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During the final weeks of gestation, infants normally begin a transition from the production of fetal to adult hemoglobin. Delayed or faulty transition to the production of adult hemoglobin might play a role in the etiology of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
To examine the association between adult hemoglobin levels measured at birth and the subsequent risk of SIDS.
Design and Setting
Cohort study of all infants born in California between March 1, 1990, and December 31, 1997, who were enrolled in the state's Newborn Screening Program and followed up during the first year of life to identify deaths attributed to SIDS.
Population-based sample of 3.2 million infants.
Main Outcome Measure
Risk of death attributed to SIDS.
The study included 2425 infants whose deaths were attributed to SIDS. There was an inverse relationship between adult hemoglobin level, expressed as a percentage of total hemoglobin, and the subsequent incidence of SIDS. After adjustment for infant sex, race/ethnicity, length of gestation, maternal age, maternal education, maternal smoking, intrauterine growth restriction, and preeclampsia/eclampsia, the relative risks of SIDS for infants in the lower 4 quintiles of adult hemoglobin level were, in descending order, 1.12 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.96-1.32), 1.38 (95% CI, 1.19-1.59), 1.55 (95% CI, 1.34-1.80), and 2.15 (95% CI, 1.87-2.47) compared with infants in the highest quintile.
These findings suggest that infants with low levels of adult hemoglobin in the first hours after birth are at elevated risk of SIDS. Delayed maturation in production of adult hemoglobin may play a role in the etiology of some SIDS cases.
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Pronunciation: (hip"u-pot'u-mus), [key]
—pl. -mus•es, -miPronunciation: (-mī"). [key]
a large herbivorous mammal, Hippopotamus amphibius, having a thick hairless body, short legs, and a large head and muzzle, found in and near the rivers, lakes, etc., of Africa, and able to remain under water for a considerable time.
Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Copyright © 1997, by Random House, Inc., on Infoplease.
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Smoking is bad for the brain
16:44 10 December 2004
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition
Psychotic symptoms more likely with cannabis
01 December 2004
Epilepsy drug may harm fetal development
14 October 2004
Passive smoking danger was underestimated
30 June 2004
Search New Scientist
Mental health department, University of Aberdeen
Scottish Mental Survey, Scottish Council for Research in Education
Given the wealth of evidence that smoking damages your health, you would have to be stupid not to kick the habit. Now a study suggests this could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because smoking reduces your IQ.
Lawrence Whalley at the University of Aberdeen and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, both in the UK, looked at how the cognitive ability of 465 individuals, approximately half of whom were smokers, changed over their lifetime and whether this related to their smoking habits.
They had all been tested in 1947 at age 11 as part of the Scottish Mental Survey, which made no distinction between smoking habits. They were tested a second time between 2000 and 2002, when they were 64 years old.
Smokers performed significantly worse in five different cognitive tests than did both former smokers and those who had never smoked. When social and health factors such as education, occupation and alcohol consumption were taken into account, smoking still appeared to contribute to a drop in cognitive function of just under 1%.
A link between impaired lung function and cognitive ageing has long been suspected, though the mechanism is unclear. One possibility is that smoking subjects the vital organs, including the brain, to oxidative stress, Whalley says. “Ageing neurons are very sensitive to oxidative damage.”
Journal reference: Addictive Behaviors (vol 30, p 77
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Ten leading US climate scientists spoke on Tuesday of the need for more urgent action to tackle global warming.
Modelling is used to work out possible future scenarios
They warned that climate models might have grossly underestimated the rises in temperature that will soon occur.
The team called for a major shift to cleaner fuel technologies to constrain the rapid growth in greenhouse gases.
"We're in the middle of a large, uncontrolled experiment on the only planet we have," said Don Kennedy, the editor-in-chief of Science magazine.
"Global warming has taken place and at our present rate of doing business, there is going to be a lot more of it and it will have serious consequences," added the co-organiser of the open gathering of researchers in Washington DC.
Room for doubt?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, has reported a 0.6C rise in the Earth's mean global surface temperature during the 20th Century - with a much greater rise expected in the coming decades.
The researchers, who met at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), urged US policymakers and the public not to get hung up on the uncertainties that still surrounded climate science - and not to use gaps in knowledge as an excuse for inaction.
"A combination of the models and the data, including the deep-past climate records, are really pretty convincing that if you increase the carbon dioxide (CO2) levels from today's values of 370 parts per million to a 1,000 ppm - which we are going to do within the next 150 years without a doubt - it is going to be a very different world," said David Battisti, from the University of Washington in Seattle.
"There are good reasons to believe the projections from the models that we have now are actually underestimating the changes."
Michael Oppenheimer, from Princeton University, added: "The overall message is that the science has been pointing in the same direction for a long time now; and it's time for politicians to sit up, take notice and actually start to act on the problem, as political leaders are doing in other parts of the world."
President George Bush has pulled away from the global climate initiative, known as the Kyoto Protocol, designed to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2.
The White House believes the treaty would gravely damage the US economy.
The administration would prefer to see gas emissions cut not by what it calls the "command and control" of Kyoto, but by voluntary action and development of new energy technologies such as hydrogen-powered fuel cells.
"Because of the time and resources needed to shift to energies and technologies so that you can avoid 1,000 parts per million, you need to start doing things now," Michael Oppenheimer said.
Daniel Schrag, of Harvard University, added that taking precautionary measures now could be viewed as a sort of insurance, "because we have a risk of catastrophe in the future and we have to make an investment in our energy technologies.
"The catastrophe may never happen but that's not why you buy insurance; you buy insurance against the possibility that it might happen."
The other researchers at the AAAS meeting were Joyce Penner, from the University of Michigan;
Thomas Crowley, of Duke University; Richard Alley, from Pennsylvania State University; Jerry Meehl, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research; Lonnie Thompson, from Ohio State University; and Chris Field, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
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For problem 1 multiply through by a factor of . This gets Then apply the quadratic formula (a=18, b=43, c=-5)to obtain your values for x. The second problem is similar yet you multiply through by a factor of , expand and then simplify.
I have gone back to school after 30 yrs and need a little help on a couple of problems. I know they are simple but for some reason I am have problems with these two. I can find the answers in the back of the text book but that does me no good. If someone could show me how to solve the it woould be greatly apprieciated. thanx. Here they are. I dont know how to show something is squared so I will just put the exp. after it.
1) 5/x2-43/x=18 ( the first x is squared)
2) 2=3/2x-1+-1/(2x-1)2 ( the 2x-1 is squared)
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MIAMI (CBSMiami.com) – Drivers on I-95 in Broward County Friday morning might have thought they were in a science fiction movie.
That’s because a giant Megalodon shark was being driven down the road to the Museum of Discovery and Science in Fort Lauderdale.
Megalodon means “giant tooth” and this shark packed quite a punch. It had seven inch long teeth and the most powerful bite of any creature that ever lived, roughly 10-18 tons. So what did the Megalodon chow down on? It turned out the giant shark snacked on prehistoric whales.
You can see an ancestor of the Megalodon if you take a swim in the outer Great Barrier Reef or if you pop in a copy of Jaws. The Great White Shark is the closest living relative to the Megalodon.
The shark will be installed in the Prehistoric Florida exhibit in the new EcoDiscovery Center set to open November 11.
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(Last Updated on : 08/07/2010)
Indian legends are a large body of folklore, traditional stories and fables which are very popular among people. Noteworthy collections of Indian traditional stories include the Panchatantra, a collection of traditional narratives made by Vishnu Sharma in the second century BC. The Hitopadesha of Narayana is a collection of anthropomorphic fabliaux, animal fables, in Sanskrit, compiled in the ninth century. The Jataka
tales also forms an important part of the Indian legends. The folktales are in fact a symbolic way of presenting the diverse means by which human beings deal with the world in which they live. These short stories concern people, either royalty or common folk or animals who speak and act like people.
The Jataka tales were written in 300 B.C, for mankind to gain knowledge and ethics. The luminous fables of 'Jataka' are intended to convey values of self-sacrifice, morality, honesty and other informative values to people. Jataka stories symbolise previous incarnations of Lord Buddha
, at times like an animal, a bird and sometimes like a human being, the future Siddhartha Gautama. The setting of the stories is made in or near Benaras (Varanasi
), which is a holy city in north central India. Each story in the Jataka tales comes with a moral, for example, the story of the golden swan instructs that greed brings nothing and people should be content with what they have. The Talkative tortoise is another interesting story from the Jataka tales which preaches against the pitfalls of talking too much. The tale of the Penny Wise monkey explains the importance to value things that one have. Other stories from the album of Jataka Tales are Cunning Wolf, Wind and Moon and Power of a Rumour.
The Hitopadesha is a noteworthy compilation of short stories. It was composed by Narayana Pandit. In Indian literature Hitopadesha is regarded more or less analogous to the Panchatantra. The word 'Hitopadesha' means 'Hita' (welfare) and 'Upadesha' (advice). As the term suggests, the Hitopadesha is a compilation of tales that advocate and advice for the welfare and benefit of everyone. Conveying morals and information, Hitopadesha is one among the most extensively read Sanskrit language
book in India. The tales from Hitopadesha comes with a moral for instance the story of the Elephant and the Jackal teaches that every despot has to meet his doom. The story of the Donkey and the Dog instructs one to mind his own business. The interesting story of Old Tiger and Traveller preaches against the dangers of greed and that greed never goes unpunished. The story of the Rabbits and the Elephants depicts the triumph of wit over might. Thus Hitopadesha can be deemed as a moral guide for the readers.
The Panchatantra is a legendary anthology of Indian short stories. It was composed in the 2nd century B.C, and is believed to be written by Vishnu Sharma along with many other scholars. The idea behind the work was to instill moral values among the readers. The grand assortment has extraordinary tales that are liked and loved by people of every age group. The Panchatantra is the best guide to implant moral values in children since its each tale has a moral lesson in its end. The etymology of the word 'Panchatantra' is an amalgamation of two words, 'Pancha' (five) and 'Tantra' (principle). So, the five principles or practices demonstrated by Panchatantra are 'Mitra Bhedha' (Loss of Friends), 'Mitra Laabha' (Gaining Friends), 'Suhrudbheda' (Causing conflict between Friends), 'Vigraha' (Separation) and 'Sandhi' (Union). The stories of Panchatantra are quite interesting. The story of the Blue Jackal depicts that the one who abandons one's own folk would perish. Monkey and the Crocodile, Hunter and Doves, Heron and the Crab and the Foolish Lion Clever Rabbits are some of the popular stories from the album of Panchatantra.
Numerous written compilations of Indian folk tales have been in existence for more than a thousand years. Apart from the Jataka tales, Hitopadesha and Panchatantra there are also several stories which are very popular in India. Stories of Tenali Raman and Birbal are quite fascinating. Kathasaritsagara
is another famous 11th century collection of Indian legends, fairy tales and folk tales.
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New Guidelines for Managing Newly Diagnosed Type 2 Diabetes in Children and Adolescents
New guidelines provide a framework for clinicians managing type 2 diabetes in youth.
New guidelines developed by the American Academy of Pediatrics with support from the American Diabetes Association, the Pediatric Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Association) provide a framework for clinicians managing type 2 diabetes in youth. The guidelines are geared to general pediatricians, family physicians, pediatric endocrinologists, and other health care providers who deal with children.
Key recommendations include the following:
• Start children/teens on insulin if it is unclear whether they have type 1 or type 2 diabetes. Continue insulin until the diabetes type can be definitively determined.
• Once a child or teen has been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, prescribe metformin and lifestyle changes, including nutrition and physical activity.
• Monitor A1C levels every three months. If treatment goals are not being met, the physician should make appropriate changes to the treatment regimen.
• Home monitoring of blood glucose is appropriate for those using insulin, anyone changing their treatment regimen, those who aren't meeting their treatment goals, and during times of illness.
• Physicians should incorporate the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics' Pediatric Weight Management Evidence-Based Nutrition Practice Guideline in nutrition counseling of children with type 2 diabetes.
• Children with type 2 diabetes should be encouraged to exercise at least 60 minutes a day and to limit their non-academic "screen time" (video games, television) to less than two hours a day.
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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIORBUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT
|Buffalo Field Office|
The Powder River Basin is also the site of several Euro-American and American Indian battles of the mid and late 19th century including Red Cloud's Wars and the Fetterman Battle of 1866. Cantonment Reno was established as a military fort in 1876 as the Bozeman Trail was used as part of the U.S. military campaign, for entry into the Powder River Basin. The Fort was occupied until 1878, when it was relocated to the present-day Fort McKinney in Buffalo, Wyoming. After the military campaign, the trail was used for emigrant settlement in the Powder River Basin in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
American Indian groups with ties to the region included the Arikara, Crow, Lakota/Dakota, Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche, Blackfeet, Cheyenne and Shoshone. Cultural sites on public lands in the Powder River Basin include Outlaw Cave and portions of the Bozeman Trail and Cantonment Reno.
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| 0.961537 | 235 | 3.609375 | 4 |
Details about The Specification of Human Actions in St Thomas Aquinas:
Thomas Aquinas believed that human actions have species, such as theft or almsgiving. A problem arises, however, concerning his teaching on how such moral kinds are determined. Aquinas uses five different terms - end, object, matter, circumstance, and motive - to identify what gives species to human actions. Although similarities in meaning can be discerned between certain of these terms, apparent differences between others make it difficult to grasp how all five could refer to what specifies human actions. Joseph Pilsner examines and compares Aquinas's understanding of these five terms to see if a consistent account of his teaching on specification can be proposed.
Back to top
Rent The Specification of Human Actions in St Thomas Aquinas 1st edition today, or search our site for other textbooks by Joseph Pilsner. Every textbook comes with a 21-day "Any Reason" guarantee. Published by Oxford University Press.
Need help ASAP? We have you covered with 24/7 instant online tutoring. Connect with one of our Philosophy tutors now.
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Asteroid impact craters are among the most interesting geological structures on any planet. Many other planets and moons in our solar system, including our own moon, are pock-marked with loads of craters. But because Earth has a protective atmosphere and is geologically active — with plate tectonics and volcanic eruptions, mostly relatively young oceanic crust, and harsh weathering from wind and water — impact structures don’t last long and can be tough to come by.
But on a few old pieces of continent, especially in arid deserts, the marks of asteroids have been preserved. One well-known example is our own Barringer crater, also known as Meteor Crater, in Arizona. The images here show some of the biggest, oldest and most interesting impact craters on the planet.
Aorounga crater, pictured above and below, is one of the best preserved impact craters on Earth, thanks in part to its location in the Sahara Desert in Chad. The 10 mile-wide crater is probably around 350 million years old. The stripes are alternating rock ridges and sand layers, known as yardangs, caused by persistent unidirectional wind. The image above was taken by astronauts in the International Space Station in July. The radar image below, taken from the space shuttle in 1994, reveals that Aorounga may be one of two or three craters.
The Shoemaker crater in Western Australia, formerly known as the Teague crater, was renamed in honor of the planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker for whom the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 is also named. The age of the crater unclear, but it could be 1.7 billion years old, which makes it the oldest known impact in Australia. The brightly colored splotches are seasonal salt-water lakes. This image was taken by the Landsat 7 satellite.
Image: NASA/USGS, 2000.
The Manicouagan Crater in northern Canada is one of the largest impact craters known on Earth. The impact occurred around 210 million years ago at the end of the Triassic period and may have caused a mass extinction that killed around 60 percent of all species. Though the crater has mostly eroded, Lake Manicouagan outlines what is left of the 43-mile wide impact structure. The asteroid that created the crater is thought to have been about three miles wide. Today the lake is a reservoir and popular salmon fishing location.
Images: 1) NASA, STS 9 Crew, 1983. 2) NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL, MISR Team, 2001.
This crazy looking structure in Western Australia is called the Spider crater, for obvious reasons. Geologists determined it was an impact crater when they found shatter cones, telltale cone-shaped, grooved rocks found only around impacts. The crazy looking legs surrounding the impact are mostly due to erosion of different rock layers. The harder sandstone ridges withstood the weathering of wind and water better than the softer intervening layers. The crater is somewhere between 600 million and 900 million years old and the raised area at its center is around 1,600 feet wide.
The image above is a false-color image taken by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer on NASA’s Terra. The true-color image below was captured by Taiwan’s Formost-2 satellite
Images: 1) NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team, 2008. 2) Cheng-Chien Liu, National Cheng-Kung University and Dr. An-Ming Wu, National Space Organization, Taiwan, 2008
The Gosses Bluff crater in Australia’s Northern Territory sits between two mountain ranges. The raised circular feature in the center of the structure is around 2.8 miles across, but the original crater rim was probably at the edge of the surrounding grayish area. The crater was formed caused by an asteroid impact around 140 million years ago.
Clearwater Lakes in Quebec, Canada were formed by a pair of asteroid impact craters. The impacts probably occurred simultaneously around 290 million years ago. The larger crater measures 22 miles across.
The Roter Kamm crater in Namibia is hard to see in visible light, but shows up more clearly with imaging radar. The crater’s 1.5 mile-wide rim stands out as a bright ring in the lower left of the image, which was taken by a radar instrument on board the space shuttle. Irregular surfaces show up brightly and smooth areas are dark. The white splotch at the bottom of the photo is a rocky hill, the darkest areas are wind-blown sand dunes, the blue around the crater’s rim may be material that was ejected during the impact, the red is limestone outcrop and the green areas are mostly vegetation. The impact occurred around 5 million years ago.
Image: NASA/JPL, 1994.
The Lonar crater in Maharashta, India is around 6,000 feet wide and 500 feet deep and contains a saltwater lake. Scientists determined the structure was caused by an asteroid through clues such as the presence of maskelynite, a glass that is only formed by extremely high-velocity impacts. The impact occurred around 50,000 years ago. This image was captured by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer on NASA’s Terra satellite. It is a simulated true-color image
Image: NASA, 2004
The Vredefort Dome in South Africa is possibly the oldest and largest clearly visible asteroid impact on Earth. The 155-mile crater is approximately 60 miles southwest of Johannesburg and was formed around 2 billion years ago.
We here at Wired Science love a really good, cheesy artist’s rendering of a space object or phenomenon, so we couldn’t resist this beauty. This is one man’s idea of what a 300-mile wide asteroid would look impacting Earth. This event probably would have killed everything on the planet. Fortunately, NASA says nothing this big is headed our way anytime soon.
Image: NASA/Don DavisGo Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.
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World Bulletin / News Desk
The outbreak of West Nile disease in the United States moved a step closer on Wednesday to becoming the second worst on record with federal health authorities reporting 280 cases of the virus-caused illness over the past week.
There have now been 4,249 cases of West Nile recorded this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 20 cases fewer than in 2006, the second-largest outbreak on record.
The number of deaths rose by five to 168 since last week, the CDC said.
The worst year on record for West Nile disease was 2003, when 9,862 cases were reported, the CDC said.
The pace of new cases of the disease - which is transmitted from infected birds to humans by mosquitoes -- has slowed since late summer, authorities said.
More than 70 percent of the cases have been reported in eight states: Texas, Mississippi, Michigan, South Dakota, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Illinois and California. Texas has been the hardest hit, recording close to 40 percent of the cases in the country, according to the CDC.
The Dallas-Fort Worth area has been the epicenter of this year's outbreak, with 33 deaths, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.
The Dallas Morning News reported Wednesday that health officials in Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, may have vastly underreported cases of the serious neuroinvasive form of West Nile.
The report said the number of cases detected through Tarrant County blood bank screenings - information that helps public officials determine the size of an outbreak - differs significantly from what officials there have reported.
But state health officials said it was unlikely cases were overlooked.
The severe neuroinvasive form of the disease almost always requires hospitalization and can lead to meningitis, encephalitis and death, according to the CDC.
"Neuroinvasive disease is not subtle," said Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the Texas health department. "We're confident physicians knew about the outbreak and were on the lookout for disease."
Nationwide, half of cases reported to the CDC have been of the neuroinvasive form. The other half are West Nile Fever, a milder form which causes flu-like symptoms and is not deadly.
Outbreaks tend to be unpredictable and are typically triggered by a combination of hot weather and intermittent rainfall as well as ecological factors such as the size of the bird and mosquito populations.
