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Diet, Morphology, and Interspecific Killing in Carnivora
Emiliano Donadio and Steven W. Buskirk
The American Naturalist
Vol. 167, No. 4 (April 2006), pp. 524-536
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/501033
Page Count: 13
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Abstract: Interspecific killing is a key determinant of the abundances and distributions of carnivores, their prey, and nonprey community members. Similarity of body size has been proposed to lead competitors to seek similar prey, which increases the likelihood of interference encounters, including lethal ones. We explored the influence of body size, diet, predatory habits, and taxonomic relatedness on interspecific killing. The frequency of attacks depends on differences in body size: at small and large differences, attacks are less likely to occur; at intermediate differences, killing interactions are frequent and related to diet overlap. Further, the importance of interspecific killing as a mortality factor in the victim population increases with an increase in body size differences between killers and victims. Carnivores highly adapted to kill vertebrate prey are more prone to killing interactions, usually with animals of similar predatory habits. Family‐level taxonomy influences killing interactions; carnivores tend to interact more with species in the same family than with species in different families. We conclude that although resource exploitation (diet), predatory habits, and taxonomy are influential in predisposing carnivores to attack each other, relative body size of the participants is overwhelmingly important. We discuss the implications of interspecific killing for body size and the dynamics of geographic ranges.
© 2006 by The University of Chicago.
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Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States (2009)
The U.S. Global Change Research Program, an interagency research program comprised of 13 federal agencies, has released a comprehensive report about climate change in the United States and what it will mean for our future and way of life. The author team is comprised of 28 climate experts from universities and research institutions across the U.S. The report is the first nationwide snapshot of our vulnerability to climate change since 2001 and represents the best available climate science in the United States.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has combed through the report to produce one national and eight regional fact sheets based on findings explained throughout the report.
- National Assessment
- Northeast Assessment (Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia)
- Midwest Assessment (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin)
- Northwest Assessment (Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Western Montana)
- Great Plains Assessment (Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas (Central), Wyoming)
- Southeast Assessment (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas (Gulf Region), Virginia)
- Southwest Assessment (Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, West Texas, Utah)
- Alaska Assessment
- Islands Assessment (Hawaii, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Palau, the Samoan Islands of Tutuila, Manua, Rose, and Swains; and islands in the Micronesian archipelago, the Carolines, Marshalls, and Marianas)
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| 0.81825 | 360 | 3.40625 | 3 |
Before the Russians had even laid the first brick for the Vozrozhdeniye Island bioweapons facility, the British were busy developing Anthrax as a weapon of World War II.
Begun in 1942, a highly virulent strain of Anthrax known as "Vollum 14578" was tested by filling "bombs" with the deadly bacteria. Once detonated the bombs would burst and a cloud of brown deadly dust would drift down onto a flock of unsuspecting sheep. Though the army learned that they could indeed contaminate German cities so thoroughly as to make them uninhabitable for decades, in the process they made Gruinard itself uninhabitable for nearly five decades.
In the early 1980s, the island, which had been left contaminated with anthrax, became a public threat when a group calling themselves "Operation Dark Harvest" began sending soil from the island to government facilities across the U.K., demanding the island be cleaned. The soil was sufficiently contaminated with anthrax and viewed as genuine threats.
In 1986, the government began cleaning up Gruinard Island by spraying down the entire place with a solution of formaldehyde and seawater. As of 1990 the island was declared "safe" and, in 1997, the history of the project was declassified for the first time.
Since 2007, there has not been a case of anthrax from the test flock of sheep left on the island following decontamination. However, not everyone is convinced the island is safe. In the words of one skeptic, "it is a very resilient and deadly bacterium."
- Wikipedia: Gruinard Island: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruinard_Island#Operation_Dark_Harvest
- Applied Science and Analysis, Inc.: Gruinard Island Returns to Civil Use: http://www.asanltr.com/newsletter/01-5/articles/015c.htm
- Time: "Biological Warfare: Dark Harvest" (November 1981): http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922652,00.html
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| 0.954728 | 440 | 3.171875 | 3 |
The people of Samaria, who were originally Jews but had intermarried with the pagan Assyrians, who had conquered Israel in 622 b.c. (II Kings 18:9-12). They developed a different form of Judaism, based mainly on their own Pentateuch, which was the only part of the Old Testament the Samaritans accepted. They had their own temple on Mount Gerizim and were bitterly hated by the Jews (John 4:9, 20). They were featured in three narratives of the Gospels: the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:33), the Ten Lepers (Luke 7:16), and the Samaritan Woman (John 4:5-42).
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| 0.982511 | 140 | 3.265625 | 3 |
Definition of Removably
1. movably [adv] - See also: movably
Click the following link to bring up a new window with an automated collection of images related to the term: Removably Images
Lexicographical Neighbors of Removably
Literary usage of Removably
Below you will find example usage of this term as found in modern and/or classical literature:
1. Cases Argued and Determined in the Circuit and District Courts of the United by District Court (Illinois, District Court (Indiana, District Court (Wisconsin, Josiah Hooker Bissell, Circuit Court (7th Circuit, United States (1878)
"AB to the question of infringement, the proof shows that defendant has sold a trunk with a removably hinged tray in the body of the trunk. ..."
2. Reports of Patent Cases: Decided in the Circuit Courts of the United States by Hubert Ashley Banning, Henry Arden (1882)
"Semple. vided with a removably hinged compartment tray. ?. A trunk, and, in combination therewith, a compartment-tray removably hinged by means of ..."
3. Transactions (1892)
"An electrode, consisting of a plate of refined material and an independent plate of crude material removably connected thereto and in metallic conductive ..."
4. Massachusetts Reports: Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Judicial by Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (1913)
"... a flexible attaching member adapted to be knotted about a spoke and an end thereof removably connected to an end of the tire crossing member. ..."
5. Federal Statutes Annotated: Containing All the Laws of the United States, of by United States, Edward Thompson Company (1918)
"Where, in a rock crusher, the combination of a crusher shaft, a core portion removably secured thereto, and a mantle portion removably secured to the core ..."
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| 0.919379 | 413 | 2.84375 | 3 |
Reader Request: Rodin
A year ago, Auguste Rodin was one of several artists discussed in the "November Artists" post for "Feel Art Again," as he was born on November 12, 1840, and passed away on November 17, 1917. Reader Ginny requested a more extensive post featuring his sculpture, so today we'll take another look at the French sculptor.
1. Rodin's first full-scale work, "Age of Bronze," originally titled "Vanquished," caused quite a stir when it was submitted to the Salon in 1876. The bronze statue was so lifelike that Rodin was accused of having cast it from the living model. Eventually, Rodin was exonerated, and the State purchased the statue.
2. An even greater stir arose over Rodin's 1898 "Monument to Balzac." The monument was supposed to have been completed in 18 months, but because Rodin took many years, the Societe des Gens de Lettres, who had commissioned the work, sued Rodin. Rodin was required to return his 10,000 francs advance in exchange for no time limit. When it was finally completed, though, the society rejected the work, declaring it "an unfinished grotesque botch." While Rodin considered the statue to be one of his greatest works, it was called "incomprehensible, if not ridiculous" and parodied in the press. A manifesto in defense of Rodin was signed by his supporters, among them Claude Monet and Claude Debussy.
3. Rodin created a bust of a "neighborhood handyman named Bibi" that was as realistic as possible, even including the man's broken nose. He named the statue "The Man with the Broken Nose." Unfortunately, "the cold conditions of Rodin's studio caused the back of the head to freeze and break off." From then on, the bust was titled "The Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose."
4. Explaining one of his most famous statues, "The Thinker," Rodin wrote: "What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes."
5. In 1880, Rodin was commissioned to design a doorway for the Museum of Decorative Arts. Rodin spent the rest of his life working on the doorway, called "Gates of Hell" after Dante Alighieri's Inferno, but he never finished it. In the 1920s, the 21-foot-high "Gates of Hell," containing nearly 180 figures, was finally installed in its incomplete state.
For larger versions of the artwork, click on the images themselves.
Fans should check out the the Rodin galleries from MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Art Renewal Center; the Musée Rodin; and the video "Auguste Rodin: The Genius, The Artist, The Romantic."
"Feel Art Again" appears every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. You can e-mail us at email@example.com with artist suggestions, with details of current exhibitions, or for sources or further reading.
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Gaskets are used to prevent fluid or gas leaks by providing a barrier between two mating surfaces. The gasket must be able to maintain a seal under pressure and temperature changes. A number of different gaskets are available: pre-cut compression (flat or extruded style), formed-in-place, and cured-in-place. Some gaskets and gasketing can also be used to shield against electromagnetic and radio frequency interference (EMI/RFI).
Common types of gaskets...
Learn More about Gaskets and Gasketing
Q & A on Gaskets and Gasketing
We asked our users for their input on Gaskets and Gasketing. Here are the results of 139 users familiar with Gaskets and Gasketing.Who Took Our Poll? | Design Trends | Applications and Use | Features | Buying Advice |
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| 0.876957 | 182 | 2.796875 | 3 |
BY: Follow @LizWFB
The federal government is spending over $33,000 to figure out whether same-sex couples live closer to tobacco retailers, theoretically making them more likely to smoke.
A National Institutes of Health (NIH) project, entitled, “Relationship Between Tobacco Retailer Density and Sexual Minority Couples,” reasons that since many gay and lesbian couples live in cities, they may be close to stores that sell cigarettes, such as 7 Elevens.
“Tobacco use is substantially higher among sexual minorities than among heterosexuals,” the grant states. “The reasons for this persistent disparity remain unclear, but the high toll of death and disability from tobacco use creates substantial health inequalities in cancer.”
“Same-sex couples’ movement within the U.S. results in same-sex couples concentrating in more urban neighborhoods where there may be more tobacco retailers,” the grant continued. “Living near a tobacco retailer has been associated with decreased success in quitting tobacco. The presence or absence of overlapping patterns of same-sex couples and tobacco retailers have not been explored.”
The $33,341 study is cross-checking a “high quality list” of nearly 100,000 tobacco retailers from 97 U.S. counties with census data to determine whether same-sex couples live nearby.
“Sexual minorities are more likely to use tobacco products than heterosexuals,” the grant said. “The reasons for this disparity are unknown; however, where people live and their proximity to tobacco retailers can influence decisions to quit smoking.”
“This study examines overlapping patterns of tobacco retailers and same-sex couples to examine the potential role of tobacco retailer density in sexual minority tobacco disparities,” it added.
Joseph Lee, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is leading the project.
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While there are no isolated technology standards in the Common Core State Standards, technology is embedded across the the grade levels. Many people are focused on students needing a device to take the assessment and not thinking about what students will need to be able to do with that device. The assessment will not only require a computer for students to take it, students will actually be tested on their use of their device.
According to the language arts standards here are the three major things students will need to be able to do.
Use search tools.
Interpet interactive elements on a web page.
Draw on information from digital sources.
Explore a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing including in collaboration with peers.
Ask and answer questions about key details in [multi]media…
Include multimedia elements…in presentations.
I haven’t separated the standards by grade level. The same requirements exist at all grade levels with different amounts of teacher assistance and depth and complexity.
In future posts I will suggest sample activities to meet each standard. If you want a preview, please check out my slideshare presentation, Technology in the Common Core.
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| 0.920247 | 231 | 4 | 4 |
- Future Students
- Current Students
- Extension & Outreach
- Research Programs
- About the College
- Information For…
August 22nd, 2014
AMES, Iowa – A new app will give high school agri-science teachers a tool for teaching biotechnology to their students.
“The Journey of a Gene” is the product of a partnership between Iowa State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). The project uses the example of soybean and the disease, sudden death syndrome, to illustrate the process of genetic engineering. The project began with a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant for more than $5 million titled “Transgenic Approaches to Sudden Death Syndrome in Soybean.”
Iowa State scientists Madan Bhattacharyya and Alison Robertson envisioned an extension component that would target agri-science teachers who also lead FFA chapters across the country. Bhattacharyya and Robertson thought an app that could be used on a smartphone or tablet would work best for teachers and their students. Robertson was familiar with UNL agronomy professor Don Lee’s teaching in genetics and biotechnology, and they partnered with him and UNL’s Plant and Soil Science eLibrary to develop and evaluate the app.
Grace Troupe, one of Lee’s graduate students, took the app development on as her master’s project. She started with UNL and Lincoln programming experts and was led to Crowd Favorite, a small app development company. She used existing Plant and Soil Science eLibrary resources and worked with videographers to capture the work of scientists from UNL and Iowa State.
The app, at http://passel.unl.edu/ge/, shows “the real science behind genetic engineering,” Troupe said.
The Journey of a Gene breaks down the genetic engineering process into four sections in showing how soybeans can be engineered to be resistant to sudden death syndrome. In the video, scientists explain techniques used in the process.
“We hope the app will capture the attention of youth and educate them in plant biotechnology, which will likely play a key role in the successful second green revolution to feed the ever-growing population in the 21st century,” Bhattacharyya said.
Bhattacharyya added that he hopes exposing students to biotechnology through the app might even encourage some to enter plant science as a career.
Troupe said the team will be getting feedback from teachers and further refining the app. It will be piloted with college students this fall to see how it changes their attitudes toward genetic engineering, and the app will be used next spring in the Nebraska FFA contest. Troupe also is presenting it at other regional meetings.
The app gives science teachers a way to present very complicated but critical, science-based information to their students.
“The reason they don’t teach this very much is they feel it’s a really difficult subject. They worry about misunderstanding the science,” Troupe said.
She cited the example of one teacher who used to spend 10 minutes on genetic engineering in class in the past; now, using the app, he wants to do eight full class periods on the topic.
“These classrooms have our future producers and consumers. They need to understand this technology so they can make better decisions,” Troupe said.
UNL’s Plant and Soil Sciences eLibrary produces educational material covering aspects of agriculture ranging from genetics to soil science to agronomic practices. Founded in 1999, the eLibrary is a collaborative project between the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Madan Bhattacharyya, Iowa State University Agronomy, (515) 294-2505, email@example.com
Donald Lee, Ph.D., UNL professor, agronomy and horticulture, (402) 472-1528, firstname.lastname@example.org
Grace Troupe, graduate student, agronomy and horticulture, email@example.com
Dan Moser, IANR News, (402) 472-3030, firstname.lastname@example.org
Barb McBreen, Iowa State University Agriculture and Life Sciences Communications, (515) 294-0707, email@example.com
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| 0.92456 | 926 | 2.9375 | 3 |
Family History and Genealogy Resources by Surname
Studebaker Surname Origin
(Origin German) Occupational - a pastry baker or seller.
Studebaker Surname Meaning and Family Facts
Studebaker Last Name Meaning
Search the FREE Ancestry.com Name Dictionary.
There is more to
Studebaker family history than the origin of your surname:
Start your Genealogy to find your personal Studebaker family ancestry. It's easy to get started. Just begin your family tree with what you already know. Learn More.
A Studebaker Family History Thought:
'I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.' --Fred Allen
To find additional surnames, choose the first letter of surname:
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Dungeons & Dragons (abbreviated as D&D) is a paper-and-pencil role-playing game (RPG). Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson created Dungeons & Dragons in the year 1974. It was first published by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (TSR). The game has been published by Wizards of the Coast since 1997.
It is normally played indoors with the participants seated around a tabletop. A typical Dungeons & Dragons game consists of an "adventure" in a fantasy world or "campaign setting". Typically, each player controls only a single character. The results of the characters' choices and the overall storyline for the game are determined by the Dungeon Master (DM) according to the rules of the game and the DM's interpretation of those rules.
Many optional accessories are available to enhance the game, such as expansion rulebooks, pre-designed adventures and various campaign settings. Commercially published campaign settings are Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Eberron and Dark Sun. Pre-made adventures (previously known as "modules") have been published throughout the history of Dungeons & Dragons.
|1974|| Dungeons & Dragons (original white box edition with three booklets)
Men & Magic • Monsters & Treasure • The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures
|1977|| Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1st Edition)
Monster Manual (December)
| Dungeons & Dragons (2nd version)
Basic Set (blue box) (levels 1–3)
|1978||Players Handbook (June)|
|1979||Dungeon Masters Guide (August) Core rulebooks complete|
|1981|| Dungeons & Dragons (3rd version)
Basic Set (magenta box)
|1983|| Core rulebooks reprinted with|
new cover art and orange spines
| Dungeons & Dragons (4th version)
Basic Set (red box)
|1984||Master Set (black box, levels 26–36)|
|1985|| Unearthed Arcana (a fourth "core" rulebook)||Immortals Set (gold box, levels 36+)|
|1989|| Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition
|1991|| Dungeons & Dragons (5th version)
Rules Cyclopedia (levels 1–36)
|1992||Wrath of the Immortals (levels 36+)|
|1993||Monstrous Manual Replaces Monstrous Compendium|
|1995|| Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition revised
| Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition revised
|2000|| Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition (three Core rulebooks)
Player's Handbook • Dungeon Master's Guide • Monster Manual
|2003|| Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition revised (v3.5)
Revised editions of the core rulebooks (compatible with 3.0 via errata)
|2008|| Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition (three Core rulebooks)
Player's Handbook • Monster Manual • Dungeon Master's Guide
|2009||Player's Handbook 2 • Monster Manual 2 • Dungeon Master's Guide 2|
|2010||Player's Handbook 3 • Monster Manual 3|| Dungeons & Dragons Essentials
Fantasy Roleplaying Game (levels 1-2)
|2012||Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition (announced)|
Several revisions of Dungeons & Dragons have been released.
The first edition (January 1974) was just called Dungeons & Dragons, now referred to as original Dungeons & Dragons. Built on Chainmail fantasy rules, it consists in a box set with three booklets, Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, and five supplements, Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry, Gods, Demi-Gods, & Heroes and Swords & Spells.
In 1977 was introduced the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, followed by Dungeons & Dragons Expert Set and several supplementary books. The basic set dealt with characters from levels 1-3; as characters got stronger, players had to move to the more advanced rulebooks to manage their characters.
In 1978 was published Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D), with its three "core rulebooks", Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual, but this was a new ruleset that was unrelated to the original rules. A second edition of AD&D was released in 1989, which is still popular today.
After Wizards of the Coast bought the rights to Dungeons & Dragons, a more streamlined version of the game was released in 2000, called Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. Most die-rolls were done a 20 sided die, instead of different types of multi-sided dice. The 3rd edition rules were eventually revised in 2003, and version 3.5 was released.
Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition was published in June 2008. This is the currently used version of Dungeons & Dragons.
On January 9, 2012 Wizards of the Coast announced that they had begun work on Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. The 2012 D&D Experience convention (January 26 - January 29) was held in Fort Wayne, Indiana, during which hundreds of convention goers got a first look at the concepts behind D&D 5th edition.
- ↑ What Is D&D?
- ↑ Editions of Dungeons & Dragons
- ↑ Charting the Course for D&D: Your Voice, Your Game
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| 0.916383 | 1,095 | 2.6875 | 3 |
We present an automated transportation routing system, called “Opportunity Knocks,” whose goal is to improve the efficiency, safety and independence of individuals with mild cognitive disabilities. Our system is implemented on a combination of a Bluetooth sensor beacon that broadcasts GPS data, a GPRS-enabled cell-phone, and remote activity inference software. The system uses a novel inference engine that does not require users to explicitly provide information about the start or ending points of their journeys; instead this information is learned from users’ past behavior. Futhermore, we demonstrate how route errors can be detected and how the system helps to correct the errors with real-time transit information. In addition we present a novel solution to the problem of labeling positions with place names.
Donald J. Patterson, Lin Liao, Krzysztof Gajos, Michael Collier, Nik Livic, Katherine Olson, Shiaokai Wang, Dieter Fox, and Henry Kautz. Opportunity knocks: A system to provide cognitive assistance with transportation services. In UbiComp 2004: Ubiquitous Computing, volume 3205 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 433-450, Berlin / Heidelberg, 2004. Springer.
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Trajan's Column is a monument in Rome raised by Apollodorus of Damascus at the order of the Senate. It is located in Trajan's Forum, built near the Quirinal Hill, north of the Roman Forum. Completed in 113, the freestanding column is most famous for its spiral bas relief, which commemorates Trajan's victory in the Dacian Wars.
The structure is about 30 meters (98 ft) in height, 38 meters (125 ft) including its large pedestal. The shaft is made from a series of 20 colossal Carrara marble drums, each weighing about 40 tons, with a diameter of about 4 meters (13 ft). The 190 meter (625 ft) frieze winds around the shaft 23 times. Inside the shaft, a spiral staircase of 185 stairs provides access to a viewing platform at the top.
According to coins depicting the column, it was originally topped with a statue of a bird, possibly an eagle, and later by a heroically nude statue of Trajan himself. In 1588, it was replaced by a statue of St. Peter (which still remains) by Pope Sixtus V.
By milwhcky @ 2007-07-25 23:15:14
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| 0.973935 | 253 | 2.765625 | 3 |
Addressing conduct and behavioural problems in childhood
Addressing conduct and behavioural problems in childhood is one of the four drivers of crime priority areas. An inter-agency group, made up of officials from the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Social Development, Ministry of Justice and Te Puni Kōkiri - is working to reduce the impact of conduct and behavioural problems in New Zealand children.
Severe conduct and behavioural problems in childhood are among the most important predictors of later chronic antisocial behaviour, including crime.
International research as well as a growing body of New Zealand academic and practicitioner knowledge informs the inter-agency group's work. The work recognises that addressing behavioural issues at their onset is the most effective opportunity to change future outcomes.
Research suggests that if successful early intervention occurs with the five to ten per cent of children with the most severe conduct and behavioural problems, this has a potential for a 50 to 70 per cent reduction in later adult criminal activity and associated poor life outcomes.
The focus of work seeks to get support in place early for at-risk children, young people and their families.
During the first six months of 2010 the inter-agency group's action focused on:
- establishing school-wide programmes to strengthen positive behaviour and reduce bullying and other disruptive behaviour
- assisting teachers to prevent, reduce and treat behavioural problems and refer children who need extra support to specialists
- supporting parents to build positive relationships with children and manage problem behaviours.
- preparing to expand mentoring and activity programmes, through Fresh Start for young offenders, and for those at risk of offending
- determining how best to engage Māori effectively in behaviour services and improve results.
Action of the inter-agency group has identified that services must be holistic, and Māori designed and delivered interventions are needed.
The next phase of action will include:
- Expanding mentoring and activity programmes for youth offenders
- Continuing development of behavioural programmes for Māori, with Māori
- Continuing to implement the Positive Behaviour for Learning Action Plan.
What is this approach about?
Conduct and behavioural problems in children and young people can lead to serious adverse outcomes in later life – such as learning difficulties, dropping out of school early, offending, alcohol and other drug abuse, mental illness and suicide. Some programmes have been shown to significantly reduce conduct problems.
This priority area aims to reduce the prevalence of conduct and behavioural problems amongst children and young people, by implementing and expanding programmes for three to seven year olds (at the age of onset), providing mentoring and activity programmes for older children and adolescents, and improving consistency in referrals and treatment. It includes a particular focus on meeting the needs of Māori, as young Māori experience high rates of conduct and behavioural problems.
Why address conduct and behavioural problems in childhood?
Severe conduct and behavioural problems in childhood are the most important predictors of later chronic antisocial behaviour, including crime. Addressing behavioural issues at their onset is most effective in changing outcomes. The focus of this area, therefore, is on getting the support needed in place early. Research suggests that if successful early intervention occurs with the 5-10% of children with the most severe conduct and behavioural problems, this has a potential for a 50-70% reduction in later adult criminal activity and associated poor life outcomes.
What is being done?
Work is focused on developing and implementing programmes and services that prevent, treat and manage conduct and behavioural problems in at-risk children and young people. Examples include school-based programmes, mentoring-based programmes, specialist parenting services, and interventions designed specifically for Māori.
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http://www.justice.govt.nz/justice-sector/drivers-of-crime/drivers-of-crime-priority-areas/addressing-conduct-and-behavioural-problems-in-childhood
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| 0.954076 | 748 | 3.140625 | 3 |
For years, all chocolate was cast off as junk food. But now, thanks to stacks of research, doctors and nutritionists know that dark chocolate can actually be very healthy – when eaten in moderation. "Dark chocolate, made from the cocoa bean, is rich in a class of plant nutrients called flavonoids," says Jennifer McDaniel, MS, RD, spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. "The main type of flavonoid with antioxidant qualities is flavonols, which have been shown to lower blood pressure, boost blood flow, and reduce blood clots."
Dark chocolate may even go as far as protecting against heart attack and stroke. A large Australian study from 2012 found that daily consumption of dark chocolate could prevent major cardiovascular events in people with risk factors for heart disease. Additionally, a German study published in 2010 tracked 20,000 people over eight years and found that those who ate one square of chocolate a day had 39 percent less chance of stroke and heart attack.
Beyond heart health, dark chocolate may also protect against diabetes. "Some studies have shown that the antioxidants in dark chocolate may help the body use its insulin more efficiently to control blood sugar," McDaniel says. It also has potential to make you smarter – at least in the short term. A British study found that the flavonols in chocolate boost blood flow to brain, which could aid alertness and cognition. Plus, dark chocolate has a modest amount of caffeine, along with the milder stimulant theobromine, making it a great all-natural pick-me-up.
Along with antioxidants, dark chocolate also contains healthy fats. Cocoa butter, the fatty part of cocoa beans, is the unsaturated type that's beneficial for your heart and cholesterol levels. But even the saturated fat in dark chocolate isn't so bad for you. "Dark chocolate contains stearic acid, a saturated fat that may have a neutral effect on blood cholesterol levels," McDaniel says.
But here's the catch with dark chocolate: To get all of these health benefits, you have to choose the right kind. "It is a myth that all dark chocolate is good for you," says McDaniel. "Sugar is often the first ingredient listed on many dark chocolate bars." Steer clear of these. Instead, you want a dark chocolate that has "cocoa solids" listed first. "Cocoa solids contain the desirable flavonols responsible for heart health protection, so they should hold the number-one spot on the ingredients list," McDaniel says. "A good rule of thumb is to look for at least 70 percent cocoa solids, which means the chocolate will have a slightly bitter taste. But you can train your taste buds over time to enjoy this less-sweet flavor." You also want to avoid dark chocolates that have added milk fat or hydrogenated vegetable oils – both of which are saturated fats.
Once you've found a dark chocolate that fits this bill, McDaniel says go for it. "One of the most common food cravings I see from my clients is chocolate," she says. "If you can contain your consumption of dark chocolate – aim for about 100 calories or less per day – you should feel good about the enjoying this antioxidant-rich, potentially heart-protective sweet."
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CONTACT: Stanford University News Service (650) 723-2558
Deaf infants suggest basic template of language
STANFORD -- Like any baby, Mary learned her native language in stages - stringing syllables together into words by 12 months, beginning sentences by 18 months. Because Mary is deaf, though, that language was expressed with her hands in signs.
Deaf infants pick up language on the same schedule as hearing babies, psychologist Laura Petitto told members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago on Feb. 8. And from the beginning, they use word signs in a different way than they use other gestures. Those findings are evidence for an entirely new theory of language acquisition, Petitto said.
The prevailing theory has been that infants acquire language as they develop the ability to make sounds into speech. Petitto said that the evidence from deaf children shows that the key is not the mode - speech or signs - but an innate human capacity to recognize language patterns.
A child is born with a basic structure-seeking mechanism that combs through adults' language looking for repeated patterns, she theorizes. Starting with syllables and the rhythms that bind them, babies analyze more and more information about the rules for building words, phrases and sentences.
First, they learn the form - babbling in meaningless sequences that look or sound like sentences. "Later, the child hangs meaning on the form," Petitto said.
"This is how human language gets started in the first place," she said. "A child needs this structure in order to get started in using language. It does not matter whether the patterns are spoken or signed. Providing he sees or hears the rhythm and structure that he seeks, the child will take that information and use it."
Petitto, an associate professor of psychology at McGill University in Montreal, is a 1991-92 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. In the March 22, 1991, issue of Science, she published the results of a study showing that deaf babies babble with sign language. This was one of several discoveries, over more than a decade of studying how deaf and hearing infants acquire language, that form the basis of her new theory.
Her research has shown that children learn language in the same stages, and on the same timetable, whether they learn with signs, speech or both. Contrary to expectations that humans have an innate instinct to prefer speech, Petitto's studies show that hearing children with one deaf parent simultaneously reach all the normal language milestones in both speech and sign.
One surprising finding is that deaf infants effortlessly distinguish language signs - to which they apply grammatical rules - from routine gestures, even when the two look very much alike. For example, a child uses the word or sign for "open" specifically as a verb, to ask for a jar to be opened. However, a general "twist" gesture is more general - used to mean "open the jar" or refer to the jar itself or to the cookies inside.
"Deaf children do not confuse language with gesture - there is a principled disassociation of the two," Petitto said. "The deaf child has taught us that infants have a basic ability to distinguish structure from other actions that have meaning."
This is an archived release.
This release is not available in any other form.
Images mentioned in this release are not available online.
© Stanford University. All Rights Reserved. Stanford, CA 94305. (650) 723-2300.
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Narrative poetry tells a story and comprises much of the oral tradition of many cultures. Famous stories, such as the legend of Robin Hood and tales of King Arthur, began as narrative poems that spread by word of mouth before literacy became widespread. Some scholars suggest that the rhythm and rhyme of these poems served as memory aids and allowed them to be passed down with little change through many generations.
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In english there are many key concepts and terms that are crucial for students to know and understand. Often it can be hard to determine what the most important english concepts and terms are, and even once you’ve identified them you still need to understand what they mean. To help you learn and understand key english terms and concepts, we’ve identified some of the most important ones and provided detailed definitions for them, written and compiled by Chegg experts.
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| 0.963812 | 209 | 4.28125 | 4 |
Now Florida's Juvenile Justice Department is being asked to develop more girl specific programs to respond to the rising number of girls in the system instead of locking them up.
Nearly 29,000 girls are in Florida’s juvenile justice system.
Seventeen-year-old Emma got into the all-girls PACE Center day program that focuses on education and building self-esteem after her run-ins with the law that included drugs and violent behavior. She says the intensive counseling and girl-centered approach is turning her life around.
Emma said, "I’ve learned to make better decisions, and to control anger and work harder and think more positively."
But a new study finds many girls in the juvenile justice system aren’t as lucky. They’re more likely than boys to be sentenced to residential lock-ups for less serious offenses, and even though girls are more likely to be victims of sexual abuse and family violence, they often don’t have access to proper counseling and treatment.
Advocates say Florida is making progress in developing gender-specific programs to get girls back on track and help them stay out of trouble. But more needs to be done, starting with funding.
Cassandra Jenkins with the Children’s Campaign says the state would do well to put more money into early intervention programs that focus on counseling and family support.
Cassandra Jenkins said, "Research has shown if you spend it on the front end and you spend it wisely in the way it should be used to address the needs of the kids, you’re going to save a lot more than if you spend it at the back end, locking them up in a residential facility or worse, putting them in a prison."
And the state needs to act soon. The number of girls referred for delinquency is up almost 70 percent from a decade ago. The study of girls in Florida’s juvenile justice system also found 40 percent commit their first crime before their 13th birthday.
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| 0.963609 | 409 | 2.640625 | 3 |
The San Diego Natural History Museum’s mission is to interpret the natural world of southern California and the peninsula of Baja California. The Museum is permanently removing 12 fossils from our collection (called deaccessioning) that are unrelated to our mission.
Following American Alliance of Museums (AAM) guidelines, with whom we are accredited, and our own collections policy, the funds from the deaccession will be used only for the acquisition of scientifically important fossils from our region as well as gems and minerals from southern California and Baja California. These will be strong additions to our collection while enhancing our mission.
As part of this thorough and multi-year process, we approached other museums we felt would be interested in the fossils, but no institutions expressed interest to acquire these specimens for their collections. Once the fossils were listed for auction, we received interest from an institution on a particular specimen, at which point we removed the specimen from the auction, and it is now being added to that institution’s collection.
The deaccession was fully vetted through a process involving several steps, including review of our internal collections and deaccessioning policies, input from the American Alliance of Museums, and approval from the SDNHM Board of Directors.
While these fossils have historical significance in that they were collected by Charles Sternberg, and it is our hope that they remain in the public trust, it is our opinion that they do not add significantly to the evolutionary and scientific history of these groups of organisms.
The sale of these fossils is scheduled for public auction on November 19, 2013.
Posted By theNAT.
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12. (Continued) low prices are harmful to merchants who,
(have to) trade at low prices58
This is because, as we have stated before,59 profit and livelihood result from the crafts or from commerce. Commerce means the buying of merchandise and goods, storing them, and waiting until fluctuation of the market brings about an increase in the prices of (these goods). This is called profit (ribh). It provides a profit (kasb) and a livelihood for professional traders. When 60 the prices of any type of goods, victuals, clothing material, or anything else (that may bring in) capital, remain low and the merchant cannot profit from any fluctuation of the market affecting these things, his profit and gain stop if the situation goes on for a long period. Business in this particular line (of goods) slumps, and the merchant has nothing but trouble. No (trading) will be done, and the merchants lose their capital.
This may be exemplified in the instance of grain. While it remains cheap, the condition of all farmers and grain producers who have to do with any of the various stages of grain production is adversely affected, the profit they make being small, insignificant, or non-existent. They cannot increase their capital, or they find (the increase) to be small. They have to spend their capital. Their condition is adversely affected, and they are reduced to poverty and indigence. This then, in turn, affects the condition of millers, bakers, and all the other occupations that are connected with grain from the time it is sown to the time it can be eaten. Likewise, the condition of soldiers is adversely affected. Their sustenance is provided by the ruler in the form of grain from farmers, through the grant of fiefs. Thus, (when the prices of agricultural products are low) the income from taxation 61 is small, and soldiers are unable to render the military service for which they exist and for which they receive sustenance from the ruler. Thus, (the ruler) discontinues their sustenance, and heir condition is adversely affected.
Likewise, while the prices of sugar and honey remain low, everything connected with (these commodities) is adversely affected, and the merchants who deal in it stop trading. The same is the case with clothing (material), while prices remain low. Thus, prices that are too low destroy the livelihood of the merchant who trades in any particular type of low-priced (merchandise). The same applies to prices that are too high. Occasionally and rarely, they may bring an increase in capital as a result of hoarding (some particular merchandise) and the large profit that goes with (hoarding), but it is medium prices and rapid fluctuations of the market that provide people with their livelihood and profit.
This insight has a bearing upon customs established among civilized people. Low prices for grain, and of other things that are traded, are praised, because the need for grain is general and people,62 the rich as well as the poor, are compelled to buy food. Dependent people constitute the majority of people in civilization. Therefore, (low prices for foodstuffs) are of general usefulness, and food, (at least) as far as this particular kind of food (namely, grain) is concerned, weighs more heavily than commerce.63
God "gives sustenance. He is strong and solid." 64
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Most people alive today actually remember “reform” measures that date only from around 1970, even though many of these originated much earlier, sometimes reappearing under new names: the Effective Schools Movement; Mastery Learning, revived around 1980; America 2000 in 1992; Goals 2000, built around a program called Outcome-Based Education in 1993; and No Child Left Behind in 2002, which, in turn, promoted a curricular program called the International Baccalaureate, which people mistook for its pre-War European counterpart.
As usual, the two organizations leading the charge on the Common Core Standards (CCS) are the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Like its “reform” predecessors, CCS can neither be described as classical academics nor substantive learning. The “standards” are rife with the usual misrepresentations, but this time with an added zinger: Parents will be completely cut out of the loop. This fulfills the oft-quoted prophesy of Dustin Heuston, head of the Utah-based World Institute for Computer-Assisted Technology (WICAT), who is famously quoted as having exclaimed during a panel discussion in the 1970s: “Won’t it be wonderful when no one can get between that child and that [computerized] curriculum?”
