considered games a highly instructive learning tool for the little ones. Children honed their math skills by counting cards, reading the dice, and tallying the score.
Two centuries before television, nocturnal entertainment meant in-person social networking, storytelling, and maintaining one’s composure when lady luck neglected to arrive at the gaming table.
Playing with a boxed set of gaming pieces would be an elegant way to lose one’s wig. This boîte de jeu is a posh porcelain game box studded with gold and diamonds and enameled decorations of the Jack of Diamonds and Queen of Hearts. The porcelain gaming chips (inscribed with the name of the coin known as “Louis,” after the king) came in different denominations for laying down bets. As elite Parisians tossed in their chips, they might have marveled at the smooth porcelain, a versatile new material in Europe dubbed “white gold.” (The magical material was also handy, literally, for drinking tea and coffee—the new hot beverages of the time).
The set was designed to play an extraordinarily tricky Spanish card game called hombre, whose full name is a friendly taunt, “Yo soy el hombre,” or “I am the man.” The ancestor of bridge and whist, hombre is a trick-taking game with trumps that involves wild scoring and betting on a 40-card deck. A four-person version of the game called quadrille also was also very popular with gaming-table types. Pierre-Louis Dumesnil’s painting Interior with Card Players, shown here, captures the relaxed ambience of a typical evening of games.
These diversions represent only a sampling of the exhibition’s 160 works of art and artifacts—from a portrait of a lady at her dressing table to a magnificent canopied bed—that correspond to activities often represented by the allegory of Four Times of Day that portray scenes from morning to night.
The show also features a centuries-old game of chance called cavagnole, an 18th-century Italian ancestor to our bingo. You might recognize the rules: Each player is given a card divided into five sections, with each section randomly numbered between 1 and 160. The player would place a wager on one numbered section of his or her card.
Small illustrated scrolls, each inscribed with a corresponding number from 1 to 160, were tucked into little green-stained ivory beads. The banker would put the beads into the drawstring bag and shake it, then pluck one bead from the bag, and unfurl the winning number, though it’s unlikely that the winning player would have exclaimed, “Cavagnole!”
The illuminated scrolls on display in the exhibit put today’s cardboard bingo cards and chips to shame. The tiny numbered squares of vellum feature ornamental fountains; wine-drinking monkeys dressed in human clothes, playing backgammon; as well as the famed 18th-century rhinoceros Clara, who traveled Europe as a celebrity for 17 years.
Gloaters were not welcome. “You were not meant to show your base emotions of greed or anger at losing or winning,” Charissa told me. “Etiquette manuals of the day were very specific in this instruction.” Squaring debts was a matter of honor; you settled your gaming debts first, before you paid your tailor or servants.
Still, there was plenty of room for cheating and rigging the game. Lotteries and gaming houses abounded, as did innocent victims of these vices. One field of statistics—probability theory—grew from strategic observances made during gaming sessions: “If I am holding so many cards in my hands, where are the other cards?” Then the card counting began.
The 1700s were also a time when people on the lower rungs of society, who didn’t live a life of Parisian luxury, could end up being extraordinarily lucky. In one famous story, an assistant to a cook in an elite household became rich overnight at the gambling table. Taking a chance never goes out of style.
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en
| 0.967664 | 1,116 | 2.546875 | 3 |
"A few toes aren't much to give to achieve the Pole," observed Robert Peary, but as this gripping 400-year history of traveling across the polar ice cap shows, much more was at risk for the men who traversed the farthest latitudes. In addition to Peary's controversial triumph at the North Pole, here is the 14-year-old Horatio Nelson battling polar bears, the sinking of the Jeannette on George De Long's push farthest north, Fridtjof Nansen's astonishing survival for two years in the Arctic, and the ill-fated dirigible expedition of the Italia. Their stories and many others are told in the direct and moving plainness of the explorers' own words.
"Spellbinding.... Readers will find this book hard to put down."—Publishers Weekly
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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en
| 0.947858 | 169 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Delahoyde & Hughes
Cadmus:Cadmus, about whose ending we'll hear later in Book 4, slays a serpent "Sacred to Mars" (58) and founds the city of Thebes (60). Cadmus kills the serpent, but will become one (60). This section ends with an echo of the last lines of Oedipus Rex, appropriately enough.
Actaeon:Ovid challenges us to find guilt in Actaeon (61). Actaeon's transformation into a deer at Diana's hand means that he becomes the hunted; the hunter becomes the prey (64).
If we apply Greek tragic vision to this story, the tale fits into an ancient formula of art. Aristotle's Poetics defines the three characteristics of successful Greek tragedy as recognition, reversal, and tragic flaw. The story of Actaeon has all three of these elements. The hunter becomes the hunted, a classic version of reversal. Actaeon also surely must recognize what it feels like to be a deer, the one pursued by hounds. His consciousness has become entrapped in the animal world.
- What is Actaeon's tragic flaw?
- What are Actaeon and his friends doing at the beginning of the story? Are they hunting to survive or are they hunting for other reasons. How can you tell?
- What do you thing the sentiment of the poet about the hunters and their actions?
Actaeon sees Diana (and her nymphs), twin sister of Apollo, an eternally virgin huntress who haunts wild places. She is sometimes referred to as Potnia Theron (Mistress of the Beasts) indicating her concern for and power over wild animals. She is also concerned with women's transition from girlhood to adulthood (via marriage) and with childbirth, a concern she shares with Hera and Eileithyia. Women who die are said to be struck down by her arrows. From a woman's point of view, Artemis represents an experience of her nascent feminine nature. But, from a man's point of view, an image of a young girl suggestive of Diana/Artemis represents the anima -- the name Jung gave to a female figure, in a man's dream or fantasy, which belongs not to the personal, but to the collective unconscious. The anima is an image of the feminine indicative of the male subject's unconscious attitudes towards women, and his notions about them. Diana/Artemis thus reflects a particular stage in his relation with his unconscious image of the feminine.
Diana without her clothes blushes, which explains the crimson colors of the dusk and dawn. She punishes Actaeon for seeing a goddess in the buff and turns him into a deer.
- At first, how does Actaeon react?
- Then the hounds get the scent. What happens?
- What is the moral to this story?
- Ovid tells us that some say Diana was too cruel. What do you think of the way she punishes Actaeon?
It doesn't pay to be the mistress of a powerful male. Semele is urged to demand that Jove (Zeus) reveal himself in all his glory, and he makes "The Rash Promise." Jove assumes the role of the mother by sewing up the fetus that will become Bacchus (Dionysus) in his thigh.
- Who is Tiresias?
- What did he mean when he tells Liriope that her son will live to see old age if "he never knows himself."
Narcissus and Echo:
Here's another case of the hunter (as Narcissus starts out in this story) becoming the hunted (68).
- Etymology: what is the meaning of the word narcissism?
- Compare this word to "ethnocentrism" and "anthropocentrism." Similarites?
- Juno puts a curse on Echo. Describe the curse.
- Where is Echo now and why?
- Narcissus and the pool: explain.
- What happens to Narcissus? Why a flower?
For medieval symbologists, the pool of Narcissus is located at the center of the Garden of Love. In the most famous and influential tale, the Lover first catches a glimpse of his beloved (Rose) reflected in this pool. What does this indicate about love?
Pentheus and Bacchus:
There's always a sullen, scornful resistence when a god of celebration comes to town. The conservative, repressed authorities are particularly nasty when women are attracted by the droves to the visiting god. In the end here, the Maenads in their characteristic frenzy tear Pentheus limb from limb.
Metamorphoses Book IV
Orpheus: Roman Mythology
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<urn:uuid:239e8b29-0bf6-4bc7-aac3-f5c37dece3b6>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/mythology/ovid3.html
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en
| 0.946818 | 992 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Previously, I've posted on topics such as the lesser-known tips on using lithium-ion batteries, as well as some of the very real dangers inherent to the technology. In relation to one of my lithium-ion battery articles, I was recently contacted by a company called ZPower. ZPower is currently working to roll out some products based on silver-zinc battery technology, and they wanted to tell me about it.
In a nutshell, the silver-zinc battery technology that ZPower is working to incorporate into consumer technology is inherently safe from explosions or from catching fire due to the absence of lithium.
Its main attraction lies in how much more charge a similarly-sized battery can hold - its power density. When pitted against lithium-ion batteries, a silver-zinc battery has 40 percent higher energy density. In addition, silver-zinc also offers plenty of potential to safely increase energy density and cycle life safely. In fact, the projected energy density improvement is expected to eventually hit approximately two times that of lithium-polymer.
To be honest, I had my moment of doubt - but before you dismiss it as another snake-oil operation, consider that ZPower counts Intel Capital as one of its investors. I was given the opportunity to interview Dr. Ross Deuber, the President and CEO of ZPower, Inc, and I took up the offer to pose him some questions via e-mail.
My questions and Dr. Deuber's responses are as follows:I see silver-zinc technology being billed as "clean""technology. Why is that so? Deuber: The primary materials of ZPower batteries (i.e. silver and zinc) are fully recyclable. That means that the materials derived from the recycling process are of the same quality as the materials that went into the initial creation of the battery. This reduces the need to mine for new materials and minimizes the removal of silver and zinc from the earth's crust. In contrast, the primary elements of traditional lithium-ion batteries are downcycled and cannot be reused. The downcycling process reduces the original battery into raw materials of lower quality which can't be reused for battery production. Additional lithium must be obtained before another battery can be produced.
The silver recycling process already exists. Refiners perfected the processes over centuries for jewelry, tableware, photographic film, and electronics. Additionally, silver obtained from scrap makes up over 30% of the silver that is needed each year to satisfy world demand.
ZPower further mentioned that it is in talks with several other high-profile laptop and cell phones OEMS to provide their technology as an option for their future devices. However, they declined to reveal any further details pertaining to the parties that they are working with.
They did also say that there will be review units available in early 2009. I'll be sure to post an update if I get to test out one of them.
Till then, perhaps you can take the poll and also share with us on your battery usage patterns.
Paul Mah is a writer and blogger who lives in Singapore, where he has worked for a number of years in various capacities within the IT industry. Paul enjoys tinkering with tech gadgets, smartphones, and networking devices.
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<urn:uuid:15b9e2bd-57eb-4029-ad8e-8eb00d98681d>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/data-center/better-than-lithium-ion/
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en
| 0.969621 | 660 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Used cigarette butts turned into high-performing energy storage material
Cigarettes are not only bad for your health, they're also bad for the environment. Used cigarette butts are the most frequently littered item, regularly discarded on sidewalks and out of car windows, making their way into waterways. It's estimated that about 5.6 million used cigarettes -- 766,571 metric tons -- are deposited into the environment worldwide each year.
A group of South Korean researchers have found a way to not only divert some of those used cigarette butts from ending up in the environment, but also a way to make them into something useful. They've found that the cellulose acetate that makes up most of the material in a cigarette butt can easily be changed into a carbon-based material that out-performs common materials used in energy storage devices.
"Our study has shown that used-cigarette filters can be transformed into a high-performing carbon-based material using a simple one step process, which simultaneously offers a green solution to meeting the energy demands of society.
"Numerous countries are developing strict regulations to avoid the trillions of toxic and non-biodegradable used-cigarette filters that are disposed of into the environment each year—our method is just one way of achieving this," said Professor Jongheop Yi, from Seoul National University.
The researchers were able to transform the cellulose acetate into a carbon-based material with a simple burning technique called pyrolysis. After the technique, the carbon-based material had lots of tiny pores that allowed it to acta as a high-performing supercapacitive material.
They then attached the material to an electrode and tested it in a three-electrode system. They found that the material stored a higher amount of electricity than commercially available materials, graphene or carbon nanotubes.
The researchers believe that this new energy storage material could be used to coat the electrodes of supercapacitors to boost their performance or that it could even be integrated into electronics like computers and smartphones, built into wind turbines to store any extra generated energy, or to boost the storage capacity of electric car batteries.
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<urn:uuid:7ad2f631-cf0b-489b-940c-39f948553d22>
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http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/used-cigarette-butts-turned-energy-storage-material.html
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en
| 0.943641 | 438 | 3.234375 | 3 |
This week the media has been full of stories about the release of the 2014 National Climate Assessment, which examines recent and future climate change around the nation. At 841 pages, this is a large body of work and in this blog I will examine the portion dealing with the Pacific Northwest. Did it get the facts correct? Was its handling of the material unbiased, hyped, or too conservative? Let's take a look.
This section begins with a review of climate change over the past century. Specifically, they note:
Temperatures increased across the region from 1895 to 2011, with a regionally averaged warming of about 1.3°F. While precipitation has generally increased, trends are small as compared to natural variability ... Studies of observed changes in extreme precipitation use different time periods and definitions of “extreme,” but none find statistically significant changes in the Northwest.
Fair enough. Over a more than a century Northwest-averaged temperature has only warmed by about 1.3F and there have been no significant trends in precipitation, including extreme precipitation. And they note that not all of the 1.3F rise in temperature was due to human influences; some of that warming was undoubtedly natural since it started in the late 1800's before humans were having much impact. To illustrate this, the figure below (from the UW Climate Impacts Group) demonstrates that much of the warming occurred before 1940, prior to significant effects of human emissions of greenhouse gases.
So Northwest climate has really not changed much during the past century.
Then the report talks about future projections:
An increase in average annual temperature of 3.3°F to 9.7°F is projected
by 2070 to 2099 (compared to the period 1970 to 1999), depending
largely on total global emissions of heat-trapping gases.
So they are suggesting that temperatures over that 100 year period (basically the difference of 1985 and 2085) will warm at 2.5 to 7.5 times the rate it did over the 1895 to 2011 period. They do not give references for this warming, but we can examine the the co-authors' (Phil Mote and Amy Snover) previous work, which give similar numbers.
Below is a figure from the recent UW Climate Impact's Group regional climate evaluation (Any Snover is the head of the CIG). It shows Northwest temperatures predicted by global climate models for various scenarios (increases in greenhouse gases). 8.5 is the most extreme, 2.6 the least. 8.5 is the scenario where we don't make drastic changes in our life style and I believe the most probable assumption. The range of climate model solutions for the 8.5 and 4.5 scenarios are shown and are consistent with the recently released climate assessment report.
You will immediately note a problem with their plot, the temperatures over the NW have been flat since 1985 (see their figure above) and the figure below show a roughly 2F increase. Furthermore, I believe it is doubtful that the warming will be as much as shown by the 8.5 simulation (7-11F warming by 2085) for two reasons. First, the climate models appear to be too sensitive to greenhouse gas forcing and secondly they appear to have particular trouble with natural variability of the eastern Pacific.
A number of climate experts at the UW (such as Professor K.K. Tung, paper here) believe that excessive sensitivity of climate models to greenhouse gases results from their "tuning" to match the warming of the late 20th century. They believe that the sensitivity of the models was cranked up to compensate for either the failure to handle the cooling effects of atmospheric particles (aerosols) or the models' inability to properly simulate major modes of natural variability like the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) mode. The tuned models look great over the 20th century (proof you can trust them!), but they overdo things in the future.
In addition, the climate models runs that included the past 40 years have failed to produced the observed cooling of the eastern Pacific (see figure), which obviously is suppressing temperatures around here.
I suspect cutting the RCP 8.5 warming prediction in half would be a far more reasonable prediction of what things will be like in 2085 (as well as starting at the observed level of 2014). So we are talking 2-4F warming. The problem is the authors of this section use the larger warming estimates as assumptions in much of the rest of their work (like snowpack changes).
The assessment notes that expected precipitation changes in the region will be modest, with a small increase in precipitation being probable:
Change in annual average precipitation in the Northwest is projected to be within a range of an 11% decrease to a 12% increase for 2030 to 2059 and a 10% decrease to an 18% increase for 2070 to
2099 for the B1, A1B, and A2 scenarios.
This is an area where the assessment is probably too conservative. Although annual precipitation will not change much, some research (including that of my group), suggests substantial enhancement of the heaviest precipitation events (pineapple express). Furthermore, with less snow pack on the slopes during early winter, enhanced rainfall could result in more serious flooding (snow actually soaks up some rain, reducing flood risk).
In the next section, the assessment states that the snowpack has declined about 20% since 1950. I co-authored a peer reviewed paper on the subject and found a reduction of 23% since 1930. But what is not said in the Climate Assessment Report is that most of this 23% has nothing to do with global warming, but rather was forced by natural variability. They claim that spring snowmelt has occurred 0 to 30 days earlier since 1950 depending on location, while we found snow melt occurs only 5 days early since 1930. Strangely, they don't even cite our paper in their section, which suggests either a biased viewpoint or a very incomplete search of the literature, neither of which is good.
The report talks about increases in Northwest wildfires:
Although wildfires are a natural part of most Northwest forest ecosystems, warmer and drier conditions have helped increase the number and extent of wildfires in western U.S. forests since the 1970s
Reading through the wildfire literature the last few days and talking to experts in the USDA Forest Service, I could find no research that shows a significant increase in wildfires in the Northwest over the three decades. And even if they did increase, it would be nearly impossible to separate climate impacts from the influence of increasing population, changes in forestry practices, and major shifts in wildfire management. Wildfires are a natural aspect of NW ecology, and the suppression of fires has resulted in the potential for catastrophic conflagrations. Quite possibly, more fires would be a good thing for the environment.
But most significantly, this regional climate report fails to mention the central and most important fact about climate change in the Northwest: the impacts of global warming will be weaker and more delayed in the Northwest than nearly any location in the U.S. The reason: the Pacific Ocean.
Virtually all climate models indicate the arctic will warm up the most and the continents will warm up more than the oceans (see figure). Furthermore, the eastern oceans will warm more slowly than the western
oceans. The weather of the Pacific Northwest is controlled by the Pacific Ocean to our west, and if the Pacific warms more slowly so will we. In fact, the lack of east Pacific warming of the past 30 years explains why our temperatures and snow pack has remained essentially constant during that period. Furthermore, most Northwest climate change of the last century has been natural in origin.
The bottom line of my analysis is that the impacts of increased greenhouse gases has been very small here in the Northwest so far. Global warming will impact our region, but the changes here will be modest and slow. The biggest impacts will be reduced snow pack later in the century and increased risk of heavier precipitation and floods. Less snow pack will reduce the amount of snow melt available during the summer and early fall. Thus, to ensure sufficient water supplies we will need larger or additional reservoirs or dams.
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March 4, 2002
1- Featured Article:
Can creatine reduce muscle damage?
2- Anthony’s Training Tip:
Eat Fat To Gain Muscle!
This Month’s Featured Article:
Can creatine reduce muscle damage?
Muscle damage is a natural consequence of exercise. A small amount of muscle damage is not a terrible thing. In fact, small amounts of muscle damage actually stimulate new muscle growth, which is good. However, if the extent of muscle damage exceeds our body’s capacity to repair it and rebuild, we’re in big trouble. We then have a scenario of net muscle breakdown, otherwise known as catabolism, which defeats the whole point of working out and is a huge waste of time, money and effort.
Two principal forms of muscle damage arise from physical exertion. The first is mechanical and occurs immediately. In other words, our muscles tear slightly during the physical stress of exercise. The second form of muscle damage is the result of chemicals that are released during exercise and that exert their degenerative effects a few days later.
Now, for more details on the second type of muscle damage. Intense exercise produces what are known as Reactive Oxygen Species, or ROSs for short. One of the most dangerous of the ROSs is the Superoxide Radical. Even sounds dangerous! Our body normally has the capacity to neutralize Superoxide as soon as it is produced.
How is Superoxide Produced?
Superoxide is produced from oxygen. Heavy breathing during intense exercise increases the rate of Superoxide production and surpasses the body’s capacity to neutralize it. This gives rise to a situation known as oxidative stress.
Superoxide weakens the muscle membrane causing it to tear. These small tears allow muscle’s contents to leak out and calcium ions to seep in. Importantly, an unregulated increase in intramuscular calcium activates enzymes that cause the muscle cell to self-destruct. Obviously, something we want to avoid.
Our bodies contain a line of defense against oxidative stress; special molecules known as antioxidants that neutralize ROSs. Vitamins A, C and E are examples of vitamin antioxidants. Vitamin E is a particularly potent antioxidant that protects our cellular membranes from degradation following oxidative stress. Some studies suggest that the vitamin antioxidants can reduce exercise-induced muscle damage. Our bodies also come equipped with their own antioxidant molecules. Some of the most important are Superoxide Dismutase, Glutathione Peroxidase and Catalase.
Eating foods rich in antioxidants and getting plenty of rest increases our body’s capacity to deal with oxidative stress.
Is Creatine an Antioxidant?
Very recently (January 2002) a study was released suggesting that creatine might act as a Superoxide scavenger in its own right. It is therefore possible that part of the benefit we obtain from creatine derives from its capacity to act as an antioxidant.
The salient points of the study are as follows:
1. The concentration of creatine used in this study was within physiological limits. In other words, comparable to that found within skeletal muscle (20-60 mM, for those who are interested). This gave relevancy to the study.
2. Creatine is a mild antioxidant. Creatine was not as effective as Glutathione at scavenging free radicals.
3. Creatine’s ability to neutralize Superoxide was measured in a test tube, not an exercising person.
This preliminary report seems to suggest that creatine possess’ antioxidant properties and can effectively neutralize Superoxide, one of the more insidious free radicals produced by exercise. However, since these findings where obtained in a test tube, it remains to be shown if creatine has the same effect in an exercising person. Although preliminary, this result is surely provocative and worth pursuing.
Lawler JM, Barnes WS, Wu G, Song W, Demaree S. (January 2002) Direct antioxidant properties of creatine. Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications. Volume 290: 1: pages 47-52.
Anthony’s Training Tips:
Eat Fat to Gain Muscle.
Studies have shown that dietary fat has a direct relationship with the production of the hormone testosterone. Testosterone is directly related to muscle growth. An increase in dietary fat seems to bring on in increase in testosterone levels. A decrease in dietary fat intake is usually accompanied by a decrease in free testosterone levels. A vegetarian diet causes lower testosterone levels than a meat-rich diet.
If you don’t want to eat meat, you can supplement your diet with healthy fats like those found in fish, olive oil, or other unsaturated oils. In addition to stimulating the production of more testosterone, these “good fats” can help to improve your overall cardiovascular health. More on “good fats” next month.
Read our recent interview of Anthony.
Still have questions about creatine? You'll probably find the answers in my ebook!
Creatine: a practical guide will teach you how to use creatine safely and effectively for greatest muscle growth. You'll learn: how to design your own personalized dosing protocol, what to eat (and what not to eat) and other methods to make the greatest muscle gains, at the lowest price. Also, find out whether expensive creatine formulations are really worth the money!
All for less than the cost of your monthly creatine!
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Graphene is certainly the “wonder material” of the moment, surpassing the former bearer of that title—carbon nanotubes. To support this research, funding mechanisms around the world are cranking up to full throttle. Some large investments in the UK to secure its position as a “graphene hub” and the €1 billion the EU has poured into graphene research are just the most recent examples of this.
Presumably all this research and all this funding is intended—eventually—to lead to some commercial applications. Things appear to be moving in the right direction with some significant advances in the mass production of graphene (liquid phase, thermal exfoliation, and chemical vapor deposition, to name a few).
Then again, you can mass-produce sealing wax but there’s not a whole lot of demand for the material anymore. To see what cheap production of a nanomaterial gets you, just take a look at the huge capacity glut for multi-walled carbon nanotubes that have left producers begging for applications.
There remains a very real possibility at this stage that graphene funding will not produce new economic development for some regions any more than investments in carbon nanotubes did.
Nonetheless there are real applications for which graphene could be used today. Those applications may not be—at least immediately—in the electronics industry, desperate though it is to keep Moore’s Law alive for another generation, but in more mundane areas such as for membranes for natural gas processing or water purification.
With this landscape as the backdrop, the National Science Foundation (NSF) wanted to highlight Jessup, Md.-based Vorbeck Materials, which just received a grant from the NSF to bring its graphene-based technology to market.
According to the NSF press release, the company claims to be “one of the first (if not the first) graphene products to go to market.” In 2009, Vorbeck introduced its Vor-ink graphene-based conductive ink for electronics at the Printed Electronics Europe 2009 tradeshow.
I am still not sure whether the company is selling their products to anyone, or whether their prototypes are ready to be sold to someone. In any case, graphene-enabled conductive inks certainly makes sense as an early application since the graphene for these types of inks can currently be produced on the ton scale.
Wisely, the company is using these conductive inks to produce its own electronic textile products, as opposed to simply producing the ink. The video below demonstrates a sheet of Vor-ink-prepared fabric put through a regular washing machine load (with detergent!) and drying cycle. (No nano-fiber-based wrinkle-resistance, however.)
The weaving together of nanotech and electronic textiles has, like carbon nanotubes, a relatively long and somewhat checkered past with much hope and high expectations but few rousing success stories. We'll see how this commercial avenue pans out for the young Vorbeck Materials. In the meantime, it is encouraging to see the first sprouts of commercial possibility emerging from the rocky soil of this emerging technology landscape.
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In an Internet-era version of pen pals, some foreign-language professors at American colleges are using free or low-cost technology to match their students with partners in classes in other countries and to provide authentic language-immersion experiences.
Teletandem, or telecollaboration, as the practice is known, uses videoconferencing—whether Skype, Google Hangouts, or Adobe Connect—to complement both in-person and online language courses. For example, students in a Spanish class here are paired with students in an English course abroad. To minimize intimidation, professors try to pair students of the same proficiency level. The idea is a simple one—I teach you my language, you teach me yours.
"It gave our students a sense of purpose, not only a sense of need—they were there to also help," says Anton T. Brinckwirth, director of the World Studies Media Center here at Virginia Commonwealth University. In his Spanish courses, he has used teletandem since 2010.
At the beginning of a 50-minute introductory-Spanish class, for example, VCU students are instructed which language to use in the first half of a conversation and which in the second. Some prepare notes with topics and vocabulary, while others just start talking.
"I like Skittles. Do you know what Skittles are?" can be heard at one end of the room. "I have a dog. Sabes que es un dog?"—Do you know what a dog is?, asks another student, mixing the languages.
Students rely on notes, hand gestures, and facial expressions, and occasionally they share pictures to communicate words or phrases they don’t know.
When Lizzett D. Uria, a senior at Virginia Commonwealth, enrolled in Portuguese 101, she expected to learn the basics—maybe by the end of the semester she would know how to introduce herself. She didn’t expect to carry on a 25-minute conversation with a native speaker.
"It basically forces you to learn," she says. "It pushes you to practice the language to make sure you are ready for the next meeting."
Ms. Uria is now taking Portuguese 102 and engaging in two teletandem sessions per week with her partner, Ghuilerme Boleta, in Assis, Brazil. Thanks to the lessons, she says, her perspective on the language and on Brazilian culture has changed, and she is more interested in continuing to practice.
Beyond Language Learning
While technology can’t offer the full-immersion experience of living abroad, for some students it is the closest they can get.
João Antonio Telles, an associate professor of linguistics at São Paulo State University, in Assis, is coordinator of Teletandem Brasil and an originator of the term "teletandem." The method existed previously, as one-on-one interactions conducted either in person or over the phone. But by 2004, when he and his colleagues began developing the current system, videoconferencing had made long-distance interaction easier.
"In Brazil there is very little immigration, so being able to speak another language with someone else is almost impossible without technology," Mr. Telles says. He considers the system a form of virtual immersion: The students not only get to talk to one another but also can see how their partners react to questions, how they look, and how they live.
"It’s not knowing only a language," he says, "but also knowing how to behave and acknowledge differences—cultural differences, behavioral differences."
Mr. Brinckwirth recalls a class in which Taiwanese students complained about their American partners as disrespectful. The American students would show up late, yawn, and slouch while having teletandem conversations.
They didn’t understand what was wrong with their behavior until the professor explained that, in Chinese culture, such body language reflects boredom and indifference. And in China, being even a few minutes late is considered disrespectful.
An idea similar to teletandem originated among language professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who in 1997 created the Cultura project. Using online blog forums built in WordPress or similar platforms, students learning French at MIT have conversations, organized by topics, with French students studying English.
"The idea is for them to learn about themselves as much as they learn about the others," says Sabine Levet, a senior lecturer in French at MIT, who is a creator of the project.
Early on, tandem learning gave participants autonomy in deciding when to meet, what to talk about, and for how long. During his research, Mr. Telles realized that, in order to take the method into the classroom, one aspect had to change: "There has to be structure," he says.
He and the other professors involved with Teletandem Brasil hold "mediation sessions" after every teletandem conversation to deliver lessons on vocabulary, grammar, and culture.
The combination of conversational autonomy and pedagogical structure is key, says Fernando Rubio, co-director of the Second Language Teaching and Research Center at the University of Utah.
"If you have a relatively high level of interaction with the instructor through a more-traditional instructor classroom," he says, "and then you have a high level of interaction with native speakers through teletandem, then you have the right ingredients for a successful learning experience."
Mr. Rubio does not use teletandem in his Spanish classroom, but he is interested in it for massive open online courses, or MOOCs.
Laura L. Franklin, a professor of French at Northern Virginia Community College, has been using teletandem in online courses. She didn’t begin teaching language courses fully online until she felt that the technology would allow students a full listening, speaking, reading, and writing experience.
"The listening and speaking was a challenge. And over the years technology kept getting better and better," she says. "Now it’s an equivalent experience. If you use Google Hangouts, if you use Skype, it’s really possible."
Benefits and Challenges
For most language professors, having every student participate in a 25-minute conversation during a classroom course is almost impossible—in group discussions, some students generally dominate while others hold back.
Michael J. Ferreira, an associate professor in Georgetown University’s department of Spanish and Portuguese, says that a student speaks the target language for an average of three minutes in a traditional 50-minute class. That includes advanced courses, which he chose as the first in his department to hold teletandem sessions.
"Advanced conversation should be real experience, where you feel that you are communicating at a native level," he says.
Mr. Ferreira is trying to introduce teletandem in other courses and has worked closely since 2009 with Mr. Telles, in Brazil, to develop the system at Georgetown. But it can be hard for colleges to change traditional teaching methods, Mr. Ferreira says.
Mr. Brinckwirth says teletandem learning requires big initial investments in time spent trying to coordinate sessions and match students, as well as in technology—computers, video equipment, and broadband connections. And all of those must be compatible with their equivalents at the partner institution.
Since 2010, professors at Virginia Commonwealth have managed to join with colleagues at 11 institutions, including São Paulo State; the Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages, in Taiwan; and Cairo University. Virginia Commonwealth now offers teletandem sessions in seven languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Mr. Brinckwirth finds the return on the investment substantial.
Seeing students react enthusiastically in the classes still amazes professors here. At the end of the introductory-Spanish course, Mr. Brinckwirth pointed at the clock—it was 2:50 p.m.—and then looked back at students so deeply engaged in conversation that they were making no effort to leave.
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Skyhorse (A Herman Graf Book) February 2012 * 384 pages/50 b&w illustrations
A CENTENNIAL EDITION OF THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED BESTSELLER FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1980
TITANIC: End of a Dream relies on survivors' accounts to establish some startling facts, including that almost two-thirds of the first-class passengers survived while only a quarter of the steerage passengers made it to safety. And that those in the lifeboats chose to ignore the piteous cries of passengers in the water, almost all of whom perished. This chilling account demonstrates that the Titanic's sinking was in many ways entirely avoidable. He begins with Titanic leaving on its maiden voyage from Southampton, full of hope and excitement. He then quickly shifts to the scene of confusion and horror right after the sinking, when few facts were known. In the next chapters the sinking comes to life through an official Inquiry into the disaster, due to the work of a Senator from Michigan and his committee who actually met the rescue ship Carpathia in New York and served many of the notables with subpoenas. The Inquiry was held within a week of the rescue ship arriving in New York. Particularly memorable is the chapter detailing the negligence of the Californian - in reality the closest ship to the point of sinking. Therefore, Wyn’s book is based on source material that was very fresh and thus gives a great read that fills in so many details that would otherwise have been lost to time and embellishment.
Titanic was truly a community afloat, with everything you might find in a small city: a government, social classes, and a sense of forward progress. As Titanic left the dock, she was almost a caricature of herself. The appropriately named ship was symbolic of the dreams and expectations of the men, women and children in 1912 prior to World War I. As they looked ahead at the brave new world they were building, Titanic reflected who they were In TITANIC: End of a Dream detail-oriented journalist Wade translates the human emotions of the Titanic sinking into modern culture. Wyn conveys what Titanic—and, more importantly, the sinking of Titanic—meant to the people of that time. If we cannot understand the impact of Titanic on the world of 1912, how can we possibly understand how Titanic integrates into our culture and thinking today?
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Stress was originally defined by a Canadian biologist named Hans Selye (1907–1982) in the 1930s as a series of biochemical, nervous, digestive, and muscular responses in laboratory animals to a perceived threat, which he called a stressor. Selye later expanded the notion of stress to include humans trying to evaluate and respond to various stressors in their daily lives. Many people, however, use the word “stress” in casual conversation to refer to almost any event or situation that worries or upsets them.
Some doctors distinguish several different types of stress according to whether the stress is positive or negative, or according to the length of time that the person experiences the stressor. In the 1970s, a psychologist named Richard Lazarus coined the term eustress to refer to stress that is good for health or leads to a sense of fulfillment. Increasing one’s strength or endurance through active exercise would be an example of eustress, as would completing a course of study or finishing a job assignment.
Stress can also be categorized as acute, episodic acute, or chronic, according to the length of time the person feels stressed and whether the stress is a one-time event, repeated periodically, or long-term and unrelenting. An example of acute stress is facing a growling and aggressive looking dog. Episodic acute stress includes the pressures that people place on themselves by taking on too many obligations or by not allowing enough time to complete tasks. Some jobs, such as police work or firefighting, involve episodic acute stress. Chronic stress is usually situational— the person is trapped in a bad marriage, a dead-end job, or living in a crime-ridden neighborhood.