Around 6.5 million deaths globally are attributed each year to poor air quality inside and outside, making it the world's fourth-largest threat to human health, behind high blood pressure, dietary risks and smoking
New World Drug Report research identifies heroin as deadliest drug
Zika has caused alarm throughout the Americas since cases of the birth defect microcephaly were reported in Brazil, the country hardest hit by the outbreak
Philadelphia has become the first big city in the US to place a tax on soda to tackle the obesity crisis
Average global temperatures startlingly higher than normal between March-May
Government study provides strongest evidence of cell phone health effects
The reason for the high-level threat in the area is the presence there of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which carry the Zika virus that health authorities say causes birth defects in newborns
Three-day African Utility Week conference begins in South African city of Cape Town
More than two thousand activists came together to close an opencast coal mine in Germany.
New federal rules unveiled on Thursday will tackle the release of the greenhouse gas methane from oil wells and equipment as part of an effort to fight climate change.
At least five reef islands in the remote Solomon Islands have been lost completely to sea level rise and coastal erosion
Heads of UN, Work Bank lay out vision to deal with climate change
Turkish environment minister signs historic agreement in New York against taking action against climate change
Human defense mechanisms could be disrupted by the presence of a class of organic pollutants in fish and other food, according to new research.
'The time has come to treat childhood stunting as a development and an economic emergency,' World Bank Group head says
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en
| 0.958619 | 834 | 3.21875 | 3 |
Electrical Safety Level I
This course is designed to provide employees with a general understanding of electricity and its hazards. Employees are provided with information to enable them to recognize and avoid electrical hazards. They will also be able to identify the physiological effects of electrical shock, electrical arc and electrical blast.
- Selection and Use of Work Practices
- Use of Equipment
- Safeguards for Personnel Protection
- OSHA regulations
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://www.richland.edu/cpe/osha/courses/electric1
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en
| 0.905241 | 84 | 3.015625 | 3 |
Sarcoidosis is an inflammatory disease that affects multiple organs in the body, but mostly the lungs and lymph glands. In people with sarcoidosis, abnormal masses or nodules (called granulomas) consisting of inflamed tissues form in certain organs of the body. These granulomas may alter the normal structure and possibly the function of the affected organ(s).
The symptoms of sarcoidosis can vary greatly, depending on which organs are involved. Most patients initially complain of a persistent dry cough, fatigue, and shortness of breath. Other symptoms may include:
In some people, symptoms may begin suddenly and/or severely and subside in a short period of time. Others may have no outward symptoms at all even though organs are affected. Still others may have symptoms that appear slowly and subtly, but which last or recur over a long time span.
Who Gets Sarcoidosis?
Sarcoidosis most often occurs between 20 and 40 years of age, with women being diagnosed more frequently than men. The disease is 10 to 17 times more common in African-Americans than in Caucasians. People of Scandinavian, German, Irish, or Puerto Rican origin are also more prone to the disease. It is estimated that up to four in 10,000 people in the U.S. have sarcoidosis.
What Causes Sarcoidosis?
The exact cause of sarcoidosis is not known. It is a type of autoimmune disease associated with an abnormal immune response, but what triggers this response is uncertain. How sarcoidosis spreads from one part of the body to another is still being studied.
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http://www.webmd.com/lung/arthritis-sarcoidosis
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en
| 0.948677 | 337 | 3.734375 | 4 |
There are different types of childcare options available for early years, these include: Sure Start Children’s Centre: Working with parents right from the birth of their child, providing early years education for children, full day care, short-term care, health and family support, parenting advice as well as training and employment advice. Nursery schools: Provide early learning and childcare for children between three and five years old. They are often based at Sure Start Children’s Centres or linked to a primary school. Preschools and playgroups: Usually run by voluntary groups providing part-time play and early learning for under fives. Three and four year olds can get their 15 hours of weekly free early years education at these providers. Day Nurseries: Often based in workplaces and rum by businesses or voluntary groups providing care and learning activities for children from birth to five years old. Childminders: Look after children under 12 in the childminder’s own home. They can look after up to six children under eight years old, although no more than three of them must be aged under five. Nannies and home-based carers: Provide care for children in your home and can look after children of any age. Since 2004 all children in the UK aged three and four years old have been entitled to free places at nursery or another preschool setting (including childminders). From 1st September 2010 the Government extended these hours from 12.5 to 15 hours for up to 38 weeks of the year. The free entitlement provides universal access to early childhood education and care, ensuring that all children have the opportunity to benefit from early years education. The extended hours also supports parents who wish to go back to work or develop their careers through further education by providing affordable daycares.
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http://www.studymode.com/essays/Summarise-Entitlement-And-Provision-For-Early-895984.html
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en
| 0.971758 | 360 | 2.8125 | 3 |
June 12, 2000
Several years ago, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled wireless carriers should allow non-service initialized cellular phones to dial 9-1-1, the public safety community was divided on the issue. The reason is that these phones do not provide any information about the caller, nor do they allow public safety agencies the ability to call the caller back should they be disconnected.
In many places in the United States, if you call 9-1-1 on a cell phone, your cell phone number and possibly your name will show up at the 9-1-1 center. The phones that are given out as part of these programs are not service-initialized, so there is no phone number associated with them. If, for example, a caller were to call 9-1-1 and for some reason they were disconnected, the 9-1-1 center would not be able to call the person back. This could be a serious problem if the person was being stalked or followed.
While safety in general is a major motivation for many people buying cellular phones, most don't realize they don't get the same level of service they do when they call from home.
Here in King and Snohomish Counties, we have a very effective Enhanced 9-1-1 system that provides the address and telephone number for most people calling from a wireline telephone. Callers from cellular phones don't receive the same level of service because their location isn't known. Cellular phones that aren't service-initialized only add to this problem, because in addition, the caller can't be identified or called back.
While these phones can and do provide an important public safety benefit, there are also serious drawbacks to their use. As with most things, public education is important, but often lacking.
Joe Blaschka, Jr., P.E., Woodinville
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http://www.nwnews.com/old/editions/2000/20000612/ed4.html
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en
| 0.96935 | 385 | 2.65625 | 3 |
As the East Coast bakes in triple-digit heat, you can bet it's even more stifling in the asphalt and concrete jungles of cities like New York and Washington than in nearby rural areas. So cities nationwide are increasingly turning to "cool" building materials to ease what's known as the urban heat island effect.
As the mercury soared into the triple digits this week along the East Coast, you can bet it was even more stifling in the asphalt and concrete jungles of cities like New York and Washington than in nearby rural areas.
It's a phenomenon known as the "urban heat island" effect, and it's getting increased attention nationwide from planners, architects and building manufacturers searching for ways to cool sweltering cities, save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The difference in the air temperature can be dramatic -- from about 5 degrees during the day to as much as 22 degrees at night as buildings release heat absorbed in daylight hours, according to the EPA.
"In the last few days, for example, we've seen temperatures in downtown Baltimore that did not drop below 80 degrees at night, whereas it was in the 70s just outside the cities," says Bruce Sullivan, a National Weather Service forecaster based in Camp Springs, Md. "During the day, it's a smaller difference, but buildings heat up faster because they've retained heat from overnight."
The landscape of black asphalt streets and rooftops typical of urban areas is partly to blame. A dark roof can add 90 degrees to the ambient temperature on hot days. As a result, some cities are turning instead to light-colored "cool" roofs and "cool pavement" that reflect solar energy. Rooftop gardens, also known as "living roofs," are another option.
"On a traditional black roof on a summer day of 95 degrees, it can easily reach 170 degrees," says Anthony Ruffine, sustainability officer for GAF Materials Corp., which makes roofing materials. On the other hand, he says, a white roof made from a special polymer "would be more like 97 degrees."
That can translate to a 10 percent to 15 percent cut in air-conditioning costs, the EPA says. Less energy use would help ease the summer strain on local power grids, which have failed in parts of the East Coast this week as demand neared record levels.
Decreased energy use also means fewer greenhouse gas emissions and smog.
"If all the cities in the hot and temperate parts of the world converted to cool roofs and cool pavement, 44 gigatons of carbon dioxide -- about one-and-a-half years' worth of current CO2 emissions -- could be offset," says Hashem Akbari, a researcher at Concordia University in Montreal and a member of the Heat Island Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
"Of the 10 largest cities in the U.S., over half are out of compliance for air quality," he says. "If you can improve air quality while saving energy costs, why not?"
In Philadelphia, where a quarter of the surface area is roofs that are mostly black or brown, city officials passed a law in May requiring that new flat-roofed buildings install cool roofs and that new buildings bigger than 10,000 square feet meet the Silver standard under the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED rating system. Similar cool roofing mandates have been passed in South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico and New York.
"Certainly, the heat wave we're in right now further emphasizes the importance of what we're trying to do," says Katherine Gajewski, Philadelphia's sustainability director. "What we're really interested in doing is looking at how we can make Philadelphia more resilient in the face of these kinds of climate events, which we expect to see more of in the future, and to make it more energy efficient in general."
City officials say they also are considering cool pavement, though most "green" efforts have focused on buildings -- where the most energy savings are to be had.
But some businesses balk at paying extra money to install greener materials.
Miquela Craytor, director of the nonprofit environmental group Sustainable South Bronx in New York, says it's difficult to change the short-term mindset of local businesses when it comes to greener buildings.
From their perspective, Craytor says, putting on a green roof that can cost $2,000 to $4,000 can be a hard sell. "We're trying to show them how that benefits them in the long term. Businesses and individuals really do want to do the right thing," she says.
Although some cool products can cost the same to install as traditional roofs, the higher-end options can be as much as 20 percent more expensive. The federal government offers modest tax credits of up to $1.80 per square foot for building owners, and 30 percent of the cost of the material, up to $1,500, for homeowners who install reflective roofs that qualify under the Energy Star program.
At Bren Hall on the campus of the University of California-Santa Barbara, the roof is covered by a "white cap" sheet material broken up by an array of solar panels. The building at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management was completed in 2002 and was the nation's first building to receive two LEED Platinum certifications.
University spokesman James Badham says that when the founding faculty considered the original plans for the building, they said, " 'Look, we should make this a green building.' So, they went back to the design and reworked it."
Bren Hall cost $26 million, and the overall "greening" added about 2 percent to the cost, Badham said. "It's a difficult number to nail down how much we've saved, but it's safe to say the building is quickly recovering the additional costs" for the certification, he said.
While cool roofs could increase heating costs in the winter, the extra expense would be more than offset by summer savings, according to the Cool Roof Rating Council, an industry group.
Tom Bollnow, senior director of technical services with the National Roofing Contractors Association, says higher wintertime costs would be minimal with a well-insulated roof. But he notes that problems can occur in colder regions because snow doesn't melt as quickly on a white roof.
"It can be a problem if you get unusual snow loads," Bollnow says. "But I think most people in northern climates would take that into account when deciding what kind of roof to install."
The heat island problem was first observed hundreds of years ago, and some European countries such as Germany have been using cool roofs for decades. In the U.S., the demand for cool materials has caught fire in the past five years, says Ruffine of GAF Materials.
"I think that a lot of cities and municipalities are starting to think this way," says Gajewski in Philadelphia. "When we look at our country at large, I think this is a slow shift. Consciousness is being changed, but it's not going to happen overnight." Copyright 2010 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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| 0.963169 | 1,476 | 3.0625 | 3 |
Introduction to Literature
insisted that to understand a literary piece, we need to understand
the author's biography and social background, ideas circulating
at the time, and the cultural milieu. This school of criticism
fell into disfavor as the New Critics emerged.
seeks to find meaning in a text by considering the work within
the framework of the prevailing ideas and assumptions of its historical
era. New Historicists concern themselves with the political function
of literature and with the concept of power, the intricate means
by which cultures produce and reproduce themselves. These critics
focus on revealing the historically specific model of truth and
authority (not a "truth" but a "cultural construct")
reflected in a given work.
In other words, history here is not a mere
chronicle of facts and events, but rather a complex description
of human reality and evolution of preconceived notions. Literary
works may or may not tell us about various factual aspects of
the world from which they emerge, but they will tell us about
prevailing ways of thinking at the time: ideas of social organization,
prejudices, taboos, etc. They raise questions of interest to
New Historicism is more "sociohistorical"
than it is a delving into factoids: concerned with ideological
products or cultural constructs which are formations of any era.
(It's not just where would Keats have seen a Grecian urn in England,
but from where he may have absorbed the definitions of art and
So, New Historicists, insisting that ideology
manifests itself in literary productions and discourse, interest
themselves in the interpretive constructions which the members
of a society or culture apply to their experience.
Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999.
Biddle, Arthur W., and Toby Fulwiler. Reading, Writing, and the Study of Literature. NY: Random House, 1989.
Lynn, Steven. Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature with Critical Theory. 2nd ed. NY: Longman, 1998.
Murfin, Ross, and Supryia M. Ray. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997.
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/new.hist.html
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| 0.897793 | 484 | 3.484375 | 3 |
A Chicago dye garden is an adventure for gardeners. Many different trees, flowers, fruits, nuts, and vegetables produce dyes to use in fun craft projects. http://www.pioneerthinking.com/crafts/natural-dyes
Ancient dyes that colored hair, skin, clothing, baskets, medicine and food were made from plants, animals and insects. Dyed flax fibers 36,000 years old were found in the Republic of Georgia. The dye industry flourished in India and Phoenicia 5,000 years ago. Colonists brought their dyestuffs to the Americas, and these were supplemented by dyes learned from Native Americans. With the development of the first synthetic dye mauveine by 18-year old Sir William Henry Perkin in 1858, natural dyes fell out of use.
Plant dyes can be made using a specific plant or its parts. Others require the addition of mordants to keep the dye from being washed out, or to make the dye fast. Mordants like alum, salt, vinegar or cream of tartar can also change the color of the dye. http://www.fs.fed.us
Grow these common flowers, fruits and vegetables to make dyes. Many trees are also used to make dyes. For shades of yellow and cream, grow dandelion, marigold, goldenrod and carrots. To make shades of orange, grow carrots, butternut squash and yellow onions. For shades of red, grow sorrel and red onions. To make pink dyes, grow strawberries, red raspberries and cherries.
For blue dyes, grow indigo, yellow iris, blueberries, mulberries and red cabbage. To make green dyes, grow grasses, lily of the valley, spinach, lilacs and snapdragons. For purple dye, grow dandelion, blueberries, hairy coneflower and blackberries. To make brown dyes, grow beets, onions and red currants. For black dyes, grow blackberry, iris and sand evening primrose. For gray dyes, grow iris.
Dye gardens offer gardeners opportunities to experiment with plants. They provide prospects for gardeners to create beautifully colored articles.
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://www.examiner.com/article/a-chicago-dye-garden?cid=rss
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en
| 0.918299 | 466 | 3.078125 | 3 |
What is Islam?
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other meanings, including people named 'Islam', see Islam (disambiguation).
Islam (Arabic: الإسلام al-’islām, pronounced [ʔislæːm] is a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the teachings of the Qur’an, a religious book considered by its adherents to be the verbatim word of God (Arabic: الله, Allāh), and the Islamic prophet Muhammad's personally demonstrated examples (collected through narration of his companions in the volumes of Hadith) for implementing them.
The word Islam is a homograph, having multiple meanings, and a triliteral of the word salam, which directly translates as peace.
Other meanings include submission, or the total surrender of oneself to God (see Islam (term)). An adherent of Islam is a Muslim, meaning "one who submits (to God)". The word Muslim is the participle of the same verb of which Islām is the infinitive.
Muslims regard Islam as the completed and universal version of an original monotheistic faith revealed to peoples before, including to Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other prophets. Islamic tradition holds that previous messages have changed and the revelations were distorted.
Religious practices include the Five Pillars of Islam, which are five duties that unite Muslims into a community. Islamic law (Arabic: شريعة Šarīʿah) touches on virtually every aspect of life and society, encompassing everything from dietary laws and banking to warfare and welfare.
The vast majority of Muslims belong to one of two major denominations, the Sunni (roughly 85%) and Shi'a (roughly 15%). Islam is the predominant religion in much of Africa, the Middle East, as well as in major parts of Asia. Large communities are also found in China, Russia and the Balkans.
Converts and immigrant communities are found in almost every part of the world. About 20% of Muslims live in Arab countries, 30% in the Indian Subcontinent, and 15.6% in Indonesia alone, the largest Muslim country in absolute numbers.
With 1.3 billion to 1.8 billion Muslims, Islam is the second-largest religion in the world and the fastest growing religion in the world.
Etymology and meaning
The word Islam is a verbal noun originating from the triliteral root s-l-m, and is derived from the Arabic verb Aslama, which means "to accept, surrender or submit." Thus, Islam means acceptance of and submission to God, and believers must demonstrate this by worshipping him, following his commands, and avoiding polytheism.
The word is given a number of meanings in the Qur'an. In some verses (ayat), the quality of Islam as an internal conviction is stressed: "Whomsoever God desires to guide, He expands his breast to Islam."
Other verses connect islām and dīn (usually translated as "religion"): "Today, I have perfected your religion (dīn) for you; I have completed My blessing upon you; I have approved Islam for your religion."
Still others describe Islam as an action of returning to God - more than just a verbal affirmation of faith. Another technical meaning in Islamic thought is as one part of a triad of islam, imān (faith), and ihsān (excellence); where it represents acts of worship (`ibādah) and Islamic law (sharia).
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://mindsecret1.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_archive.html
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en
| 0.942165 | 750 | 3.015625 | 3 |
APL gets more solar surprises from NASA's Voyager
Data from NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft continue to provide new insight into the outskirts of our solar system, a frontier thought to be the last that Voyager will cross before becoming the first man-made object to reach interstellar space.
In papers published in June in the journal Science, scientists from Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory and other Voyager partner institutions provide more clarity on the region they named the "magnetic highway" in December 2012. Cruising through what scientists describe as a curious, unexpected charged-particle environment, Voyager has detected, for the first time, low-energy galactic cosmic rays, now that particles of the same energy from inside the bubble around our sun have disappeared. As a result, Voyager now sees the highest level so far of particles from outside our solar bubble that originate from the death of other nearby stars.
"Voyager 1 may be months or years from leaving the solar system—we just don't know," says APLís Stamatios Krimigis, principal investigator for Voyager's Low-Energy Charged Particle, or LECP, instrument, which was designed and built at APL with NASA funding. "But the wait itself is incredibly exciting, since Voyager continues to defy predictions and change the way we think about this mysterious and wonderful gateway region to the galaxy."
Voyager 1 and 2 were launched in 1977 and between them have visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Since 1990, the twin spacecraft have been on their interstellar mission, on track to leave the heliosphere, which is the bubble of magnetic field and charged particles that the sun blows around itself. On Aug. 25, 2012, when Voyager 1 was about 11 billion miles from the sun, the spacecraft reached the magnetic highway, where charged particles from inside the heliosphere zoomed out along the magnetic field as cosmic rays from far outside zoomed in. The lack of a detectable change in the direction of that magnetic field convinced scientists that Voyager remained within the sun's influence.
The new Science papers focus on observations from summer and fall 2012 by LECP as well as Voyager 1's Cosmic Ray and Magnetometer instruments, with additional LECP data through April 2013.
"The most dramatic part was how quickly the solar-originating particles disappeared; they decreased in intensity by more than 1,000 times, as if there was a huge vacuum pump at the entrance ramp onto the magnetic highway," Krimigis says. "We have never witnessed such a decrease before, except when Voyager 1 exited the giant magnetosphere of Jupiter some 34 years ago."
"Surprisingly, the traveling direction of the 'inside' charged particles in this region made a difference, with those moving straightest along the magnetic field lines decreasing most quickly. Those that moved perpendicular to the magnetic field did not change as quickly," says LECP co-investigator Robert Decker, also of APL. The cosmic rays from outside, moving along the field lines, were somewhat more intense than those moving perpendicular to the field, and this imbalance varied significantly with time during the eight months since. Adds APL's Edmond Roelof, also an LECP co-investigator, "It is this time-varying behavior of the cosmic rays that tells us that we're still in a region controlled by our sun."
The multidimensional measurements speak to the unique abilities of the LECP detector, designed at APL in the 1970s. It includes a stepper motor that rotates the instrument through 45-degree steps every 192 seconds, allowing it to gather data in all directions and pick up something as dynamic as the solar wind and galactic particles. The device, designed and tested to last four years and work for 500,000 steps, has been working for nearly 36 years and well past 6 million steps.
Voyager 1 is 11.6 billion miles from the sun, poised to become Earthís first robotic ambassador to the space between the stars. At 9.4 billion miles, Voyager 2 has seen some gradual changes in the charged particles, yet scientists do not think Voyager 2 has reached the magnetic highway.