Computerized data collection, linked to testing and curriculum, was a pipe dream until a team comprised of former WICAT colleagues — George Hall, Richard M. Jaeger, C. Philip Kearny and David E. Wiley — figured out how to do it and wrote a ground-breaking paper for the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Information in 1985 that was championed by Emerson J. Elliott. Elliott eventually headed up a then-new National Center for Education Statistics, a component of the DoE which virtually transformed the thrust of schooling in America from that of excellence and hard knowledge to one of functionality and family intervention.
Among the many education researchers and policy analysts who have written extensively on the CCS reform scheme is Texas-based Donna Garner. The concept, she discovered, revolves around millions in tax dollars to provide individual technology devices for every child so that a revised slate of new assessments — remember, “assessments” are not “tests” — will require constant multi-media, individualized computer access that parents do not see.
Up until recently, the National Assessment, as well as most state assessments, used a random sampling method — i.e., not every child was assessed every time. So, the cost of technical support and upgrades to include every child, every time, will be astronomical (and often unaffordable without federal “assistance”). On top of that, a new evaluation system under CCS will exacerbate the trend of teachers fudging results, as per the scandal recently uncovered in Atlanta. The scheme will also likely end what little is left of local control.
Then there’s technology support staff required to keep the hardware and software running for thousands of students per school district. Add to that, salaries for consultant-coordinators to help states “interpret” for educators the meaning of obscure CCS jargon.
So, just how expensive would implementation of the CCS really be? In California alone, conservative estimates come out to $1.6 billion.
There’s a laundry list of other problems: For example, the “Common Core” Math Standards do not focus on attainment of chronological steps along the path to competency at incremental level, such as Algebra I, Geometry and Algebra II, Trigonometry, etc., but, rather, all of these are treated as essentially one, making it impossible to tell which skills have been mastered by students and which have not. This, in turn, makes it impossible to improve instruction.
Similarly, in English, the high-school-level standards do not set grade-level-specific targets — again, specified increments to be achieved. Spelling and grammar are fused with literature and vocabulary, which of course they eventually are once a child has mastered the fundamentals. But that’s the point: The student hasn’t mastered the fundamentals, which is why, supposedly, children go to school.
Additionally, the emphasis in Literature is on information and modern works, not on appreciating the contributions of the classical masters in various disciplines. One is free to enjoy the great classicists, or not, but only if one knows about them. Today’s high school seniors and even college graduates have little idea what the philosophers, scholars and artists prior to 1945 said or believed, even though their works greatly affected the evolution of governance in Europe and, in turn, America — underscoring the reasons why the U.S. took such a different route.
Omaha (Neb.) Public Schools exemplify the level of deceptiveness that has become part and parcel of education initiatives. Omaha recently spent $130,000 of its “stimulus” dollars to purchase social justice handbooks for every school district employee. Instead of helping teachers enhance their knowledge of subject matter and teaching strategies, they were required to attend “professional development” workshops that centered on the United Nations-based concept of social justice articulated in the handbooks.
There, teachers learn to “acknowledge historical systemic oppression in schools, including racism, sexism, homophobia and ‘ableism,’ defined … as discrimination or prejudice against people with disabilities….” One handbook tells educators that “American government and institutions create advantages that channel wealth and power” to elite whites, and suggests that since color-blindness will never end racism, educators should “take action” for social justice.
Left out is the fact that “social justice” is not the same as “justice under the law” — the kind set out by the Framers of the U.S. Constitution. Yet, many Americans — possibly a majority at this point — have unwittingly signed onto social justice with no clue concerning its origins or how it flies in the face of the Founders’ vision.
“Justice” in the Founder’s view was grounded in “acts” — what you do to someone and what somebody does to you — carried out by either individuals or groups, and deemed legal or illegal according to specific U.S. laws. But beginning in the 1960s, “justice” started being nudged away from the American definition toward a fuzzy view of “fairness” — a definition built into United Nations ideology.
Like most federal programs, CCS pretends to be voluntary. But Bill Costello points out in an article for American Thinker, that any U.S. states refusing to adopt CCS risk losing funding from Title I — the $14.4-billion program that provides monies for low-income students. Inasmuch as most school districts are now dependent on Title I funds, this kind of blow encourages all state and local education agencies to sign on.
If fully enacted, the Common Core of Standards will be the culmination of a process that began in earnest immediately following the Second World War, with the goal of producing a nationwide, attitude-changing curriculum that molds public opinion. A victory for CCS may well finish off the Founders’ “grand experiment” in self-government and self-determination because it would further institutionalize, for the foreseeable future, progressivism’s core philosophy: that socialization (or “teamwork”) is more important than facts or context, and that political correctness rather than accomplishment is the key to success in a Nanny State.
Note: This was the third segment in a series on modification to education policy under the Obama Administration. The fourth segment will focus on how the Education Department has broken federal law on curriculum involvement and the amount of money involved; the fifth segment will show how progressivism has come to be embedded in the culture via the schools so that it now drives policy and voter decision-making. A final segment will detail how schools can be made to serve students and, in turn, the nation. The first segment covered early childhood education/subsidized day care, and the second focused on the unholy alliance between the Dept. of Education, the NEA teachers union and the United Nations.
Beverly K. Eakman began her career as a teacher in 1968. She left to become a science writer for a NASA contractor, then editor-in-chief of NASA’s newspaper in Houston. She later served as a speechwriter and research-writer for the director of Voice of America and two other federal agencies, including the U.S. Dept. of Justice. She has since penned six books, scores of feature articles and op-eds covering education policy, mental-health, data-trafficking, science, privacy and political strategy. Her e-mail, a detailed bio, speaking appearances and links to her books all can be found on her website: www.BeverlyEakman.com.
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| 0.955011 | 1,881 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Skills Required in the English Language
An admission requirement for many business as well as graduate programs around the globe, the revised General Test of GRE is an exam that measures your skills in quantitative reasoning, verbal reasoning, and analytical writing. This general test does not evaluate your knowledge or cognitions in any of the subject areas like Chemistry, Physics, or Literature. However, it is important that you prove your communication skills and the working knowledge of English as required by graduate level programs. Read on to find more on English language test - what is expected and how do you prepare?
English Sections of the GRE revised General Test
Two sections of the revised General Test are designed to measure your skills in English language in the key areas of written expression, reading comprehension, information analysis and critical thinking abilities:
- Verbal Reasoning: The revised format of this section includes new question types to check your ability at understanding written information and applying reason. The English skills tested in this section include:
- Ability to analyze and understand a given discourse/passage and draw conclusions, by understanding different levels of meanings, assumptions, and viewpoints present in it.
- Ability to identify important points in a given text, and summarize the information present.
- Analytical Writing: This part of the test evaluates your ability to write precisely and effectively in response to the given task or context. Accordingly, the English skills tested in this section include:
- Ability to verbalize ideas unambiguously, effectively, coherently, and precisely, and whenever required, support your points with relevant examples and rationale.
- Ability and skills to analyze claims presented in the given text, by looking at accompanying evidences.
- Ability to use English correctly and as per the accepted standards of usage.
- Excellent active reading skills - which include the ability and skills to understand the meanings of words, phrases, expressions, idioms, and sentences, by way of understanding both their literal and figurative meanings. You also require the ability to grasp the overall meaning and context of the given texts, which may be from different areas like Biological Sciences, Social Sciences, Humanities, and Business.
- Ability to summarize or rewrite given information from different areas, some of which might be unfamiliar to you.
- Good reading comprehension and analytical skills or the ability to analyze given information and reach conclusions based on it, sometimes based on incomplete data.
- Ability to develop alternative lines of thoughts or expressions, by questioning, formulating and reflecting on related factors.
- Excellent vocabulary to understand passages and to write essay answers clearly and coherently.
- As we have seen, an excellent vocabulary can help you in improving your reading comprehension as well as writing clearly. There are many ways in which you can improve your English vocabulary - by using English word lists in the test, flash cards, and mnemonics, by playing word games, and by reading voraciously.
- You may familiarize yourself with the revised General Test question types, by going through previous question papers, official practice materials, and other reliable sources. This can provide you with an idea of what to expect on the test day and be prepared accordingly.
- Practice maketh perfect. Practicing is very important for improving your English skills. You may do this by focusing on the relevant English tasks like writing, reading comprehension, analysis, and summarizing.
- You may also want to join a preparation program for improving your English skills for the test.
For more information on the English content of the test, visit the official GRE website (http://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/).
Question Types and the Required English Skills
The question types in the revised General Test Verbal Reasoning and Analytical Writing sections are designed to reflect the purpose of assessing your language skills. The English question types include comprehension, text completion, and sentence equivalence types in the Verbal Reasoning part; and analysis type in the Writing part. While some of the questions require you to select the only correct answer from a group of options, some others require that you choose all the correct answers from a given lot of options.
It is important that you have the right English skills polished to answer the tasks in the test:
Achieving the Required GRE English Skills
Now that you have an understanding of the kinds of English questions and the skills required to answer them, you should focus on improving your language skills and abilities for the test tasks:
This test being a standardized admission test requires that you prove your English communication skills and abilities within the stipulated time. In addition, improving your English skills can have far-reaching positive effects on your career and personal life. So, why not take GRE as an alibi and change your life now?!
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A historic late-April “nor’easter” storm affected much of the northeastern US during the 22 April – 23 April 2012 period. This storm produced heavy snowfall (as much as 23.3 inches at Laurel Summit, Pennsylvania), heavy rainfall (as much as 5.74 inches at New Boston, New Hampshire), and wind gusts as high as 94 mph at Mount Washington, New Hampshire. AWIPS images of 4-km resolution GOES-13 6.5 µm water vapor channel images (above; click image to play animation) showed the development of various features of the storm on 23 April, including a large and well-defined comma head, dry slot, and deformation zone.
By tracking the movement of various water vapor image features between consecutive images, atmospheric motion vectors can be calculated which give an indication of the wind direction and wind speed within the middle to upper troposphere. GOES-13 6.5 µm water vapor images with overlays of MADIS 1-hour interval water vapor winds are shown below (click image to play animation).
Satellite-derived water vapor winds can also be used to calculate an upper-tropospheric (150-300 mb) divergence product (below), which in this case showed persistent divergence aloft over much of the northeastern US on 23 April. This upper-level divergence created an environment that favored upward vertical motion within the atmospheric column, helping to enhance and prolong the ongoing precipitation over those areas.
A series of 1-km resolution MODIS 11.0 µm IR and POES AVHRR 12.0 µm IR images (below; click image to play animation) indicated that enhanced areas of colder clouds (some exhibiting a banding structure) developed over the region of persistent upper level divergence.
The 10-km resolution GOES-13 sounder Total Column Ozone (TCO) product (below; click image to play animation) revealed an anomalously large area of elevated TCO covering much of the eastern US, indicative of a lowered tropopause associated with the large upper-level trough of low pressure.
===== 24 April Update =====
A comparison of the 1-km resolution MODIS 0.65 µm visible channel image at 16:09 UTC (12:09 pm local time) with a corresponding false-color Red/Green/Blue (RGB) image created using the MODIS 2.1 µm “snow/ice detection” channel (above) helped to identify high-elevation areas with significant snow cover remaining after the passage of the storm — snow appears brighter white on the visible image, and darker red on the false-color image. Note that cirrus clouds appear as a lighter shade of red in the RGB image.
A 250-meter resolution MODIS true color image from the SSEC MODIS Today site (below; viewed using Google Earth) showed even better detail of the snow-covered high terrain.
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| 0.889156 | 622 | 2.703125 | 3 |
It is often said that tax expenditures operate as "spending through the tax code" and often obscure what the true size of government is. With the amount of tax breaks exceeding $1 trillion, that obfuscation has become increasingly important. To clarify things, Donald Marron and Eric Toder of Tax Policy Center have attempted to quantify what government spending would equal if we counted tax expenditures that substitute for spending as outlays in the federal budget.
A difficult question is determining which tax expenditures are truly "spending in the tax code" and which are simply features of the tax code or broad tax structure choices. Normally, tax expenditure analyses count the standard deduction and personal exemptions as part of the tax code rather than tax expenditures. Beyond that, Marron and Toder exclude some tax preferences that they label as structural choices rather than faux-spending. These include:
- Preferential rates and other treatment for long-term capital gains and qualified dividends
- Accelerated depreciation
- Deferral of income for controlled foreign corporations
- Retirement savings provisions (which could be said to move the tax code closer to a "consumption tax" rather than representing a particular preference)
- Exclusion of some Social Security benefits from income taxation
What's left? Big ticket items include the mortgage interest deduction, the exclusion for employer-paid health insurance premiums, the charitable deduction, and the Earned Income Tax Credit. These four items alone are estimated to cost over $2 trillion from 2012-2016.
Another difficult question is how to account for various items like premiums or user fees. These items count as negative spending in the federal budget (for example, Medicare premiums net against Medicare spending) instead of revenue. Marron and Toder argue that while the traditional method is appropriate to account for the amount of spending that must be financed by general revenue or borrowing, for the purpose of determining the size of government, it is better to use the gross cost. Nonetheless, they present their measures of government spending both including and excluding user fees and premiums. The chart below is from the report, detailing spending as a percent of GDP in FY 2007 when you include tax expenditures (labelled SLTP or "spending-like tax preferences").
Thus, the report finds that spending would have been shown as 20 percent higher in FY 2007 if the spending-substitute tax expenditures had been accounted in that way and 30 percent higher if offsetting receipts are counted.
In other words, the government might be 6 percent of GDP larger than we think.
Click here to read the full paper.
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Early Childhood Conference
April 27, 2012
Merging Play and Learning with LEGO Duplo Educational
A hands-on demonstration of materials and projects for the young builders
to learn about math, science, and the world around them.
Participants built with gears, beams, blocks, and other LEGO DUPLO
Presenter: Linda Hamilton
I have worked with area schools and do camps with these materials
and have many lesson plans and examples up on
Counting and comparing
Tram and ZOO
There was an old lady that had so many children
the neighbors helped out by bringing in food.
Thank you for your help before, during, and after the session.
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| 0.862433 | 140 | 2.8125 | 3 |
|artificial neural network||computing dictionary|
<artificial intelligence> (ANN, commonly just "neural network" or "neural net") A network of many very simple processors ("units" or "neurones"), each possibly having a (small amount of) local memory. The units are connected by unidirectional communication channels ("connections"), which carry numeric (as opposed to symbolic) data. The units operate only on their local data and on the inputs they receive via the connections.
A neural network is a processing device, either an algorithm, or actual hardware, whose design was inspired by the design and functioning of animal brains and components thereof.
Most neural networks have some sort of "training" rule whereby the weights of connections are adjusted on the basis of presented patterns. In other words, neural networks "learn" from examples, just like children learn to recognise dogs from examples of dogs, and exhibit some structural capability for generalisation.
Neurones are often elementary nonlinear signal processors (in the limit they are simple threshold discriminators). Another feature of NNs which distinguishes them from other computing devices is a high degree of interconnection which allows a high degree of parallelism. Further, there is no idle memory containing data and programs, but rather each neurone is pre-programmed and continuously active.
The term "neural net" should logically, but in common usage never does, also include biological neural networks, whose elementary structures are far more complicated than the mathematical models used for ANNs.
(01 Mar 1997)
|Bookmark with:||word visualiser||Go and visit our forums|
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"The problem with cooking is that we've denigrated it," said Michael Pollan in last week's New York Times, promoting Cooked, his new book about the importance of home cooking. "There's just a cultural problem of persuading people it's a valuable way to spend their time."
Underpinning these statements is the idea that, until the mid-20th century, cooking was indeed valued. And then Big Food taught us to view kitchen work as drudgery, and everything went to hell. These beliefs, repeated by food writers and celebrity chefs from Pollan to Mark Bittman to Jamie Oliver to Alice Waters, have become received wisdom among the food-loving classes.
But, as I've written before, cooking has not been particularly valued in the past. Necessary, sure. But valued? Not exactly. Respected? Certainly not. For most of human history, cooking involved hot, back-breaking physical labor—drawing water from the well, killing and plucking chickens, kneading bread day in and day out. When possible, it was delegated to servants or slaves.
In fact, cooking has historically been so undervalued that, as far back as the mid-1800s, reformers have been crusading to earn it more respect, and to convince Americans to do more of it. Pollan and co, it seems, are merely the latest in a long line of pro-cooking agitators.
In the early- to mid-1800s, some of the era's greatest female thinkers turned their hands to the task of making cooking, and other so-called "women's work," worthy of respect. Feminist and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child wrote The American Frugal Housewife (1829), in which she warned readers against "convenient" pre-made bread and cakes, and despaired over young women too busy having fun to learn to cook. Catharine Beecher, an educator and the sister of Uncle Tom's Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), arguing that cooking should be "on an equality with the other sciences in female schools." This was a radical idea at the time, as cooking was seen as a form of manual labor, unfit for cultured ladies.
"A lady would be ashamed to be seen in her kitchen at work," wrote Sarah Josepha Hale, a writer and pioneering magazine editor (and author of "Mary Had a Little Lamb"), in an 1841 cookbook—The Good Housekeeper—she wrote to combat just such attitudes.
Later, the Home Economics Movement, founded by Ellen Swallow Richards (the first female MIT graduate), aimed to make cooking as professional—and therefore as respected—as any other science. This was an uphill battle.
"In the past, domestic science was unrecognized and the whole trend of education was away from home-making," wrote a Mrs. Wells W. Cooke in the early 1900s, in an editorial arguing that home ec ought to be taught in public schools. Cooking, wrote Cooke, was not simply about manual labor, but about "an expansion of all the senses." Good food, she said, was necessary for creating good citizens, and for nourishing social justice.
"We need to exalt the profession of home making to see that it is as dignified and requires as much intelligence as other professions," wrote an editor of The New England Kitchen Magazine in 1890.
To achieve these goals, Richards and other home economists applied the era's newly discovered scientific principles to housework. They set up academies to teach young ladies the science of homemaking, and started cooking schools, where they taught women how to cook the most nutritionally sound food (by the standards of the day, that is, which meant a heavy emphasis on meats and white sauce).
"The cook who can compute the calories of heat which a potato of given weight will yield, is no drudge," said Richards proudly.
Today's home cooking crusaders lean away from professionalization and science, and towards a simpler, more personal approach. But the fact that experts have felt the need to act as boosters for home cooking for the past 200 years suggests one thing: "persuading people it's a valuable way to spend their time" has never been easy.
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Claim: Golf courses have eighteen holes because a bottle of Scotch contains eighteen shots.
Example:[Collected via e-mail, 2002]
Why do full-length golf courses have 18 holes, and not 20, or 10 or an even dozen?
How many of you golfers know the answer to this one?
During a discussion among the club's membership board at St. Andrews in 1858, one of the members pointed out that it takes exactly 18 shots to polish off a fifth of Scotch. By limiting himself to only one shot of Scotch per hole, the Scot figured a round of golf was finished when the Scotch ran out.
Now you know. I'll drink to that.
Origins: Although this bit of lore about soused Scots limiting themselves to one slurp at the flask per hole has its charm, it does not have history on its side. The number of holes comprising a standard golf course was not determined by the amount of Scotch in a
Games similar to golf have been around since Roman times, and golf was being played at Scotland's famed Old Course at St. Andrews, the oldest extant golf course in the world, at least as far back at 1552. (Early Scottish versions of the game were called "golf" even though the game itself was not at that time all it would finally become.) However, golf wasn't always as regulated as it is now: Prior to standardization, early courses typically had any number of holes from five to twenty-four, and only over a long period of time did the game evolve to the point that eighteen became the standard number of holes for courses all over the world.
But couldn't that number still be tied to a hip flask, you say? Not unless the bottle shrank. Originally, the Old Course at St. Andrews had only 12 holes,10 of which were played over the same set of fairways both out and back, for a grand total of 22 holes per round. (That is, two of the holes were played once per round, while the other ten holes were each played twice per round, for a total of 22 holes per round.) In 1764, the Old Course's first four holes were combined into two holes, and from then on a round of golf at St. Andrews consisted of playing the now-standard total of 18 holes.
So there you have it — no drunken Scots at all.
Barbara "holey unimaginable" Mikkelson
Last updated: 28 July 2015
Browning, Robert. A History of Golf, the Royal and Ancient Game.
founded snopes.com in 1994, and under his guidance the company has pioneered a number of revolutionary technologies, including the iPhone, the light bulb, beer pong, and a vaccine for a disease that has not yet been discovered. He is currently seeking political asylum in the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.
Thank you for writing to us! Although we receive hundreds of e-mails every day, we really and truly read them all, and your comments, suggestions, and questions are most welcome. Unfortunately, we can manage to answer only a small fraction of our incoming mail.
Our site covers many of the items currently being plopped into inboxes everywhere, so if you were writing to ask us about something you just received, our search engine can probably help you find the very article you want.
Choose a few key words from the item you're looking for and click here to go to the search engine.
(Searching on whole phrases will often fail to produce matches because the text of many items is quite variable, so picking out one or two key words is the best strategy.)
We do reserve the right to use non-confidential material sent to us via this form on our site, but only after it has been stripped of any information that might identify the sender or any other individuals not party to this communication.
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| 0.975484 | 795 | 2.890625 | 3 |
The Chronicles of Narnia:
Here are some activities to incorporate into a lesson or literature unit using Prince Caspian from "The Chronicles of Narnia" by C. S. Lewis.
Prince Caspian, The Return to Narnia
The four brothers and sisters Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are waiting for their train to school, when suddenly they find themselves again in an unknown land.
It was Prince Caspian who called them for help to defend Old Narnia, the land they once reigned as kings and queens, against some cruel human beings who had settled down there a hundred years ago. This way they meet their old friends again and also Aslan, the lion, and they are having one more great adventure together. In the end they win the battle and banish the cruel people from Narnia.
About the Author:
C.S. Lewis was born in 1898 in Ireland and died in 1963 in England. Although he was married, he never had children. As an author, he wrote novels as well as children’s books.
Suggested Vocabulary Words:
Prince Caspian Word Search Using Vocabulary Words
Questions and Activities:
1. Once more we meet Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. In
what ways have they stayed the same? In what ways have
they changed? How have their previous adventures shaped
them? How do they behave differently as children and then
as Kings and Queens of Narnia?
2. Compare and contrast Nikabrik and Trufflehunter. What
different points of view do they represent?
3. “But because they have quarreled with the trees they are
afraid of the woods. And because they are afraid of the woods
they imagine that they are full of ghosts” (Doctor Cornelius,
p. 56). What observation about fear does this reflect? Why
do you think King Miraz is afraid of the stories of Old
4. How does faith or lack of faith guide the actions of characters
in this book? What difficulties face a person who believes in
something others cannot see? How does Susan feel when she
does not follow Aslan? What does Aslan mean by telling her
she has “listened to fears”? (p. 162) What do you think is the
author’s view of faith?
5. What do you think of the way Peter faces the possibility that
he might be killed by Miraz?
6. In what way does Aslan test Caspian about his suitability to
be King? How does Caspian pass the test?
7. How does Reepicheep earn his tail back? Do you think he
Prince Caspian Word Search Puzzle Fun
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - Mini Unit Study
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| 0.940273 | 594 | 4 | 4 |
Harness the power of plants.
From crop-based biofuels to pest-resistant plants, discoveries of plant scientists
make a profound impact on the world’s food production, natural resources and the
This program prepares you to make your own contribution to this exciting field through
the in-depth study of the production, protection, breeding and genetics of plants. Gain a
sophisticated understanding of the interdisciplinary field, with specialized skills in areas
like biotechnology, weed science, crop management, plant pathology and more.
Much of your experience will take place in the on-campus plant science farms, climate-controlled greenhouses and laboratories, where you will conduct independent research alongside leading faculty experts in the field.
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| 0.875835 | 150 | 2.640625 | 3 |
A transparent coating of ice, especially on a road surface.
- The A127 and A13 were particularly badly hit after several centimetres of snow fell overnight, compounded by black ice and a frost which hardened the snow into a virtual skating rink.
- Road conditions were bad after Wednesday night's rain led to areas of black ice on both roads and footpaths making driving conditions difficult for both drivers and pedestrians.
- The Longfield Road, which leads to Dundalk, is completely out of bounds because of the amount of black ice on the road.
For editors and proofreaders
Line breaks: black ice
Definition of black ice in:
What do you find interesting about this word or phrase?
Comments that don't adhere to our Community Guidelines may be moderated or removed.
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| 0.955113 | 163 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Getting vaccines can be stressful for kids -- and their parents. But with a new needle-free patch, getting your kid his shots may soon be easy and painless. Researchers at universities, government labs, and drug companies are all working to make needle-free vaccines in the form of a patch, NBC News reports.
Needle-free vaccines have been used before, like nasal sprays and oral, but patches are a new frontier. Today’s technology makes creating needle-free vaccines easier than ever, and the Food and Drug Administration has permitted some researchers to begin testing their vaccines on people, NBC New reports.
Infectious Disease Research Institute President Dr. Steven Reed says that the patch device, which is covered with miniature blades that scratch and pierce the first layer of skin, “is incredibly small. You can’t even see it. You just feel a little pressure — nothing else.” The vaccine is delivered to dendritic cells that then distribute the vaccine throughout the body. The device is applied to the skin with a needle-free syringe that is easy enough to use at home. This means that parents could potentially receive their children’s vaccines in the mail and administer themselves.
Georgia Tech is working now to create polio and flu vaccines in the form of a patch, which dissolves after use. These needle-free vaccines would cost less and be easier to make than traditional flu vaccines, which take months to produce. Doctors also believe that the ease of needle-free vaccines will encourage more parents to vaccinate their children.
Would you welcome a needle-free vaccine? Leave a comment.
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| 0.958541 | 333 | 3.40625 | 3 |
The traditional kangri, fire-pot, in the Indian-administered Kashmir, keeps people warm during the severe winter months when temperature dips to as low as minus 20.
It is a portable and moving heater that Kashmiris keep in their pheran, a long woollen cloak reaching down to the knees worn by people during the frosty winters.
The kangri is earthenware filled with glowing embers and encased in pretty handmade wicker baskets and is carried as a personal warmer.
Manufacturing the kangri involves labour and local artisanal craftsmanship.
Twigs are collected from deciduous shrubs, scraped and peeled and go through a process of soaking, drying, dying and are finally woven around the bowl-shaped earthenware.
The earthenware is decorated with colourful threads, mirror-work and sequins and is about six inches (150 mm) in diametre.
Kangris can be ignited by just 250 grams of charcoal; it is cheaper than oil, gas and wood-fired heaters and costs from Rs 70 ($1.12) to Rs 1,500 ($24).
The traditional fire-pot is an effective and economical heating arrangement in the modern era when electronic heating gadgets are available.
In the absence of electricity or load-shedding, it does not disappoint people and keeps them warm in harsh winters.
The kangri remains an enduring emblem of local craft that is eco-friendly and cost effective.
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| 0.955483 | 309 | 2.625 | 3 |
The Extent of the Labor Market in the United States, 1850-1914
NBER Historical Working Paper No. 78
Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the beginning of World War I improvements in transportation and communication encouraged increasing interregional and international economic integration. This paper traces and analyzes the progress of increasing labor market integration in the United States during this period of `globalization.' It argues that although the falling cost and increasing speed of transportation and communication in this period initiated a substantial expansion of labor market boundaries, the pattern of increasing integration was strikingly uneven. By the end of the nineteenth century, labor markets in the northern United States were part of a tightly integrated regional labor market that was in turn closely linked with labor markets in northern Europe. But this regional and international integration coincided with the persistent failure of integration between northern and southern labor markets within the United States. The importance of this finding is two-fold. First, it suggests that the forces shaping the determination of wages, the evolution of wage structure, and the growth of unions cannot be understood at either a purely local, or a purely national level. Second, it shows that the process of market integration was complex, depending on the interaction between historically determined market institutions and falling transportation and communication costs.
Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/h0078
Published: Social Science History, Vol. 22, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 183-205.
Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded these:
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WHAT IS A PLOT PLAN?
What is a Plot Plan and why do I need a Plot Plan?
A Plot Plan, or more precisely named Mortgage Inspection Plan is used by title insurance companies and mortgage lenders to answer the following questions:
Does the house or building, as well as accessory structures (pools, sheds, etc), conform to the local setback zoning by-laws? Does the house or building, as well as accessory structures, fall within the F.E.M.A. flood hazard zone (which would require flood insurance)?
Is there any building encroachments?
Are there any easements that are attached to the property?
In addition to answering these questions, our plan indicates the reference information used in its preparation. These references include deed book and page numbers, property plan numbers, land court plan numbers (if applicable), assessor map and lot numbers and F.E.M.A. rate map numbers. This information can be very helpful to the homeowner.
Because our measurements are taken with tapes only, and not with electronic surveying instruments, the accuracy is usually within two to three feet. It must be remembered that the field work involved in preparing the Mortgage Inspection Plan does not include the setting of property line stakes. Therefore, although tape measurements are sufficient to make zoning and flood hazard determinations, the plan should not be used as a substitute for a "Building Permit Plot Plan" or to determine property lines.
Using Our Expertise...
Often at the closing of a residential property, the borrower erroneously believes that the mortgage plot plan presented is an accurate land survey. The following information is a summary of the purposes of the Mortgage Inspection Plot Plan, and what differentiates it from a Certified Plot Plan (Land or Boundary Survey).
How is the Mortgage Plot Plan Performed?
1) A physical inspection of the dwelling's exterior is made, with tape measurements to show the approximate location of the dwelling.
2) Record documents are obtained at the Registry of Deeds or town offices to determine the lot configuration.
3) Information from the field is merged with record information to create a drawing of the property (the plot plan) and the approximate location of the dwelling on the lot.
4) Flood zone is determined.
5) Quality review performed by Professional Land Surveyor.
What is the Purpose of the Mortgage Plot Plan?
The mortgage plot plan is a tool used to identify potential survey problems. Not to be confused with an instrument survey, the mortgage plot plan serves several very basic purposes:
1) To satisfy part of a real estate closing.
2) Certifies compliance of the original dwelling with zoning set-back requirements at the time of construction.
3) Certifies as to the flood zone of the dwelling (for flood insurance purposes).
4) May identify and note potential encroachments, boundary conflicts, violations or other on-the-ground problems worthy of further investigation.
What is Not Provided by a Mortgage Plot Plan?
1) No representation is made as to the accuracy of the depicted property lines!
2) No attempt has been made to verify the boundary configuration or, typically, the mathematical correctness of the description!
3) Property corners can not be located based on this type of plan, therefore no fences, hedge rows or other improvements can be determined or located!
4) The location of any improvements shown are approximate, and therefore any planned construction should not be based on the locations as shown!
What is a Certified Plot Plan (Boundary, Land or Instrument Survey)?
An accurate survey involves the location of established monuments or survey control points, which are then mathematically tied in to the property being surveyed. This process utilizes sophisticated, state-of-the-art equipment, and precisely locates both the property lines and the improvements on the property in relation to those property lines.
In any circumstance where accuracy is required - for construction, location of fences, pools or other improvements - a full instrument survey is necessary. No changes or designs should be made using a Mortgage Inspection Plot Plan - it is not an accurate survey and is not intended for these purposes.
Copyright © 2015 Des Lauriers & Associates, Inc.
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antiracism is a valid word in this word list. For a definition, see the external dictionary links below.
The word "antiracism" uses 10 letters: A A C I I M N R S T.
No direct anagrams for antiracism found in this word list.
Words formed by adding one letter before or after antiracism (in bold), or to aaciimnrst in any order:
s - antiracisms
Try a search for antiracism in these online resources (some words may not be found):
Wiktionary - OneLook Dictionaries - Merriam-Webster - Google Search
Each search will normally open in a new window.
All words formed from antiracism by changing one letter
Browse words starting with antiracism by next letter
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Can Antibiotics Lower Stomach Cancer Rates?
People With H. pylori Infection Can Reduce Risk If Drugs Taken Early Enough
Jan. 13, 2004 -- Although stomach cancer remains one of the world's five most common cancers among men and women, its incidence has steadily declined in the U.S. over recent decades -- thanks, say experts, to lower rates of helicobacter pylori bacteria infection among Americans.
The link between H. pylori and stomach cancer is well established. Still, H. pylori infection is present in nearly half the world's population, and it's rampant in parts of Southeast Asia, Latin America, and other countries with crowded and less hygienic living conditions. The bacterium is so implicated in stomach cancers that in 1994, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified H. pylori as a group 1 carcinogen -- a definite cause of human cancer.
But the question remains: Will successfully treating those infected with H. pylori with antibiotics reduce rates of stomach cancer?
Not really, suggests the first randomized study to address the issue. After tracking 1,630 patients for more than seven years, researchers at the University of Hong Kong found that overall, there was little difference in stomach cancer rates between people who received active antibiotics to eradicate H. pylori infection and those getting "dummy" pills, which did nothing.
However, there is some good news: Antibiotic H. pylori treatment did seem to reduce later cancer rates -- by about one-third -- in a small group of patients who didn't have precancerous tissues in their stomach when first given the drugs.
"If this holds true (in future studies), treatment in early life, when the stomach does not yet have precancerous lesions, will be better," lead researcher Benjamin Chun-Yu Wong, MD, tells WebMD.
That could be important because H. pylori infection, at least in the U.S., typically occurs in childhood -- and can exist innocuously for decades before causing stomach cancer. This bacterium also raises the risk of peptic ulcers.
Sanitation Key to Reducing Spread
"Most people here are infected by age 5," says Julie Parsonnet, MD, of Stanford University. "It's passed from diapers, children playing with poop, crawling on the floor, and sticking things in their mouths. The way to prevent infection is to wash your hands frequently, especially when you take care of your kids, and to decrease household crowding -- things we're doing anyway."
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|On the outer edge of the Latin
world, in Spain, Sicily, and North Africa, and surrounding Byzantium in Egypt, Palestine,
and Syria, was the world of Islam. For centuries, Islam was both a threat and the source
of new ideas to the Greek East and Latin West. Between the 7th and 12th centuries, Islam
became the center of a brilliant civilization and of a great scientific, philosophic, and
artistic culture. Although its language was neither Greek nor Latin, Islam absorbed a
great deal of Greek culture which it managed to preserve for the Latin West. In general,
it can be said that Islam absorbed and added its culture to the heritage of Greece, Rome,
Judaism, Christianity, and the Near East.
In the beginning the Muslims were both open and cautious. They borrowed and integrated elements of other cultures into their own. The new religion of Islam, which we will get to in a moment, adopted elements of Christian, Jewish, and pagan religious beliefs and practices. The Muslims tolerated religious minorities within territories they had conquered so long as these minorities recognized Islamic political rule, paid taxes, and did not proselytize among Muslims. Still, the Muslims were careful to protect the purity of their religion, language, and law from any foreign influence. With the passage of time, and with increased conflict with both eastern and western Christians, this protective instinct grew stronger. In the end, Islamic culture did not penetrate the west in the same way that Germanic culture did, but would remain strange as well as threatening to the West.
Fundamental to Islam was its religion -- this, of course, is true for the medieval west as well. However, we know more about early Christianity then we do about early Islam. And the reason is clear. Christianity was produced by a literate culture. Islamic religion, however, was formed largely in an illiterate, nomadic culture.
The home of Islam is the Arabian Peninsula. The Peninsula is predominantly desert and the tribes who inhabited this area were nomadic, that is, they traveled from place to place. Politically, Islam was not a unified territory nor was there any centralized government.