In general, stress is a complicated set of physical and emotional responses to changes that occur in everyone’s life. On the biological level, stress begins with the “fight-or-flight” reaction—the activation of a section of the brain called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system, or HPA. When a human perceives a situation as stressful, the HPA system releases cortisol, a steroid hormone. The next stage in the stress reaction is the release of neurotransmitters, or brain chemicals, that activate parts of the brain that register the emotion of fear. The neurotransmitters also suppress activity in parts of the brain associated with short-term memory, concentration, and rational thinking. This limitation allows a human to react quickly to a stressful situation but it also lowers his or her ability to deal with intellectual or social factors that may be part of the situation.
On the physical level, the person’s heart rate and blood pressure rise; he or she breathes more rapidly, which allows the lungs to take in more oxygen. Blood flow to the muscles, lungs, and brain may increase by 300–400 percent. The spleen releases more blood cells into the circulation, which increases the blood’s ability to transport oxygen. The immune system redirects white blood cells to the skin, bone marrow, and lymph nodes. At the same time, nonessential body systems shut down. The skin becomes cool and sweaty as blood is drawn away from it toward the heart and muscles. The mouth becomes dry, and the digestive system slows down.
After the crisis passes, the levels of stress hormones drop and the body’s various organ systems return to normal. This return is called the relaxation response. Some people are more vulnerable to stress than others because their hormone levels do not return to normal after a stressful event. In chronic stress, the organ systems of the body do not have the opportunity to return fully to normal levels. Different organs become under- or overactivated on a long-term basis. In time, these abnormal levels of activity can damage an organ or organ system.
What complicates the experience of stress is that different people respond differently to stressors. Some people find driving a highly stressful experience, for example, while others enjoy it. Similarly, some people enjoy the intellectual challenges of certain fields of study, while others are bored by them. Personality differences are another factor that influences people’s response to stress. Some people are highly aggressive, inclined to worry, or easily irritated, while others are less competitive or more optimistic about life.
Almost everyone has experienced acute or episodic acute stressors. Some people, however, are more vulnerable than others to chronic stress related illnesses:
• Children. Children have very little control over their environments. In addition, they are often unable to communicate their feelings accurately.
• Elderly adults. Aging appears to affect the body’s response to stress, so that the relaxation response following a stressful event is slower and less complete. In addition, the elderly are often affected by such major stressors as health problems, the death of a spouse or close friends, and financial worries.
• Caregivers of mentally or physically disabled family members.
• Women in general.
• People with less education.
• People who belong to racial or ethnic groups that suffer discrimination.
• People who live in cities.
• People who are anger-prone. Chronic anger is associated with narrowing of the arteries, a factor in heart disease.
• People who lack supportive relatives or friends.
Nursing Care Plan Signs and Symptoms
Stress is caused by the human body’s response to any event or situation perceived as a stressor. Perception is an important factor in a person’s reaction to stress because it can be modified or changed in some situations. The specific symptoms of stress-related illness vary from person to person depending on which organs or body systems are most vulnerable.
Common symptoms of stress include:
• Heart. Chronic stress raises blood pressure, triggers the release of cholesterol into the bloodstream, and causes the arteries to narrow. It also increases the possibility that a clot will form in the coronary arteries, thus increasing the person’s risk of heart attack or stroke.
• Skin. Eczema and other allergic skin rashes can be triggered or made worse by stress.
• Digestive tract. Stress leads to nausea, diarrhea, constipation, bloating, and irritable bowel syndrome in many people. It may also play a role in the onset of eating disorders.
• Reproductive system. Stress can lead to loss of sexual desire in both men and women. In addition, stress during pregnancy is associated with a 50 percent higher risk of miscarriage. High stress levels on the mother during pregnancy are also related to higher rates of premature births and babies of lower than average birth weight; both are risk factors for infant mortality.
• Bones, joints, and muscles. Stress intensifies the chronic pain of arthritis and other joint disorders. It also produces tension-type headaches, which are headaches caused by the tightening of the muscles in the neck and scalp.
• Brain and central nervous system. Stress hormones released during acute stress interfere with memory and learning. People who are under severe stress become unable to concentrate; they may become clumsy and accident-prone. Acute stress interferes with short-term memory, although this effect goes away after the stress is resolved. In children, however, the brain’s biochemical responses to stress clearly limit the ability to learn.
• Immune system. Chronic stress increases a person’s risk of getting an infectious illness. Several research studies have shown that people under chronic stress have lower than normal white blood cell counts and are more vulnerable to colds and influenza. Men with HIV infection and high stress levels progress more rapidly to AIDS than infected men with lower stress levels.
Nursing Care Plan Diagnosis
There is no specific test or imaging study for diagnosing stress. People with specific mental disorders like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or panic disorder can be diagnosed by a psychiatrist qualified to evaluate these conditions. In most other cases, however, a person is diagnosed in the course of a checkup for a stress-related physical condition when the doctor asks about the stress level in their living situation, school, or job.
Nursing Care Plan Treatment
Treatment for stress depends on the parts of the person’s body that are affected and the sources of stress and types of stress in his or her life.
Most people benefit from a combination of treatment approaches:
• Medications. These can be prescribed to treat physical conditions related to stress like high blood pressure or high cholesterol levels, or to help relieve emotional anxiety.
• Psychotherapy. The two approaches most often used in treating stress are interpersonal therapy and cognitive therapy. In interpersonal therapy, people learn about the events in their past and the triggers in their lives that set off the stress response, together with strategies for coping with stressors. Cognitive therapy works by teaching patients to change their ways of thinking about stressful situations or events. Many people have underlying negative assumptions about life that make them more vulnerable to stress.
• Lifestyle changes. People who have used alcohol, drugs, or smoking are usually advised to quit. In some cases, people may have to change jobs or leave bad relationships in order to relieve chronic stress.
• Physical exercise. Physical activity is a good way to work off tension in the muscles and joints, and to improve strength and endurance.
• Stress management. Stress management refers to programs or techniques intended to help people deal more effectively with stress. Many of these are intended to help people handle job- or workplace- related stress. Stress management programs ask participants to identify the specific aspects of their jobs that they find stressful and then plan a course of positive action to lower their stress levels.
• Complementary and alternative approaches. Acupuncture, yoga, relaxation training, meditation, prayer and religious practice, guided imagery, hypnosis, massage therapy, music therapy, humor, and pet therapy are alternative approaches that help many people cope with stress.
The prognosis for stress depends on the patients’ overall health, their age, the specific stressors they confront, and the ways of coping that they have developed over time. Some people tend to focus on their feelings about the stressful situation while others focus on solving the problem. Still others react to stress by trying to escape from it through drugs or alcohol.
Nursing Care Plan Prevention
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has compiled a list of ten things people can do to prevent stress:
• Stay away from stressors that can be avoided.
• Avoid making too many lifestyle changes too close together—such as trying to quit smoking while planning to move to a new city and take a new job.
• Recognize limitations and not take on too many responsibilities at the same time.
• Organize tasks according to priority and allow enough time to complete each one.
• Learn to communicate effectively and politely with others.
• Don’t isolate; share thoughts or feelings with friends, family, or appropriate others, and take their advice if it seems reasonable and helpful.
• Create a positive attitude toward life.
• Set aside time for a break or a treat as a reward for overcoming a stressful situation.
• Get regular physical exercise, at least thirty minutes each day.
• Eat a healthy diet and get enough sleep.
The stress level in people’s lives is likely to increase in the future rather than improve. One reason is the growing complexity and interconnectedness of the world; political, economic, and public health problems in almost any country can have an impact on others thousands of miles away. Another factor is the effect of the mass media and rapid communications. People are constantly bombarded with news about natural disasters and other frightening events.
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Prior to the 20th century, the distance to
the Sun was obtained using the Moon's distance, and some clever trigonometry:
Measure the angle between the Moon and
the Sun when the Moon is exactly in its first quarter phase. This angle will be almost, but not quite 90.0 degrees.
The Sun-Moon-Earth angle is exactly 90 degrees,
so the Sun, Moon and Earth form a very skinny right triangle at the
instant of the Moon's first (or third) quarter phase. We know two of the
triangle's interior angles (90 degrees, and not quite 90 degrees), and the
length of the enclosed side (384,400 km),
so we can use trigonometry to
determine the distance between the Earth and Sun.
Of course, now that we
have RADAR, we don't have to be so clever.
Average distance to the Sun
(a.k.a. one Astronomical Unit): 150 Million km.
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DISPLAY AND ART HISTORY: THE DÜSSELDORF GALLERY AND ITS CATALOGUE
At the Getty Research Institute, Getty Center
May 31—August 21, 2011
April 27, 2011
LOS ANGELES—Display and Art History: The Düsseldorf Gallery and Its Catalogue illustrates the making of one of the earliest modern catalogues, La galerie électorale de Dusseldorff (1778), a revolutionary two-volume publication that played a significant role in the history of museums and helped mark the transition from the Baroque to the Enlightenment.
Constructed by Elector Palatine Johann Wilhelm II von der Pfalz between 1709 and 1714, the Düsseldorf gallery is an early example of exhibiting an art collection in a nonresidential structure. It charted the course toward what would eventually become the institution of the public museum. The Düsseldorf gallery featured a new system of display in which the arrangement of objects was determined by art historical principles such as style and school, rather than subject. Published in the second half of the eighteenth century, the Düsseldorf catalogue represented this new display in numerous etchings; the accompanying text sought to educate a broader circle of readers.
Display and Art History: The Düsseldorf Gallery and Its Catalogue, on view at the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center from May 31 through August 21, 2011, showcases the exquisite watercolors, red chalk drawings, and architectural elevations that were used to produce this revolutionary catalogue. The exhibition explores their role in the printmaking process and underscores their value as precious works of art created by accomplished draftsmen.
"We are most fortunate to have an almost complete set of preparatory drawings in our archives, which allows for the reconstruction of this ambitious enterprise and reflects a pivotal moment in the history of art as well as the history of the art museum," says Thomas Gaehtgens, Director of the Getty Research Institute.
Prince-elector Johann Wilhelm II assembled one of the most important European art collections of the eighteenth century. He constructed a gallery to exhibit his nearly 400 paintings, 46 of which were by Peter Paul Rubens. At the time, many princes were reorganizing their substantial collections in order to convey the message that they not only possessed a wide variety of artistic treasures but were also able to care for them properly and make them available for study.
A generation later, Prince-elector Carl Theodor von der Pfalz, Johann Wilhelm's nephew and successor, commissioned Lambert Krahe, director of the Düsseldorf Academy and gallery, to rehang the paintings collection following its storage during the Seven Years' War (1756-63). Krahe broke with the Baroque tradition of decoratively covering entire walls with paintings. Instead, he displayed the paintings in a didactic, symmetrical arrangement ordered by schools, thus introducing a completely new and modern system of organizing art. Rather than hanging paintings frame-to-frame, Krahe integrated space between them, preserving their identity as separate works of art. This new display encouraged viewers to draw comparisons.
The Düsseldorf catalogue similarly fostered learning and education, in addition to celebrating the prestige of the collector. Produced by court architect Nicolas de Pigage, printmaker Christian von Mechel, and linguist Jean-Charles Laveaux, the catalogue illustrates Krahe's display of paintings on the gallery walls. Unlike earlier catalogues that only provided brief inventories, Pigage's publication offers an analysis of each painting that was aimed at an educated public.
"In this sense, the catalog was very much a work of the Enlightenment, and the princely gallery, accessible to interested visitors, became more like a museum as we understand it today," says Gaehtgens.
Louis Marchesano, the GRI's Curator of Prints and Drawings, adds, "The catalogue no longer simply represented princely magnificence; it now also fostered aesthetic reflection and art historical education."
Display and Art History is co-curated by Thomas Gaehtgens, Director of the Getty Research Institute, and Louis Marchesano, the GRI's Curator of Prints and Drawings. They also co-authored an accompanying book, Display and Art History: The Düsseldorf Gallery and Its Catalogue.
# # #
About the Getty:
The J. Paul Getty Trust is an international cultural and philanthropic institution devoted to the visual arts that features the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Getty Research Institute. The J. Paul Getty Trust and Getty programs serve a varied audience from two locations: the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Getty Villa in Malibu.
Sign up for e-Getty at www.getty.edu/subscribe/ to receive free monthly highlights of events at the Getty Center and the Getty Villa via e-mail, or visit our event calendar for a complete calendar of public programs.
The Getty Research Institute is an operating program of the J. Paul Getty Trust. It serves education in the broadest sense by increasing knowledge and understanding about art and its history through advanced research. The Research Institute provides intellectual leadership through its research, exhibition, and publication programs and provides service to a wide range of scholars worldwide through residencies, fellowships, online resources, and a Research Library. The Research Library - housed in the 201,000-square-foot Research Institute building designed by Richard Meier - is one of the largest art and architecture libraries in the world. The general library collections (secondary sources) include almost 900,000 volumes of books, periodicals, and auction catalogues encompassing the history of Western art and related fields in the humanities. The Research Library's special collections include rare books, artists' journals, sketchbooks, architectural drawings and models, photographs, and archival materials.
Visiting the Getty Center: The Getty Center is open Tuesday through Friday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. It is closed Monday and major holidays. Admission to the Getty Center is always free. Parking is $15 per car, but free after 5pm on Saturdays and for evening events throughout the week. No reservation is required for parking or general admission. Reservations are required for event seating and groups of 15 or more. Please call 310-440-7300 (English or Spanish) for reservations and information. The TTY line for callers who are deaf or hearing impaired is 310-440-7305. The Getty Center is at 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, California.
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Much like lizards that ditch their tails in a tussle, some deep-sea squid can sacrifice their glowing arms to distract enemies and swim to safety. Scientists observed this defense mechanism first-hand in the foot-long octopus squid (Octopoteuthis deletron) off the coast of California.
"If a predator is trying to attack them, they may dig the hooks on their arms into the predator's skin," said University of Rhode Island researcher Stephanie Bush. "Then the squid jets away and leaves its arm tips stuck to the predator. The wriggling, bioluminescing arms might give the predator pause enough to allow the squid to get away."
Setting out to answer why many octopus squid have arms of different lengths, Bush and her team deployed a camera-equipped remotely controlled vehicle in the undersea Monterey Canyon and prodded a squid with a bottlebrush.
"The very first time we tried it, the squid spread its arms wide and it was lighting up like fireworks," Bush said in a statement from the University of Rhode Island. "It then came forward and grabbed the bottlebrush and jetted backwards, leaving two arms on the bottlebrush. We think the hooks on its arms latched onto the bristles of the brush, and that was enough for the arms to just pop off."
Though the squid eventually re-grow their severed arms, the strategy might seem extreme. Bush notes that there is "definitely an energy cost associated with this behavior, but the cost is less than being dead." [See Cool Photos of Squid]
During later experiments, Bush found that some of these deep-sea squid seemed hesitant to let go of their limbs, while some did so after being poked several times, according to the statement. She also tested seven other squid species for the defense strategy and found that none of them jettisoned their arms.
The results of Bush's experiments were published in the July 2012 issue of the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.
Past research on the octopus squid found they have another ingenious ability: In the deep, dark waters where the squid live, meeting a mate is tough, and when they do come across their own species, the deep-sea gloom means it's tough to tell a gal from a guy. The octopus squid's workaround? They simply mate with any octopus squid that crosses their path.
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Alternative energy systems, despite their promise for easing the nation’s dependence on imported oil, are still a solution searching for economic feasibility, says James Wooten, Extension associate, agricultural and biological engineering, at Mississippi State University.
“At this point, with current energy prices, farmers’ best use of money is not in producing power, but in finding ways to better conserve the power they use,” he said at the annual conference of Mississippi Women in Agriculture.
“In the future, who knows? Events in the Mideast or elsewhere could push energy prices up sharply — as we saw with $140 per barrel oil and $4 gas prices a while back — and make these alternatives more feasible.
“But right now, energy from most alternative systems is more expensive than using gasoline, diesel, or electricity to do the same jobs.”
A number of companies and businesses have begun adopting “green energy” systems and techniques, Wooten notes. “These generally cost more than the companies will realize in savings, but they garner a lot of PR value from it.”
One alternative energy system that may be economically practical, he says, is solar water heaters, but even that is a long-term proposition, needing 15 to 20 years for payback on investment.
There is a 30 percent federal tax break that is available until 2016 for purchases of energy-efficient appliances, insulation, doors/windows, and other improvements that could be cost-effective if those appliances or improvements are needed.
Of the alternative energy systems now available, Wooten says, costs are the major drawback. These include:
Photovoltaic (solar) cells: “These typically run $6,000 to $8,000 per kilowatt of energy for a self contained solar system, prohibitively expensive for most residential/farm uses. But, prices are dropping sharply, and some analysts are predicting they could decline 60 percent to 80 percent over the next three to five years, and that solar will eventually become competitive with natural gas.
“China has moved into this market in a big way, and prices may continue downward as production increases.”
While there are some small-scale solar installations for poultry houses, residences, and schools in Mississippi, Wooten says, “I wouldn’t be in any big hurry to get into this until prices come down more.”
Wind turbines: “These systems offer no potential in Mississippi. They require an average wind speed of 15 mph and in our state the average wind speed is less than 1 mph.”
Biodiesel: “These are made with fats and vegetable oils mixed with alcohol and a catalyst. Anybody can make biodiesel — there are all sorts of information kits available on the Internet — but only a few can make good biodiesel.”
And therein lies the rub, Wooten says. “It can have a cleaning effect on engines and result in clogging of oil and fuel filters in older engines. Bad Biodiesel can also be quite corrosive to aluminum engine parts.
“What do you gain if you save a few bucks by making your own biodiesel, but ruin a $20,000 diesel engine?”
Vegetable oils: While the original engine developed by Rudolph Diesel was designed to run on vegetable oil, these oils can cause serious problems of gumming up modern engines if even a small amount of water gets into the system, Wooten says. And they will eventually cause crankcase oil to solidify.
“Quite a bit of work is being done in Germany with vegetable oils, mostly canola,” Wooten says, “but at present, there isn’t much potential here.” Additionally, he notes, new vegetable oil is prohibitively expensive as a fuel.
Ethanol: Production of ethanol, chiefly from corn, skyrocketed during the period of $140 per barrel oil prices and federal mandates for blending ethanol with gasoline.
“Mixtures range anywhere from 5 percent to 85 percent,” Wooten says, “and price is generally the chief influence on how much is used.”
A gallon of ethanol has only about 85 percent of the energy content of gasoline, he notes, and gasoline mileage ratings for autos sold in the U.S. are based on gasoline only.
“In addition to reduced mileage, ethanol can be corrosive to copper and aluminum parts in some situations,” he says. “There have also been numerous reports of problems with ethanol/gasoline blends in two-cycle engines, such as chain saws and WeedEaters.”
Anaerobic digesters: Manures from livestock and poultry operations can be digested to produce methane gas, which can be used to run engines and generating systems.
Some poultry operations in Mississippi are using this method.
One problem, Wooten says, is that ammonia from some manure can corrode engine parts.
Net metering: This allows anyone generating excess electricity from a private system to feed it into a utility company grid and get paid for it.
Many states have net metering laws, Wooten says, but attempts have failed thus far to get legislation passed in Mississippi.
“Some utility companies have got onboard with this, but many oppose it because they say the cost of providing electricity to rural areas is not in the power itself, but in running the lines to those areas.
“At present, Mississippi has some of the cheapest electricity rates in the nation, so net metering isn’t such an attractive proposition economically.”
Biomass: This includes grasses such as switchgrass and giant Miscanthus, corn stover, wheat stubble, wood/forestry wastes, etc.
“Currently, there is little or no market for these,” Wooten says. “A number of companies are trying to get into the business, and if we see sharp increases in energy costs, this could be a big moneymaker for our landowners and tree farmers.”
Much of the U.S. paper industry has moved offshore, he notes, so a lot of pulpwood, wood chips, and forest understory vegetation could be used as feedstock for fuel production.
The cellulosic ethanol production process, converting cellulose from grasses or woody plants to sugar for fermentation for ethanol, is still prohibitively expensive, Wooten says. But again, should energy prices rise sharply, it could become economically feasible.
Handling of biomass also presents challenges, he notes, and researchers are looking at ways to compress materials on site, such as cubing and pelletizing, before moving them to processing plants.
Should farmers grow biomass grasses? “Not yet,” Wooten says. “There’s no commercial demand at this point. But if escalating energy prices make this a profitable industry, there could be huge demand. We see potential for a major biomass industry, fed by farmers.”
For production of switchgrass, giant Miscanthus, and other grasses, he says, “This most likely would be a contract arrangement, with a farmer providing the land and the contractor planting, overseeing, and harvesting the biomass.”
Mississippi State University’s Sustainable Energy Research Center is involved in a number of research efforts for alternative energy, Wooten notes.
“We’re heavily involved in a process that converts wood to bio-oil. This fast pyrolysis process applies heat to biomass, then cools it quickly. The result is a thick, black, nasty liquid that can be burned in furnaces for heat and power.
“The cost is probably around $1 per gallon and is cost competitive with oil at $70 per barrel. We’ve been trying to get a plant established in Mississippi.”
University researchers are also working with gasification systems that partially burn biomass to produce syngas that can be converted directly into gasoline or alcohol that can be refined into gasoline.
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By Benjamin M. Guyer
The English word canon comes from the Greek κανών. The term originally pertained to a measuring rod, but eventually referred to the standards which regulated various trades in the ancient world. After the rise of Christianity, it was also used to describe Christian norms. Many readers will be familiar with the phrase “canon of Scripture,” but canon has also been used in other, no less important ways. For example, it can describe normative liturgical practice; it can refer to disciplinary procedures; it can denote decisions reached through mutual counsel. Consequently, canon is a word of notable polysemy; appealing to one set of canonical norms refers one to other sets of canonical norms. Canon law is one of the canons used by the Church for maintaining its common life. The canon of Scripture contains “all things necessary for salvation,” but it does not contain all things necessary for running the Church. This latter task is fulfilled by canon law.
A Historical Sketch
The origins of canon law in the Episcopal Church extend through the Church of England back to the medieval period and thus to the early Church. In 325, the Council of Nicaea passed twenty canons for regulating the life and practice of the Church in the Roman Empire. The Nicene canons, which were prefaced by the first version of the Nicene Creed, regulated a large number of jurisdictional, liturgical, and theological matters. Later councils, both Eastern and Western, continued the practice of passing canons.
In the early medieval West, canon law was regional and kings exercised ecclesiastical oversight. In England, for example, kings appointed bishops and royal law enforced the observance of ecclesiastical law and liturgical practice. In the 12th century, when jurisdictional debates between the papacy and European kings reached a fevered pitch, the period of “classical” Western canon law began. This followed the Gregorian reforms of Pope Gregory VII (+1085), who sought to make the Church wholly independent of royal authority. However, the great early work of canon law was not completed until around the mid-12th century, when a monk named Gratian compiled and edited The Harmony of Discordant Canons. Almost nothing certain is known about Gratian, but in his work he placed thousands of canons, rulings, and theological statements into a coherent whole. His work quickly became the theological best seller of its day and by the end of the 12th century was disseminated throughout Europe. It was soon known simply as the Decretum Gratiani — The Decree of Gratian — and it formed the basis of all later Western canon law.
Medieval canon law did not disappear from the Church of England or other Protestant churches on the European continent. In the 16th century, there was nothing strange about being a Protestant canonist. Although Henry VIII banned the study of Roman canon law in England, Archbishop Cranmer sought — unsuccessfully — to reform English canon law. Under Elizabeth I, there were reforms of both canon law and the ecclesiastical courts, and under King James VI and I new canons were promulgated in 1604. For centuries, English canon law was a field ripe for study, practice, and publication.
Two factors changed this situation. First, during the mid-19th century, a series of legal reforms in England undermined the independence of the national church. This marginalized the study and practice of canon law. Second, the international development of the Anglican Communion led to the proliferation of provincial bodies of canon law. These various regional canons overlap significantly but also diverge from one another. We have no set of shared canonical norms for church membership or the transference of holy orders, and no set of shared canonical norms which define provincial autonomy and interdependence. Recent years have seen a significant interest in returning canon law to the Anglican agenda, and the Anglican Covenant is the most recent manifestation of this trend. Nonetheless, the Anglican situation today is much like that which Gratian faced centuries ago: we need a harmony of our discordant canons.
Law as κανών
Any Anglican theology of law is bound to use both pre- and post-Reformation authors such as Gratian, Aquinas, and Hooker. At the beginning of his Decretum, Gratian offers two important definitions: “What is put in writing is called enactment or law, while what is not collected in writing is called by the general term ‘custom.’” Aquinas used this distinction to posit a difference between divine law and natural law, both of which are unchanging, and human or positive law, which can be revised. Following Aquinas, Hooker maintained the same. Canon law is human law and insofar as it achieves a good end, the law itself is good. Should canon law fail in this, it must be revised. It is precisely here in a discussion of the good that canon law invokes other canons, namely, the canon of Scripture. If Scripture contains “all things necessary to salvation,” then canon law should be written to aid the Church in attaining these same divinely revealed ends.
Canon law is thus evangelical through and through. A church’s witness to the wider society begins with its own, internal witness. In this way, canon law is constructive, even in its punitive functions. The purpose of ecclesiastical discipline is never to punish but always to restore. The violation of canon law is a matter of no small importance in the Church, just as the violation of civil law is a matter of importance in the State. Only the arbitrary use of authority allows law to be violated in an ad hoc fashion. In the State this is called tyranny; in the Church it is called abuse. A church that cares nothing for canonical infractions also cares nothing for restoration. A church without confession is a church without repentance, and such a church is also without forgiveness, for it stands in need of lawful and righteous judgment. How can there be justice if there is no law?
Canon law is one of several canons in the Church’s history. It has a vitally important role in maintaining order in the daily life of the Church, and in its particulars canon law expresses how a church strives after Gospel. The goodness of canon law is determined by its ability to achieve the divine ends given in Scripture. But canon law also serves a restorative purpose. The ordered maintenance of canon law testifies to a church’s commitment to a just and lawful internal life, itself inseparable from evangelical witness.
Gratian: The Treatise on Laws, translated by Augustine Thompson, OP, and James Gordley (Catholic University of America Press, 1993), provides an excellent introduction to the Decretum. Roman Canon Law in Reformation England (Cambridge University Press, 1990) and The Spirit of Classical Canon Law (University of Georgia Press, 1996) by R.H. Helmholz are essential reading. J.H. Baker, Monuments of Endlesse Labours: English Canonists and Their Work 1300-1900 (Hambledon Press, 1998) is a fine collection of short biographical essays on key English canon lawyers. Norman Doe, Canon Law in the Anglican Communion: A Worldwide Perspective (Clarendon Press, 1998) presents groundbreaking work on contemporary Anglican canon law. Much helpful information is available from the the Ecclesiastical Law Society and the Anglican Communion Legal Advisers Network.
Benjamin M. Guyer is a doctoral student in British history at the University of Kansas.
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Rose Pests and Problems
Roses are easy to grow if given the proper conditions. Adequate sunlight (5-6 hours minimum), water (about an inch a week on average) and fertilizer (roses are gluttons and love to be fed). Roses are also like most any other garden plants in that they are susceptible to a number of diseases, insect pests and other problems. It is up to the gardener to decide what level of damage and maintenance, or lack of, they are willing to live with. The hard core exhibitor is striving for the perfect bloom and immaculate foliage, and will do whatever it takes to achieve that goal. Then there is the "survival of the fittest" type gardener. This type gardener digs a hole, plops a rose bush in, fills the hole, and gives little, if any, water or fertilizer through out the year. Most rose gardeners fall some where in between the two extremes.
The most common disease problems in the Atlanta area are fungal diseases such as Blackspot, Powdery Mildew, Downy Mildew and Bothyris . Blackspot is the most common disease and causes dark circular spots with irregular margins, mainly on the upper surfaces of the leaves. The spots enlarge until the leaf turns yellow and drops from the plant. Blackspot loves the humid conditions found in the Georgia and the Southeast and can occur at any time in the growing season. Uncontrolled blackspot can rapidly defoliate a rose bush and spread throughout a rosebed. There is no cure for blackspot only prevention. One of the best ways to control blackspot and other fungal diseases is the regular application of fungicides. The ARS website has an article on blackspot titled What is Blackspot?. Other ARS articles on Powder Mildew and Downy Mildew can be found at the Diseases in Roses page on the ARS website.
Two of the more serious disease problems are Rose Rosette and Rose Mosaic . While Rose Rosette hasn't been reported in Georgia, confirmed cases have been found in western and middle Tennessee, with possible cases in the Huntsville, Alabama area. It is thought to be caused by a virus and spread by a specific type of mite. Good articles on Rose Rosette can be found at:
Rose Mosaic is also thought to be caused by a virus that, unlike Rose Rosette, is not fatal to roses. However it has been shown to reduce the vigor and flower production of most infected plants. An excellent article on Rose Mosaic by Dr. Malcom Manners, of Florida Southern College, can be found on the ARS website at Rose Mosaic Virus Disease.
There are a multitude of insects that feast on roses and almost as many solutions for eliminating them. Fortunately, most of the bad bugs have a good bug counterpart or predator. The problem is that you first must have the bad bugs before the good ones show up and by then the damage is done.
Some of the more common bad bugs are aphids, thrips, caterpillars, grasshoppers, spider mites, and the dreaded Japanese beetle. The most common good bugs are Lady bugs, bees and wasps, praying mantis, and the one that I personally hate but co-exist with in the rose bed - the spiders.
All of the bug problems can be treated by various insecticide sprays with varying degrees of success. The thing to remember is that when you use insecticides you are also killing the good bugs, which in the long run may make your problem worse. By using Integrated Pest Management (IPM) you may be able to keep your bug problems under control. A good place for more information on IPM is at www.gaipm.org/turf/index.html which is published by the UGA Dept. of Entomology.
If you do choose to use sprays, either fungicides, insecticides or combinations, always read the label carefully and follow mixing directions exactly. This stuff is poison!!!
information on insects and insect control can be found at: http://www.jps.net/rosebug/
Pesticide Safety information can be found at: http://ace.orst.edu/info/extoxnet/pips/ghindex.html
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Adapted from Dr. Fuhrman's book Disease Proof Your Child:
Do not feed babies anything with added salt, sugar, or honey. Only organic fruits and vegetables and organic baby food should be used. To reduce the chance of developing allergies, delay feeding strawberries and citrus fruits until twelve months of age, and hold off on ground nuts and nut butters until nine months of age. Of course, children should not be given whole nuts until the age of two and a half because of a choking hazard, but raw nut butters and food made with ground raw nuts are fine after nine months of age. Avoid peanuts and peanut butter until the age of two, because they have such a strong potential for food allergy.
Raw nuts and seeds are an excellent source of protein, the healthiest type of fat, and are loaded with minerals and vitamins. Grind up sunflower seeds, almonds, and walnuts and store these ground nuts in the freezer to add to vegetables and fruit dishes for your child after nine months of age.
Important Foods to Avoid (at least) Until the First Birthday:
Eggs, fish and other seafood, meat, cow's milk, cheese, butter, oils, wheat, strawberries, oranges, grapefruits, fruit juice, sweeteners, honey peanuts, and processed foods with additives or salt.
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PIRLS 2011 Assessment Framework
The PIRLS 2011 Assessment Framework serves as a blueprint for IEA’s 2011 PIRLS and prePIRLS assessments of reading literacy. The framework describes the purposes for reading and the processes for comprehension that are assessed by PIRLS, and presents the test booklet design and specifications. The framework also establishes the national contexts as well as the home and school factors to be covered in the PIRLS 2011 Encyclopedia and the questionnaires completed by the students themselves as well as their parents, teachers, and school principals.
Publications are available in Portable Document Format (PDF). If you need to download a copy of Adobe Reader, which will enable you to read and print the reports, click the Adobe icon.
The report is also available in a printed and bound volume which can be ordered by request. Shipping and handling is $5 for each book within the United States, US$15 per book for international orders. Print a faxable order form.
Download by chapter:
- Chapter 1: Overview of IEA's PIRLS Assessment
- Chapter 2: PIRLS Reading Purposes and Processes of Reading Comprehension
- Chapter 3: Contexts for Learning to Read
- Chapter 4: Assessment Design and Specifications
- Appendix A: Acknowledgements
- Appendix B: Sample PIRLS Passages, Questions, and Scoring Guides
- Appendix C: Sample prePIRLS Passage, Questions, and Scoring Guides
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Korea Economic Slice: The Fiat System, Asian Money Today and TomorrowSep 7th, 2010 | By Rob | Category: DS Feature, Korea
September 2, 2010 -In 1933 the Gold Standard was pushed aside and the United States Dollar (USD) officially became tied to nothing. Later in 1944, during a gathering of global leaders in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, international exchange rate policies were put in place to assure the system of “floating” global currencies. Yet it would be the Mr. John Maynard Keynes who went on to define this exchange of paper money as “fiat currency”, or money where the “material substance… is divorced from its monetary value”. More recently it has become crucial to have an understanding of what currencies are worth relative to each other and to actual assets, because the value of this floating paper is changing more erratically every day. Here we re going to look at what is moving Asian currencies now and whether these moves make since over the long term.
Download the full report below then share your thoughts. What do you agree with? Disagree with? Make us support our opinions!
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The Sky This Week, 2013 October 22 - 29
Messier 31, the Great Andromeda Galaxy
Imaged at Fishers Island, NY, 2013 July 31
The Moon wanes in the morning sky this week, wending her way through the bright stars of the Great Winter Circle before ending the week among the rising stars of spring. Last Quarter occurs on the 26th at 7:40 pm Eastern Daylight Time. Luna may be found near bright Jupiter before dawn on the mornings of the 25th and 26th. On the morning of the 29th look for the Moon at the south apex of an attractive triangle with the bright star Regulus and the red planet Mars.