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://hub.jhu.edu/gazette/2013/august/apl-voyager-space
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en
| 0.955856 | 849 | 3.40625 | 3 |
And as the technology to capture carbon from the burning fossil fuels reaches scale, and sources of clean energy grow, net carbon emissions could drop to zero by 2100.
Even so, it will be hard, if not impossible, to meet the goal set by the world’s governments of holding the average increase in global temperatures to 2 degrees centigrade.
Today in Washington, Royal Dutch Shell’s chief executive, Peter Voser, and Jeremy Bentham, the head of Shell’s scenarios team, unveiled a pair of “New Lens” scenarios, dubbed “oceans” and “mountains,” and available in much greater detail here. In essence (and it’s more complicated this), the “mountains” scenario envisions a strong role for government and coordinated global policy, while the “oceans” scenario sees dispersed power, greater volatility, a stronger role for markets and rapid economic growth. Shell has been generating scenarios for about 40 years, to help guide the company’s long-term planning as well as influence policy makers.
Underlying both scenarios, though, are assumptions about the world’s increasing population and economic growth that together will drive demand for energy by about 80% by 2050. That rising demand is all but unavoidable, Bentham said, even assuming strong policies to promote efficiency or high energy prices that discourage consumption.
Meeting that demand for energy, while reducing carbon emissions dramatically, will be extremely difficult, to say the least, the Shell executives said.
“At current trends,” Voser said, greenhouse gas emissions “will far exceed what is widely to believed the upper limits for climate change.”
Shell’s two scenarios generate different energy mixes for the future. The policy-driven “mountains” analysis leads to a shift from oil and coal, which are the world’s biggest energy sources today, to natural gas. The company says:
New policies unlock plentiful natural gas resources – making it the largest global energy source by the 2030s – and accelerate carbon capture and storage technology, supporting a cleaner energy system.
The more chaotic “oceans” scenario has less regulation, higher cumulative emissions and higher energy prices. The company says:
Market forces rather than policies shape the energy system: oil and coal remain part of the energy mix but renewable energy also grows. By the 2060s solar becomes the world’s largest energy source.
But Bentham said that “neither scenario is able to meet the 2 degree” target agreed to during UN climate negotiations by the world’s governments, including the US. “That’s one of the troubling features in the work,” he said.
The report says, in a section called “Reflections on development and sustainability”:
One conclusion that can be drawn from the New Lens Scenarios is that substantive change will not come about by itself — as a result of pricing signals or policy responses delayed until crises become apparent. A positive outcome requires a series of proactive, far-sighted and co-ordinated national and international policy developments that, to date, seem beyond the bounds of plausibility.
Then again, as Yogi Berra may or may not have said: Predictions are hard, especially about the future. Shell didn’t see the global financial crisis coming in its last scenario, and either political organizing or technology breakthroughs could affect the climate-change equation, in unforeseeable ways.
So what is Shell doing about all this? The company has invested in biofuels and advocated strongly for technology to capture and store CO2 emitted from power plants. In the policy arena, unlike other fossil-fuel giants, Shell supports greenhouse gas regulation. The company says: “Government action is needed and we support an international framework that puts a price on CO2, encouraging the use of all CO2-reducing technologies.”
Said Bentham: “It’s not a question of clean fossil fuels or green renewables. It’s clean and green.”
Below is a chart on projected GHG emissions under various scenarios, and another on the energy mix under the “oceans’ scenario showing the growth of solar. You can click on either chart to enlarge it.
Disclosure: In 2011 and 2012, I was paid by Shell to moderate company events on environment issues.
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<urn:uuid:598d173d-fda2-4fb2-b59e-5062677bf860>
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The Gas Addition Module provides a safe and efficient means of performing gas-liquid reactions under continuous flow-through conditions. Based on an ingenious ‘tube-in-tube’ design developed by scientists at Cambridge University in the UK, it promotes rapid diffusion of pressurized gas through gas-permeable tubing to quickly create a gas saturated solvent stream in typically less than 10 seconds.
Liquid (usually in the form of an organic solvent) is passed through a gas-permeable inner tube which is nested inside a closed, thick-walled outer tube filled under pressure with a reactive gas. The gas is able to diffuse across the membrane into the liquid phase, but the liquid cannot move in the opposite direction.
The Gas Addition Module is compatible with a wide range of reactive gases (e.g. CO, CO2, H2, D2, ethene, ethyne, SO2) and organic solvents (e.g. THF, MeCN, MeOH, PrOH) and is designed to be connected in-line with any FlowSyn continuous flow reactor. Its primary purpose is to provide a solvent feed stream pre-saturated with gas, but it can also be used as a reactor in its own right.
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ABBA COHEN OF BARDELA:
By: S. Mendelsohn
A scholar of the last tannaitic generation (about the beginning of the third century). The few Halakot emanating from him refer to the rabbinical civil law. In Biblical homiletics several of his expositions have been preserved (Sifre, Deut. 2; Gen. R. 23, 76, 93). The last-mentioned passage runs as follows: "Wo to mankind, because of the day of judgment; wo, because of the day of trial! Balaam, the wisest among the Gentiles, was confounded at the reproof of his ass (Num. xxii. 30). Joseph, one of the youngest of Jacob's sons, silenced his elder brethren (Gen. xlv. 3). How will man be able to endure the judgment of the omniscient Lord?" (B. M. 10a; Yer. Giṭ. viii. 49c; Yer. B. M. i. 7d; Yer. B. B. viii. 16b).
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Definitions for ectodermal dysplasia
This page provides all possible meanings and translations of the word ectodermal dysplasia
Ectodermal dysplasia is not a single disorder, but a group of syndromes all deriving from abnormalities of the ectodermal structures. More than 150 different syndromes have been identified. Despite some of the syndromes having different genetic causes the symptoms are sometimes very similar. Diagnosis is usually by clinical observation often with the assistance of family medical histories so that it can be determined whether transmission is autosomal dominant or recessive. Worldwide around 7,000 people have been diagnosed with an ectodermal dysplasia condition. Some ED conditions are only present in single family units and derive from very recent mutations. Ectodermal dysplasias can occur in any race but are much more prevalent in caucasians than any other group and especially in fair caucasians. Ectodermal dysplasias are described as "heritable conditions in which there are abnormalities of two or more ectodermal structures such as the hair, teeth, nails, sweat glands, cranial-facial structure, digits and other parts of the body."
U.S. National Library of Medicine
A group of hereditary disorders involving tissues and structures derived from the embryonic ectoderm. They are characterized by the presence of abnormalities at birth and involvement of both the epidermis and skin appendages. They are generally nonprogressive and diffuse. Various forms exist, including anhidrotic and hidrotic dysplasias, FOCAL DERMAL HYPOPLASIA, and aplasia cutis congenita.
The numerical value of ectodermal dysplasia in Chaldean Numerology is: 9
The numerical value of ectodermal dysplasia in Pythagorean Numerology is: 4
Sample Sentences & Example Usage
A lot of people treat me differently, as though I was mentally challenged or inferior to them. In reality ectodermal dysplasia is a physical condition.
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"ectodermal dysplasia." Definitions.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2016. Web. 1 Jul 2016. <http://www.definitions.net/definition/ectodermal dysplasia>.
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Vodou is a Way of Life
SACRED DAYS OF THE LWA
Vodou is a tradition of action. That is why most people will say “M sevi Ginen” (I serve Ginen) rather than say “I’m a Vodouisant”. Now all religions are, ideally, a way of life. But Vodou is most adamantly so. Service is an action, and that is how we describe our tradition, in terms that refer to those actions. Vodou is something you live, rather than simply do. It is not a tradition you can learn passively. You need to dig right in and get your hands dirty, so to speak. During ceremonies, everything is based on actions: salutes, dancing, drumming, singing, and tracing veves – to name a few. We do not have congregation members sitting as someone preaches.
Everyday of the week is sacred to a particular Lwa or group of Lwa. Sunday is God’s day. Vodouisants vary on what happens on Sunday. Some will not do any spiritual work, will not salute the lwa, will not do anything that has to do with Ginen. Others do not discriminate against the day. They say, “Yes, Sunday is sacred to God, I will remember Him and respect Him, but everyday I need to eat!” In other words, they still do Vodouisant activities on this day. Most Vodouisants attend Church and Mass and may say prayers or give some other sort of attention directed towards the Creator.
There are a variety of ways to serve the Lwa on their sacred day: wearing their colors on their day, observing abstinence on that day, singing, and serving them with ceremony. People who are married to a Lwa are obligated to observe the sacred day of that Lwa. They may have to wear certain clothes, prepare their bed in a certain way, and do other things that signify the human spouse’s sacred commitment. Vodouisants will also frequently observe the days of their most important Lwa by tending to the Badji, giving libations or other sacred activities.
Here is a general list of the Sacred Days of the Lwa. Depending on the lineage or Vodou House, as always, there may be changes in the way they do things or serve. For the most part, many of these days are consistent in most houses.
Monday is the second day of the week. This is also the day that many consider to be the beginning of the week. This day is sacred to the Ancestors, Gede and Legba. As the opening day, the same lwa that one must take care of before going on to other lwa, are taken care of on this day. Think about it: After God (Sunday), one should have his/her ancestors taken care of. After they are taken care of, things will flow easier, including work with the Lwa. This is where Gede and the ancestors come in. Yet before one can call other Lwa, one must salute Legba. Legba is the gate keeper, and he is the one who can open our doors or shut them as he may please.
Most Vodouisants do some sort of “daily devotional”, especially Vodouisants whose main source of income is serving Ginen. In the process, one “wakes them up”, if you will, in order to get them working. They will also open the doors, of the Vodouisant’s home, to receive clientele. There are a variety of ways that an individual may choose to “wake” them up.
On Mondays, I make sure to remove all glasses of water from all the altars. This water I toss outside the front door. I then wash the glasses, and the coffee cup of Gede. I also throw Gede’s coffee out the front door. I make Gede some new coffee, and fill all the glasses with cool fresh water. I then light a candle, and pray. After this, I talk to my spirits. I give them their coffee and water. I may alternately perform a libation of rum to them as well. For me, Monday is a day to attend to and cleanse and keep the Badji.
Vodouisants also do other things to live the tradition. One thing is that once you come into this tradition, your whole view of the world will change. You will learn to act in accordance with yourself, in time. When you change the way that you view the world, your world will change. You will also find that your new spiritual attunement and connection will lead you into all new sorts of opportunities and change.
Tuesday is the day that is sacred to the Petro spirits, notably Ezili Danto. On this day, Vodouisants that have Petro Lwa in their escort may make observances, libations or in another way serve their Lwa. This is also considered a good day to work Petro based magick.
Wednesday is the day for the Nago Nation, again notably it is Ogou’s day. Almost all the Ogous are observed or serviced on this day.
Thursday is for all of the Lwa Rada. Danbala, Agwe, Freda, LaSirene all have this day as their sacred day. Also known to as the Lwa Blan or white Lwa.
Friday belongs to Djouba nation as well as Gede. The Djouba Nation is composed of Kouzen Zaka, his wife, Kouzin and all the other Lwa of Taino origin.
Lastly, Saturday is a day for all the Lwa!
I suggest you work on your own personal devotion to the Lwa on a daily schedule. It can be a short little moment of five minutes or so. Alternately, you can decide that your devotion will take longer. It is a great way to get the Lwa working in your daily life. You will see how your life improves.
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A snowplough (also spelled snow plough or in US snowplow snow plow, see miscellaneous spelling differences) is a device intended for mounting on a vehicle, used for removing snow and ice from outdoor surfaces, typically those serving transportation purposes. Although this term is often used to refer to vehicles fitted with such devices, more accurately they are known as winter service vehicles, especially in areas that regularly receive large amounts of snow every year, or in specific environments such as airfields. In other cases, pickup trucks and front end loaders are outfitted with attachments to fulfill this purpose when required. Some regions that do not frequently see snow may use graders and other equipment for this task, but graders are nonetheless the best equipment to remove compacted snow and ice off the streets. Snowploughs can also be mounted on rail cars to clear railway tracks.
A snowplough works by using a blade to push snow to the side or straight ahead, clearing it from a surface. Modern ploughs may include a great deal of technology to make the job—and staying on the road—easier, such as Global Positioning System receivers, head-up displays and infrared cameras.
Large custom snowploughs are mainly used at major airports in North America. These ploughs have oversized blades and additional equipment like a rotating sweeper broom (sometimes called jetblade) and blowers at the rear of the plow.
Underbody scrapers are sometimes mounted on vehicles in residential and urban settings, operating on principles similar to a road grader, but allowing greater weights and speed along with the carriage of a road treatment applicator in some countries.
Newer technology has allowed the use of articulated plough systems which can clear multiple divided highway lanes simultaneously; jurisdictions adopting this technology include Ontario Canada, along with Minnesota and Missouri in the US.
In some European countries with high snow falls they use variable width ploughs and special buckets fitted with wings on wheeled loaders fitted with snow chains or studded tyres.
The first snowploughs were horsedrawn wedge-ploughs made of wood. With the advent of the car (automobile), a number of inventors set about to improve existing snowploughs. In the US, patents were issued for snowplow improvements at least as early as 1920.
In 1923, the brothers Hans and Even Øveraasen of Norway constructed an early snowplough for use on cars. This proved to be the start of a tradition in snow-clearing equipment for roads, railways and airports, as well as the foundation of the company Øveraasen Snow Removal Systems. Carl Frink of Clayton, New York, USA was also an early manufacturer of automobile-mounted snowploughs. His company, Frink Snowplows, now Frink-America, was founded by some accounts as early as 1920.
In many countries, railway locomotives have small snowploughs permanently attached to their bogies, which also serve as pilots. With others, the snowplough forms part of the obstacle deflector below the bufferbeam. Bolt-on versions also exist, and these attach to the bufferbeam or front coupler. However, larger snowploughs exist, which tend to be conversions rather than purpose-built vehicles. Steam locomotive tenders, large diesel locomotive bogies and various freight vehicles have been used, with the snowplow body mounted on the original frames. They are one-ended, with conventional coupling equipment on the inner end.
Conventional operation may see one or two locomotives running together with a snowplough at either end. This enables a snow clearance train to reverse direction quickly if it gets stuck. Alternatively, a single locomotive with bogie plows can act as a self-propelled snowplough by running light engine.
Domestic and pedestrian snowploughsEdit
In countries like America were ride on mowers and garden tractors are common they are often fitted with small blades for snow clearing during the winter months. Other machines are walking tractors fitted with a blade in place of the rotavator head or ploughshare, with some being equipped with a snow blower head.
Ski resort operators use specialist tracked units fitted with large blades to prepare the ski runs and form jumps for skiers and snowboarders.
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|Add any external links that directly relate to this articles subject and have more info or have related images. Other general external links can be added to the web Site Links list.|
|This page uses some content from Wikipedia. The original article was at snowplow. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Tractor & Construction Plant Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons by Attribution License and/or GNU Free Documentation License. Please check page history for when the original article was copied to Wikia|
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Earth Science - New York Regents January 2004 Exam
Base your answers to questions 38 and 39 on the graph below. The graph shows the recorded change in water level (ocean tides) at a coastal city in the northeastern United States during 1 day.
|NY Regents Exam Teasers IQ Tests Chemistry Biology GK C++ Recipes|
Home > Examinations > NYSED Regents Exams > Earth Science - High School >
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Even Short Smoking Breaks Might Lower Heart Risk
13 February, 2014
ISLAMABAD: In chronic smokers who stop smoking, there is a rapid increase in the number of circulating cells that aid in the repair of the lining of blood vessels, researchers have found.
Therefore, "even short-term cessation of smoking may be an effective means to reduce cardiovascular risk," they write in the medical journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology.
Researchers at the Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan counted the number of circulating "endothelial progenitor" cells -- stem cells that can become new cells lining arteries and veins -- in 14 healthy nonsmokers and in 15 otherwise healthy age-matched smokers. The smokers were recruited from among people who wanted to quit smoking.
According to Dr. Takahisa Kondo and colleagues, the levels of progenitor cells were reduced in the chronic smokers compared with nonsmokers, and the more people smoked the fewer cells they had. All of the smokers did quit, eight with nicotine patches and seven without. When they stopped smoking, levels of the circulating endothelial progenitor cells rose rapidly, the team found.
In lighter smokers -- those who smoked less than 20 cigarettes per day -- the magnitude of the recovery was greater than in smokers who smoked 20 or more cigarettes per day.
However, after a month, all the smokers had "unexpectedly" relapsed, and progenitor cells dropped nearly to their original low numbers.
"Because the decreased number of endothelial progenitor cells in peripheral circulation is a strong predictor for cardiovascular risk, our findings provide further evidence for the consensus that smoking cessation is to be highly recommended for the prevention of cardiovascular disease," the researchers conclude.
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Albatrosses are amongst the most threatened groups of birds on the planet. Since the 1990s, the impact of longlining on albatrosses has become a global conservation priority, resulting in the development of the Global Seabird Programme (GSP). While the GSP is addressing an impressive range of seabird conservation issues, a major focus was, and remains, saving albatrosses from extinction by working with fishing industries and national governments and, wherever possible, to find innovative and win-win solutions to seabird bycatch. This, in a nutshell, is the work of the Albatross Task Force (ATF).
BirdLife South Africa hosted the first ATF team in 2006 – there are now another 7 in other countries (Namibia, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Argentina). By the end of 2008 (to date) it was clear that the work was worth it – the ATF had notched up a fantastic 8570-95% reduction in seabird bycatch!
The South African ATF team primarily works with three fleets within our local waters: the deep-sea hake trawl fishery, the pelagic longline fishery (made up of local and foreign Asian fishing vessels) and the hake longline fleet.
Albatross deaths down by 99% in local trawl fishery
A great achievement for BirdLife South Africa's efforts in reducing seabird deaths in the SA trawl fishery. In 2008 it was estimated that 18 000 birds were dying in this fishery each year. In April 2014, BirdLife South Africa released a paper that reports on how that figure has changed. It's pretty dramatic - for all seabirds the reduction is of the order of 90%, but for albatrosses its more like 99% fewer mortalities. This is thanks to the Albatross Task Force team's efforts, and a very cooperative fishery that worked with the ATF to ensure the risks were addressed. The fishery has Marine Stewardship Council certification, and that was an important factor in ensuring this fantastic outcome. Read more pdf Trawl seabird figures 2014 (119 KB)
The research is available from http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/acv.12126. The full citation is:
Maree, BA, Wanless RM, Fairweather TP, Sullivan BJ & Yates O. 2014. Significant reductions in mortality of threatened seabirds in a South African trawl fishery. Animal Conservation 17: published online
What we do
The main work of the ATF instructors is done at sea when we join fishing trips to collect data and conduct experiments. The companies accommodate us on a voluntary basis and for this we are always grateful. These trips help us to understand the realities of the fishing industry.
We collect seabird abundance and interaction data during fishing operations. This helps us to understand ways we can prevent them from getting caught in fishing gear.
By trying different mitigation measures at sea and improving on them we try to adjust practical solutions so fishermen can easily implement them at sea.
The main idea of the ATF is that we are here to work with the fishermen towards finding and implementing solutions to the problem of seabird bycatch. Fishermen don't want to see a dead albatross on the hook (longline) or a drowned petrel taken by a net cable (trawl). We all have to put our heads together and keep on working towards creating a safe environment for these impressive birds.
Major successes to date
The South African ATF successfully lobbied to have tori lines (bird-scaring lines) declared mandatory in the South African hake (Merluccius spp.) trawl fishery (a Marine Stewardship Council (MSC)-certified fishery). Bird scaring lines are devices to keep birds away from the danger area (around the cables in this case) and consist of a mainline with colourful streamers that flap in the wind at the back of fishing vessels. Despite some teething problems, industry realised that it was not in their best interests to do nothing about unnecessary seabird deaths and, before long, compliance with the measure was high. This resulted in an immediate and significant decrease in seabird deaths associated with trawl warp interactions.