The great unifying agent in Islamic civilization was clearly that of Muhammad (c.570-632). He was born at Mecca and raised by family of modest means. His father had died in the year of his birth and his mother died when he was 6 years old. At the time of Muhammad's birth, Mecca was one of the most prosperous caravan cities. However, Mecca was still tied to the traditional social and religious life of the Arabian world. In other words, it was governed by the tribal societies of the desert. Membership in the tribe was determined by blood descent. In such an order, the interests of the individual were always subordinate to those of the group or tribe. Each tribe worshipped its own gods in the form of objects from nature (moon, sky, dog, cat, ram) but all Arabs worshipped one object in common: the Kaaba, a large black stone enshrined at Mecca. It was the Kaaba that made Mecca significant as a place of worship and pilgrimage.
As a youth, Muhammad worked as a merchant's assistant, traveling the major trade routes of the Peninsula. When he was 25, he married the widow of a wealthy merchant and became a man of means. He also became a kind of social activist, critical of Meccan materialism, paganism, and the unjust treatment of the poor and needy.
Muhammad worked hard at his career but like so many "saviors" and prophets, Muhammad was plagued by doubts. His doubt increased to such an extent that he left Meccan society and lived a life of isolation in the desert. In 610, and at the age of 40, he received his first revelation and began to preach. He believed his revelations came directly from God, a God who spoke to him through the angel Gabriel, who recited God's word to him at irregular intervals. These revelations grew into the Qur'an which his followers compiled between 650 and 651. The basic message Muhammad received was a summons to all Arabs to submit to God's will. Islam means "submission to the will of God."
There was little that was new in Muhammad's message. It had been uttered by a long line of Jewish prophets going back to Noah but now ending with Muhammad, the last of God's chosen prophets. The Qur'an also recognized Jesus Christ as a prophet but did not view him as God's co-eternal and co-equal son. Like Judaism, Islam was a monotheistic and theocratic religion, not a Trinitarian one like Christianity.
The basic beliefs of Muhammad's religion were (1) that God is good and omnipotent, (2) that God will judge all men on the last day and assign them their place in either Heaven or Hell, (3) that men should thank God for making the world as it is, (4) that God expects men to be generous with their wealth, and (5) that Muhammad was a prophet sent by God to teach men and warn them of the last judgment.
It ought to be clear that many of these beliefs are similar to those of the Judeo-Christian tradition. However, Muhammad's religion was not a mere copy. Instead, Muhammad's religion grew as a result of the social and economic conditions of Mecca itself. One other difference ought to be noted. Christianity was produced in an urban environment while the faith of Muhammad was fashioned from his life in the desert.
For Muhammad, there were also five obligations which were essential to his faith: (1) the profession of faith there is no God but Allah and Muhammad was the last prophet, (2) prayers had to be uttered five times daily, (3) the giving of alms, or charity, (4) fasting, and (5) the pilgrimage to Mecca. These laws are recorded in the Qur'an, a book which contains all of the revelations of Muhammad.
Muhammad believed that God had chosen him to be the last prophet. Abraham and Moses were prophets. So too was Jesus Christ. But Muhammad believed that Jesus was not the son of God. The Jews and Christians, according to Muhammad, had strayed from the true faith, a faith which Muhammad believed he had had revealed to him by the angel Gabriel. It was his task to convert them and bring them back to the true word.
Despite the faith of his flock, Muhammad met with disappointment as he preached his religion at Mecca. Jews and Christians failed to convert. His faith was totally rejected by the authorities at Mecca. It should be obvious that the merchants at Mecca would have objected to Muhammad's belief actually a profession of faith that men should be generous with their wealth. The authorities tried to quiet Muhammad and so he left for the northern city of Medina in the year 622. The journey to Medina the hegira (the "breaking of former ties") became the true foundation of the Islamic faith. The hegira also marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar.
At Medina, Muhammad created an Islamic community. Besides the profession of faith, Muhammad also specified that at his community there would be strict rules governing diet; wine, gambling and usury were prohibited; he set up his own legal system; and prohibited infanticide. After settling in Medina, his followers began to attack the caravans on their way to and from Mecca. By 624 his army was powerful enough to conquer Mecca and make it the center of the new religion.
Muhammad died in 632 and his death presented his followers with a series of profound problems. He never claimed to be of divine origin yet his loyal followers saw no reason to separate religious and political authority. Submitting to the will of Allah was no different than submitting to the will of Muhammad. Unfortunately, Muhammad never named a successor. Who would lead the faithful? Soon after his death, some of his followers selected Abu Bakr, a wealthy merchant and Muhammad's father-in-law as caliph, or temporal leader.
In the early 7th century, Muhammad and successive caliphs, took up the Arabic custom of making raids against their enemies. The Qur'an called these raids the jihad ("striving in the way of the Lord"). The jihad was not carried out as a means to convert others for the simple reason that acts of conversion to the Islamic faith were voluntary. The Byzantines and Persians were the first to feel the pressure of Arab raids. At Yarmuk in 636, the Muslims defeated the Byzantine army. Syria fell in 640. A decade later, the Muslims had conquered the entire Persian empire. Egypt, North Africa and Spain (with its center at Córdoba) were all conquered and under Muslim rule by the 720s. In 732, a Muslim army was defeated at the Battle of Tours, and Muslim expansion in Europe came to an abrupt halt.
One of the main problems confronting the Islamic world was the choice of caliph. When Muhammad's son-in-law was assassinated, Muawiyah, a general, became caliph.. Muawiyah made the caliphate hereditary in his own family, thus creating the Umayyad dynasty. One of the first things Muawiyah did was to move the capital of the Muslim world from Medina to Damascus in Syria. However, internal dissension over the caliphate created a split in Islam between the Shiites, or those who accepted only the descendants of Ali, Muhammad's son-in-law, as the true rulers, and the Sunnites, who claimed the descendants of the Umayyads were the true rulers. This split exists to this day.
In the 8th and 9th centuries, under the Abbasid caliphs, Islamic civilization entered a golden age. Arabic, Byzantine, Persian and Indian cultural traditions were integrated. And while in Europe, learning seemed to be at its lowest point, the Muslims created what I suppose could be called a "high civilization." Thanks to Muslim scholars, ancient Greek learning, acquired from their contact with Byzantine scholars, was kept alive and was eventually transferred to the West in the 12th century and after (see Lecture 26). But not only did Muslim scholars preserve the heritage of Greek science and philosophy, they added to it by writing commentaries and glosses, thus adding to what eventually became the western intellectual tradition. Throughout the Qur'an one can find a strong emphasis on the value of knowledge in the Islamic faith. The Qur'an encourages Muslims to learn and acquire knowledge, stemming from, but not limited to, the Muslim emphasis on knowing the unity of God. Because Muslims believe that Allah is all-knowing, they also believe that the human world's quest for knowledge leads to further knowing of Allah.
| The History Guide | |
copyright © 2000 Steven Kreis
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On 4 July scientists at CERN in Geneva declared that they had discovered a new particle 'consistent' with the long-sought Higgs boson, also known as the 'God particle.' Although further research is required to characterize the new particle fully, there can be no doubt that an important milestone in our understanding of the material world and of the evolution of the early universe has just been reached.
Exciting times! But why all the fuss? What is the Higgs boson and why does it matter so much? Was finding it really worth all the effort?
The answers to these questions can be found in the story of the so-called Standard Model of particle physics. As the name implies, this is the standard framework that physicists use to interpret the elementary constituents of all matter and the forces that bind matter together, or cause it to fall apart. It is a body of work built up over many decades of unstinting effort, which represents the physicists' best efforts to interpret the physical world around us.
The Standard Model is not yet a 'theory of everything.' It does not account for the force of gravity. In recent years you may have read about exotic new theories of physics which attempt to unify the fundamental forces, such superstring theory. Despite the efforts of hundreds of theorists engaged on these projects, these new theories remain speculative and have little or no supporting evidence from experiment. For the time being, and despite flaws that have been acknowledged since its inception in the late 1970s, the Standard Model is still where most of the real action is.
The Higgs boson is important in the Standard Model because it implies the existence of a Higgs field, an otherwise invisible force field which pervades the entire universe. Unlike other kinds of force field (such as an electromagnetic or gravitational field) the Higgs field points but it doesn't push or pull. It was invented in 1964 in attempts to explain how otherwise massless particles could acquire mass, by Belgian physicists Robert Brout and François Englert, English physicist Peter Higgs at Edinburgh University and Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble at Imperial College in London. The mechanism was applied three years later in the construction of a theory of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force (responsible for a certain type of radioactivity) by American Steven Weinberg and Pakistan-born theorist Abdus Salam.
The mechanism works like this. Without the Higgs field, elementary particles such as quarks (the constituents of protons and neutrons) and electrons would flit past each other at the speed of light, like ghostly will o' the wisps. The elementary particles that make up you, me and the visible universe would consequently have no mass. Without the Higgs field mass could not be constructed and nothing could be.
What actually happens is that these elementary particles interact with the Higgs field and are slowed down by it, as though swimming in molasses. We interpret this 'slowing down' as inertia and, ever since Galileo, we have identified inertia as a property of things with mass.
Many of the predicted consequences of the Higgs field were borne out in particle collider experiments in the early 1980s. But inferring the field is not the same as detecting its tell-tale field particle.
The publication of Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the 'God Particle' is timely, coming only six weeks after the discovery announcement. But I had the idea for a book about the discovery of the Higgs boson in March 2010, just as CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was setting a new world record for particle collision energy. I figured that there was a chance that this particle -- the last missing piece in the jigsaw of the Standard Model -- might be discovered soon. This is perhaps the first example of a book that has been largely written in anticipation of a discovery.
But the question was: How soon?
We saw tantalizing glimpses of the Higgs in summer 2011, and in August I met with Peter Higgs on a wet Thursday afternoon in Edinburgh. Higgs had retired in 1996 but had remained in Edinburgh close to the University department where he had first become a lecturer in mathematical physics in 1960. He was now a sprightly 82 years old.
Higgs had published the paper that was to bind him forever to the particle that bears his name in 1964, and had waited nearly fifty years for some kind of vindication. 'It's difficult for me now to connect with the person I was then [in 1964],' he explained, 'But I'm relieved it's coming to an end. It will be nice after all this time to be proved right.'
Alas. The tantalizing glimpses were a desert mirage. They faded as we got close enough to inspect them. But strong hints resurfaced in data reported in December. Expectations built in intensity. Right up to July 3 we had hypotheses and compelling theoretical structures. Finally, on the following day we began to gather hard scientific facts. Our understanding took a giant leap forward.
Simply declaring the discovery of a new particle pays little respect to the efforts of all involved in running the LHC, operating the two primary detectors -- ATLAS and CMS, setting the triggers, managing the pile-up of proton-proton collision events, calculating the background, managing the worldwide computer grid needed to analyze the results, performing the detailed analysis and not sleeping much. The discovery represents an enormous triumph for an experiment that was conceived nearly thirty years ago, on which construction began twelve years ago, and which has engaged worldwide collaborations of three thousand scientists working in competition on each detector facility.
Precisely what kind of boson has been discovered remains to be seen, and there's hope of more surprises yet to come.
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This article provides a brief history of brainwave entrainment. To learn more, visit http://www.BrainwaveCollege.com/
Brainwave entrainment was first identified in 1934, although its effects had been noted as early as Ptolemy.
Not long after the discovery of the Alpha brainwave by Hans Berger in 1929, researchers found that the strength of the wave could be "driven" beyond its natural frequency using flickering lights. This is called "Photic Driving," which is another word for brainwave entrainment using photic (light) stimulation. In 1942, Dempsey and Morison discovered that repetitive tactile stimulation could also produce entrainment and in 1959, Dr. Chatrian observed auditory entrainment in response to clicks at a frequency of 15 per second.
By the 1960s, entrainment started to become a tool rather than a phenomenon of the brain. Anesthesiologist M.S. Sadove, MD, used photic stimulation to reduce the amount of anesthesia needed for surgery. Bernard Margolis published an article on brainwave entrainment used during dental procedures, noting less anesthesia required, less gagging, less bleeding and a general reduction in anxiety.
In a 1973 issue of Scientific American, Dr. Gerald Oster examined how combining 2 pure tones resulted in a rhythmic beat which he called Binaural and Monaural beats. In comparing Binaural beats against Monaural beats, Oster noted that Monaural beats were shown to elicit extremely strong cortical responses, which is the electrical activity responsible for entrainment. Oster concluded that while Binaural Beats produced lesser neural response (because the depth of a Binaural Beat is only 3db or 1/10 the volume of a whisper), they could be useful in diagnosing certain neurological disorders.
In the 1980s, studies continued with Dr. Norman Shealy, Dr. Glen Solomon and others researching entrainment for headache relief, serotonin and HGH release, as well as general relaxation. Michael Hutchison wrote his landmark book MegaBrain in 1981, outlining the many possible uses of entrainment from meditation to super-learning. In 1980, Tsuyoshi Inouye and associates at the Department of Neuropsychiatry at Osaka University Medical School in Japan found that photic stimulation produced "cerebral synchronization." Dr. Norman Shealy later confirmed the effect, finding that photic stimulation produced synchronization in more than 5,000 patients. In 1984, Dr. Brockopp analyzed audio-visual brain stimulation and in particular hemispheric synchronization during EEG monitoring. He said "By inducing hemispheric coherence the machine can contribute to improved intellectual functioning of the brain."
In 1981, Arturo Manns published a study showing the effectiveness of Isochronic Tones. This was later confirmed by others such as David Siever. This entrainment method was perceived to be more effective than Binaural and even Monaural beats, and combined use of the methods was found to bring about greater results.
Studies continued into the 90's with researchers such as Dr. Russell, Dr. Carter and others who explored the vast potential of using entrainment with ADD and learning disorders. Research has also been conducted into PMS, Chronic Fatigue, Chronic Pain, Depression, Hypertension and a number of other disorders. Steady research continues today with the work of Dr. Thomas Budzynski, David Siever, psychologist Michael Joyce and many others. The results of entrainment have been so promising that many modern clinical EEG units come with entrainment devices.
In total, there are over 75 years of solid research behind brainwave entrainment.
Despite this, the average individual still has little idea that this branch of science even exists. Perhaps this is down to the almost unbelievable idea that music can affect the brain so dramatically. It's common for most people to be skeptical about brainwave entrainment until they experience it for themselves.
Yet still, the word about brainwave entrainment is spreading - and every day, more psychologists, mental health clinics, coaches, teachers and professionals are discovering entrainment, and uncovering the powerful impact it can have for both themselves and their clients.
To learn more about brainwave entrainment in general, and its history so far, check out the Brainwave College at http://www.brainwavecollege.com/
Responses to Clicks from the Human Brain: Some Depth Electrographic Observations, Gian Emilio Chatrian, M.D., Magnus C. Petersen, M.D., and Jorge A. Lazarte, M.D. - Rochester State Hospital (1959).
Academic Performance Enhancement with Photic Stimulation and EDR Feedback, Thomas Budzynski, Ph.D., John Jordy, M.Ed., Helen Kogan Budzynski, Ph.D., Hsin-Yi Tang, M.S., and Keith Claypoole, Ph.D., Journal of Neurotherapy
Repeated stimulation induced neuronal activation (SINA), with cognitive and behavioral functioning changes in ADHD children., Harold Russell, Ph.D., Journal of Neurotherapy
A Comparison of Depths of Relaxation Produced by Various Techniques and Neurotransmitters by Brainwave Entrainment, Shealy, N., Cady, R., Cox, R., Liss, S., Clossen, W., Veehoff, D., Shealy and Forest Institute of Professional Psychology A study done for Comprehensive Health Care.
Auditory beats in the brain., Oster, G., Scientific American, 229, 94-102.
Isochronic Tones and Brainwave Entrainment, David Siever, C.E.T.
The central effects of rhythmic sensory stimulation., Walter, V. J. & Walter, W. G., Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1, 57-86
Visual Evoked Responses Elicited by Rapid Stimulation, Kinney, J.A., McKay, C., Mensch, Lurisa, Encephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, Vol 34: 7-13
The Interaction of Certain Spontaneous and Induced Cortical Potentials, Dempsey, E., Morison, R., American Journal of Physiology, 135, 310-307
Neurochemical Responses to Cranial Electrical Stimulation and Photo-Stimulation via Brain Wave Synchronization., Dr. Roger K. Cady, Dr. Norman Shealy, Study performed by the Shealy Institute of Comprehensive Health Care, Springfield, Missouri, 1990
The Application of Audiostimulation and Electromyographic Biofeedback to Bruxism and Myofascial Pain-Dysfunction Syndrome, Dr. Arturo Manns, Miralles, R., Adrian, H., Oral Surgery, 1981, Vol. 52
Learn more by watching this introductory video to brainwaves, from Karl Moore:
Want to try out BrainEv for yourself? Enter your name and e-mail address below, and we'll send you a FREE MP3 demo within the next hour. We won't spam you, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
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Analysis on Mine Accident Injuries Dataset
Mineral mining has a long history in America and the early practice of mining may date back to the Gold Rush period, 19 century. Mining can make people rich, but can also lead people to death because of the fatal mine accidents. Mining is one of the most dangerous jobs and the history has witnessed numerous terrible mine accidents that took away thousands of people's lives. The Monongah Mining Disaster was the worst mining accident of American history; 362 workers were killed in an underground explosion on December 6, 1907 in Monongah, West Virginia. We may attribute this disaster to the poor working condition and equipment in the old time. However, when modern mining equipment and regulation are applied, mining accidents never stop injuring the miners and ruining their family. On January 2, 2006, the Sago Mine disaster trapped 13 miners for nearly two days; one miner survived. Although efforts have been taken to investigate accidents, advise industry, conduct production and safety research, and teach courses in accident prevention, the situation is still tough and accidents haven't been completely avoided.
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The Data Set
This data set is a documentation of all mine accidents reported by mine operators and contractors starting from 1983. The dataset is derived from US department of labor and contains 165775 records with key attributes like the mine, the controller, the operator, the accident time, degree of injury, accident type, the sub-unit of the mine etc. The data source is linked here:
To Dodge Severe Mine Accident, Get Experienced!
The working experience is the important aspect that determines the quality of the work in almost all professions. This also applies to mining process. The Scatter Plot visualization is constructed with X-Axis denoting the accident date and the Y-Axis denoting the mining experience of the victims. The color is used to differentiate the degree of injuries with green representing minor injury, black fatality, and pink permanent injury. From the visualization, we can perceive that the most of the severe accidents are caused by workers with less mining experience, while the minor accidents can happen to workers with various mining experience. Therefore, the mining companies will reduce the number of severe accidents by putting more efforts on training their workers, thus reducing the accident-caused revenue.
Don't Blame Bad Luck! Mine Accidents Can Be Controlled
The line chart visualization shows the number of occurrence of mine accidents in different mining sub-unit across ten years period from 2000 to 2010. The X-Axis is used to show calendar year from 2000 to 2010 and the Y-Axis is for the number of mine accidents at each year. Each line in the visualization represent a mining sub-unit and the difference is denoted by colors.
From the first half of the line chart visualization, we can easily see that three sub-units are the main source of mine accidents. They are underground, strip & quary & open pit, mill operation/preparation plant. Fortunately, the lines for these three main accident contributors have significantly noticeable negative slopes, which means that the number of accidents in those sub-units is reduced during that ten year period. In detail, the decrease rate of accidents in the three sub-units is 43.11%, which is good to hear. However, the rest of the sub-units don't seem to contribute to the accidents drop a lot, even though they don't account for the major part of the accidents. To see detail, the second line chart filters out the three major sub-units and visualizes the rest. From the slope of the lines, we can see there is no obvious decrease of accidents.
From the above visualization, we can see that the difference of accidents decrease rate in different sub-units is obvious. This concludes that the decrease in some sub-units must be caused by some external factors other than simple luck. Since the previous ten years has witnessed a huge amount of effort in reducing the chances of mine accidents, we can hypothesize that the decrease in the three sub-units are caused by those efforts. While the stable accidents rate in the rest of the sub-units tell us that our action should not only be taken on the major sub-units, they should also be spent on the other parts of the mining endeavor.
Be Careful When You Start Working!
The bar chart visualization from figure 1 shows the number of occurrence of mine accidents in different times of a day for all months in a year. The X-Axis is used to show calendar month from January to December and the Y-Axis is for the number of mine accidents. Each sub bar in one bar represents a time of a day in an increasing order from bottom to top, the length of which indicates number of mine accidents and is denoted by colors.
The scatter plot from figure 2 is basically showing the same thing as figure 1 does but instead of displaying time as bars from bottom to top in an increasing order, figure 2 sets each time as a circle and puts that in a position where X-Axis still indicates the month but Y-Axis indicates the number of accidents occur in that specific time.
When learning the statistics relations regarding the amount of accidents and time(time of a day, month or quarter in a year) from figure 1, it's surprising to know that last quarter tends to have the least accidents while August has the most accidents in a year. What's more surprising is that this phenomenon doesn't really have anything to do with temperature, otherwise January, a month when it's as cold as December, would have a lower rate of accidents than it actually does. It's more affected by the national holidays when workers don't need to work. And the holidays are more and longer in November, December while none in August.
When it comes to the time of a day when the accidents happen the most, intuitively it would be a night time when people are usually too tired or sleepy to concentrate on their work so that it's more likely to make some mistakes that can cause accidents. But statistics show opposite. Taking a look at the first figure, of all the months, the time when the accidents happen the most is 10AM. And to have a deeper and detailed understanding on how amount of accidents varies depending on time, take a look at figure 2, where darker circles represent earlier time of a day while lighter circles represent later time of a day. All the top circles for each month is 10AM, and the later of a day, the less likelihood that accidents will happen. So if 10AM is the time when workers start working in a day, then they should be very careful as they might just wake up and their brains are not ready for a work that needs carefulness and concentration.
Overall, SpotFire is a powerful integrated visualization systems that features most of the useful visualization and interaction techniques for users to do efficient and meaningful visual analytic. It's a well developed and documented commercial product. The main advantage of SpotFire is its capability of handling several magnitude more data than those academic visualization tools. However, there exists some minor flaws in SpotFire which makes it subject to further improvement.
- When doing the dynamic filtering, the scale of the bar chart changes according to the current maximum value, which is good for analyzing the current data itself but hard for doing comparison when filtering dynamically.
- The parallel coordinate visualization is useful but the interaction is slow when dealing with a data set with hundreds of thousands of records.
- Though the different views are coordinated which means the selected records will be highlighted in all views. The coordinated highlighting in many visualizations such as bar chart and TreeMap, is not meaningful because it simply highlights the whole data group even when it contains only one of the selected records. I suggest adding partial highlighting to indicate the portion of the selected records in the whole group.
- There is no easy way to filter out a single group of records while leave others. For example, if I want to filter out the group with missing data.
- The Scatter Plot overlapping problem is severe when the data set scale exceed the screen capability. If a layer ordering functionality is provided then users can alleviate the overlapping problem by interaction.
- SpotFire doesn't have easy-to-access sorting functionality which is a crucial feature for a visualization system.
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Mention sanguisorba to most gardeners and they'll assume you're talking about the sun-loving herb called salad burnet (Sanguisorba minor), a medicinal plant popular in Tudor gardens. The Latin name sanguis (blood) and sorbeo (to soak up) describes the medicinal use of salad burnet, which was one of the staple herbs to travel across the Atlantic with the Pilgrim Fathers.
Few gardeners realise, however, that there are some fine garden plants among the other 17 species and their hybrids and that these easy-to-grow perennials, which colonise the cooler parts of the Northern Hemisphere, perform consistently in the mixed flower border.
Although sanguisorbas are widely grown in continental Europe and new species have been collected from wild sources during recent years, they are in short supply here. Their flowers, borne on stiff stems, vary from upright spike to fluffy catkin to small, tight bobble and many make good winter silhouettes.
The autumn star of the genus, Sanguisorba canadensis, was an early introduction from Canada in 1633. This substantial and sturdy 5ft tall plant bears white, upright bottlebrush flowers that start as short, millet-like sprays of green buds.
As they open from the bottom upwards, they reveal tiny green-white flowers packed with long white stamens. Each spike extends in length as the flowers open, eventually reaching 6in. Once mature, these ramrod-straight flower spikes fade to green and white without a hint of brown. The toothed foliage of S. canadensis is soft green and the serrated edges of the pinnate leaves have darkened tips.
Handsome foliage is a trait that all sanguisorbas share and the leaves of these members of the rose family (the Rosaceae) have been likened to Melianthus major. Sanguisorba obtusa, a glaucous-leaved Japanese species that arrived in 1860, has the finest foliage of all.
Each round grey-green leaf has an attractive matt bloom, enhanced by a finely edged rim of deep pink. The fluffy, rather squat flowers on this 4ft high plant are a strong rose pink and they bend over slightly as they mature. Flowering begins in July and continues until late August.
Two other pink forms well worth tracking down are the early-summer flowering S. 'Pink Elephant'. This 4ft tall, slender sanguisorba has tight, lipstick-pink flowers that are almost horizontal when they open in early summer, and narrow, light green leaves.
The easier to find S. hakusanensis, from Japan, makes a large, substantial clump reaching 4ft in height and sends up a succession of flower spikes from late summer until late autumn. Each flower, which resembles an overfed caterpillar arching its back, is liberally covered with long, almond-pink stamens.
The flowers brown unattractively as they fade, but rubbing them between finger and thumb removes the spent stamens and leaves a good seedhead.
There are also white forms that have soft, fluffy flowers. The 3ft high S. tenuifolia 'Alba' has very serrated, narrow leaves and slim, nodding bottlebrush flowers. There are late-flowering forms of this willowy, elegant plant, but most are over by late summer. There are also low-growing white forms with spreading habits, sold under a variety of names - but often listed as S. albiflora.
Our native, meadow-loving great burnet (Sanguisorba officinalis) has produced some fine garden plants, too. These have a very different look about them. Instead of forming fluffy catkins, the flowers consist of tight, wine-red heads.
These neat, oval bobbles measure about half an inch in length and appear from June until mid-August. These gently age to dark chocolate-brown, forming an everlasting flowerhead that endures to late winter. The neat leaves are smaller, rounder and greener.
The easiest form to find is 'Tanna', a low-growing sanguisorba for the front of the border, which reaches 12in or so in height. A taller form from Piet Oudolf, 'Arnhem', reaches more than 3ft and both make more of an impact when planted in groups or when repeated as a motif through a border.
The autumn-flowering S. canadensis mixes well with other tall autumn performers such as Helianthus 'Lemon Queen' and Aconitum carmichaelii 'Arendsii'. It can also be used on the edges of ponds and streams.
The tight maroon bobbles of S. officinalis go well with roses - try 'Tanna' woven through several 'White Pet' roses. These neat bobbles also mix well with the flowing grasses Stipa tenuissima, S. capillata and S. barbata.
Using Sanguisorba obtusa with old-fashioned roses and cleome extends the flowering season of rose borders. The low-growing white S. albiflora mixes well in a cool border of ferns (dryopteris, polystichum and polypodiums) and airy late-season grasses such as Deschampsia cespitosa 'Bronzeshleier' and Stipa calamagrostis.
Sanguisorbas need fertile, moist soil to flower well, but they do not show distress in dry conditions and generally don't suffer from mildew. The exception is S. menziesii.
They thrive among other flowers in a sunny, mixed border, flowering well in full sun or semi-shade. The white-flowered forms are often better in some shade, where the flowers are less likely to brown.
These easy, undemanding plants are untroubled by slugs or disease. If needed, they can be divided during the autumn, but some forms increase very slowly.
Sanguisorbas are promiscuous plants and they cross freely and hybridise. It is always better to divide your plants because seedlings will inevitably vary.
Where to buy
Cally Gardens, Gatehouse of Fleet, Castle Douglas, Scotland DG7 2DJ. Send three first-class stamps for catalogue. Mail order available.
Desirable Plants, Pentamar, Crosspark, Totnes, Devon TQ9 5BQ. Send three first-class stamps for catalogue. Mail order only.
Glen Chantry, Ishams Close, Wickham Bishops, nr Witham, Essex CM8 3LG (01621 891342).
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People spreading mosquito nets in Ethiopia
Malaria used to be a disease found in the tropics. But, due to climate change, the anophelese mosquito which carries the disease is appearing in new parts of the world – even Europe. If global warming carries on, some 40 to 60 million more people could be at risk.
Our fight against malaria never stops. One of our biggest sources of pride as a company is our LifeNet™, a mosquito bednet made from a fabric impregnated with insecticide. It’s effective far longer than conventional bednets.
At the same time, we’re always searching for new active substances to control the anopheles mosquito – staying one step ahead as the bug becomes resistant to standard products. Helping us fulfil our goals is a valued partner, the UK-based Vector Control Consortium, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Our work together has already uncovered some promising routes, such as blocking mosquitos’ odor receptors so that they can’t locate victims through smell.
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pH (potential of hydrogen) is a measure of the acidity or alkalinity of a solution. The pH is measured on a scale of 0 to 14--the lower the pH the more acidic the solution, the higher the pH the more alkaline (or base) the solution. When a body is healthy, the pH of blood is 7.4, the pH of urine is 7.4, and the pH of saliva is 7.4. The pH of saliva or urine parallels the extra cellular fluid. Certain areas of the body should be more acidic than others - such as the stomach. Other areas should be more on the alkaline side. When testing the urine or saliva with pH paper sticks, aim for a level of 7.4.
The foods we eat are digested and they break down into either an acid or an alkaline end-product in our tissues. This end-product is called the ash and is what remains in the body after the food has been broken down. Foods that produce an alkaline ash are called alkaline forming food whereas those producing acid ash are called acid-forming foods.
The body needs both types of foods. However alkaline forming food should predominate over acid forming ones. Everyone is different, but for most, the ideal diet is 75 percent alkalizing and 25 percent acidifying foods by volume.
Meat, sugars, eggs, dairy, most grains, white flour and carbonated beverages are acid forming. Drugs are acid forming. Artificial chemical sweeteners like NutraSweet, Equal, or Aspartame, are extremely acid-forming. Fresh fruits and vegetables are alkaline forming to help your body produce and maintain a healthy pH balance.
Generally speaking, most individuals are overly acidic, which can become a dangerous condition that weakens all body systems. An internal environment more on the acidic side is conducive to disease, as bugs, viruses, bacteria and inflammation all thrive in an acidic environment. A pH-balanced environment, on the other hand, allows for normal, healthy body functioning necessary to resist disease.
When an acidic environment exists, it forces the body to borrow the electrolyte minerals- calcium, sodium, potassium and magnesium - from the blood, vital organs and bones to buffer or neutralize the acid so it can be safely removed from the body.
Studies have shown that heavy consumers of soft drinks (with or without sugar) use up large amounts of calcium, magnesium, and other trace minerals in order to buffer the acid contained in soft drinks. The more mineral loss, the greater the risk for osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, hypothyroidism, coronary artery disease, high blood pressure, and a long list of degenerative diseases including cancer.
A food's acid or alkaline-forming tendency in the body has nothing to do with the actual pH of the food itself. For example: Though lemons, limes, and grapefruits are chemically acid, tests show that when they are metabolized in the body they actually have an alkalizing effect and are very beneficial. Likewise, meat will test alkaline before digestion but it leaves very acidic residue in the body so, like nearly all animal products, meat is very acid-forming.
Alkalizing the body fluids (raising pH) is one of the single most important health regeneration benefits available as disease causing microforms (fungi, bacteria, virus, cancer, etc.) cannot survive in an alkaline oxygenated environment.
Barbara Bates is a Registered Nutritional Consulting Practitioner, Registered Orthomolecular Health Practitioner, Certified Personal Trainer, Reiki Practitioner and CancerGuide. She holds a Masters Degree of Applied Science in Holistic Nutrition and runs a wellness practice in Canada. Barbara is specifically trained in diagnosing and correcting the underlying root cause of health concerns rather than treating the symptoms and her nutrition services are offered over the internet to assist those in all areas of the world. To contact Barbara, please visit innerbalancewellness.com. You can email her at firstname.lastname@example.org. She can be reached via email at email@example.com.
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The First Presbyterian Church of Stamford, Connecticut was founded in 1853 and dedicated its first house of worship, a white frame colonial church at the edge of downtown Stamford. In 1884 a stone church replaced this building as the congregation’s membership increased and Stamford expanded around it. In 1952 the congregation’s size had doubled and acceptable worship and classroom space, and parking were problems. They decided to celebrate the congregation’s centenary by moving to a new building at 1101 Bedford Street. In the 1940s they had bought this eleven acres of rolling and wooded land, at what had become the new edge of downtown Stamford.
The site’s building committee was originally in favor of building another white frame colonial church. However, some committee members became intrigued with the possibility of building a modern design church after visiting St. John’s Lutheran Church in Midland, Michigan (Designed by Adrian B. Dow who apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright). To resolve the question of colonial vs. modern, a firm of architects, Sherwood, Mills, & Smith was asked to study the project in collaboration with an outside architect. One of the partners was acquainted with Wallace Harrison and recommended choosing him as the outside architect.
“Donald F. Campbell, First Presbyterian’s pastor, remembers that at his first meeting with Sherwood, members of the congregation, and Harrison, the latter ‘expressed his interest in getting to know me and our theology. He wanted to go to Europe to look at churches there. Wally didn’t know what he would do, but he was honest about it. He was the only one without preconceived ideas for the project.’ As a result of this meeting, Harrison, in association with the firm of Sherwood, Mills, & Smith was asked to design the church complex: he would be responsible for the sanctuary (and a bell tower added in 1968); Willis N. Mills would take on the remainder of the project, consisting of a small chapel and an educational complex” (Newhouse 167).
Dr. Campbell explained to Harrison that Christian theology as interpreted by American Presbyterians “addressed a God who was as much a part of everyday life as he was a transcendental being — a concept that the new sanctuary should somehow convey” (Newhouse 169). In 1953 Harrison visited churches and cathedrals in Europe reflecting on how to design a modern sanctuary, which would express this theology. His design was approved by the congregation, construction began, and the sanctuary was dedicated in 1958. When the sanctuary was completed Harrison declared, “the church was the most satisfying job I ever worked on” (Newhouse 172).
The sanctuary is constructed of 152 precast concrete panels, which rise to a height of sixty feet and span the sanctuary space without supports, forming a canopy. For eighty percent of the side wall length, the panels are inlaid with 20,000, one-inch thick pieces of colored pot-metal glass manufactured in Gabriel Lorie’s atelier in Chartres. Harrison, depicting themes from the crucifixion and resurrection, arranges the stained glass in abstract designs. This main portion of the sanctuary, the nave, is entered from the narthex, mostly in darkness except for a small amount of light entering from stained glass at the rear of the narthex. Although it was not intentional by Harrison, the sanctuary is in the shape of a fish leading to the name “the Fish Church.”
The chancel of the sanctuary is dominated by a 32-foot high cross, faced with wood from the library of Canterbury Cathedral in England, damaged by bombing during World War II. Seating capacity in the nave is 670, with 50 more seats in the balcony above the narthex.
The Maguire Memorial Carillon Tower, designed by Harrison, rises to a height of 260 feet and is located along side of the sanctuary. It contains fifty-six bells and incorporates thirty-six bells, which were given to the City of Stamford in 1947 by the Nestle Company. The Church holds these bells in trust for the city.
Wallace K. Harrison first became aware of Gabriel Loire’s technique of embedding colored chunks of pot-metal glass into concrete during his European tour of churches after receiving the commission.