As the Moon edges toward the morning sky we can take advantage of the crisp autumn evenings to explore some of the sights of the season’s "deep sky". Gone are the hazes and humidity of summer. Gone as well are the mosquitoes, which tend to ruin many an observing session in the warmer months. The stars of late summer seem to linger in the west, and the three bright stars of the Summer Triangle, Vega, Deneb, and Altair still dominate the high western sky at the end of evening twilight. From dark locations you can still enjoy a leisurely binocular tour of some of the Milky Way’s best star clouds with their embedded star clusters and gaseous nebulae.
By 10:00 pm another geometric figure approaches the meridian. Made up primarily of second-magnitude stars, the so-called "Great Square" of Pegasus is nonetheless quite prominent, mostly due to the paucity of other bright stars in the area. As we look out in the direction of Pegasus we’re looking out of the plane of the Milky Way toward the vast reaches of intergalactic space. The dominant type of deep-sky objects that we see in this area is thus the faint light smudges of far-flung galaxies. Large amateur telescopes can track down hundreds of these within the bounds of the square, but there is one that’s located in this general area that you can see with no optical aid at all. Start your search at the upper left corner of the square at its brightest star, Alpharatz. You should notice a "chain" of stars leading off toward the east. Find the second (and brightest) star in the chain, a golden-hued star called Mirach. Now "hop" up past two faint stars to where you’ll see what appears to be a detached piece of the Milky Way. That smudge of light is the combined light of some 400 billion stars that make up the Great Andromeda Galaxy, Messier 31. At a distance of some 2.5 million light years this is the most distant object you can see with the naked eye. Binoculars will begin to show its lenticular shape, and if the sky is very dark you may notice two smaller satellite galaxies, M32 and NGC 205. As you increase the aperture of the instruments that you train on M31 its structure becomes more evident, but it will stubbornly refuse to resolve into stars. Instead it shows light of a most exquisite character, likened by the 17th Century telescope pioneer Simon Marius as "the light of a candle showing through horn". My favorite feature is the almost star-like nucleus which we now know harbors a massive black hole with a mass of millions of sun-like stars.
Returning to the humble neighborhood of our little solar system we can now enjoy the bright glow of Venus in the southwestern sky during evening twilight and the first hour of dark-sky time. Although she is bright enough to cast shadows in dark locations, this particular apparition won’t allow her to climb high enough in the northern sky to observe this phenomenon. However, you can watch her as she progresses through the last of the summer constellations, drifting eastward toward the "teapot" asterism of Sagittarius.
Jupiter now rises at around 11:00 pm, accompanied by the bright stars of the winter constellations. Early morning skywatchers can follow his progress as he follows Orion into the crisp night air. Thanks to the later shift from Daylight back to Standard Time, which will occur on November 3rd, we can also see him at his best in the pre-dawn hours at around the time many of us wake up for work or school. I have been getting some wonderful views of Old Jove, setting my telescope up before retiring and enjoying my first cup of morning coffee at the eyepiece. As an added bonus, we’ll have the Moon to look at as well this week.
I had my first good look at Mars earlier this week as the red planet has finally cleared the roofline of my house before the onset of bright morning twilight. His disc is still quite tiny in the eyepiece, but a number of features are prominent. Most obvious is the planet’s white north polar ice cap, which should stand out prominently in virtually any telescope’s view. Fortunately, the planet’s disc is beginning to grow as Earth begins to close the distance gap. By the time of Mars’ opposition next spring it will be nearly four times bigger than it is now.
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Have patient sit or lie with head tilted toward the side of the affected eye. Protect patient and bed with a waterproof pad.
Don disposable gloves. Clean lids and lashes with cotton ball moistened with normal saline or solution ordered for irrigation. Wipe from inner canthus to outer canthus. Discard cotton ball or use a different corner of washcloth with each wipe.
Place curved basin at the cheek on the side of affected eye to receive irrigating solution. If patient is sitting up, ask him or her to support basin.
Expose lower conjunctival sac and hold upper lid open with your nondominant hand.
Hold irrigator about 2.5 cm (1 inch) from eye. Direct flow of solution from the inner to the outer canthus along the conjunctival sac.
Irrigate until solution is clear or all solution has been used. Use only sufficient force to gently remove secretions from conjunctiva. Avoid touching any part of eye with irrigating tip.
Have patient close eye periodically during skill.
After irrigation, dry area with cotton balls or gauze sponge. Offer towel to patient if face and neck are wet.
Remove gloves and perform hand hygiene.
Chart irrigation, appearance of eye, drainage, and patient’s response.
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Don’t miss out. Stay Informed. Get EcoWatch’s Top News of the Day.
It is no secret that in the war against meat pathogens in commercial U.S. meat production, the pathogens are winning. The logical result of the tons of antibiotics Big Meat gives livestock (not because they are sick, but to fatten them up) is clear: antibiotics that no longer work against antibiotic-resistant diseases like staph (MRSA), enterococci (VRE) and C.difficile. Antibiotic-resistant infections, once limited to hospitals and nursing homes, can now be acquired in the community, Florida public beaches and on the highway behind a poultry truck.
Big Meat has found some novel ways to retard the growth of salmonella, E.coli and listeria on commercially grown meat, but it does not necessarily want people to know about them and these substances are conspicuously absent from labels.
1. Chlorine Baths
If you want to know the most problematic ingredients in our food supply, just look at the items the European Union boycotts, starting with genetically modified organisms (GMOs), hormone beef and chicken dipped in chlorine baths. U.S. Big Food lobbyists are pushing hard to circumvent the European bans, says MintPress News, especially “bleached chicken.” They claim the “many unwarranted non-tariff trade barriers … severely limit or prohibit the export of certain U.S. agricultural products to the EU.”
That’s the idea. In fact, the EU has not accepted U.S. poultry since 1997.
Why do U.S. poultry processors use chlorine? It “kills bacteria, controls slime and algae, increases product shelf life [and] eliminates costly hand-cleaning labor and materials” in addition to disinfecting “wash down” and “chilling” water. “Pinners” in the slaughter facility who remove the birds’ feathers by hand wash their hands with chlorinated water to “reduce odors and bacterial count” after which the birds are sprayed to “wash all foreign material from the carcass.” Meat is similarly disinfected with chlorine, says one industrial paper, especially because conveyer belts are “ideal breeding grounds for bacteria.”
In a 2014 directive, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) admits the many uses of chlorine in poultry and meat production, none of which are required to be on the label under the “accepted conditions of use” (which limit the parts per million of chlorine allowed). And it gets worse. The FSIS directive also reveals that chlorine gas is used on beef “primals,” giblets and “salvage parts” and for “reprocessing contaminated poultry carcasses.” Bon appétit.
It has only been two years since the nation’s stomach churned when it saw photos of “pink slime” oozing out of processing tubes and bound for U.S. dinner tables and the National School Lunch Program. Looking like human intestines, “lean, finely textured beef” (LFTB) was made from unwanted beef “trim” and treated with puffs of ammonia gas to retard the growth of E. coli. While the company making most of the nation’s LFTB, Beef Products Inc. (BPI) shuttered three plants and laid off hundreds of employees two years ago, it is since fighting back and has brought a lawsuit against ABC news.
The suit alleges “that ABC launched a disinformation campaign that had an adverse effect on BPI’s reputation, and used the term ‘pink slime’ to describe the company’s LFTB even after it had been provided factual information about the product,” reports Beef magazine. And, indeed, a quick look at FSIS’s 2014 directive, whose purpose is to provide an “up-to-date list of substances that may be used in the production of meat, poultry and egg products,” shows that “lean, finely textured beef” is alive and well. “Lean finely textured beef,” says the FSIS, is treated with anhydrous ammonia, “chilled to 28 degrees Fahrenheit and mechanically ‘stressed.'” Ground beef is also treated with anhydrous ammonia “followed with carbon dioxide treatment.” Neither treatment appears on the meat label.
In November, Ag giant Cargill announced it is bringing back pink slime, with two changes—instead of ammonia, E.coli will be killed with citric acid and the meat will be identified as “Finely Textured Beef” on its label.
3. Carbon Monoxide
Eight years ago there was an uproar about Big Meat using gases like carbon monoxide to color meat an unnatural red even as it was aging on the shelf. The brown color meat assumes after a few hours is as harmless as a sliced apple turning brown, says the American Meat Institute. But like mercury in tuna or ractopamine in beef, pork and turkey, Big Food didn’t blink or make any changes because it knew the contretemps would blow over—and it did. Thank you for your short memory, John Q. Public. “Modified atmosphere packaging” of meat, using assorted gases, is still a mainstay of meat production and “safe and suitable” in meat production, according to the FSIS report.
According to the FSIS directive, carbon monoxide is used as a “part of Cargill’s modified atmosphere packaging system introduced directly into the bulk or master container used for bulk transportation of fresh meat products. Meat products are subsequently repackaged in packages not containing a carbon monoxide modified atmosphere prior to retail sale.” Carbon monoxide is also used to “maintain wholesomeness” in packaging Cargill’s “fresh cuts of case-ready muscle meat and ground meat,” says the FSIS directive.
Why is Cargill’s name actually written into government directives? Maybe because it’s one of the world’s biggest Ag players according to Rain Forest Action. With annual revenues bigger than the GDP of 70 percent of the world’s countries, Cargill is the world’s largest privately held corporation, says Rain Forest Action. It operates in more than 66 countries and is one of a “very small handful of agribusiness giants that collectively are shaping the increasingly globalized food system to their advantage.”
4. Other “Safe and Suitable” Ingredients You Don’t Know You’re Eating
Unless you’re a chemist, you may not recognize some of the other ingredients in the 2014 FSIS directive, but that doesn’t mean you want to ingest them. Take “cetylpyridinium with propylene glycol for bacterial control.” While cetylpyridinium is a germ-killing compound found in mouthwashes, toothpastes and nasal sprays, in meat production it is combined with propylene glycol to “treat the surface of raw poultry carcasses or parts (skin-on or skinless).” Yum.
How about, “aqueous solution of sodium octanoate, potassium octanoate or octanoic acid and either glycerin and/or propylene glycol and/or a Polysorbate surface active agent,” also to kill germs?
And, does anyone want to eat “hen, cock, mature turkey, mature duck, mature goose and mature guinea” into whose raw meat and tissue has been injected protease produced from the mold Aspergillus for tenderness?
Another unrecognizable chemical is sodium tripolyphosphate, used as an “anti-coagulant for use in recovered livestock blood which is subsequently used in food products,” says FSIS. According to Food & Water Watch, seafood like scallops, shrimp, hake, sole or imitation crab meat may be soaked in sodium tripolyphosphate to make it appear firmer, smoother and glossier. Sodium tripolyphosphate, “a suspected neurotoxin, as well as a registered pesticide and known air contaminant in the state of California,” says Food & Water Watch, also can make seafood weigh more. To avoid sodium tripolyphosphate, buy fish labeled as “dry,” says Food & Water Watch, and avoid seafood marked as “wet.” We have not found advice on how to avoid the chemical in meat.
An under-reported way in which Big Food is seeking to kill meat pathogens, especially antibiotic-resistant pathogens, is with bacteriophages. Phages are viruses that infect and kill bacteria, essentially turning the bacteria cell into a phage production factory until the bacteria cell bursts, releasing hundreds of copies of new phages, which go on to infect and kill more bacteria. Phages, discovered in 1919, were used to treat bacterial infections but fell out of favor when antibiotics became widely available in the 1940s. Antibiotics had the advantage of attacking more than one bacterium at the same time and were not usually recognized by a patient’s immune system, so they could be used over and over in the same person to fight bacterial infection without producing any immune response.
In 2008, OmniLytics, Inc. announced FSIS approval (issuance of a no-objection letter) for a bacteriophage treatment for poultry it developed in conjunction with Elanco, the animal division of Eli Lilly, to reduce salmonella. Other, similar products soon surfaced for meat production. At least nine bacteriophage uses are listed in the FSIS 2014 directive, mostly sprayed on the hides or feathers of live animals to reduce bacterial count before slaughter. While phages are certainly “greener” than antibiotics, there are two reasons many food activists do not laud the development. Bacteriophages accommodate rather than reform the high-volume, low-ethics factory farming and do not clean up drug excesses. The other reason is phages could become yet another tool of factory farming. Cattle and other livestock operators could use phages to make animals gain weight without risking antibiotic resistance, observed a recent documentary.
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The adverb belongs to a large class of words that add information by qualifying or modifying a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a preposition, or a clause, indeed anything except nouns and pronouns (which are modified by adjectives). Confused? Don't be! After we provide some examples of adverbs, you will have a much better understanding of this mystifying modifier.Read Article
Adjectives or Adverbs?
Tips for telling adjectives and adverbs apart
Are you constantly confusing adverbs and adjectives? Well, we're here to cure your confusion for good. Think of adjectives and adverbs as answers to a question. Adjectives generally answer one of three questions about a noun: which one, how many, or what kind? Adverbs, on the other hand, tell us where, why, when, or how something happened.
Two key points to remember
1. Adjectives describe nouns and pronouns
Example: Your hat is old.
(The underlined word hat is a noun. The italicized word old is the adjective that describes the hat.)
Example: It is old.
(If we replace the hat from the previous sentence with it, this time the adjective old is describing a pronoun.)
2. Adverbs describe verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs
Example: He slowly walked to the store.
(The underlined word is walked, and it is a verb. The italicized word is slowly, and it is the adverb that describes how he walked.)
Example: Jenny is clearly annoyed.
(The underlined word annoyed is an adjective because it describes Jenny. The italicized word clearly is an adverb describing annoyed. By this, we mean the adverb clearly describes to what degree Jenny is annoyed.)
Example: He walked very slowly.
(In this case, we know slowly is an adverb because it describes how he walked. However, very is also an adverb, and it modifies or describes how slowly he walked.)
How can I identify adjectives and adverbs?
The above explanations are all well and good, but you might be wondering how you can identify adjectives and adverbs just by looking at a sentence. We've established some basic rules:
1. Adjectives, although much simpler to use than adverbs, don’t give off any tell-tale hints that they are indeed, adjectives. The best way to find an adjective is to look for the nouns (people, places, things, or ideas) or pronouns (words that replace nouns) within a sentence and then decide if there are any words that describe the nouns or pronouns. Here’s an example with the nouns italicized:
Your dog ate my baseball hat.
At first glance, you might be tempted to say baseball is a noun, but upon closer inspection, we see that, in this case, the word baseball actually describes the noun hat. Therefore, baseball is an adjective in this sentence.
2. Many adverbs end with the suffix –ly. Searching for words that end in –ly is a good way to find adverbs. Here’s an example:
If you’ll kindly give me my ticket, I’ll be on my way.
You can probably see that the only word ending in –ly is the word kindly. Upon closer inspection, you should realize kindly is describing the verb give, which means kindly is indeed an adverb.
Some words have the same form whether they are used as adjectives or adverbs. Here are some examples:
(Adjective) — That is a fast speedboat.
(Adverb) — He stood up so fast he knocked his chair over.
(Adjective) — The ground was hard.
(Adverb) — They all worked hard to meet the project deadline.
In addition, please note that all adverbs do not end in –ly. Here’s a short list of adverbs that don’t end in –ly:
afterwards, almost, always, even, far, fast, less, more, never, not, often, too, very, and well.
If you're still not completely sure you know the difference between adjectives and adverbs, or if you’d like to learn more about adjectives and adverbs, check out GrammarCamp.com, the trusted online grammar course.
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In this experiment, a double-slit optical system was used to test the possible role of consciousness in the collapse of the quantum wave-function. The ratio of the interference pattern’s double slit spectral power to its single slit spectral power was predicted to decrease when attention was focused toward the double slit as compared to away from it. The study found that factors associated with consciousness significantly correlated in predicted ways with perturbations in the double slit interference pattern.
“Observation not only disturbs what has to be measured, they produce it. We compel the electron to assume a definite position. We ourselves produce the results of the measurement.” (1)
In the first experiment, participants were instructed to direct their attention toward the double-slit apparatus or to withdraw their attention-toward a task. At certain times, a computerized voice instructed them saying: “Please influence the beam now,” and for attention away it said “You may now relax.” This first experiment was modestly in accordance with the consciousness collapse hypothesis (perturbations in the double slit interference pattern).
“For audio feedback, during attention-away periods the computer played a soft, continuous drone tone, and during attention-toward periods it played a musical note that changed in pitch to reflect the real-time value of R (perturbations in wave function). Participants were instructed to direct their attention toward the double-slit device as in the initial experiment. If they were successful, then the double slit spectral power was predicted to decline, and in turn the pitch of the musical note would also decline.”
A third experiment was then conducted, using 33 sessions where six meditators contributed to 22 sessions and seven non-meditators contributed to 11 sessions. The 22 meditator sessions resulted in “a significant decline” in the ration of the interference pattern. The meditators here had “an especially strong statistical effect.” This experiment clearly supported the hypothesis.
In the fourth experiment, thirty one people contributed 51 sessions, and the experimental effect size observed in this study was 3 times greater than that observed in the first four experiments.
“The study found that factors associated with consciousness significantly correlated in predicted ways with perturbations in the double slit interference pattern.”
This does not mean human consciousness literally "creates" reality,
Since many people including me have experience of the opposite your view will never be interesting to us since we have so much proof it is a lie (I am doing Reiki on myself and my family so I know materialism as it is described is not the whole truth of "what is"). What humanity is doing now is quantifying the experience so we get formulas on how it is done that afterwards can be used by all as proof of what we are saying that can be replicated by everyone. - See more at: www.abovetopsecret.com...
The debate is going to continue ad nauseam until the collective mass becomes big enough to change the paradigm. If you want proof of something test a tool (for instance Reiki/meditation/astral projection) for yourself and see what happens like a seeker/scientist who questions everything would do. - See more at: www.abovetopsecret.com...
originally posted by: Kashai
a reply to: sled735
I do believe this is the correct link with respect to IONS...
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Literature and Writing Quotes
How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph). Within each chapter you will find unnumbered sections. These sections are separated by asterisks; in our citations, we’ve numbered these sections for simplicity’s sake.
What are you laughing at? asked Stephen.
You, said Heron. Byron the greatest poet! He's only a poet for uneducated people.
He must be a fine poet! said Boland.
You may keep your mouth shut, said Stephen, turning on him boldly. All you know about poetry is what you wrote up on the slates in the yard and were going to be sent to the loft for. (2.3.32)
Nash pinioned his arms behind while Boland seized a long cabbage stump which was lying in the gutter. Struggling and kicking under the cuts of the cane and the blows of the knotty stump Stephen was borne back against a barbed wire fence.
Admit that Byron was no good.
At last after a fury of plunges he wrenched himself free. His tormentors set off towards Jones's Road, laughing and jeering at him, while he, half blinded with tears, stumbled on, clenching his fists madly and sobbing. (2.3.36)
This is a very notable moment – it’s the first time we see Stephen stand up for himself, despite the threat (and eventual reality) of physical violence. Of course, the reason for his rebellion is poetry.
The rain-laden trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann […] he foreknew that as he passed the sloblands of Fairview he would think of the cloistral silver-veined prose of Newman; that as he walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of the provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti and smile; that as he went by Baird's stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty; and that passing a grimy marine dealer's shop beyond the Liffey he would repeat the song by Ben Jonson… (5.1.10)
Amidst the squalor of Stephen’s home and his city, he takes refuge in the literature he loves. This reminds us of his thoughts in the first chapter, when he took his mind off the unpleasantness of Clongowes by focusing on the words he enjoys in his textbooks.
The pages of his time-worn Horace never felt cold to the touch even when his own fingers were cold; they were human pages […] even for so poor a Latinist as he, the dusky verses were as fragrant as though they had lain all those years in myrtle and lavender and vervain… (5.1.18)
This reference to Horace embodies the passion that Stephen feels for great literature. Even ancient works still have human life and warmth, despite their age, proving that art is eternal.
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Q: I teach English at a university in New Jersey. A student of mine insists that the son of a cousin is a cousin too. To me, the son of a cousin is a nephew, since he’s one generation down in the family tree. Could you please shed some light on this word?
A: In modern English, a cousin’s child is referred to as a first cousin once removed or a second cousin. Today such a child wouldn’t be called a niece or nephew.
Although many people refer loosely to a second cousin as simply a “cousin,” the principal meaning of “cousin” is a son or daughter of an aunt or uncle.
Cousinhood in all its ramifications is an interesting subject, though for many of us it doesn’t come up much in conversation except around Thanksgiving.
In medieval times, “cousin” didn’t have the narrow meaning it has now. In olden days, it could mean almost any relative other than a sibling or parent.
The word came into English sometime during the 1200s from the Old French cosin. But its ultimate source is the Latin word consobrinus, which the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology defines as “mother’s sister’s child.”
When “cousin” first showed up in English, the Oxford English Dictionary explains, it was “a collateral relative more distant than a brother or sister.” It could also mean simply “a kinsman or kinswoman, a relative.”
Consequently, the OED adds, in those days “cousin” was “very frequently applied to a nephew or niece.”
Shakespeare, for example, used “cousin” to mean a nephew in Much Ado About Nothing (1600), as when Leonato says to his brother Antonio: “How now brother, where is my cosen your sonne.”
But those uses of “cousin” are now considered obsolete, the OED says. So today, you wouldn’t refer to a niece or nephew as a “cousin.”
We can’t tell you when that old sense of “cousin” died out, but the last citation given in the OED is dated 1747.
Another sense of the word that’s obsolete today was used in legal writing from the 1400s into the 1600s, according to published references in the OED.
In this legal usage, a “cousin” was one’s next of kin, “including direct ancestors and descendants more remote than parents and children,” Oxford says.
Here’s an example the OED gives from an Act of Parliament dated 1503: ““Robert Brews Squyer Cosyn and heire unto Sir Gilbert Debenham … that is to say, sone of Elizabeth Brews Sister to the seid Sir Gilbert.” (So this “cousin” was Sir Gilbert’s next of kin, who happened in this case to be his nephew.)
The principal meaning of “cousin” today—“the son or daughter of (one’s) uncle or aunt”—showed up around 1290, not much later than the obsolete broader meaning, according to the OED.
In this example from a sermon delivered around 1380, the relationship is pretty clear: “Joon Evangelist … Crist was his cosyn, and Cristis modir was his aunte.” (“John the Evangelist … Christ was his cousin, and Christ’s mother was his aunt.”)
Later that kind of cousin was sometimes called a “first cousin.” In the mid-1600s, as the OED explains, people began adding “first,” “second,” and so on to express various degrees of cousinhood.
“Thus,” the dictionary says, “the children of brothers or sisters are first cousins to each other; the children of first cousins are second cousins to each other; and so on. The term second cousin is also loosely applied to the son or daughter of a first cousin, more exactly called a (first) cousin once removed.”
There’s yet another use of “cousin” that has nothing to do with families. As the OED says, “cousin” is sometimes used “as a term of intimacy, friendship, or familiarity.”
For example, it’s not uncommon for young children to fondly call an old friend of the family “Aunt Gracie” or “Uncle Chuck,” even though they’re not related.
The OED gives another example. In the British county of Cornwall, the dictionary says, Cornishmen call one another “cousin Jan” or “cousin Jacky.” The BBC’s website once offered a possible explanation for this Cornish tradition:
“Some say that Cornish miners became known as ‘Cousin Jacks’ because they were always asking for a job for their cousin Jack back at home. Others think it was because the miners used to address each other by the old greeting of ‘cousin,’ and Jack was the most popular Christian name in Cornwall.”
Before ending this, we should note that “nephew” and “niece” have had other meanings in the past, too.
Nowadays, as we’ve written on our blog, “nephews” and “nieces” refer to the sons and daughters of siblings.
But they once were also used for grandsons and granddaughters, male and female descendants, and, euphemistically, illegitimate sons and daughters (especially those of popes and other churchmen who were supposed to be chaste).
Check out our books about the English language
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How to Make White Carbon Paper
I want to do this! What's This?
If you need white carbon paper and find yourself without any, don't panic. With some paper and chalk, you can follow a few simple steps to make your own. In addition to being easy to do, making your own carbon paper also saves money. Children can also perform this task with little effort, and the paper can be used over and over.
Things You'll Need:
* White chalk
* Plain paper
1. Place a piece of plain white paper onto your work surface.
2. Hold the edge of the paper securely with the tips of your fingers so it doesn't slide around.
3. Lay a stick of white chalk on its long side at the top of the paper. Press firmly and pull the chalk across the paper, allowing the chalk to create a film onto the paper.
4. Continue dragging the chalk across the paper until the paper is covered with it. Tip the paper over a trash receptacle and gently tap the edge of the paper to remove any loose chalk.
5. Place the paper back onto the surface and drag the chalk across the chalked surface in the opposite direction so the paper is completely filled. Tap the paper over the trash bin again to remove any loose debris.
6. Transfer your pattern onto a surface by simply laying the chalked side of the paper face down onto the surface and using a pencil to draw the lines. When you lift the paper, the chalk will have made the outlines you need.
Read more: How to Make White Carbon Paper | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_4965262_make-white-carbon-paper.html#ixzz126vOtKPy
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The Common Core State Standards have been adopted in 45 states and have for the first time established clear, consistent and robust standards for student learning. Now, states are implementing and administering assessments aligned to these standards, which will give us a new window into student achievement and college readiness. Results from those assessments are starting to come in, marking an incredibly important moment for school districts – this will establish a new benchmark that more accurately reflects students’ readiness for college and career.
School district leaders and teachers predicted that the transition from the old standards to the new ones might be a little painful at first. But for the first time, we’re being honest about how prepared students are for college and for work. And while this transition may be hard on parents and students, we owe it to them to be honest about the challenges ahead. The long-term benefit of these assessments – which will provide more useful information about how to make sure every student is well-prepared for life after high school – will far outweigh any short-term challenges.
But for the first time, we’re being honest about how prepared students are for college and for work.
Take New York State, for example, where the state just reported the first round of results from new, tests aligned with the Common Core – a major milestone in their admirable efforts to improve achievement and college readiness for all students. At first glance, the scores might look like a drop in proficiency from last year, but those numbers actually reset the baseline to a level that will allow teachers to more accurately measure their student’s learning and college readiness going forward.
These bold and brave steps will cast a more successful future for generations to come. While it will take time, and every state will face its own unique set of challenges, we must stay the course by providing the supports, training and resources teachers need in order to meet the challenging, yet worthwhile demands before them.
It’s heartening to see states taking the tough step of implementing more rigorous assessments tied to the Common Core. It’s even more encouraging to see states embracing the early assessment results for what they are – important new information that’s necessary as we continue to strive to better prepare students for success in life.
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Understanding an EOB and Your Bill
An Explanation of Benefits (EOB) is the document that health insurance companies send to communicate their decisions to members regarding payment for services. Every insurance company EOB is different, and many of them are difficult to understand. An EOB is not a bill, but it usually will have enough information for the member to review what the physician will eventually be billing them. Unfortunately, EOB’s are not standardized and can be very confusing to decipher, but it is usually a matter of semantics. Understanding health insurance language is very helpful in reading the communications between your doctor, your insurance company, and yourself.
In the health insurance world, the doctor or hospital is known as the “provider” because they provide services to you, the “member.” Insurance companies group multitudes of people with identical insurance plans into a “group.” The insurance “benefits” are the services that are payable according to the plan you are signed up with. For instance, some plans have maternity benefits, and others do not.
There are many different versions of an EOB. While the information displayed is usually identical, each payer has the option to convey the information in their own format. The most common format style used is the Standard Paper Remittance format. This format is most commonly used by Medicare. An example of that format is displayed below.
This document is cryptic looking and intimidating on first glance. Be assured that it isn't as complicated as it looks. To make things clearer we are going to examine the most important pieces of the EOB. Let's take a closer look now at each section.
The header of the document contains three items of note. On the top left is the name, address and phone number of the insurance company that the EOB is being sent from. Directly below this is the name and contact information of the provider where medical services were rendered. On the right hand side,
the date and check number are displayed. This information provides important tracking data.
After the header there are one or more sections of very detailed data. An example of one of these sections is displayed below.
Each one of these sections represents a claim. A claim is made of one or more charges which are usually from a similar date range and which represent treatment for one or a few similar medical diagnosis. Depending on the type of medical treatment you are undergoing, the billing for that medical condition might be comprised of many claims over a period of time. When an EOB is sent to a patient it usually only contains a single claim such as in our example. The claim identifies the member, the individual charges and how or if the insurance company paid each charge. Let’s examine the claim in detail.
At the top of the claim the patient or member is identified. The patient name is displayed here. There are several numbers appearing on the EOB which all pertain to the provider and insurance company identification and references. The “HIC” number is the member’s personal identification number that the insurance company uses to identify them. The “ACCT” number is a blend of the patient’s account number from the physician’s records and an assigned number from the insurance company. The internal control number or “ICN” is the number assigned by the insurance company that identifies the claim. The ICN will be asked for anytime you communicate with your insurance company about a processed claim. “ASG” shows a Y or N, indicating whether or not the provider accepted the assignment of the claim, which includes allowed amounts and acceptance of their decisions and any payments. The Medicare outpatient adjudication remarks codes under “MOA” refers to a list that summarizes the decisions made for that particular service. Details about these codes are available at the bottom of the EOB in the glossary.
The most important data for a patient to understand on an EOB is pertaining to the services rendered. The headers for each are at the top of the claim. Both the header and the data have been labeled in these examples.
The “service date” or a range of dates is when the provider claims you received services. In some instances, such as a treatment that requires a great deal of planning, the patient may not necessarily have been present during the rendering of the service, such as in radiation therapy planning. The “POS” or place of service is the code showing where you received services. For example, this EOB indicates the service was provided in an office/outpatient setting, represented by an ‘11’. The term “NOS” is the quantity of times you received each service. This is usually one, but there are times when a procedure is repeated during the same visit. When this occurs, it is billed for the number of times it was rendered. Also, keep in mind that often a service can actually refer to a range of similar treatments. When you visit the doctor, you may receive many different services, such as an office visit and lab work. Each different service is identified by a code and represented by an individual line in the EOB. These codes are referred to as procedure codes and identified in the “PROC” column. These codes are standardized and designed by the American Medical Association. They are used by all physicians to describe the services you received. These numbers have very specific definitions such as “office visit – 30 min. or less” or “Set radiation therapy field.” There may be a modifier labeled as “MODS” . Modifiers are used to describe an additional detail about how the service was performed or how it is being billed. “BILLED” is the doctor’s charge to the insurance company.
If you have received services from a ‘preferred’ or ‘in-network’ provider, that means the doctor has a contract with your insurance company to accept the amount the insurance company is willing to pay for services. The amount the company is willing to pay is known as the “allowed amount”.
In this example, the preferred provider who bills $431.00 for a complex office visit is allowed only $193.15 as a payable amount, and therefore would “write off” the remaining $237.85. This is one of the most complicated issues in medical billing. In order to understand it, you need to realize that the provider almost always bills more than is expected to be paid. So, even though $431.00 was billed, the provider is technically only able to bill $193.15. The difference is written off and neither the insurance company nor the patient is expected to be responsible for this amount. The provider must adjust it off. The write off/adjustment process must take place every time the provider sends a bill out. Patient responsibility such as deductibles and co-insurance are calculated from the allowed amount, not the original charge amount. Often, invoices are sent directly to the patient before this process takes place. When the patient receives the original bill before the write off process, the cost can seem overwhelming. That is why it is important that the patient understands the EOB and waits for the write-off process to occur before paying the bill.
Once the allowed amount is determined, the insurance company applies the insurance policy’s patient responsibilities. Many insurance plans have a “deductible,” or a set amount that the patient is responsible for each year. If your plan has a $200 deductible, then starting January 1st each year, your responsibility of $200 begins again and the insurance company will not pay anything to your physician until you have paid the $200. However, as noted above, the provider’s charges still must be adjusted down based on the policy’s allowed amount. The allowed amount is the only amount the patient can be responsible for. “Coinsurance” is a percentage of the allowed amount. This can be a confusing aspect of a patient’s benefits because the insurance company may have different coinsurance percentages on different types of services. For example, laboratory coinsurance can be 20% while an office visit is only 10%. Because of the allowed amounts, the insurance company has to process the physician “claim” or charges before patients will know the actual amounts they are responsible for. Again, it is easy to be deceived by an initial bill received from a provider which was sent before the write-off or adjustment process took place.
When you see “Disallow” or “RC-AMT” on an EOB, this is the portion of the billed charge that the insurance company will not pay. This is inclusive of the write-off amount based on the allowed amount . This can simply be the write-off as per the contract between the insurance company and the physician, or it can be a full denial of the services being billed. Either way, there will be a “denial code” somewhere on that line being billed. The write off or denial code will be short, such as in this case, CO-45 . This code stands for Contractual Obligations, meaning that this amount was written off, or adjusted based on the contract agreement with the provider.
The next item of interest is the “PROV PD” or more succinctly, the amount the insurance company paid. In this case, the insurance company paid $154.52. Remember this is based on the allowed amount of $193.15. That implies that only $38.63 is outstanding. Notice that the amount $38.63 is referenced next to the title “PT RESP” . This stands for Patient Responsibility or the amount that the patient must pay the provider. If you have secondary insurance, make sure you have given all of your information to your physician, because the next bill to go out will be to that insurance company. Generally, a secondary insurance company will only pay the amount the patient is responsible for. An EOB from a secondary insurance company will show if the patient has any responsibility to the physician.