The tuna and swordfish longline fishery in South Africa is divided into two groups. Local permit holders, who use heavy gear and target mostly swordfish, and a foreign-flagged fleet operating in joint ventures with South Africa, who use much lighter gear and target tunas. It is the latter group that was identified as having a significant seabird bycatch problem. There were some very good permit conditions in place for this fishery for several years, but they had very little impact on reducing seabird bycatch – probably due to a lack of legal, agreed-upon actions that could be taken against vessels that failed to comply with the permit conditions. Then, in 2007, the ATF was involved in implementing new permit conditions, in a desperate attempt to ensure the fishery complied with the preventative measures in the existing permit conditions. A seabird bycatch 'cap' was placed on each vessel, and fishing would end for that vessel for the year, once that cap was reached. This precautionary catch limit or ‘cap’ still applies for this fishery, with the two bycatch limits in place, the first at 25 birds, after which addition measures are imposed on the vessel (extra wights on the line to ensure a faster sink rate and a second bird scaring line) and the second at (a total) 50 birds per vessel per annum. The upshot was that bycatch of albatrosses in the foreign-flagged fleet decreased by an estimated 85% in 2008 compared to 2007. The level of bycatch within this fishery has remained low and within the limit laid out in the South African National Plan of Action for Seabirds. Other measures in place in this fishery are night setting (not compulsory within the domestic fleet), the use of bird scaring lines and addition weight to the fishing line (voluntary until the ‘cap’ has been reached). The South Africa ATF also partakes (together with national government and local fishery representatives) in discussions and a review of these fishing regulations at the end of each year.
Seabird bycatch measures (such as extra weighting, fishing at night and bird scaring lines) have been extremely successful in many fisheries worldwide, reducing seabird bycatch by up to 90%. Despite these advances, pelagic (mid-water) longline fishing, targeting tuna and swordfish, has remained a fishery that no one has been able to address…until now! Thanks to some innovative minds in BirdLife International and FishTek (a UK-based company), there lies a promising ‘silver bullet’ for seabirds…the Hook Pod…which is being put through its final paces right here in South African waters! This magical device is designed to easily attach to pelagic (mid-water) longline gear and prevents incidental seabird capture by protecting the barb of the hook during the setting operations. Once the fishing gear sinks to a predetermined depth, the pod opens (using a pressure-release system), releasing the hook to begin fishing. The pod is then simply retrieved during hauling operations closed and is ready to be reused on the following set. The critical ingredient to effective bycatch mitigation is to provide fishermen with an option that is easy to use, cost-effective and has operational or economic advantages to their business. The hook pod has all these ingredients. The hook pod has the potential to virtually eliminate seabird bycatch in industrial pelagic longline fisheries worldwide!
On land work
- Bird Mitigation Plan project: hake trawl fishery
It is understood that each vessel class within the trawl fleet is different and cannot necessarily comply with the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach of fishing regulations (also known as permit conditions) that regulate the fishery. Originally a project of the Responsible Fisheries Alliance, this project is now run by BirdLife South Africa’s ATF. It is a collaborative approach that involves non-governmental organizations (NGOs, including WWF-SA), fishermen, skippers of vessels, onshore fishing managers and CEOs of fishing companies to come together and come up with the best available seabird mitigation options that each vessel can adopt (while still complying with these legal requirements). An assessment is done on board each vessel and agreed upon by all parties, which is then adopted in a formal document.
We conduct training workshops with fishermen, fisheries observers and governmental compliance officers. In these workshops we discuss the impacts that modern fishing has on the marine ecosystem and how all stakeholders can help in assuring a better future for all our marine life by implementing a responsible approach to fisheries.
- Harbour visits
A key ATF strategy is to build personal relationships with fishermen. We visit them at the harbour, an environment where they feel at home. We discuss their recent trips, any issues that came up, and plan future sea trips with them. We also deliver bird scaring lines and discuss other mitigation measures with them.
In an attempt to try to prevent future incidents, a cartoon has been created to educate people and shows very simply how to handle a live bird with a hook in it. If done properly it is hoped that it will result in the birds escaping without much injury.
Download the cartoon pdf How to handle a hooked live bird (369 KB)
Ocean View is a coastal village near Cape Point where there is a very high level of unemployment, due in some ways to the demise of the line-fishing industry. Within this community is the Ocean View Association for Persons with Disabilities (OVAPD) who indicated a willingness to become involved in the manufacture of bird scaring lines. This association provides disabled people from in and around the local community with a place where they can interact, learn skills and possibly make a small income. This project which was first started in 2006, aimed to provide fishing industries with bird scaring lines at an affordable cost, while at the same time providing upliftment and employment to individuals in a fairly impoverished community. In 2011, BirdLife South Africa assumed responsibility for managing the project when a second round of funding was received from Total South Africa. A variety of materials are used to create the lines including cable ties, garden hose, rope and plastic strapping. The lines are sold to fishing companies, with a small proportion of the money being given back to the Ocean View Centre. This project is an excellent example of an environmental NGO, a community centre, large commercial fishing companies and a corporate sponsor all work together towards a common goal!
Seabird Bycatch fact sheets
Simple and inexpensive mitigation measures can be highly successful in reducing seabird bycatch.
BirdLife have produced a series of Seabird Bycatch Mitigation Factsheets which describe the range of potential mitigation measures available to reduce seabird bycatch in longline and trawl fisheries. The sheets assess the effectiveness of each measure, highlight their limitations and strengths, and make best practice recommendations for their effective adoption. They are designed to help decision-makers choose the most appropriate measures for their longline and trawl fisheries.
For more information, please contact Bokamoso Lebepe
The ATF teams successes could not be achieved without the following sponsors: Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, BirdLife International, Total South Africa, Rand Merchant Bank, Van de Venter Majapelo (VVM), Cornelian Society, Zest for Birds and the Gregory Hawarden Trust.
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First Chinese woman ready for space journey
Reportedly, 'China is set to send its first female astronaut into space. It is also reported that the historic mission may face tough challenge. Valentina Tereshkova, 'a Soviet woman who is said to be still alive in Russia, became the first female astronaut of the world in 1963 at 27. The Soviet Union was the first country that put up a satellite in 1957.
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买麻藤科 mai ma teng ke
Authors: Liguo Fu, Yong-fu Yu & Michael G. Gilbert
Vines evergreen, woody, less often erect shrubs or trees, dioecious or sometimes monoecious; stems with swollen nodes. Leaves opposite, petiolate, without stipules, simple, pinnately veined, margin entire. Flowers unisexual, borne in whorled, spikelike cones (here termed "spikes"), arranged in lax, dichasial cymes. Cymes terminal or lateral, sometimes arranged in dense, cauliflorous clusters on old stems. Spikes with many cupular to almost flat, annular, involucral collars, each formed by the fusion of a whorl of bracts. Male spikes with collars closely arranged and ± hiding axis (less often somewhat laxly arranged), each collar with 20-80 flowers, often also with a whorl of sterile female flowers, apical whorl with sterile female flowers only; male flowers with a cupular, succulent false perianth, usually ± obconical; stamens 2, filaments fused, exserted from false perianth; anthers opening by a common, apical slit, pollen rounded, with minute projections. Female spikes solitary or several in a panicle, often cauliflorous; involucral collars widely separated, each with 4-12 flowers; female flowers with a false perianth tightly enclosing ovule; ovule with 2 integuments, innermost integument elongated into a micropylar tube exserted from false perianth; outer integument with a fleshy, outer layer connate with false perianth and developing into a false seed coat, inner layer bony. Seeds drupelike, enclosed in a red, orange, or yellow, fleshy (rarely corky) false seed coat; female gametophyte tissue copious, succulent. Cotyledons 2. Germination epigeal.
One genus and about 40 species: mostly tropical and subtropical Asia, fewer species in W Africa and NW South America; nine species (six endemic) in China.
Following common convention, the strictly flowering plant terms inflorescence, flower, fruit, stamen, filament, and anther are used here to avoid unwieldy descriptions.
Cheng Ching-yung. 1978. Gnetaceae. In: Cheng Wan-chün & Fu Li-kuo, eds., Fl. Reipubl. Popularis Sin. 7: 490-504.
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January 31, 2011
New Hardware Boosts Communication Speed On Multi-Core Chips
Computer engineers at North Carolina State University have developed hardware that allows programs to operate more efficiently by significantly boosting the speed at which the "cores" on a computer chip communicate with each other.
The core, or central processing unit, is the brain of a computer chip; most chips currently contain between four and eight cores. In order to perform a task more quickly using multiple cores on a single chip, those cores need to communicate with each other. But there are no direct ways for cores to communicate. Instead, one core sends data to memory and another core retrieves it using software algorithms."Our technology is more efficient because it provides a single instruction to send data to another core, which is six times faster than the best state-of-the-art software we could find," says Dr. James Tuck, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. Tuck explains that the technology, called HAQu, is "not hardware designed to communicate data on its own, but is hardware that expedites data-sharing using existing data paths on a computer chip." Because HAQu uses these existing data paths, the research team compared it to software communication tools "“ even though it is a piece of hardware.
HAQu is also more energy efficient. "It actually consumes more power when operating but, because it runs so much more quickly, the overall energy consumption of the chip actually decreases," Tuck says.
The next step for the research team is to incorporate the hardware into a prototype system to demonstrate its utility in a complex software environment.
The paper, "HAQu: Hardware-Accelerated Queueing for Fine-Grained Threading on a Chip Multiprocessor," is co-authored by Tuck, NC State Ph.D. students Sanghoon Lee and Devesh Tiwari, and Dr. Yan Solihin, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State. The paper will be presented Feb. 14 at the International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture in San Antonio, Texas. The research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation.
On the Net:
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Dalton McGuinty’s decision to use his minority position to prorogue (i.e. suspend) Ontario’s legislature is the latest in a series of disturbing tactics by Canadian politicians that threaten our democracy.
The act of proroguing a legislature supposed to be used to end one session of a parliament so that another can be started under a new legislative agenda.
- The new session starts with a Speech to the Throne that outlines the legislation that a government plans to bring forward during that session.
- The session normally ends when the government has met its stated legislative objectives and needs to table a new agenda.
- Prorogation is used to provide the time required to prepare the new agenda.
Prorogation is not intended to be used to abrogate democracy. Both McGuinty and Stephen Harper have used loopholes in the prorogation procedure to escape public enquiry that might lead to a vote of non-confidence in their minority governments.
Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right.
The date of the next session of parliament / legislature should be announced when the previous session is prorogued. The amount of time between sessions should be reasonable (60 to 90 days) so that a new legislative agenda can be prepared.
Unfortunately the Ontario Legislative Assembly Act does not require the date for the new session to be announced at the time of prorogation, and allows the Assembly to be suspended for up to a year.
The Ontario government doesn’t pay teachers for not teaching during the summer, or doctors who don’t see patients, so why do we pay our elected representatives for not representing us?
It’s time we closed these gaps in our democracy by amending the Legislative Assembly Act:
- Members of the Assembly should be paid only when the Assembly is in session or is prorogued for less than 90 days.
- The Lieutenant Governor should be required to proclaim the date of the next session at the time of proroguing the current session of the legislature.
- In the event that a minority government requests prorogation before completing all of their objectives as declared in their most recent Speech to the Throne, the Lieutenant Governor should be required to ask the other leaders in the Assembly if they can form a government which can carry out its objectives. Only if no other leader can form a government should premature prorogation be granted to a minority leader.
If every legislature and parliament in Canada made similar amendments, the likes of McGuinty or Harper would think twice about using prorogation to escape the democratic process.
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To understand the purpose of this post and the notations in these diagrams, please read the Introduction.
A Story involves 1 or more Characters who face 1 or more Challenges. Each Character has Motivations (minor Characters may have none); and each Motivation may give that Character a reason to face some Challenges.
A simple Story has 1 Timeline consisting of 1 or more Events, with each Event potentially involving a Challenge. A more complex Story may have multiple Timelines, especially if it is a fantasy or science fiction Story involving time travel. Every Event involves at least one Character.
A Story can be structured into 1 or more Acts, which represent major divisions of the action. (A Story not formally broken into Acts can be considered a 1 Act Story.) Three classical Story structures are One Act, Three Act, and Five Act:
In a short story, there may be only one brief, direct story following Characters through a small number of Events and a small number of Challenges. The Characters and Challenges are introduced through the resolution of the Events.
- Act I:Introduce the main Characters and a major Challenge. This might be the primary Challenge, or it might be a contributing or concealing Challenge.
- Act II:The Characters struggle to overcome the Challenges. Though they have some successes, Act II ends with them at their weakest and facing their biggest Challenge.
- Act III: The Characters find a way to overcome their weaknesses and triumph over the Challenges. Alternatively, they fail at the Challenges, and we see the consequences.
- Act I: Exposition.Introduce the main Characters and a major Challenge.
- Act II: Rising Action.The Characters struggle to overcome the Challenges. Though they have some successes, Act II ends with them at their weakest and facing their biggest Challenge.
- Act III: Climax (Turning Point).The Characters find a way to overcome their weaknesses and triumph over the Challenges; or they realize they’re outmatched.
- Act IV: Falling Action.The Characters successfully deal with remaining Challenges; or the remaining Challenges overcome them, and they try to escape.
- Act V: Denouement (Resolution). The final wrap-up of the Story.
Figure 3. Five Act Structure
A Story isn’t restricted to these classical structures; but critics, reviewers, and editors may assume the Story has some recognizable Act structure, and may disapprove if it rambles with no clear Acts. Notice also that Acts are somewhat in the eye of the beholder: different readers or viewers may not agree where the Act breaks are, and the author may have different ideas where the Act breaks are as well. (In a larger work broken into chapters, it’s very likely that the Act breaks fall on chapter breaks; but one Act may consist of multiple chapters.)
Each Act consists of 1 or more Scenes, where a Scene depicts 1 or more Events occurring at a given Location. A Scene is told from one Point of View, though the Point of View may change from Scene to Scene. Occasionally you may see the same Scene told from the Points of View of different Characters; but it’s simpler to treat each Point of View change as a new Scene. Some authors like to structure Scenes much as they do Acts: 1 Scene, 3 Scenes, 5 Scenes, etc. Others are more free-form.
The Scenes tell the Events of the Story, but not necessarily in the order those Events occur in a Timeline. For instance, one common method to get readers interested quickly is to tell a story in media res (Latin: in the middle of things). Rather than tell the reader a lot of introductory details, you jump straight to “the good stuff”. But that may leave details that the reader will need to know later; so through flashbacks, recollections, and other techniques, you fill those details in when you need them. Thus, the Scenes may play out of order from the Timeline. Sometimes you can tell a really interesting story simply by telling the scenes completely out of order based on the timeline, perhaps even omitting scenes and just implying their Events. A Timeline can be important to the author in order to understand and organize the Story; and the reader may form a mental Timeline to help understand the Events; but the Timeline itself is typically not a part of the Story.
It’s not required for a Story to have a Theme, but it’s common. The Theme is a point or lesson the author conveys through the Story. Again, the Theme is subjective, and authors and readers may not always agree what the Theme is.
We’ll explore each of these elements in more detail in later posts.
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1599 - 1658
Oliver Cromwell was born in Huntingdon, Huntingdonshire.
He studied at Cambridge, and in 1628 he was first elected
Cromwell opposed the absolute power of the crown, and when war broke out he became a military organizer for the Parliamentary forces. Realizing the inferior quality of the rebel troops, he organized a 'godly' regiment - the 'Ironsides'. The Ironsides were men of strong convictions who fought with religious enthusiasm.
After the Civil War and the execution of king Charles I, Cromwell became first chairman of the the new republic. He suppressed an insurrection in Ireland (1650) with a severity remembered by the Irish Catholics with bitterness. In the same year he defeated a Royalist army in Scotland, and he fought the Dutch in several naval battles.
In 1653 Cromwell dissolved Parliament and he became Lord protector of the new puritanical republic. As Lord protector he concluded the Anglo-Dutch War, sent an expeditionary force to the Spanish West Indies and destroyed the Spanish fleet at Teneriffe.
In the fall of 1658 Cromwell died, and England fell away from his attempt to realize a puritanical commonwealth of free men.
www link :
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The circuitry behind this is fairly simple. It relies on the principle that the default state of a Redstone Torch is on, and that when power is applied to the block that it is mounted on, it will turn off. When no power is applied to the bottom block in the circuit, the bottom and top Redstone Torches are on, and the middle is off, because the bottom one is powering the block the middle one is attached to.
The bottom piston is on because the bottom Redstone Torch is powering it. The middle piston is also on, because the bottom Redstone Torch is powering the cobblestone directly above it, also powering the piston adjacent. The top piston is on because the top Redstone Torch is powering it.
When a current is applied to the bottom block of cobblestone, the bottom Redstone Torch is turned off, because it is mounted on the cobblestone. This makes the bottom piston retract. Because no power is being applied to the middle cobblestone block, the middle piston turns off, and the middle Redstone Torch also turns on (because power isn't being applied to it anymore). This, in turn, turns off the top Redstone Torch (because power is being applied to the cobblestone block it is mounted on), turning the top piston off.
And yes, this design can be repeated upwards infinitely (but there will be a noticeable delay between the topmost and bottommost pistons, as it takes time for each Redstone Torch to change states).
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A new program beginning this year at Stevenson Elementary School will teach students the basics of the Spanish language even as they learn the fundamentals of writing and reading English.
Under the new program, students in grades 1-3 will participate in a 30-minute Spanish class each week.
The class will connect to a fourth-grade Spanish class that also will begin this year at Edison Intermediate/Larry Larson Middle School.
Ultimately, the district's goal is to build a foreign-language program that will carry students from elementary school through high school, Stevenson Principal Angela Ullum said.
"Certainly, we're not expecting that our elementary students will become fluent in Spanish," she said. "This year the focus will be on building basic vocabulary and communication in Spanish."
Stevenson's program will be taught by Emily Deprez, who has taught Spanish classes at the elementary level the past seven years in Wake County, N.C.
Deprez said she and her family are making a return home to central Ohio. She previously taught in the Hilliard City School District.
The curriculum at Stevenson will include students learning Spanish words in categories such as greetings and introductions, colors and shapes, body parts, family and weather, she said.
"It's the basic skills that will provide a building block for using Spanish throughout school and the rest of their lives," Deprez said.
Elementary-age children demonstrate a particular knack for learning language, even a foreign language, she said.
"Their brains are just wired to learn language at that age," Deprez said.
Early in her career, Deprez taught high school Spanish.
She said she has found elementary-age students show greater skill at learning another language than the older students.
"They are so eager and excited to learn Spanish," Deprez said. "They come into class really eager to learn. They also love to learn about the Spanish culture.
"It's really a lot of fun to teach them."
For more information about Stevenson's foreign-language class and curriculum, visit rlsspanish.weebly.com.
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Hydraulic fracturing may cause more earthquakes than previously thought, a new study of US gas drilling fields suggests.
A panel of seismic experts decided it was "highly probable" that the company's drilling was responsible for two quakes and 28 aftershocks in Blackpool
The "fracking" process involves injecting large volumes of water and chemicals underground to bring methane to the surface. It has long been associated with causing small underground tremors and occasionally with earthquakes that are noticed on the surface.
But the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found at least 59 minor quakes in the Barnett shale region in Texas, ranging from 1.4 to 2.5 in magnitude, that had not been reported to the US National Earthquake Information Centre.
Researchers used 400 seismographs on the site for two years to build up a comprehensive picture of a fracking field. The number of earthquakes may have been increased by drilling in a region that already had some geological fault lines, the University of Texas researchers said.
An Australian drilling engineering and seismology expert, Mark Tingay from the University of Adelaide, said the findings added to what is already known about injecting fluid underground - whether during fracking for gas or drilling to release geothermal energy.
"What they're looking for is the threshold beyond which it would trigger a larger earthquake," Dr Tingay said. Hydraulic fracturing did cause many minor tremors, but almost all would not be felt by humans on the surface, he said.
The Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association pointed to a separate University of Texas study that found "no documented cases of induced earthquake from hydraulic fracturing. Only one documented case of induced seismicity has been recorded globally, that occurring at Blackpool in northwest England, in 2011, and according to independent experts, the event resulted from a rare combination of geologic factors not likely to be encountered with any frequency in the future."
The study is a reference to gas drilling in the UK by a partly Australian-owned company, Cuadrilla Resources. A panel of seismic experts decided it was "highly probable" that the company's drilling was responsible for two quakes and 28 aftershocks in Blackpool.
Asked if earth tremors had been known to take place in Australia as a result of fracking, an APPEA spokesman said: "The answer to your question is 'no'."
Dr Tingay said many kinds of drilling and fluid injection had caused earthquakes in Australia, but they were so small people rarely noticed.
"It's wrong to say we don't cause earthquakes with oil and gas, because we know we do," he said. "We can theoretically just do that from agricultural water production as well. This study is saying that there's a higher frequency of earthquakes near some large injection sites.