"(He) turned his attention to Loire’s béton-glas to see if this material of medieval origin could be used with a structural system of folded concrete that would span a space without supports. On the grounds of his Long Island home, in the same area where he had worked out the problems of prefabricated housing, Harrison spent painstaking hours tilting heavy concrete panels to test the angles at which they would stand and hold weight. The result was the use of 152 similar precast concrete panels for the sanctuary, rising to a height of sixty feet to support the structure. Each concrete structure element is reinforced with rows of protruding steel rods (reinforcement rods) that are fastened to the rods of adjoining concrete sections and then reinforced with larger rods and a layer of cement (concrete) (Harrison is forming a cast in situ vertical joint which combines the precast panels). For almost the entire width of the side walls, the panels are inlaid with thick chunks of faceted, multicolored glass. At either end, where the church is made of concrete unrelieved by glass, the exterior walls are covered with slate shingles, as is most of the roof. … the church is 234 feet long, fifty-four feet wide, and covers an area of 11,500 square feet” (Newhouse 169).
“There are, however a few noteworthy exceptions that embody his (Harrison’s) personal style; among them are the First Presbyterian Church at Stamford, Connecticut, two auditoriums, one for Rockefeller University in New York and another for the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D. C., and a small lodge for Nelson Rockefeller at Pocantico” (Newhouse 166).
In 1964 Harrison employed the béton-glas technique he first used in the First Presbyterian Church, in construction of the Hall of Science for the New York World’s Fair. The Great Hall is constructed of an undulating eighty-foot high, fifteen-inch thick wall. The wall is formed into 5,400 rectangular coffers of about twenty-eight by forty-eight inches. Inside each rectangle is a thin panel of concrete studded with chunks of cobalt blue Dalla de verre glass. Standing in the Great Hall, the effect is … as Harrison intended … of floating in the void of space. In 2014 a major renovation of the Great Hall, now known as the New York Hall of Science, will be completed.
Newhouse, Victoria, Wallace K. Harrison, Architect, New York, NY, Rizzoli, 1989
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View our privacy statement for more information and how to manage them.
Use the Protect your Well App to identify whether or not your well is at risk of contamination. Scan the QR code below.
Private wells are not regulated under the European Communities (Drinking Water) Regulations 2014.
A private well is a well that is privately owned and provides water to a single house and does not provide water to the public through a commercial or social activity.
Irish Water has no role to play in abstractions relating to private water supplies. Water charges do not apply to private well owners so long as they are not also connected to a public water supply.
This means that you are responsible for the quality of your well water; however, your local authority is responsible for providing advice and guidance in relation to the protection of your supply. While strictly speaking your supply does not have to comply with the drinking water regulations it should comply with the water quality standards, which have been set in order to protect human health (see parameters listed for full details). The onus is on you to resolve the water problem if it relates to an issue that requires water treatment and is outside the pollution control remit of the local authority or the EPA (if it relates to an EPA licenced facility).
If you are concerned about your well water, contact your local authority or your HSE Environmental Health Officer for advice. If you suspect that your water may be contaminated it may be advisable to boil your water until you have had your well water tested.
Please keep in mind that while you might not get sick from water that you have been using for many years, visitors and especially young children can be very susceptible to infection with very slight contamination because they have not developed immunity to the bacteria in your well.
You may need to obtain independent advice on how to remedy the problem. See EPA Advice Note on Exempted Supplies for more details.
It is important that everyone is aware of the risks posed to water coming from private wells. Just because the water comes from underground does not mean it is ok to drink at all times.
Soil cover can provide protection to the water in your well but if it is shallow your well may be vulnerable to contamination. Polluting activities such as domestic wastewater treatment systems or septic tanks, farmyards and land-spreading of slurry and grazing cattle may pose a risk to the water in your well. One litre of domestic wastewater contains around 1 million E. coli bacteria yet it takes just a few organisms of one type of E. coli (VTEC) to cause severe human illness. In rare cases VTEC infection can be fatal. The drinking water standard for E. coli is zero.
Polluting matter may seep into the ground and contaminate the groundwater itself and then pumped into your well (see Figure below) OR it may flow over the land surface and down around the top of your well and into the groundwater, which is then pumped into your well.
The most common problem associated with private wells is poor well construction. It is very important that the well is drilled properly, grouted and lined to make sure that polluting matters cannot get into the well from the ground surface or from shallow groundwater. See Advice Note 14 and the IGI Guidelines for more details on good well construction and wellhead protection.
There are recommended setback distances between polluting activities and your private well which will assist in protecting your well from contamination if it has been constructed appropriately in the Table below.
Minimum distance (in metres) from the polluting activity to your private well 1
Select the infographic image to download the full size version.
It is recommended that you secure your wellhead from animal access (e.g. putting a fence around your wellhead).
To ensure that your health is not at risk from contamination of your water supply, you should check that your well is adequately protected. Make sure that contamination is not getting into your well by checking
The best way to ensure your water is safe is to look for any potential sources of contamination such as:
Water from your well may be contaminated if it is discoloured, even occasionally, or if there is an odour coming from it. Even if your water is crystal clear it may still be contaminated as many of the bugs in water are invisible.
Use the Protect your Well App to identify whether or not your well is at risk of contamination.
PO Box 3000 Johnstown Castle Estate Wexford, Y35 W821 053-916 0600Other EPA locations
© EPA 2016
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Toward Sustainable Landscapes: Phosphorus Management to Protect Wetlands
To reduce phosphorous loads in waterways within the Peel-Harvey catchment, the project aims to develop new configurations in landuse with greater integration of perennial plants into farming systems. Key to achieving this landuse change is the new and detailed knowledge this research will gather on the forms of phosphorous in soil and water, and the hydrological mechanisms that transport the phosphorous off farms.
Researchers will also tap into community knowledge to help with information gathering. The research is engaging landholders and community members on research objectives and milestones, and presenting reports to stakeholder groups throughout the project. While reviewing existing information on the phosphorous movement within the Peel-Harvey catchment, researchers are also gathering "grey literature," that is, information held by people, but not formally published.
Deep soil cores will be taken in two contrasting fields to characterize soil properties. Scientific instruments will be installed at four locations, representing upland, mid-slope and riparian ecosystems. This allows for assessment of the shallow aquifer groundwater system and its role in biogeochemical processes and nutrient transport over a seven-12 month period. Soil collected from field sites will be analyzed to determine the point at which the addition of more phosphorous results in phosphorous leaching. Analysis of soil samples from native wetland and existing pastures will help determine the role these ecosystems play in capturing the phosphorous on a seasonal basis. Finally, researchers will experiment by planting certain species of primarily native plants in various locations on farms to see how they contribute to phosphorous uptake.
University of Western Australia
Play Wetlands Video (1:48)
Download Transcript (185 KB, PDF)
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| 0.908748 | 351 | 3.546875 | 4 |
Sample essay on Stress:
The word stress has many possible meanings. The meaning of the word depends on whom you’re talking to. The most common definition of stress is best described in the Cambridge Dictionary, which gives several general definitions. The first being, a great worry caused by a difficult situation, an example of this would be choosing between two great jobs. A second definition is worried or anxious such as, waiting to find out if you’re pregnant. Another definition is to give emphasis or special importance to something, such as putting emphasis on a word in a sentence to make it mean something different rather than putting no emphasis on it at all. A final definition is a force that acts in a way which tends to change the shape of an object, an example being a stress fracture where a bone changes its shape by getting a hair line split in it causing pain to an individual.
There are also many other definitions for stress. The word stress is used in a variety of different fields. In the Dorland’s Medical Dictionary, stress is defined as the pressure of the upper teeth against the lower teeth in mastication. In the Dictionary of Computing, stress is an acronym for Structural Engineering System Solver, which is used by computer programmers. Another definition found in Geology dictionary defines stress as being a force applied to a material that tends to change dimensions. Finally stress is also used in the field of art. In a dictionary of Art stress is defined as the important significance or emphasis placed on something. An example of this would be in a drawing of a person the artist might want to give emphasis or stress that person’s eyes.
I would say the Cambridge Dictionary give the best definition of worried or anxious, this would be my favorite definition. I believe that this particular definition is the most common because it is how most people use the word stress.
You can order a custom essay, term paper, research paper, thesis or dissertation on Stress at our professional custom essay writing service which provides students with custom papers written by highly qualified academic writers. High quality and no plagiarism guarantee! Get professional essay writing help at an affordable cost.
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<urn:uuid:a23209ab-2681-4c84-b8a8-ae696655ea81>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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| 0.949658 | 436 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Studying the HumberThe environment and future of Western Newfoundland’s most important river
By Michelle Osmond
Earth sciences, chemistry and engineering researchers are collaborating on a project that will help determine the future of the Humber River. The results could have an impact on how the river will respond to anticipated changes in climate, tourism, aquaculture, agriculture and local industry.
Dr. Sue Ziegler with the Department of Earth Sciences – the principle investigator in the project – Drs. Erika Merschrod and Christina Bottaro from the Department of Chemistry, and Dr. Kelly Hawboldt from the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, have received roughly $60,000 per year for the next three years to launch this multidisciplinary research program to study the effects of human impact in the Humber River Basin.
“What’s really exciting about this project is that we can take a very comprehensive ‘source-to-sea’ view of the river basin, because of the wide expertise of the researchers,” said Dr. Merschrod. “We can track the human impact from its source to its eventual fate downstream. From large-scale biogeochemical processes, which can be connected to phenomena such as climate change, to the more local effects of human impact such as industrial contaminants or human waste.”
The “wide expertise” means a chemical engineer to identify the source of human based discharges into the water body (e.g. sewage outfalls) and what needs to be measured, chemists who will conduct the measurements, and an earth scientist, who will determine how all of these things flow through the river and impact the wider environment. The information can then be used by the engineers and chemists to identify the sources having the most significant impact and developing technologies or methods to minimize this impact.
The researchers will also be developing new environmental monitoring technologies making this type of work more efficient and accessible in future. For example, microfluidic technology (very tiny tubes embedded in a small chip) will enable researchers to assess water quality in remote areas at lower cost and without complicated equipment.
As Dr. Merschrod puts it, “it could be as simple as dipping a chip into the well or other drinking water source and getting an instant, easy-to-read response.”
The project, titled Development of a source-to-sea understanding and monitoring capabilities for assessing human and climate change impacts on water resources in the Humber River Basin, is funded through the Humber River Basin Project (HRBP).
As recently reported in the 2008 Research Report, the HRBP is an umbrella network of researchers working out of Sir Wilfred Grenfell College’s Centre of Environmental Excellence.
From environmental studies focusing on the river’s potential as a drinking water source, to historical analysis of how the people have used this river to help them survive, the project is an integrated approach to ecological assessment and long-term monitoring.
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http://www.mun.ca/gazette/issues/vol40no17/studying.php
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en
| 0.920023 | 617 | 3.328125 | 3 |
NIAAA Scores at the USA Science &
On October 23 and 24, 2010, NIAAA took part in the first USA Science & Engineering Expo in Washington, DC. With an estimated 500,000 visitors, the free, 2-day event featured famous scientists, demonstrations, and lots of hands-on activities. It included exhibitions from both the public and private sectors—the NIH, NASA, the Department of Energy, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, PBS Kids, among others.
Targeting adolescents ages 8–18, NIAAA presented the “Cool Spot Carnival” to show the negative effects that alcohol can have on the brain. The material presented was based on the NIAAA Web site for kids, www.thecoolspot.gov.
Youngsters visiting the NIAAA booth had the opportunity to try their hand scoring in a football-toss game while wearing “fatal vision goggles” to simulate being under the influence of alcohol. While the kids enjoyed throwing at (and usually missing) the target, NIAAA booth staff drove home the message that even though this is a fun activity, it shows the extent to which alcohol can impact the way we see things and our ability to do even a simple task such as throwing a football.
The Cool Spot Carnival was a huge success, with thousands of youngsters and their families visiting the NIAAA exhibit. Other Carnival activities included flip-board games that gave kids a chance to "pick your no's"—demonstrating the best way to say “no” to alcohol—and dispel the myth that “everybody is drinking.”
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| 0.952052 | 336 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Save Money With Electrical Power Utilizing Solar Power
Solar energy is probably the most untapped sources of renewable energy available in the ecosystem. Although a solar panel pay for itself with the energy it adds to your house that saves you money, but it is probably the few energy sources used on the globe that is 100 percent renewable and 100 percent pollution free. Unlike energy sources such as coal or nuclear which produce toxic gases and byproducts that are harmful to the environment, solar power leaves zero carbon footprint and no harmful emissions in the act of absorbing sunlight to product electricity.
Solar Panels are made by mounting solar cells on a backing plate. Some panels are rigid and can be roof mounted while others are flexible and can be rolled up and put into a rucksack
Solar Cells are usually made from silica which comes from sand
Solar cells are small semiconductors which produce a small voltage and electric current when light shines on them
Solar Panels are getting cheaper now. With so much pressure from climate change concerns lots of technological effort is going into producing more cheaply.
Solar Panels are also getting more affordable due to central government grants and perhaps local grants too
Solar panels are gaining in efficiency in extreme measures. Wikipedia has it that the first solar cell was only 1% efficient and commercial cells are commonly 20% efficient. Breaking news would be that the latest experimental cells in a laboratory setting are 45% efficient. These cells hold a promise of smaller cheaper panels with even cheaper electric power.
Do-it-yourself enthusiasts are also building their own panels. The main skill needed for this sort of D.I.Y. project is soldering. You need this skill because the panels consist of, for example, 24 solar cells hooked up electrically and with leads soldered onto each cell. And in order to connect to your residence electric circuits even a keen D.I.Y. enthusiast would be recommended to call in a qualified electrician experienced in home solar energy to check what they’re doing!
The price of a factory made solar panel varies widely with its size and construction. It will be in the $800 to $1200 range and the home would need perhaps a dozen of these or more. You can view why the DIY market exists with prices like these!
It’s correct that electric utility companies may buy solar electricity out of your home should you be generating more than you are using but not all utilities do this, so check beforehand if this sounds like one of the goals
A solar survey done by an experienced solar installer will help you and advice on the position and direction of your panels. The panels need to face the sun and in the northern hemisphere they will face South but shade from trees and chimneys may mean that an installation is not practical on that roof. Some people solve that problem by mounting their panels on poles or frames well away from their home.
Solar energy is over a hundred years old and is now developing very fast. It is well worth checking to see if it may help you reduce both your impact on the environment your living costs.
|Print article||This entry was posted by kteinc on May 4, 2010 at 1:13 pm, and is filed under Technology. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.|
Comments are closed.
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://greenlinkup.com/save-money-with-electrical-power-utilizing-solar-power
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| 0.959477 | 687 | 3.125 | 3 |
New research suggests that celiac disease could be even more common than previously thought. It is currently believed that celiac disease affects around 1 in 100 people but a new Australian study suggests that the number affected could be more like one in 60 Australian women and one in 80 men.
Researchers led by Walter and Eliza Hall and scientists from Barwon Health and Deakin University developed a new kind of diagnosis test to screen for celiac disease. This screening process includes the usual antibody test but also adds a genetic test which looks for two key genetic markets, which are carried by 99.6% of people with celiac disease.
Results of the first study to assess the prevalence of celiac disease in Australians showed that 56% of the population carry one of the two known genetic markers associated with the autoimmune disorder. We must remember however that whilst a huge percentage of the population may have a genetic predisposition to the disease, not everyone will go on to develop it.
More than 2700 people took part in this decade-long study. Initial testing showed that whilst 37% of the people were genetically predisposed to celiac disease, just one person has been diagnosed. On repeat testing a decade later, six more people had been diagnosed; still a very small number compared with the number of people who probably have the disease.
“About one in 40 who carry the genetic markers will go on to develop coeliac disease,” said gastroenterologist Dr Tye-Din. “There is a lot of coeliac disease out there but a large amount isn’t being picked up by doctors in the community.”
Very interesting research and I look forward to further studies on the prevalence of celiac disease in other countries, including the US. Could the future see a world where one in 60 women and one in 80 men have celiac disease…
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http://www.triumphdining.com/blog/2013/09/03/is-celiac-even-more-common-than-we-first-thought/
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| 0.966424 | 380 | 3.203125 | 3 |
Hi, Does anyone have discussion questions for Mark Twain's "How to Tell a Story?"
Many, many thanks, Marian
1 Answer | Add Yours
I sometimes use this essay to begin my unit on storytelling. I have a short quiz that I use with my class that lets me know that they were paying attention. I have listed the questions below. Hope this helps.
1. What does Mark Twain states that he knows?
2. Mark Twain states that there are many types of stories, but only one difficult kind. What type of story did Twain consider to be difficult and why?
3. According to Twain, where do “witty” stories come from?
4. According to Twain, where do “comic” stories come from?
5. What four storytellers does Twain reference in this essay?
6. Write a brief summary of the anecdote Twain relates in this essay.
7. What is a “nub?”
8. In Twain’s opinion, how long should it take a storyteller to relate a humorous story?
9. Write a brief summary of “The Golden Arm.” Why is it humorous?
10. What are the differences between a humorous story, a witty story and a comic story?
We’ve answered 327,551 questions. We can answer yours, too.Ask a question
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http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/hi-does-anyone-have-discussion-questions-for--391200
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en
| 0.950595 | 291 | 3.359375 | 3 |
A channel that can read and write bytes.
A nexus for I/O operations.
A channel that can read bytes.
A byte channel that maintains a current position and allows the position to be changed.
A channel that can write bytes.
Utility methods for channels and streams.
A channel for reading, writing, mapping, and manipulating a file.
Checked exception received by a thread when another thread closes the channel or the part of the channel upon which it is blocked in an I/O operation.
Checked exception received by a thread when another thread interrupts it while it is blocked in an I/O operation upon a channel.
Checked exception thrown when an attempt is made to invoke or complete an I/O operation upon channel that is closed, or at least closed to that operation.
Unchecked exception thrown when a blocking-mode-specific operation is invoked upon a channel in the incorrect blocking mode.
Unchecked exception thrown when an attempt is made to read from a channel that was not originally opened for reading.
Unchecked exception thrown when an attempt is made to write to a channel that was not originally opened for writing.
A nexus for I/O operations
Can read into a buffer
Can write from a buffer
Can read/write to/from a buffer
ByteChannelconnected to an entity that contains a variable-length sequence of bytes
A channel represents an open connection to an entity such as a
hardware device, a file, a network socket, or a program component that is
capable of performing one or more distinct I/O operations, for example reading
or writing. As specified in the
channels are either open or closed, and they are both asynchronously
closeable and interruptible.
Channel interface is extended by several
ReadableByteChannel interface specifies a
read method that reads bytes
from the channel into a buffer; similarly, the
WritableByteChannel interface specifies a
write method that writes bytes
from a buffer to the channel. The
interface unifies these two interfaces for the common case of channels that can
both read and write bytes. The
interface extends the
ByteChannel interface with methods to
modify the channel's
current position, and its
FileChannel class supports the usual
operations of reading bytes from, and writing bytes to, a channel connected to
a file, as well as those of querying and modifying the current file position
and truncating the file to a specific size.
Finally, it defines
methods for forcing updates to the file to be written to the storage device that
contains it, for efficiently transferring bytes between the file and other
channels, and for mapping a region of the file directly into memory.
Unless otherwise noted, passing a null argument to a constructor
or method in any class or interface in this package will cause a
NullPointerException to be thrown.
Copyright (c) 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Use of this specification is subject to license terms.
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| 0.869319 | 630 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Information on Waste Management and Water Quality Issues
RCED-95-200BR: Published: Jun 28, 1995. Publicly Released: Jun 28, 1995.
- Full Report:
Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the management of animal agriculture waste and related water quality issues, focusing on: (1) water quality concerns arising from animal agriculture sources of nonpoint pollution; (2) consolidation trends and geographical shifts in animal agriculture; (3) animal agriculture production covered by point source permits; (4) commonly used animal waste management practices and their associated costs; (5) Department of Agriculture (USDA) cost-share assistance for animal waste management; and (6) the management of wastes associated with animal breeding and feeding operations.
GAO found that: (1) animal waste runoff can introduce excess nutrients, organic matter, and pathogens into surface- and groundwater; (2) agricultural nonpoint pollution is a major factor in water quality degradation; (3) since 1970, the concentration of animal production in large, confined operations has increased for each of the 6 livestock categories studied; (4) geographical shifts in livestock production vary with the specific livestock industry; (5) large, concentrated feeding operations can obtain point source permits to control sources of pollution discharges; (6) many feedlot operations are not required to have point source permits because they do not discharge wastes during most storm events, but many other operations that should have permits do not because of erroneous exemptions or insufficient resources to identify all operations needing permits; (7) commonly used animal waste management practices include storage structures to hold animal wastes until they can be used as fertilizer, buffers to filter nutrients and organic matter from runoff before it reaches surface water, and nutrient management which ensures proper timing and application of manure as fertilizer; (8) waste management costs vary depending on the size and type of operation; and (9) USDA provided about $89 million in cost-share assistance to farmers for animal waste management for fiscal years 1992 through 1994.
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<urn:uuid:3a9360f6-4bd4-44f7-884c-38e28935017a>
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http://www.gao.gov/products/RCED-95-200BR
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| 0.895368 | 411 | 3.421875 | 3 |
DINP is a phthalate that is mainly used as additives in plastics to make them
more flexible. Its structure and applications are very similar to those of
DIDP. It has been widely used in everyday
products, ranging from floorings to shoe soles.
In the 1990s, around 95% of DINP was used in
PVC as a
plasticiser. More than half of the
remaining 5% was used in the production of polymers other than PVC (e.g.
rubbers). The remaining DINP was used in non-polymer applications including
inks, adhesives and sealants, paints and lacquers.
At present, DINP is banned in toys and childcare articles that children can
put into their mouths (see
European Directive 2005/84/EC).
Source: based on the
GreenFacts study on Phthalates
Di-isononyl phthalate (DINP)
Molecular formula C26H42O4
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<urn:uuid:50d7b304-f540-4b0a-bb85-a0b3df838739>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://ec.europa.eu/health/opinions/en/phthalates-school-supplies/glossary/def/dinp-di-isononyl-phthalate.htm
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| 0.971496 | 216 | 3.171875 | 3 |
Definitions for E minor
This page provides all possible meanings and translations of the word E minor
a minor key with the notes E, Fu266F, G, A, B, C, and D
E minor is a minor scale based on the note E. The E natural minor scale consists of the pitches E, F♯, G, A, B, C, and D. The E harmonic minor scale contains the natural 7, D♯, rather than the flatted 7, D – to align with the major dominant chord, B7. Its key signature has one sharp, F. Its relative major is G major, and its parallel major is E major. Much of the classical guitar repertoire is in E minor, as this is a very natural key for the instrument. In standard tuning, four of the instrument's six 'open' strings are part of the tonic chord. The key of E minor is also extremely popular in heavy metal music, as its tonic is the lowest note on a standard-tuned guitar.
The numerical value of E minor in Chaldean Numerology is: 6
The numerical value of E minor in Pythagorean Numerology is: 2
Sample Sentences & Example Usage
A clever man commits no minor blunders.
We are currently active on some minor disposals.
Minor surgery is surgery someone else is having.
Thankfully most of the injuries seem to be minor.
Patience. A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.
Images & Illustrations of E minor
Translations for E minor
From our Multilingual Translation Dictionary
- Ми минорRussian
Get even more translations for E minor »
Find a translation for the E minor definition in other languages:
Select another language:
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<urn:uuid:2d059605-8a78-44f5-a042-0f2b8465b043>
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en
| 0.885433 | 370 | 3.015625 | 3 |
Art of Exploitation®: Assembly Fundamentals Edition is a unique introductory assembly course,
which covers both x86 and ARM architectures. This course exposes students to the assembly concept,
the compilation process, and hardware data storage including registers and memory paradigms.
It covers 16- and 32-bit assembly with mention of 64-bit changes. Students begin with simple
arithmetic instructions and proceed briskly to importing libraries and calling functions.
Students will end the course with implementing system calls to create a simple chat server
using IPv4 network protocols.
Experienced computer professionals with no programming experience can also complete the course with effort,
although they may find the capstone exercises very challenging.
This course introduces students to the assembly concept and teaches computational and programming
theory through practical coding exercises. Students will leave the course having seen conditional
execution, stack behavior, bitwise operations, console I/O, memory manipulation, and socket-based networking.
Class is approximately 70% hands-on, instructor facilitated training and 30% lecture-based training.
Students will code in Windows XP, Windows 7, and ARM-based Debian computers.
- Number Theory
- Arithmetic Instructions
- DOS Interrupts
- Reverse Engineering
- Console I/O with Windows API Functions
- Control Flow Instructions
- ARM with gcc
- Assembling and Linking Manually
- Console Printing with Service Calls
- Conditional Code Execution
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http://www.artofexploitation.com/academics_assembly_fundamentals.aspx
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en
| 0.848685 | 300 | 2.578125 | 3 |
That science, or class of sciences, which treats of the exact relations existing between quantities or magnitudes, and of the methods by which, in accordance with these relations, quantities sought are deducible from other quantities known or supposed; the science of spatial and quantitative relations.
mathematics embraces three departments, namely: 1. Arithmetic. 2. Geometry, including trigonometry and conic sections. 3. Analysis, in which letters are used, including algebra, analytical geometry, and calculus. Each of these divisions is divided into pure or abstract, which considers magnitude or quantity abstractly, without relation to matter; and mixed or applied, which treats of magnitude as subsisting in material bodies, and is consequently interwoven with physical considerations.
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| 0.945476 | 153 | 2.96875 | 3 |
When votes are counted for an election, there are instances in which individual ballots do not contain valid votes. This can happen for two reasons: overvoting and undervoting. When overvotes and undervotes occur, it can mean that your votes are canceled or you do not cast as many votes as you are permitted to.
An overvote happens when you vote for more candidates than the number of candidates you are permitted to vote for in a particular office race.
Overvotes can only occur when voting on an optical scan or paper ballot voting system. Overvotes cannot occur when voting on a direct recording electronic voting system.
How to Avoid an Overvote
To avoid overvoting when using an optical scan or paper ballot voting system:
- Be sure to read the voting instructions for the voting system used in your election district. Examples of instructions for voting include: "Vote for One," "Vote for not more than Two," or "Vote for not more than Three."
- If you accidentally vote for more than the allowed number of candidates for a particular office, ask for a new ballot before the defective ballot is cast. If you have not cast the ballot, the District Board of Elections is obligated to provide you with a replacement ballot upon request.
Undervoting means that you cast fewer votes for a particular office race than you are permitted to cast. Unlike overvoting, you have the right to undervote if you choose to do so. No ballot or vote will be canceled as a result of an undervote.
Ask for Help
If you are confused as to whether you have overvoted or undervoted, please do not hesitate to ask for assistance from a member of the District Board of Elections.
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en
| 0.953286 | 350 | 3.390625 | 3 |
America Doesn’t Need a Big Army Any More
It was not surprising that the mass media response to the 2015 defense budget was that it would result in “the smallest Army since before World War II.” It would have been a shock had anyone continued: “and it’s a good thing.” But it is—and Russia’s current actions in the Crimea do not change that fact.
Reversing the early-2000s growth in land forces is a start on what has to be a 20-year effort to forge a military that’s actually relevant for the future.
Today’s force has its roots in an era when wars were fought on the land and on the sea, zealots explored the air, scientists dreamed of space and cyber did not exist. Forces had to be within visual range in order to gauge each other’s strength and start thinking about tactics. The intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance role was in the embryo stage.
But even in 1939, the boot-centric view of warfare was on shaky ground. Large standing armies with professional leadership were an idea less than 100 years old. The Greek and German classic studies of warfare were based on Europe—then as now unique in short distances and high population density.
Historians bemoan the pre-WWII U.S. Army’s lack of readiness and its reversion to pre-1917 habits. But a nation that had no fear of land invasion did not need to make its army a priority. That is the case today.
The argument that land forces have special strategic significance is weak. The record of boots-on-the-ground wars is that they usually cause more problems than they solve. The argument that they are the nation’s prime military means, or that other services exist only to support them and get them to the fight, is neither realistic nor helpful.
Globally, there are few cross-border land threats to which the U.S. would respond. North Korea’s shift of resources to missile technology means that land attack is no longer the main threat to the South. It takes a stubborn refusal to read headlines or history to think that the U.S. will send land forces across borders to promote democracy again, at least for a long time.
Events in Ukraine and the Crimea, combining ethnic, civil and international strife, are a case in point. The strongest conceivable U.S. land or amphibious forces would not provide a military option. In the long term, the most significant effect of the Russian action may be to convince the Putin regime to pursue a military that it can’t afford, a policy that did not exactly work out well for the Soviet Union.
Absent major land wars, future conflicts will either be ethnic issues—not along national boundaries, but within or across them—or will involve threats to the global commons, whether at sea, in the air, in space or in the domain of communications.
The air and the sea will be the most important domains for U.S. military power in the next decades, with space and cyber assuming growing importance, and ISR, mostly from the air and space, as the connective tissue for every military action.
Trade and prosperity make the commons important. We will have to recognize a marked change in the motivation of future strategy, in that it will be based on national, material self-interest. There is nothing wrong with such a focus. It is surely preferable to blood-letting in the guise of ideologically-guided nation-building.
The U.S. military budget is equivalent to Pennsylvania’s gross state product. Its population—uniformed, civilian and retired, contractors and dependents—would also make a mid-ranked state. You couldn’t switch Wisconsin from cheese to computing in one year, or even five. There are two ways to change the Pentagon—slowly, or not at all.
That is why a 20-year perspective is important. It’s asking too much to expect individuals and Congress to sustain such a long focus. However, it is not an unreasonable expectation for uniformed and civilian leadership, professional and appointed, and for the industrial C-suite. Indeed, that’s what we pay them to do.
This column also appears in the March 10 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology.
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Multi-Dimensional Damage Detection for Surfaces and Structures
- Created: Monday, 01 July 2013
This system determines the size, depth, and location of damage in a multi-layered system.
Current designs for inflatable or semirigidized structures for habitats and space applications use a multiple-layer construction, alternating thin layers with thicker, stronger layers, which produces a layered composite structure that is much better at resisting damage. Even though such composite structures or layered systems are robust, they can still be susceptible to penetration damage.The ability to detect damage to surfaces of inflatable or semi-rigid habitat structures is of great interest to NASA. Damage caused by impacts of foreign objects such as micrometeorites can rupture the shell of these structures, causing loss of critical hardware and/or the life of the crew. While not all impacts will have a catastrophic result, it will be very important to identify and locate areas of the exterior shell that have been damaged by impacts so that repairs (or other provisions) can be made to reduce the probability of shell wall rupture. This disclosure describes a system that will provide realtime data regarding the health of the inflatable shell or rigidized structures, and information related to the location and depth of impact damage.
The innovation described here is a method of determining the size, location, and direction of damage in a multi-layered structure. In the multi-dimensional damage detection system, layers of two-dimensional thin film detection layers are used to form a layered composite, with non-detection layers separating the detection layers. The non-detection layers may be either thicker or thinner than the detection layers. The thin-film damage detection layers are thin films of materials with a conductive grid or striped pattern. The conductive pattern may be applied by several methods, including printing, plating, sputtering, photolithography, and etching, and can include as many detection layers that are necessary for the structure construction or to afford the detection detail level required. The damage is detected using a detector or sensory system, which may include a time domain reflectometer, resistivity monitoring hardware, or other resistance-based systems.
To begin, a layered composite consisting of thin-film damage detection layers separated by non-damage detection layers is fabricated. The damage detection layers are attached to a detector that provides details regarding the physical health of each detection layer individually. If damage occurs to any of the detection layers, a change in the electrical properties of the detection layers damaged occurs, and a response is generated. Real-time analysis of these responses will provide details regarding the depth, location, and size estimation of the damage. Multiple damages can be detected, and the extent (depth) of the damage can be used to generate prognostic information related to the expected lifetime of the layered composite system.
The detection system can be fabricated very easily using off-the- shelf equipment, and the detection algorithms can be written and updated (as needed) to provide the level of detail needed based on the system being monitored. Connecting to the thin film detection layers is very easy as well. The truly unique feature of the system is its flexibility; the system can be designed to gather as much (or as little) information as the end user feels necessary. Individual detection layers can be turned on or off as necessary, and algorithms can be used to optimize performance. The system can be used to generate both diagnostic and prognostic information related to the health of layer composite structures, which will be essential if such systems are utilized for space exploration. The technology is also applicable to other in-situ health monitoring systems for structure integrity.
This work was done by Martha Williams, Mark Lewis, and Luke Roberson of Kennedy Space Center; and Pedro Medelius, Tracy Gibson, Steven Parks, and Sarah Snyder of ASRC Aerospace Corporation. For further information, contact the KSC Technology Transfer Office at (321) 867-5033. KSC-13588
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Chapter 10 : Comparing Apples and Oranges
A man or woman in the seventh century, however, would not have known about this fine distinction between the sun and the moon. To such a person, the two would appear as a greater light and a lesser light.
Really? They wouldn't? We shall shortly demonstrate that this fact was already known during the time of Christ and is therefore nothing new.
Such a person would observe that the greater light lights up the day and the lesser light lights up the night. And this indeed is how the sun and the moon were described in previous books.
The Bible, describing the creation, says:
"God made two great lights the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night" (Genesis 1:16).
The author of the Qur'an however, was aware that this comparison between the sun and the moon is not adequate.
Actually the author of the Quran made several mistakes when discussing the sun and the moon as well as the constellations.
Therefore the Qur'an does not refer to them as being a greater and a lesser light.
The Qur'an says:
"God is the One who made the sun a shine and the moon a light" (Qur'an 10:5).
Commenting on this, Dr. Bucaille says:
"Whereas the Bible calls the sun and moon `lights', and merely adds to one the adjective `greater' and to the other `lesser', the Qur'an ascribes differences other than that of dimension to each respectively" (The Bible, the Qur'an and Science, p. 156).
Bucaille and Shabir can choose to believe that the distinction made by the Quran in relation to the sun and moon is not limited solely to their dimensions, the fact remains that the verses are vague and do not conclusively prove the points that Shabir is trying to make. It doesn't take a scientist to realize that the sun's light is stronger and much brighter than the light reflected by the moon. So far, nothing in the Quran would make one conclude that the information contained within it is something that could only be from God.
Similarly, the Qur'an says:
"Blessed is the One Who placed the constellations in heaven and placed therein a lamp and a moon giving light" (Qur'an 25:61).
Here again, the difference between the sun and the moon is noted. The sun is called a lamp, and the moon is called an object giving light.
Again in the Qur'an God says that He "made the moon a light" and "made the sun a lamp" (Qur'an 71:15-16).
The issue of different words used for the light of the Sun and the Moon is discussed in detail in Moon Light is Reflected Light. Let us turn here to some other aspects. Shabir failed to mention the fact that the Quran also implies that heaven contains many more lamps than just the sun:
And He completed them seven heavens in two days and inspired in each heaven its command; and We adorned the lower heaven with lamps, and rendered it guarded... S. 41:12
We have indeed adorned the lower heaven with the beauty of the stars. S. 37:6
These passages leave Shabir with major scientific difficulties. The lamps that adorn the lowest heaven are identified as the stars. The problem is that stars do not just adorn the lowest heaven, but adorn all the galaxies that we know of. Hence, lamps can be seen throughout the billions of galaxies and are not just limited to one specific part of the heavens. This is a gross scientific error.
Furthermore, it would seem that the term "lamps" is not just limited to the starry host but includes everything that seems to give forth light, such as the sun being referred to elsewhere as a lamp. This seems to suggest that the term is inclusive and would also include the moon as one of those light-giving lamps since it too is a light in the midst of heaven according to the Quran.
Furthermore, God calls the sun a "blazing lamp" (Qur'an 78:12-13).
This term which is used for the sun is never used for the moon in the Qur'an.