This summarizes the most important aspects of the claim section of the EOB. The rest of the data fields shown represent the totals of the claim. There are also some fields that allow for when unusual circumstances occur such as interest payments. There is one more important area on the EOB. The “GLOSSARY” reference at the bottom of the EOB will give a short explanation of each code referenced in the EOB.
After the primary insurance and secondary insurance have processed the claims, finally, the physician will send a bill for any leftover patient responsibility to the patient. Some offices collect co-pays at the time of the visit because that amount is always due and can be counted upon as correct. Always read the communications from your insurance company and compare the dates, billed amounts, and patient responsibility amounts to your physician’s invoice.
Again, a patient who has insurance needs to make sure they wait until their insurer has processed the charges before they pay their portion. Patients may receive the initial unprocessed charges that show the provider has billed the insurance, and it may appear that the patient owes the amount being billed. It is important to understand that the provider is charging more than they expect to be paid, and the insurance company will likely reduce that amount again before applying patient responsibility.
Wait for an EOB from your insurance company before paying for services that appear on your physician’s invoice. If you have more than one insurance company, wait for all EOB’s showing each determination. Remember, the “billed amount” minus the “adjustment” or write-off equals “allowed amount.” Patient responsibilities are based on this “allowed amount” and subtracted from it before the physician gets a payment. The physician will bill the amount marked “Patient Responsibility” on the EOB. All this information should be conveyed in the patient bill. Let’s look how this would appear based on the example EOB above.
Here, you can see how it all breaks down. In this example, the initial billed amount is $431.00. Next, $237.85 represents primary payer’s (MEDICARE), disallowed amount, which was adjusted off the account by the provider. The primary payer also made a payment of $154.52. This corresponds exactly to the original EOB we looked at above. Next, it is shown that the secondary payer also made a payment of $28.63. Finally, that all adds up to a remaining patient responsibility of $10.00. This is the amount billed to the patient.
In some cases, physicians will set up a payment plan with their patients in the case of ongoing therapies or lengthy illness. The monthly bill should reflect this agreed upon amount due in a ‘Minimum Amount Due’ category, even if the total balance is larger. This is shown in the example below. You can see that while the current account balance is very large, the minimum payment required reflects the fact this patient is on a $100.00 a month payment plan.
If you ever have questions or suspect any errors in your patient bill, don’t hesitate to ask for assistance. As you can tell, this is a complex process and miscommunication is common. Consider calling both your insurance company and physician to verify that the explanations are in sync. Always take notes, and if possible, retrieve a case number for these calls in case you need to dispute a bill. Communication with all parties is important for your understanding, and if you find a mistake, it is always correctible.
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The DC Office of Human Rights enforces the DC Human Rights Act, which makes discrimination illegal based on 19 protected traits for people that live, visit or work in the District of Columbia. The DC Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodations and educational institutions.
Protected Traits for Housing, Employment, Public Accommodations and Educational Institutions include:
1. Race: classification or association based on a person’s ancestry or ethnicity
2. Color: skin pigmentation or complexion
3. Religion: a belief system which may or may not include spirituality
4. National origin: the country or area where one’s ancestor’s are from
5. Sex: a person’s gender; sex discrimination includes sex harassment, and discrimination based on pregnancy, childbirth, related medical conditions, breastfeeding, and reproductive health decisions.
6. Age: 18 years or older
7. Marital status: married, single, in a domestic partnership, divorced, separated, and widowed
8. Personal appearance: outward appearance, but is subject to business requirements or standards
9. Sexual orientation: homosexuality, heterosexuality, and bisexuality
10. Gender identity or expression: your gender-related identity, behavior, appearance, expression or behavior which is different from what you are assigned at birth
11. Family responsibilities: supporting a person in a dependent relationship, which includes, but is not limited to, your children, grandchildren and parents.
12. Political affiliation: belonging to or supporting a political party
13. Disability: a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities; includes those with HIV/AIDS.
Additional Traits Applicable to Some Areas include:
14. Matriculation (applies to housing, employment and public accommodations): being enrolled in a college, university or some type of secondary school.
15. Familial Status (applies to housing, public accommodations and educational institutions): a parent or guardian with children under 18
16. Genetic information (applies to employment and public accommodations): Your DNA or family history which may provide information as to a person’s predisposition or likely to come down with a disease or illness.
17. Source of Income (applies to housing, public accommodations and educational institutions): origination of a person’s finances
18. Place of Residence or Business (applies to housing and public accommodations): geographical location of home or work
19. Status as a Victim of an Intrafamily Offense (applies to housing): a person who was subjected to domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking
Please note that these definitions are not exhaustive.
This information is also available in PDF format.
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Downtown Sheridan: Sheridan, Wyoming
Some considered pioneer and Civil War veteran John D. Loucks foolish to plat 40 acres in May 1882 for a town in the "Big Goose country" of north central Wyoming. The doubters didn't stop Loucks. With dramatic views of the Big Horn Mountains to the west and south, plentiful wild game in the valley, and fresh water close by, Loucks had no second thoughts.
Two years later the town named in honor of Union Army Gen. Philip Sheridan was incorporated. Today, Loucks's original plat is part of Sheridan's Downtown Historic District and surrounding town additions that APA is designating as one of its 2008 Great Neighborhoods. The neighborhood is noteworthy given its outstanding mountain views, preserved and restored historic downtown, strong identity and sense of place, and engaged community.
Several Victorian homes were built in Sheridan between 1890 and 1913 which have been preserved through the efforts of residents and historic preservation groups. Photo Courtesy of Elizabeth Wood.
The downtown business district and surrounding neighborhood is defined by topography, history, and mixture of Western, Eastern, and other cultural influences. Sheridan's frontier days were short-lived. Within 15 years of Loucks's arrival, a new building boom began in this regional center of commerce and continued through the 1920s. Supported by coal mining, farming, cattle ranching — and a deliberate promotion strategy targeting journalists at major daily newspapers — Sheridan's population reached 8,500 by 1910.
Nearly all of the original houses and false-front buildings along Main Street were replaced with brick, masonry, or iron-facade structures. More than 30 of these buildings remain from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the Sheridan County Courthouse, a part Neo-Classical Revival and part Beaux Arts building designated a national historic landmark in 1982.
The town's original 40 acres quickly grew to include eight more additions. Victorian-styled city residences of the region's more well-to-do cattle ranchers, bankers, and businessman were built here, as well as boarding houses, and later apartments, for residents and workers. The most prominent home was John Kendrick's mansion, completed in 1913. Kendrick was a successful rancher who became a Wyoming governor and U.S. senator. His house, located on a bluff at the Trail End State Historic Site, has a commanding, 180-degree view of Sheridan and the Big Horn Mountains.
Increased attention and legal protections for historic buildings dating from the 1960s and 1970s prompted a number of well-endowed Sheridan residents to buy many of the early 20th century buildings along Main Street, explained Downtown Sheridan Association Executive Director Roger Bent. The buildings were the basis for the Main Street area's designation as a national historic district in 1982, and led the city to adopt design and historic preservation guidelines for Main Street and surrounding residential additions.
Facade renovations along the Sheridan Business District have maintained traditional western culture. Photo Courtesy of Downtown Sheridan Association.
The next step was developing a Downtown Master Plan, a joint effort of the city and Downtown Sheridan Association. Approved in 1992 and most recently revised in 2001, the plan gave the neighborhood a vision and blueprint for managing change.
Major streetscape improvements along Main Street have included burying electric lines, installing period street lamps, pouring new sidewalks, and putting in new water mains and stormwater drains. The street repairs also uncovered remnants of the electric streetcar system operated downtown and elsewhere by the Sheridan Railway Company between 1911 and 1926.
Several of the buildings downtown have been refurbished, such as the iron front of Dan's Western Wear store, or have been adapted for new uses, such as the ornate Romanesque Helvey Hotel and Cady Opera House, which is now occupied by Sanford's Grub Pub and Brewery.
Whitney Commons, a large greenspace adjacent to downtown, incorporates many of the elements of the Downtown Plan. Developed in the last few years by the Whitney Benefits charitable foundation, the commons hosts farmer's markets and incorporates water features and English gardens into a tranquil setting.
The Downtown Plan also suggested capitalizing on Sheridan's well-established appreciation for art. Under the leadership of former Mayor Jim Wilson and current Mayor Dave Kinskey, the city's public arts initiative has blossomed. Thirty pieces have been purchased or donated to the city and are displayed in Grinnell Plaza and elsewhere downtown. Another 27 pieces are on display through loans to the city.
"I have always hoped that ... I could go back home and lend myself wholeheartedly to a scheme of making Sheridan one of the most beautiful and attractive residential towns, not only in the West, but on the face of the earth," Sen. Kendrick wrote in 1919 to a friend while living in Washington, D.C. He didn't have that opportunity, but the community leaders and residents living here have, and they are delivering on Kendrick's dream.
Community events such as this old car festival attract residents and visitors alike. Photo Courtesy of Downtown Sheridan Association.
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Definition of Cube
A Cube is a three-dimensional figure with six square faces.
Video Examples: Cube
Example of Cube
A dice is in the form of a cube.
Solved Example on Cube
Ques: Find the total surface area of a cube of side 2 cm.
Choices:A. 24 square centimeters
B. 12 square centimeters
C. 10 square centimeters
D. 2 square centimeters
Correct Answer: A
Step 1: The total surface area of a cube of side length s = 6 × s × s.
Step 2: The total surface area of the cube with side length 2 cm = 6 × 2 × 2 = 24 square centimeters.
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The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory flew over Hurricane Arthur five times between July 1 and July 5, 2014. Arthur is the first tropical cyclone of the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season.
GPM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The Core Observatory was launched Feb. 27 from Japan and began its prime mission on May 29, just in time for the hurricane season.
The five GPM passes over Arthur are the first time a precipitation-measuring satellite has been able to follow a hurricane through its full life cycle with high-resolution measurements of rain and ice. In the July 3 image, Arthur was just off the coast of South Carolina. GPM data showed that the hurricane was asymmetrical, with spiral arms, called rain bands, on the eastern side of the storm but not on the western side.
Arthur was born as the first 2014 Atlantic tropical depression on June 30. It strengthened into a tropical storm on July 1 and reached maximum intensity as a Category 2 hurricane on July 4. The storm moved up the U.S. East Coast and made landfall on July 3 at 11:15 p.m. EDT over the Shackleford Banks between Cape Lookout and Beaufort, North Carolina, before swinging northeast over the ocean toward Greenland, where it became an extra-tropical storm on July 5.
“With these new observations we are able to see fine scale structures of precipitation to about 1,000 feet vertically and 3 miles horizontally. This allows us to measure precipitation regionally and to improve weather forecasting models,” said Gail Skofronick-Jackson, GPM project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland.
The GPM Core Observatory’s observations of storms like Arthur will also help scientists decipher some of the thorniest questions about hurricanes, such as how and why they intensify. Hurricane intensity is one of the most difficult aspects to predict and is an area of active research that GPM's observations will contribute to, said NASA Goddard hurricane researcher Scott Braun.
The spacecraft carries two instruments that show the location and intensity of the rain, which defines a crucial part of the storm structure. The GPM Microwave Imager sees through the tops of clouds to observe how much and where precipitation occurs, and the Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar observes precise details of precipitation in three dimensions.
With the added capability and higher resolution on the new instruments, "hurricane features pop out more. They're sharper, there's more clarity to the structures," said Braun. "Being able to see the structures more clearly may allow for better determination of the structure of the eye wall and rainbands, thereby providing clues about the likelihood of a storm intensifying or weakening.”
For forecasters, GPM's radiometer and radar data are part of the toolbox of satellite data that they use to monitor tropical cyclones and hurricanes. This toolbox includes data from other low Earth orbit and geostationary satellites.
"The whole idea here is to use these tools to understand the initial genesis of the tropical cyclone, then to monitor its location, eye structure and intensity as it evolves, and to use that along with our numerical model forecast to generate a five- to seven-day forecast every six hours," said Jeff Hawkins, head of the Satellite Meteorological Applications Section for the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California. His group is an early adopter of GPM data and monitors near-real time tropical cyclones worldwide. They distribute satellite products generated from multiple satellites' data to operational and research users, including the Navy and Air Force's Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Hawaii and the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Florida.
The addition of GPM data to the current suite of satellite data is timely. Its predecessor precipitation satellite, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, is in the17th year of its operation. GPM's new high-resolution microwave imager data and the unique radar data ensure that forecasters and modelers won't have a gap in coverage.
All GPM data products will be released to the public by Sept. 2, 2014. Current and future data sets are available to registered users from NASA Goddard's Precipitation Processing Center website at: http://pps.gsfc.nasa.gov/
GPM Mission - http://www.nasa.gov/gpm
Hurricane Arthur Updates - http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/arthur-atlantic/
Naval Research Laboratory Tropical Cyclones Page: http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/TC.html
SVS link to the animation - http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?4186
Rob Gutro | Eurek Alert!
Crucial peatlands carbon-sink vulnerable to rising sea levels
29.06.2016 | University of Exeter
ChemCam findings hint at oxygen-rich past on Mars
28.06.2016 | DOE/Los Alamos National Laboratory
3D printing revolutionized the manufacturing of complex shapes in the last few years. Using additive depositing of materials, where individual dots or lines...
R2D2, a joint project to analyze and development high-TRL processes and technologies for manufacture of flexible organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has been successfully completed.
In contrast to point light sources like LEDs made of inorganic semiconductor crystals, organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are light-emitting surfaces. Their...
High resolution rotational spectroscopy reveals an unprecedented number of conformations of an odorant molecule – a new world record!
In a recent publication in the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter...
Strands of cow cartilage substitute for ink in a 3D bioprinting process that may one day create cartilage patches for worn out joints, according to a team of engineers. "Our goal is to create tissue that can be used to replace large amounts of worn out tissue or design patches," said Ibrahim T. Ozbolat, associate professor of engineering science and mechanics. "Those who have osteoarthritis in their joints suffer a lot. We need a new alternative treatment for this."
Cartilage is a good tissue to target for scale-up bioprinting because it is made up of only one cell type and has no blood vessels within the tissue. It is...
Physicists in Innsbruck have realized the first quantum simulation of lattice gauge theories, building a bridge between high-energy theory and atomic physics. In the journal Nature, Rainer Blatt‘s and Peter Zoller’s research teams describe how they simulated the creation of elementary particle pairs out of the vacuum by using a quantum computer.
Elementary particles are the fundamental buildings blocks of matter, and their properties are described by the Standard Model of particle physics. The...
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Within the field of holistic health and nutrition there is a great deal of controversy about food combining. Even among the population at large there is growing concern about diet, and confusion over the large number of conflicting theories on the subject.
Ayurveda, an ancient holistic science of healing, offers a logical and scientific approach for determining correct diet based upon an individual's constitution. Vata, pitta and kapha; the tri-dosha, are the elements which comprise individual constitution. This approach is quite different from the "traditional" view of a balanced diet; viz., eating daily from the basic food groups; meat, dairy, fruit, grains and vegetables. According to Ayurvedic literature, such a scheme is insufficient to lead us to the path of good health.
In the Ayurvedic literature there are five types of nutritional disorders:
1. Quantitative dietary deficiency. This includes under-nutrition due to insufficient food, and even starvation.
2. Qualitative dietary deficiency. This includes wrong food combination which results in malnutrition, toxic condition and lack of essential nutrients.
3. Qualitative and quantitative over-nutrition. This includes emotional overeating which can result in obesity and/or high cholesterol which can lead to hypertension, heart attacks or paralysis.
4. Toxins in food. Certain foods and food combinations lead to toxemia and to certain digestive disorders.
5. Foods not suitable to one's constitution may affect natural resistance and cause disease.
These five factors are closely connected to the strength of agni (the gastric fire). There are four types of agni:
1. VISHAMA AGNI. Due to vata dosha the gastric fire becomes vitiated, causing irregular appetite, indigestion and gases. Emotionally this can result in anxiety, insecurity, fear, and neurological or mental problems.
2. TIKSHNA AGNI. Pitta dosha is responsible for this type of agni disorder. It may cause hyper-metabolism, hyperacidity, heartburn and hypoglycemia leading to inflammatory diseases.
3. MANDA AGNI. This is due to an excess kapha condition, leading to slow metabolism, overweight, allergies and congestive diseases.
4. SAMA AGNI. This type of agni is the result of balanced tri-dosha. A person having this type of agni can eat almost any type of food without difficulty. Digestion, absorption and elimination are all normal.
The nutritionist should give consideration to these types of agni when making suggestions concerning diet.
According to Ayurveda, every food has its own taste (rasa), a heating or cooling energy (virya) and post-digestive effect (vipak). When two or three different food substances of different taste, energy and post-digestive effect are combined together agni can become overloaded inhibiting the enzyme system and resulting in production of toxins in the system. While it is true that an individual's agni largely determines how well or poorly food is digested, food combinations are also of great importance. When foods, (proteins, carbohydrates and fats) having different attributes, tastes, heating or cooling properties, and post-digestive effects are eaten together, agni will be slowed down. The foods can then remain in the stomach for seven to eight hours. These same foods, if eaten separately might well stimulate agni, be digested more quickly and even help to burn ama. Thus, according to Ayurveda, one should eat according to one's constitution and take fruits, starches, proteins and fats separately at different times of the day. Combining foods improperly can produce indigestion, fermentation, putrefaction and gas formation. This condition, if prolonged, can lead to toxemia and disease complex. For example, eating bananas with milk can diminish agni, change the intestinal flora producing toxins and may cause sinus congestion, cold, cough and allergies.
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One of the tenets of capitalism is that a free market fails from time to time. The market should be able to correct itself by ridding itself of the poorly performing businesses and investments that dragged it down. But the United States has a long shown a lack of faith in the free market's natural correction mechanism.
In times of financial crisis, the United States has customarily turned to capitalism's antithesis -- socialism -- to artificially correct the markets. The very existence of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alone indicates the U.S. economy isn't a free market. For the first 116 years after it was established in 1817, the New York Stock Exchange operated without government regulation. Following the crash on Oct. 24, 1929, the federal government held hearings that revealed the types of fraud corporations used to mislead and swindle investors. These hearings led to unprecedented government oversight of the stock market. For one, corporations now had to file earnings reports with the newly formed SEC, which had the ability to audit these companies [source: Berenson].
But the SEC's formation in 1934 was hardly the U.S. government's first foray into business. By the end of the 19th century, the government concluded that major corporations such as Standard Oil, Carnegie Steel and Union Pacific Railroad had grown too powerful. As a result, a spate of laws and bureaucracies were created to offset this power. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 outlawed monopolies. The Food and Drug Administration was created in 1904 and vested with litigation of companies that broke new purity laws. The Federal Trade Commission was created in 1914 to regulate competition among American companies. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 established a national minimum wage for workers (25 cents an hour) [source: Dept. of Labor]. Under a pure capitalist system, none of these laws or entities should exist.
Essentially, each act limited markets by granting the federal government the power to regulate business. As a result, the United States no longer has a free market system. Instead, the United States now has a managed economy -- by definition, a nonmarket economy since it doesn't exist solely on supply and demand [source: Merriam-Webster].
These government regulations are constant -- even in periods of calm and prosperity. But they tend to emerge during times of crisis; the market crisis of 2008 is a good example of a managed economy in action. In addition to the interventions already mentioned -- like the takeover of Mae and Mac and the buy-in of AIG -- the U.S. government also called for further steps to artificially correct the market. In September, a $700 billion bailout was proposed. In the wording of the plan, the government would take unprecedented control of the market. Not only would it intervene by purchasing businesses, it would also temporarily nationalize some of them and control how they're governed. One provision stipulates how much compensation these companies can offer their executives after the government purchases their bad debt [source: U.S. House].
Whether it's favorable that the United States has a managed economy instead of a free or socialized one is purely academic. It would literally take a revolution to steer a government toward either pole of the economic spectrum. Unlike corporations, governments can exercise their will virtually unfettered. If a government decides to intervene in a market, there's little anyone -- capitalist or socialist -- can do.
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| 0.968475 | 688 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Over the past several years, wind energy has been one of the fastest growing sources of new electricity generation in the United States, accounting for over 40% of all new generation capacity in recent years. Wind energy has proven to be a reliable, cost effective, and completely non-polluting source of electricity.
There are tens of thousands of experts working in the field of wind energy. A few of the most relevant sources for education and information are below:
The American Wind Energy Association, the largest US wind energy trade group
National Geographic has an excellent demonstration of wind power:
The Union of Concerned Scientists offers information about the basics of wind power and how it is generated, with emphasis on its environmental impacts. The Union also provides an overview of energy policy and different energy sources, including information on the need to shift to clean, renewable sources.
The U.S. Department of Energy and National Renewable Energy Laboratory are excellent sources of impartial wind power information.
There have been a number of misrepresentations about wind energy popularized by a small but vocal group of clean energy opponents. As informed citizens, it is important for everyone to learn about the truth behind some of these rumors.
Finally, here is a map showing that Maine has by far the largest potential for wind energy generation of any state in New England.
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| 0.947267 | 267 | 3.203125 | 3 |
For the Media
American educators comb the data from school systems in other countries for clues to what might work closer to home.
Concern over U.S. students' middling test scores vies with caution about cultural and other factors that shape school improvement.
Why is it important to study schools from other countries? Watch and listen to Education Week's reporters who studied the issue at large for Quality Counts.
Prestige and respect, not just salary, prove crucial in assuring a truly professional teacher workforce.
The right mix of content instruction and pedagogy is seen as crucial in preparing prospective teachers.
Assessment looms large even beyond the U.S., while other accountability measures also flourish.
Other nations' curricula and standards were important in putting crafting the learning goals most states have adopted.
Immigration policies, culture, and other factors complicate efforts to help foreign-born students and those learning a new language.
American policymakers examine how other nations invest in getting students ready for life after high school.
Community-based services are a priority in a system that funnels provincial aid to local schools.
Comparing Finland and Minnesota may prove instructive, experts say-but there's more to it than just scores.
Although praised for its students' education achievement, South Korea needs to boost the creative dimension of learning, Byong-man Ahn writes.
Michael Barber explains the critical lessons he learned while leading the implementation of school reforms in Tony Blair's administration.
Many of the ideas behind Finland's internationally recognized education system were born abroad, writes Pasi Sahlberg.
The federal government should play a discrete and powerful role in education accountability, writes former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.
State of the States
's annual survey finds that despite continued economic pressure, the U.S. and its states made incremental gains on key indicators. Still, challenges remain.
Includes tables with updated scores and letter grades on:
• Chance for Success
• K-12 Achievement
• Standards, Assessments, and Accountability
• Teaching Profession
• School Finance
This interactive map offers a quick way to examine state-by-state grades and summary data.
Your turn. Manipulate grades for states based on weighting schemes of your choice.
Looking for detailed state data? The State Highlights Reports assemble findings on each of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia and compare individual state data to national data.
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Hazardous waste presents immediate or long-term risks to
humans, animals, plants, or the environment. It requires
special handling for detoxification or safe disposal. In
the U.S., hazardous waste is legally defined as any discarded
solid or liquid that
- contains one or more of 39 carcinogenic, mutagenic,
or teratogenic compounds at levels that exceed established
limits (includingmany solvents, pesticides, and paint
- catches fire easily (such as gasoline, paints, and solvents);
- is reactive or unstable enough to explode or release
toxic fumes (including acids, bases, ammonia, and chlorine
- is capable of corroding metal containers such as tanks,
drums, and barrels (such as industrial cleaning agents
and oven and drain cleaners).
The EPA has a list of more than 500 specific hazardous wastes.
Businesses such as metal finishers, gas stations, auto repair
shops, dry cleaners, and photo developers produce many toxic
waste products. These by-products include sulfuric acid,
heavy metals found in batteries, and silver-bearing waste,
which comes from photo finishers, printers, hospitals, schools,
dentists, doctors, and veterinarians. Heavy metals, solvents,
and contaminated wastewater result from paint manufacturing.
Photo processing also creates organic chemicals, chromium
compounds, phosphates, and ammonium compounds. Even cyanide
can be a by-product, resulting from electroplating and other
If you think industry is the only source of hazardous
waste, you may be surprised. There is hazardous household
waste as well. For example, do you use any of the following
automotive products, such as gasoline, antifreeze,
oil-based paints and thinners
pesticides, herbicides, and other garden products
household cleaning products
* There are nontoxic alternatives to many of these products
that, when disposed of, do not constitute hazardous waste.
Check with a local "green consumer" organization or find
out more in the related resources section of this exhibit.
about Possible Solutions]
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Manuscript volume, 1925-1942, of the James Island Ginning Company (Charleston County, S.C.) constitutes a record of stockholders meetings dating from the time of the company’s organizational meeting, 27 June 1925, until its decision on 5 July 1941 to liquidate assets and surrender the company’s charter.
The declaration for charter, 27 June 1925, and charter, 29 June 1925, both of which are tipped into the volume, indicate that the company was established to gin and bail cotton as well as to sell cotton and cotton seed. Directors were F.P. Seabrook, Jr., president, A.L. Welch, vice-president, John Rivers, secretary, W.H. Mikell, and Sandiford Bee.
While the minutes reflect financial difficulties beginning as early as September 1925, by 1928 the company was reporting increased business from areas beyond James Island. At the 9 February 1929 meeting of stockholders it was reported that “with the improvement in roads and the advent of the modern truck our business was gradually extending beyond our immediate territory and we were now drawing cotton from distances which a few years ago would have been impossible. We ginned the past year from territory beyond James Island more than 5 times as much cotton as the year previous and it was felt that when the bridge across the Stono River is completed the increase will still be augmented.”
Beginning in 1931, as the agricultural depression and the declining market price of cotton continued to take their toll, the company began to report increasingly smaller crops and fewer bails ginned. The resulting business proved too small to make any profit. By 1940 the stockholders recognized that “the day of cotton in our territory was over & it was deemed advisable to dispose of our machinery & liquidate our stock but it was felt that inasmuch as a large percentage of those planting cotton were dependent on our gin for ginning their cotton we ought at least to let them know that we intended to dispose of our machinery.” It was determined, therefore, to operate another year before liquidation.
By the time of the 1941 special meeting to advertise the sale of the company’s equipment, the heretofore all male board of directors had been replaced by a female board, undoubtedly an indication of the war’s disruption. Subsequent correspondence inserted in the volume indicates that the machinery was purchased by the Kershaw Oil Mill.
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| 0.978839 | 496 | 2.546875 | 3 |
If we are to believe that there are some things inherent in our nature as humans, perhaps we should include in this list ethnocentricity. Whenever one delves into a study of mythologies, what becomes exasperatingly clear is our proclivity for syncretism. In our attempts to understand the history, customs, and beliefs of cultures foreign to our own, it seems we instinctually grasp for ideas that overlap our own to make an exotic set of values and ritual familiar and thus less threatening and even controllable. This was true just as much in the time of the Celts as now. In his his account of the conquest of Gaul, De bello gallico, Caesar observed the religious activities of the Celts and that they had a goddess very similar to Minerva of Roman mythology.
"They worship as their divinity, Mercury in particular, and have many images of him, and regard him as the inventor of the arts....Next to him they worship Apollo, and Mars, and Jupiter, and Minerva; respecting these deities they have for the most part the same beliefs as other nations"(Caesar,6.17).
This Minerva figure was none other than the triplicate Brigid, or Brigandio as she would have been known to Caesar's Gauls, the daughter of the Dagda, but above all, the most powerful goddess in the Celtic pantheon.
The existence of a Christian saint of the fifth century by the same name creates the temptation to make similar syncretistic judgements within the very culture of the ancient and early Christian Celts. Taken at face value one would be hard put to argue differently, but a closer look at the material evidence shows that the similarities between the goddess Brigid and the Saint point instead at a radically different phenomenon. Rather than mere projection and coincidental concurrence, St. Brigid and the goddess may be one and the same. It is possible that the saint is the goddess transformed, or reinvented in a manner less obscene to the new patriarchal monastic hierarchy. To support this we have the striking continuity of symbolism and the rarity of features that would blatantly distinguish the heroine of the Tuatha du Danann from the Patroness of Ireland.
Tuatha du Danann means "people of the goddess Anu or Danu, it is the name for the Celtic body of gods and goddesses (Smyth, 25). Brigid, or Dea Brigantia as she was known in Britain, is another name for this omnipotent fertility goddess and mother of the gods. The king of this otherworldly genealogy, known as the Dagda was the father of the goddess Brigid. However, ambiguity is probably more common in Celtic mythology than heroes. Brigid was one of many trifold entities within the pantheon, including her own sons and the three war-goddesses known as the Morrigna. Not only did she function as three separate entities as the patroness of smithwork and fire, fertility and poetry, but she appeared in three physical forms as well, as maiden, mother, and crone, the daughter, lover, and wife of the Dagda (Condren, 25). Marked sexual characteristics are the most significant feature of Celtic goddesses, especially Brigid. Boand, another local goddess, but most likely a derivation of Brigid, is a good example of some of the symbols associated with her role as a fertility goddess. This white cow goddess, whose name is given to the Irish River Boyne, was also a lover of the Dagda. Cows are one of the animals most often associated with Brigid along with serpents and vultures. According to legend, the different colors of the cows of Boand each symbolized a different phase of the moon (Smyth, 20). The Triple Spiral often representative of Brigid's trifold nature, is also a metaphor for the phases of the moon. It is possible that she was either a combination of a great number of goddess traits, or that the name Brigid was actually synonymous with the word for goddess.
Just as there are some questions as to the breadth of Brigid and her placement within the genealogy of gods, there is equal if not greater disagreement surrounding the history of the saint. The uncertainty about St. Brigid is in her existence as portrayed in the many versions of her lives. There is very little historical fact in regards to Brigid of Kildare (Farmer, 56). What we do have is a seemingly endless supply of information from hagiographers, the monastic authors of her lives, the earliest of these dating from at least one hundred years after her death. The specifics about her parents as well as the location of her birth vary from source to source but the date seems to be agreed upon as 453 C.E. Her parents' names were Dubthach and Brotseach, although whether or not Brotseach was her birth mother varies from story to story. In some examples, her mother was a slave driven from the house by Brotseach. In others it is Brigid herself who is the slave. The lives are also contradictory about the social status of her parents, some sources say she was of humble birth, others say she had noble blood and even go so far as to list the family names of her parents, her father may even have been a druid (Rolt-Wheeler, 29). Her birthplace is equally elusive, she may have been born in Faughart or even in nearby Kildare.
This could suggest confusion between the birthday of the saint and the saint's feast day, which actually celebrates the death of the saint, her birth only in the sense that she was born into heaven on that day. More likely these conflicts occur because to lay claim to a saint would have beneficial rewards for the town involved. Brigid is usually described as having blonde hair and after becoming a nun at a very young age as wearing a white veil and cloak. She founded a double monastery at Kildare, Ireland, and may have been consecrated as a bishop. She died of old age in the early sixth century and was interred in the church of her own monastic community.
St. Brigid's miracles are limitless but the most famous and those that bear the closest resemblance to the cult of the goddess seem to be divided into two categories, one, those that involve milk and her maternal characteristics, and secondly those that concern fire. Perhaps the most intriguing of these are those where St. Brigid is called the Mary of the Gael or the Second Mary. The name comes from a vision of a bishop named Ibor the night before an assembly addressed by Brigid, the same Bishop may be the very same that inadvertedly made her a Bishop as well. (Peritia, 126). Some of her lives describe her as the sister of Mary, or even the midwife, they go so far as to say she suckled the child (Holt-Wheeler, 43). Time constraints seem to have little bearing on the actions of St. Brigid. Another tells how the Virgin Mary went to the Temple for purification and Brigid walked before her with lighted candles. This festival established by Pope Gelasius, is known as Candlemas and takes place in February, it also called the Feast Day of Bride of the Candles (Holt-Wheeler, 51). Quite typically, it falls on the same day as Imbolc, a pre-existing Pagan celebration. One of the eccentricities of the cult of the saint, particularly relevant in terms of her relationship to the goddess, was a prayer said to the serpent on the same day.
the serpent shall come from the hole,
I will not molest the serpent,
nor will the serpent molest me" (Condren, 58).
Where the goddess differs from the saint, apart from the obvious changes that inevitably fall from the fact that Brigid is human and the goddess is supernatural, is in her sexuality. Although the Celts were never a matriarchal society, women did hold a place in the society uncommon to their classical contemporaries. This claim is supported by mythology as well as by archaeology, although most information probably comes from early documentation from sources such as Diodorus or Caesar. Fertility rites were part of almost all of the major Celtic festivals especially Samhain, Lughnasa, and Imbolc. To insure the prosperity of kingdoms, Celtic myth holds that the king would take part in sacred marriages. The goddess would yearly come to him in her hag form and as a duty to his people, he had to have intercourse with her, she would resume her maiden form after his initial embrace (Condren, 23-24). Sex was not something the Celts shied away from in their literature or in their art. It was only with the advent of Christianity in the fourth or fifth century, the replacement of the Druids with Christian holy men and women, that sex became something to be avoided for sanctity's sake. So why then would a fertility goddess's attributes be found within the trappings of a virgin saint? There are several reasons.
First, we have to reflect on who actually recorded the lives of St. Brigid. The most important of her hagiographers was a monk living at the monastery at Kildare and writing towards the close of the eighth century, nearly two centuries after the supposed death of the saint in date. The other important source for information on St. Brigid is an Irish Franciscan Friar, Father John Colgan, who published a volume at Louvain in 1647 including six lives of the saint (Holt-Wheeler, 29). These two servants of the church represent the recognized sources although many others exist. The most important thing to remember is that these men and the writers of the other lives were hagiographers, and not historians. They were dedicated to making holy biographies to awe and impress the faithful, not true to life recollection of happenstance. To embellish the stories and depict the saints as the flag-bearers of purity and incredulous good deeds, they would often draw from native saga, continental vitae, and anything else handy, including other Irish saint's lives (Bitel, 11). The next question then, is to what degree was the incorporation of Brigidine myth a conscious effort. The other option being that the monks themselves as Irishmen were susceptible to confusion between the newly imported tenets of Christianity and the wealth of oral culture cultivated by thousands of years. Irish monasticism from the earliest developed as an entity quite apart from Rome. Images such as the Sheelagh-na-Gig, found in medieval churches as late as the eleventh century, indicate that the dividing lines remained blurred for years after Christianity's introduction to the Celts.