The largest known quake thought to be caused by underground fluid injection in Australia was at a geothermal drilling site in South Australia's Cooper Basin, Dr Tingay said. That caused a local quake of magnitude 3.7, he said, though it had received little attention because it was in an insolated area.
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At times the desert can make people seem small and inconsequential and even foolish. Bill Schlesinger feels that way today. With spikes and tape measure, he and co-worker Jane Raikes have staked out some 100 square yards of desert land in the Jornada Basin, 15 miles north of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Their claim includes some low-slung olive-drab creosote bushes, a clump of wispy tan snakeweed, and a lot of bare soil. Some ants roam the ground. A palm-size Texas horned lizard tries to stay cool in the shade of a creosote. It is a patch of desert that looks pretty much like countless other patches of desert in North America.
Why anyone--even someone like Schlesinger, a biogeochemist from Duke University in North Carolina--should bother to mark and study this particular patch of desert is hard for an outsider to divine. Schlesinger is aware of this. So, as he calls out pairs of numbers to Raikes, he is not surprised by the puzzled looks he gets from passing weekend horseback riders. Raikes goes to the corresponding coordinates in the plot, armed with a rock hammer and a metal pipe. She drives the pipe two inches into the ground, the blows ringing out in the silence. Then she pries the pipe out and taps the clogged soil into a Ziploc bag. I can see it in the press now, says Schlesinger. ‘They banged a pipe in the dirt many times and found it exciting.’
Despite his habitual self-mockery, Schlesinger knows that the tablespoons of soil he and Raikes are collecting may help reveal a profound secret of the desert. If Raikes and Schlesinger had come to this spot 150 years ago, they would have been surrounded by almost uninterrupted grasslands stretching across the basin. Somehow the Jornada has since changed, and Schlesinger, Raikes, and the other researchers who work here think they know why. In many cases, they believe, a desert is like a living organism. Like a cactus or a sidewinder, it needs parents to give it birth, but once kicked into the world it can grow and thrive on its own. Deserts aren’t necessarily the product of outside forces like decreasing rainfall, they say. Rather, it’s the internal ecology of the desert itself--its web of plants, animals, and soil--that drives its growth to maturity and stability. Nor does the transformation of a grassland to a desert necessarily mean the creation of a place where life is more scarce--only one where life is rearranged.
Grasslands are changing into full-blown deserts not only in the Jornada Basin but around the world, on every continent but Antarctica--on every continent, that is, where humans have settled. In North America alone an estimated 1.1 billion acres have been desertified, and researchers suggest that global warming may generate more desert acreage in the coming century. Desertification is sufficiently serious a threat that representatives of 87 countries have drafted a treaty to combat it; only two other environmental crises--ozone destruction and global warming--have earned such attention. But scientists still argue about exactly how desertification happens, how much of it is a matter of natural fluctuations, and how much is man-made. The political impact of the debate is huge--witness the conflict between ranchers and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt over grazing rights on public land. If the model Schlesinger and his colleagues at the Jornada have built proves true, it will inject some desperately needed science into this debate.
There’s a touch of ecological hubris in trying to generalize to the entire globe from the Jornada’s 310 square miles, but then, the Jornada is an exceptional place. It is arguably the best-studied desert in the world. As Kris Havstad, the director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Jornada Experimental Range, drives around on a tour of the basin with Schlesinger and Raikes, he recounts the Jornada’s long history: As early as 1600, Spanish wagons were traveling from Mexico City to Santa Fe with livestock. They tried to avoid the Rio Grande because the terrain was broken and heavy and they’d get bogged down. So they crossed over the mountains, up into the plains. The problem is, there’s almost no water here. You read the journals people kept of their trip, and when they get here, they get really quiet.
The 90-mile trail was soon given the name Jornada del Muerto-- Journey of the Dead. Dry as it was, though, the basin was not a desert at the time.
Nothing could exceed the beauty of the country we traveled over this morning, wrote May Humphrey Stacy after crossing the basin in 1857. The whole extent, as far as vision reached ahead, was a level plain, covered thickly with the most luxurious grass.
The Jornada Basin is at the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, which runs south 1,000 miles from New Mexico, through the western wedge of Texas and down the backbone of Mexico. Creosote bushes and small, spiny mesquite trees dominate the landscape. Yet for thousands of years the Jornada had been a stable grassland. The closely packed tufts of golden- stalked black grama grass attracted Mexican cattle raisers, and after them, Americans.
But because those early settlers could water their livestock only at springs in the bordering mountains, they raised rather few cattle. It wasn’t until we brought the technology to drill wells in places like this, where the water is 400 feet down, that this land opened up to heavy grazing, says Havstad. After water was brought to the surface in the 1880s, there were 20,000 head of cattle out here. This place just got hammered.
By the turn of the century people had begun to notice that the Jornada was changing. The grass was thinning, and the mesquite and creosote were spreading. The ground became bare; in some places low dunes formed. Ranching was becoming less and less profitable. Similar changes were happening throughout the American West, and in 1912 USDA officials fenced off 192,000 acres of the basin and set up the Experimental Range, where they tried to understand what was happening and how they could stop it.
As Havstad tells the tale of the Jornada, he is looking out the truck window for some of that history. Half a mile down the road he finds a red ribbon tied to a barbed-wire fence; 50 yards from the road is another ribbon tied to one of the spear-shaped leaves that explode from the top of a soap-tree yucca. Nearby, four rusted steel posts sprout from the ground, forming the corners of a square. When the USDA took over the Jornada 83 years ago, it sent surveyors to stake out 104 such sites, and for decades thereafter USDA researchers faithfully sketched the vegetation in each square. Havstad has some of the early drawings of this plot in hand. They show scattered patches of grass. Now the four posts enclose only mesquite.
These early researchers did not consider themselves ecologists. They were range scientists, dedicated to figuring out how to make the Jornada grow food for cattle. They did everything they could to stop the basin’s transformation. They cut the herd down to a few hundred head. They tore up mesquite, poisoned the shrubs, seeded grasses, and dug giant pits to help water penetrate the ground. They failed. The Jornada researchers estimate that in 1858 about 5 percent of the range was dominated by mesquite or creosote, 37 percent had a few shrubs in it, and the remaining 58 percent was shrub free. Just over 100 years later, in 1963, 64 percent of the range was dominated by mesquite and creosote and none of the remaining 36 percent could unqualifiedly be called grassland any longer. Now, Havstad estimates, about 80 percent is classic desert shrub land.
Heartbreaking as the desertification was to range scientists, it made the Jornada a fascinating place for desert ecologists. You can find virtually every kind of vegetation unit there that you would find anywhere in the Chihuahuan Desert, says Walt Whitford. Whitford began studying the Jornada in 1964 when he came to New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. The short drive from campus and long history of research made it an attractive place for doing ecology. And most important, says Whitford, he could really do ecology there. You can go to national parks, but you can’t do experiments in them. The Jornada is a huge piece of land dedicated to research. We can move livestock, impose droughts, burn strips--we can do almost anything you can imagine.
In 1981 Whitford launched the Jornada Long-Term Ecological Research Project. His own expertise was in desert animals, and he enticed other researchers to join him to study the Jornada’s plants, its soil chemistry, its patterns of wind and water. But by the mid-eighties, as the data crammed their filing cabinets and computers, Whitford’s team began to feel more like bookkeepers than scientists. The big problem was to relate what we were doing at a single site in New Mexico to global desertification, explains Duke ecologist James Reynolds. Precisely how had the Jornada changed, they asked, and was the same process responsible for changes elsewhere?
The first glimmers of an answer came in 1988, on an afternoon when the senior Jornada researchers closeted themselves in a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, during an ecology meeting. That day, in the course of their long conversations, they first realized that they had all noticed a simple but important pattern in the Jornada: the desert is patchy. Its vegetation is obviously patchy even to the untrained eye, looking like an archipelago in a drained ocean. But the researchers had discovered that the desert is also patchy in unseen ways, such as in the distribution of its water, nutrients, and microbes. Grasslands, on the other hand, are relatively uniform carpets of plants and resources. Find what drives an ecosystem from smooth to patchy, the Jornada researchers decided that afternoon, and you’ve explained desertification.
Over the next several years they constructed something they call the Jornada model, based on observations, experiments, and intuition. Like all models, it is a story, and it begins in the 1800s, when the basin was a grassland. Though its climate was precariously dry, the ecosystem had remained stable for millennia, thanks in part to its ability to create its own weather. Its spongy soil soaked up rain, and when the water evaporated back into the air, it formed clouds that then recycled the rain back to the basin.
The grassland was also able to shut out competing plants. While a few creosote bushes and mesquite trees grew in the basin, they had a tenuous existence. They’re a native element that was always there, just waiting, says Havstad. Shrub seedlings, though, were particularly vulnerable to the fires that swept the grassland, and the ones that survived faced a crippling water shortage: the shallow, dense roots of the grass absorbed the rain before it could percolate down to the shrubs’ deeper roots.
In the late 1800s the vast unmanaged herds of cattle that were made possible by the advanced drilling technology helped the shrubs penetrate the grassland’s defenses. Simply by eating the grass, the cattle impaired its ability to photosynthesize and grow. Less obviously--but just as important--they may well have made the landscape patchy. The ecologists speculate that as the cattle trampled the ground to their favorite feeding spots, the ground they habitually walked on became less able to absorb water. Rain flowed over this soil rather than into it, forming channels. No longer lingering in the upper soil, where grass roots grew, the water instead either escaped downstream or percolated through the channel bottoms, down to where only the deep-rooted shrubs could get to it. Hoofprints gave rise to pools of water that infiltrated the soil, creating spots for a seedling to take root and thrive. Water was no longer evenly spread over the basin, but now concentrated in scattered places.
By the time the giant herds left the Jornada, they had pushed it over a critical threshold. Now the ecology of the desert itself took up where outside influences left off. Thanks to patchiness, shrubs established a foothold, and they made the patchiness even greater.
The shrubs are deeply and widely rooted, explains Schlesinger, so they’re obtaining nitrogen from a big area of the desert. It’s at low concentrations out there, but they’re getting it and concentrating it in their tissues. Then as the shrubs drop their leaves, the leaves fall under the shrub. It’s like a pumping mechanism. They’re sucking nutrients in from far and wide and dumping them under their canopies. The leaves decompose under the shrub and the nitrogen gets circulated. The bulk of the nitrogen is what gets circulated from under the shrub, but every year there’s new nitrogen that’s also being added from these roots.
The shrubs rearranged the nitrogen in the basin from a smooth layer to concentrated and increasingly isolated islands of fertility. Wind and rain began to make these islands grow faster. Gusts scoured the bare patches, carrying away nutrient-rich dust, but when they hit the canopies of creosote and mesquite, they broke into whirling, weakened eddies, dropping their dust--as well as dead leaves and other organic matter--to the base of the shrubs. When a raindrop hit unprotected soil, it shoveled up the topsoil and carried it away in the overland flow of water, and when the water hit the downslope edge of the patch, it carved away even more soil. But the shrub roots protected their islands from the flow, and their leaves broke the fall of raindrops, which dribbled gently to the spongy ground below.
The mesquite and creosote also brought animals adapted to them, which in their own ways helped the islands grow. Termites and kangaroo rats collected food from a wide range and stored it in their nests, which they often made under shrubs. In this way they brought a lot of organic matter into the islands and took it away from surrounding areas. Meanwhile, nests they established away from the shrubs often became ideal birthplaces for new seedlings.
Even the shape of an insect’s mouth could help build the desert. In a grassland, most of the processing is done by chewers, says Whitford, and the droppings of these grassland insects--the scientific term is frass- -consist of tough, complex material that spreads over the ground before it finally breaks down. But the insects you find on shrubs, he explains, are predominantly guys with mouthparts like little hypodermic needles, and they’re sticking them directly into the vascular system of the plant and siphoning off its sap. The frass is basically a simple sugar solution. When that hits the soil, you’ve got a ready source of energy for the microbes to use and break down into the soil, where it’s available for growing plants.
According to the model, all these feedback cycles will eventually, over the course of millennia, reach an equilibrium in the Jornada. When a shrub dies, the island it leaves will be a nursery for a new one, which will be protected from fire by the distance from one island to the next. Neither hard, bare soil nor shrub-dominated islands will offer any hope to colonizing grass. And since the soil will hold less and less water, rain recycling will stop, making the desert even drier.
Ecology being such a slow science, the researchers knew that by proposing this model they were indenturing themselves for decades. Seven years after their first brainstorm, they sound hopeful. Just about all the evidence we’ve collected so far supports it, says Reynolds. New Mexico State University biologist Laura Huenneke, for example, has been measuring the mass of the Jornada vegetation, and she finds that the central tenet of the model holds true: arid grassland and shrub-dominated desert contain about the same weight of plant material. It’s just arranged differently.
The researchers even feel confident enough now to argue that the Jornada model explains desertification in other parts of the world. The grass may not be black grama and the shrubs may not be mesquite and creosote, but the basic process seems universal.
The model also ought to apply to the spread of deserts before humans began to change the landscape, with slow shifts of climate playing the role of grazing cattle. As a grassland experienced centuries of decreasing rainfall, this scenario goes, the upper level of the soil would dry out. Grasses, with their shallow roots, would suffer, but shrubs would still be able to tap the deep water that trickled into the ground from storm runoff, and they’d start building their islands. A simultaneous change in the composition of the atmosphere could speed the process. Grasses are much more efficient absorbers of carbon dioxide than are plants like mesquite and creosote, and so they can thrive on low levels of the gas. But when the atmospheric level of CO2 jumped from time to time, grasslands lost their competitive advantage and became vulnerable to shrubs and patchiness.
As they test the model further, the researchers crawl over the basin like a swarm of locusts. Schlesinger and Raikes, for example, bang their pipes into the dirt and find it fascinating because they want to see how the distribution of chemicals in desert soil changes over millennia. The model predicts that the chemicals important to life get concentrated under vegetation, while unnecessary elements like lithium and bromine remain smoothly scattered. Schlesinger is collecting soil samples from Jornada grassland and shrub land and comparing them with samples from the Mojave Desert in California, where a dry climate has allowed creosote to build islands of fertility for 10,000 years. If the model is right, he should see a progression in the distribution of chemicals from young desert to old.
However, it is not these last stages of the model that are most controversial, but the first ones--in which grazing supposedly gives islands of fertility their start. The human causes of desertification and their cures have attracted vast amounts of money and prompted political wrangling. Billions of dollars have already been spent in various schemes to fight desertification, even though researchers are only beginning to understand how it works. Critics maintain that developing countries use the fear of spreading deserts as a way to guarantee a flow of aid. But the argument isn’t limited to Third World nations. In the United States, environmental groups are urging Secretary Babbitt to increase fees for grazing on the 280 million acres of public rangeland. Cheap grazing rights, they say, degrade the land, drive species extinct, and lead to desertification. Ranchers claim that they’ve improved their grazing practices since the turn of the century, so that the only real effect of raising grazing fees will be their bankruptcy.
The Jornada researchers try their best to keep the hue and cry from affecting their work. The ranching industry doesn’t like us at all, says Schlesinger. They’d love to say that cows make no difference, that it’s all drought or climate change or kangaroo rats. But I don’t see these things as mutually exclusive. There’s no point in our singling out one thing at the expense of others.
The debate has a hell of a lot less to do with science than emotion, says Whitford. It’s about economics, about whose ox is getting gored. Hopefully we can provide some factual information. We don’t have unequivocal evidence that there are these links; that’s why we’re doing the experiments we’re doing.
So far those experiments have given them results that are suggestive but not conclusive. In 1982 the Jornada ecologists closed off some plots from the USDA’s cattle. Over the following ten years many of the plots that still had some grass in them dramatically improved, compared with unprotected grass nearby; meanwhile, shrub-dominated plots saw no change. Still, some of the plots untouched by cows also died out, suggesting that drought too must play a role in the long-term survival of grassland.
However, New Mexico State University ecologist William Conley has shown that droughts may not have been so important in the Jornada. Grass is indeed susceptible to drought, but only when it strikes during the summer growing season. The USDA’s 80-year record of rainfall in the basin shows that droughts this century have actually hit the Jornada more during the winter, the growing season of mesquite and creosote. If anything, they should have helped the grassland survive. Conley also made a statistical analysis of the rainfall record that shows that the droughts were not freakish; they had probably hit the Jornada every few decades for centuries. If they had the power to desertify, the Jornada should have become a desert long before Mexicans first passed through it.
That leaves grazing as the most likely culprit. Only now, though, are the Jornada ecologists performing the experiment that can document the steps by which cattle may initiate islands of fertility. Almost dead center in the basin, a wave of mesquite is rolling over some of the last remaining black grama. In 1993, on the border between the two plant communities, USDA researchers set up 18 fenced enclosures, each about 750 feet square. In 9 enclosures they hacked down the mesquite and painted the stumps with herbicide; the other 9 sites were left untouched. Whitford, who has continued to study the Jornada since he joined the Environmental Protection Agency in 1992, cataloged all the plants and animals. Schlesinger, who with Reynolds now heads the Jornada Long-Term Ecological Research Project, measured the distribution of dozens of chemicals in the soil. Before this winter is over, Havstad will bring two dozen head of cattle into 6 of the corrals and let them graze for 24 hours, in which time they should devour two-thirds of the grass and trample the ground. This summer he will let them loose in 6 others, while the 6 remaining will stay unmolested. In the next five years the researchers will measure how the soil, plants, and animals change in response. Two of the grazed plots will be burned and 2 others will be covered in rain-out shelters to see how fires and droughts enhance or reduce the effects of grazing.
If the story of the Jornada does turn out to be the story of other deserts, then ecologists should be able to foretell the story of deserts not yet born. And that’s a skill that may be in high demand in the coming decades. As we burn fossil fuels and add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, we once again take away the competitive advantage grass has in a CO2-poor world. Simulations also suggest that global warming may make continental interiors drier. Grasslands that now get comfortable levels of rain may become vulnerable to grazing, as the Jornada was in the nineteenth century.
For over 20 years Reynolds has been turning data collected in the Jornada into mathematical equations. By calculating 200 variables, he can now accurately simulate the year-to-year evolution of a few square yards of the Jornada, whether it’s occupied by grass, an island of fertility, or bare soil. Now he’s stitching these patches together into a quilt that represents the entire basin. Using its actual topography and weather, he lets the patches interact. Shrubs deplete the surrounding soil, and bare patches help erode neighboring topsoil as water flows from one patch to the next. By measuring the growth of creosote and mesquite in an isolated, CO2- flooded area, Reynolds hopes to be able to predict how the basin will evolve in the near future.
Ultimately the simulation should be able to predict the fate of any grassland. An ecologist in Chile, for instance, could feed a computer data on the local topography, weather patterns, and patterns of vegetation and see how likely the land would be to shift over to desert. We’ll be able to say how sensitive places will be to grazing and climate change, says Reynolds. We can say, this area is not beyond the threshold and it would be worth trying to restore it, but this other area has changes that are irreversible.
Irreversible is a tough word, but the Jornada model makes clear why most efforts to restore self-sustaining grasslands are futile. Take away the shrubs, and the landscape, full of islands of fertility, is still perfectly suited for new creosote and mesquite to invade. We’ve talked about a homogenization experiment, says Reynolds, in which we’d go out to some of the big dunes where it’s really heterogeneous and just bulldoze those babies and see if when you distribute everything, the grasses would be successful again. This would just be an academic pursuit; it wouldn’t be a restoration tool. Deserts do turn to grasslands naturally, but only when thousands of years of steadily increasing rainfall counteracts the power of the islands of fertility.
Perhaps the name Jornada del Muerto should now be changed to Jornada del Desierto. Just as people have journeyed across the basin for centuries, the land itself is taking a journey that these researchers are now able to trace. According to Whitford, history may provide a glimpse of its destination.
Climatically, North Africa should be a grassland savanna, he says. You can go back to historical records and read about the trees on the mountains and lush grass, about how they were the breadbasket for Rome, providing grain and meat to the empire. Well, now it looks like parts of Nevada. You put these things together and say, ‘Well, the model probably worked there, and it looks like it followed the trajectory that we’re following in places like the Jornada.’ We’re well on our way.
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Skip to comments.VISTA stares deep into the cosmos: Treasure trove of new infrared data made available to astronomers
Posted on 03/21/2012 11:13:00 AM PDT by Red Badger
ESO's VISTA telescope has created the widest deep view of the sky ever made using infrared light. This new picture of an unremarkable patch of sky comes from the UltraVISTA survey and reveals more than 200 000 galaxies. It forms just one part of a huge collection of fully processed images from all the VISTA surveys that is now being made available by ESO to astronomers worldwide. UltraVISTA is a treasure trove that is being used to study distant galaxies in the early Universe as well as for many other science projects.