If we assume that the term "lamps" includes all the heavenly objects which seemingly give forth light, then this affirms that the term is used for the moon as well. Furthermore, the description of the sun as a "blazing lamp" is not impressive at all and does not entail a revelation from God. Anyone looking at the sun on a clear day can tell that it resembles a blazing object, whereas the moon obviously does not.
In all of these verses, God expresses the notion that the sun and the moon are "not absolutely identical lights" (The Bible, the Qur'an and Science, p. 156).
Dr. Bucaille draws his conclusions from what he found in the Qur'an about the sun and the moon:
"What is interesting to note here is the sober quality of the comparisons, and the absence in the text of the Qur'an of any elements of comparison that might have prevailed at the time and which in our day would appear as phantasmagorial" (The Bible, the Qur'an and Science, p. 157).
In short, "There is nothing in the text of the Qur'an that contradicts what we know today about these two celestial bodies." (The Bible, the Qur'an and Science, p. 157).
Actually, to say that the sun and moon are not identical lights is a difficulty since we know that the moon has no light of its own. Rather, the moon reflects the light of the sun. This would affirm that their lights are identical since one object reflects the light of the other. If by identical one means that their lights do not resemble each other in that one light is blazing and the other is not, this still would not prove that the Quran is inspired. Anyone looking at the sun and moon can tell that the sunlight seems to be different and more intense than the light reflected by the moon.
Furthermore, the statement that the Quran contains no contradictions to what we know today about constellations is not true. We have already seen that the Quran assumes that stars are found only in the lowest heaven, as opposed to being found throughout the entire universe. The Quran also asserts that the moon is located in the midst of the seven heavens which is a gross error:
The only problem with this statement is that the average distance from the earth to the moon is 384,400 km, while Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us outside of the solar system, is already about 4.3 light years = 40,682,300,000,000 km (40 trillion kilometers) away, or expressed differently, we need to multiply the distance of the moon by more than 100 million to reach even the nearest of all the stars. Hence, to say that the moon is in the midst of the seven heavens implies that the moon is actually farther away from the earth than the stars since the latter are only found in the lowest heaven. This is a major scientific error!
Other mistakes include the following:
Yusuf Ali translates this verse as follows:
It is not permitted to the Sun to catch up the Moon, nor can the Night outstrip the Day: Each (just) swims along in (its own) orbit (according to Law).
By the sun and his brightness, And the moon when she followeth him ... S. 91:1-2
These verses give the impression that both the sun and the moon travel on an identical orbit where the sun never catches up to the moon. The fact is that the moon and sun are not traveling together since the moon orbits around the earth, not the sun. It is the earth that travels around the sun. Furthermore, while there are plenty of verses speaking about the orbit of the sun and moon, there is not one single passage in the Quran that mentions that the earth is also traveling in an orbit. In fact, the Quran gives the impression that the earth is not traveling, but rather it is the center, and the sun, moon and stars travel around it:
And He it is Who created the night and the day, and the sun and the moon. They float, each in an orbit. S. 21:33
And maketh the sun and the moon, constant in their courses, to be of service unto you, and hath made of service unto you the night and the day. S. 14:33
Allah it is Who raised up the heavens without visible supports, then mounted the Throne, and compelled the sun and the moon to be of service, each runneth unto an appointed term; He ordereth the course; He detaileth the revelations, that haply ye may be certain of the meeting with your Lord. S. 13:2
He hath created the heavens and the earth with truth. He maketh night to succeed day, and He maketh day to succeed night, and He constraineth the sun and the moon to give service, each running on for an appointed term. Is not He the Mighty, the Forgiver? S. 39:5
This would have been a perfect opportunity for God to have included the earth as traveling in a course seeing that the orbit of the sun and moon are mentioned here. Yet, the impression given is that the earth, unlike the sun and moon, is not traveling. This point is solidified by the following verse:
Pickthall's translation gives the impression that the earth is in a fixed position, and hence is stationary. The Quran also teaches that the earth is prevented from shaking by hills and mountains that act as firm anchors or pegs:
And the earth have We spread out, and placed therein firm hills, and caused each seemly thing to grow therein. S. 15:19
And We have placed in the earth firm hills lest it quake with them, and We have placed therein ravines as roads that haply they may find their way. S. 21:37
He hath created the heavens without supports that ye can see, and hath cast into the earth firm hills, so that it quake not with you; and He hath dispersed therein all kinds of beasts. And We send down water from the sky and We cause (plants) of every goodly kind to grow therein. S. 31:10
The problem with these statements is that hills and mountains are an indication of the earth's instability, not its stability. Hills and mountains form when the earth's plates either divide or collide with each other, causing earthquakes. In fact, another type of earthquake is caused by volcanic eruptions. Hence, if anything the fact that we have hills and mountains proves the exact opposite of what the Quran claims.
It should be obvious to anyone that we do not have seven earths in our galaxy. If by seven earths one means planets this is still wrong since we have nine planets all together.
And for the moon We have appointed mansions till she returns like an old shrivelled palm-leaf. It is not for the sun to overtake the moon, nor does the night outstrip the day. They all float, each in an orbit. S. 36:39-40
Al-Baidawi comments on this verse:
Instead of appealing to respectable Muslim exegetes like Baidawi, Shabir is forced to cite Bucaille as his authority. The reason becomes obvious, since to cite authorities such as Baidawi would leave Shabir with major scientific problems. For example, Baidawi understands the Quranic statement that the moon is appointed mansions to mean that the moon travels throughout the galaxy, traversing the different constellations such as Pleiades. This is a gross error! In order to avoid these errors, Shabir appeals to Bucaille who is not considered an authority on Islam.
Finally, the fact that the moon has no light of its own but merely reflects the light of the sun was known during the life of Christ and was therefore nothing new to the Jews of Muhammad's day. This is due primarily to the fact that the Jewish philosopher, Philo, writing during the time of Christ in his From Questions on Genesis (92), clearly knew that the moon had no light of its own but reflected the light that emanated from the sun:
"God appears here to fix the limit of human life by this number, indicating by it the manifold prerogative of honour; for in the first place this number proceeds from the units, according to combination, from the number fifteen; but the principle of the number fifteen is that of a more transparent appearance, since it is on the fifteenth day that the moon is rendered full of light, borrowing its light of the sun at the approach of evening, and restoring it to him again in the morning; so that during the night of the full moon the darkness is scarcely visible, but it is all light." (Quoted as found in Glenn Miller's article.)
The following excerpt is taken from Abraham Cohen's Everyman's Talmud:
Cohen has a note to this story:
Hence, the Jews knew that the moon was reflected light even before Muhammad was born. Interestingly, both Philo's statement and the Apocryphal story are more scientific than the Quran since the latter nowhere even alludes to the fact that the moon has no light of its own. Certainly it is not explicitly stated.
In fact, there even are biblical passages which suggest that the moon is reflecting the sun's light:
"Immediately after the distress of those days ‘the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’" Matthew 24:29
These passages suggest that the sun's darkening is somehow linked to the moon not giving light. One can, therefore, argue that the bible writers were aware that the moon derived its light, or reflected it, from the sun, which accounts for why the the darkening of the sun leads to the moon not giving any light. If anything, the language of these passages are more compatible with modern science then the Quran's statements regarding moonlight.
In summary, there is nothing miraculous in the Quran since most of its statements are vague and it does not make the scientific statements Muslims claim, nor does it contain anything new.
Responses to "Islamic Information"
Answering Islam Home Page
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Utah State Flower
The Sego Lily - Calochortus gunnisonii or Calochortus nuttalli, also known as Mariposa lily, is adopted as the state flower of Utah of the U.S in 1911. Sego lilies are grown as an ornamental plants.
Calochortus, is a genus of 65 species including the Sego and Mariposa lilies. The Sego flowering plants grow in dry areas, in open pine forests and on hillsides between 5000 - 8000 feet in altitude. The sego plant gives out tulip-like flowers. Each sego flower has 3 petals ranging from white to lavender having a yellow base. The three light green sepals are lance shaped, sharp pointed and about 2/3 as long as the petals. The blooming period of Sego Lily is between May - July.
Facts About Sego lily
- The Sego lily grows upto 6-8 inches in height.
- The Sego lily looks like tulips, and their blooms are seen in many colors.
- The Sego lily is the single grass like blade in blue green in color.
- The three-sectioned sego lily seed pods taste similar, either raw or cooked, to young peas.
- The sego lily leaves grow to 4 inches in length and are green, narrow and curved up at the edges.
- The Sego lily flowering plant has a single grasslike, blue-green leaf.
- Sego lily grows from an underground edible bulb.
There are many online florists who deliver flowers to Utah. You can send flowers, plants of your choice to your loved ones living in Utah or from Utah to other locations across the United States of America through these popular Utah Online Florists.
Facts About Utah state
The Capital City of Utah state is Salt Lake City. Utah state attained its statehood in 1896. Utah state flag was adopted in 1913.
- Utah state nickname is Beehive State.
- Utah state is located between 40.777N, 111.929W of the U.S.
- Total land area of Utah state is 84904 sq.mi.
- Utah state is bordered by Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming.
- Utah state's economy depends upon Agriculture: Cattle, dairy products, hay, turkeys; Industry: Machinery, aerospace, mining, food processing, electric equipment, tourism.
- There are number of places in Utah state to be visited like, National Parks such as Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and Zion.
- National Monuments such as Dinosaur, Natural Bridges, Rainbow Bridge and Monument Valley are seen in Salt Lake City.
- Utah was the site of the 2002 Winter Olympics.
- Utah state is refered as a desert state, and a second driest state in the U.S.
- Rainbow Bridge, Nature's abstract sculpture carved of solid sandstone, is the world's largest natural-rock span, standing at 278 feet wide and 309 feet high.
- Utah state is well known for its computer software companies such as Novell and Word Perfect.
- Utah has the highest literacy rate in the nation.
- The Great Salt Lake covers 2,100 square miles, with an average depth of 13 feet, with 75 miles width, and covering more than a million acres.
- Annual precipitation varies from 5-60 inches of rainfall.
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2012 Calendars: Religions: Islam
(Every effort has been made to assure that the dates below are correct)
Islamic Holidays 2012
February 04, 2012
Isra Al Mi'Raj (Ascent of the Prophet Muhammad)
June 16, 2012
This Muslim holiday commemorates the Prophet Muhammad's journey from Mecca to Jerusalem, his ascent into the Seventh Heavens and his return to Mecca -- all on the same night.
Lailatul-Bara'at (Eve. after 14 Sha'ban):
July 04, 2012
July 20, 2012
The start of the holy Islamic month of Ramadan. Muslims around the world will commemorate the month in which the Koran was revealed by Allah to His prophet Muhammad by fasting from sunrise to sunset.
Lailatul-Qadr (Night after 26th Ramadan)
August 14, 2012
Eid-Al-Fitr (Celebrating the Fast)
August 19, 2012
Today is the first full day of the three-day Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan.
Eid-Al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice)
October 26, 2012
This Muslim holiday, celebrated during the time of the annual hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca, marks the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Ishmael, as commanded by God. The day is consecrated with an animal sacrifice, of which one-third is shared with the poor while the other two-thirds is enjoyed with family and friends.
Muharram 1 (Al-Hijra - Islamic New Year)
November 15, 2012
Today is the first month of the Islamic calendar and the start of the new year. (began the previous night at sundown)
Ashura: Tenth Day
November 24, 2012
This Shia Muslim holiday commemorates the death of Muhammad's grandson, killed during the Battle of Karbala. Celebrated on the 10th of Islamic month of Muharram, Ashura is a day of fasting, reflection and meditation.
Actual starting date depends on the sighting of the moon in North America.
All Islamic Days begin at sunset the preceding evening.
2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015
Archive: 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008
Calendars: Religions: Baha'i | Christian | Jewish | Islamic | Pagan | Wiccan | Buddhist | Hindu
Did you know that every day is a holiday? Everyday. Somewhere.
Someone is celebrating something! And now you can too! Visit our website - Daily Holidays of the Net - for more information on Fun and Wacky Holidays.
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WASHINGTON — Sally Ride, who blazed trails into orbit as the first American woman in space, died yesterday of pancreatic cancer. She was 61.
Ride died at her home in the San Diego suburb of La Jolla, said Terry McEntee, a spokeswoman for her company, Sally Ride Science. Ride was a private person and the details of her illness were kept to just a few people, McEntee said.
Ride rode into space on the space shuttle Challenger in 1983 when she was 32. After her flight, more than 42 other American women flew in space, NASA said.
“Sally was a national hero and a powerful role model. She inspired generations of young girls to reach for the stars,” President Barack Obama said in a statement.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, a former astronaut, said Ride “broke barriers with grace and professionalism — and literally changed the face of America’s space program.”
“The nation has lost one of its finest leaders, teachers and explorers,” he said in a statement.
Ride was a physicist, writer of five science books for children and president of her own company. She had also been a professor of physics at the University of California in San Diego.
She was selected as an astronaut candidate in 1978, the same year she earned her doctorate in physics from Stanford University. She beat out five women to be the first American woman in space. Her flight came two decades after the Soviets sent a woman into space.
“I didn’t really think about it that much at the time,” Ride recalled in a NASA interview for the 25th anniversary of her flight. “But I came to appreciate what an honor it was to be selected to be the first to get a chance to go into space.”
Ride flew in space twice, both times on Challenger, in 1983 and in 1984. She logged 343 hours in space.
She also was on the president’s committee of science advisers.
One of Ride’s last legacies was allowing middle-school students to take their own pictures of the moon using cameras aboard NASA’s twin Grail spacecraft in a project headed by her company.
Ride’s company said she is survived by Tam O’Shaughnessy, her partner of 27 years; her mother, Joyce; her sister, Bear; a niece and a nephew.
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Scientists have identified a new species of African monkey with distinct coloring that differentiates it from other species. The new primate species now scientifically named Cercopithecus lomamiensis was first found by a research team during their field surveys in a remote area of the middle Lomami Basin between Tshuapa, Lomami and Lualaba Rivers in central Democratic Republic of Congo.
The species is locally known as "Lesula" and was first seen by researchers in captivity in 2007 with a schoolgirl in the town of Opala who had it as a pet.
"We never expected to find a new species there.. Right away I saw that this was something different. It looked a bit like a monkey from much further east, but the coloring was so different and the range was so different," said Dr. John A. Hart lead scientist and researcher with the Lukuru Foundation, a wildlife research group, who identified the species.
Hart, along with his wife and fellow researcher Terese Hart, and his team of field researchers were on a research expedition to Africa's remote Lomami forest, when the team unexpectedly came across the unusual looking monkey species.
The owl-faced monkey has a blond chin and upper chest with dark limbs and a reddish color on the lower back which make it quite different from other monkey species. Researchers said that its unusual coloring made them suspect that the species was something new.
"And adult males have a huge bare patch of skin in the buttocks, testicles and perianal area. It's a brilliant blue, really pretty spectacular," said Hart.
In a report published in the journal PLoS One, Hart said that the Lesula is only the second new species of African monkey to be discovered in the past 28 years. The Lesula has a mane of long grizzled blond hairs, framing a protruding pale, naked face and muzzle, with a variably distinct cream-colored vertical nose stripe.
One of the portrait photos taken by the researchers depicts a female Lesula with amazing human-like eyes and a remarkably melancholic expression.
The researchers, having observed the species for the past five years both in captivity and in the wild, say the analyzed DNA samples confirm the Lesula's genetic distinction from that of other species.
The Lesula monkeys live in the remote forests of central Congo and are well-known to local hunters. The Lesula is hunted upon by humans and also wild animals and big birds of prey such as eagles. The Lesula are already considered "vulnerable" as the locals hunt them for food or to sell to the bush-meat trade, thereby endangering their existence.
The husband-wife team are now raising funds to to launch a conservation project to protect the newly found species.
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DAITOA SENSOU: Pacific War
(or, literally, the Great East Asia War)
The years 1942-45 were labeled the Daitoa Sensou, or Pacific War. Before Pearl Harbor,
the war was not a war at all; it was an 'Incident.' After Pearl Harbor, though, the
government gave an official name to the battle, which included the war on mainland
China, other countries, and all the Pacific islands. More directly translated as 'Great East
Cups and bottles from this period are less personalized. The patterns are almost always
stamped (not hand-painted), and they are often sloppily colored. Since these were made
toward the end of the war, the artists probably didn't care so much. Most were hungry
and war-weary. In addition, the artists could have been children or people who had no
Another difference is the lack of family names. Once you find a daitoa cup, they will
almost never have a soldier's name, regiment number, or place of dispatch inscribed.
Since resources were getting scarce and money was, too, fewer cups were made, sold,
and bought. In addition, entire regiments were being wiped out and the movements of
troops was quite varied. Also few soldiers were being discharged after 1942.
Because of these factors and others, I suppose, daitoa items are comparatively rare.
Here are the relevant kanji:
DAI-TO-A SEN-SOU KI-NEN.
There are exceptions, though. Here is a daitoa cup
with name inscribed below the helmet & flags.
Rare cup marked with both 'China Incident'
and 'Great East Asia War.' The ink color and
kanji style are different, so these were
probably inscribed at different times.
|Inscribed 'Daitoa Sensou Commemorative, Loyal Warrior'.
|This one has a tank in
the pattern, though it is
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| 0.965554 | 415 | 3.203125 | 3 |
Work groups and teams make collective decisions. Jury’s reach verdicts. Executive teams choose strategies. Creative teams at ad agencies settle on a campaign they’ll recommend. Task forces and panels publish their findings. On their way to collective decisions and agreements, groups generate ideas, exchange information and opinions, synthesize data and eventually reach conclusions. Anyone who has ever served on a work team or facilitated a work team’s deliberations understands that it’s a messy, unpredictable process blessed and burdened by the vagaries of human interaction and social systems dynamics.
People who study how group members process information together generally focus on one of two broad research areas: the study of how groups generate and exchange ideas and the study of how groups reach agreements and make decisions.
Think about the last meeting you attended. There were probably presentations or, perhaps, some brainstorming followed by discussion. At some point in the meeting, discussion or information sharing ended and the group, formally or informally, chose what information or ideas would lead to action and what actions should be taken. For simplicity sake, let’s use the term, “diverging” to describe times when group members engage in idea generation, information exchange, and opinion sharing. Let’s use the term, “converging” to describe times when group members engage in culling or synthesizing information, discarding ideas, and reaching conclusions. For example, the recent controversy about the effectiveness of traditional approaches to brainstorming is an example of research about divergence. The classic “Groupthink” studies of team cohesion leading to policy fiascoes, like the Bay of Pigs Invasion, represent convergence research.
While it’s important to help teams become more effective at diverging and converging, for me, the more interesting aspect of group information processing has to do with what happens as teams navigate the largely uncharted territory marking the transition from episodes of diverging to episodes of converging. What’s going on with a group at the point in their deliberation when additional information, ideas, and opinions stop being influential? What are the characteristics of the moment when the group pivots from being influenced by interactive exchanges to shutting itself off from consideration of additional information? As organizational systems scholars, how can we help groups recognize when it’s time to shift from diverging to converging and what are the implications of mismanaging or mistiming the transition from diverging to converging?
I use the term, “inflection point” to describe the moment of transition in team information processing from diverging to converging. According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, an inflection point is “a point on a curve that separates an arc concave upward from one concave downward, and vice versa.” Think of the concave upward portion of the curve and the space above it as representing an episode of divergent thinking during team interactions when information is being added; when the group is open to generating and considering additional data and perspectives. In the same way, the concave downward portion of the curve and the space below it represent episodes of convergent thinking during team interaction when information is being assessed and culled, when team knowledge becomes fixed and new information, even if it is shared, is not influential.
An inflection point in team deliberation marks a shift in the collective openness to additional information and perspective. The earlier a team reaches an inflection point, the earlier the nature of the interaction changes from information seeking to information culling. Consider, for example, a jury deliberation. An interaction episode that starts with each jury member stating his or her conclusion about the guilt of the accused and concludes with someone proposing a collective verdict represents a relatively quick move through an inflection point. Reach an inflection point too early and the team risks missing something important. Reach an inflection point too late and the team risks drawn-out exchanges that add no value to the team’s deliberation. Clearly, not all individual members of a group will shift their thinking from divergent to convergent at the same time. The inflection point may be wide or narrow depending upon how long it takes the collective to shift; consider the jury deliberation in 1957’s Twelve Angry Men, a classic movie depicting a lone juror slowly influencing eleven others who had initially reached a different verdict.
When teams deliberate effectively they bring out the best in each individual team member while making productive use of the diverse perspectives and available expertise. When teams deliberate ineffectively, they run the risk of missing something important, reaching poor quality conclusions, or damaging rapport among team members. Since organizations increasingly rely on work teams to set direction or accomplish critical tasks, organizational effectiveness depends to a significant degree on the quality of the outcomes teams produce and how people feel about work has more and more to do with how they feel about their teams.
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Why Some People are Right Handed And Some Left Handed
Tristan it appears that there is no single mechanism that will definitively determine which hand you will prefer. Technology and further studies will continue to help shed light on the subject. What is known is that it essentially comes down to genes and biological asymmetry in the human brain. What tends to be true in so many other aspects of human preference, handedness also seems to be more of a spectrum. You have some people who strongly prefer right or left handedness, and some that can use both with the same level of comfort. Then there are countless people who have different degrees of ability using their non-dominant hand.
The biological side of the question has been known for quite a while and there are countless published articles on the topic. Most people control speech and language (including writing) with the left hemisphere of their brain, no doubt resulting from millennia of evolutionary mediated natural selection. This asymmetry is an extremely important factor in our brains. Since the left side of the brain tends to control the right side of the body, it leaves a majority of the population with the preference for being right handed. Depending on which study you read, approximately 80-90% of the population is right handed. This idea is further backed up with the ancillary evidence residing in our closest animal relatives, apes. Their brains are much more symmetrical than ours and apes don’t typically show any tendencies towards a type of handedness.
The second and more recently known aspect of handedness is genetic. Technology has allowed us to explore with more accuracy the countless genes associated with all types of human tendencies and behaviors. In 2007, researchers found that a gene (LRRTM1) was involved in the development of handedness.
There are two manifestations (alleles) of that gene- one known as the D gene and the other C gene. The D is more frequent in all populations and promotes right handed preference. The C gene does not promote left handedness but instead is a gene of chance. It appears that 50% of people with this allele are left handed and 50% are right handed. The discovery also helps explain some of the well known phenomenon regarding handedness. More specifically, that you can “teach” someone to use their non-dominant hand, and become ambidextrous. This was a well known practice when it was once believed that left handedness was the result of the Devil and it promoted evil behaviors.
How the manifestation of this gene affects people’s handedness isn’t fully understood. The leading theory is that it affects the asymmetry of the brain. The LRRTM1 gene also slightly increases a person’s risk of developing schizophrenia, a disorder known to involve abnormal asymmetry of the brain. But don’t worry if you’re left handed, there seems to be many factors involved in the development of schizophrenia, and most left handed people never develop the disorder. All the same, if you write with your left hand, watch out for the possessed psychiatrist who definitively wants to kill you!
If you liked this article and the Bonus Facts below, you might also like:
- Why Doctors ask Men to “Turn Your Head and Cough”
- Why Beans Give You Gas
- Why Voices Squeak During Puberty
- Why Fingers Wrinkle in the Water
- Why Scratching a Mosquito Bite Makes it Worse
- While most people’s brains have the left side handling language, in 1 in 7 lefties, both hemispheres process language. This is in comparison to righties where 1 in 20 have both hemispheres processing language.
- The idea that people who are left handed are naturally disposed to evil has been around for as long as we have recorded history. The Devil is mostly portrayed as left handed. The Bible mentions right handedness positively over 100 times, while left handedness is mentioned only 25 times and every time is negative.
- Famous left handers include “The Boston Strangler”, Osama Bin Laden, Justin Bieber, Fidel Castro, Jack the Ripper, Whoopie Goldberg, Mark Hamill, OJ Simpson, and Tom Cruise, among countless others.
- Due to the aforementioned shunning of left handedness, it is difficult to say which U.S. Presidents were or were not naturally left handed. However, it’s interesting to note that 4 our of the last 7 Presidents have been left handed and Ronald Reagan may have been left handed, but was taught to use his right from his youth, so ended up being considered ambidextrous. If you count Reagan, it is 5 of the last 7. The confirmed most recent lefties are: Ford, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Obama. Not only does it seem like there are a disproportionate number of Presidents that are lefties, but there are also a disproportionate number of Nobel Prize winners that are lefties, as well as painters and professional writers.
- The average left handed person will reach sexual maturity later than a right handed person.
- In 1992, “National Left-Hander’s Day” made its debut. It’s August 13th if you care. I wonder how the truly ambidextrous feel? They only represent less than 1% of the world. Why don’t they get a day? 😉
|Share the Knowledge!|
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A congregation of women with simple vows, founded in 1633 and devoted to corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Their full title is Sisters or Daughters of Charity (the founder preferred the latter term), Servants of the Sick Poor. The term "of St. Vincent de Paul " has been added to distinguish them form several communities of Sisters of Charity, animated with a similar spirit, among whom they rank in priority of origin and greatness of numbers. They have always been popularly known in France as "the Grey Sisters" from the colour of their habit, which is bluish grey, but are not to be confounded with the Grey Nuns, a community will known in Canada and New England. They are not infrequently called the sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, though a recent French congregation having this saint for their patron, bears that name.
In the United States several diocesan communities who follow a modified form of the rule of the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul and wear a black habit are often called the "Black Cap Sisters", while the "White Cap" or "Cornette" Sisters are those who follow the original rule and form part of the world-wide community under the direction of the superior General of the Congregation of the Mission. or Lazarists, in Paris. These latter sisters were founded by St. Vincent de Paul and the Venerable Louise de Mérillac (1591-1660), and the widow of Antoine Le Gras, known according to a quaint usage of the time as Mlle Le Gras. The need of organization in work for the poor suggested to St. Vincent the forming of a confraternity among the people of his parish. It was so successful that it spread form the rural districts to Paris, where noble ladies often found it hard to give personal care to the wants of the poor. The majority sent their servants to minister to those in need, but often the work was slighted. St. Vincent remedied this by inducing young women from the country to go to Paris and devote themselves to the service of the poor under the direction of the Ladies of Charity. These young girls formed the nucleus of a very large community of the Sisters of Charity now spread over the world, and who have done so much to make the name of St. Vincent de Paul a household work. Mlle Le Gras, who had recently devoted herself at St. Vincent's request to the superintendent of the various confraternities of charity, had charge of these young girls, who lodged at some convent or with the ladies of the confraternity. They met on Sundays at St. Vincent's house for instruction and encouragement. But after three or four years Mlle Le Gras received a few of the most promising of them at her house, where, on 29 November, 1633, she began a more systematic training in the care of the sick and in spiritual life. This is looked on as the real foundation of the community. This little snowball, as St. Vincent playfully called it, was not long in increasing, and on 31 July, 1634, St. Vincent initiated a series of conferences, extending over twenty-five years, which, written sown by the sisters, have had ever since a powerful effect in their formation.
For more than twelve years St. Vincent guided them thus without written rule or constitution and without seeking approval of them as a distinct organization. Let the work grow gradually as the needs of the times demanded, and little did he imagine the vast structure he was laying the foundation of. He used to explain that neither he nor Mlle Le Gras was the founder of the Sisters of Charity, for neither he nor she had ever thought of founding such a community. It sprang from the practical need for such organization. When the idea developed it was at variance with the notions and customs of the times. Hitherto women who publicly consecrated their lives to God's service did so in convents that cut them off from the world, but his sisters were to spend their time nursing the sick in their homes, having no monastery but the homes of the sick, their cell a hired room, their chapel the parish church, their enclosure the streets of the city or wards of the hospital, "having", as St. Vincent says in the rule he finally gave them, "no grate but the fear of God, no veil but holy modesty". After a few months spent with the sisters in her house, Mlle LeGras bound herself irrevocably by vow to the work she had undertaken, 25 March, 1634. This anniversary is religiously kept in the community, for every year the sisters make their annual vows on the feast of the Annunciation. The sisters had hitherto helped the poor and the sick in their homes, but they were now called on for hospital work. A society was formed by some ladies of rank to better the condition of the sick poor in Hotel-Dieu at Paris. A community of Augustinian nuns was in charge, but the miseries of the times had overcrowded the wards, and the revenue was inadequate. It was helpers of the ladies who in turn aided the nuns of the institution that the Sisters of Charity took up hospital work which has since become so prominent a feature in their beneficent activity. A large room near by was hired for their use, where they made delicacies for the sick and also for sale, to swell the income of the hospital. During thefirst year the labours of the ladies and sisters were blessed by seven hundred and sixty conversions, of Lutherans, Calvinists, and even of Turks wounded in sea-fights.
In May, 1636, Mlle Le Gras moved to more commodious quarters with her community. A house at La Chapelle was chosen because of its nearness to Saint-Lazare, the priory recently given to St. Vincent for the Congregation of the Priests of the Mission he had founded. Here the instruction of the poor children in religion and in elementary branches was taken up, the beginning of the widespread labour of the Sisters of Charity in teaching the children of the poor. The charge of foundlings so characteristicof St. Vincent and his sisters came to them through his finding out how miserably these tiny waifs were cared for by the State. The modern foundling asylums owe, of not their origin, at least their excellent system to the work of the Sisters of Charity. On 1 Feb., 1640, at Angers the sisters assumed complete charge of a hospital in which hitherto they had acted as aids to the charitable ladies. In 1641 the headquarters of the community was transferred to a house opposite Saint-Lazare. Here they remained until driven away by the French Revolution. In answer to their desire to be bound by vows, authorization was finally granted to four of the sisters, and these on 25 March, 1642, took simple vows for one year. A copy of these first vows is preserved in the archives of the mission in Paris and says:I, the undersigned, renew my baptismal promises and make a vow of poverty, chastity and obedience to theSuperior of thePriests of the Mission in the company of the Daughtersof Charity, to apply myself all this year to the corporal and spiritual service of the sickpoor, our true masters, with the help of God, which I ask though His Son, Jesus crucified, and by the prayers of the Blessed Virgin. Signed, Jeannede la Croix .
During the war of the Fronde, whole provinces were reduced to the utmost destitution, and St. Vincent took upon himself the burden of relieving all this misery. In this the sisters had a large share. What they did in Paris is seen from St. Vincent's letters: "they shelter from 800 to 900 women ; they distribute soup every day to 1300 bashful poor. In St. Paul's parish they aid 5000 poor, and altogether 1400 persons have for the last six months depended on them for their means of subsistence". At the request of the Queen of Poland, a former Lady of Charity, three sisters were sent to her dominions. Here for the first time the sisters appear on the field of battle. This is a ministry often given by them since, and which has secured for then the title of "Angels of the Battlefield", some dying "sword in hand", as St. Vincent used to style it. Their usefulness opened the eyes of many a dying soldier to the light of the Faith, and inspired the wish to die in the religion which produced such heroism.
While the sisters were on the battlefield in Poland, St. Vincent's daughters took up a new work in the care of the aged and infirm at the House of the Name of Jesus, the pioneer of those homes for the aged so multiplied in our day through a kindred community, the Little Sisters of the Poor . At the same time a hospital for the insane was committed to their care, practically completing the list of human miseries to which they brought alleviation.
On the death of Mlle Le Gras and St. Vincent de Paul there were, in 1660, more than forty houses of the Sisters of Charity in France, and the sick poor were cared for in their own dwellings in twenty-six parishes in Paris. As years went on their numbers grew. Switzerland received the sisters in 1750. In 1778 they were established in Piedmont, whence they spread over Italy. The Spanish community was started by six sisters from Paris in 1790. In 1789 France had 426 houses; the sisters numbered about 6000 in Europe. At the very beginning of the Reign of Terror, the motherhouse of the sisters was invaded by the revolutionists, who had attacked Saint-Lazare across the street the night before, but the sight of this band of angels of mercy on their knees in the chapel, moved their assailants to leave them unmolested. In August, 1792, the sisters were ordered to quit the motherhouse; and the end of 1793 saw their community disbanded officially, though the superior, Sister Antoinette Duleau, strive to keep them together as far as practicable. As soon as the Consular government was established, in 1801 the society was recalled by an edict setting forth the excellence of their work and authorizing Citoyenne Duleay, the former superior, to reorganize. Their greatest growth has been in France during the nineteenth century. Persecution has driven them from all their schools for the poor and from most of their works of mercy, but this has given hundreds of new labourers to the foreign missions. During the last hundred years their growth has been extraordinary. They have gone to Austria, Portugal, Hungary, England, Scotland, Ireland, North and south America. The Orientals call them "The Swallows of Allah" from their cornettes, and they have houses in Constantinople, Smyrna, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Damascus, Persia, Abyssiania, and China. Their number is about 25,000.
The first house in the province of the British Isles was opened at Drogheda, Ireland, in 1855. The first house in England in Sheffield in 1857; and in Scotland at Lanark in 1860. The numbers of foundations in 1907 was: England, 46 houses and 407 sisters ; Ireland, 13 houses and 134 sisters ; Scotland, 8 houses and 62 sisters, making a total of 67 houses and 603 sisters, besides 20 aspirants at the Central House, Mill Hill, London. The principal works under the care of the sisters are as follows, several of these works being carried on in the one house: orphanages, 23; industrial schools, 7; public elementary schools, 24; normal school, 1; traininghomes, 7; homes for working girls, 2; home for women ex-convicts, 1; asylum for insane women, 1; hospitals, 8; houses from which the sisters visit the poor, in which they have soup-kitchens, take charge of guilds and do various other works for the poor, 35.
In the United Stated the first community was started by Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton in 1809. She arranged to have sisters come over from the motherhouse in Paris 1810 to affiliate her young community at Emmitsburg, Maryland to the daughters of St. Vincent, but Napoleon forbade the departure of the sisters for America. She had received, however, from Bishop Flaget, the rules of the Sisters of Charity, and put them in practice with some modifications which were suggested. Houses were founded in Philadelphia and New York, when through the request of Archbishop Hughes of New York, in 1846, the majority of the sisters labouring there were released from the Emmitsburg jurisdiction and formed an independent community following the same rule.
Four years after the withdrawal of the New York sisters, Mother Seton's community at Emmitsburg was received under the jurisdiction of the Superior General of the Sisters of Charity in France and assumed the French habit and St. Vincent's rule in its entirety. Their general motherhouse in140 Rue du Bac, Paris, and their central house at St. Joseph's Academy, Emmitsburg, Maryland. They have establishments in the Archdioceses of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, New Orleans , Philadelphia, and San Francisco, and the Dioceses of Albany, Alton, Buffalo, Dallas, Detroit, Grand Rapids , Harrisburg, Hartford, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Mobile, Monterey, and Los Angeles, Nashville, Natchez, Richmond, Rochester, St. Joseph, San Antonio , Syracuse, Wilmington, Puerto Rico, and the Vicariate of North Carolina, where there are 1704 sisters in charge of these institutions: academy, 1; hospitals, 38; orphanages, 28; infant asylums, 14; industrial schools, 5; parochial schools, 33; asylums and schools, 6; insane asylums, 5.
The growth of St. Vincent's community has been gradual, and the slowness of their founder in giving it a written rule allowed that rule to have a practicability that has made it as fitted for the democratic notions of our day as for the aristocratic ideas of the old regime. But this is most of all because its animating principle is the saying of Christ, "So long as you do it to the least of these my brethren, you do it unto me". In 1646 the approbation of the Archbishop of Paris was asked by St. Vincent for his community, and this was granted in 1655. Though numerous privileges have been granted to the sisters by various popes, no approbation has ever been asked from the Holy See because their founder wished this community to be a lay one with only private vows. Hence the canon law concerning religious communities does not apply to them. Their confessor is the pastor or secular priest approved by the bishop. The interior administration is subject only to superior general. or his delegates. while their interior works are of course under the jurisdiction of the bishop. This has been the case from the very beginning, and the Holy See has on several occasions ratified their long established custom, notably in 1882.