It seems likely that although both may have played a role, the former is the likelier resolution. If it is true that we have a weakness for syncretism, then what better way to make believers out of a people than to use their own mythology against them. The monks were ruthless in their pursuit and protection of relics, snatching bodies before they were cold, dying for a shard of tooth, so why should we believe that they would abandon this zeal in their missionary efforts? Christian churches were almost always built directly over sites already possessing rich spiritual histories. This is not only true of churches in Ireland but throughout Europe. Possibly the thought was that certain spaces were inherently spiritual centers and because there was only one God they must be sacred to Christians. More likely, however, is that they thought to displace and dominate the local gods by systematically assimilating their sites and festivals. In other words, they would convince the native peoples that their own religion and Christianity were one and the same so that they would listen to their message, and hope that in time paganism would fade into the past. .
Of course there are other issues at hand as well, converting Pagans was not the only goal of abbots, abbesses and their monks and nuns. Hagiography was literature by and for monastics. No doubt another motive for incorporating the goddess stories into the Vitae of St. Brigid was the glorification of the community at Kildare among its peers both in Ireland and in Rome. To be associated with a figure like St. Brigid brought with it increased respect and esteem. Along with Patrick and Columcille, Brigid was one of the three most significant Irish saints. The more outstanding her accomplishments, the better. Even the things we consider fact, that Brigid established a double monastery, were exaggerated by Cogitosus. The great urban center that it became in his own life time was by no means the situation in the fifth century (Farmer, 56-57)
If aligning the saint with the goddess was a conscious effort on the part of the early Christians in Ireland, it was probably a major step in the right direction for their purposes. Although socially the people of Ireland must have been ready to accept the new patriarchal religious order Christianity represented, it was probably not so easy to let go of the spiritual residue of their more female-friendly mythology. As a virginized saint, Brigid could almost hold an equal position among a hierarchy of men. By denouncing earthly marriage, in a sense she forfeited her womanhood and sexuality, but in exchange, she could be the leader of a great monastic center, attend Synods, and even become a bishop, (although this story tends to be downplayed by another that says she was mistakenly consecrated by a bishop inebriated with her glory)( Peritia, 126). The Celtic people could still pay their devotion to a protective mother figure, and yet consider themselves Christians. If we look at the lives of St. Brigid, she is still very much a maternal being, the patron saint of pregnant women. Only now she is not directly involved in the fertility rites, she remains chaste while helping others to conceive.
This is not to say that
the Saint did not exist as a living, breathing, human woman, that she was a
construct of Celtic monasticism and her Vitae. When reading a novel, one of
the first things students are told is to be aware of the many different levels
of consciousness inherent in the process. There is the realm of the reader,
the physical author, the author as narrator, the characters, and so on. The
same kind of multi-layered conundrum is what lends to St. Brigid a degree of
mystery that has absolutely nothing to do with her holy nature. If a woman named
Brigid was born in the fifth century and founded the monastery at Kildare her
life story has not been recorded. Once canonized, the Saint and her unattainable
holy existence obscured the woman. The division is finely demarcated but there
may also be some element of separation between St. Brigid of the Church, the
contemporary of St. Patrick, and St. Brigid of the people, she who is invoked
for the protection of home and harvest. In the end, the only definitive thing
that can be said is that there is indeed continuity between the legendary daughter
of the Dagda and the Mary of the Gael. Nonetheless, it is a metamorphosis of
more than a thousand years, and to come to clear-cut conclusions about when,
how, and why it happened would be presumptuous. What we are left with are many
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Individual differences |
Methods | Statistics | Clinical | Educational | Industrial | Professional items | World psychology |
Biological: Behavioural genetics · Evolutionary psychology · Neuroanatomy · Neurochemistry · Neuroendocrinology · Neuroscience · Psychoneuroimmunology · Physiological Psychology · Psychopharmacology (Index, Outline)
- This article is about the self administration of rewards in animal studies. For its medical sense in humans see: self medication.
In animal experimentation, self-administration is a form of operant conditioning where the reward is a drug. This drug can be administered remotely through an implanted intravenous line or an intracerebroventricular injection. Self-administration of putatively addictive drugs is considered one of the most valid experimental models to investigate drug-seeking and drug-taking behavior. The higher the frequency with which a test animal emits the operant behavior, the more rewarding (and possibly addictive), the test substance is considered. Self-administration of addictive drugs has been studied using humans, non-human primates, mice., and, most commonly, rats.
Self-administration of heroin and cocaine is used to screen drugs for possible effects in reducing drug-taking behavior, especially reinstatement of drug seeking after extinction. Drugs with this effect may be useful for treating people with drug addiction by helping them establish abstinence or reducing their probability or relapsing to drug use after a period of abstinence.
In a prominent model of self-administration developed by George Koob, rats are allowed to self-administer cocaine for either 1 hour each day (short access) or 6 hours each day (long access). Those animals who are allowed to self-administer for 6 hours a day show behavior that is thought to resemble cocaine dependence, such as an escalation of the total dose taken during each session and an increase in the dose taken when cocaine is first made available.
The "self-administration" behavioral paradigm serves as an animal behavioral model of the human pathology of addiction. During the task, animal subjects are operant conditioned to perform one action, typically a lever press, in order to receive a drug. Reinforcement (through the use of the drug) occurs contingent upon the subject performing the desired behavior. Drug dosing in self-administration studies is response-dependent. This is an important element of creating a disease model of drug addiction in humans because response-independent drug administration is associated with increased toxicity and different neurobiological, neurochemical and behavioral effects. In summary, the effects of response-dependent drug dosing greatly differ from response-independent drug dosing and self-administration studies appropriately capture this distinction.
As far back as the mid 20th century, researchers have investigated animals’ drive to consume drugs of abuse in order to better understand human addictive processes. Spragg was one of the first researchers to create a model of chronic morphinism in a chimpanzee to explore the role of operant conditioning in relation to a drug dependency. When deprived of both food and morphine, chimpanzees would repeatedly attempt to seek out the drug of choice, even doing so much as to physically pull the experimenter into the room housing morphine and syringes. Weeks (1962) published an account of the first true use of the intravenous self-administration paradigm in a study aiming to model morphine addiction in unrestrained rats. For the first time, a drug of abuse served as an operant reinforcer and rats self-administered morphine to satiety in stereotyped response patterns.
The scientific community quickly adopted the self-administration paradigm as a behavioral means to examine addictive processes and adapted it to non-human primates. Thompson and Schuster (1964) studied the relative reinforcement properties of morphine in restrained Rhesus monkeys using intravenous self-administration. Significant changes in response to other types of reinforcers (i.e., food, shock avoidance) were observed in drug-dependent subjects. In 1969, Deneau, Yanagita and Seevers provided macaque monkeys free access to a variety of drugs of abuse for investigating whether nonhuman primates would voluntarily initiate self-administration of these substances. Initiation and maintenance of self-administration produced dependence and toxicity in monkeys, thereby more closely approximating important aspects of drug addiction in humans and allowing for the first of modern self-administration studies.
The procedure of testing the efficacy of a pharmacological agent as a reinforcer would soon become a standard assay. Most frequently, studies were performed in nonhuman primates to identify abuse potential, as required by the drug development process. In 1983, Collins et al. published a landmark paper in which rats were exposed to a battery of 27 psychoactive substances. The team compared test drug self-administration rates with saline vehicle self-administration rates. If animals self-administered at a rate significantly greater than vehicle, the drug was considered an active reinforcer with abuse potential. With few exceptions, the abuse liability observed in rats paralleled that observed from previous research in monkeys. In light of these similarities between the different animal models, it was identified that the abuse potential of psychoactive substances could be investigated using rats instead of nonhuman primates.
Operant conditioning represents the behavioral paradigm underlying self-administration studies. Subjects are trained to perform some action, such as a lever press, with the anticipation of receiving a reinforcer, such as food or water (under food- or water- restricted conditions, respectively). The reinforcer functions to increase the future probability of a response. Following this initial training, the reinforcer is replaced by a test drug to be administered by one of the following methods: oral, inhalation, intraperitoneal, intracerebral, intravenous. Intravenous catheterization is used most commonly because it maximizes bioavailability and has rapid onset. Additionally, humans suffering from addiction often resort to intravenous drug use for similar reasons, so this route of administration increases the face validity of the construct.
Upon presentation of the drug to the subject, a number of experimental variables might be manipulated to test hypotheses:
Both humans and animals will adjust the rate and number of drug infusions to maintain stable rewarding blood levels of drugs, like cocaine. A dilute dose of cocaine will be administered intravenously at a faster rate than a concentrated dose of cocaine.
Continuous Reinforcement: A single operant response triggers the dispense of a single dose of reinforcer, though this is true only in theory. A time-out period follows each operant response that successfully yields a dose of reinforcer; during this period, operant responses fail to produce drug administration allowing previous injections to take effect. Moreover, time-outs also help prevent subjects from overdosing during self-administration experiments. Fixed-Ratio studies require a predefined number of operant responses to dispense one unit of reinforcer. Standard Fixed Ratio reinforcement schedules include FR5 and FR10, requiring 5 and 10 operant responses to dispense a unit of reinforcer, respectively. Progressive Ratio reinforcement schedules utilize a multiplicative increase in the number of operant responses required to dispense a unit of reinforcer. For example, successive trials might require 5 operant responses per unit of reward, then 10 responses per unit of reward, then 15, and so on. The number of operant responses required per unit of reinforcer may be altered after each trial, each session, or any other time period as defined by the experimenter. Progressive ratio reinforcement schedules provide information about the extent to which a pharmacological agent reinforces through the breakpoint. The breakpoint is the number of operant responses at which the subject ceases engaging in self-administration, defined by some period of time between operant responses (generally up to an hour). Fixed Interval (FI) schedules require that a set amount of time pass between drug infusions, regardless of the number of times that the desired response is performed. This “refractory” period can prevent the animal from overdosing on a drug. Variable Interval (VI) schedules of reinforcement allow the experimenter to adjust the amount of time that elapses between drug infusions. At this point, this method has only shown to be effective with cocaine.
Secondary Reinforcement Schedules
Second-order reinforcement schedules build on basic reinforcement schedules by introducing a conditioned stimulus that cues the onset of the reinforcer. Second-order schedules are built from two simpler schedules; completion of the first schedule results in the presentation of a conditioned stimulus (such as a colored light), with a fixed-interval schedule following the cue and resulting in the original reinforcer at the end of the fixed interval. Second-order schedules result in a very high rate of operant response following the presentation of the conditioned stimulus, as this cue becomes a reinforcer of its own. Benefits of this schedule include the ability to maintain a high level of responding with relatively few drug infusions, reduced risk of self-administered overdose, and external validity to human populations where environmental context can provide a strong reinforcing effect for drug use.
Extinction and ReinstatementEdit
Extinction involves the discontinuation of a particular reinforcer in response to operant behavior, such as replacing a reinforcing drug infusion with a saline vehicle. When the reinforcing element of the operant paradigm is no longer present, a gradual reduction in operant responses results in eventual cessation or “extinction” of the operant behavior. Reinstatement is the restoration of operant behavior to acquire a reinforcer, often triggered by external events/cues or exposure to the original reniforcer itself. Reinstatement can be broken into a few broad categories:
Drug-induced reinstatement: exposure to a reinforcing drug after extinction of drug-seeking operant behavior can often reinstate drug-seeking, and can even occur when the new drug of exposure is different from the original reinforcer. This is thought to be strongly linked to drug sensitization Cue-induced reinstatement: environmental cues associated with drug administration can trigger drug reinstatement by acting as conditioned stimuli, even during drug abstinence
1. Environmental surroundings as well as drug-associated behavior or actions can function as environmental cues.
2. Stress-induced reinstatement: in many cases, a stressor can reinstate drug-seeking in a drug-abstinent animal. This can include (but is not limited to) acute stressors such as foot-shock or social defeat stress. In many cases, it appears that social stress can potentiate drug reinstatement just as strongly as exposure to the drug itself
Animal self-administration experiments are typically performed in standard operant conditioning chambers adapted for the catheters used to deliver a drug intravenously. The catheter is secured to the animal by a harness or back plate and is tethered to a protective leash that extends upward through a hole in the top of a chamber, where it attaches to a rotating swivel on a mechanical arm that allows the subject to move around freely. The chamber houses two levers: one whose depression results in the delivery of a drug, the other whose depression does nothing. Activity on these levers can be used to measure drug administration (via activity at the drug-inducing lever) as well as changes in nonspecific behavior that reflect short- and long-term effects of the drug (via activity at the non-inducing lever). The sterile intravenous catheter used to deliver the drug into the bloodstream of the subject is typically composed of a flexible plastic, silastic tubing and nylon mesh placed subcutaneously. It is attached to a mechanical pump that can be calibrated to deliver a specific amount of drug upon depression of one of the levers in the chamber. Other chamber modifications are required if the drug is to be delivered orally or via inhalation, such as liquid containers or an aerosol distribution mechanism.
Self-Administration studies have long been considered the “standard” in addiction research using both animal and human models. Conducting self-administration studies in animal models provides a much greater level of experimental flexibility than in humans because investigating the effects of novel pharmacological drug treatments poses significantly fewer ethical and practical barriers. In 1999, Pilla and colleagues published in Nature a study documenting the efficacy of a partial D3-agonist (BP-897) in reducing environmental cue-induced cocaine craving and vulnerability to relapse. An interesting aspect of this study was the use of second-order reinforcement schedules to identify a dissociation in the effects of BP-897 in that the drug inhibits cue-induced cocaine seeking but has no primary reinforcement effect. This latter condition is important for any pharmacological agent to be used in the treatment of addiction—drugs used to treat addiction should be less reinforcing than the drug whose addiction they treat and optimally have no reinforcing effects.
A recent study published in Nature showed an upregulation of microRNA-212 in the dorsal striatum of rats previously exposed to cocaine for extended periods. Animals infected with a viral vector overexpressing miR-212 in the dorsal striatum produced the same initial levels of cocaine intake; however, drug consumption progressively decreased as net cocaine exposure increased. The authors of the study noted that viral-infected animals exhibited decreased operant responding during the post-infusion time-out period and proposed that this demonstrated a reduction in compulsive drug-seeking behavior.(Hollander et al.) miR-212 acts through Raf1 to enhance the CREB response; CREB-TORC is known to negatively regulate the reinforcing effects of cocaine. (Hollander et al.) This study provides one example (miR-212, owing to its amplification of CREB) of a self-administration study that may provide potential therapeutic targets for the treatment of cocaine addiction. One of the most important advances to emerge from self-administration studies comes from a behavioral model for addiction in animals. This model relies on observation of three separate phenomena to classify a rat as “addicted:” 1) Persistence in drug-seeking: Depends on the attempts of rats to obtain drug during time-out or no-periods in the self-administration apparatus. 2) Resistance to punishment: Measured by how much rats maintain rates of self-administration when cocaine infusion is paired with an electric shock. 3) Motivation for the drug: Measured by the breakpoint in progressive ratio reinforcement. (Deroche-Gamonet et al.)
The researchers used an additional test to further support classification of a rat as “addicted” by measuring relapse rates during reinstatement paradigms. Human drug addicts reportedly relapse at a rate of >90% as measured from the initial diagnosis. Rats that responded at high rates after some form of cue-induced reinstatement could be considered likely to relapse.(Deroche-Gamonet et al.) This model provided an important advancement for the method of self-administration because it allows animal models to better approximate the physiological and behavioral aspects of drug addiction in humans.
Self-administration experiments can also be paired with methods such as in vitro electrophysiology or molecular biology to understand the effects of addiction on neural circuitry. Self-administration studies have allowed researchers to locate a staggering number of changes in brain signaling that occur in addiction. One example of such a study involved examining synaptic plasticity in rats undergoing the behavioral shift to addiction. Using the criteria for classifying rats as “addicts” or “non-addicts” as put forth by Deroche-Gamonet et al., it was found that addicted rats display a prolonged and persistent impairment in mGluR2/3-dependent Long-Term Depression. Despite exposure to the same self-administration paradigm, control rats recovered this form of synaptic plasticity. The authors of the study propose an important explanation for their results in that this specific loss of plasticity over an extended period is responsible for the progressive loss of controlled drug use.(Kasanetz et al.) This represents a potential molecular mechanism by which addicts might differ from non-addicts and undergo pathological learning processes during the development of addiction.
Much like animal studies, human experiments that pair self-administration studies with additional neuroscientific techniques provide unique insight into the disease of addiction. Human self-administration studies have gained momentum with the widespread use of fMRI technology to measure BOLD signals. Brain imaging coupled with human self-administration studies with the laboratory have led to the development of a three-stage model of human neurocircuitry of addiction: Binge/Intoxication, Preoccupation/Anticipation, and Withdrawal/Negative Effect. Koob, Lloyd, and Mason reviewed the laboratory models approximating each stage of the model of human addiction.(Koob et al.) The binge-intoxication phase traditionally has been modeled by drug or alcohol self-administration; the psychological effects of addiction might be modeled by the increased motivation for self-administration observed in drug-dependent animals. Self-administration studies capably model the somatic effects of addiction, but many of the most deleterious effects related to drug addiction can be considered psychological in nature. (Koob et al.) Models like the one published by Deroche-Gamonet and colleagues in 2004 better approximate the effects of addiction on physiology and psychology, but animal models are inherently limited in their ability to reproduce human behavior.
The use of the self-administration methodology to model human drug addiction provides powerful insight into the physiological and behavioral effects of the disease. While self-administration experiments in humans or animals each pose unique barriers to complete understanding of addiction, the scientific community continues to invest a great deal of effort in both avenues of research in the hopes of improving understanding and treatment of addiction.
- ↑ Higgins, Stephen, Warren K. Bickel, John R. Hughes (1994). Influence of an alternative reinforcer on human cocaine self-administration. Life Sciences 55 (3): 179–187.
- ↑ Beveridge, Thomas, Hilary R. Smith, James B. Daunais, Michael A. Nader, Linda J. Porrino (9 Jun 2006). Chronic cocaine self-administration is associated with altered functional activity in the temporal lobes of non human primates. European Journal of Neuroscience 23 (11): 3109–3118.
- ↑ Pomrenze M, Baratta, V. M, Cadle, B., Cooper, D.C. (2012). Cocaine self-administration in the mouse: A low- cost, chronic catheter preparation. Nature Precedings March 29 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2012.7040.1
- ↑ (2005) Neurobiology of Addiction, Academic Press.Template:Page needed
- ↑ Waterhouse, B.D (Ed.). (2003). Methods in Drug Abuse Research: Cellular and Circuit Level Analyses (17-50). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press LLC.
- ↑ Spragg, S.D.S. (1940). Morphine addiction in chimpanzees. Comparative Psychology Monographs, 15(7), 1–132.
- ↑ Weeks, J. R. (1962). Experimental morphine addiction: Method for automatic intravenous injections in unrestrained rats. Science, 138, 143-144.
- ↑ Thompson, T. & Schuster, C.R. (1964). Morphine self-administration, food-reinforced, and avoidance behaviors in rhesus monkeys. Psychopharmacologia, 5, 87–94.
- ↑ Deneau, G., Yanagita, T. & Seevers, M.H. (1969). Self-administration of psychoactive substances by the monkey. Psychopharmacology, 16(1): 30-48.
- ↑ Collins, R.J., Weeks, J.R., Cooper, M.M., Good, P.I., & Russell, R.R. (1984). Prediction of abuse liability of drugs using IV self-administration by rats. Psychopharmacology, 82, 6–13.
- ↑ Panlilio, L. V. & Goldberg, S. R. (2007). Self-administration of drugs in animals and humans as a model and an investigative tool. Addiction, 102, 1863–1870.
- ↑ Pomrenze M, Baratta, V. M, Cadle, B., Donald C. Cooper (2012). Cocaine self-administration in the mouse: A low- cost, chronic catheter preparation. Nature Precedings March 29 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2012.7040.1
- ↑ Pomrenze M, Baratta, V. M, Cadle, B., Donald C. Cooper (2012). Cocaine self-administration in the mouse: A low- cost, chronic catheter preparation. Nature Precedings March 29 http://www.figshare.com/articles/Cocaine_self-administration_in_the_mouse:_A_low-_cost,_chronic_catheter_preparation/91521
- ↑ Weiss SJ, Kearns DN, Cohn SI, Schindler CW, Panlilio LV (2003) Stimulus control of cocaine self-administration. J Exp Anal Behav 79:111-135. PMID 12696744
- ↑ Everitt B.J. & Robbins T.W. (2000). Second-order schedules of drug reinforcement in rats and monkeys: measurement of reinforcing efficacy and drug-seeking behaviour. Psychopharmacology, 153, 17-30.
- ↑ De Vries TJ, Schoffelmeer AN, Binnekade R, Mulder AH, Vanderschuren LJ (1998) Drug-induced reinstatement of heroin- and cocaine-seeking behaviour following long-term extinction is associated with expression of behavioural sensitization. Eur J Neurosci, 10, 3565-3571. PMID 9824469
- ↑ Buccafusco J.J. & Shuster L. (Eds.) (2009). Methods of Behavior Analysis in Neuroscience (2nd ed.) Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press
- ↑ Crombag HS, Bossert JM, Koya E, Shaham Y (2008) Review: Context-induced relapse to drug seeking: a review. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 2008 Oct 12;363(1507):3233-43.
- ↑ Pomrenze M, Baratta, V. M, Cadle, B., Cooper, D.C. (2012). Cocaine self-administration in the mouse: A low- cost, chronic catheter preparation. Nature Precedings March 29 http://www.neuro-cloud.net/nature-precedings/pomrenze
- ↑ Pomrenze M, Baratta, V. M, Cadle, B., Cooper, D.C. (2012). Cocaine self-administration in the mouse: A low- cost, chronic catheter preparation. Nature Precedings March 29 http://www.figshare.com/articles/Cocaine_self-administration_in_the_mouse:_A_low-_cost,_chronic_catheter_preparation/91521
- ↑ Adriani, W., Macri, S., Pacifici, R., & Laviola, G. (2002). Peculiar vulnerability to nicotine oral self administration in mice during early adolescence. Neuropsychopharmacology , 212-224.
- ↑ Jaffe, A., Sharpe, L., & Jaffe, J. (1989). Rats self-administer sufentanil in aerosol form. Pharmacology , 289-293.
- ↑ Pilla, M., Perachon, S., Sautel, F., Garrido, F., Mann, A., Wermuth, C. G., et al. (1999). Selective inhibition of cocaine-seeking behaviour by a partial dopamine D3 receptor agonist. [10.1038/22560]. Nature, 400(6742), 371-375.
- ↑ Koob, G. F., Kenneth Lloyd, G., & Mason, B. J. (2009). Development of pharmacotherapies for drug addiction: a Rosetta Stone approach. [10.1038/nrd2828]. Nat Rev Drug Discov, 8(6), 500-515.
- ↑ Hollander, J. A., Im, H.-I., Amelio, A. L., Kocerha, J., Bali, P., Lu, Q., et al. (2010). Striatal microRNA controls cocaine intake through CREB signalling. [10.1038/nature09202]. Nature, 466(7303), 197-202.
- ↑ Deroche-Gamonet, V., Belin, D., & Piazza, P. V. (2004). Evidence for addiction-like behavior in the rat. Science, 305(5686), 1014-1017.
- ↑ Lüscher, C., & Malenka, Robert C. (2011). Drug-Evoked Synaptic Plasticity in Addiction: From Molecular Changes to Circuit Remodeling. Neuron, 69(4), 650-663.
- ↑ Kasanetz, F., Deroche-Gamonet, V., Berson, N., Balado, E., Lafourcade, M., Manzoni, O., et al. (2010). Transition to addiction is associated with a persistent impairment in synaptic plasticity. Science, 328(5986), 1709-1712.
- ↑ Koob, G. F., & Volkow, N. D. (2009). Neurocircuitry of Addiction. Neuropsychopharmacology, 35(1), 217-238.
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Current Editor: Chris Merrill, firstname.lastname@example.org
Previous Editors: Mark Sanders 1989-1997; James LaPorte: 1997-2010
An Analysis of the Technology Education Curriculum of Six Countries
The government of Finland has begun planning a new national curriculum framework for the comprehensive and upper secondary schools. The aim of this study was to find information that could be used in establishing a theoretical basis for planning the technology education curriculum. In order to define the scope and focus of each curriculum element (e.g., rationale, theory, objectives, methods, content, and means of evaluation), the technology education curricula of six different countries were studied: Australia, England, France, The Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. The rationale for choosing these six countries was that their technology education programs have developed rapidly over the past ten years and profound research, experimental programs, and the development of learning materials have been undertaken, especially in Australia, England, The Netherlands, and the United States. The aim was not to conduct a comparative study of the curricula of other countries. Rather, it was to synthesize theory and practice. A secondary aim was to search for more detailed and concrete curriculum materials for provincial, district, municipal, and school purposes. Although this research was conducted to support Finnish curriculum development, the results may be pertinent to other countries as well.
Different countries use different terms to describe technology education, such as technics, design and technology, technology education, and technological education. In this study these titles were considered to be synonymous. Regardless of the term used, the universal goal is to help students to become technologically literate.
A model was developed so that the technology education curricula of the selected countries could be systematically analyzed and the important curricular elements could be identified. Assessment practices were not included in the study, although Kimbell's (1997) work in this area must be recognized since he included most of the countries reported herein.
The analysis is presented in two phases. First, the curricula of the six countries are summarized. The goal at the outset was to cross tabulate the elements from the curricula; however, it was found that the countries differ to such degree that it was impossible to reach this goal. Curriculum guidelines of the six countries are, however, presented so that the reader can obtain a general understanding of the different curricula. Following this, all six countries are examined more closely using a method of systematic analysis in order to identify both common and unique features of their curricula.
According to Madaus and Kelleghan (1992 , p. 128), a curriculum consists of six components: 1) content 2) general objectives 3) specific objectives 4) curriculum materials 5) transaction 6) results. These components served as one dimension of comparison for the study. A second dimension used three elements: rationale and content, implementation goals, and other observations.
The primary sources for curriculum information in this study were:
A statement on technology for Australian schools, A joint
project of the States, Territories and the Commonwealth
of Australia ( Australian Education Council, 1994 ).
Design and technology in the National Curriculum 2000
( Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 2000 )
Noveaux programmes de 6e ( Ministére de
Noveaux programmes du cycle central ( Ministére de l'Education, 1997 )
The new core objectives for the subject technology in the
Netherlands ( Huijs, 1997 )
Development of technology education ( deVries, 1999 )
Kursplaner för grundskolan ( Utbildningsdepartement,
Technology for all Americans: A rationale and structure
for the study of technology ( International Technology
Education Association, 1996 )
Standards for technological literacy: Content for the
study of technology ( International Technology Education
Association, 2000 ).
All of these documents were regarded as nationally accepted guidelines for technology education within the countries concerned at the time the study was conducted.
The Technology Education Curriculum of Australia
In Australia, technology is one of eight subject areas studied in schools. Technology is divided into four content areas, called strands: designing, making, and appraising; information; materials; systems. The strands are considered to be interrelated and are the basis for curriculum monitoring, revision, and reform.
Rationale and Content
The curriculum is based upon the rationale that people face technology everyday and therefore they must learn about it.
The overall goal is to respond to the current and emerging economic and social needs of the nation and to provide those skills which will allow students maximum flexibility and adaptability in their future employment and other aspects of life. This includes the development in the student of:
- Skills of analyzing and problem solving
- Skills of information-processing and computing
- An understanding of the role of science and technology in society, together with development of scientific and technological skills
- An understanding of and concern for a balanced development of the global environment
- A capacity to exercise judgment in matters of morality, ethics, and social justice
The Importance of Technology
Through the study of technology, people will become more innovative, knowledgeable, skillful, adaptable and enterprising. This will enable people to:
- respond critically and resourcefully to challenges
- devise creative ways of generating and applying ideas
- translate ideas into worthwhile outcomes
- find innovative solutions to community needs
- focus on the design of techniques and products
- deal with uncertainty in an informed way
- cooperate in flexible teams
- appreciate cultural differences
- learn throughout their lives
- use local, national, regional, and international networks
Technology is to be included as one of eight broad areas of study:
- the arts
- health and physical education
- languages other than English
- society and environment
The theory and practice of technology are integrated. Study is to be interdisciplinary. Technology involves the development and application of ideas and principles from other areas of learning such as the applied sciences, engineering, and business and commerce.
Technology should be studied by both girls and boys during the compulsory years of schooling (years 1-10). Secondary school programs are more specialized, often leading to discrete programs as students progress toward year twelve. In upper secondary years, many technology programs focus on further education and life and work outside school.
Technology programs can be structured and delivered either as discrete programs or combined with other areas of learning. Technology programs in primary schools give students a broad foundation for further learning. They are taught by classroom teachers, sometimes in association with specialists or resource people, with varying allocations of time to allow different activities. In the secondary school, technology education includes a number of different areas of study.
- computing/information technology
- home economics
- industrial arts, manual arts, design and technology
The Technology Education Curriculum of England
The National Curriculum in England was revised in 2000 and will gradually become statutory over a three-year period. Compulsory schooling is divided into four Key Stages. Key Stage One (grades 1-2, ages 5-7) and Key Stage Two (grades 3-6, ages 8-11) concentrate on English, mathematics, science, design and technology, information and communication technology (ICT), history, geography, art and design, music, and physical education. In Key Stage Three (grades7-9, ages 11-14) and Key Stage Four (grades 10-11, ages 14-16), citizenship and modern languages are added, with one language required.
Rationale and Content
The overall rationale for design and technology education is the need to prepare pupils to participate in tomorrow's rapidly changing technologies. Through technology education they learn to think and intervene creatively to improve the quality of life. They become autonomous and creative problem solvers, as individuals and as members of a team. Through needs, desires, and opportunities they develop a range of ideas in order to design and make products and systems. They combine practical skills, aesthetics, social and environmental issues, and reflect on and evaluate present and past design and technology, its uses and effects. Through design and technology they become innovators and discriminating and informed users of products. Specifically, pupils should be taught to:
- develop, plan, and communicate ideas
- work with tools, equipment, materials, and components to make quality products
- evaluate processes and products
- know and understand materials and components
The specific objectives become more demanding with each higher Key Stage. At Key Stage Four one more objective is added: to know and understand systems and control.
Technology is one of the core subjects in the schools and is to be studied by both girls and boys. A national examination is required, resulting in a General Certificate of Education upon completion of compulsory education. Technology education is to be integrated where convenient, for instance with the arts, mathematics, and science.
There are nine attainment levels that become hierarchically more difficult. Very specific information on the quality of pupils' performance is included. The specifications for the ninth level are very rigorous.
The Technology Education Curriculum of France
Technology education is a compulsory subject for the four years of the junior secondary level (ages 11-15). At the time of the study, there is a detailed curriculum only for class levels six (11-12 years, adaptation level), five (12-13 years, first central level), four (13-14 years, second central level) and three (14- 15 years, orientation level). A specific plan was not in place at the primary level.
Rationale and Content
Technology education aims to clarify the interconnections among work, products, and human needs, and the effects of technology on society and culture. When studying technology, pupils must face concrete situations requiring application of know-how and implementation of skills. These skills are enriched during the study process. Specifically, technology education gives pupils an opportunity to:
- become acquainted with technical systems, their implementation and use
- learn to use the correct language of the discipline
- become acquainted with the special methods of technology, where a variety of solutions can be found for a specific problem
- learn how to use developed expertise in different situations to solve a problem
- use equipment and control systems in a rational way, by following safety precautions and the laws of ergonomics
- observe development, different means of production, and different technical solutions to a similar technical problem
- observe and build connections between the schools and enterprise
- take a critical stand and participate in the technological world without emotional obstacles
In primary schools, simple mechanisms, electric plans, energy production, and production in general are studied. Students engage in small projects, particularly those using computers. In secondary schools, production, marketing, needs analysis, and professions in production and service are covered. Experience with applications of CAD/CAM is also included.
Integration with the French language is considered particularly important. This includes terminology, word processing, critique of commercials, and wise consumerism. Relationships among the French language, science, and social studies, with considerable emphasis on computing, are stressed. The time devoted to the study of technology range from 90 to 120 minutes per week. Technology education is to be studied by both girls and boys.
Technology education is taught by class teachers at primary level and subject teachers at secondary school level. The aim is to use three-fifths of the total study time for hands-on activities or learning by doing. Technology studies must continue from primary school to secondary school without any gaps in the coverage of topics.
The Technology Education Curriculum of the Netherlands
The Technology Action Plan for The Netherlands was implemented during the years 1993 to 1997 for primary schools (pupils aged 4 to 12). Financed jointly by the Ministries of Education, Culture and Science, and Economic Affairs, the purpose was to stimulate attention to technology within and outside primary schools. Importance is given to combining thinking with doing ( Lemmen 1997 , p. 118).