The telescope has been trained on the same patch of sky repeatedly to slowly accumulate the very dim light of the most distant galaxies. In total more than six thousand separate exposures with a total effective exposure time of 55 hours, taken through five different coloured filters, have been combined to create this picture. This image from the UltraVISTA survey is the deepest infrared view of the sky of its size ever taken.
The VISTA telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile is the world's largest survey telescope and the most powerful infrared survey telescope in existence. Since it started work in 2009 most of its observing time has been devoted to public surveys, some covering large parts of the southern skies and some more focused on small areas. The UltraVISTA survey has been devoted to the COSMOS field, an apparently almost empty patch of sky which has already been extensively studied using other telescopes, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. UltraVISTA is the deepest of the six VISTA surveys by far and reveals the faintest objects.
Data from the VISTA surveys totalling more than 6 terabytes of images are now being processed in data centres in the United Kingdom, and in the case of UltraVISTA in France, and are flowing back into the ESO science archive and being made available to astronomers around the world.
At first glance the UltraVISTA image looks unremarkable, a few bright stars and a sprinkling of fainter ones. But in fact almost all of those fainter objects are not stars in the Milky Way, but very remote galaxies, each containing billions of stars. Enlarging the image to fill the screen, and zooming in reveals more and more of them, and the image records more than 200 000 galaxies in total.
This view shows a section of the widest deep view of the sky ever taken using infrared light, with a total effective exposure time of 55 hours. It was created by combining more than 6,000 individual images from the VISTA survey telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile. This picture shows a region of the sky known as the COSMOS field in the constellation of Sextans (The Sextant). More than 200,000 galaxies have been identified in this picture. Credit: ESO/UltraVISTA team. Acknowledgement: TERAPIX/CNRS/INSU/CASU
SEE REMARKABLE VIDEO AT LINK!
This video offers a zoom on UltraVISTA the widest deep view of the sky ever taken using infrared light. The sequence starts with view of most of the sky. We zoom towards the faint constellation of Sextans (The Sextant) and then close in on a much-studied region of sky called the COSMOS field. The final very detailed infrared view comes from the VISTA telescope at ESOs Paranal Observatory. Credit: ESO/A. Fujii/Digitized Sky Survey 2/UltraVISTA teamESO. Music: John Dyson (from the album Moonwind)
To have even our small place in such a large tapestry is astounding...
Proof of God.
Proof BY God.................
We are but a speck of dust in the Sahara desert, comparatively speaking........
There are clearly, so many planets to strip-mine, so many forests to pollute, so many alien races to be predjudiced and racist against, and subjegated into slavery -- because that's what we in the GOP does!
And I won't live long enough to see ANY of it.
Or is that “boggled”? Sorry, I was a few light-years away...
A speck of dust on a speck of dust. The usual human associations on the size of scale break down pretty quickly.
And you can bet at this very moment, liberals are making plans to support alien same-sex marriages and demonize the hated Republicanoids.
Not to mention wanting to put in place curbs on warp-emissions to prevent Galactic Warming.
Yes, I see it!.....LOL!.........
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
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An attribute that belongs to neither the Parent nor
Key roles, a Regular attribute is used to support our dimensions
with additional adjectives. That is, the regular attribute allows us
to associate additional information with the dimension to support analysis of
characteristics we deem important within our respective analytical
environments. (We address Regular attributes throughout my Introduction to MSSQL Server Analysis Services
A Parent attribute is used to support the
recursive, parent-child relationships among the members of a dimension
requiring such support. Each dimension is limited to only one attribute
of this usage type. (We address parent-child dimensions within other
articles of my Introduction to MSSQL Server
Analysis Services series.)
Every dimension contains a single Key attribute.
The attribute member key serves as the link that associates its
containing dimension to a given measure group. Throughout the Analysis
Services documentation, as well as within numerous books and periodicals
based upon the subject matter, the attribute key is likened to the
primary key within a relational table: a relationship, similar to a join within
the relational world (relating two tables), is established between the dimension
and measure group(s) through the presence of the attribute key.
The attribute member key for a
representative dimension, the Geography dimension within the AdventureWorks sample cube, appears as
shown in Illustration
Illustration 1: A
Representative Key Attribute ...
Our focus within this article will be the attribute member key. The attribute member key is critical to the identification
of unique attribute members within Analysis Services. The key,
as we shall see, is specified within the KeyColumns setting, within the Source
group of a dimensions Attribute properties. (We overviewed the Source
properties in my Database Journal article Dimension
Attributes: Introduction and Overview, Part V.)
The members of an attribute in Analysis Services
can have one of two types of keys: a simple key or a composite key.
In this, the first half of this article, we will consider the characteristics
and properties of a simple key. In Part II, we will consider the
characteristics and properties of a composite key. A simple key
can be of any data type allowed within an Analysis Services database. It
must, of course, be unique, and is defined by a single value.
Before we get started working within a sample cube clone,
we will need to prepare the local environment for the practice session. We
will take steps to accomplish this within the section that follows.
Preparation: Locate and Open the Sample Basic UDM Created Earlier
In Dimensional Model Components: Dimensions Part I, we created a sample basic UDM within which to perform the
steps of the practice sessions we set out to undertake in the various articles
of this subseries. Once we had ascertained that the new practice database
appeared to be in place, and once we had renamed it to ANSYS065_Basic AS DB,
we began our examination of dimension properties. We continued with our
examination of attributes within the same practice environment, which we
will now access (as we did within Dimensional Model Components: Dimensions Part I and Dimensional Attributes: Introduction
and Overview Parts I through
by taking the following steps within the SQL Server Business Intelligence
NOTE: Please access the UDM
which we prepared in Dimensional Model Components: Dimensions Part I before proceeding with this
article. If you have not completed the preparation to which I refer in the
previous article, or if you cannot locate / access the Analysis Services
database with which we worked there, please consider taking the preparation
steps provided in Dimensional Model Components: Dimensions Part I before continuing, and prospectively
saving the objects with which you work, so as to avoid the need to repeat the
preparation process we have already undertaken for subsequent related articles
within this subseries.
and click, the SQL
Server Business Intelligence Development Studio, as appropriate.
briefly see a splash page that lists the components installed on the PC, and
then Visual Studio .NET 2005 opens at the Start page.
Close the Start
page, if desired.
-> Open from the main menu.
Services Database ... from the cascading menu, as depicted in Illustration
Illustration 2: Opening
the Analysis Services Database ...
to Database dialog appears.
the Connect to existing database radio button is selected, type the Analysis
Server name into the Server input box atop the dialog.
selector just beneath, labeled Database, select ANSYS065_Basic AS DB, as shown in Illustration 3.
Selecting the New Basic Analysis Services Database ...
settings on the dialog at default, click OK.
Server Business Intelligence Development Studio briefly reads the database from
the Analysis Server, and then we see the Solution Explorer
populated with the database objects. Having overviewed the properties of dimension
attributes in previous articles, we will continue to get some hands-on
exposure to properties for an example attribute member key, from
within our sample UDM.
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In the context of this wiki, graphics refers to pictures, images, and other artwork that can be used in an eBook. A specialized form of graphics are the glyphs used in fonts. See also editing graphics.
Types of Graphics
There are two types of graphics data, bitmapped and vector. It is possible for an image to be built out of both forms. For example a vector representation could be displayed over the top of a bitmap.
Bitmapped image
This format is also called raster image from the way is it usually displayed. In its simplest form a bitmap draws a picture by laying down a series of dots. If these dots are small enough and laid closely together in a rectangle the image can be discerned. This is the way a TV and a computer screen displays a picture or video. It is also the way digital camera pictures are stored.
One dot is referred to as a pixel when it is represented on an electronic screen since it may be represented with more than one dot. For example, on a TV a color pixel is built from 3 different colored dots (Red, Green, Blue). RGB is another term used to describe the bitmapped format utilizing the first letters of the three colors. In digital color a true color image will devote a full Byte, 8 bits, to each of the three colors thus a single pixel will have 24 bits of data.
While RGB is a popular format there are also other formats. For example a format described as YCbCr would describe the data information by breaking out the Brightness (monochrome data) Y from the Color component. With this definition a Gray scale image could be produced from the Y component alone. The Cb, chroma blue, would contain the data needed to represent the Blue and Cr represents the red data. Note that subtracting the B and R data from the Y data would represent the G (Green) data.
While a bitmap is typically rectangular in shape but it is possible to make it seem to be an arbitrary shape. Some bitmap formats support a transparent color that allows you to see through the graphic to the underlying background. This can be used to create odd shaped images and even holes in the image. Some formats can even support a partially transparent color. Of course bitmaps can even represent characters as in Bitmapped fonts.
Vector image
This format is more like a person would draw. It is lines and shapes drawn like you would do with a pen. However, unlike a free hand drawing these lines and shapes are described mathematically like you or a draftsman might do with graph paper. A line could be described by two xy coordinates on the paper. Attributes could be defined to describe the thickness of the line, the color, etc. Curved lines can also be described mathematically. Closed vector objects can be empty (transparent inside) or filled with a color similar to coloring the image in a coloring book. Objects are typically rendered in a defined order such that later objects are on top of earlier objects which may cause them to obscure a portion of the earlier object. In some cases transparency can be defined to permit the earlier object to show through.
Many standard graphic formats do not support the use of vector formats. TIFF can use a vector format. Vector and Bitmaps images can be combined by drawing the vector data over the top of a bitmap image.
The ePUB standard requires support for SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics, format. This is a full vector format and is intended to provide searchable text and scalable images, two things that raster images have trouble with. PDF can handle SVG as well.
The concept of zooming means to reduce (zoom out) or enlarge (zoom in) the object. For text this generally means to change the amount of text on a screen by increasing or decreasing the individual fonts that are used for the text and then reflowing the page. The font change can be done with scaleable fonts or by replacing the font with one of a different size. For images zooming does different things depending on the type of image.
A bitmap image starts at 100% when there is a one to one correspondence between the pixels in the image with the pixels on the screen. Bitmapped graphic images zoom out by removing or merging pixels to achieve the desired size. There can be slight distortion of content unless the zoomed scale is an exact multiple of the source file. Zooming in replicates the pixels which can cause distortion due to uneven replication and will cause blockiness if the zoom in is so much that the duplicated pixels start becoming visible as pixels. Zooming an image beyond the edge of the screen will require panning to see the rest of the image. With some eBook formats the original image is intentionally shrunk for initial display so that the user can zoom in without losing display resolution of the image. Sometimes zooming is accomplished by replacing the image with another image with more or less pixels to avoid the distortion effects. Of course this causes the eBook to be larger to accommodate the separate images.
A vector image typically does not change quality or get distorted as it is zoomed in or out. The image itself is stored as points and objects in a database so it is not stored in a form that looks like an image. Instead the image is created on the screen based on the scaling of coordinates. Zooming just recomputes and recreates the image with a new scale factor. While vector images will scale well there can still be distortion. Sometimes an image is created by connecting point with lines to form an outline of a complex shape. Having too few points can cause distortion when zooming in. Using a Bézier curve can sometimes reduce this distortion.
Graphic Formats
The Graphics formats listed here are the predominant ones that are used in eBooks. There are many other formats that are not covered because of their limited use in eBooks.
BMP is the extension used for a BitMaP image file which is an uncompressed graphics format developed by Microsoft. The same format can be compressed and if so the extension is normally changed to RLE. A program that claims to support BMP files may or may not be able to support an RLE file. A generic term that is applied to BMP files is RGB files since the bitmap is made up of red, green, and blue information. Some Generic bitmap files may not list the colors in this order.
A 24 bit uncompressed BMP file is huge and should not be used on any but the smallest of images. Reducing the number of bits may reduce the file size considerably with a sacrifice in the quality of the color image due to the reduced colors if they were in use.
Most OS's other than Windows do not support BMP files and it is not standard for web browsers although accepted by Internet Explorer. TIF files can contain a generic version of BMP data. Device-independent bitmap, DIB, is the term used to describe a generic bitmap. Windows also uses this format for its icons which often have an ICO extension. See also PPM.
GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format and developed in 1987 by CompuServe. It is a lossless bitmapped graphics format which means the compression technology does not lose any of the image detail. It was designed for the reproduction of line drawings but can work well with photographs. Widely used on the Internet for logotypes and drawings. The coding scheme uses a LZW lossless compression scheme which is patented but patents ran out in 2004.
GIF files use a palletized color scheme which means that the pixel color is selected from a predefined pallet of colors. There can be only a maximum of 256 different colors (8 bits) in the pallet but different pictures can have their own pallet. Some people consider GIF to by a lossy format since there could be losses due to having to reduce the number of colors down to 256. The pallet of colors itself is defined as needed by up to 24 bits of data (12 bits is a popular option). Using less colors and less bits will reduce the file size of the picture. Large areas of one color will also reduce the file size.
It is possible to define one of the colors as a transparency color. When this is done the rendering code will not draw that color on the screen. This allows the background color of the screen to be seen in the image. This is mostly used to make the image shape look like it is the total shape rather than a picture with a frame around it.
GIF images can be animated but eBook readers typically do not support animation although many web browsers do. If animation isn't supported only the first image in the animation sequence will be shown. Removing the animation frames will make the image size smaller. Animation is done by combining several GIF images in one file. The later images are simply superimposed on the earlier images one by one. The later image can be smaller in size than the original by providing an offset as to where it should be placed. The frame rate is specified in the file itself.
GIF can represent grayscale images of course and can be lossless in this task. Reducing the grayscale gradient can drastically reduce the size of the file. Line art is often best represented as a GIF image.
Gifsicle - A program to manipulates GIF images and animations.
JPG (or JPEG) stands for the Joint Photographic Experts Group. It uses 24 bits to represent a color pixel (often called True Color). It uses a lossy compressed graphics format that is designed to support photographs rather than line art. It was developed in 1992 and issued as the ISO 10918-1 standard in 1994, the quality depends directly on the amount of compression employed. It is widely used on the Internet and by most digital camera manufacturers.
The JPEG File Interchange Format (JFIF) is a minimal version of the JPEG Interchange Format that was deliberately simplified so that it could be widely implemented and thus has become the de-facto standard. Another standard format is the Exchangeable image file format (Exif). This is the specification used for the image files on digital cameras.
There is also a newer format is called JPEG 2000. It generally has a jp2 or jpg2 extension to distinguish the new improved format from the original format however that is not always the case. Older imaging display programs will not display this newer format. PDF files may have images in this format which can make converting them difficult. The latest JPEG format is JPEG XR. It provides even better compression with less processing and can provide lossless compression as well.
Jpeg also supports a 256 level gray scale mode which is not lossy. Jpeg can also be used to provide motion video by having multiple images in the same file. This is called M-JPEG.
PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics format. It is a bitmapped graphic format that employs a lossless compression system. It was designed to improve upon and replace GIF files back when the GIF patent was in effect. PNG does not require a patent license. Its main drawback is the complexity of its color model. It supports many different color schemes including both palettes and direct with differing number of bits. Some software that support PNG may specify that it only supports 8 bit images or have other restrictions on what is supported.
PNG files with more bits per pixel can use some of those bits for transparency. For example a 32 bit pixel might use 24 bits for color (8 for each of the 3 primary colors) and 8 bits for transparency. This is similar to the transparency of GIF images but an existing color is not used. Instead the amount of transparency can be defined per color so that some amount, but perhaps not all, of a background image can show through.
TIF (or TIFF) stands for Tagged Image File Format. It is a container that can hold images in a wide variety of bitmapped or even vector formats. They can also be compressed or uncompressed. If compressed they can use RLE, JPG, LZW, Zip or potentially other formats. This standard is owned by Adobe. TIF can even support multiple images and even a mix of bitmapped and vector images in the same file.
DjVu is a digital image format with advanced compression technology and high performance value. DjVu supports very high resolution images of scanned documents, digital documents, and photographs. DjVu viewers are available for web browsers, the desktop, and PDA devices. Its main characteristics is that the compress ratio is about 10x better than in PDF format at the same quality. IW44 is a subset simplified version of DJVU.
SVG, scalable vector graphics, is a vector graphic system and is a required feature of the ePUB publishing standard. It is the only vector graphics system with any standardized use in the eBook field. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a text-based graphics language that describes images with vector shapes, text, and embedded raster graphics.
SWF, Shockwave Flash, currently functions as the dominant format for displaying "animated" vector graphics on the Web. It can also support static vector images of course. Currently this format is only used on eBooks that have LCD screens.
- Netpbm a Unix collection of formats.
- PCX early bitmap format
- DXF exchange format of vector CAD files.
- HDR High Dynamic Range Image extends the color/brightness spectrum.
- WebP's lossy image format is based on the intra-frame coding of the VP8 video format.
- The IrfanView wiki page contains a fairly exhaustive list of graphics format.
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As the kiddies go back to school, they will soon be on the sharp end of the State's public health immunisation program, but why do we still need to protect our children from a range of diseases which have largely been eliminated?
Dr Marisa Gilles says that although we don't see a great deal of diseases such as measles in Australia, it is prevalent in countries like Bali.
"So we do see people getting measles is Bali and coming home and if your child or teenager hasn't been vaccinated for measles they will get sick and they'll get very sick," she says.
While there is a large success rate when it comes to immunising children there is a small minority who choose not to have their kids vaccinated over concerns of a bad reaction.
And although there is no guarantee immunisation is 100 percent safe, Dr Giles says past vaccinations have been a continual success.
"In my experience of 30 years of being a doctor I've never ever seen a bad reaction from immunisation and that experience would be mirrored by the majority of doctors in this country."
She joined the ABC's David Bone to talk about the reasons behind WA's immunisation policy.
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| 0.976199 | 241 | 2.640625 | 3 |
In 1998 American Robert Gardiner in his book ‘Titanic: The ship that never sank’, first postulated the theory that on the 14th of April 1912, a hundred years ago today, that RMS Titanic was scuttled for the Insurance money.
More importantly it wasn’t even the Titanic that sank, but her older decaying and seriously damaged sistership, RMS Olympic, in what would become one of the greatest insurance frauds of all time – if proved to be true!
Insurance Blogger whilst initially thinking what a load of ……, decided to look deeper into the ‘conspiracy’ and in particular the question of marine insurance for the vessel.
In order for the possibility of an insurance fraud to have taken place answers must be given to the following questions:-
Did the Owners, Company or individuals stand to benefit from the total loss of a ship?
Could the Titanic have been swapped for the Olympic as Gardiner proclaims?
What evidence is there to prove that the ship lying two and a half miles down at the bottom of the Atlantic is indeed the Olympic ?
Incredible as it first seems, the more you look into the assertations, the more feasible the fraud becomes!
And there is some amazing evidence to suggest that persons or persons unknown conspired to defraud the insurers of £1 million of hull cover, unknown P & I liability losses and cost life insurance and personal accident companies nearly £3 million.
Titanic – The Case for Insurance Fraud
Before we discuss the evidence for fraud in the sinking of the Titanic it is important to set the economic scene for 1912.
In particular the fight for the most lucrative transport routes at the time, not dissimilar to the airline struggles of today with the exception that sea travel had a monopoly on trans-atlantic trade, there was no alternative.
The White Star Line was ultimately owned by International Mercantile Marine (IMM) and after years of struggling to win trade, they commisioned the Olympic class liners in 1907 to try to take the luxury end of the market.
For the previous fifteen years the lucrative passenger sea traffic to and from the US from the UK, France and Europe was dominated by the super-fast German mercantile fleets that held the Blue Riband for the fastest crossings.
The SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse and SS Deutschland (1900) owned respectively by the Norddeutscher Lloyd and the Hamburg America Line HAPAG, the two German top shipping companies.
In the UK, Cunard rose to the challenge with the launch of the RMS Mauretania and her ill-fated sister ship, the RMS Lusitania. The ships were very fast and the Mauretania went on to keep the coveted Blue Riband for more than twenty years, from 1907 to 1929.
The White Star Line, who had been losing money for years, struck back with the Olympic class and the upgraded Titanic was supposed to be the largest and fastest of the luxury ocean liners to rival the Maurtania for speed.
Construction of Olympic started in December 1908 and Titanic in March 1909.
The two ships were built side by side at Harland and Wolff’s Belfast Shipyard.