The rule and constitution have remained unchanged since the days of St. Vincent. To his successor, as Superior General of the Congregation of the Mission and the Daughters of Charity, the sisters vow obedience. He ratifies the election of the mother general divided into several provinces governed by a visitatrix and a director, a priest of the Congregation of the Mission, who are appointed by the central government. There is no distinction among the sisters; those from the highest as from the humblest walks of life associate together as servants of the poor. The hour of rising is everywhere at four o'clock; then followed meditation and Mass and usually Communion. At noon there is their particular examination of conscience which is made again before supper. In the afternoon there are spiritual reading and another meditation. No office is recited, for "Charity is your office", said St. Vincent. All the rest of the time is given to the poor. He used to tell them that when they left prayer to wait on the poor they were leaving God for God. After three months of approbation the candidate is sent to the " seminary ", where she is trained for six months and then admitted to the habit, which is put on without any ceremony whatever, and after a trial of five years she is permitted to take the four annual vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and the service of the poor. The dress is that of peasant women of the neighborhood of Paris at the date of the foundation, a grey habit with wide sleeves and a long grey apron. The head-dress was at first a small linen cap, but to this was added in the early days the white linen cornette. At first it was used only in the country, being in fact the headdress of the Ile de France district, but in 1685 its use became general. Seven sisters were martyred during the French Revolution, and ten laid down their lives for the Faith in 1870 at T'ien-tsin, among whom was an Irishwoman, Sister Alice O'Sullivan. But no one can count the numbers that have died martyrs to duty on the battlefield, or among the plague-stricken, or in the hidden ways of continuous hard work for the poor. In 1830 at the motherhouse of the sisters, Rue du Bac, Paris, Sister Catherine Labouré (declared venerable in 1907) had a vision of the Blessed Virgin, who urged her to have a medal made and distributed, since well known as the miraculous medal, through the wonders wrought in favour of those who wear it devoutly. Pope Leo XIII granted a special feast of Our Lady of Miraculous Medal to the double family of St. Vincent. The scapular of the Passion, or red scapular was revealed to Sister Apollone Andreveau in 1846 and approved by Pope Pius IX in 1847.
The Catholic Encyclopedia is the most comprehensive resource on Catholic teaching, history, and information ever gathered in all of human history. This easy-to-search online version was originally printed between 1907 and 1912 in fifteen hard copy volumes.
Designed to present its readers with the full body of Catholic teaching, the Encyclopedia contains not only precise statements of what the Church has defined, but also an impartial record of different views of acknowledged authority on all disputed questions, national, political or factional. In the determination of the truth the most recent and acknowledged scientific methods are employed, and the results of the latest research in theology, philosophy, history, apologetics, archaeology, and other sciences are given careful consideration.
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Copyright © Catholic Encyclopedia. Robert Appleton Company New York, NY. Volume 1: 1907; Volume 2: 1907; Volume 3: 1908; Volume 4: 1908; Volume 5: 1909; Volume 6: 1909; Volume 7: 1910; Volume 8: 1910; Volume 9: 1910; Volume 10: 1911; Volume 11: - 1911; Volume 12: - 1911; Volume 13: - 1912; Volume 14: 1912; Volume 15: 1912
Catholic Online Catholic Encyclopedia Digital version Compiled and Copyright © Catholic Online
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Paul Butler, an intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team, was interested in visualizing the "locality of friendship". Luckily, he has some great data to work with: Facebook's social network of the friendships between its 500 million members. But visualizing that much data can be a challenge in its own right -- it takes skill to draw meaning from what could easily be an incomprehensible mess of data. After drawing a sample of 10 million friend pairs from the Hive interface to Facebook's Hadoop-based database, Paul set to using R to solve this visualization problem.
As Paul describes in a post on his Facebook page, initial attempts to visualize the data resulted in a "big white blob" roughly resembling the outline of the continents. But when Paul switched from plotting every friend pair to instead plotting every city pair with a great-circle line whose transparency was determined by the number of friend-pairs in those cities, something beautiful emerges: a clear image of the world, with friendship bonds flowing between the continents:
This is a beautiful image, and a testament to Paul's visualization skills (with a little help from the graphical prowess of R). Not only can you see the population centers in bright white (from the density of intra-city friendships), you can also see clear country outlines: look how visible India is, floating in the dark void of China and Russia. You can also see cultural relationships: Hawaii to the continental US; Australia to New Zealand; India to the UK. (The latter's a bit hard to see, though -- it would be fascinating to see this in a 3-D globe form, with relationships flowing through the middle of the globe.) Paul sums up the impact of this visualization best in his own words:
After a few minutes of rendering, the new plot appeared, and I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. The blob had turned into a surprisingly detailed map of the world. Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well. What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn't represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line might represent a friendship made while travelling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life.
Paul Butler: Visualizing Friendships
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Why Health Costs Are Still Rising
November 18, 2010
Prices for medical services have been rising faster than prices of other goods and services for as long as anyone can remember. But not all health care prices are rising, says Devon Herrick, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis.
Most people pay for only a small portion of their medical care:
- For every $1 worth of hospital care consumed, the patient pays only about three cents out of pocket, on the average; 97 cents is paid by a third party.
- For every $1 worth of physician services consumed, the patient pays less than 10 cents out of pocket, on the average.
- For the health care system as a whole, every time patients consume $1 in services, they pay only 12 cents out of pocket.
Thus the incentive for patients is to consume hospital services until they are worth only whatever they pay out of pocket.
Cosmetic surgery is one of the few types of medical care for which consumers pay almost exclusively out of pocket. Even so, the demand for cosmetic surgery has exploded in recent years. Despite a huge increase in demand, cosmetic surgeons' fees have remained relatively stable, says Herrick.
- Since 1992, medical care prices have increased an average of 98 percent.
- The price of physician services rose by 74 percent.
- The increase in the price of all goods, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), was 53 percent.
- Yet, an index of cosmetic surgery prices only rose only about 21 percent.
Thus, while the price of medical care generally rose almost twice as fast as the CPI, the price of cosmetic surgery went up less than half as much.
The contrast between cosmetic surgery and other medical services is important. One sector has a competitive marketplace and stable prices. The other does not, says Herrick.
Source: Devon Herrick, "Why Health Costs Are Still Rising," National Center for Policy Analysis, November 18, 2010.
Browse more articles on Health Issues
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Can you see why?
I don't even know where to start with the first step.1. Write down the range of values of x for which the graph of y = f(x) has a negative gradient.
They're talking about a tangent line, yes? So where do I draw it?2. The equation f(x) + x – 1 = 0 can be solved by drawing a line on the grid.
(i) Write down the equation of this line.
(ii) How many solutions are there for f(x) + x – 1 = 0?
"...graph of y = f(x) has a negative gradient. " There's only one negative slope, so the answer is the start and end values of the slope on the x-axis. The slope starts at (0,3) and ends at (6,-9) so the answer is 0 and 6. Is my reasoning right?
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CHARLESTON S.C. (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Energy said on Wednesday it will study the environmental risk of importing spent nuclear fuel from Germany that contains highly enriched uranium, a move believed to be the first for the United States.
The department said it is considering a plan to ship the nuclear waste from Germany to the Savannah River Site, a federal facility in South Carolina.
The 310-acre site already holds millions of gallons of high-level nuclear waste in tanks. The waste came from reactors in South Carolina that produced plutonium for nuclear weapons from 1953 to 1989.
The Energy Department said it wants to remove 900 kilograms (1,984 pounds) of uranium the United States sold to Germany years ago and render it safe under U.S. nuclear non-proliferation treaties.
Clements said shipping the uranium to South Carolina would only add more nuclear waste to the Savannah River Site.German and U.S. officials signed a statement of intent for the import in March and April. A feasibility study is under way, the Energy Department said.”The Germans couldn’t quite figure out what to do with it,” Clements said.German officials have been embroiled in a fight over who will pay for clean-up of nuclear waste from nine remaining decommissioned nuclear plants.
Sources told Reuters in May that German utilities were in talks with the government about setting up a “bad bank” for nuclear plants, in response to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to close them all by 2022 after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Read more at German Nuclear Waste May Be Headed to U.S.
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Elgar – The Last Romantic
This article originally appeared in the WBJC program guide in 2007 to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Sir Edward Elgar. It gave me a welcome opportunity to reevaluate this composer who I believe is one of the great composers of his era.
Once perceived as a remnant of the Victorian era, Sir Edward Elgar is an easy composer to take for granted. Thinking back to the first time I heard the Enigma Variations while announcing at a college radio station in 1977, and told a fellow music student/announcer that it was a “good piece”, I must admit I have devoted little thought to Elgar’s status as a composer in the intervening years. Yet I have always enjoyed his music.
Like most great artists, Elgar was middle class. His father owned a music store in Worcester, a relative cultural backwater compared to London. His slow rise to fame seems an almost impossibly perfect realization of the ideals of Romanticism to which Elgar himself subscribed, but it did not bring him the happiness that it might have.
Even as a child, Elgar jotted down tunes, some of which he considered worthy enough in his adulthood to be the source of his The Wand of Youth suites. He composed wind ensembles to be performed with his family; Elgar apparently taught himself bassoon for these occasions, although his main instruments were piano, violin, and organ. He wanted to attend the conservatory, but his family finances would not permit it, so other than some early violin lessons, the man who would become England’s most famed composer was self taught. He certainly had enough practical experience to learn his art. As a young man, Elgar played violin in local orchestras, and conducted the band at the lunatic asylum, composing dances for these performances.. He was a church organist, and indeed his first mature extended instrumental composition was an organ sonata composed in 1895. Often Elgar would go for walks in the country, turning to nature for inspiration. Indeed, he claimed, “There is music in the air. All you have to do is take as much as you require.”
At age fifteen, his family’s financial needs required him to go to work full time as an assistant in a solicitor’s office. One year later, he resigned, in order to support himself as a freelance musician. Elgar would never hold a full time job again in his life. Although many composers of the day found it necessary to hold full time teaching positions, Elgar compared teaching to being ground down by a millstone. He would teach part time for many years, even after achieving fame, but would take little pleasure in it. Moreover, the specter of financial inadequacy would haunt him through much of his life.
Elgar’s mother had warned him to be wary of “modern women”, and he took her advice to heart. In 1886, after a couple of failed courtships, he met Caroline Alice Roberts, one of his piano students, and discovered the partner for whom he had been searching. She was an accomplished woman, who had published a novel, wrote verse, spoke German, and sang in a choir. To the outside world, their match must have appeared anything but ideal. Eight years his senior, she was the daughter of a late Major-General, and Elgar, a shopkeeper’s son, was far beneath her social station. Even in his hometown of Worcester, Elgar was looked down upon for his humble origins, and his marriage to a woman so far above him actually made his social status worse. As for Alice Roberts, her family threatened to disown her for a time. Nonetheless, Alice shared Elgar’s belief in his creativity and saw beneath his nervous, self-doubting exterior a man of character who could bring his dreams to fruition. Risking social ostracism, she married him in 1889, and became his domestic support and creative inspiration for the rest of her life.
As a marriage gift, Elgar composed a salon piece entitled Salut d’amour, a charming melody for strings that became his first big hit. Many years after selling the publishing rights, Elgar commented that the fiddler playing for coins on the street corner had made more money from Salut d’amour than he ever did. Apparently many years later after Elgar had become famous, his publisher paid him a fair royalty for the work.
Elgar’s mother had converted to Roman Catholicism, and Elgar’s wife joined the religion prior to her marriage. In Protestant England, Elgar’s Catholicism was also a social stigma, as well as an impediment to his career. His feelings of inferiority as a provincial shopkeeper’s son, and his outsider status as a Roman Catholic, wounded Elgar in ways that never healed, even after he achieved fame. After Elgar composed the Imperial March for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the queen invited him to a reception. Elgar declined, saying that the presence of a shopkeeper’s son would bring dishonor on the event.
Elgar’s first composition performed in London was Sevillana at a Crystal Palace concert in 1886. Neither it nor the popularity of Salut d’amour, however, brought him any attention in the urban cultural centers of England. It came as a stroke of good fortune, therefore, that the popular Three Choirs Festival was held annually in Worcester. In 1990, Elgar composed his Froissart overture for the event. Although not a masterpiece, it foreshadows his mature style in its contrasting moods of vigorous optimism and lyric tenderness, and was Elgar’s first exposure to a wider audience and England’s cultural elite. With perhaps too much self-confidence, Elgar and his wife moved to London to seek success as a composer, but the hoped for commissions were not forthcoming, and soon they had to return to the provinces.
The choral festivals generated a demand for cantatas and oratorios, and Elgar wisely observed that this could be a potential avenue to his success. The 1890’s saw a string of such choral works flow from Elgar’s pen: The Black Knight (1893), Scenes from the Bavarian Highlands (1896), The Light of Life (1896), Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf (1896), and Caractacus (1898), for which Queen Victoria accepted Elgar’s offer of a dedication. If you have never heard these works, you are not along. I never have either. They are virtually unknown outside of England, where their performance is still quite a rarity, so much so that to this day people marvel how Elgar seemingly could have begun his career with fully formed masterworks like the Enigma Variations and The Dream of Gerontius. I dislike accepting conventional wisdom without judging for myself, but the current critical view is that these works are uneven, containing flashes of brilliance among much bombast and mediocrity. Nonetheless, they helped make Elgar’s career, both as training for his later masterworks, and the raising of his stature to that of a respected British composer. Preparations for his various performances frequently brought him to London, where he met and worked with the best know English composers and musicians of his day, includingHubert Parry, Charles Stanford, Granville Bantock, and Arthur Sullivan.
One day in 1897, Alice Elgar heard her husband toying with various versions of a melody at the piano. When asked what it was, Elgar replied that the different versions of the tune reminded him of various friends, and perhaps it would amount to something. This was not uncommon in Elgar’s compositional process. He would frequently take fragments written even years earlier and combine them in new ways to make a larger composition. His lovely Serenade for Strings (1892), for example, was based on several earlier short pieces, now lost. Nonetheless, the theme and variations form was a new challenge for Elgar, who had never formally studied composition. Forced to focus his musical ideas, Elgar’s genius finally emerged in his first masterpiece, the Enigma Variations (actually titled Variations on an Original Theme; his publisher and friend A.J. Jaegerwrote “Enigma” beneath the title before the first performance). The noted German conductor Hans Richter premiered the work in London in June of 1899, and Elgar suddenly became world famous. At the age of 42, he was an overnight success. When Rimsky-Korsakov heard it, he called it the finest orchestral variations since Brahms Haydn Variations, a work Elgar apparently did not even hear until September of 1898, when his own variations were nearing completion.
The following year, Elgar composed an oratorio based on the narrative poem, The Dream of Gerontius by Cardinal John Newman. A highly regarded English Catholic poem of its day, the work had deep personal meaning to Elgar and his wife, who both owned copies before their engagement with important passages bookmarked. It tells the story of a dying knight who repents his sins, spends time in Purgatory, and finally is united with God. The work is scored for soloists, including a major part for tenor in the title role, chorus, and orchestra. Almost operatic in conception, Gerontius rarely adheres to a series of set pieces, relying instead on a through composed juxtaposition of soloists and chorus. The work contains searingly emotional solos for tenor, inspiring and contemplative choral sections, and dramatic confrontations between demons and angels. Elgar insisted that the singers not perform too reverentially, but emphasize the drama of the music. Gerontius has been called the best oratorio ever written by a native born English composer, and many consider it Elgar’s greatest masterpiece.
The first performance of Gerontius was a disaster. Both Elgar and the conductor underestimated the difficulty of the work, and the chorus was poorly prepared. Nonetheless, Elgar’s publisher Jaeger, realizing the importance of the music, persuaded several important German musicians to attend the premiere, and in spite of the performance, they were duly impressed. Shortly after, The Dream of Gerontius was performed in Dusseldorf, Germany, and was hailed as a masterpiece. If the Enigma Variations had made Elgar world famous, Gerontius secured his reputation as one of the greatest living composers. Richard Strauss called Elgar “the first English modernist”.
Elgar’s style drew on all the major musical influences of his day, while forging a highly personal and distinctly British style from them. Firmly rooted in the German Romanticism of Schumann and Brahms, Elgar nonetheless absorbed the lessons of Wagner’s revolutionary chromatic harmonies, which he applied with taste and musicality, creating a harmonic language that could only have existed in the musical culture of his day. He was very aware of the symphonic poems of Richard Strauss that had been composed in the decade prior to the Enigma Variations, and he made Strauss’s sprawling symphonic landscape his own. Some have observed the influence of French composers such as Gounod and Bizet, in their elegance and lightheartedness. I would also add the influence of British music prior to Elgar, such as Hubert Parry, Charles Stanford, and Arthur Sullivan, both in their stateliness and the occasional nod to light English salon music and music hall, particularly in the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. Indeed, Elgar wrote a sizeable amount of light music: salon miniatures for strings or solo piano, sentimental but elegant Victorian parlor songs, incidental music, ballets, and works inspired by childhood. It has been said that Elgar could create moments of profundity in many of his lighter works, such as the beautiful Serenade for Strings, and in turn move effortlessly from moments of great drama and profundity to passages of lightness and charm in his most serious works, such as the Symphony No. 1 from 1908, not merely creating a dramatic contrast between the two states of mind, but casually turning from one to the other, then back again, revealing them to be intrinsic parts of each other in the complex fabric of human existence. In the final movement of the Symphony No. 1, for example, the main theme in a minor key is restless and sinister, going through various stages of development, and combining with the stately main theme of the opening movement in enigmatic ways. Suddenly the main theme moves briefly into a major key. The effect is not heroic and thrilling, like the final scene of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, when the Black Swan theme is finally heard in a major key, but almost reconciling, as if Elgar’s theme had been taking a stroll down one of his beloved country lanes the entire time a philosophical battle was raging in his head, only to suddenly become aware of the tranquility of his surroundings.
Elgar followed Gerontius with a projected trilogy of oratorios depicting the lives of the twelve disciples of Christ. Although he only completed the first two oratorios, they remain among his greatest works. The Apostles (1903) and The Kingdom (1906), settings of Elgar’s own librettos based on biblical texts, are even more ambitious works than Gerontius. Unfolding in a series of dramatic scenes, in which Elgar musically depicts each setting often before a word is sung, the two oratorios assign leitmotifs to each character that recur in both works. Complex interaction among numerous characters takes place. On occasion, the musical flow is interrupted with choral or solo interjections representing comments from the crowd or a passerby, in a style reminiscent of the “turbo” scenes in the Bach Passions. According to Elgar scholar Diana McVeagh in the Grove Encyclopedia, The Apostles “is as progressive as anything Elgar composed: the parallel triads, whole-tone progressions and false relations, and the exoticism of the Morning Psalm, are unmatched elsewhere in his music. But there are also in both works conservative elements.”
In 1901, Elgar composed his first two Pomp and Circumstance Marches. The trio of the first march became Elgar’s most popular work since Salut d’amour, and made Elgar a household name. I recall marching down the aisle to its noble strains at my own high school graduation, like countless millions. One year after Elgar composed the piece, he set it to lyrics in the patriotic finale to his Coronation Ode for King Edward VII, Land of Hope and Glory, insuring its reputation as the “second British National Anthem”. Although very patriotic in his young adulthood, Elgar came to dislike the jingoistic lyrics to the song, finding them inappropriate during the carnage of the First World War. Imploring his fellow countrymen to change the lyrics, Elgar’s entreaties not surprisingly were ignored. Unfortunately, the association of Pomp and Circumstance No. 1 with British imperialism is probably responsible for the misconception of Elgar as a pompous and bombastic composer in the years following the dissolution of the British Empire. It took his reputation decades to recover from this notion in the years following his death.
Following Elgar’s ascendancy to the position of a British national treasure, honors were quick to follow. In 1904, he was knighted. Honorary doctorates were numerous throughout the world. Elgar was eventually asked to assume a music professorship. Unable to attend a university in his youth, he was now a member of the faculty.
Often complaining that he could not find the time to write symphonies and chamber music, Elgar finally completed his Symphony No. 1 in 1908. By this time, his international reputation was so great, that the work received almost one hundred performances throughout the world in the first year after its premiere.
Nonetheless, his insecurities never ceased. Elgar’s compositions never made as much money as he desired. At one point he said he would have to learn a trade, and he even considered ending his life. More and more, he assumed the pose of an English country squire almost as a mask. Later in life, he claimed to have no interest in music, preferring golf or horses.
In 1919, Elgar composed his Cello Concerto, a work of heartfelt Romanticism that some even consider tragic. Lady Alice Elgar was present at the premiere, and it would be the last concert of her husband’s music that she would attend. One year later, she died, and with her died Elgar’s creative soul. He would never compose another major work again, even though he lived until 1934.
Of course, there were other reasons for Elgar’s retirement. Once on the cutting edge of modern music, Elgar became passé after the war. A new impressionist influenced style of British music had emerged with Vaughan Williams and Delius, and by 1919 the modernist movement of atonality, dissonance, and had pushed aside the last vestiges of Romanticism as the mainstream. Indeed, Elgar felt that society as a whole had moved away from his Victorian values, and he did not feel there was a place for him in the modern world.
For many years, Elgar’s music disappeared from concert halls, even in England. Only the BBC occasionally broadcast his music. After the Second World War, this began to change, but for a long time only the English performed Elgar’s music. However, the beauty of Elgar’s music was bound to prevail. During the 1960’s, musicians around the world began to perform his works again. Cellist Jacqueline DuPre revived interest in the Cello Concerto, which is now second only to Dvorak’s as the most performed in the world. Every major orchestra has the Enigma Variations in its repertoire, and even Elgar’s minor works are being recorded.
By ending his career in 1920, Elgar seems to inadvertently have created a line of demarcation signifying the Romantic era as closed. There would be other great music in a Romantic style after 1920, such as Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody, and many other composers, like Sibelius, Richard Strauss, Mahler, and Janacek, had already found their way to combining modern harmonies, rhythms, and structures with the Romantic impulse. But after 1920, the uncompromising Romanticism of Elgar would never again be the style of the age. It remains today as one of the most moving examples of its own era, with Elgar as one of its greatest masters.
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Getting to medical appointments becomes increasingly difficult for older adults as they age, especially for those living in rural communities without transportation. The availability of rural public transit can be a lifeline for older adults accessing necessary medical care. AARP produced this fact sheet, as part of its mobility agenda, to examine the relationship between health care and transportation for seniors living in rural communities.
The fact sheet provides a discussion of the obstacles older adults living in rural communities face in accessing needed medical services due to long distances and lack of public transit options. Access to health care is an important purpose of local transit programs, especially in rural areas. Many rural communities offer some form of non-emergency medical transportation services provided by volunteer driver programs that ensure older adults will be able to access medical care when they need it.
Other report highlights include:
- The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is partially intended to impact medically-related transportation and delivery of medical services.
- Medicaid spending on transportation far exceeds specialized transportation expenditures of other federal agencies.
- Medicaid transportation expense is nearly 10 times the Federal Transit Administration’s specialized transportation budget.
How to Use
The fact sheet provides an overview of the connection between accessing health care and public transit services, as well as discusses funding options for health care reforms that will impact the availability of public transit in rural communities. Local government officials can use this fact sheet to better understand the importance of public transportation options, particularly for older adults facing difficulties in accessing needed medical services due to long distance and mobility limitations.
View full report: Health Care and Transportation in Rural Communities – (PDF – 241 KB)
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Ever have a document that needs to have a paragraph like this?
I usually accomplish this trick (having left- and right-justified text on the same line) in Microsoft Word with Tables. For me, tables make a lot of alignment issues a lot easier. Here, I’ll turn on the gridlines (on the Table Tools | Layout tab that comes up whenever your cursor is in a table) and show you:
Pretty straightforward if you’re use to Tables in Microsoft Word. The left column is left-justified, and the right column is right-justified. Easy-peasy … if you know how.
But not everyone’s comfortable with Tables in Word. And because there’s always (okay, almost always) more than one way to accomplish the same goal in any Microsoft Office application, here’s another alternative: Right Tabs:
See that right-pointing arrow between the date and the dollar amount (I’ve got Show/Hide turned on so you can see the codes)? That’s a right tab I set up at the 6.5″ mark (on an 8.5″ wide sheet of paper with 1″ margins on both sides, 6.5″ would be the right margin). I typed the date, set up the right tab, and started typing the amount at the right-hand margin.
Let me back up and explain a bit.
With regular tabs, you’re moving the cursor over and beginning your typing at that point. This results in the left edges of your tab stops being aligned (if you’re using tabs to, say, type in columnar data), like so:
See how the left edges of each of those columns lines up? Those are left tabs. And that’s what you get by default when you press the Tab key.
Sometimes, though, you need for the data to line up on the right-hand side:
For this example, I set a left tab at 1.0″ (for the Date of Hire column, since it starts 1″ from the margin) and a right tab at the 3.5″ point (the right-hand edge of the Position Title column) so that data would line up along the right side rather than the left.
Here’s the step-by-step for setting up the tab stops:
1. First, I brought up the Paragraph Format dialog box by clicking on the arrow in the lower right-hand corner of the Paragraph section of the Home tab:
2. Then, I clicked on the Tabs button in the lower left-hand corner of the Paragraph dialog box above to bring up the Tabs dialog box:
3. The above is what the default settings look like. First, I typed 1.0 in the Tab Stop Position field in the upper left, chose Left in the Alignment section in the middle, then clicked the Set button. That set up the left tab for the Date of Hire column.
4. Next, I typed 3.5 into the Tab Stop Position field, chose Right in the Alignment section in the middle (to get a right tab this time instead of left), and clicked the Set button again.
5. Once I set those two tabs, the dialog box looked like this:
Now all that’s left is to type the data into the respective columns: typing the surname first, hitting the Tab key to go to the Hire Date column at the 1-inch mark and typing a date, then hitting the Tab key again to bring the cursor to the 3.5-inch mark to begin typing the Position Title.
You’ll notice, as you start typing in the third column with the right tab, that your letters move to the left to keep the alignment of the column on the right. Don’t freak out — once you press the Return key and begin typing the next line, everything will be fine.
If you find that, once you get further in your document, you need to restore the default tab stops (say, for paragraph indentation), you can go back into the Tabs dialog box and click the Clear All button. This will clear your custom Tabs from that point forward, restoring the document’s default tabs (or allowing you to re-set some other Tab stops as appropriate).
What sort of documents would you use Right Tabs in? Let me know in the comments below.
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Hanover, NH--All blood cell production in adults depends on the steady work of a vital gene that if lost results in early bone marrow failure, Dartmouth Medical School cancer geneticists have found. Their research reveals an unexpected role for the gene in sustaining the adult blood-forming system, and opens novel strategies for targeting the gene, which is often involved in a type of childhood leukemia.
We have identified a new pathway that is essential for blood stem cell turnover, said team leader Dr. Patricia Ernst, assistant professor of genetics and member of the Norris Cotton Cancer Center. The pathway could be exploited for treating a rare but aggressive infant leukemia, she added. These findings were reported in the September issue of Cell Stem Cell.
The investigators created a mouse model to track the function of a gene called MLL, which stands for Mixed Lineage Leukemia. The gene acts in bone marrow stem cells and controls key aspects of their growth to generate all the mature blood cells. If disrupted, it cannot work properly, and leukemia can ensue.
MLL is the most commonly affected gene in childhood leukemia in children under a year of age; this particular type of leukemia has one of the worst success rates with the existing cancer therapies, said Ernst, who first helped clarify the role of MLL as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.
Many childhood leukemias result from mutations called translocations, where gene pieces on chromosomes accidentally relocate and misalign. In infant leukemia, the chromosome containing the MLL gene breaks within MLL and ends up fused to a different gene. MLL fusion genes likely co-opt normal MLL functions in blood cells, leading to the overproduction of white cells and leukemia.
Previous studies indicated that MLL is critical for embryonic blood stem cell development, but its role for the adult system was unknown. In their mouse model, the researchers found that bone marrow failure occurred as early as 14 days after they induced the experimental loss of MLL, demonstrating the crucial role of MLL as necessary for both the development and maintenance of the bodys blood supply, according to the researchers.
We have shown that the adult blood-forming system depends on the continuous actions of MLL, Ernst said. Moreover, with the mouse model the scientists established to define normal MLL functions, they can begin exploring how to craft new anti-cancer treatments, she pointed out. We and other groups can start designing targeted therapies that inhibit cancerous forms of MLL that occur in childhood leukemia and do not affect normal MLL function, which, based on our studies in mice, would be fatal for the patient.
|Contact: Hali Wickner|
Dartmouth Medical School
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Latasha, 7 years old, says, “I’d like to live in some other world.” Learning to read opens the door to that world. PRI gives you the keys to make that possible for struggling readers in our local schools. PRI equips you with knowledge of how the alphabet works, dialect differences, and what motivates kids to read.
PRI starts children on THE READING ROAD, a tutoring program that carries the reader from cat to astronomically, from reading words one at a time to figuring out why people do what they do. Tutors working with PRI learn things about the alphabet they never knew before, and get the satisfaction of turning “I hate to read!” into “I love reading!”
An introduction to the use and structure of dialects of English used by the African American and Latino communities in the United States. It is an academically based service learning course. The field work component involves the study of the language and culture of everyday life and the application of this knowledge to programs for raising the reading levels of elementary school children.
This course will be concerned with the application of current knowledge of dialect differences to reduce the minority differential in reading achievement. Members will conduct projects and design computer programs to reduce cultural distance between teachers and students in local schools and to develop knowledge of word and sound structure.
Tutoring is also available outside of the classroom to work-study students and anyone who wants to volunteer. Anyone can become a tutor, and after a brief training session, you will have the knowledge to utilize the Reading Road effectively to the benefit of your reader.
Attendance at weekly meetings is a must, so that ideas can be exchanged between you and other tutors to better understand the needs of the students.
The Reading Road is our own instructional program. Its unique design informed by sociolinguistic research has been shown to raise achievement levels of struggling readers in low income schools.LEARN MORE »
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Epistemology. Epistemology ( i/ɨˌpɪstɨˈmɒlədʒi/; from Greek ἐπιστήμη, epistēmē, meaning "knowledge, understanding", and λόγος, logos, meaning "word") is a term first used by the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier to describe the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge and is also referred to as "theory of knowledge".
Put concisely, it is the study of knowledge and justified belief. It questions what knowledge is and how it can be acquired, and the extent to which knowledge pertinent to any given subject or entity can be acquired. Much of the debate in this field has focused on the philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and how it relates to connected notions such as truth, belief, and justification.
The term was probably first introduced in Ferrier's Institutes of Metaphysic: The Theory of Knowing and Being (1854), p. 46. Background and meaning Knowledge Knowledge that, knowledge how, and knowledge by acquaintance Ontology. Parmenides was among the first to propose an ontological characterization of the fundamental nature of reality.
Overview Some fundamental questions Principal questions of ontology include: "What can be said to exist? ""What is a thing? " what it is (its 'whatness', quidditas or essence)how it is (its 'howness' or qualitativeness)how much it is (quantitativeness)where it is, its relatedness to other beings Further examples of ontological questions include: Concepts Essential ontological dichotomies include: Types Philosophers can classify ontologies in various ways using criteria such as the degree of abstraction and field of application: History Etymology The first occurrence in English of "ontology" as recorded by the OED (Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, 2008) came in a work by Gideon Harvey (1636/7–1702): Archelogia philosophica nova; or, New principles of Philosophy.
Bildungsroman. In literary criticism, a bildungsroman (German pronunciation: [ˈbɪldʊŋs.ʁoˌmaːn]; German: "novel of formation/education/culture"), [a] novel of formation, novel of education, or coming-of-age story (though it may also be known as a subset of the coming-of-age story) is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming of age), and wherein character change therefore is extremely important.
History The term was coined in 1819 by philologist Karl Morgenstern in his university lectures, and later famously reprised by Wilhelm Dilthey, who legitimized it in 1870 and popularized it in 1905. The genre is further characterized by a number of formal, topical, and thematic features. The term coming-of-age novel is sometimes used interchangeably with bildungsroman, but its use is usually wider and less technical.
The genre translates fairly directly into cinematic form, the coming-of-age film.
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| 0.934275 | 677 | 3.375 | 3 |
Love in the Time of Cholera Theme of Sex
Obviously, sex is going to be a big deal in a novel whose central character is a sex-driven maniac. Yeah, we know, we all feel like sex-driven maniacs sometimes. Trust us, though, Florentino Ariza is a hyperbolically sexual character. By the time he's an old man, he's written in his journal called Women about 622 long-term liaisons – and that's not even counting the one-night stands. (That's about twelve sexual partners a year for 54 years, for anyone who's counting.) Florentino's theories about women's sexuality are about as sophisticated as his macho method of keeping score.
While Florentino's neanderthalian understanding of women and sex is often proved wrong, we can't shake the feeling that García Márquez himself clings to some ideas in Love in the Time of Cholera about female sexuality that are a bit sexist – like the idea that women can only be liberated and fulfilled if they can find a man to initiate them into the sexual experience (think about the Widow Nazaret, Ausencia Santander, or Sara Noriega). Or the problematic notion that a young woman, even a child, might enjoy being raped (both Leona Cassiani and América Vicuña serve as examples of this). What do you think? Are these characters a reflection of the author's attitudes about female sexuality?
Questions About Sex
- In what order do sex, love, and marriage come for Dr. Urbino and Fermina Daza? Why do their experiences develop in this order?
- What are the "rules" for sexual conduct for men and women in the social setting of Love in the Time of Cholera? What is allowed and what is prohibited? Do those social guidelines match up to the ones we observe in our society today?
- Does Florentino's long list of sexual experiences change the way he perceives love in general, or his love for Fermina Daza?
- How do the sexual experiences of female characters reflect or react against the position of women in society?
Chew on This
In Love in the Time of Cholera, women cannot be completely free or happy until they attain sexual fulfillment, a state that is difficult if not impossible to achieve within the confines of marriage.
Florentino's concern for keeping his affairs quiet shows that, in the society of the novel, men are just as vulnerable as women to having their reputations tarnished by engaging in socially prohibited sexual activity.
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François Marie Arouet de Voltaire
The first "complete" edition of Voltaire's work was the so-called Kehl edition, by Beaumarchais (70 vol. in octavo or 92 vol. in duodecimo, 1784–89); a later edition is that of M. Beuchot (72 vol., 1828–40; rev. and enl., 52 vol., 1883). See his correspondence, ed. by T. Besterman (part of the series Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century [SVEC], 1955–). There are English translations of Voltaire's most widely read works. Biographies and studies of Voltaire reflect continued controversy as to Voltaire's real thought and beliefs.
See biographies by G. Lanson (1906, in French; tr. by R. A. Wagoner, 1966), A. Mourois (1932), H. N. Brailsford (1935, repr. 1963), S. G. Tallentyre (1972), H. T. Mason (1981), A. J. Ayer (1986), and J. Leigh (2004); studies by P. Gay (1959) and V. W. Topazio (1966); N. Mitford, Voltaire in Love (1954); I. O. Wade, Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet (1941, repr. 1967) and The Intellectual Development of Voltaire (1969); I. Davidson, Voltaire in Exile (2005).
Sections in this article:
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: French Literature: Biographies
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| 0.785123 | 363 | 2.765625 | 3 |
Groundhog Day: Feb 2, 2012
Groundhog Day has been used as a predictor of the end winter for many years, does the folklore hold true in the Twin Cities?