In the Netherlands, all pupils go to the comprehensive school, "Basisvorming," until the age of 15 or 16. After national debates of what the content of basic education should be, the present curriculum was published in 1998. There are at least 15 subject areas to be studied, with one of them being technology. There are five general objectives to be achieved within all the subject areas:
- working on interdisciplinary themes
- learning to carry out a plan and task
- learning to learn
- learning to communicate
- learning to reflect on the learning process and the future
Technology is studied from three different perspectives:
- technology and society
- technical products and systems
- designing and making products
Rationale and Content
The overall purpose of the technology education curriculum is to enable the students to:
- become familiar with those aspects of technology that are significant to an understanding of culture, to the way in which pupils function in society, and to the development of pupils' technical abilities
- acquire knowledge and understanding of the function of technology and its close relationship with natural sciences and society
- become actively involved in applications of technology
- learn to design and develop solutions for human needs
- learn how to use a number of technological products in a safe manner
- be given the opportunity to explore their abilities and interests in technology
The specific objectives are organized under the headings of technology and society, technical products and systems, and the design and making of products.
Technology education curriculum should offer equal opportunities and appeal to both boys and girls ( Huijs 1997 , p. 107). At the primary level it is not a separate subject area, but is integrated with crafts, arts, and natural sciences. At the secondary level it is a subject area of its own, but it is also integrated with mathematics, science, and social studies. In the first and second years of secondary technology, it is studied for two teaching hours per week. At the secondary level, 180 teaching hours are allocated to technology education.
National tests are given upon completion of the secondary school program.
The Technology Education Curriculum of Sweden
In Sweden, the equivalent to technology education is called "teknik" (technics). According to the national curriculum of 1994, technology education aims to develop in pupils an understanding of the essence of technics, particularly, an understanding of the impact of technology on production, society, physical environment, and living conditions. Technical expertise becomes an important prerequisite for the control and use of technology.
Pupils are expected to achieve basic technical competence (grundläggande teknisk kompetens). This competence results from gaining knowledge of the role of technical development, historical perspective, and reflection on the solution of technical problems. In addition, there is need to develop an ability to analyze and value the relationships among human beings teamwork in the context of society, technics, and nature. Students are to understand the way technics is used and its effects on the environment. A number of ethical questions dealing with basic values are also addressed.
Rationale and Content
The primary objectives of the study of technology education in Sweden are to:
- study the history and development of technical culture, and the effects of technics on people, society, and nature
- develop an awareness of the technics in the world around the student
- reflect upon and evaluate the effects of choices of different technics on human beings, society, and nature
- update technical knowledge of the structure and use of technics for practical situations
- have a positive interest in technics and confidence in their own abilities to solve technical problems
The objectives to be achieved are stated in such a way that they describe what pupils should have learned by the end of grades five and nine. Meeting these objectives provides a basis for making choices about careers and further education.
The primary teaching methods emphasize practical work and exploration. Students are to be engaged in doing tests and observing results, planning, constructing, and evaluation.
Technics is to be studied at both the primary and junior secondary levels. It should be integrated with history, science, and social studies, and offered equally to girls and boys. The study of technics:
- should promote development of perspective regarding the effects of technics on individuals, society, and nature from a historical and international point of view
- should illustrate interaction among humans, technics, and nature
- should convey that the purpose of technics is to alter, store, and control
- should present a component - system point of view
- should include construction experiences in a workshop environment for the identification and solution of problems
The curriculum documents indicate a belief that the technical culture is mainly based on the tradition of know-how that has been achieved through practical work. Current technological development is based more on scientific research and systematic development than has been true in the past and this should be reflected in the school curriculum.
The Technology Education Curriculum of the United States
In the United States, there are national standards for various core subjects. At the time of the study, standards existed for English, language arts, geography, music, art, social studies, foreign languages, mathematics (curriculum and evaluation standards were approved as early as 1989), and science (national standards were approved in 1996). The most recent subject for which standards were developed is technology education. They were approved at the beginning of the year 2000. The Technology for All Americans Project has been engaged for the past several years in research and development for technology education. In 1996, an initial statement and policy document called Technology for All Americans: A Rationale and Structure for the Study of Technology was published. This publication provided the basis for technology education in the United States and became the philosophical foundation for the Standards for Technological Literacy: Content for the Study of Technology ( ITEA. 2000 ). These two documents are intended for state and local curriculum planning.
Rationale and Content
The principal rationale for technology education in the United States is that every citizen should be technologically literate and, thereby, is able to use, manage, and understand technology. Technology is defined as human innovation in action. The framework for technology education is based on the universals of technology. These universals are considered to be significant and timeless, even in an era dominated by uncertainty and accelerated change. At the time this study was started, the universals were comprised of knowledge, processes, and contexts. Though these universals changed with the release of the final version of the Standards ( ITEA, 2000 ), they nonetheless represent the initial philosophy.
- technology should be integrated as one of the core subjects from kindergarten to junior and senior high schools, and even beyond
- technology education can be integrated with other school subjects, especially with science and mathematics
- technology should be compulsory at every study level, for girls as well as boys
- local conditions, aspirations of individuals, career goals, and abilities should influence the development of the curriculum for technological literacy
- the ultimate goal is to realize technological literacy for all
The Standards for Technological Literacy underwent an extensive review and consensus-building process that extended over a lengthy period of time. The National Academy of Engineers and the National Research Council, very influential and important organizations, were closely involved in the development of the Standards.
Summary of the Curricula of the Selected Countries
The curriculum documents of the six countries vary significantly. On the one hand are lehrplan-type documents (from the German word for curriculum) that provide very specific details of what should be taught and how it should be taught (used in Australia and England). On the other hand are curriculum standards-type documents that specify the goals that should be met, but do not specify the actual curriculum (used in Sweden and the United States). Standardstype documents are more general and allow a great deal of flexibility (see Malinen, 1985 , pp. 17-19 and 39-45). France and the Netherlands use guidelines that are combinations of the two types, having a standards-type emphasis but with many lehrplan-type components (see e.g. Malinen 1992 , p. 15). All of the documents described above were published relatively recently. The curriculum documents of Australia and Sweden are the oldest, dating back to 1994. The curriculum for lower-level classes in France is from 1995 and the curriculum for upper-level classes from 1997. The attainment targets of the Netherlands were revised in 1998 and 1999 (see also deVries 1999 , p. 143). In England, the curriculum was revised in the year 2000. The curriculum standards for technology education in the United States were published most recently (2000).
According to the technology education curricula of the six countries studied, technology should be studied by both girls and boys. In all of the curricula the importance of studying the effects of technology on society are emphasized, and Sweden particularly emphasizes the importance of the history of technology. France is the only country that does not directly refer to studies of the relationship between technology and the environment. In all the countries, learning how to plan, produce, and evaluate is emphasized. The ability to tolerate uncertainty is included in the curricula of Australia and the United States. In the Australian curriculum the importance of life-long learning and learning of innovative skills is clearly a focus.
To analyze the curricula of the six countries in more depth, a special method called systematic analysis was chosen. In this method, factors connected to a particular theory or idea are clarified. In other words, a single method is not used alone, but rather a "method-family" is usually identified and applied ( Scriven 1988 , pp. 131 - 149; Jussila, Montonen & Nurmi 1992 , p. 157). This method includes a qualitative analysis of the content of selected excerpts of text. In this study, the objects of the analysis were the technology education curricula of the six countries.
Systematic analysis differs from content analysis in that the goal is to penetrate the world of ideas as they are expressed linguistically. The aim is not to search for and present statistically representative samples, but to bring forward the essential ideas from thinking-structures in order to make possible the clarification of the original thought entities and their further development if needed ( Jussila et al. 1992 , p. 160, see also Alasuutari 1993 ; Pyörälä 1995 ).
In systematic analysis, logical and conceptual entities are highlighted through theoretically oriented exploration. The task of the researcher is to look for fundamental questions from within the content of the text and to outline and examine the text in order to discover core ideas, even those that are not obvious. A mere description of the expressions presented is not sufficient in this type of analysis ( Jussila et al. 1992 , p. 174).
One of the objectives of this research was to look for suitable components for the Finnish curriculum framework so that they could be applied by municipalities and individual schools. A two-dimensional model was thus developed to meet this objective. One dimension was the influencers of curriculum and consisted of three elements, the society, the school, and the individual.
- Society (global, state, municipality)
Elements include technology as part of society, technology and the environment, the relationship between industry and school, the needs of society and people, and technological professions.
- School (teacher)
Elements include the interaction between the school and the environment, technological know-how, the learning environment, and integration among different subject areas.
- Individual (student)
Elements include technological literacy, the interaction between technology and the individual, environmental balance, ethics of technology, technological skills and knowledge, and interest.
The second dimension was the internal elements of the curriculum: objectives, methods, and content. Figure 1 below describes the analysis framework.Figure 1 . The dimensions of analysis.
Results of the Analysis
The elements of the results of the systematic analysis are presented in abbreviated form in Table 1. The information presented in the table is not in any particular order of importance. For the complete results of the study, the reader is referred to Rasinen (2000) .Table 1.
Comparison of objectives, methods and contents by the perspectives of society, school and the student.
OBJECTIVES METHODS CONTENT
Technology is an integral Increase cooperation Systems and structures of part of society between the schools and technology (mechanisms, S Human needs and the community outside the structures, products and O technology are intimately schools their applications, transfer, C connected Provide experiences that storage, control, I There is a need to prepare the student for life regulation, processing, E establish a balance after school communication, T between technology and Experiences should information, energy, Y nature include teamwork, power, quality) There are careers in analysis, invention, Careers in technology technology and the planning, producing, and (production process, schools should provide evaluating working conditions, practical, exploratory Experiences should be control of quality, sharing experiences related to provided that promote of work, technical them positive attitudes toward appliances used by careers in technology different professions, Experiences should be changes in different provided for all students to professions) increase tolerance for Safety and ergonomics uncertainty For boys and girls
Role of technology in Integration into/with other Planning, making, S society subjects evaluating C Skill development Experiences in planning Information H (planning, making, Learning by doing Materials O knowing and Teacher education and inservice Systems O understanding, evaluation, development are Control of systems L social interaction, moral critical Structures and ethical) National examinations in Processing Integration with other technology are needed Communication subjects Energy and power Safety
Technological literacy Planning, co-operation and Role of technological (ability to use, control, and networking. development S understand technology) Practical work: History of technology T Problem solving skills experiments, observations Solving technological U Understanding the role of and building; planning and problems D science and technology in evaluating. Evaluation and valuation E society Learning by doing of the relationship N Developing technology in Safety between humans, society, T balance with the and nature environment Effects of technology on Moral, ethic, and social nature justice Functions of technology Know-how, skills, values (alter, store, control, and Adopting critical attitude regulate) Applications of Process work (identifying, technology constructing, and Planning and solutions evaluatinwhich therefore has to be denied or ignored. Technology is around us, whether we want it or not. Thus, students should be educated to cope and deal withg) from human viewpoint Information Students should become Energy and power more innovative, Materials conscious, skillful, Safety flexible, and enterprising Marketing
Although the format and approach in the six curricula studied differ from one another in many ways, common features were found. There were no particular contradictions among any elements of the six curricula, nor are there significant differences in the emphasis placed on the various sub-areas of technological studies. The French curriculum appears to give more attention to computing as a principal focus, whereas computers are seen more as one of the tools of technology in the other countries.
As Table 1 illustrates, there are many overlapping elements, regardless of whether the table is studied horizontally or vertically. Technology is universally seen as a significant part of human life; it affects the routines of individuals, schools, and the whole society, from local municipalities to the entire world. It is considered important to realize the history and development of technology and its effects on human beings and the environment. Technology is not seen as something good that has to be accepted as it is, nor is it seen as something bad, which therefore has to be denied or ignored. Technology is around us, whether we want it or not. Thus, students should be educated to cope and deal with technology, to develop it in balance with the environment, and to approach its study with a realistic, yet critical, manner. None of the technology education curricula included in the study defined directly any philosophical points of departure. They do, however, offer brief statements on the importance of the study of technology. The rationale the countries share in common is the need to prepare students to live in a rapidly changing technological world. There seems to be a universal emphasis on learning to plan and produce solutions to technological problems, to become discriminating and informed users of technology, and to become innovative thinkers. Understanding underlying social, aesthetic, and environmental issues is also considered essential within all six curricula. The importance of learning by doing and problem solving is universally evident.
The educational approach to the curricula is clearly hermeneutic. The objective is to learn about natural world and how humans have changed it through technological development. Humans are regarded as goal-oriented, intentional, and active beings who form social systems. Students must learn how to make rational and justified choices while they are in school so that they become contributing members of society once initial schooling is complete.
Technological phenomena are studied as phenomena in themselves. That is, their essence and nature are considered but little attention seems to be placed on what influences them. For example, it is universally believed that students should learn planning, making, and evaluating. However, the way in which the brain controls the planning process or what factors affect eye-hand coordination are not included.
The six countries chosen to be studied in this research are at different stages of developing their technology education programs. Departure points for curriculum planning, the planning process, and the structure of the curriculum differ from one country to another. For these reasons, a single model cannot be applied to each country. The curricula have, however, been observed from so many different perspectives that the essentials have undoubtedly been discovered. Although the countries under study are separated geographically at quite a distance from one another and their cultures also differ, there are several similar features in their curricular objectives, methods, and content.
Technological literacy is a universal goal. Principal objectives include understanding the role of science and technology in society, the balance between technology and the environment, the development of technological literacy, and the development of skills such as planning, making, evaluating, social/moral/ethical thinking, innovativeness, awareness, flexibility, and entrepreneurship. The prominent methods focus on experiences for students that engage them in planning, analyzing, inventing, innovating, making, and evaluating. The most significant content includes the systems and structures of technology, professions in technology and industry, safety practices, ergonomics, design, construction techniques, assessment practices, the role and history of technological development, problem-solving strategies, and evaluating and valuing the relationship between society and nature. The list of content included in the curricula of the six countries was quite broad and extensive, making it very difficult to condense it. The long standing argument of breadth versus depth was clearly evident across all of the curricula, with the former being more prevalent than the latter.
The way in which technology studies have been organized also differs from country to country. For the most part, technology education at the primary level is integrated with other subjects, such as handicrafts and science. Since technology education at that level is mainly taught by class teachers, it is more natural and easy to integrate it with other subjects than would be the case if the subject were taught by subject specialists. However, in England, where the practice is already several years old, technology education at the primary level is taught as a separate subject. A systematic in-service program assists the teachers in updating their knowledge and skills.
Technology education in the junior and senior secondary schools in the countries studied is usually taught by specialized subject teachers. However, integration among different subjects and the surrounding society seems to be emphasized universally, at least in theory.
Since technology education does not have a long tradition, the standards of teaching vary widely. The extent to which technology education has evolved varies from one country to another, ranging from the highly developed programs in England to those less developed in other countries. Though technology education in the US has existed for a number of years, there are still few programs at the elementary level. Among the countries studied, technology education is developed to the greatest extent at the middle school/junior high (lower secondary) levels. Even at this level, though, there are still many obstacles that must be overcome before the intended curriculum can fully realize its intended goals and ideals.
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Aki Rasinen ( email@example.com ) is Senior Lecturer in Pedagogy of Technology, Department of Teacher Education, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
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Saddam’s Blighted Marsh Draws $150,000 Goldman Winner
In the 1990s, Saddam Hussein diverted the flow of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, then drained and burned the marshes of southern Iraq.
The reasons were mainly political; the effect was an epic disaster that killed or displaced tens of thousands of people and threatened to erase the very cradle of civilization.
“It’s where writing was invented,” said Azzam Alwash, 54, a dual citizen of Iraq and the U.S., and a force in the efforts to restore the Mesopotamian marshes. “It’s where the first cities were created. It’s where agriculture started. It’s where Abraham was born. The myth of creation is from there. It is not only Iraqi heritage, it is a world heritage.”
Shortly after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Alwash left his Los Angeles home and career in hydraulic engineering to return to Iraq to help save the dessicated marshland.
He started Nature Iraq, a nonprofit based in the town of Sulaimani, and consulted with the Madan, or Marsh Arabs. They had already begun punching holes in the walls of the canals built by Hussein, so that the area could seasonally flood again.
Alwash will be named today as one of the six 2013 recipients of the Goldman Environmental Prize. Each gets a bronze sculpture and $150,000.
I sat down recently with Alwash, a handsome man with graying hair, at Bloomberg’s global headquarters in New York, and asked him what it was like in 2003, three months into the war, to see the marshes after so many years.
“A feeling of physical disgust,” Alwash said. “It’s one thing seeing satellite pictures of the dried marshes, another thing seeing it at ground level. You know distance gives it abstractness. It’s vast, but it doesn’t give you that visual of what the desert looks like, especially a place that was so unique in your childhood.”
He spoke of the horror of Basrah at the time -- the stench, the skeletal dogs and cats on the streets, the lost beauty of the city -- but his natural optimism overwhelmed the bitter memories:
“There was also this hope in the air, just that everything and anything is possible. So while it was sad seeing your childhood place dead, you come in with this American attitude. It’s like: Damn it, we’re going to do it!”
Ten years on, the marshes are restored to more than 50 percent of their original size and the Madan are returning. It has been a monumental job under hellacious conditions -- war, terrorism, poverty and tumultuous social and political change.
“How do you convert 50 years of socialism into a free market?” Alwash asked. “How do you separate church from state? And what was fascinating for me, for the first seven years and even now, I see the Americans making mistake after mistake, but they’re not listening to people like me.”
The U.S. government did help with marsh restoration at first, but after an initial $175,000 in aid, it gave no more, Alwash said. He partly blamed his own conflicts with the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“I just couldn’t get along with USAID. It was my attitude. I don’t like being told what to do and what not to do, and I don’t like people who tell me it can’t be done. The experts telling me it can’t be done were hired by USAID.”
Italy provided funding and consultants, and this month a sizable piece of the marshes will become Iraq’s first national park. Alwash is also involved with a survey of more than 300 biodiversity sites throughout Iraq, looking to further expand protected areas.
Iraq’s recovery will depend on how it develops its oil fields, many of which are in the south. Alwash has a pragmatic take on the subject.
“I might be viewed as a heretic in the environmental movement, but my point of view with respect to Iraq is that the world needs oil and Iraq needs income,” he said. “I would rather be inside the tent working with oil companies and with Iraq on responsible development than outside the tent demonstrating without being effective.”
The next threat to the marshes will probably not be oil, however, but the many dams tapping into the river systems upstream, including one of Turkey’s largest along the Tigris, set for completion next year.
“There’s another thing coming up on the horizon that nobody’s talking about,” Alwash said. “The issue of water: That’s going to be a problem and that’s going to be my next challenge.”
The other Goldman Environmental Prize winners are:
Jonathan Deal, who led a successful campaign against fracking in South Africa.
Rossano Ercolini, an elementary-school teacher whose public-education campaign about the dangers of incinerators in his small Tuscan town became a national “Zero Waste’” movement in Italy
Aleta Baun, an Indonesian who organized peaceful protests at marble mining sites and helped halt the destruction of forestland on Mutis Mountain on the island of Timor.
Kimberly Wasserman, who led a campaign to shut down two coal plants in the southwest side of Chicago.
Nohra Padilla, who organized Colombia’s “waste pickers” to make recycling part of waste management.
(Mike Di Paola writes on preservation and the environment for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Mike Di Paola at firstname.lastname@example.org.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff in New York at email@example.com.
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Lake Moultrie is the third largest lake in South Carolina (60,400 acres) and is located within Berkeley County. It is the smaller of the two coastal plain impoundments that comprise Santee Cooper Reservoir. Constructed in the Cooper River Drainage, over half its shoreline is contained within a network of Dams and Dikes. This depression era electrification project was originally designed to route the Santee River flow down the Cooper River. However, since 1985 flow has been re-diverted to the Santee River through an Army Corp of Engineers canal and hydroelectric dam located near the town of St. Stephen. The St. Stephen Dam is equipped with a fish lift that allows passage upstream for sea run anadromous fish species like American shad and blueback herring. Lake Moultrie’s Pinopolis Dam has a boat lock that allows both boat traffic and anadromous fish passage.
Most of Lake Moultrie, unlike Lake Marion, was timbered before impoundment. However, caution is urged when navigating in shallow water on Lake Moultrie, as many submerged stumps are present on its gently sloping shorelines. Aquatic vegetation is present in backwater sloughs and in the 900 acre Hatchery section of the lake. Originally constructed to be a separate impoundment within Lake Moultrie, the remnants of the Hatchery dike still provide enough shelter to allow significant aquatic vegetation growth that provides habitat for largemouth bass, pickerel, bream, and many other species. Once away from the shoreline, the stump hazards decrease and the majority of Lake Moultrie is suitable for pleasure boaters and fisherman alike. Much of the open water varies in depth from 10 feet to 30 feet deep, as numerous underwater humps and contour breaks exist throughout the lake. The lake is 14 miles across at its widest point, and a marked navigational channel runs from Pinnopolis Dam to the Diversion Canal.
The closure of Lake Marion Dam in 1941 trapped a founding population of striped bass and a thriving population developed in the reservoir. Investigations of this population first demonstrated that striped bass could complete its life cycle entirely in freshwater. The striped bass fishery has declined in recent years due to a variety of factors, but recent steps taken to rebuild the population have had positive results. Blue catfish and flathead catfish were introduced into the system in the mid-1960s. They have readily adapted to the Santee Cooper lakes system and today provide many anglers with the opportunity to catch the largest freshwater fish they will ever encounter. Largemouth bass and shellcracker fisheries also draw anglers each spring, providing unique opportunities to catch large fish.
Miles of Shoreline: 210.24
Acres of Surface Water: 60,400
Counties Lake is Within: Berkeley
Average Depth: 18.7 feet
Maximum Depth: Approximately 75.46 feet
Boat Ramps: 8
Fish Attractors: 19
Fishing Access Locations: 1
Fishing Loaner Tackle Locations: None
Owned and Managed by: Santee Cooper
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Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is a pulmonary
disease characterized by interstitial fibrosis of
- The pathology, which is non-specific, varies with the stage of the disease.
- The dominant pattern is inflammatory early on leading to
organization of the exudate and interstitial fibrosis in the later stage.
- The severe septal thickening (fibrosis) leads to a "honeycomb"
appearance of the lung and pronounced alveolocapillary block. Refer to
Figure 15-35 in your textbook.
Unknown. In actually this pathologic condition may be the end stage of manydifferent
Hypoxemia, dyspnea, cyanosis, pulmonary hypertension and cor pulmonale.
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While Colorado has one of the nation’s highest renewable energy standards, between 2000 and 2010 it also had one of the biggest increases in carbon dioxide emissions, according to federal Energy Information data.
Colorado saw a 13.9 percent increase in carbon dioxide emissions to 96.5 million metric tons. That place it behind Nebraska, which had a 16 percent jump to 48 million tons, and Iowa with an 14.1 percent rise to 88.7 million tons.
One driver was a 38 percent increase in emissions from burning natural gas, which contributed 26.8 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2010. Most of that came from industrial operations and electricity generation.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere and is linked in scientific studies to climate change
In all, 32 states saw declines in their carbon emissions and 18 recorded increases in emissions. The biggest drops were in Delaware, 27.9 percent to 11.7 million tons, and New York, which cut emissions 18 percent to 172 million tons.
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Definitions of chamomile
n. - A genus of herbs (Anthemis) of the Composite family. The common camomile, A. nobilis, is used as a popular remedy. Its flowers have a strong and fragrant and a bitter, aromatic taste. They are tonic, febrifugal, and in large doses emetic, and the volatile oil is carminative. 2
n. - See Camomile. 2
The word "chamomile" uses 9 letters: A C E H I L M M O.
No direct anagrams for chamomile found in this word list.
Words formed by adding one letter before or after chamomile (in bold), or to acehilmmo in any order:
s - chamomiles
All words formed from chamomile by changing one letter
Browse words starting with chamomile by next letter
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| 0.871019 | 197 | 2.59375 | 3 |
This article was written by M.Farouk Radwan The founder of www.2knowmyself.com a website that got 10,000,000 Visits so far
Why do some people panic when they approach new people and why do some of them feel anxious around strangers?
I am sure that you tried more than once to speak to a stranger or to approach someone yet felt anxious and afraid. Most people want to be outgoing and outspoken but sometimes they fail to maintain their confident state as soon as they encounter approach others.
You might be wondering why you sometimes speak with confidence with some people and feel afraid while approaching others.
As soon as you meet strangers two things happen, you will first load the beliefs you have about yourself and then watch for their feedback.
If you believed that you aren't worthy but was treated well then your anxiety will disappear while if you got bad treatment then this will remind you of your false beliefs about yourself and you will feel more anxious.
In short people feel confident as long as nothing reminds them of their false beliefs and they feel anxious when these false beliefs come into their attention.
People make conclusions about the world with a bias towards their own internal beliefs and that’s why people who think of themselves negatively will incorrectly interpret the signals sent to them by others then feel bad.
A research found that people with negative beliefs about themselves interpret neutral facial expressions negatively and so reinforce these beliefs they hold.
Confident people on the other hand don’t feel anxious around others because they don’t think negatively of themselves and even if they were rejected they attribute the rejection to other factors.
Another factor that ads to the fear of approaching people is the lack of social skills. If you don’t know how to start to conversation or if you don't know how to find the right words to say while talking to someone then there is a big possibility that you will feel very anxious.
So to sum this all, the reasons you might be afraid of approaching people are:
If you managed to get rid of these false beliefs nothing will remind you of them while being with people and you will feel relaxed instead of feeling anxious.
In the solid confidence program i don't only help people identity their false beliefs but i tell them exactly how can they get rid of them. The Solid confidence program will either make you more confident or give you your money back.
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| 0.968098 | 488 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Using Play to Help Your Child Cope with Surgery
Children use play to express emotion, learn, and interact. When preparing for surgery, play can help children understand and cope with their hospital experience.
How can play be used to help your child?
Specific play items and activities can help teach your child about surgery. They can also help distract and relax your child before and after surgery.
What play items are appropriate for your child?
Infants use their senses to learn about what’s around them. They can also sense feelings and emotions. Try to stay calm around your child. Bring toys with you to the hospital that your child is currently interested in, such as a rattle or a musical toy. These can be used to distract your child. A pacifier may be helpful since your child can’t eat before surgery.
Toddlers like to be active. They like to touch and explore things. Toy medical kits can help your child become familiar with hospital equipment. Bring your child’s favorite toy, such as a stuffed animal, with you to the hospital. You can also bring puzzles, books, or coloring books. These can help your child relax while waiting to have surgery.
Preschoolers have active imaginations. Teach them about surgery with puppets, dolls, picture books, and toy medical kits. Playing a dress-up game with a surgical hat and mask can be helpful. Encourage your child to pick which toys or activities to bring to the hospital. Preschoolers enjoy being with other children. Check if your hospital has a play area for children.
School-aged children enjoy activities such as reading, writing, and using a computer. Teach them about surgery with age-appropriate books, pictures, or websites on the Internet. Let your child help pick the toys or activities that he or she wants to bring to the hospital. This might include items such as books, video games, or music players.
Teenagers learn about surgery by asking questions. They also enjoy reading and researching information with books and the Internet. To cope with surgery, they may relax with activities, such as talking to their friends, writing in a journal, or listening to music.
What is a child life specialist?
Many hospitals have a child life specialist. This person is specially trained to help children understand and cope with their hospital experience. Families can arrange to see a child life specialist when their child is scheduled for surgery. The child life specialist uses age-appropriate items such as books, dolls, and toy medical or hospital equipment to explain surgery. Parents and siblings are encouraged to attend and be involved in these sessions.
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| 0.96684 | 536 | 3.578125 | 4 |
Definitions for fab lab
This page provides all possible meanings and translations of the word fab lab
A small scale workshop with the ability to fabricate almost everything. This includes products generally perceived as limited to mass production.
A fab lab is a small-scale workshop offering digital fabrication. A fab lab is generally equipped with an array of flexible computer controlled tools that cover several different length scales and various materials, with the aim to make "almost anything". This includes technology-enabled products generally perceived as limited to mass production. While fab labs have yet to compete with mass production and its associated economies of scale in fabricating widely distributed products, they have already shown the potential to empower individuals to create smart devices for themselves. These devices can be tailored to local or personal needs in ways that are not practical or economical using mass production.
The numerical value of fab lab in Chaldean Numerology is: 8
The numerical value of fab lab in Pythagorean Numerology is: 6
Images & Illustrations of fab lab
Find a translation for the fab lab definition in other languages:
Select another language:
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| 0.891711 | 226 | 2.8125 | 3 |
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 2, 2014 — It may be possible to change negative memories into positive ones, and vice versa, using optogenetics techniques. A team at the Riken-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics looked at how brain structures, such as the hippocampus and the amygdala, collaborate to form memories, and examined whether emotions are stored in the same place in the brain as the memories that cause those emotions. In the study, mice were placed in a chamber, with some receiving a mild foot shock while others were allowed to socialize, prompting the test subjects to form either a fear or a rewarding memory. The researchers were able to genetically label neurons that were active during the formation of either memory. The dentate gyrus of the hippocampus (middle) and the basolateral amygdala (bottom corners) were injected with a virus carrying the gene for the light-inducible protein. This image depicts the injection sites and the expression of viral constructs. Courtesy of MIT. Those same neurons were later activated using optogenetics. The researchers could judge from the mouse's behavior whether the activated memory was fearful or a rewarding one by whether the mice avoided or were attracted to a particular location in the chamber where the memory neurons were optogenetically activated. “If our technology drives memory engrams, it should work independently of whether the (emotional) valence is negative or positive,” said Dr. Roger Redondo. “We wanted to show that the memory reactivation was not restricted to fear memories, as we had used in the past.” The mice were then given a new experience with the opposite emotional association while the original memory was activated simultaneously in either the hippocampus or the amygdala. As a result, the memory engram stored in the hippocampus could change its valence. The valence of the memory engram in the amygdala could not be altered, the researchers found. The study’s findings could explain the success of behavioral therapy for people with phobias, depression or PTSD. New treatments could also be developed for such disorders. The research was published in Nature (doi: 10.1038/nature13725). For more information, visit www.mit.edu.
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| 0.957759 | 451 | 3.71875 | 4 |
The lungs are a pair of breathing organs located with the chest which remove carbon dioxide from and bring oxygen to the blood. There is a right and left lung.
(12 Dec 1998)
lung, hyperlucent, lungie, lungoor, lung perfusion agents < Prev | Next >
lung segmental anatomy, lung transplantation
© mondofacto 2008-10 | about us | advertise with us | disclaimer | privacy & cookies | contact us
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| 0.846332 | 96 | 2.859375 | 3 |
2011-12 Annual Technology Survey Snapshot
293 districts responded to our annual technology survey.
Standards for Technology Proficiency
- 204 school districts have technology standards for students. In 144 districts, tech standards are mandatory.
- 164 districts have technology standards for teachers. In 87 districts, these standards are mandatory.
- 53 districts have technology standards for paraprofessionals. In 27 districts, these standards are mandatory.
- 127 districts have technology standards for educational leaders. In 60 districts, these standards are mandatory.
- 99.8% of classrooms have networked Internet connectivity.
- The ratio of students to standards-based networked computers with Internet connectivity is 3.87 to 1, while the ratio of students to all computers is 2.62 to 1.
- 29% of instructional computers in use do not meet state-recommended minimum standards.
- Of the total 393,150 instructional computers in use, 48% are located in computer labs or libraries.
Generally, standard represents a 4-year old or newer computer. The metric is processing power. So, school laptops or desktop PCs must be built with this processor level or higher.
- Intel or AMD based Pentium IV 3.0 GhZ or higher or Dual Core desktop or laptop
- Intel Core Duo or higher Mac desktop or laptop.
- Netbooks purchased within the last three years.
- Nearly all K-12 certificated staff have email accounts provided by their school district.
- 176,515 of our 1,030,346 K-12 students have e-mail accounts provided by their school district.
- Teachers and kids can take advantage of 50,976 document cameras and 15,556 interactive whiteboards – present in an average of 85.9% and 26.2% of state classrooms.
- 97.5% of classrooms have an LCD projector – 56,517 units across Washington.
- 102,820 portable computers — laptops and net books — are available for class activities and learning projects, as well as 9,625 wireless tablet devices (predominantly iPads).
- 13.7% of the computers run Macintosh OS, 85.7% run Windows.
Computer Access Outside Class
- 68.6%+ of state schools provide computer access outside class time, split
between before school, after school or during free periods. On average 53.5
computers are available in these schools for student use.
- In 9% of our schools, students can take laptops or smart keyboards
home. There are, on average, 89.8 devices available.
Wireless Internet Access
- 84.6% of Washington school buildings provide some degree of wireless access to the Internet. Of those buildings, 56.2% provide access throughout the entire building.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
- 175 districts (59.7%) allow students or staff to connect personal devices to their district network, although 49 of those districts allow staff access only.
Role of Teacher-Librarians
- In 57.3% of school buildings, teacher librarians have a role in supporting technology integration.
- Of the 118 districts (40.3%) that have an Internet safety initiative, 65 (55.1%) involve teacher librarians in the delivery of this training.
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| 0.922443 | 679 | 2.734375 | 3 |
Learn the Arabic alphabet with this fun series of worksheets! Kids get to practice writing, reading and pronouncing the Arabic letter "Ṣād."
Kids learn to write Arabic with these attractively illustrated worksheets. This one focuses on the letter Hā', which maps roughly to the "h" sound in English.
Check out this cool Arabic alphabet worksheet from our Arabic alphabet series. Kids practice writing and pronouncing the letter Ḥā'.
Want to learn to write in Arabic? Kids practice writing and pronouncing the letter 'Ayn in this cool worksheet on the Arabic language.
Learn how to write Arabic calligraphy with this fun worksheet on the Arabic letter Kāf, pronounced similar to an English "k" sound.
Learn the Arabic Alphabet! Kids practice their vocabulary, pronunciation, and writing skills with this attractively illustrated worksheet on the letter "Thā'."