The construction of a third ship the RMS Gigantic began in 1911 after the commissioning of Olympic and Titanic’s launch.
Following the sinking of Titanic, Gigantic was renamed Britannic, and the two remaining vessels underwent many changes in their safety provisions. The Britannic was sunk by a mine in 1916.
What was Covered?
Willis Faber & Co. (today part of the Willis Group) are reported to have brokered the deal for underwriting the hull and cargo insurance for the Titanic. The original boat insurance slip was passed to Lloyds Mercantile Dept for underwriting, but is since reported lost to this day.
There is some dispute about the value of the Willis contract however all newspaper reports of claims paid out and enquiries staged immediately after the sinking report that the Hull was underwritten for loss and liability at Lloyds for $5,000,000.
In 1912 both the USA and the UK were on the Gold standard and the exchange rate was always very close to $4.87 to the £1 or 0.21. This meant that the policy for the hull was insured for around £1,050,000. Perhaps more importantly, the actual cost of building or replacing the vessel was £1,680,000 or $8m, meaning that the hull was significantly under-insured and the owners were bearing a third of the risk as captive. This was an unusually high amount of risk taking. At the time marine insurance would usually only provide for three quarters of the risks, as P & I Clubs (ship owners collective pools) always carried a quarter of the collision liability risk and provided accident cover for the crew, and still do to this day.
It is unknown what if any cover was paid out by White Star to a P & I Club for staff liability. What became evident after the event to many of the 800 plus families of the Crew that perished, who were nearly all from Southampton, was that they received paltry or little compensation for their losses and years of subsequent poverty.
In addition to the hull cover, the marine insurance policy issued by Lloyd’s to the White Star Line for the Titanic included total loss cover for cargo at $600,000 and personal effects at £400,000, which equates to £126,000 marine cargo and £84,000 for personal effects. Both these sums insured proved to be inadequate following the disaster.
What Was Lost?
In an act of incredulous speed all claims by the White Star Line for loss of the Titanic, were paid out within a week of the ship sinking and the Lutine Bell being rung at Lloyd’s on the 15th of April.
The company was reimbursed for the loss in a straightforward process that was completed long before any official enquiries heard evidence as to the cause of the sinking.
Claims for loss of life and personal effects were taking a little longer.
Imagine that today, when you have to wait weeks for compensation for just a minor car insurance claim!
The New York Times of one week after the disaster, reported the speed of the claims payouts and lists all the amounts claimed and the processes involved in the claim.
The list of Claims losses paid out were:
Titanic Hull Insurance – Actual loss $8,000,000 – Paid out $5,000,000
Titanic Cargo Insurance – Actual Loss $420,000 – Paid out $400,000
Titanic Personal Effects – Actual Loss $1,000,000 – Paid out $600,000
Life Assurance Passengers - Actual Loss >$4,000,00 – Paid out $2,125,000
Over 119 Life insurance companies paid out the largest of which was the Travelers Insurance company of Hartford, Connecticut.
Personal Accident Claims – Actual Loss >$2,000,000 – Paid out $1,564,000
Over 48 personal accident companies were involved in claims payouts.
The Olympic Switch
The case for an insurance fraud begins with the RMS Olympic. If a conspiracy to defraud existed it would have began sometime after September 1911 and before April 1912.
On September 20th 1911 while in the Solent returning to Southampton RMS Olympic was struck and severely damaged by a collision with cruiser HMS Hawke.
The Liner, despite being holed above and below the water-line in two places and damaged for 38 feet, made it the fifteen miles or so back to port under tug.
Eyewitness reports suggest that the route of the Hawke and the Olympic intersecting may not have been an accident at all. Interestingly, the Captain of the ship that day was none other than Edward J Smith, Captain of the ‘”Titanic” some seven months later. The ship was temporarily patched up and returned to dock in Belfast alongside the nearly complete Titanic.
White Star quickly had the damage assessed by marine engineers, and put in a claim. However beause it was well below a policy excess of $750,000, the claim was repudiated. In December White Star brought the claim to court, this time claiming $750,000 for loss and damage to the ship including lost passenger effects, to make up the difference to the excess.
The court ruled that the collision was entirely the fault of the Olympic, the only saving grace being that they would not have to pay damages to the Royal Navy as the Olympic was under compulsory pilotage at the time. A further appeal was rejected in 1913.
Unable to collect money for her repairs, White Star was left with a severely damaged ship, quite possibly a lot more damaged than originally thought, which was losing money by the day, by being unable to collect fares and fulfill bookings.
The basis of the case for conspiracy to defraud starts here.
Gardiner asserts that the damage to the Olympic was tantamount to a write-off. In particular the secondary damage to her starboard engines, drive-shafts and propellers which rendered her incapable of reaching speeds of more than ten knots as she limped back to Belfast for repair.
On closer inspection of the damage at Harland and Wolff it was realised that it would take six months to get her in the least bit seaworthy again. The repairs would have to be paid for by the White Star Line which was already committed to $16 million for the building of the Titanic and the half-built Britannic.
The costs of the repairs would in effect wipe out the White Star operating profit for that year, a third of the income of IMM, and the losses from having no ships at sea for six months would equate to another $500,000 plus.
The decision was taken by senior executives at both White Star Line and Harland and Wolff to swap the ships and bring into service, the very near to completion Titanic, as the Olympic.
If the decision had not been taken jobs would be lost and the shipyard and White Star would be threatened with closure.
Getting the Titanic a certificate of seaworthiness was at least six months away. Olympic already had one!
Ship swap is reported to be the most common form of marine insurance fraud practiced in the 19th century although this is as yet unsubstantiated.
It would only take a handful of ready picked dockers and tug operators and a skeleton crew to be involved in any movement and re-berthing of the ships, particularly as they were constantly being put to sea for tests.
Both ships were mysteriously painted in the same black and white livery, the Olympic having previously been painted all white.
After the repairs in Belfast including changes to cabins, without doubt the only outwardly visible reported differences between the two ships appears to be the layout of the 1st class passenger B deck, which was enclosed on the Titanic according to the original plans. Photos of the ‘Titanic‘ leaving Southampton and Queenstown show a different layout!
Fitters, Electricians, carpenters etc in Belfast would not necessarily know which ship they were on a short term contract for, and even if they did, they were kitted out almost identically. Final fittings and named objects could have been loaded on-board in boxes to both ships at anytime. In the closed shop world of the protestant dockyards of Belfast and the fraternal offices above, a conspiracy involving less people than the Great Train Robbery is not so hard to envisage.
None of the crew or staff would have been aware of what ship they were on when they signed on in Southampton. Just what the nameplate told them.
The “Olympic” put to sea and started earning off the North Atlantic run in early 1912. It was only two hundred miles from the “Titanic” returning to the UK, when the “Titanic” sank!
There is some excellent photographic evidence which shows the damage repairs to the Olympic following its collision with HMS Hawke and in later years where there is no sign whatsoever of repairs!
You can read more about the ship swap, see photographic evidence and watch a documentary at TitanicUniverse
You should also have a look at Mark Chirnside’s university dissertation which argues subjectively the case against a fraud.
Having looked at all the evidence Insurance Blog believes that a ship swap did take place, however not for the purposes of committing an insurance fraud but out of business economic necessity.
So how did what had been a business decision to hoodwink the Ministry of Transport turn into an insurance fraud?
Well the matter of an Iceberg for one thing!
Gardiner goes on to explain all sorts of incredulous reasoning about how White Star planned to scuttle the ship and had pre-arranged a collision in mid-Atlantic, however all this was unnecessary if the iceberg was just an accident.
This explains why the ship was under-insured, White Star never had any intention of scuttling the ship. The swap was purely to keep the company in business!
White Star did effectively gain out of the loss of the “Titanic”. The loss cost them just £680,000. A lot less than the $8 million required to fund a new vessel, which they did!
As an interesting footnote, Chairman of White Star J Bruce Ismay, the man William Randolph Hearst choose to bully and pillory as a coward, went on to hold prominent Director positions on the boards of the Liverpool and London Insurance Company, Globe Insurance Company, Royal Insurance Company and the Thames and Mersey Marine Insurance Company.
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| 0.976652 | 2,851 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Previous estimates about the total mass of all life on our planet have to be reduced by about one third. This is the result of a study by a German-US science team published in the current online issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).
According to previous estimates about one thousand billion tons of carbon are stored in living organisms, of which 30% in single-cell microbes in the ocean floor and 55 % reside in land plants. The science team around Dr. Jens Kallmeyer of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and University of Potsdam has now revised this number: Instead of 300 billion tons of carbon there are only about 4 billion tons stored in subseafloor microbes. This reduces the total amount of carbon stored in living organisms by about one third.
Previous estimates were based on drill cores that were taken close to shore or in very nutrient-rich areas. "About half of the world's ocean is extremely nutrient-poor. For the last 10 years it was already suspected that subseafloor biomass was overestimated" explains Dr. Jens Kallmeyer the motivation behind his study. "Unfortunately there were no data to prove it". Therefore Kallmeyer and his colleagues from the University of Potsdam and the University of Rhode Island, USA, collected sediment cores from areas that were far away from any coasts and islands. The six-year work showed that there were up to one hundred thousand times less cells in sediments from open-ocean areas, which are dubbed "deserts of the sea" due to their extreme nutrient depletion, than in coastal sediments.
With these new data the scientists recalculated the total biomass in marine sediments and found these new, drastically lower values.
Despite of the high logistic and financial efforts for marine drilling operations there are more data of the abundance of living biomass in the sea floor than of their abundance on land. "Our new results show the need to re-examine the other numbers as e.g. the amount of carbon in deep sediments on land," Jens Kallmeyer states. In particular the research into the "Deep Biosphere" is still in the fledgling stages; this is life that can be found in kilometer's depth inside the Earth's crust.The new findings contribute to a better picture of the distribution of living biomass on Earth.
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| 0.958741 | 486 | 3.890625 | 4 |
Of the over 40,000 concentration camp guards during the Holocaust, almost one-tenth were women, or about 3508 guards. Many of these women volunteered, and many more were conscripted. When we think of the atrocities associated with the concentration camps, we usually imagine male guards committing the crimes and overlooking the prisoners. However, the role that women played in the implementation of Hitler’s Final Solution cannot be overlooked. Throughout history, women have demonstrated levels of violence and sadism that are on par with those of men, and the Holocaust was no exception. The level of abuse the female concentration camp guards participated in was shocking and included medical experimentations, selection, sexual abuse, beatings, infanticide, and more. However, there were also many female concentration camp guards that tried to do their jobs without inflicting violence on prisoners, who used their time as guards mainly as a way to improve their social situation. These women spent their time overseeing prisoners, flirting with male guards, and trying to ignore the atrocities going on around them. This website will explore what life was like for the guards, including their duties and training, and what the average female guard was like. We will also look into motivations behind the actions of the camp guards, the question of gender in relation to camp guards, and at the exceptional cases of extremely brutal women.
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| 0.986484 | 273 | 3.859375 | 4 |
A firewall is designed to protect network resources. Through a firewall, information can be securely shared amongst...
servers and workstations. They are a common form of security for any organization that has data to protect from mainly external sources. Firewalls are designed to block incoming traffic by preventing access through open ports. After installing a firewall, however, it is not necessarily safe to say that the organization is now protected against denial-of-service attacks. How can the network administrator know if the firewall is doing its job?
- The system that supports the firewall must be properly maintained. The network administrator should create a list of all field replaceable components for this system. Once this list is compiled, the components should be located in a safe storage area so that in the event of a system failure the components can be readily available. An ideal situation would be to have a totally redundant firewall system so that in the event of primary system failure, security would not be compromised.
- Whenever a change is made to the firewall configuration, perform a backup immediately to reflect that change. For example, there may be rules set up to perform specific functions. Whenever an update to any rule is made, the network administrator should perform an immediate backup of the configuration.
- Have the firewall vendor test both the firewall software and system hardware periodically for any "leaks." The testing procedure should include scanning the firewall system to determine the presence of known vulnerabilities and, if any are found, the immediate application of patches or fixes. Alternately, the network administrator should also have third-party certified vendors perform the same tests to ensure that the firewall's vendor does not have a bias. The tests should be performed when there is the least network traffic, because test scripts can possibly overload a network. The person conducting the tests should be supervised by either the CIO or the network administrator. In this way, questions can be asked about the testing procedure and results presented by the tests.
- The results of the tests should be stored in a secure location to prevent any unauthorized persons from gaining access to it
- As part of the testing phase, the firewall alarms and thresholds should also be tested. Delays in receiving alarms via e-mail or pager should be observed.
- Some vendors may require remote access to the firewall in order to perform testing procedure whenever there is a problem. This should be avoided unless there is written assurance from the vendor and approval by the client company's legal advisor.
Adesh Rampat has 10 years of experience with network and IT administration. He is a member of the Association of Internet Professionals, the Institute for Network Professionals and the International Webmasters Association. He has also lectured extensively on a variety of topics.
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http://searchwindowsserver.techtarget.com/tip/Performing-firewall-maintenance
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| 0.942072 | 551 | 2.65625 | 3 |
The Dutch, National Institute for Public Health had reported on Thursday that a second Dutch person has been diagnosed with the human variant// of mad cow disease, last year a woman died from the disease.
The Dutch Institute for Health and Environment (RIVM) did not however disclose any further details about the patient to help protect his privacy. They however did issue a statement that eating contaminated meat products would have on all probabilities caused the infection in the person.
Early last year, a 26-year-old Dutch woman from Utrecht had been diagnosed with the brain wasting Creutzfeldt-Jakob (vCJD) disease, which is the human form of the Bovine Spongiform Encephelopathy (BSE) and she died in May 2005. The Netherlands has now enforced stricter restrictions on blood donation over the increasing concerns about the transmission of vCJD.
There are reports of over 150 cases of vCJD all over the world, though many cases were from Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Canada, and the United States were also affected. The vCJD is a progressive neurological disorder that is fatal and incurable, and is supposedly caused by eating food-contaminated food, obtained cattle with BSE. Doctors have explained that a person with vCJD usually succumbs to the disease within 18 months of acquiring it.
Mad cow disease had first appeared in Britain in the 1980s that had forced the slaughtering of millions of cattle. The Netherlands is one of the world's biggest exporters of meat and dairy products and its livestock sector have undergone major escalation in growth over the past few years, with most animals raised on specialized farms.
It was also reported that the country has suffered a series of animal disease crises in the past decade, including swine fever, foot-and-mouth disease, and bird flu, which has lead to the culling of millions of livestock. Page: 1 Related medicine news :1
. Second hope for men with erectile dysfunction2
. Second SARS suspect fuels worry in India3
. The Harmful Effects Of Secondhand Smoke 4
. Second Hand Exposure To Smoke In Childhood Can Cause Respiratory Problems Later5
. HIV Virus Emerging Drug Resistant In UK, Prompting Fear Of A Second Epidemic 6
. Women With Breast Cancer At Risk For Developing Second Cancer7
. Stroke Destroys Nearly 32, 000 Neurons In Just A Second!8
. Websites Are Judged In Less Than A Second9
. Can Second Hand Smoke Cause Cancer?10
. Second Hand Smoke Does No Harm11
. Healthy Kidney Removed From Patient, Second Surgery Needed
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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| 0.967876 | 552 | 2.734375 | 3 |
Year 5 are going to start a project looking at creating their own ‘Match of the Day,’ program. In preparation for this, today Class 5B looked at a match report recount focusing on some of the language features that are necessary for producing a detailed football report.
We first read through the text and looked at some of the features. After making a list on the board, children used the app ‘Skitch’ to annotate to highlight the features we had discussed in class.
I had also produced a QR code, made before the lesson which listed all the features I wanted the children to find examples of. This meant that children could simply copy the features and then focus more on highlighting examples.
After downloading a picture of the text from dropbox, the children imported it into skitch and then started to annotate it and find examples of every feature discussed in class. As children were working in pairs, it was a great collaborating task as children were then discussing types of words and what should and shouldn’t be highlighted.
Unfortunately the lesson seemed to fly by and few children got their pictures completely finished however those that did were left with a very clear, bright and colourful annotation. Here is an example:
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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| 0.981257 | 251 | 3.328125 | 3 |
I don't know the term either. I don't think it is established baking slang, so it is bound to vary between recipes, should you find it in another one at all. But if you got it from a bread recipe, it must be because you need optimal conditions for your yeast. The optimal temperature for yeast rising is 35°C, with rising being too slow below that (but it will still happen, even at 4°C in the fridge!) and not possible at 40°C and above, where leavening action gets too low for practical purposes (and at some point, the yeast dies).
This is a nice representation of the amount of CO2 produced by yeast (which correlates well with leavening) at different temperatures. The difference between the low effective temperature (25°C), the optimal temperature (35°C) and the upper limit of the effective temperature (40°C) is not big, so I don't rely on my imperfect senses and always use a thermometer when making yeast dough.
But you are writing that you want a "rule of thumb", so you probably don't have (or don't want to bother with) a thermometer in your kitchen. In this case, you can still have your bread rise well. The literal thumb is a bad choice, as it is quite insensitive, but the trick our grandmas used to gauge the temperature of infant food is still valid: use your elbow.
The skin of the elbow is very thin, and it will very well notice the difference between a 35°C liquid (which feels roughly the same temperature as the elbow, remember that 37°C are normal inside the body, not on the skin outside) and a 40°C liquid (which feels too warm). If you were to use your fingers or the back of your hand, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference well enough, and will risk overshooting and killing the yeast. There are possibly other body parts which can feel the difference (I'd guess the tongue, if you don't scald it daily with hot drinks), but hygienewise, the elbow is probably better.
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| 0.966151 | 438 | 2.796875 | 3 |
In 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble linked the redshift visible in the spectra of distant galaxies, to the constant expansion of the universe.
Hubble suggested that this cosmological red shift is caused by the Doppler Effect, as the space through which the light travels, is stretched out. This would hence indicate the speed of recession of these galaxies -- and, by using Hubble's Law, the distances of the galaxies.
A second mechanism for red shift is the gravitational red shift, also called the Einstein shift. It was predicted by Albert Einstein with his general relativity theory -- According to which periodic processes are slowed down in a gravitational field. This Einstein Shift is noticeable in the spectra of massive, compact stars, such as white dwarfs.
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| 0.94309 | 154 | 4.15625 | 4 |
Image credit: Michael Smith, Institute for Biodiagnostics, Winnipeg, Canada; image source; larger image
Lasers light up blood-flow dynamics
If you shine a laser beam at a small angle to a piece of white paper, so the beam spot spreads out, you'll see what is called a speckle pattern (do this experiment with adult supervision). If you shine the beam on your skin, you'll see a different kind of pattern.
The image shows how laser speckle imaging can show the difference between normal blood flow, in the finger on the left, and increased blood flow due to the warming of the skin (the figure on the right was immersed in hot water). To find out more, see Lasers light up blood-flow dynamics.
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PhET Simulation: Lasers
Once you have clicked on the "simulation" link below, be sure to read the Java Security Advisory before running the simulation: To do that, click the "Read now" button on the yellow band near the top of the PhET page.
See if you can produce a laser beam in this simulation from the University of Colorado. Excite the laser's atoms with lights of different wavelengths and control components of the laser to create the beam.
(This feature was updated on May 5, 2013.)
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A lot of progress has been made in the field of biotechnology and biomedicine since the completion of the human genome projects in 2003. The completion of this project was a huge milestone, and it was supposed to usher in a new era of genetic medicine with new cures. But sequencing the human genome and actually understating its inner working turned out to be something entirely different.
Only now, a decade later, are we starting to understand the insides of the genetics of the body and the genetics of certain disease. There have been a lot of advancements in the research labs and these advancements are just now on the edge of coming to the commercial market.
One area in which biomedicine is making exciting progress is in the field of treating cancer. This is an area in which not much has happen since the 1970s. The standard treatment over past 40 years has been for doctors to take biopsies, study the biopsies, and provide the patient with chemotherapy or radiation therapy.
A big problem with this approach is that these two therapies are delivering toxic material and toxic radiation to our bodies damaging healthy cells. There hasn't been a good way of just targeting the problem cells and avoiding healthy cells until very recently.
We now have the ability of treating cancer cells with more accuracy, and the level of precision is improving quickly. For example, two technologies already available are Proton therapy - consisting of focused proton beams. This technology might be replacing traditional radiation therapy within a near future. It has a much tighter beam, which can be controlled in three dimensions, eliminating much of the damage done to healthy cells. Another new technology called Liposomal therapy take traditional chemotherapy drugs and places them inside liposomes, which can infiltrate cancer cells more selectively with less damage to healthy cells.