February 2 is the day that tradition has the Groundhog leaving it's den and if seeing his shadow there will be six more weeks of winter. If he doesn't see his shadow, spring is right around the corner. With the way that the winter of 2011-12 is going in the Twin Cities, it feels as though Spring is already here.
Looking back on February 2 for the past 20 years in the Twin Cities to 1992, the groundhog would have seen his shadow during the day in 13 of those years. The last one inch snow cover over the past 20 years has ranged from February 24th, 2000 to April 29th in 1994 (where the Groundhog did not see his shadow in both cases) When the Groundhog has seen its shadow in the last 20 years, the last 1 inch snow depth in the Twin Cities has ranged from March 16 in 1999 to April 28th in 2002. That said, there does to be a slight tendency to earlier ending winters when the Groundhog does not see his shadow.
There may be a climatological explanation for the success of the groundhog. If the groundhog does not see its shadow there could be plenty of clouds with around lots of moisture. The moisture can be in the air due to melting snow and generally warm weather, like Feb 1-2 2012 with dense fog as well. When the groundhog sees his shadow, it can be due to clear and cold conditions associated with arctic high pressure. The groundhog would have seen its shadow in 2011.
One interesting footnote is that February 2 is also the state record coldest temperature too set in 1996. With numerous members of the media present, the low dipped to -60 three miles south of Tower. Governor Arne Carlson cancelled school statewide due to the cold.
Some weather statistics for February 2 for the Twin Cities
Average High 25 Average Low 9 Record High 48 (1991) Record Low -32 (1996) Most snowfall 6.2 (1983) Greatest snow depth 22 inches (1969) The average date of the last 1 inch snow cover in the Twin Cities is March 25.
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Posted on 07/05/2014 by Daniel
Thruster burn kicks off crucial series of manoeuvres
Today kicks off a crucial series of Rosetta thruster burns (formally, orbit correction manoeuvres or OCM) designed to bring the spacecraft onto the proper trajectory to arrive at the comet on 6 August. The first burn is set to take place at 17:30 UTC (19:30 CEST).
Rosetta is just under 2 million km from its target comet, 67P, and is moving at a speed with respect to the comet (relative velocity, or ‘rel-v’) of 775.1 metres/second (m/s).
If the mission control team did nothing more, Rosetta and comet 67P would pass by each other at a distance of some 50 000 km on 4 June (given the current Rosetta-comet relative distance and speed) and, well, that would be pretty dull!
We'll provide more details on the (complex) process of lining up the two trajectories later; today, let's take a look at the burns themselves and the thrusters that are going to do all the hot work in the coming weeks.
Rosetta and the comet are moving on different trajectories, such that – absent any burns – they would pass by each other like two ships in the night.
“By doing the manoeuvres, we continuously change Rosetta’s speed so that, on 6 August, they have the same speed and position,” says Rosetta flight director Andrea Accomazzo.
You’ll see the term ‘delta-v’ a lot in our blog; it refers to the thruster performance and is measured in metres/second; i.e. by how much should the thruster burn change the speed of Rosetta with respect to the comet.
“The orbit correction manoeuvre this week is planned to achieve a delta-v of 20 m/s,” says Armelle Hubault, a spacecraft operations engineer on the Rosetta team.
“It is a small ‘test’ manoeuvre, done to make sure that all systems work as expected prior to starting the much larger manoeuvres later on. It will reduce our rel-v from 775 m/s to 755 m/s.”
The Rosetta team have planned a series of eight thruster burns through to the end of July, one every two weeks for the first four burns, then weekly thereafter.
This cycle enables the teams working on Rosetta (operations, flight dynamics, science, etc.) to have a predictable work schedule, and the final weekly cycle allows sufficient time to assess the performance of the burn, determine the actual resulting orbit and then implement or replan the succeeding burn.
In the nominal case, i.e., when all the burns provide the expected results, here's the schedule:
|Date||Delta-v||Midpoint of burn (UTC)||ROS/67P dist||ROS/67P rel-v|
|Wed 07/05/14||20 m/s||16:45||1,918,449||775.1|
|Wed 21/05/14||290.89 m/s||19:08||1,005,056||754.1|
|Wed 04/06/14||270.98 m/s||17:48||425,250||463.0|
|Wed 18/06/14||90.76 m/s||14:31||194,846||192.1|
|Wed 02/07/14||58.80 m/s||12:57||51,707||101.3|
|Wed 09/07/14||24.91 m/s||11:57||22,314||43.0|
|Wed 16/07/14||10.65 m/s||11:12||9,590||18.4|
|Wed 23/07/14||4.62 m/s||10:30||4,126||7.9|
- The time shown indicates the mid-point of the burn that day
- The relative distance and relative speed between the two are shown at the end. (As you can see, these two quantities steadily decrease over the period.)
There are two more burns in the series: one on 3 August, which should bend Rosetta's trajectory from a 200-km miss distance to 70 km and reduce the rel-v to a stately 1 m/second, and one on 6 August, which is the orbit insertion manoeuvre itself; we'll talk about those in a later blog post.
The Rosetta operations team at ESOC have stressed on a number of occasions that the burns starting today are crucial. This is not only because if, as mentioned, no burns happen, we'll miss the comet.
It's also because the burns have to happen more or less on schedule, and this requirement gets progressively tighter. At the start of the series, we have a relatively wide window in which to ensure that each burn happens – i.e. a number of days. As we get closer to arrival, the windows become narrower with each burn.
If there is any problem that prevents the burn from happening on schedule as intended, the teams will have to work quickly to identify, troubleshoot and fix the problem to get back on schedule.
Any on-board software glitch, any unexpected safe mode (when the spacecraft reboots itself and then waits for fresh instructions from ESOC while doing nothing) or a communication problem could delay any of the burns.
The longer that any one burn is delayed, the longer that successive burns will have to run to correct for the lost time.
Rosetta's working well, and no one expects any problems, but remember that all of the orbiter’s thrusters are being used at lower pressure than originally planned because of a Reaction Control System leak that occurred in September 2006.
Rosetta is equipped with 24 bi-propellant 10-Newton thrusters. Over half the launch weight of the entire spacecraft was taken up by propellant (just over 1700 kg).
These thrusters are extremely robust and use mature technology provided by European industry (EADS Space & Defence, formerly, Astrium); they are designed for precision attitude, trajectory and orbit control of large satellites and deep-space probes. (See links here and here for technical details on the thrusters.)
Roughly speaking, on Earth's surface, 10 N of thrust is equivalent to weight of 1 kg of mass.
For delta-v manoeuvres, Rosetta will use only four thrusters, called the axial thrusters, because they are aligned with the spacecraft’s Z-axis (i.e. along the same direction in which the instruments are pointing, although the thrusters are mounted on the other side of the main body).
Andrea adds that: “These four thrusters are also used to control the spacecraft attitude around the two directions – X and Y – running perpendicular to the Z-axis thrust direction.”
“Another four thrusters are uses to control the spacecraft’s attitude around the Z-direction; these will have a negligible contribution to the delta-v manoeuvres due to their orientation and very low activation frequency.”
(You can read more about the Rosetta propulsion system here.)
There's a video at the end of this post showing how a bi-propellant thruster appears in operation; note that this video shows the much more powerful 220 N thruster that is used on ESA's ATV cargo vessel, but the technology on Rosetta is the more or less the same.
Today's burn starts at 17:30 UTC (19:30 CEST) and will run for just under 45 min.
“The next big OCMs – called the ‘NCD’ for Near Comet Drift – will take place on 21 May, 4 June and 18 June, with, respectively, planned delta-v’s of 290, 270 and 90 m/s,” says Armelle.
“At the start of the NCD-series, we will be 1 million km from the comet. By the end of NCD, the distance will only be 200 000 km, with a relative velocity of 190 m/s.”
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Worldwide poultry consumption has generated a huge amount of feather “waste” annually. Currently, the feather has a low value-being used for animal feed in the world.
The quality of fibrous air filters depend on their main component, fibers. The main physical structure of chicken feathers is barbs which can be used directly as fibers. They have small diameter, which makes them a good choice for air filtration.
The main chemical structure of chicken feathers is structural fibrous protein, keratin. Therefore, chicken feathers could potentially be used for protein fiber production.
To obtain chicken feather fibers, barbs were stripped from the quills by a stripping device and separated with a blender. Some feather fibers were entangled with polyester staple fibers, and needlepunched to form a nonwoven fabric. Some feather fibers were blended with CelBond™ bi-component polyester as binder fibers, and pressed between two hot plates to produce thermobonded nonwovens. Whole chicken feathers were ground into powder and their keratin was reduced in water. The reduced keratin was salt precipitated, dried and dissolved in ionic liquid with/without bleach cotton. The reduced chicken feather keratin ionic liquid solutions were spun into regenerated fibers through dry-jet wet spinning.
The needlepunched and thermobonded nonwovens were tested for filtration and other properties. With an increase of areal density and feather fiber composition, the air permeability of the needlepunched nonwovens decreased, and their filtration efficiency and pressure drop both increased. The case can be made that feather fibers gave fabrics better filtration at the same fabric weight, but at the expense of air permeability and pressure drop. The scrim and needlepunching process improved the filtration efficiency. Their strength depended on scrim. The hot-press process was very simple. The thermobonded nonwovens had very high air permeability. In them, there was also an inverse relation between air permeability and either pressure drop or filtration efficiency.
From these kinds of nonwovens, it is realized that feather fibers’ fineness and the tree/fan-like structure of the feather does not offer a high level of performance advantages over conventional fibers. The use of feather fiber in air filtration applications must rely primarily on a favorable cost and weight differential in favor of the feather fiber.
Only after chicken feather keratin was reduced, could it dissolve well in ionic liquid. 100% chicken feather keratin did not produce high tenacity fibers. Reduced chicken feather keratin and cellulose produced blend fibers with mechanical properties close to silk, cotton, and polyester fibers. Chemically reforming crosslinks might improve mechanical properties and the stability of the fibers to water and make them suitable for most fibrous applications. From this, it can be proposed that using chicken feathers for fiber production may be a good way to add value to chicken feather “waste”.
|Adviser||Royall M. Broughton|
|Subjects||Agriculture engineering; Materials Science; Textile research|
About ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
With nearly 4 million records, the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Global database is the most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses in the world. It is the database of record for graduate research.
PQDT Global combines content from a range of the world's premier universities - from the Ivy League to the Russell Group. Of the nearly 4 million graduate works included in the database, ProQuest offers more than 2.5 million in full text formats. Of those, over 1.7 million are available in PDF format. More than 90,000 dissertations and theses are added to the database each year.
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How did supermassive black holes get so big? New data give a clue.
Scientists have now measured the spin of a supermassive black hole, describing the rate in terms of the energy needed to sustain the spin. These black holes are thought to occupy the center of virtually every galaxy.
For the first time, scientists have measured the spin of a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy – a measurement that could help explain how these objects got so large.
Supermassive black holes are thought to occupy the center of virtually every galaxy in the universe. They tip the cosmic scales at millions or billions of times the sun's mass.
The supermassive black hole in question spins furiously at the center of the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy, formally known as NGC 1365. It lies some 56 million light-years away in the constellation Fornax. The black hole at its center has 2 million times the mass of the sun.
Putting a miles-per-hour number on the rate of the spin is tough because a black hole has no real surface and no timing markers, explains Fiona Harrison, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the lead scientist behind NASA's NuSTAR orbiting X-ray telescope, one of two X-ray telescopes that contributed to the discovery.
Instead, scientists describe the rate in terms of the energy needed to sustain the spin. This black hole's spin is sustained by an amount of energy equivalent to the energy released by a billion stars shining for a billion years, says Dr. Harrison, who is a member of a team reporting the results in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
"That's a huge amount of rotational energy," she says.
Indeed, it represents 84 percent of the maximum spin rate predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity, adds Guido Risaliti, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who was the lead author of the paper in Nature.
The supermassive black hole's high spin rate provides a direct clue as to how it grew, researchers say.
"We believe that these black holes were born when the universe was only about 10 percent of its current age," said Arvind Parmar, mission manager for the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescope, during a press briefing Thursday afternoon. Back then, Dr. Parmar says, these objects would have tipped the cosmic scales at 20 or 30 times the sun's mass.
They can grow as galaxies collide and their central black holes merge. If both black holes are spinning in the same direction, the merger would result in a black hole with amped-up spin. Likewise, if the black hole continuously feeds on material in its host galaxy in what's called ordered accretion, the spin would accelerate as well. If feeding is random, however, spin rates would be relatively slow.
Thus, for this black hole, the results imply either constant feeding, a merger, or both, Parmar suggests.
Now that researchers have demonstrated that a supermassive black hole's spin can be measured, the next step is to observe these objects in ever more-distant galaxies that span a large stretch of cosmic time.
"This will allow us to probe the importance of accretion and the importance of mergers in creating the universe we see today," he says.
Measuring a supermassive black hole's rate of spin represents a 20-year-old problem in astrophysics that researchers were able to solve with three days' worth of observations from NuSTAR and XMM-Newton.
The X-rays appear thanks to energetic charged particles that are accelerated by a black hole's magnetic field. The particles form into jets that vault into space from the black hole's north and south poles, streaming for distances that can top 1 million light-years.
The region of a jet with the most intense X-ray emissions lies at the end nearest the black hole. These X-rays can in effect be reflected by the swirling disk of material falling into the supermassive black hole.
Meanwhile, the black hole's enormous gravity tugs on the very fabric of space-time itself as the object spins, distorting the disk of infalling material. The largest amount of distortion appears in the region nearest the black hole's event horizon – the point of no return for infalling material. This distortion shows up in the spectra of the disk material, carried by the X-rays that the material reflects. The brightest, most distorted spectra provide a measure of the black hole's spin.
Between the two telescopes, the researchers were able to measure iron's X-ray spectra from the black hole's vicinity with higher precision, in more detail, and over a wider range of X-ray energies than previous instruments could. This not only allowed them to zero in on emissions closest to the black hole, but it also allowed them to rule out competing explanations for the spectra they recorded.
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| 0.93965 | 1,021 | 4.09375 | 4 |
See what questions
a doctor would ask.
Researchers have found that Aricept, an Alzheimer's drug, is effective in improving language and learning skills in Down's Syndrome patients. This would make it the first Down's syndrome drug which could improve the quality of life and level of participation by Down's syndrome sufferers. Alzheimer's and Down's symptoms are both due to a lack of acetylcholine produced by the brain. Aricept works by preventing enzymes from breaking down the acetycholine that is produced. However, more research needs to be done on the long term effects of Aricept use on young children.
Source: summary of medical news story as reported by The Star
About: Down Syndrome symptoms treatable with Alzheimer drug
Date: 28 October 2004
Source: The Star
Author: Pat Hagan
http:/ This summary article refers to the following medical categories:
Related Medical Topics
More News Topics
This summary article refers to the following medical categories:
Search Specialists by State and City
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| 0.948714 | 209 | 3.21875 | 3 |
Not all homeschool families make a lifelong commitment to homeschooling; as family circumstances change or as children age (and approach calculus-level math) some choose to switch from home-based to in-school learning. But while the notion of a fresh-faced homeschool student entering the crowded halls of public high school and struggling to open his locker may sound like the premise of a John Hughes movie, the truth about homeschool students entering (or reentering) traditional schools is a bit more nuanced.
Jeffrey Koonce, a school superintendent in Miller County, Missouri, wrote his doctoral dissertation on the subject. His findings? While every student’s experience is different, the keys to academic and social success seem to lie with the parents. “Homeschooling means so many different things. … It all boils down to [parental] leadership,” he says.
Koonce’s research suggests that children of parents who opt to homeschool for pedagogical reasons—that is to say, because the parents want to try a different academic approach than might be available in a traditional school—tend to do better when they enter public schools than the children of parents who homeschool for ideological or moral reasons. Koonce theorizes that that’s because the former group tends to be more academically focused, while the latter tends toward a more “shoot-from-the-hip approach.” As he writes in his dissertation:
- Parents need to have a home school structure and curriculum solidly within their grasp before starting to home school. An unstructured, undisciplined approach will academically hurt their children, regardless of the nobility of one’s motives in home schooling.
But as any high school freshman can attest, getting along in school isn’t just a matter of academics. Kenneth Bernstein, a high school government and social studies teacher in Prince George’s County, Maryland, estimates that about half of his previously homeschooled students experience “some difficulties in adjusting,” though, he adds, “once they form networks of friends, these largely disappear.”
A larger issue than finding friends, says Bernstein, is the fact that some students who come from a homeschool setting have not been exposed to “diverse points of view,” and thus aren’t used to being in settings where their patterns of thinking get challenged by students or teachers whose ideas are very different. For these students, a high school government class can feel foreign—or even hostile. But, he adds, every homeschool experience is different; for every homeschooler who struggles in high school government class, there’s likely to be another who is excited by the exchange of ideas.
Aside from academic and social concerns, traditional school can also usher in some unexpected logistical challenges—including waking up early, catching the school bus and managing time during tests. Laura Brodie, an English professor who decided to homeschool her middle daughter for fifth grade in an effort to “give [her] a break from the usual routine,” made it a point to keep up with the fifth-grade math and science curricula, because she knew that her daughter would be returning to the classroom after a year. Still, upon her return, Brodie’s daughter Julia scored a D on her first math test.
“I was shocked,” remembers Brodie, who later wrote about her experiences in the memoir Love in a Time of Homeschooling, “because I knew we had thoroughly covered and exceeded the fifth-grade math requirements. So I asked her what happened, and she said that one of the word problems in the middle of the test was interesting, so she spent the rest of the period thinking about it and didn’t finish the second half of the test.”
Preparing homeschool students to enter traditional schools can be tricky—after all, what parent could anticipate their child being sucked in by an “interesting” word problem? Although each homeschool student is likely to experience a unique set of challenges, there are some basic guidelines that homeschooling parents can follow to help ease the transition to bricks-and-mortar-based schooling. Here are six tips:
- Follow an academic curriculum that corresponds roughly to that of your school district, and have your child take yearly standardized tests so that he’s familiar with the tests he will be faced with in school.
- Document your child’s academic progress as a homeschooler and be ready to share it with school officials if need be.
- Help your child form social networks by engaging her in community activities and sports teams well before the first day of school begins.
- Teach your child according to your own philosophical or moral beliefs, but try not to shelter him from opposing viewpoints.
- Arrange for your child to visit the school and sit in on a class or two before enrolling her.
- Send your child to school with a good attitude. “Public schools are not the big bad ugly monsters” people might think, says Koonce. “Go in with an open mind: these people are here to help [you]. That’s their job.”
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In 2008 Al Gore prophesized that the North Pole would be ice free within five years because of man-made global warming. Interestingly, now six years later, the latest satellite data show that not only is there plenty of ice, but that the ice cover has actually expanded by 50 percent, compared to 2012 levels. At the same time, sea ice levels in Antarctica have expanded to record levels and the southern hemisphere now has 19.5 million square kilometers of ice cover, more than at any point since records were first kept in 1978. And back home 86 percent of the country experienced colder than normal temperatures this winter so it won't surprise most to learn that the earth's temperature has not risen in 17 years amidst the huge global warming hype.
As the evidence mounts that global warming is not advancing as predicted, many global warming propagators have changed course to say that instead of warming, carbon emissions will lead to more "climate change" and that this change will result in increased hurricanes, tornadoes and flooding. That may sound plausible, except that it too is not backed by the data. Even the liberally minded United Nations noted that current data shows "no robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricane counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin."
So what are the real facts? Most reasonable scientists seem to agree that there has been global warming since 1800 although the warming rates have been sporadic and overall quite minimal, totaling 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit since the start of the industrial revolution, according to noted MIT and Harvard climatologist Richard Lindzen. Lindzen agrees with the concept of the greenhouse effect but disagrees with the alarmist predictions like those of Al Gore. Lindzen says that the 150 year history of burning fossil fuels in large quantities has had a relatively minimal effect on the climate and that the small degree warming is nothing to be alarmed about.
But even if we did have something to worry about, what could we possibly do to curtail the use of hydrocarbons? Does anyone think that we could convince the world's growth countries like China or India to curtail the use of energy to deny their citizens the comforts that industrialization brings, the comforts that we in the U.S. have enjoyed for decades? I cannot envision Russia's Putin or China's Xi, for instance agreeing to stifle their respective economies for what the U.S. or the U.N. determines to be the "collective good". And it would be fruitless for a single country like the U.S. to suffer through any kind of punitive "cap and trade" policy without the rest of the world on board as our unilateral action would not even make a dent in the world's emissions rate. As it is, thanks to the rise in natural gas production, the U.S. greenhouse emissions are already at a 20-year low and falling.
It is hard to fathom how an issue such as global warming can become so burdened with bias and emotion without regard for factual data. One large contributing factor is the significant financial pot at the end of the rainbow for global warming advocates, whether funded by the U.N. or by the nation's universities via government grants. Between 2010 and 2012 alone, American taxpayers spent 7.45 billion to help developing countries cope with climate change and that is just a drop in the bucket relative to total global warming outlays. The alarmism has become "big business" and it is amazing what some will do and say to capitalize on the money at stake. Just listen to Al Gore.
The sensible way to proceed is to let the scientists do their work and then thoroughly vet the facts before creating any kind of new policy. Although doom and gloom sells, the media outlets must tell the whole story, not just one side as has so often been the case. And just as we have done in this country for the past 250 years, we must continue to promote and reward entrepreneurship to find new energy saving alternatives that will provide more efficient and less costly energy alternatives for future generations of Americans as well as the rest of the world. It is time for fact and logic to prevail.
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By Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD
The National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) asked if I would contribute an article on the dangers of dieting (specifically, how dieting increases weight gain) as part of their outreach for National Eating Disorders Awareness week, which begins February 26, 2012. Of course, I said yes, and here it is.
While many people seem to know that dieting doesn’t work in the long run--most are shocked to hear that the process of dieting itself, (independent of genetics), increases your body’s propensity to gain weight. Scientists call this “dieting-induced weight-gain” and it may be a contributing factor to the obesity epidemic.
Dieting is biologically akin to compound interest—but in a negative context. If you put your money in a compound-interest savings account, you will accelerate your earnings, resulting in more money accumulated, compared to an ordinary savings account. In a similar way, dieting amplifies the amount of weight gained, compared to a nondieting person with similar genes and body. Far-fetched analogy? Not according to a new study on twins.
The weight-amplifying effect of dieting was evaluated in a novel study on over 2,000 sets of twins from Finland, aged 16 to 25 years old (Pietilaineet al, 2011). Dieting twins, who embarked on just one intentional weight loss episode, were nearly two to three times more likely to become overweight, compared to their non-dieting twin counterpart. Furthermore, the risk of becoming overweight increased in a dose-dependent manner, with each dieting episode.
The results indicate that dieting itself, independent of genetics, is significantly associated with accelerated weight gain and increased the risk of becoming overweight. The researchers concluded, “It is now well established that the more people engage in dieting, the more they gain weight in the long-term.” This study adds to a body of research dating back to World War II, which shows that dieting and the ensuing cycling of losing weight, re-gaining weight, and gaining more weight with each subsequent diet, ratchets the baseline weight up even higher, beyond the original weight
Here are other compelling studies, which indicate that dieting promotes weight gain regardless of age, gender, or athleticism.
If you think that exercise will protect your body from the weight-promoting effects of dieting, research tells another story. A study on over 1,800 people, evaluated the impact of repeated losing and gaining weight, (known as weight cycling), on world-class male athletes involved in weight-based sports, such as boxing, weight lifting and wrestling. Weight cycling predicted subsequent weight gain and the risk of obesity in the athletes with a weight cycling history (Saarni et al 2006.)
Dieting also is associated with increased food preoccupation, binge eating, and eating in the absence of hunger. Furthermore, dieting appears to be causally linked to both obesity and eating disorders (Haines & Neumark-Sztainer 2006). A large 3-year study on nearly 2,000 adolescents found that dieting is the most important predictor of new eating disorders (Patton et al 1999).
Studies aside--what has your own dieting experiences shown you? Many people say their first diet was easy- -the pounds just melted off. But that first dieting experience is the seduction trap, which launches the futile pursuit of weight loss via dieting. But your body is very smart and wired for survival.
Biologically, your body experiences the dieting process as a form of starvation. Your cells don’t know you are voluntarily restricting your food intake. Your body shifts into primal survival mode—metabolism slows down and food cravings escalate. And with each diet, the body learns and adapts, resulting in rebound weight gain. Consequently, many people feel like they are a failure—but it is dieting that has failed them, and contributed to the weight gain process. Dieting disconnects you from your innate hunger and satiety cues, and it becomes easier to eat in the absence of hunger and develop a mistrust of your biological eating cues.
So what’s a chronic dieter to do? The answer lies in attunement with your mind and body, an inner-oriented process, rather than an external approach (such as counting calories or points). This process is called Intuitive Eating, which consists of 10 principles, but can be summarized into these three characteristics by the research of Trach Tylka (2006):
To date there are over 25 studies on Intuitive Eating, which combined, show that Intuitive Eaters have lower body mass index levels, (without internalizing the unrealistically thin ideal), lower disordered eating and eating disorders, eat a variety of foods, enjoy eating, better cholesterol levels, and a psychological hardiness, which includes welling-being and resilience (Tribole & Resch, 2012).
No diet or meal plan could possibly “know” your hunger and fullness levels, or what satisfies you. Only you know your thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Only you, can be the expert of you. But dieting interferes with attunement and Intuitive Eating, which is one of the reasons why the first principle is “Reject the Diet Mentality”.
Dieting has harmful consequences, beyond lacking long-term effectiveness. Dieting is not an innocuous right of passage, whether it’s for teenager angst, a wedding dress, a New Year’s resolution, or athletic performance.
Consider this article a public health service announcement and tell everyone you know: Dieting increases your chances of gaining even more weight in the future, not to mention increase your risk of eating disorders, and body dissatisfaction. The dieting industry won’t like this message. A recent Wall Street Journal article described how a major weight loss company is targeting men to increase their market share, which comprises about 90% women. (This company had $1.45 billion in revenue in 2011.) We don’t need another dieting casualty, male or female.
Mann, T. et al. (2007).Medicare’s search for effective obesity treatments: Diets are not the answer. American Psychologist, 62(3): 220-233.
Field, A,E. et al (2003). Relation Between Dieting and Weight Change Among Preadolescents and Adolescents. Pediatrics,112:900-906. [Free Full Text http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/112/4/900.long ]
Haines, J. & Neumark-Sztainer D (2006). Prevention of obesity and eating disorders: a consideration of shared risk factors. Health Education Research, 21(6):770–782. [Free Full Text http://her.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/6/770.long ]
Kwoh, L. (January 9, 2012).Weight Watchers Chief Looks to Men, China for Growth. Wall Street Journal. http://on.wsj.com/xnZqfD
Neumark-Sztainer, D. et al (2006). Obesity, disordered eating, and eating disorders in a longitudinal study of adolescents: how do dieters fare five years later? J Am Diet Assoc,106(4):559-568.
Patton, G. C., et al. (1999). Onset of adolescent eating disorders: population based cohort study over 3 years. British Medical Journal, 318:765-768. [Free Full Text http://www.bmj.com/content/318/7186/765?view=long&pmid=10082698 ].
Pietiläinen, K.H. et al. (2011). Does dieting make you fat? A twin study. International Journal of Obesity, | doi:10.1038/ijo.2011.160
Saarni, S. E. et al (2006). Weight cycling of athletes and subsequent weight gain in middleage. International J Obesity, 30: 1639–1644. [Free full text at http://bit.ly/yvfnhE]
Tribole E. & Resch E. (2012-in press). Intuitive Eating (3rd edition). St.Martin’s Press: NY,NY.
Tylka, T. L. (2006). Development and psychometric evaluation of a measure of intuitive eating. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 53, 226-240.
Copyright © 2012 by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD Published at www.IntuitiveEating.org
•Rights to Reproduce: You may reproduce this post, as long as you leave it unchanged, you don’t charge for it, link to it, and you include the entire copyright statement. Please let us know you have used it by sending a website link or an electronic copy to Etribole at gmail dot com.
DISCLAIMER: The information is intended to inform readers and is not intended to replace specific advice from a health care professional.
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A new study in the journal Science by researchers Emma Teuten, Li Xu, and Christopher Reddy at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is causing researchers to rethink the sources and fates of many chemical compounds in the environment.
It has been known for decades that industrially produced compounds such as polybrominated diphenyl ethers or PBDEs, used as flame retardants in furniture and clothing, accumulate in human and animal tissues. Structurally similar compounds, methoxylated polybrominated diphenyl ethers or MeO-BDEs, have recently been found in fish and marine mammals and are a new class of bioaccumulated compounds. In some samples, the MeO-BDEs are among the most abundant compounds in the environment after DDE, a breakdown product of the pesticide DDT, and several polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, but their source has remained unknown.
Teuten, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry at WHOI, isolated two chemicals from 10 kilograms (about 22 pounds) of whale blubber from a True's beaked whale found dead at False Cape, Virginia, in November 2003. The blubber was supplied to Teuten and colleagues by the Virginia Marine Science Museum, which removed the whale from the beach to look for clues to its death.
After six months of painstaking lab work to remove fats and other material to get to the compounds of interest in their most pure form, Teuten had about 1 milligram (less than one ounce) to determine if the source was natural or human-produced. The researchers used the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (NOSAMS) facility at WHOI, a precision carbon-dating laboratory, to analyze the sample. Natural sources have a detectable radiocarbon signal, human-produced sources from petrochemicals do not.
"It has been assumed that industrially produced compounds accumulate in animals, but our results show that natural products do as well," Teuten said. "Did the whale we studied accumulate these compounds from its diet of squid, and if so, where did the squid get them? Animals have been exposed to industrial compounds for years, and having natural compounds of similar chemical structure may help toxicologists explain how and why enzymes have the ability to metabolize compounds like PCBs."
For Teuten and colleagues, the study was a challenge from the start. They had to request and receive a permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service, which limits the "take" of marine mammals for research. With permit in hand, they contacted researchers at marine mammal stranding networks to alert them that they needed a sample the next time one became available. The True's beaked whale blubber arrived in January 2004, and months of lab work, countless dulled knives and several blenders, and an array of chemical procedures followed.
"It was like looking for a needle in a haystack," said Reddy, an associate scientist in the Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry Department. "This type of study had not been done before. In a sense we are chemical detectives. Our goal was to determine whether these compounds were industrially derived or naturally produced, and in this one sample we found they are not derived from flame retardants but are coming from nature. But where do they come from? Our next steps are to study other animals and other suspect compounds."
Since the team's findings show that very similar chemical compounds are made by humans and naturally by many plants and animals, Teuten and Reddy say many more questions need to be answered, among them whether these natural compounds are affecting the health of whales or other animals that accumulate them.
Reddy says a similar approach can be taken to determine the sources of chloroform in the atmosphere, something many have debated. "It would require many thousands or millions of liters of air to get enough chloroform to make a radiocarbon measurement, but with enough time and patience it can be done."
The study was supported by the National Science Foundation, The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Inc., the J. Seward Johnson Fund, and the WHOI Ocean Life Institute.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is a private, independent marine research and engineering and higher education organization located in Falmouth, MA. Its primary mission is to understand the oceans and their interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the ocean's role in the changing global environment. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, the Institution operates the U.S. National Deep Submergence Facility that includes the deep-diving submersible Alvin and the remotely operated vehicle Jason II, a fleet of global ranging ships and smaller coastal vessels, and a variety of other tethered and autonomous underwater vehicles. WHOI is organized into five departments, interdisciplinary institutes and a marine policy center, and conducts a joint graduate education program with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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The mild winter and hot summer could be increasing the population of a summer pest. The Japanese beetle affects home gardens, trees and shrubs and farm crops this time of year. ISU Extension research shows that in a normal winter, mortality rates for these bugs average 53percent in southeast Iowa, however this year the predicted rate was close to 30 percent.
Gene Mohling the Washington County Extension Office says the Japanese beetle is similar to a June bug, and will eat leaves, and while it usually won’t kill a plant, it does affect it. Mohling says that infestations of the insect can be sprayed, but for farmers, that can get expensive.
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At the NanoPhotonics Centre at the University of Cambridge, scientists are tinkering with tiny structures like the ones in butterfly wings to create crazy new materials that manipulate light and change color in strange ways.
“A lot of this stuff is not completely mainstream,” said Jeremy Baumberg, who directs the center. “People think it’s a bit weird.”
During a recent visit to Cambridge, I sat down with Baumberg to talk about some of the projects he and his colleagues -- engineers, physicists, chemists, materials scientists, and biologists -- are working on. This gallery shows off a few highlights.
The secrets behind these multicolored materials lie in the tiny nanostructures they’re made from: spheres, helices, tangled gyroids, lattices, super-thin membranes, and stacks. “The nice thing about all these materials is they’re a very visual example of nanotechnology,” Baumberg said. “The features and the color all come from structure.”
Super-thin, transparent nanolayers reflect different colors depending on their thickness and the interface between them. If those layers are flexible enough, they can be folded and stacked to create inflatable membranes that change color as they inflate. That's how the lab created these psychedelic looking bubbles. “You blow air through the membrane, and you get these color-changing bubbles,” Baumberg said.
In addition to groovier party balloons, such technology could inspire practical products like tires that change to green when inflated to the right air pressure.
Image and Project: Gen Kamita, NanoPhotonics Cambridge
Your white walls are so boring. What if you could flick a switch and watch them become something less predictable?
Baumberg and his group are working on wall coatings that can change color. These coatings would contain transparent nanostructures arranged in precise matrices. Changing the structures’ separation – by running an electrical current through the coating, for example – would shift the wavelength, and the color, they reflect. The group has already figured out how this could work, and they've made sheets about the size of a postage stamp. The challenge now is coming up with a good way to make sheets big enough to liven up your dreary office.
“The thing that’s important to me is not making a tiny bit of material using expensive technology,” Baumberg says. Instead, he's aiming for materials that are low-cost and easy to produce.
Image and Project: Jan Martens and Laura Brooks, NanoPhotonics Cambridge
Biomimetic berry-based structures
Dry a bunch of flowers for a few months and they’ll lose much of their color, fading into dusky, wilted versions of their original hues. But not Pollia condensata. These brilliant berries maintain their bluish purple iridescence for decades. They're the most intensely colored biological thing on Earth.
Last year, Baumberg's team, including collaborator Silvia Vignolini, worked out the secret to the berries' transfixing, glittery color. Rather than incorporating pigments that fade – like those in the flower petals – the berry’s surface cells build color-generating structures in their membranes. The structures are made from cellulose nanofibers, laid down in periodic, twisting helices. The tiny spirals act as reflective cavities and bounce light around, ultimately amplifying and reflecting the bluish purple hue.
Now the group is working on replicating these color-producing structures using cellulose nanocrystals. “It’s not easy to do at the moment,” Baumberg said. There are some good reasons for trying, though. Remember those blue M&Ms that are no longer around? Turns out, most blue food dyes are carcinogenic. Maybe, if the group gets it right, they’ll come up with a nontoxic dye that can be used to resurrect those long-lost chocolaty treats.
Image and Project: Silvia Vignolini, NanoPhotonics Cambridge
A 3-D gyroid metamaterial made from gold sounds totally whack. And it kind of is. The various twists and turns assumed by the metal affect the way light moves through it.
Baumberg and his team make this weird material by starting with a polymer that self-assembles into the gyroid lattice. “It will do that if you cool it slowly enough, and at the right concentration,” Baumberg said. The lattice, he notes, "is really beautiful.” Then, they add a second polymer that fills in the empty space. Removing the original, self-assembling polymer leaves a veiny mold that can be filled in with gold. Once the gold is in, they dissolve away the mold, leaving behind a 3-D metal lattice. “I call it holey gold,” Baumberg said. “It has completely different properties from gold. Light worms its way through differently.”