Kids learning how to write in Arabic can practice writing the letter "ba" with this cool worksheet that also helps them build their Arabic vocabulary.
Learn Arabic letters with this series of enlightening worksheets. Kids practice writing the letter Mīm (pronounced "meem"), an important Arabic prefix.
Learn Arabic with our Arabic Alphabet series! This worksheet drills beginners on the letter Lām, which sounds a lot like the English "L" sound.
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| 0.907546 | 285 | 3.625 | 4 |
We Die Alone recounts one of the most exciting escape stories to emerge from the challenges and miseries of World War II. In March 1943, a team of expatriate Norwegian commandos sailed from northern England for Nazi-occupied arctic Norway to organize and supply the Norwegian resistance. But they were betrayed and the Nazis ambushed them. Only one man survived--Jan Baalsrud. This is the incredible and gripping story of his escape.Frostbitten and snowblind, pursued by the Nazis, he dragged himself on until he reached a small arctic village. He was near death, delirious, and a virtual cripple. But the villagers, at mortal risk to themselves, were determined to save him, and--through impossible feats--they did.We Die Alone is an astonishing true story of heroism and endurance. Like Slavomir Rawicz's The Long Walk, it is also an unforgettable portrait of the determination of the human spirit.
Back to top
Rent We Die Alone 1st edition today, or search our site for other textbooks by David Howarth. Every textbook comes with a 21-day "Any Reason" guarantee. Published by Lyons Press.
Need help ASAP? We have you covered with 24/7 instant online tutoring. Connect with one of our tutors now.
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| 0.952678 | 266 | 2.546875 | 3 |
You are our 39269 visitor! Thanks for stopping by!
Pictou County Villages and Pictou Place Names and Their Origin
Abercrombie: 4 miles from New Glasgow, named after General James Abercrombie, a British General, who was connected with the 42nd or the first battalion of Royal Highlanders. He made several campaigns in Canada,, and was killed at Bunker Hill in 1775.
Alma: named in commemoration of the place where a great victory was won by the British and French over the Russians in the Crimean War in the year 1854.
Avondale: was known as Central Barney until July 2nd, 1869 when it was resolved at a public meeting to change the name to Avondale.
Barney River: There is a river and village of this name named after Barnabus, or Barney, McGee, who was the first settler in Merigomish. He moved to Barney River in the year 1776.
Blue Mountain: was named by W. Ross, who settled there in 1818.
Bridgeville: was two miles up the East River from Springville, and in 1878 a rich vein of iron yielding 65% pure iron was being worked there.
Caribou Harbour: This name is said to have arisen from some of the first settlers having seen a herd of caribou on the east point of what is now known as Big Island, but which was then a headland connected with the shore, and which was called Caribou Point. The old Indian name was "Komagunuk", meaning a decoy place where they set out duck decoys.
Dalhousie Mountain: first settled by Peter Arthur, a native of the Orkneys. Later in 1815 came a number of Lowland Scots. The first settlers had some difficulties about their titles, some speculators claiming them. Lt. Gov. Earl Dalhousie interfered and made satisfactory arrangements for the settlers, who in gratitude named the place for him.
Dayspring Lake: The children of the Presbyterian Churches in the Maritime Proovinces raised the money for a vessel to be used as a mission ship in the South Seas. A vessel was built in New Glasgow in 1863-64 and named the "Dayspring". The spars for the vessel were brought from the neighborhood of this lake, which for that reason was named after the vessel.
Durham: named after the Earl of Durham, Governor-General of Canada. The settlement was previously known as West River and the new name was suggested by William Graham. In 1883 Durham had a new school to replace the Theological Hall which had served as a school house since the school was burned.
East River: was called by the Indians "Duckland".
Egerton: a township of Pictou County. The county was subdivided in the year 1807 into three townships, Pictou, Egerton, and Maxwelton. Probably named after Francis Egerton, the third and last Duke of Bridgewater. He was a great projector of canals and was known as "The Father of British Inland Navigation".
Eureka: named after the Eureka Milling Company which was established there.
Ferrona: from "Ferra", (iron). Named by officers of the Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company, when the Company were manufacturing pig iron there.
Four, Six and Eight Mile Brook: were given these names because they were four, six and eight miles from the starting point of the old Cobequid Road to the point where they crossed the road.
Gairloch: In the year 1805 a vessel arrived with passengers from Gairloch, on the western coast of Ross-shire, Scotland. Three of them took up their lands at a brook which they named after their native parish in Scotland.
Garden of Eden: was nammed by William MacDonald, who came from Scotland and settled there.
Glengary: was known as the "Forks" of Middle River until 1865. It was probably named after the famous Glen in Invernesshire.
Green Hill: The old Indian name was "Espakumegek", meaning "High Land".
Haliburton: named in honor of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a native of Nova Scotia, who wrote extensively and well of Nova Scotia, and was a member of the Nova Scotia Legislature and a judge. He was the creator of "Sam Slick", the clockmaker.
Hopewell: received its name from the ship which brought Alexander McNutt and his Ulster settlers to Colchester County in 1761.
Loch Broom: so named because of the resemblance from its harbour approaches to Loch Broom in Invernesshire, Scotland. First settled by Alexander Cameron in or about 1773.
Lorne: was named in 1878 in honour of Governor-General, Marquis of Lorne, who was married to Princess Louise, Queen Victoria's daughter. The settlement had formerly been known as Big Brook, West Branch of East River.
Lyon's Brook: was named after Rev. James Lyons, one of the Philadelphia emigrants, who arrived on the brig "HOPE" in 1767. By an act of Parliament in 1903 it was enacted that Logan's Tannery, Scotch Hill and Lyons Brook be thereafter known as Lyons Brook. In 1893 Logan's Tannery employed 60 persons and turned out leather by the ton each week. Other industries were W. McKean's blacksmith shop, Alfred Hogg's carriage factory, Robert Leithead's shoemaker's shop and Charles Hogg, Capt. T. O'Brien and Dougald Logan, Postmaster, kept merchandise. There were two teachers, W. O. Creighton, who had 40 pupils, and Isaac Grant, who had 30. Mr. Creighton also taught an agriculture class every Thursday night.
Merigomish: Micmac "Mallegomichk". At one time called "Malegonish". The MicMac word means "Hardwood Grove". First settled by Barnabus McGee, a native of the north of Ireland who emigrated to Pennsylvania or Maryland and from there to Merigomish in the year 1776. One version means Five Bays.
Mill Brook: was first settled by John and Thomas Fraser in the year 1800. They built a mill there in 1808, hence the name. It was earlier known as Bear Brook, owing to their having trapped a large bear there on their first visit to the Brook.
Millstream: about a mile from Springville, on the road leading to Hopewell. In 1878 was one of the best mill sites in the county, with a large sawmill, a grain mill and a furniture factory.
McLellan's Mountain: received its name from John McLellan, the first settler at the mouth of the brook that flows past the base of the mountain. Here was organized the first Presbyterian church in Nova Scotia.
New Glasgow: Settled in 1809, named by early Scotch settlers after the city of Glasgow in Scotland. Mr. James Carmichael, who built the first house here, is said to have the credit of selecting the site for a town and New Glasgow for its name. The first grant of land was for 500 acres to John MacKenzie in 1809.
Northumberland Strait: There was a ship named the "Northumberland" lost in this strait in the year 1747 and the name may have come in this manner. The Strait, or at least part of it, was named "St. Lunaire" by Cartier. Its southern end was at one time called the "Red Sea".
Pictou Island, 1809:To the Surveyor General of the King's Woods for the Province of Nova Scotia and all other his majestys territories in America or to his lawful deputy for the time being..
Whereas His Excellency Sir George Prevost Bart, L.L.D., Governor and Commander in Chief of said Province did by his warrant direct me to lay out unto Sir Alexander F. Cochrane Bart, a certain island commonly called and known by the name of Pictou Island situated lying and being in the Streights of Northumberlland in the district of Pictou and County of Halifax and containing two thousand nine hundred acres according to the annexed plan and in conformity to his Majesty's instructions I do hereby make this report in order to obtain a certificate that the aforesaid described tract is not comprised in any reservation made for the use of the crown.
Given under my hand the 17th day of October 1809 and in the 49th year of his majestys reign. Charles Morris, Sur. Gen.
Piedmont: was named by Rev. Dugald McKeichan, the first minister of Barney's River, from its position at the foot of the range of hills. "Pied" frm "Pes", latin for 'foot". It was first settled in 1810-15 by Scotchmen from Perthshire and Blair Athole.
Plymouth: The places on the East River, opposite Stellarton, hitherto known as Churchtown and Irishtown, are to be called Plymouth. 1873.
River John:Town Officers, River John 1797
Chris. Jean Perin --- overseer of roads.
Geo. Bigany --- overseer of fisheries.
Geo. Mattatal --- assessor.
John Simpson --- constable.
Jas. Gratto --- overseer of fences and thistles. River John --- 1842: The settlement of River John, second or third in point of size and population in the county, has, until this three or four years back, been one of the most prosperous places in the county. About that period there used to be a great deal of lumbering and shipbuilding carried on. Ministers were hired to preach the gospel regularly, and several places of worship were erected. The Old Presbyterian Meeting House was, at that time, too small for the congregation and a new one was built but never finished. An English chapel was also built. But from the building of these places of worship, River John has to date its decline and fall they both stand yet as they have stood for years in anything but a state of completion and the place intended for the Episcopalians has, until lately, been used as a carpenters shop, and a shed for cattle. There are, besides these places of worship, a Methodist, a Baptist, and a few miles out a Catholic Chapel. The school house is also unoccupied. The answer to these conditions is that times are so bad that we can't afford to pay for preaching and teaching. Signed: A Spectator.
Riverton: In 1877 byy a two-thirds majority of the inhabitants of Fishpoolls, East River, the name of that place was changed to Riverton. This name applied only to the west side of the river.
Scotsburn: is in future to be the designation of that part of Rogers Hill north of Fitzpatrick Mountain. 1867.
Springville: was settled about 1780 by John Fraser and others. An extremely large stream which issued from the foot of a hill there suggested the name. In 1878 it was descriibed as being about 10 miles above New Glasgow and had two stores, a church, a school house and a Temperance Hall, lodge of Oddfellows and Sons of Temperance. On January 1, 1880, the new bridge was open for traffic. This bridge was built of old discarded rails of the Intercolonial Railway and was said to be the second bridge in Canada to be in like style.
Thorburn: 5 miles from New Glasgow. Formerly known as the Vale Collierly, it was given its present name in 1886. The name was made up of "Thor" for the Scandinavian god of thunder. and "burn", the Scotch and northern English name for brook or small river.
Toney River: was named in honour of Capt. Toney, a Frenchman who was a great chief among the MicMac Indians. He is said to have made a treaty of peace with the English in 1761. The old MicMac name "Booktowtagun", meaning "spark of fire", or "flint", literally the place where flint stone is found.
Trenton: the birthplace of steel in Canada. Called after the capital of New Jersey. In October 1882 Mr. Harvey Graham proposed the name Trenton for the new town being laid out by him at Smelt Brook. The streets of the town were to be named after the trees of the forest annd a new school house opened early in 1884.
Waterville: The east side of the upper part of West Branch of East River was named Waterville in 1864.
This information was compiled by Morgan Robertson. The source for this information was "The Pictou Book", written by George McLaren.
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In This Issue
- Confirming the Global Extinction Crisis
- New Publications
- Information Highway Hi-Lites
- Current Literature
The global extinction crisis is as bad or worse than believed, with dramatic declines in populations of many species, including reptiles and primates, according to the 2000 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Since the last assessment in 1996, critically endangered primates increased from 13 to 19, and the number of threatened albatross species has increased from three to 16 due to long-line fisheries. Freshwater turtles, heavily exploited for food and medicinal use in Asia, went from 10 to 24 critically endangered species in just four years. These are among the alarming facts announced by the world's largest international conservation organization, with the publication of the Red List, the most authoritative and comprehensive status assessment of global biodiversity.
"The fact that the number of critically endangered species has increased - mammals from 169 to 180; birds from 168 to 182, was a jolting surprise, even to those already familiar with today's increasing threats to biodiversity. These findings should be taken very seriously by the global community," says Maritta von Bieberstein Koch-Weser, IUCN's Director General.
Human and financial resources must be mobilized at between 10 and 100 times the current level to address this crisis, the Red List analysis report says. IUCN should join forces with a wide range of partners, continue to develop strong relationships with governments and local communities, and engage the private sector at a new level, it adds.
A total of 11,046 species of plants and animals are threatened, facing a high risk of extinction in the near future, in almost all cases as a result of human activities. This includes 24 percent (one in four) of mammal species and 12 percent (one in eight) of bird species. The total number of threatened animal species has increased from 5,205 to 5,435. Indonesia, India, Brazil and China are among the countries with the most threatened mammals and birds, while plant species are declining rapidly in South and Central America, Central and West Africa, and Southeast Asia.
Habitat loss and degradation affect 89 percent of all threatened birds, 83 percent of mammals, and 91 percent of threatened plants assessed. Habitats with the highest number of threatened mammals and birds are lowland and mountain tropical rainforest. Freshwater habitats are extremely vulnerable with many threatened fish, reptile, amphibian and invertebrate species.
For the IUCN Red List system, scientific criteria are used to classify species into one of eight categories: Extinct, Extinct in the Wild, Critically Endangered, Endangered, Vulnerable, Lower Risk, Data Deficient and Not Evaluated. A species is classed as threatened if it falls in the Critically Endangered, Endangered or Vulnerable categories.
While the overall percentage of threatened mammals and birds has not greatly changed in four years, the magnitude of risk, shown by movements to the higher risk categories, has increased. The 1996 IUCN Red List of Threatened Animals included 169 Critically Endangered and 315 Endangered mammals; the 2000 analysis now lists 180 Critically Endangered and 340 Endangered mammals. For birds, there is an increase from 168 to 182 Critically Endangered and from 235 to 321 Endangered species.
In the last 500 years, human activity has forced 816 species to extinction (or extinction in the wild). The increase in known bird extinctions is partly due to improved documentation and new knowledge, but 103 extinctions have occurred since 1800, indicating an extinction rate 50 times greater than the natural rate. Many species are lost before they are even discovered.
A total of 18,276 species and subspecies are included in the 2000 Red List. Approximately 25 percent of reptiles, 20 percent of amphibians and 30 percent of fishes (mainly freshwater) so far assessed are listed as threatened. Since only a small proportion of these groups has been assessed, the percentage of threatened species could be much higher.
A total of 5,611 threatened plants are listed, but as only approximately 4 percent of the world's described plants have been evaluated, the true percentage of threatened plant species is much higher. With 16 percent of conifers (the most comprehensively assessed plant group), known to be threatened, the scale of threat for plants may be similar to that for some of the animals.
As well as classifying species according to their extinction risk, the Red List provides information on species range, population trends, main habitats, major threats and conservation measures, both already in place, and those needed. It allows better insight than ever before into the processes driving extinction. The 2000 Red List provides the basic knowledge about the status of biodiversity that can be used by conservation planners and decision-makers around the world to establish priorities and take the necessary action. The 2000 IUCN Red List has been produced for the first time on CD-ROM and is searchable on its website at http://www.redlist.org.
Turtle Conservation, edited by Michael W. Klemens with a foreword by Nat B. Frazer, provides a comprehensive analysis of threats to turtles and tortoises worldwide. Considering the most significant problems facing the group, Klemens and eighteen international experts on turtle biology and conservation chart successes and failures of past conservation programs, discuss the use of genetics and demography in turtle conservation, and propose more effective strategies that take into account chelonian biology as well as the economic and social situations that affect turtle conservation efforts. They review the outlook for marine, freshwater, semi-aquatic, and terrestrial species and propose that turtle and tortoise conservation efforts be integrated into more broadly focused land-use projects. Published by Smithsonian Institution Press, Tel: 1-800-782-4612. Available in hardcover: ISBN 1-56098-372-8; $35.00. 8 b&w photographs, 7 b&w illustrations. 344 pp.
Raptor Watch: A Global Directory of Raptor Migration Sites, compiled and edited by Jorje I. Zalles and Keith L. Bildstein, provides detailed accounts of 388 globally significant "watchsites" for raptors, including hawks, eagles, falcons, and owls. For each site, the contributors document raptor species, migration periods, protection status, land use, and monitoring activities. Organized by continent and illustrated with photographs and maps, Raptor Watch offers an accessible, thoroughly researched guide to the viewing opportunities and conservation efforts provided by raptor watchsites around the world. Published by Smithsonian Institution Press with BirdLife International and Hawk Mountain Society. To order, call 1-800-782-4612. Available in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and South America. Hardcover: ISBN 1-56098-817-7; $58.00. 20 b&w photographs, 38 line illustrations. 438 pp.
Ants: Standard Methods for Measuring and Monitoring Biodiversity, edited by Donat Agosti, Jonathan D. Major, Leeanne E. Alonso, and Ted R. Schultz with a foreword by Edward O. Wilson, covers aspects of ant ecology and taxonomy, species identification, specimen preparation, and sources of sampling equipment. This book provides the necessary foundation for readers from a wide range of backgrounds. It is indispensable not only to ant researchers but also to entomologists, conservationists, students, land managers, and others who assess biodiversity or environmental impacts. Published by Smithsonian Institution Press, Tel: 1-800-782-4612. Available in hardcover: ISBN 1-56098-858-4, $60.00; or paperback: ISBN 1-56098-885-1, $26.95. 11 b&w photographs, 33 b&w illustrations. 248 pp.
In Lichens, lichenologist William Purvis contends that understanding and maintaining lichen biodiversity may lead to the discovery of new medicines and increasingly precise monitoring of the environment's health. Explaining that lichens produce more than seven hundred chemical compounds, he details the unique symbiosis between fungal and photosynthetic partners, which has allowed them to colonize habitats where alone they would be rare or nonexistent. Lichens reveals the varied and intriguing world of organisms that are becoming key indicators of the earth's environmental health. Published by Smithsonian Institution Press, Tel: 1-800-782-4612. Available in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and South America. Paperback: ISBN 1-56098-879-7, $14.95. 158 color photographs. 112 pp.
In Snakes, Peter Stafford charts the biology and natural history of snakes, highlighting the variety and complexity of a group that includes almost three thousand living species. Snakes are described in terms of evolution, anatomy, locomotion, senses, prey, feeding, growth, and reproduction. Stafford also details the habitats, conservation status, markings, and unusual behaviors of individual species. Making the case for snakes as a valuable and ecologically important group, the book provides a comprehensive introduction to their diverse biology and fascinating behavior. Published by Smithsonian Institution Press, Tel: 1-800-782-4612. Available in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and South America. Paperback: ISBN 1-56098-997-1, $14.95. 136 color photographs. 112 pp.
The world is losing species and biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. The causes go deep and the losses are driven by a complex array of social, economic, political and biological factors at different levels. Immediate causes such as over-harvesting, pollution and habitat change have been well studied. But the socioeconomic factors driving people to degrade their environment are less well understood. In Root Causes of Biodiversity Loss (edited by Johanna Mang, Alexander Wood and Pamela Stedman-Edwards), the underlying causes are examined. The book provides analyses of a range of case studies from Brazil, Cameroon, China, Danube River Basin, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Tanzania and Vietnam, and integrates them into a new and interdisciplinary framework for understanding what is happening. From these results, the editors are able to derive policy conclusions and recommendations for operational and institutional approaches to address the ‘root causes’ and reverse the current trends. Published by Earthscan Publications, 120 Pentonville Rd, London N1 9JN, UK, <http://www.earthscan.co.uk>. Available in paperback, ISBN:1853836990, £17.95; 304 pages.
Although more and more land and water surface is under some form of protection, many vital ecosystems are under-represented, and traditional conservation methods are often quite ineffective. New approaches are urgently needed. Edited by Sue Stolton and Nigel Dudley, Partnerships for Protection examines how improvements can be made. Itself the result of a collaborative project between IUCN The World Conservation Union (through its World Commission on Protected Areas) and the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF), the book sets out ways to safeguard all the major ecosystems and explores innovative management partnerships involving individuals, communities, companies and governments. It draws attention to the importance of building collaboration among those with a stake in the resources, and an incentive to protect them. Published by Earthscan Publications, 120 Pentonville Rd, London N1 9JN, UK, <http://www.earthscan.co.uk>. Available in hardback, ISBN:1853836141, £45.00; and paperback ISBN:1853836095, £18.95; 288 pages.
New from Earthscan Publications is Endangered Species, Threatened Convention, edited by Jon Hutton and Barnabas Dickson. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) is the best known and most controversial of international conservation treaties. Since it came into force 25 years ago, debate has raged over its most basic assumptions. CITES treats the international trade in wildlife as the most important threat to the continued existence of wild species. It offers a prescription of trade bans and restrictions for endangered species. However, it is now generally acknowledged that for most species habitat loss is a much more significant threat. Some argue that the CITES remedy actually exacerbates the problem by removing the incentive to conserve wildlife habitat. This collection of essays, the first of its kind, charts the controversies and changes within CITES. It provides case studies of the way CITES has dealt with particular species and notes the growing role of the South in shaping the direction of the treaty. It considers the role of sustainable use, the precautionary principle and unilateralism within CITES. Finally, it examines options for the future of CITES. Implicit within a number of the contributions is the recognition that questions of wildlife conservation cannot be divorced from wider issues of land use, development and social justice. Earthscan Publications, 120 Pentonville Rd, London N1 9JN, UK, <http://www.earthscan.co.uk>. Available in hardback ISBN:1853836672, £35.00; paperback ISBN:1853836362, £14.95; 224 pages.
World Book, Inc. offers an educational resource focusing on species extinctions: The Problem of Species Extinction <http://www.worldbook.com/fun/wbla/earth/html/ed03.htm>. Designed for the educated public or the college classroom, the text is authored by some of the leading environmental scientists in the world: Drs. Peter Raven, Thomas Lovejoy, Norman Myers, and Stuart Pimm, among others. In addition to the five main chapters, the resource also includes classroom activities and a quiz to test newly acquired knowledge.
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Animal-Assisted Therapy (AAT) or Pet Therapy is a supportive goal-oriented intervention which is mainly result from human and animal interaction. - In this treatment process, a health professional/patients’ doctor have to determine which animal model should be accompanied with a specific clinical goal. This interventions can be followed by physical therapists, neurologist, psychiatrist, veterinary public health specialists, psychologist, occupational therapists, provided that they have taken a certification in AAT. In addition, all therapy processes should be followed by patients’ doctor according to the suggestions of AAT specialist.
Although there are so many approach about the effect mechanism of AAT, it is known that the human and animal interaction is the basis for all of them. The positive-constructive bond result from between human and animal interaction is the key point to initiate the effect mechanism of AAT. This curative effect starts to work four basic mechanism including psychological stimulation, emotional, playing, and physical according to the Ballarini. However all of these mechanisms are different therapy ways, they can become interpenetrate with each others. The important point is that, it is supposed that the psychosomatic effects which give rise to curative features of AAT occurs when these mechanisms start to work. All of the mechanism together revealed that psychosomatic effects of human-animal bond and interaction in people taking an AAT and AAA. ,
Lafrance et al., reported that patients’ social and verbal behaviors have been improved in a presence of a therapy dog. Nathans et al., revealed that Animal Assisted Therapy can be used for improving anhedonia in patients with schizophrenia. In addition, they have found that AAT can be beneficial for rehabilitation of life quality and psycho-social behaviors. Different researchers have reported that AAT should be considered planning of the treatment of individual with dementia. , -
The interaction between an animal and human result in an increase neurochemicals initiating a decrease in blood pressure and relaxation. This relationship may be beneficial for ameliorating agitate behavior and psychological symptoms of dementia. In another study, it has been reported that aquarium assisted therapy may be beneficial for increasing eating behavior of aged people living in a nursing home. Richeson revealed that AAT can be increase social interactions by initiating decrease the agitate behaviors of patients with dementia. Kongable et al., observed that a therapy dog increased patients’ some social behaviors such as smile, laugh, look, touch, verbalization.
In aged people, AAT are used for ameliorating agitate behaviors, psychological, occupational, social and physical disorders especially in Alzheimer and Dementia. - People with Alzheimer may have an easier time decoding the simple repetitive, non-verbal actions of a dog. Animals can act as transitional objects, allowing people to first establish a bond with them and then extend this bond to people. Most of the study results revealed that AAT especially dog therapy had an “calming effect” on the patients with dementia and Alzheimer disease. - , This effect can be helpful as a communication link during therapy sessions and also decrease agitation behaviors. It is well known that incidence of aggression, agitation, social withdrawal, depression, and psychotic disorders are growing problems in Alzheimer disease for special care units, staff and family members of patients. Furthermore, environmental factors in nursing home or other health care units have been become increasingly forcible barrier for therapy of Alzheimer disease. In this conditions, AAT and other animal activities may be helpful to cope with these difficulties by presenting a different aspect.
AAT should be more commonly used in the world through increasing awareness of public health services about beneficials of companion animal and activities. Especially, AAT can be used for improving health disorders of aged people with physical-mental and social disabilities such as Alzheimer, dementia, aphasia, anxiety, depression, stres, schizophrenia, and feeling of loneliness, quality of life. An aquarium assisted therapy may be a good starting point to learn about benefits and facilities of AAT in developing countries like Turkey which have more lower the socio-economic groups than the developed countries.
Main principle of AAT is based on using psychosomatic effects, which appear as results of biological-physical-chemical changes during human and animal interactions. Feeding animals or being together with animals cause these effects to appear, and play an important role in recovery of mental, social and physical health. The strength of bonding between humans and animals has been revealed in a survey study, which is conducted on 14 veterinarians and 117 patients in Ontario. In the study, patients, whose pets are died, have received a survey to define causes and effects of their worries by a phone call or e-mail. Of 30% of participants has been observed to have severe worries. This strong bonding between humans and animals can also affect physical and mental health, and sometimes death or loss of an animal can be so effective that it can change a subject’s life. Dog, horse and dolphin are the most commonly preferred animal species in animal assisted therapy.
There are also studies indicating that keeping an animal has positive effects on the community health. Heady et. al. reported that AAT caused decreasing national health costs. Governments have been recently realized the significance of interaction between humans and animals as well as the contributions into human health, life quality and economy. Many countries have passed laws, which are a new understanding to allow keeping animals in apartments for rent, so as to support pet owners. Positive measures are taken in many European countries to keep pets in houses by laws. AAT is to benefit from animal companionship during a targeted therapy in order to facilitate achievement of optimum results in patients, and to support the therapy. It provides very positive effects like providing adaptations of subjects to stressful situations and hospital environments; decreasing anxiety, stress, pain and blood pressure; increasing mobility and muscle activity. It has been shown that guiding animals increase physical activity, help in prevention of some moods like loneliness and depression, improve daily life activities and provide a social support by increasing the life quality. -
2. Benefits of animal companionship for therapy from past to present
Close relationships between humans and animals are way back to the prehistoric ages. By using DNA techniques, it has been demonstrated that dogs might have been domesticated 100,000 years ago. Animals have been used to improve emotional and functional conditions of humans since ancient Greeks. Ancient Greeks have used dog drawings in their therapeutic temples, and they have provided melancholic people to ride on horses so as to get rid of their diseased souls. These applications have been used later also by Romans. A dog showing the way to a blind man is drawn on armor in Pompeii historical ruins.
The first studies, which have shown animal assistance in therapy, were performed to recover behaviors of mentally ill people in 1792 in York Retreat in United Kingdom by using farm animals. Florence Nightingale defined the significance of assisting animals for therapy as: “Especially during treatment of a patient with a chronic illness, a small pet is a perfect friend for the patient”.
Dogs were used in rehabilitation after the World War I, in the first half of the 20th century. To improve moods of American army officers, who experienced depression related to the war, dogs were given to them to keep in company. In the same period, thousands of dogs were trained under a program to support blinded soldiers in Germany. In 1931, “Guiding Dogs Society” was established for blind people. Currently, dogs are being trained in order to support people with hearing problems; to alert people with seizures before the symptoms are started; and to support people with severe physical problems.
Similar applications have been widely spread all over the world, so they have helped thousands of people with disabilities to live freely. Lane et. al. have reported that this ability of dogs was very amazing, and this social support that they have provided for people they have accompanied was very significant.
Since 1980s, animal assisted therapies, which have been performed by planning and an experienced team, have been shown to improve social functions and to be beneficial especially in elderly people, so studies about this issue have been supported. - Therefore, when it was 1990s, study results of many articles are published from different populations. , , - Sable explained in the manuscript how, especially dogs and cats, could contribute into well being of family members, with whom they lived all their lives, emotionally and socially.
As mentioned before, the first scientific studies indicating effects of human and animal interactions have been conducted in the second half of 20th century. UK originated Society for Companion Animal Studies (SCAS) is established in 1979, whereas the international organization, named International Association of Human-Animal Interaction Organization (IAHAIO) is established in 1990. IAHAIO is an affiliation of the World Health Organization, and it functions as a conductor organ among non-governmental organizations and other affiliations. The most marked point in the studies belonging to 2000s is that animal assisted therapy has been used against specific diseases, and evaluation of human-animal interaction results. , , -
Current patient healthcare methods, which are developing and containing evidence based interventions, are faced with some problems. Along with conventional treatments, complementary and adjuvant treatments are also included in these methods. Animal assisted therapy (AAT) is discussed as a supportive treatment approach with positive effects on life quality and health.
3. Action mechanism in animal assisted therapies
Gagnon et. al. defined animal assisted therapy as a clinical intervention method, which has aimed to establish natural and improving bonding between humans and animals, and is applied for both preventive and therapeutic requirements. Animal assisted therapy (AAT) can be applied through different action mechanisms in respect with the disease type and individual characteristics. Five factors directing the mechanism are psychological impulse, emotional, physical and playing mechanisms. Although these mechanisms are defined separately, they cannot be considered independent from each other for functioning and developing of psychosomatic effects. The most important point in the treatment is human-animal interaction. This interaction constitutes a strong emotional background. It has been reported result benefits would depend on the strength of the emotional interactions.
In another words, confident, positive and sedative bonding between a human and an animal can trigger beneficial mechanisms by affecting secretions of adrenaline (epinephrine) and other corticosteroid hormones or stress hormones (like cortisol etc.); decreasing arterial blood pressure, cardiac and respiratory rates. Emotional, psychological impulse, playing and physical mechanisms used in AAT applications cause psychosomatic effects.
Understanding of “play” principle is quite important in animal assisted therapy. Ballarini reported that activities like “entertainment” and especially “laughing” are parts of the bonding between humans and animals. When an ill person plays with a cat or laughs at a dog’s behavior, an increase in the healing potential of that illness is initiated. As playing increases mobility, it is a good physical activity source. Haubenhofer and Kirchengast measured cortisol levels in saliva of dogs, which were involved in animal assisted interventions and therapies to investigate their physiological reactions. Cortisol levels, which were monitored during therapy sessions in the earlier time periods of day, were reported to be higher than those measured after the therapy and in the control periods. The study results showed that therapeutic work was physiologically activating for the dogs. At this point, it may be considered that these physiologically changes occurred in dogs can result in positive reactions in humans during animal assisted therapies and activities. But, further research is needed to indicate whether these positive effects related to the animal assisted therapies or not.
We have already mentioned that action mechanism of AAT is based on positive-healing bonding, which has occurred by human-animal interaction, and psychological, emotional, playing and physical mechanisms, which have caused physical and biochemical reactions by activation of this bonding. , Key structures activating these mechanisms in patients should be structured according to mainly four theories. These are touching, biophilia hypothesis, learning and cognitive theories. In animal assisted therapy applications, all types of applications, which are performed according to these four theories, can provide various benefits.
Touching theory provides a special and continuous bonding between patient and animal at the first contact. The aim of this bonding is generally due to searching for closeness and tendency to preserve this closeness instinctively. It is normal that such a bonding occurs between an Alzheimer patient and a therapy dog. Because, may be, this is the first time that the patient has met another living organism without any prejudice, without verbal communication and agitated behaviors, and which has accepted him/her as he/she is. In this situation, patient firstly feels comfortable, and a trained dog will allow the patient to direct to itself first by expanding its limits, and allow the patient to touch it. Generally this initial contact in therapies is started with patient directing to the dog and touching it. During therapy period in this comfortable- caring treatment environment, many supportive benefits for clinical treatment compliance (being the leading one), relatives of patients, and healthcare personnel have been achieved.
Another important concept in therapies is biophilia hypothesis. As it has been mentioned in this review before, this concept defends that there is an instinctive, strong bonding between humans and all other living organisms, and both sides are in need of his strong bonding in order to survive. According to biophilia concept (short definition may be enthusiasm for life) human beings get in contact with the environment and all living creatures around genetically due to the human nature. This symbiotic relationship was started in the past, and continued in the present by contacting and keeping dogs, cats (the leading animals), other farm animals. As feeling of ownership has affected humans negatively in time, animals have been the mainly damaged side of this relationship. Especially animals, which we are calling currently domesticated, have moved away from their natural environments, and instead of living with humans, or accompanying humans, they have got under protection of humans. All other living creatures that human being as not felt close to himself, or could not domesticate or has not get under protection have remained as “Undomesticated-Wild”. The reasons why we mention these philosophical approaches is the context of animal assisted therapies especially ethically, are applications, which are performed with animal companionship, and we would very much emphasize to use “living with the company of animals” term rather than “pet ownership” or “keeping an animal”. Thus, “living with the company of animals” will be developed. May be this approach will help to develop the awareness of “living with somebody/living creature that is ill” rather than “having an ill relative”. Then, experiencing the pure form of animal-human interaction at the beginning, and providing patient and his/her relatives to share this humane environment may reveal many positive effects, which we have not known or defined yet.