These types of structures could be used to enhance the conversion of light into electricity in solar cells, or to create metals with completely different properties than the original.
Image: Stefano Salvatore, NanoPhotonics Cambridge
Named for their resemblance to an opal’s flickering colors, these materials change color when stretched. What initially looks like a shiny piece of yellow elastic shifts through green to blue. Patterns printed onto the color-changing stretchable also morph as the material’s shape shifts.
These materials are made by laying a matrix of tiny spheres onto a stretchable fabric. Spheres of a certain size, separated by a certain distance, will reflect light of a certain color. But as you yank on the fabric and increase the distance between the spheres, the wavelength of light they reflect shifts. Suddenly, instead of orange, you have something green.
It’s tempting to imagine where these color-changing materials might find a home. Perhaps not surprisingly, Baumberg says the most interest the team has gotten has been from the fashion industry. Already, runways in Paris have showcased garments incorporating these stretchables. Maybe we’ll be able to wear a trippy, color-changing jumpsuit to Burning Man next year?
Designer, and Image: Jasna Rokegem/Qibin Zhao, NanoPhotonics Cambridge; Video: YouTube
In photonics, woodpile structures are layered materials stacked in much the same way as an actual woodpile – except of course that they're not made of wood. Also, they're very tiny. And they control light in weird ways.
“They’re very technically difficult structures to make, on a 100-nanometer scale,” Baumberg said. Working in this size range allows the material to trap and reroute light because it creates regions within the structure where electromagnetic radiation, including visible light, cannot pass. Baumberg and his team are working on creating metal-containing woodpile structures, using gold wires and other flexible materials. Because these structures can direct how light (and information) moves through a system, they're useful in communications systems and sensors.
Image and Project: Lindsey Ibbotson, NanoPhotonics Cambridge
Single-layered, stretchy mats made of gold nanoparticles and elastic materials could function very effectively in cell phone sensors. Someday.
When these mats are relaxed and the gold particles are near one another, the material looks like gold and acts like a metal. That is, electrons can hop from particle to particle. But if you stretch the mat and increase the distance between the gold nanoparticles, the material morphs. First, its color changes to red. And second, it starts behaving like an insulator since electrons have a tougher time moving from particle to particle.
Baumberg envisions these kinds of nanoparticle mats finding a place in sensors – perhaps in the form of disposable films that could be coupled to a mobile phone. The mats could be made sensitive to different things by intercalating different molecules between the gold particles. “For instance, it could measure the contaminants in the environment, or in something you ate, or something in our sweat,” Baumberg said. When the right molecules interact with the particle mat, it will swell and turn red.
Image and Project: Matthew Millyard, NanoPhotonics Cambridge
Plasmonic gold lattice
This tube is made from a rolled up, superthin lattice of gold cups. Each of the cups traps and concentrates light, allowing certain colors to spiral around the tube. Those colors change as the tube changes shape, and varying the intensity of light shined on the tubes causes them to roll and unroll. The tube, and its cups, are able to control and manipulate light on a nanoscale. Related technologies are used in molecular diagnostics.Image: Fumin Huang, NanoPhotonics Cambridge
Color-changing wrapping paper
Thin, clingy films that reflect a myriad of colors can not only be styled into balloons (see the first slide in this gallery), they can be used to wrap stuff up. Baumberg and his team do this by floating the filmy layers on water, to keep them flat and prevent them from clinging to everything, then rolling them around objects, like the human hairs in the image above. We know it’s highly improbable that this kind of technology will ever find its way into hair salons, but if does – yes, please.Image: Mathis Kolle and Nick Gibbons, NanoPhotonics Cambridge
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| 0.925208 | 2,023 | 3.5 | 4 |
|(Route of Ghaggar-Hakra River - Ancient River Bahawalpur State)|
The Ghaggar-Hakra River (Devnagri: घग्गर हकरा, Gurmukhi: ਘੱਗਰ ਹਕਰਾ, Shahmukhi: گهگـر هکره) is an intermittent river in India and Pakistan that flows only during the monsoon season. The river is known as Ghaggar before the Ottu barrage and as the Hakra downstream of the barrage. The Ghaggar-Hakra is generally identified with the Vedic Sarasvati River by most scholars, though it is disputed whether all Rigvedic references to the Sarasvati should be taken to refer to this river. The identification of the Vedic Sarasvati River with the Ghaggar-Hakra River was accepted by Christian Lassen, Max Müller, Marc Aurel Stein, C.F. Oldham, and Jane Macintosh.
The Ghaggar is an intermittent river in India, flowing during the monsoon rains. It originates in the Shivalik Hills of Himachal Pradesh and flows through Punjab and Haryana states into Rajasthan; just southwest of Sirsa, Haryana and by the side of talwara jheel in Rajasthan, this seasonal river feeds two irrigation canals that extend into Rajasthan.
The present-day Sarsuti (Saraswati River) originates in a submontane region (Ambala district) and joins the Ghaggar near Shatrana in Punjab. Near Sadulgarh (Hanumangarh) the Naiwal channel, a dried out channel of the Sutlej, joins the Ghaggar. Near Suratgarh the Ghaggar is then joined by the dried up Drishadvati (Chautang) river.
The wide river bed (paleo-channel) of the Ghaggar river suggest that the river once flowed full of water during the great meltdown of the Himalayan Ice Age glaciers, some 10,000 years ago, and that it then continued through the entire region, in the presently dry channel of the Hakra River, possibly emptying into the Rann of Kutch. It supposedly dried up due to the capture of its tributaries by the Indus system and the Yamuna river, and later on, additionally, the loss of water in much of its catchment area due to deforestation and overgrazing. This is supposed by some to have happened at the latest in 1900 BCE, but actually took place much earlier.
Puri and Verma (1998) have argued that the present-day Tons River was the ancient upper-part of the Sarasvati River, which would then had been fed with Himalayan glaciers. The terrain of this river contains pebbles of quartzite and metamorphic rocks, while the lower terraces in these valleys do not contain such rocks. However, recent studies show that Bronze Age sediments from the glaciers of the Himalayas are missing along the Ghaggar-Hakra, indicating that the river did not or no longer have its sources in the high mountains.
In India there are also various small or middle-sized rivers called Sarasvati or Saraswati. One of them flows from the west end of the Aravalli Range into the east end of the Rann of Kutch.
The Hakra is the dried-out channel of a river in Pakistan that is the continuation of the Ghaggar River in India. Several times, but not continuously, it carried the water of the Sutlej during the Bronze Age period. Many settlements of the Indus Valley Civilisation have been found along and inside the river beds of the Ghaggar and Hakra rivers.
The Sarasvati River is mentioned in all books of the Rigveda except the fourth. It is the only river with hymns entirely dedicated to it: RV 6.61, RV 7.95 and RV 7. 96.It is mentioned as a divine and large river,which flows "from the mountains to the samudra," which some take as the Indian Ocean. Talageri states that "the references to the Sarasvati far outnumber the references to the Indus" and "The Sarasvati is so important in the whole of the Rigveda that it is worshipped as one of the Three Great Goddesses". However, the reason for the predominance of the Sarasvati in the Rigveda is the late Harappan (1900-1300 BCE) population shift eastwards to Haryana; the latter part of the period corresponds to the common scholarly opinion of the date of this text.
Another reference to the Sarasvati is in the geographical enumeration of the rivers in the late Rigvedic Nadistuti sukta (10.75.5, this verse enumerates all important rivers from the Ganges in the east up to the Indus in the west in a strict geographical order), as "Ganges, Yamuna, Sarasvati, Shutudri", the Sarasvati is placed between the Yamuna and the Sutlej, consistent with the Ghaggar identification. It is clear, therefore, that even if the river had unmistakably lost much of her former prominence, the Sarasvati remained characterized as a river goddess almost throughout the Rigveda.
According to some palaeo-environmental scientists and Archaeologists,between 2500 BCE and 1900 BCE some tectonic disturbances caused tilt in topography of Northwest India resulting in the migration of river. The Sutlej moved westward and became a tributary of the Indus River while the Yamuna moved eastward and became a tributary of the Ganges. The Yamuna shifted its course eastwards, supposedly in the early 2nd millennium BCE, allegedly reaching its current bed by 1st millennium BCE, while the Drishadvati bed retained only a small seasonal flow. The Sutlej several times over shifted its channel northwards and was eventually captured by the Indus system. The water loss due to these movements caused the Sarasvati river to dry up in the Thar Desert.
However, Henri-Paul Francfort, utilizing images from the French satellite SPOT already two decades ago, found that the large river Sarasvati is pre-Harappan altogether and started drying up already in the middle of the 4th millennium BC; during Harappan times only a complex irrigation-canal network was being used. The date should therefore be pushed back to c 3800 BC. R. Mughal (1997), summing up the evidence, concludes that the Bronze Age Ghaggar-Hakra sometimes carried more, sometimes less water (for example derived from the Sutlej). The latter point agrees with a recent isotope study. Painted Grey Ware sites (ca. 1000 BCE) have been found in the river bed and not on the banks of the Ghaggar-Hakra river, which suggests that river was certainly dried up by this period.
The Rig Vedic hymn X 75, however, gives a list of names of rivers where Sarasvati is merely mentioned while Sindhu receives praise. It is commonly agreed that the tenth Book of the Rig Veda is later than the others. Some revisionists think, ahistorically, that this may indicate that the Rig Veda could be dated to a period after the first drying up of Sarasvati (c. 3500 BCE) when the river lost its preeminence.
Scholars, however, commonly date the Rig Veda to after the Indus Valley culture, arguing for example, that the lack of clear evidence of domesticated equids at Indus Valley culture sites contrasts with the Rig Veda's frequent references to domesticated horses. Scholars also interpret frequent use in the Rig Veda of the word "ratha", which in later Sanskrit can mean any kind of carriage, to be references specifically to horse-drawn, spoked-wheeled war chariots, whereas the only carts (called 'anas' in Vedic) found at Indus Valley culture sites are solid-wheeled bullock carts. There are indeed a number of mentions in the Rig Veda of spoked (ara) wheels, horse-drawn chariots and the use of chariots in sport, competition and battle, including also the deity Indra's vehicle. Indra is described as throwing his vajra weapon from a heavenly "ratha" pulled by two "hari" horses, a noun form of "bay".
The many archeological sites along the bed of Sarasvati (variously given as 414 or even 600) dwarf the number of sites so far recorded along the Indus River, which number less (about three dozen). However, most of the Harappan sites along the Sarasvati are found in desert country, and have remained undisturbed since the end of the Indus Civilization. This contrasts with the heavy alluvium of the Indus and other large Panjab rivers that have obscured Harappan sites, including part of Mohenjo Daro. About 80 percent of the Sarasvati sites are datable to the fourth or third millennium BCE, suggesting that the river was flowing during (part of) this period, which is also indicated by the fact that some Indus sites are found inside the bed of the Ghaggar-Hakra.
Association with the Harappan civilization
Some estimate that the period at which the river dried up range, very roughly, from 2500 to 2000 BC, with a further margin of error at either end of the date-range. This may be precise in geological terms, but for the mature Indus Valley Civilization (2600 to 1900 BC) it makes all the difference whether the river dried up in 2500 (its early phase) or 2000 (its late phase). By contact with remnants of the IVC like the Cemetery H culture, legendary knowledge of the event may have been acquired.
Along the course of the Ghaggar-Hakra river are many archaeological sites of the Indus Valley Civilization; but not further south than the middle of Bahawalpur district. It has been assumed that the Sarasvati ended there in a series of terminal lakes, and some think that its water only reached the Indus or the sea in very wet rainy seasons. However, satellite images contradict this: they do not show subterranean water in reservoirs in the dunes between the Indus and the end of the Hakra west of Fort Derawar/Marot. It may also have been affected by much of its water being taken for irrigation.
In a survey conducted by M.R. Mughal between 1974 and 1977, over 400 sites were mapped along 300 miles of the Hakra river. The majority of these sites were dated to the fourth or third millennium BCE.
S. P. Gupta however counts over 600 sites of the Indus civilization on the Ghaggar-Hakra river and its tributaries. For ereason stated above, only 90 to 96 Indus Valley sites have been discovered on the Indus and its tributaries (about 36 sites on the Indus river itself.) V.N. Misra states that over 530 Harappan sites (of the more than 800 known sites, not including Late Harappan or OCP) are located on the Ghaggar-Hakra. The other sites are mainly in Kutch-Saurashtra (nearly 200 sites), Yamuna Valley (nearly 70 Late Harappan sites) and in the Indus Valley, in Baluchistan, and in the NW Frontier Province (less than 100 sites).
Most of the Mature Harappan sites are located in the middle Ghaggar-Hakra river valley, and some on the Indus and in Kutch-Saurashtra. However, just as in other contemporary cultures, such as the BMAC, settlements move up-river due to climate changes around 2000 BCE. In the late Harappan period the number of late Harappan sites in the middle Ghaggar-Hakra channel and in the Indus valley diminishes, while it expands in the upper Ghaggar-Sutlej channels and in Saurashtra. The abandonment of many sites on the Ghaggar-Hakra between the Harappan and the Late Harappan phase was probably due to the drying up of the Ghaggar-Hakra river.
Because most of the Indus Valley sites known so far are actually located on the Ghaggar-Hakra river and its tributaries and not on the Indus river, some Indian archaeologists, such as S.P. Gupta, have proposed to use the term "Indus Sarasvati Civilization" to refer to the Harappan culture which is named, as is common in archaeology, after the first place where the culture was discovered.
Satellite photography has shown that the Ghaggar-Hakra was indeed a large river that dried up several times (see Mughal 1997). The dried out Hakra river bed is between three and ten kilometers wide. Recent research indicates that the Sutlej and possibly also the Yamuna once flowed into the Ghaggar-Hakra river bed. The Sutlej and Yamuna Rivers have changed their courses several times.
Paleobotanical information also documents the aridity that developed after the drying up of the river. (Gadgil and Thapar 1990 and references therein). The disappearance of the river may additionally have been caused by earthquakes which may have led to the redirection of its tributaries. It has also been suggested that the loss of rainfall in much of its catchment area as well as deforestation and overgrazing may have also contributed to the drying up of the river. However, a similar phenomenon, caused by climate change, is also seen at about the same period north of the Hindu Kush, in the area of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex.
There are no Harappan sites on the Sutlej in its present lower course, only in its upper course near the Siwaliks, and along the dried up channel of the ancient Sutlej, which indicates the Sutlej did flow into the Ghaggar-Hakra at that time.
|(Sutlej River Bahawalpur)|
At Ropar the Sutlej river suddenly turns sharply away from the Ghaggar. The narrow Ghaggar river bed itself is becoming suddenly wider at the conjunction where the Sutlej should have met the Ghaggar river. There also is a major paleochannel between the turning point of the Sutlej and where the Ghaggar river bed widens.
In later texts like the Mahabharata, the Rigvedic Sutudri (of unknown, non-Sanskrit etymology) is called Shatudri (Shatadru/Shatadhara), which means a river with 100 flows. As mentioned, the Sutlej (and the Beas and Ravi) have frequently changed their courses. The Beas probably joined the Sutlej (as in Rgveda 3.33) further downstream from where it joins that river today. Before that time, the Sutlej is said to have flowed into Ghaggar.
There are no Harappan sites on the present Yamuna river. There are however Painted Gray Ware (1000 - 600 BC) sites along the Yamuna channel, showing that the river must have then flowed in the present channel. The sparse distribution of the Painted Gray Ware sites in the Ghaggar river valley indicates that during this period the Ghaggar river was already partly dried up.
Scholars like Raikes (1968) and Suraj Bhan (1972, 1973, 1975, 1977) have shown that based on archaeological, geomorphic and sedimentological research the Yamuna may have flowed into the Sarasvati during Harappan times. There are several dried out river beds (paleochannels) between the Sutlej and the Yamuna, some of them two to ten kilometres wide. They are not always visible on the ground because of excessive silting and encroachment by sand of the dried out river channels. The Yamuna may have flowed into the Sarasvati river through the Chautang or the Drishadvati channel, since many Harappan sites have been discovered on these dried out river beds.
Identification with the Rigvedic Sarasvati
Main article: Sarasvati River
The identity of the dried-up Ghaggar-Hakra with the late Vedic and post-Vedic Sarasvati is widely accepted. The identification of the early Rigvedic Sarasvati with the Old Ghaggar is another matter, and the subject of recent dispute. The identification with the Sarasvati River is based the mentionings in Vedic texts (e.g. in the enumeration of the rivers in Rigveda 10.75.05 - the order is Ganges, Yamuna, Sarasvati, SutudriSutlej), Parusni, etc. - and other geological and paleobotanical findings. This however, is disputed. The Victorian era scholar C.F. Oldham (1886) was the first to suggest that geological events had redirected the river, and to connect it to the lost Sarasvati: "[it] was formerly the Sarasvati; that name is still known amongst the people, and the famous fortress of Sarsuti or Sarasvati was built upon its banks, nearly 100 miles below the present junction with the Ghaggar." It also is alleged that the Nara is still called the Sarasvati by rural Sindhis and its dried up delta in Kutch is still regarded as that of Sarasvati by the locals.
- Between 2500 BCE and 1900 BCE,Some techtonic disturbances caused tilt in topography of Northwest India resulting in the migration of rivers. The Sutlej moved westward and became a tributary of the Indus River while the Yamuna moved eastward and became a tributary of the Ganges. The water loss due to these movements caused the river to dry up in the Thar Desert, without reaching the sea. Later Vedic texts record the river as disappearing at Vinasana (literally, "the disappearing") or Upamajjana, and in post-Vedic texts as joining both the Yamuna and Ganges as an invisible river at Prayaga (Allahabad). Some claim that the sanctity of the modern Ganges is directly related to its assumption of the holy, life-giving waters of the ancient Saraswati.
- The identification is also justified by post-Vedic literature like Mahabharata.According to Adi Parvan of the Mahabharata(1.90.25-26),it is mentioned that "Many kings performed yajña (sacrifice) in Fire altars at the bank of Sarasvati river, which is connected with the alleged Harappan fire altars at Kalibangan, a town located on the left or southern banks of the Ghaggar River. They are even assumed by some to be Vedic and that the structures may perhaps have been used for ritual purposes.
- The Mahabharata says that the Sarasvati dried up in a desert (at a place named Vinasana or Adarsana). According to the Mahabharata, the river dried up in order that the Nishadas and Abhiras might not see her. The Mahabharata also states that Vasishtha committed suicide by throwing himself into the Sutlej and that the Sutlej then broke up in a 100 channels (Yash Pal in S.P. Gupta 1995: 175). This myth seems to be related with the changing of the course of the Sutlej river. According to the Mahabharata (3.81.115), Kurukshetra is south of the Sarasvati and north of the Drishadvati. In the Sabha Parvan of the Mahabharata (2.29.8) it is mentioned that "Nakula conquered the Shudra and Abhira who lived at the bank of the Sarasvati near the Sindhu (Indus) river.
Devnagri is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal. It is written from left to right, does not have distinct letter cases, and is recognizable by a horizontal line that runs along the top of full letters. Devanāgarī is the main script used to write Standard Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali. Since the 19th century, it has been the most commonly used script for Sanskrit. Devanāgarī is also employed for Bhojpuri, Gujari, Pahari, (Garhwali and Kumaoni), Konkani, Magahi, Maithili, Marwari, Bhili, Newari, Santhali, Tharu, and sometimes Sindhi, Dogri, Sherpa and by Kashmiri-speaking Hindus. It was formerly used to write Gujarati.
Gurmukhi is the most common script used for writing the Punjabi language. An abugida derived from the Laṇḍā script and ultimately descended from Brahmi, Gurmukhi was standardized by the second Sikh guru, Guru Angad Dev Ji, in the 16th century. The whole of the Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji's 1430 pages are written in this script. The name Gurmukhi is derived from the Old Punjabi term "guramukhī", meaning "from the mouth of the Guru". Gurmukhi is primarily used in the Punjab state of India where it is the sole official script for all official and judicial purpose. The script is also widely used in the Indian states of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and the national capital of Delhi, with Punjabi being one of the official language in these states.
Shahmukhi is a Punjabi variant of the Perso-Arabic script. Nastaʿlīq is a portmanteau word of naskh of Arabic and ta'aliq, (an ancient style of the Persian alphabet used in Iran). Both of the scripts of Iranian and Arabic roots were amalgamated and invented by Ameer Ali Tabrezi in Tabrez to be used as the standard characters to write the Persian language.
The Shahmukhi script was first used by the Sufi poets of the Punjab; it became an official writing style for the Muslim populace of the Pakistani province of Punjab following the Partition of India, while the largely Sikh province of Punjab, India adopted the Gurmukhi script is to record the Punjabi language. The text of Nasta'aliq is written in the right to left direction and from right page to left page; but Gurmukhi is written from left to right.
The Ottu barrage (sometimes spelled as the Otu barrage and also known as Ottu Head, is a masonry weir on the Ghaggar-Hakra river in Haryana state of India that creates a large water reservoir out of the formerly-small Dhanur lake, located near the village of Ottu, which is about 8 miles from Sirsa in Haryana. It is a feeder for the two Ghaggar canals (the Northern Ghaggar canal and the Southern Ghaggar canal) that carry irrigation water to northern Rajasthan state.
The Sarasvati River is one of the chief Rigvedic rivers mentioned in ancient Hindu texts. The Nadistuti hymn in the Rigveda (10.75) mentions the Sarasvati between the Yamuna in the east and the Sutlej in the west, and later Vedic texts like Tandya and Jaiminiya Brahmanas as well as the Mahabharata mention that the Sarasvati dried up in a desert. The goddess Sarasvati was originally a personification of this river, but later developed an independent identity and gained meaning.
The identification of the Vedic Sarasvati River with the Ghaggar-Hakra River was accepted by Christian Lassen, Max Müller, Marc Aurel Stein, C.F. Oldham and Jane Macintosh, while some Vedic scholars (eg. Kochhar 1999) believe the Helmand River of southern Afghanistan corresponds to the Sarasvati River.
The Rigveda is an ancient Indian sacred collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns. It is counted among the four canonical sacred texts (śruti) of Hinduism known as the Vedas. Some of its verses are still recited as Hindu prayers, at religious functions and other occasions, putting these among the world's oldest religious texts in continued use. The Rigveda contains several mythological and poetical accounts of the origin of the world, hymns praising the gods, and ancient prayers for life, prosperity, etc.
It is one of the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language. Philological and linguistic evidence indicate that the Rigveda was composed in the north-western region of the Indian subcontinent, roughly between 1700–1100 BC (the early Vedic period).
Rann of Kutch is a salt marsh located in western tip of Gujarat (primarily the Kutch district), India. It is divided into twp main parts; Great Rann of Kutch and Little Rann of Kutch. The Rann of Kutch is covered in 5,000 square feet (0.00 sq mi). The climatic and geo-morphological expansion of the grassland and desserts of the Rann of Kutch has formed Gujarat.
The Yamuna is the largest tributary river of the Ganges (Ganga) in northern India.
Mohenjo-daro, lit. Mound of the Dead, Sindhi: موئن جو دڙو), is an archeological site situated in the province of Sindh, Pakistan. Built around 2600 BC, it was one of the largest settlements of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization, and one of the world's earliest major urban settlements, existing at the same time as the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Crete. Mohenjo-daro was abandoned in the 19th century BC, and was not rediscovered until 1922. Significant excavation has since been conducted at the site of the city, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980.
The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was a Bronze Age civilization (3300–1300 BCE; mature period 2600–1900 BCE) located in the western region of South Asia, and spread over what are now Pakistan, northwest India, and eastern Afghanistan. Flourishing in the Indus River basin, the civilization extended east into the Ghaggar-Hakra River valley and the upper reaches Ganges-Yamuna Doab; it extended west to the Makran coast of Balochistan and north to northeastern Afghanistan. The civilization was spread over some 1,260,000 km², making it the largest ancient civilization.
The Indus Valley is one of the world's earliest urban civilizations, along with its contemporaries, Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. At its peak, the Indus Civilization may have had a population of well over five million. Inhabitants of the ancient Indus river valley developed new techniques in metallurgy and handicraft (carneol products, seal carving) and produced copper, bronze, lead, and tin. The civilization is noted for its cities built of brick, roadside drainage system, and multistoried houses.
The Indus Valley Civilization is also known as the Harappan Civilization, as the first of its cities to be unearthed was located at Harappa, excavated in the 1920s in what was at the time the Punjab province of British India (now in Pakistan). Excavation of Harappan sites has been ongoing since 1920, with important breakthroughs occurring as recently as 1999. There were earlier and later cultures, often called Early Harappan and Late Harappan, in the same area of the Harappan Civilization. The Harappan civilisation is sometimes called the Mature Harappan culture to distinguish it from these cultures. To date, over 1,052 cities and settlements have been found, mainly in the general region of the Indus river and its tributaries. Among the settlements were the major urban centres of Harappa, Mohenjo-daro (UNESCO World Heritage Site), Ganweriwala, Dholavira, and Rakhigarhi.
Bahawalpur located in Punjab, is the twelfth largest city in Pakistan. The city was once the capital of the former princely state of Bahawalpur. The city was home to various Nawabs (rulers) and counted as part of the Rajputana states (now Rajasthan, India). The city is known for its famous palaces such as the Noor Mahal, Sadiq Ghar Palace, and Darbar Mahal, as well as the ancient fort of Derawar in the Cholistan Desert bordering India. The city is located near the historical and ancient cities of Uch and Harappa, which were once a stronghold of the Delhi Sultanate and Indus Valley Civilisation. The city is home to one of the few natural safari parks in Pakistan, Lal Suhanra National Park.
Derawar Fort is a large square fortress in Pakistan near Bahawalpur. The forty bastions of Derawar are visible for many miles in Cholistan Desert. The walls have a circumference of 1500 metres and stand up to thirty metres high.
The first fort on the site was built by Hindu Rajput, Rai Jajja Bhati of Jaisalmer. It remained in the hands of the royal family of Jaisalmer until captured and completely rebuilt by the nawabs of Bahawalpur in 1733. In 1747, the fort slipped from the hands of the Abbasis owing to Bahawal Khan's preoccupations at Shikarpur. Nawab Mubarak Khan took the stronghold back in 1804.
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A liver biopsy may be ordered to help a doctor decide whether to start treatment for chronic HBV infections and/or to confirm a diagnosis of primary liver cancer. It is generally considered a minor surgical procedure and is done in the hospital as an "outpatient procedure"(it does not usually require admission). Although the procedure itself is relatively short, there is a longer recovery period during which patients will be asked to lie on their right side for several hours to prevent any bleeding. A patient should expect to be in the hospital for approximately 6 to 8 hours, and must arrange for someone to drive them home from the hospital.
Liver Biopsy Methods
Percutaneous Needle Biopsy
Most patients undergo this type of liver biopsy. This procedure involves numbing an area on the right ribcage, making a tiny incision, and then inserting a thin needle between the ribs to obtain a small tissue sample from the liver (a ½-inch sample is removed).
This procedure is ordered when tissue samples from specific parts of the liver are required. A special tube called a "laparoscope" is inserted through a small incision in the abdomen. The laparoscope sends images of the liver to a monitor that a doctor watches to guide him or her in obtaining tissue samples from one or more parts of the liver.
This procedure is used when patients have blood-clotting problems or fluid in the abdomen. It involves placing a biopsy needle inside a tube called a catheter, which is inserted into a vein in the neck and then guided into the liver to obtain a tissue sample.
Additional Information About Liver Biopsy
Visit Liver Cancer Connect, the Hepatitis B Foundation's dedicated patient-focused liver cancer website.
About A Liver Biopsy by the NIDDK of the National Institutes of Health
Page Last modified March 6, 2014
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Riparian Easements As A Tool For Watershed Protection
Riparian areas, or those areas adjacent to waterways, serve many ecological functions when left in their natural wooded state. These functions include in-stream and upland wildlife habitat, flood control, streambank erosion protection, and water quality protection. Riparian forests provide the last line of defense for water quality protection by filtering runoff and groundwater before it enters streams. Therefore, riparian forest protection can be a useful tool for meeting goals of watershed protection plans.
The Thomas Jefferson Soil and Water Conservation District has been protecting soil and water resources in Albemarle, Fluvanna, Louisa and Nelson counties for over 60 years. Recently, increased funding has been made available to the TJSWCD to support tree-planting for the creation of riparian forests. Now, the TJSWCD is trying to ensure that existing, and newly created, riparian forest buffer areas are protected well into the future.
One way to do that is through the dedication of conservation easements. Conservation easements are legal agreements between a landowner and a public body or conservation group, in which the parties agree to protect certain natural resource values of the land. Riparian easements are a particular type of conservation easement that applies only to streamside (riparian) areas, and are dedicated for the purpose of protecting streamside habitats, floodplains and/or water quality.
Conservation easements are recorded in the local courthouse, and run with the land as the land is passed to heirs or sold. Each easement is tailored to reflect the conservation values of the property, the individual goals of the landowner, and the goals of the holder of the easement. It is a legal agreement in which the landowner retains ownership and control, but conveys certain specified rights, which are negotiable, to the holder of the easement. The public does not gain access to the property. The easement holder works with the landowner to develop a management plan to ensure the protection of the riparian zone. Usually this includes maintaining woody vegetation and limiting livestock access and buildings. Easements often provide for selective cutting of timber in accordance with an approved management plan.
Several conservation organizations, government agencies, and land trusts will hold open space easements in this area. Each easement holder has their own criteria which they use to select the types of easements they will hold. Some examples of criteria include acreage limitations, proximity to other conservation easements, historical value, or natural resource value. Currently, only the TJSWCD will hold riparian easements in this area.
Donating an easement in perpetuity is a way to voluntarily exercise private property rights, ensuring that the natural resource values, which are important to the owner, will be protected indefinitely, no matter who owns the land in the future.
Please contact the TJSWCD at 804-975-0224 for more information on open-space or riparian easements. (Due to staffing limitations, the TJSWCD must be selective in the easements they hold at this time. As interest in the program increases, our hope is that staff resources will increase accordingly.)
Alyson Sappington, District Manager
Thomas Jefferson Soil and Water Conservation District
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In 1976, when I commenced my teaching career then as an elementary school teacher, we were instructed to emphasize metrics since the system would be fully adopted in 1978.
Then 1978 came and left, and we were still teaching the Old English measurements while still trying to interject some metrics. It turns out Big Business decided it did not want to go along with the rest of the world – it would be “too costly” for it and the small businesses to convert. So we didn’t.
It’s 2014 and mathematics teachers today are STILL trying to instruct the students about the two measurement systems, and usually neither topic receives fair coverage. As a result, 14 year olds really do not appreciate ounces and pounds or meters and kilometers. It’s a tragedy we created ourselves.
A few years later I taught from some of the “New Math” books, and as Elizabeth Green's New York Times article proposes, I do not recall much inservice instruction regarding approaches and techniques in delivering the material. It was a hard sell at best, students and parents mired in confusion, and eventually “New Math” went the way of “whole word” reading instruction.
These days I substitute from time to time, one day a 4th grade, the next time 11th, and often I am a mathematics instructor.
What do I see? For the most part, I see students who do not enjoy or appreciate mathematics, especially the high school students. Those in high school want to (and are often allowed to) use calculators for every activity. Many do not even really know their times tables!
If they do not even have that basic skill in their quiver, I understand why mathematics is a challenge and a hassle for them.
There are those who have a natural love of the subject and excel. It is obvious which ones are mathematically inclined, and they will succeed no matter the hurtle.
But too many other students just do not see the relevance of mathematics to their lives, and fail to apply themselves and acquire the skills required.
Basic skills used to be called “arithmetic”. We learned how to multiply and divide, and how to measure an object in weight, size, and volume. We learned our times tables. Period.
I believe the issue today is more related to discipline than instruction, whether it is called “arithmetic”, “mathematics”, or “New Math”.
All students MUST MASTER basic arithmetic skills. All must know their times tables by the end of 4th grade. It is simple memorization, just as they memorize the lyrics to songs they hear. By “knowing” I mean able to recite 2s – 10s tables as quickly as they know their own names. We are a base 10 system, so learning 11s and 12s seems superfluous (extra credit).
With a strong foundation students can launch into true mathematics. They can learn to appreciate being able to figure out how much wallpaper to buy for a room, how much fencing for a yard, how much paint will be required for a job, managing a household budget, and the best price when buying items at the grocery store. What is the best deal on a new car loan? What is this thing I hear about all the time called “The Stock Market” and how might I invest?
Mathematics will be relevant to their lives. They will want to learn.
Higher mathematics skills such as algebra, trigonometry, calculus, math analysis, statistics…..maybe.
Or maybe these are for the students who are mathematically inclined to decipher while the others investigate and research true life skills such as relationships instruction (how to be and choose good friends, what “puppy love” is, how to cope with a broken heart, what to look for in a life partner), nutrition instruction (what food additives are and what they can do to you and how to avoid them, essential foods, GMOs), how to take care of your bicycle or car (and understanding gear ratios and how they affect biking and driving)….on and on.
The “New Math” approach found ways to make the material seem relevant and interesting.
If schools apply the approach of making arithmetic/mathematics instruction relevant and interesting, no matter whether in the form of “New Math” or traditional, attitudes and aptitudes will change.
Everyone seems to enjoy touting how poorly U.S. students perform on mathematics tests. But look at our country’s productivity and business prowess. Yes, we may not score as high overall on tests around the world. But somehow, as has always been the case, we are managing just fine.
But let’s do make arithmetic/mathematics relevant to our children’s lives – and give them the gift of the joy of learning and living.
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en
| 0.966447 | 1,018 | 2.734375 | 3 |
FAO’s first forecast for global wheat production in 2016 points to a small decrease, with
lower outputs expected in Europe and the United States of America.
COUNTRIES IN NEED OF EXTERNAL ASSISTANCE: FAO estimates that, globally,
34 countries, including 27 in Africa, are in need of external assistance for food. Civil conflicts
continued to severely affect the food security of a number of countries, while adverse
weather, in some cases linked to El Niño, curbed production in others, constraining food
access and pushing consumer prices up.
AFRICA: Adverse weather reduced 2015 cereal output, resulting in a significant increase in
the number of food insecure people in several countries, with conflicts further affecting food
security and the agriculture sector in parts. Planting of the 2016 crops has begun in Central,
East and West Africa, while in Southern Africa, with the harvest expected to commence
from April, El Niño-associated drought conditions have significantly dampened production
prospects, with severe negative implications for food security in the subregion. In North
Africa, 2016 production prospects are mixed, with ongoing drought in Morocco and Algeria
lowering production expectations.
ASIA: The production outlook for the 2016 winter crops is generally favourable, with early
forecasts indicating large wheat crops in most countries. In the Near East, however, persistent
conflicts in Iraq, the Syrian Arab Republic and Yemen have continued to erode the capacity
of the agriculture sector, affecting 2016 production prospects and further worsening the
humanitarian crisis. The 2015 regional cereal output is estimated above the previous year’s
level, mainly on account of increased harvests in China and Turkey that more than offset
lower outputs in several countries of the Far East, in particular India.
LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN: In Early 2016 cereal production prospects are
mostly favourable, with harvests expected to remain at high levels, mainly as a result of large
outputs anticipated in Mexico and South America. In Central America and the Caribbean,
while Mexico is forecast to register an increase in production, elsewhere the continuation
of El Niño-linked dry conditions may keep production depressed in 2016. In South America,
cereal production in 2016 is forecast to decline slightly from the previous year’s record level,
mostly reflecting a contraction in plantings, but is expected to remain well above average.
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|
en
| 0.915016 | 502 | 2.6875 | 3 |
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