Learning theory, which is a model in psychology, defends that human beings give various responses to his/her surroundings by the learning principle. In AAT, the learning principle of the patient is triggered in a more human way; so a patient with Alzheimer´s disease can show some behaviors that he or she has started to forget, without the degree of forgetting, in the same way again, or can show some behaviors for longer times without forgetting. For example, while feeding fish in the aquarium, their eating desire may be increased or they remember eating behavior and eat some food; while feeding a dog, they may start to use hand skills, so that these will help them to improve slightly their daily life activities etc. This interaction with animals may be perceived as a more human approach than verbal reminding of healthcare personnel and/or patient’s relatives or verbal commands of caregivers what to do. While healthcare personnel and/or patient caregivers can be under intensive stress and may unintentionally pronounce these commands at higher and sharp voice tones, and they may even say/behave in agitated ways for patients. Therefore, animal assisted therapies and activities can be a good supportive way in long term therapy and care for individuals with chronic diseases like Alzheimer´s disease. Cognitive theory, which is another model in psychology, tries to explain human behaviors by investigating how human beings gain, process, and store the knowledge. Main headings in cognitive approach, which investigates perception of knowledge, processing of knowledge, and switching into behaviors, are perception language, attention, memory, problem solving, decision making-judging and intelligence.
As animals do not have any expectations and demands from humans at their first contacts, patients feel self-confidence, and they may feel that everything is under their controls. Therefore, animals do not react like us when they meet a healthy or ill person. We, humans, tend to perceive, remember, shape up, judge with the previously learned concepts, and even show verbal-physical behaviors, when we first meet a healthy or ill person or any living being. This situation is quickly sensed and perceived by the opposite side. When a dog meets a blind, limb or amnestic person in the street, it will behave as if it has met a healthy individual. However, when we meet people with health problems in the street, we define them as “he has got no arm!”, “he is blind!”, “Is he a lunatic?”, “ill person”, and we imply our thoughts sometimes with words or sometimes with our behaviors. Due to these reasons, animal assisted therapies naturally eradicate negative conditions like these, and they provide a more humane surrounding for therapies of subjects with chronic diseases; they support them; they increase adaptation potentials of patients and their relatives to difficult therapy periods, and they improve their life qualities. After all, we should remembered that the aforementioned paragraphs are theoretical concepts which try to comprise biology, sociology, psychology and philosophy to explain some of the effects AAT on humans in general, not only for patients with Alzheimer´s disease.
4. Fields of Animal Assisted Therapies (AAT)
According to medical studies and field screenings, it is evident that AAT has relaxing and supportive effects on humans. Recoveries obtained in some diseases through these positive interactions are listed in Table 1. , - , ,
This supportive therapy with various services is being provided to more than 35000 patients in more than 100 healthcare service units in San Francisco. Subjects mainly benefited from these services are as follows: Children treated in pediatric clinic; AIDS patients; patients, who require acute care and physical rehabilitation services; children with conduct disorder and physical problems; subjects staying at hospitals (patients, their relatives and hospital personnel), patients with mental diseases. Public health organizations currently provide various services with dogs suitable for therapies. Samples for some application fields of AAT are given in Table 2 regarding human health improvement and development. ,
As Ballarini has mentioned, AAT is no longer a mysterious application, but currently it has become a treatment option, which is applied for supportive aims, and has resulted in positive outcomes in many diseases. In recent years, AAT has gained more attention all over the world, and it is being preferred as a complimentary and supportive method to improve life quality and health in some therapies, during which various problems have arisen. , , Therefore, many studies have been performed to establish its scientific background, and different AAT models are being developed. Dolphin assisted therapy is one of these, and it is employed as an adjunctive method in various diseases (Table 3). , During therapies, it has been observed that dolphins have tried to communicate with ill subjects by increasing their sound levels.
5. AAT use in some chronic diseases
Since Alzheimer´s disease is generally observed in elderly people, it may be concomitant with some other chronic diseases. Among these diseases, cardiovascular diseases are the leading ones. Conducted studies have indicated that systolic blood pressure and plasma triglyceride levels are lower in pet owner subjects when compared with the non-owners. In Odendaal’s study, neurochemicals (β-endorphin, oxytocin, prolactin, phenylacetic acid, dopamine, cortisol) related to drop down of blood pressure were evaluated between 18 subjects and 18 dogs before and after the positive interactions. Statistically significant data (p<0.05) have indicated that neurochemicals related to blood pressure are increased in both groups and attention behavior function is increased after AAT except cortisol (cortisol was low significantly in humans, but this decrease was not found to be significantly in dogs. It has been reported in studies of another chronic disease, namely cancer, that AAT had positive effects both on patients and their relatives. , , The positive effects are reported as decreased stress and anxiety; compliance with treatment and improvement in adaptation; relaxation; better nutrition; physical activity; socialization; participitating in new activities; verbalization of fright and concerns; decreased nervousness; increased feeling of happiness; thus improvement in life quality. ,
Similar results have been obtained in studies performed on disabled subjects. - Especially achieved improvements were increased non-verbal interactions, physical activities, and daily life activities leading to increased life quality. Although these studies have been performed commonly in children with widespread developmental disorders, it should also be considered that Alzheimer patients may have various disabilities, which would lower their life quality, so their daily life activities may be limited according to the stage and severity of disease. When evaluated in this aspect, animal assisted therapies will provide significant benefits.
In a study performed on AIDS patients, it has been reported that cat assisted therapy has supported patients’ communications with their families and friends, and has provided prevention from the feeling of loneliness.
6. Psychological and psychiatric diseases
Animal assisted therapies are especially employed in hospitalized children and Alzheimer patients to decrease stress. Animal companionship is employed in anxiety, refusal of therapy, refusal of eating and decreasing other agitated behaviors, treatments of various psychological and psychiatric disorders o provide treatment compliance and to increase the life quality. Patients, who are hospitalized in rehabilitation centers are scheduled for weekly or monthly therapy programs with trained animals, so physical, emotional, social and cognitive benefit of AAT are used. It has been reported that blood pressure and cardiac rate are decreased, cortisol (stress hormone) is markedly decreased, and pain sensation is decreased.
|Reference||Patients, study group||Pet therapy model||Results|
|Macauley BL, 2006||Three men with aphasia from left-hemisphare strokes and during AAT therapy with a 8 year old neutered male Newfoundland dog participated into the study.||Dog therapy||Dog may act as an excellent catalyst to motivate the client to talk and provide an atmosphere of unconditional acceptance for the speech disorders and brain injuries.|
|LaFrance C et al, 2007||A 61-year old male with non-fluent aphasia and a left cerebral vascular accident. A therapy dog was 5 year old tetriever.||Dog therapy||In condition with the dog and dog handler, it was found that both social verbal and non-verbal behaviors markedly increased in patient.|
|Nathans-Barel I et al, 2005||Patients with hedonic tone of 10 chronic schizophrenia participated in 10 weekly sessions of AAT was compared to control group treated without animal.||Dog therapy||In AAT group, significant improvements of hedonic tone compared to control. It was observed that an increasing in use of leisure time and motivation.|
|Richeson N, 2003||15 nursing home residents with dementia participated in a daily AAT for three weeks.||Dog therapy||Significant decrease in agitated behaviors and statistically significant increase in social interaction.|
|Kovács Z, 2004||Seven schizophrenic patients living in a social institute participated into the study for 9 month treatment period. Each weekly therapeutic session was 50 min.||Dog therapy||AAT was found to be helpful in daily life activities and rehabilitation of schizophrenic patients.|
Significant improvement in domestic and health activities.
Nathan reported from his study that animal assisted therapy improved anhedonia in chronic schizophrenia patients. Anhedonia is one of the negative symptoms of dementia, and it is the main phenomenon related to poor social functionality and development of treatment resistance. In an active study performed with dogs, significant improvement has been observed in anhedonia in AAT group when compared with the controls. As a result of the study, it has been reported that animal assisted therapy might contribute in life quality and psychosocial rehabilitation of chronic schizophrenia patients.8
Antonioli and Reveley observed in their randomized, controlled study that depression symptoms were observed to be improved in the 2nd week of treatment in patients with mild-moderate depression. Antonioli responded the comment indicating that patient number was limited and study population was a specific group as this dolphin study has indicated that, according to “Biophilia” hypothesis, interaction between animals and humans could be beneficial in their natural environments. , “Biophilia” term is first defined by psychologist Erich, and is based on “affection level, which is required for mental health and emotional well-being”. Kellert and Wilson improved biophilia concept, and stated that human health and well-being were related to interactions with the natural environments.
7. How can a dog assisted therapy be beneficial for therapy in Alzheimer patients?
It may cause decreased agitation, improvement in the mood, and increased communication with the surrounding: Alzheimer patients may experience different clinical symptoms at different disease stages. Generally as the disease is progressed, they isolate themselves from their surroundings, family members, friends, healthcare personnel; they become quieter and less mobile. In this stage, an accompanying therapy dog may even become the only communication bridge to continue the interaction with their surroundings. Sometimes patients may end up the silence on a dog’s touch or behaviors; they may smile, talk a few words, and even they may be involved more with their surroundings.
Indoor and outdoor safety problems are most commonly encountered problems in some patients. With the accompanying well-trained dog, the patient can feel more secure. Since the dog can estimate behaviors of the patient, it may warn the patient and his /her relatives and/or healthcare personnel before and/or during the behaviors. A guiding dog may prevent the patient, who would like to leave his/her surrounding (home or nursery home) without informing anybody, from many dangers he/she would be confronted with. When the patient come to the top of the ladder, the dog may inform the patient about his/her position, how he/she should act or what he/she should do next by barking or behaving differently non-verbally without agitating the patient. It may protect the patient while crossing the street. The dog guiding a patient, who will forget the way home or the address of his/her home, can lead the patient home safely and in good health.
Aquarium assisted therapy studies have revealed that eating habits of Alzheimer patients are improved by feeding fish. Moreover aquarium assisted activities improve hand skills as well as they increase socialization of patients. Various mood disorders like nervousness, agitation, unhappiness, very quietness, and loneliness may be observed in subjects with dementia, who live in nursery homes. Aquariums at nursery homes may attract attention of subjects in these crowded environments, they may provide relaxation and happiness for them as well as they may help people live in more humane environments by decreasing work load and stress also for relatives of patients and healthcare personnel. Aquariums may help all individuals to share the same environment with the underwater creatures.
AAT is especially effective in elderly subjects with cognitive disorders like Alzheimer disease. Patients with dementia usually experience various degrees of agitation mainly in the evening. This situation, known as “sundowning”, is not only stressful for patients, but can also be challenging for the healthcare personnel. Even touching an animal may decrease anxiety during challenging evening hours, and increase calmness/well-being feelings.
It has been observed that responses have been achieved in patients with advanced dementia by animal assisted therapies. Some patients with dementia may develop better and easier communications with animals when compared with humans. A pet can listen to a patient with dementia without judging. In guiding dog visits in AAT program, dogs may allow patients to come near to them and play with them. It has been reported that dog assisted therapies may help these exercises to be happier and more motivating experiences in patients, who are recommended to take a walk. These patients are also reported to have improved life quality, and socialization desires when compared with patients, who have not kept or lived with animals.
A therapy dog provides the Alzheimer patient a unique communication and love bonding, which can be re-shaped according to the target whichever animal assisted therapy is required, and various physical, mental and social health benefits can be achieved. Fish, cat, dog, horse or tortoise may present human benefits, which we cannot presume for Alzheimer patients, and by supporting patients’ treatment compliances, they provide that patient relatives and healthcare personnel serve under more positive conditions. To provide the most benefit from AAT or AAA, in especially dog therapies, “resident” or “visiting” models can be used together for patients with dementia and Alzheimer´s disease. , , It is not clearly explored which therapy model more useful than the other one. In another review written by Williams and Jenkins reported that animal visitings to nursing-care units can provide various benefits including relaxation, improving of apathy and decreasing in agitation, aggression behavior and blood pressure for both patients and their caregivers, relatives. According to the Churchill et al., a therapy dog can reduce some agitation behaviors of Alzheimer patients with especially sundown syndrome, and also help increasing social behaviors and calm down.
Studies shown that environmental factors or changes in Alzheimer’s disease special care units can be effect on patients’ behavioral health outcomes including aggression, resident agitation, social withdrawal, depression, psychotic problems. , That is why, treatment procedures should be planned and managed considering a balanced combination of pharmacologic, behavioral and environmental options in order to improve health, behavior and quality of life of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. It is important that physicians who are playing a key role in recognizing problems and arranging suitable treatment for their patients should consider alternative treatment options based on social and recreational interventions including meditation, validation therapy, reality orientation, reminiscence therapy, sensory interventions (therapeutic touch and massage therapy, aromatherapy, music therapy, dance therapy, light therapy, multisensory stimulation therapy), social contact (animal-assisted therapy, simulated presence therapy), exercise, art therapy and Montessori-based activities. , In addition, most of the AAT studies have been focused on dog, cat and other small animal activities. It is not well-known that animal assisted therapies with farm animals may have positive effects on self-efficacy and coping ability among psychiatric patients.
As displayed on Table 5, AAT especially dog therapies can be used successively as a preventive and interventional method in patients with Alzheimers’ disease and dementia. Also, recent studies have shown that AAT may be beneficial to improve for various psychiatric diseases including Alzheimer, dementia, depression, anxiety, addiction, schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorder. -
According to the literature, number of studies recommending animal assisted therapies in clinical and social medicine practices in elderly people with dementia, Alzheimer´s disease, ability losses, mental health problems and conduct disorders, cognitive problems, physical and functional health problems have been increased rapidly. [1-3], Targeted acquisitions in AAT applications can be classified under five headings as social, psychological, training, physical and motivational. Moreover, what we expect from all applications in a patient with Alzheimer´s disease are mainly physiological improvements, better focusing on environment, enabling physical contact, interaction with surroundings, improvements in nutritional behaviors, socialization, acceptance, motivation, increased physical activity, stress, decreased mood disorders like depression, and agitation, enjoying, and decreased feeling of loneliness.
8. Risks of AAT and Their managements
In USA, 60% of the population has at least one pet at home. Patients and animals participating in AAT require special care for prevention of zoonotic diseases, hypersensitivity reactions and injuries during visits. Therefore, the maximum benefit obtained from this therapy method depends on the multidisciplinary team work of a veterinarian specialist, a veterinarian public health specialist, a medical doctor, and an experienced therapist. , Animal assisted therapy performed at treatment centers should always be performed following by a structured program, under the recommended guides, and targeted at the objectives of the program. Hamsworth and Pizer reported after they investigated studies, which evaluated interactions with animals, and risk factors for zoonosis in immunocomprimised children, and guidelines that information obtained from specialists were not adequately evidence-based. Keeping an animal is beneficial for prevention and development of emotional and physical health. However, guidelines are also required to conduct treatments.
Minimization of risks in such applications depends upon a careful planning with multidisciplinary approaches, written protocols, personnel training, documentation, and investigations. Veterinarian public health practices, which will be performed in this field, are important sources to keep risks endangering human and animal health at minimum levels. Especially veterinarians should choose the appropriate animal for therapy of each patient group according to temperament and behaviors of animals, perform the care for each animal, work for prevention of zoonotic diseases, and suggest an appropriate interaction model for the therapy. Infection controlling policies and regulations should be obeyed in treatment and prevention of zoonotic diseases, so that animal assisted therapies will be more widespread. If measures for risk prevention are taken, then AAT applications can be performed safely. ,
In studies, where risk analyses have been performed, people interacting with pets have been observed to have benefits for their health. It has been reported from regions, where risks were not significantly high, controlled environmental conditions are provided especially in Europe and North America, potential benefits are reported in treatments with animals kept at home or at hospitals. Guidelines have been developed to limit infection risk during applications and to perform safe treatments. -
In addition to guidelines used during treatments, supportive units have also been established. Animal Assisted Crisis Response (AACR) unit is one of these. This unit provides services in how to struggle with the impending crises for assigned healthcare personnel, consultants and other trainers during animal assisted therapies. Efficiency of these studies depends upon conductance of communication between the related units with a mutual language and a multidisciplinary approach. The most commonly encountered crises issues may be animal behavior, infection risk, and patient-trainer dispute.
Before starting animal assisted therapy and during its’ all procedures, it is always remembered that AAT should be performed according to the guidelines in order to prevent risks including adverse reactions of patients, animals, physicians, caregivers, nurses, health personnels, and also relatives of patients, infectious diseases, bitings, etc. it is well clearly explained that AAT should be arranged, managed and performed by a specialist team including patients’ physician, veterinary surgeon, psychologist, occupational therapist, expert caregivers, specialist nurses. Therefore, especially veterinary students should be trained about animal assisted therapies, activities and first of all human-animal bond during their undergraduate and postgraduate education. - At this point, according to the Timmins, a veterinary family practice conception can be helpful to understand and contribute human-animal bond from the theoretical framework into the practice for providing needs of patients.
During applications, issues like increased work intensity of the personnel, zoonotic diseases, comfort and care of animals are considered. These may be prevented by well-planned programming. Disease risk can be easily prevented by regular animal health controls, and follow up of individuals. In developing countries like Turkey, animal assisted therapy is not practiced as a specialty filed, yet. Only limited services can be provided according to positive outcomes of human-animal interactions. But recently, an international project (Animals in Therapy Education) have been implemented for 2 years among different institutions from Turkey, Italy and France with financial supporting by European Union LLP Grundtvig Program for aged people. This project intends to design a collection of best practices related to implementation of pet therapy on aged people. As a result of this project will also ease the transfer of pet therapy practices through the comparison and the evaluation of different solutions adopted in the countries involved among partners from Italy, France and Turkey.
In this present review, some information about what animal assisted therapies are, application fields, mechanism of action, sample applications for Alzheimer patients, and risk control in AAT, and some recommendations are suggested. It has been observed that this supportive therapeutic approach has been aimed at “complete well-being of individuals physically, socially and mentally as well as improvements of these well-being conditions”, which is always emphasized in public health aspect. However, there are still some questions without clear answers, such as AAT is also effective in group therapies as it has been in individualized therapy; how temperament and other features of assisting animal should be. Whatever types the program is, temperaments of all animals should be tested; they should be examined by a veterinarian; and listening-learning training should be performed with patients.
When AAT is practiced according to guidelines, appropriate ethical principles, then it will be an effective supportive treatment option for improvement of human health, life quality, and especially preservation of health state of individuals. However, as it has been undertaken in this present review, it is believed that studies related to animal assisted therapies are required also in our country to evaluate its efficacies in different patient groups correctly.
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Parameter Estimation and Inverse Problems, 2e provides geoscience students and professionals with answers to common questions like how one can derive a physical model from a finite set of observations containing errors, and how one may determine the quality of such a model. This book takes on these fundamental and challenging problems, introducing students and professionals to the broad range of approaches that lie in the realm of inverse theory. The authors present both the underlying theory and practical algorithms for solving inverse problems. The authors' treatment is appropriate for geoscience graduate students and advanced undergraduates with a basic working knowledge of calculus, linear algebra, and statistics.
Parameter Estimation and Inverse Problems, 2e introduces readers to both Classical and Bayesian approaches to linear and nonlinear problems with particular attention paid to computational, mathematical, and statistical issues related to their application to geophysical problems. The textbook includes Appendices covering essential linear algebra, statistics, and notation in the context of the subject. A companion website features computational examples (including all examples contained in the textbook) and useful subroutines using MATLAB.
- Includes appendices for review of needed concepts in linear, statistics, and vector calculus.
- Companion website contains comprehensive MATLAB code for all examples, which readers can reproduce, experiment with, and modify.
- Online instructor's guide helps professors teach, customize exercises, and select homework problems
- Accessible to students and professionals without a highly specialized mathematical background.
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1 Answer | Add Yours
Many critics argue that this novel is a perfect example of a modern-day Greek tragedy. It certainly has may of the various plot elements that we see in ancient tragedies. Okonkwo is a great example of the tragic hero, with plenty of hamartia or faults that bring his tragedy upon him. Some of his key traits are pride and impulsiveness, and it can be seen how these traits get him into trouble again and again, such as when he kills his kinsman in a fit of rage. His downfall is a direct result of his actions.
The way that this story is recast is of course due to the way that Achebe plants Okonkwo in a pre-colonial setting when white man is just about to arrive on the scene. He has worked so hard to gain status and power in his tribal setting, having started out with very little. Now, with the new order that is being ushered in, he stands to lose everything, and this is something that he cannot accept. What leads to Okonkwo's downfall ultimately is his fear that others will detect weakness within him, as it leads him to make various decisions cause him great sadness and regret in his life. Achebe therefore uses the elements of traditional Greek tragedy but gives them a modern-day spin by focusing on the way in which it can be applied to colonialism in Africa.
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- freely available
Remote Sensing 2012, 4(11), 3417-3426; doi:10.3390/rs4113417
Abstract: Tidal flats provide habitat for biodiversity, protection from storm surges and sea level rise, and a range of other ecosystem services. However, no simple method exists for mapping tidal flats over large (>1,000 km) extents, and consequently their global status and distribution remain poorly understood. Existing mapping methods are restricted to small areas with known tidal regimes because tidal flats are only fully exposed for a brief period around low tide. Here we present a method for mapping tidal flats over very large areas and demonstrate its utility by mapping the tidal flats of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea. We (i) generated tide height predictions at the acquisition time of all Landsat Archive images of our study area using a validated regional tide model, (ii) selected suitable images acquired in the upper and lower 10% of the tidal range, (iii) converted high and low tide images to a land and water class image derived from the Normalized Differenced Water Index (NDWI) and, (iv) subtracted the high tide classified image from the low tide classified image, resulting in delineation of the tidal flat. Using this method, we mapped the tidal flats for 86.8% of the study area coastline (13,800 km). A confusion matrix for error assessment indicated an accuracy of >85% for the resulting tidal flat map. Our method enables coastal morphology to be mapped and monitored at continental scales, providing critical data to inform coastal adaptation measures for sea level rise, for monitoring coastal habitat loss and for developing ecosystem-based coastal conservation measures.
Tidal flats, the area between marine and terrestrial environments, are critically important for supporting biodiversity and providing coastal ecosystem services (e.g., storm protection) [1,2]. Yet, despite an abundance of remote sensing projects that have focused on coastal areas [3–5], there is no global estimate of the extent of tidal flats and present knowledge of their overall distribution remains limited. This is primarily due to a deficiency of tidal flat mapping techniques suitable for use over very large areas. Due to human impacts and a range of other threats, tidal flats are rapidly changing and reliable knowledge of their status is urgently required [6,7].
Mapping tidal flats accurately is difficult because they are only exposed fully for a brief period at low tide, requiring precise timing of the acquisition of remotely sensed data. Specific applications of high precision mapping of tidal flats have been achieved in some countries using Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) from aircraft [4,8]. However, these methods are limited for application over continental scales because of rapidly changing tidal conditions and the high cost of airborne acquisitions [3,9].
Over larger areas, satellite sensors such as the Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM), Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+), MODIS and SPOT are regularly used to map the boundary between a water body and the exposed terrestrial surface, known as the waterline. A range of methods to establish the location of waterline have been developed, including manual digitization [10,11], edge detection , density slicing [9,13] and multi-band classification . By delineating the waterline at known tide heights, digital elevation models for the intertidal zone can be developed and tidal flats mapped to high accuracy . However, if the aim is to map the extent of tidal flats, these methods are only suitable for areas where there is tide height information for the precise time of data capture. Furthermore, by focusing only on the low-tide waterline they do not account for the location of the high-tide waterline, which is fundamental in determining the area of tidal flat. This is particularly important for continental scale mapping, where information on the location of the high-tide waterline is not readily available. Thus, to determine the distribution and extent of tidal flats at continental scales, mapping methods must be developed that can manage (a) the scarcity of observed tide height data and (b) variation in the position of the high-tide waterline.
Here we address this deficiency by developing a new methodology for mapping tidal flats suitable for application over continental or global scales. We use large-scale, freely available Landsat Archive imagery and tide predictions from validated regional tide models to map areas where there is no prior information on tide heights available. By considering only two classes (tidal flat and other) and incorporating information on high-tide waterlines, tidal flats are mapped rapidly and accurately at a continental scale. We demonstrate this method over ∼16,000 km of coastal East Asia, from southern China to the Republic of Korea, a region with some of the largest tidal flats globally .
Our study area comprised the coastline from the Vietnam-China border (21°32′N, 108°1′E) to the eastern Democratic People’s Republic of Korea-Republic of Korea border (38°36′N, 128°21′E).
2.1. Satellite Sensor and Image Selection
Metadata for all Landsat TM and ETM+ images available for the study area since 2000 were obtained (13,125 images) using the USGS Earth Explorer , which contained information on the geographic location, cloud cover and acquisition time and date. Knowledge of tide height is critical for mapping the extent of tidal flats, so we determined the tide height at image acquisition for all available images by generating tide predictions for a point 5 km from the coastline and nearest to the coastline mid-point of each image, allowing selection of images obtained at known tide heights (Figure 1). We used the Tide Model Driver and the Oregon State University Tidal Inversion Software to operate the China Seas tide model, which is a regionally validated tide model with an RMS misfit of <5 cm [16–18].
We obtained all images in the upper (high tide) and lower (low tide) 10% of the tidal range with a cloud coverage of <30% (1,040 images). From this image set, the final low-tide and high-tide images were selected according to the following selection criteria; (i) obtain the highest and lowest tide heights possible, (ii) minimize the period of time elapsed between capture of the high and low tide images, (iii) minimize coastal cloud cover and, (iv) use the most recent imagery available. The final set, covering the entire coastline of China and the Korean Peninsula, contained 78 images over 39 path/rows with a mean time difference between high and low tide images of 664 days (σ = 532 days).
2.2. Image Pre-processing
The final image set was pre-processed to at-surface reflectance by converting digital number values to at-sensor reflectance and then applying a dark pixel subtraction to account for atmospheric attenuation [19–21]. Georectification was not required as all images were processed to USGS level 1 terrain-corrected products (L1T), which was determined as an acceptable level of spatial accuracy for the aims of the study .
2.3. Tidal Flat Delineation
To map the tidal flat, which we defined as the area inundated between the low and high tide waterline, we developed a 2 phase process centered on differencing high and low tide TM and ETM+ images (Figure 2). The method was implemented in ArcGIS 10.0 using the Python programming language.
In the first phase, we generated a land and water class image using the Normalized Differenced Water Index (NDWI) . The NDWI is widely used to delineate open water features from terrestrial environments [24,25] and as it includes the Near Infrared (NIR) and a visible band, is suitable for delineating the waterline in tidal habitats . We calculated NDWI for each pixel with the following formula:
In the second phase we subtracted the high tide water class from the low tide water class, enabling the area that changed between high and low tide to be identified; the tidal flat. The tidal flat output was post-processed to remove random incorrect pixels and areas that had changed between high and low tide images but were not tidal flats, such as coastal developments or flooding of aquaculture ponds. Additionally, a manually-derived mask was applied to remove areas that were (i) covered by cloud, (ii) certainly not tidal, such as land or deep ocean or (iii) areas where waterline delineation could not be achieved due to siltation, ice or algal blooms.
2.4. Accuracy Assessment
The accuracy measures (overall, user’s and producer’s) of the resulting spatial estimate of tidal flat extent were derived and assessed by independently comparing reference data with map data in a confusion matrix [26,27]. We generated 260 sample locations by stratified random sampling the non-masked area for the two output classes (tidal flat and other). Map data was extracted for these points from the tidal flat map. Reference data were derived by an independent analyst who labeled each sample point with tidal flat or other class, based on assessment all available Landsat bands of the low-tide images and other available information (such as Google Earth).
3. Results and Discussion
We utilized 78 Landsat TM and ETM+ images to produce the first continental scale map of tidal flats, covering 13,800 km (86.8%) of the China, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Republic of Korea coast (Figure 3).
Overall classification accuracy across the sample set was 89.2%, with a user’s accuracy of 91.1% and a producer’s accuracy of 86.9% (Table 1). Such a high level of accuracy is not surprising given the manual application of the land-water threshold to each NDWI image, the use of Landsat TM/ETM+ for validation and the small number of mapping categories [11,23,27]. Misclassified pixels overwhelmingly occurred in the landward region of the tidal flat on slivers of exposed surface between the high tide waterline that we detected and the natural coastline or seawall. Such misclassifications generally arose from limited availability of spring high tide images, which required the use of images acquired below the highest possible tide, although these were always within the upper 10% of the tidal range. Despite using accurate, regionally validated tide models available there were small errors in tide height predictions, as well as from natural variation in tide heights across each Landsat image [16,17]. Our method results in estimates that are conservative compared with the actual tidal area, because complete delineation of the entire intertidal area can only be achieved when the images are precisely timed relative to the extremes of the tide. Nevertheless, the accuracy of our method for mapping exposed tidal flat is well within the bounds of widely accepted targets for remote sensing .
Due to environmental factors such as cloud cover, sea ice, extreme water turbidity, pollution, algal blooms and vegetation cover it was not possible to map 13.2% of the study coastline. Because paired images were required for image differencing, if one these factors occurred on either image then mapping the tidal flat was not possible for that area. Additionally, the occurrence of SLC-off striping on recent ETM+ imagery resulted in some striped areas of no-data within the mapped output that could not be gap-filled due to varying tide heights in other available imagery .
The availability of suitable high and low tide images resulted in considerable periods of time elapsing between acquisitions of each paired image. For the coastline of China and South Korea particularly, anthropogenic coastal modification, including widespread land reclamation, is occurring at such a rapid rate that the coastline can change between image acquisitions. For example, land claims for coastal development were occasionally identified as tidal flat because they changed from water to land between the high and low tide images. Such artifacts were removed manually during post-processing. Furthermore, the dynamic nature of tidal flats, particularly in estuaries where accretion and erosion continually occur as well as areas with regular seasonal changes of tidal flat extent, can lead to changes in the tidal flat extent between the acquisitions of suitable images.
Ryu et al. investigated the accuracy of several approaches for delineating tidal flats based on waterline delineation and showed that although some methods can result in error of up to several hundred meters, best performance was achieved using a combination of the NIR and a visible band, preferably on a flood tide when the exposed sediment is most dry. By using the NDWI, which includes the NIR and the green band, we adopted a high performing, widely accepted method for delineating open water features . However, evaluation of waterline mapping on tidal flats with the NDWI is required, preferably with on-ground reference data collected at known tide stages and heights at the same time as sensor data. Since the threshold value of the NDWI for delineating open water features is known to vary among scenes with TM or ETM+ data [23,28], additional work to predict the waterline threshold using individual image properties would allow for further automation of our methodology .
Tidal flats are declining in area in many regions due to human impacts and sea-level rise, leading to suspected declines in biodiversity [29,30], loss of ecosystem services [2,31] and negative impacts to human livelihoods [2,6]. As such, an analysis of their current status is urgently required. Our method could be applied to all images in the Landsat Archive (MSS, TM or ETM+), which will allow the status of tidal flats to be determined for any region where sufficient Landsat data exist. Additionally, the method is suitable for application to other sensor data, permitting the use of a wide range of sensors to meet varying objectives. For example, if higher resolution mapping of the tidal area is sought, perhaps for areas with very small tidal flats, obtaining data at the relevant tides from a high resolution source such as Quickbird, Worldview 2, IKONOS or SPOT would be possible. Likewise, if the aim is to determine the maximum area of tidal flat, then the use of a high repeat frequency sensor such as MODIS would likely increase the likelihood of obtaining images acquired on the highest and lowest tide, although its resolution would restrict its application to large tidal flats only.
Despite major advances in applications of remote sensing, such as the suite of global land-cover maps and habitat specific atlases, the spatial distribution and status of intertidal habitats globally remains poorly understood. Here we present a simple, broadly applicable method developed for mapping tidal flats over large areas (continental to global) using the Landsat archive of TM and ETM+ imagery. We used regional tide models to select Landsat images that were captured only at high or low tide. These images were pre-processed and classified into land and water classes using the Normalized Differenced Water Index (NDWI). Differencing of the high and low tide NDWI images allowed delineation of the tidal flat.
To demonstrate the method, we produced the first map of tidal flats of China and the Korean peninsula, an area that is undergoing rapid coastal change and is at-risk from coastal inundation due to sea level rise. We used 78 Landsat TM and ETM+ images to map tidal flats over 13,800 km of coastline. The accuracy assessment indicated an overall classification accuracy of 89.2%. Tidal flats in the region are threatened by intense coastal development, and our map will provide a baseline that allows for the monitoring of future impacts to tidal flats.
Importantly, the method can be rapidly and efficiently applied to all Landsat imagery in the Landsat Archive, allowing the status of tidal flats to be determined for any region around the world. This will prove a useful tool for studies of ecological and morphological change in coastal regions, particularly with regard to ecosystem services, climate adaptation responses, biodiversity conservation, human impacts and coastal management. Future implementation of this method will focus on obtaining wider geographic coverage of tidal flat maps, with the aim to eventually understand the status of tidal flats globally.
This work was supported by Linkage Grant LP100200418 from the Australian Research Council, co-funded by the Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management, the federal Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, the Queensland Wader Study Group and the Port of Brisbane Pty Ltd. Additional support came from a Birds Queensland Research Grant and a CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship scholarship (to N.J.M.). We thank Mitchell Lyons, Jeffrey Hanson and Vladimir Wingate for advice, programming support and assistance with the accuracy assessment. We also thank Tony Gill and Lisa Hardy (Joint Remote Sensing Research Program/Remote Sensing Centre at Queensland Department of Science, Information Technology Innovation and the Arts) for Landsat Archive processing expertise and early discussions.
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|Classified||Reference||∑ Producer||Producer’s accuracy (%)|
|User’s accuracy (%)||91.1||87.5|
|Overall Accuracy (%)||89.2|
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