In clinical trials
The fight against cancer can be compared to modern warfare, where the biggest challenge is to fight against insurgences that blend in with the local population. We already have the weapons to kill the cancer cells but the biggest challenge is to find them and target them without harming any "civilians."
Cancer cells are part of our own body, and the difference between healthy cells and cancer cells is minuscule. That is why they have been hard to target and hard to detect. But biomedicine is finding new creative ways of finding them and removing them with precision.
For example, a startup in Mountain View, California (Metabolomx) recently started clinical trials on a breathalyzer that can spot lung cancer with 83% accuracy. It also has the ability to distinguish between several different types of disease, something that usually requires a biopsy.
Other products are also in clinical trials right now that will be able to target cancer cells with much greater precisions and with fewer side effects. Some of these techniques are Molecular targeted therapy, which aim is to disrupt cell duplication of cancerous cells, or Telomerase therapy which has a similar function. Its purpose is to inactivate the telomerase - an enzyme that enables cell replication. Another drug that might make it into the market as early as this year is called the Reovirus - a virus that feasts on specific cells with particular characteristics, like cancer cells.
On the horizon
Even more sophisticated technologies are on the horizon. Technologies like RNAi and Nanobubbles to fight cancer can already be found in laboratories. RNAi (RNA interference) is a form of genetic medicine that can "turn off" messenger RNA carrying bad genetic information before that RNA can do its harm. Nanobubbles is another delivery system currently being tested on animals. It delivers chemotherapy drugs in small packets of nanoparticles to cancer cells. After they have accumulated around the tumor, ultrasound can be directed at the target, breaking the bubbles and releasing the drug directly onto the cancerous cells.
In terms of preventive medicine, a company called 23andme.com has a service offering genetic testing to check if a patient if genetically predisposed to any types of diseases. The patient can then take this information to his healthcare provider and develop a personalized prevention plan which may consist of a certain kind of diet, exercise, medication and testing.
All these new technologies are exciting but investing in this industry can produce a number of challenges. The industry is very capital intensive and some drugs can cost half a billion to $1 billion to develop. In addition, the industry is full with cumbersome regulations that make it difficult to bring an early pre-revenue biotech company to market. As a result, 90% of these companies never make it.
A company that is targeting cancer, for example, might require up to a billion dollars to complete testing and make it through all the regulatory hurdles. Knowing of the immense cost for a drug that has perhaps a 10% chance or less of making it to market, many smart investors spread risk around.
Nevertheless, the advancement in technology and the race to cure cancer has led to a boom in funding. New exciting technologies are coming to the market at an increasing speed and some of these new technologies will have a profound impact on both humanity and the investors involved.
Picking a winner in this field is difficult. It requires a lot of research and perhaps a little but a luck. Diversifying through ETFs such as iShares Nasdaq Biotechnology ETF (NASDAQ:IBB), SPDR Biotech ETF (NYSEARCA:XBI), Market Vectors Biotech ETF (NYSEARCA:BBH), and First Trust Amex Biotechnology Index ETF (NYSEARCA:FBT) might be a better option for many retail investors.
Reference: Casey Research.
Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.
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| 0.958203 | 1,176 | 3.3125 | 3 |
1 (Strandloper) A member of a Khoisan people who lived on the southern shores of southern Africa from prehistoric times until the second millennium ad.
- ‘There are not prominent brows, indicating a woman, and the front is that of a typical strandloper,’ he said.
- This area too was the stomping ground of the earliest inhabitants of the peninsula - the Khoi-San hunter-gatherers, ‘strandloopers’ who foraged a living from the sea.
- Prehistoric rubbish heaps produced by the strandlopers are found in a number of caves and tell a great deal about the San people's lifestyle.
2South African A person who collects items on the shore; a beachcomber.
- Mouths caked numb by a throat-cracking berg wind, we lurched back along the beach, bumbling along the craggy rocks to rest beneath the overhang, surfed out strandlopers looking wild and red-eyed.
- The strandlopers, back in the 17th century, dined on mussels, abalone, crayfish and seals, on roots and fruits and edible seaweed.
- Martin said he would like to see Xhosa actors playing the role of Khoikhoi heroes like Harry the Strandloper, David Stuurman, Sarah Baartman, Allan Boesak and others, to acknowledge the cultural diversity.
Afrikaans, from strand 'seashore' + loper 'runner'.
For editors and proofreaders
Line breaks: strand|loper
What do you find interesting about this word or phrase?
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Thunder was in the forecast yesterday as members of the Havasupai, a tiny Indian tribe that lives deep inside the gorges of the western Grand Canyon, prepared for a day of ritual that had been a long time coming. Blood was to be mourned; blood of the dead and of the living. Blood, more importantly, that had been wrongfully purloined.
After prayers, dancing and singing in Supai Village on the Canyon floor, the assembled vials were due to "rest" for four days. On Monday they will be interred and an episode that began nearly 20 years ago with the drawing of blood from tribe members by scientists at Arizona State University for a DNA research project will be over.
It is a time of mourning but also rejoicing that started earlier this week when the university settled a lawsuit filed against it by the tribe, which numbers just over 600 souls.
Their claim was straightforward legally but heavily freighted with emotion and spiritual meaning. The outcome will have repercussions for scientists everywhere who, when handling DNA, may have to think more deeply about the rights of those who surrender it.
What was advertised as an exercise in benevolence began in 1990 when an ASU scientist approached the tribe with an idea: its members had for years suffered from an unusually elevated rate of type 2 diabetes, ravaging its ranks and leading to amputations even among some of its young. If tribe members would agree to surrender some of their blood, the university would try to establish what genetic links might lurk behind its struggles with the disease.
This was no easy decision for the Indians, for whom blood holds grave sacred significance. The souls of their dead cannot not rest with the spirits if any part of their physical body is absent at the time of burial, fluids included. But this was a disruption to their religious rhythms they were prepared to take. Between 1990 and 1994, about 200 samples were drawn and taken away for the scientists to analyse.
In the end, hopes for a genetic answer to their diabetes riddle were dashed. But there was something else they didn't know: over time, the blood had been released for other research projects, sometimes by senior ASU scientists and even by graduate students completing a thesis for their finals.
The betrayal was discovered by Carletta Tilousi, a tribal councilwoman and one of those who gave blood, seven years ago. It wasn't just that the tribe had been under the impression their DNA was for diabetes research only. Almost more upsetting was the nature of the other avenues that had been pursued with the help of their samples. There had been studies on schizophrenia among the Havasupai and the impact on their community of inbreeding.
One student penned a thesis that had made use of the Havasupai DNA asserting that their ancestors had hailed from Asia, arriving on the North American continent after a migration via the Bering Straits. It was a version of history that directly contradicts the traditional tribal teachings that gave the Grand Canyon itself as the origin of the Havasupai. Indeed, this is what gave them their sovereignty and their claim to be the guardians of the Canyon.
Under settlement, the university, led by its Board of Regents, agreed to pay $700,000 (£455,000) to the Havasupai to be shared between the 41 plaintiffs. It will also work with the tribe to help raise financing for scholarships for its young, for a new high school in their village and a medical clinic. Perhaps most importantly, the remaining blood, stored in vials in a deep freezer at the university's science centre, will be returned.
"The Board of Regents has long wanted to remedy the wrong that was done," the board said in a statement. "This solution is not simply the end of a dispute but is also the beginning of a partnership between the universities, principally ASU, and the tribe."
Members of the tribe had initially asked for tens of millions of settlement cash, but their lead lawyer, Albert Flores, hailed the deal as "the start of something good" for the tribe. Similarly satisfied was the chairwoman of the tribal council, Bernadine Jones, who said the settlement "is far more than dismissing a lawsuit... the settlement is the restoration of hope for my people, and the beginning of nation building for my tribe."
It was the job of Ms Tilousi to take custody of the blood at 6am yesterday. From the ASU campus at Tempe, Arizona, she was to take the samples by van to the rim of the Canyon from where a helicopter would take her to the floor. (Normally, access to Supai Village means a steep 11-mile trek.)
Some who gave blood are still living. But others are dead, caught in limbo until their blood is buried with them. "Their spirits will no longer be locked in a cooler," Ms Tilousi said. "We are going to take them back down to Supai Canyon so they can rest in peace."
Her own elders are among those trapped between the Earth and celestial rest, including an aunt, an amputee, who died from diabetes last year. "I'm holding my breath until the blood samples of my grandfather, my great-grandmother and my relatives reach the floor of the Grand Canyon."
In spite of the settlement, the argument over whether the tribe gave its permission for the DNA to be used in research beyond the original diabetes project or if it was duped, remains unresolved.
"I was doing good science," insists Dr Therese Markow, who instigated the cooperation with the Havasupai in 1990. She is now a professor at the University of California, San Diego. She told Nature magazine last night: "I'm glad it's over; but it never should have happened. There was no basis for any claim. They would have lost had it gone to trial."
Some experts concurred that the fall-out may be far and wide impacting the assumptions made by scientists about what they can do with DNA once it is in their possession. Some may be reluctant to accept the implication of the settlement that consent must be given before a person's genetic information can be used for research in new areas.
David Karp of University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center who has focused on the importance of DNA research versus the rights of those who give it, told The New York Times: "Everyone wants to be open and transparent. The question is, how far do you have to go? Do you have to create some massive database of people's wishes for their DNA specimens?"
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| 0.98422 | 1,341 | 3.046875 | 3 |
After uranium is mined and milled, the tailings—the crushed-up rock which formerly contained uranium—is typically disposed of at the mining and milling site.
In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal agency regulating all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle except uranium mining, regulates all aspects of tailings management and disposal. The various aspects include the following: siting and design of tailings impoundments, disposal of tailings or wastes, decommissioning of land and structures, groundwater protection standards, testing of the radon emission rate from the impoundment cover, monitoring programs, airborne effluent and offsite exposure limits, inspection of retention systems, financial surety requirements for decommissioning, and long-term surveillance and control of the tailings impoundment.
The NRC specifies the general design requirements for long-term tailings-storage facilities, and the NRC’s regulations are written so as to take account of the particularities of each mining and milling site. The design configuration preferred by the NRC is as follows: “The ‘prime option’ for disposal of tailings is placement below grade, either in mines or specially excavated pits (that is, where the need for any specially constructed retention structure is eliminated). The evaluation of alternative sites and disposal methods performed by mill operators in support of their proposed tailings disposal program (provided in applicants’ environmental reports) must reflect serious consideration of this disposal mode…[In exceptional] cases, it must be demonstrated that an above grade disposal program will provide reasonably equivalent isolation of the tailings from natural erosional forces.” Tailings facilities must be engineered to be effective for 1,000 years. All facilities must also include a multi-layer water-balance cap designed to limit infiltration and control runoff of precipitation, liners to prevent releases into groundwater, and monitoring systems to detect changes from background conditions.
The NRC protection standard also requires prospective licensees (companies proposing to mine uranium and dispose of tailings) to demonstrate that tailings storage facilities are capable of withstanding severe weather and seismic events. Facilities must be located above the Probable Maximum Flood plain and designed to withstand hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods. Water levels in the tailing cells must be monitored continuously, and any abrupt change in water level due to a containment breach must trigger an alarm to activate the appropriate response by operations staff. After closure, a cover system designed to withstand erosional forces produced by any severe weather events must protect the tailings; tailings cells must be located above plains where flooding is at all likely to occur.
After fulfilling the reclamation requirements contained in the NRC regulations and obtaining the NRC’s approval for its reclamation job, a mining company transfers ownership of the tailings disposal cells to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Thereafter, the DOE sees to the long-term care and maintenance of the tailings facilities.
Tailings impoundment at JEB mill in northern Saskatchewan. Tailings go into the former open pit and are kept under several feet of water. Take note of these important characteristics of the design, characteristics which the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission would require for a tailings impoundment in the U.S.: 1) keeping the tailings wet as a heavy liquid slurry and keeping them under water as they are stored eliminates the dispersion of any dust from the tailings 2) keeping water over the tailings traps radon gas, which cannot be released from the tailings into the environment 3) Even in the event of a hurricane or flood, this facility would keep the tailings isolated from groundwater. The facility can accommodate several feet of excess water, far more water than it would receive in a “Probable Maximum Flood” event—or the greatest precipitation event at all likely to occur where the facility is located.
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| 0.938538 | 802 | 3.671875 | 4 |
Veterans — If you are out in the sunlight in the summer time, you should wear sunglasses with ultraviolet protection. Ultraviolet radiation from the sun's rays can potentially cause skin cancer and affect your overall health. It can also be damaging to your eyes and potentially harm your vision.
According to Dr. Kelly Thomann, Chief of the Optometry Program at Hudson Valley Health Care System, “Long-term UV radiation exposure puts you at a greater risk of developing ocular conditions such as cataracts and macular degeneration. In fact, people with any ocular disease should be especially cautious about protecting themselves from the sun.”
Dr. Thomann notes that while most elderly people will eventually develop cataracts, most individuals are not aware that increased UV radiation can result in cataracts developing earlier.
It is important to understand that lens darkness does not correlate with the amount of UV protection.
Good quality sunglasses are recommended when outdoors, even if it's for a few minutes at a time. The sunglass frame should be wide and adequately cover the eyes and fragile tissue around the eyes including the eyelids.
Dr. Thomann reminds her Veteran patients that the fragile tissue around the eyelids can develop melanoma from UV radiation — another reason to wear quality sunglasses whenever you are out in the sun.
A hat with a brim is also beneficial to block out those sun rays coming in over the top of your sunglasses.
As Dr. Becky Forman points out, “When purchasing sunglasses, it is important to make sure there is both UV-A and UV-B protection, as both types contribute to dermatological and ocular disease.”
Dr. Forman is a Staff Optometrist at VA Hudson Valley.
She adds that “It is important to understand that lens darkness does not correlate with the amount of UV protection, which is the key factor in adequate sun protection. Polarized sunglasses may be beneficial in patients who experience glare.”
Most eye doctors recommend wraparound sunglasses for better protection. And while prescription sunglasses are better, standard off the rack sunglasses are okay if they provide full protection.
Dr. Forman says Veterans should look for sunglasses that absorb at least 90 percent of UV radiation.
“Look for the two categories of protection on the label — UV-A and UV-B.”
Routine visits to your VA eye doctor will help determine your specific UV protection needs and new advances in sunglass wear.
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| 0.935057 | 507 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Make Triangle Units
1. Sew together a gold print B piece and solid brown B piece to make a gold triangle unit (Diagram 1). Press seam open. Repeat to make four gold triangle units total. (Be sure to join B pieces on the same side so fabrics will alternate when they are later sewn into a circle.)
2. Using purple print instead of gold print, repeat Step 1 to make four purple triangle units. (To duplicate the purple triangle units in the featured quilt, reverse the placement of the solid brown in these triangle units.)
3. Using orange tone-on-tone instead of gold print, repeat Step 1 to make four orange triangle units.
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| 0.796842 | 138 | 2.734375 | 3 |
Earwigs are fearsome looking insects, known for the popular superstition that they will burrow in the ears of humans. While they can give you a little nip if you pick one up, they cannot burrow into people. They are generally considered harmless creatures living in mulch and organic debris on the ground. Occasionally when conditions are favorable, earwig populations can get quite large and they can become temporary pests in or around homes.
Description and Behavior. Earwigs are medium-sized insects usually brown to black in color. A few have stripes on their legs or bodies. The adults have small wings and all earwigs, young and adults, have curved pinchers at the end of their bodies (abdomen). They usually use their pinchers to protect themselves from predators, but in some cases, they may use them to catch prey. Most earwigs only eat decaying plant material or dead insects. In very high numbers, they can sometimes damage cultivated plants.
There are 22 species of earwigs found in the United States. The European earwig is the most common species found in South Carolina and is the most common earwig pest around homes. As with many other household pests, they are often associated with moist conditions. They do not survive well in hot, dry conditions. The ring-legged earwig is found in the south as well. While this earwig is usually found outdoors, it can become a pest of moist, improperly stored grain products. Another southern species is the striped earwig. These are common in agricultural fields and gardens. They are actually beneficial, feeding on many important pests like aphids, scales, mites and other small plant insects.
Earwigs mate in the spring and the female cares for the eggs and the young for a short time after they hatch. Females can lay between 30 to 50 eggs in a batch and may produce several batches. If disturbed with her eggs, she will move them to a new location. Females can be very defensive of their nest and will protect offspring if disturbed. When the female is not guarding her eggs, she will often pick them up as though she is cleaning them. After the eggs hatch, the young take between two to three months to become adults. Adults may live up to seven months.
Earwigs are active at night and will remain hidden under protective surfaces, and in cracks. They often prefer to live under mulch, boards, rocks, woodpiles and other cool damp places. If they are living indoors, they are usually associated with plants that have been brought inside from outdoors. They may also be found around moisture problems around doors, windows and garages. Sometimes they nest under carpets that remain wet.
Since earwigs are attracted to moist organic areas, one of the best nonchemical control strategies is to maintain dryer conditions. Correct any indoor moisture problems, reduce excessive mulch and cut back on watering near the house if earwigs become a problem. Moving problem conditions away from the foundation of a home such as woodpiles, stepping stones, wet outdoor mats and debris will reduce population outbreaks.
Often when earwigs are found in a home, they are few in number. Hand removal or vacuuming is all that is needed in this case. Make sure you caulk or apply weather stripping around doors and other points earwigs may be entering the house.
If earwig populations are large or persistent, outdoor chemical treatment may be needed. Usually, outdoor treatment coupled with indoor hand removal will eliminate the problem. Insecticide dusts lightly puffed into voids and spaces around doors and walls that you cannot effectively caulk will at least kill earwigs as they try to enter your home. In mulched areas, consider using insecticide granules or liquid sprays. Buy products that are listed for the areas you want to treat and have earwigs on the label. Make sure you get the granules or spray down into the mulch or leaf litter to reach where earwigs like to live and feed. Remember that insecticide treatments will only provide temporary control. Removing, reducing or drying the places earwigs like to live will provide the best long term control.
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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https://www.clemson.edu/cafls/departments/esps/factsheets/household_structural/earwigs_hs37.html
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| 0.963243 | 856 | 3.71875 | 4 |
The artist’s task in creating an exceptional portrait must be more than rendering an accurate likeness of the subject. The artist must find a story to tell about the subject and make that story compelling. Formal portraits typically focus on the public aspects of an individual’s life, such as their position in a family or society or their celebrated accomplishments and honors. Portraits can also be informal, revealing aspects of the sitter’s private interests, friendships and emotional life. Life Stories: American Portraits Past and Present features paintings, photographs and sculpture spanning a period of over two hundred years. The exhibition explores how styles and purposes of portraiture have changed over time, reflecting changing social values and the shift of emphasis from formal to casual representations of the individual. Early American paintings by Benjamin West, Rembrandt Peale and William Hubard include formal portraits of distinguished individuals, families and military heroes and reveal much about the history and social values of the period. From the late 19th and early 20th centuries are portraits by John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam and Robert Henri. These artists are represented with portraits of friends and acquaintances that are painted with engaging warmth that expresses the bond between artist and subject. Cindy Sherman, Elizabeth Peyton and Anneè Olofsson are among the contemporary artists represented in the exhibition. These important artists have used portraiture to explore issues of identity, psychology and spirituality that go beyond individual character. For these artists, portraiture is an opportunity to make broader statements about culture and society. These contemporary artists demonstrate that portraiture remains a vital tradition still open to new and creative possibilities.
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Introduction. The Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (UNIT) is a set of individually administered specialized tasks. These tasked are designed to measure fairly the general intelligence and cognitive abilities of children and adolescents from age five through 17 years who may be disadvantaged by - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
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1. UNIT: Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test
2. Introduction The Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (UNIT) is a set of individually administered specialized tasks. These tasked are designed to measure fairly the general intelligence and cognitive abilities of children and adolescents from age five through 17 years who may be disadvantaged by traditional verbal and language-loaded measures.
The UNIT is intended to provide a fair assessment of intelligence for children and adolescence who have speech, language, or hearing impairment; color-vision deficiencies; different cultures or language back-grounds; and those who are verbally uncommunicative.
The UNIT also provides diagnostic information relevant to education exceptionalities and psychiatric diagnosis.
3. Theoretical Foundations UNIT’s definition of intelligence: the ability to solve problems using memory and reasoning
General Intelligence, or g
Memory and Reasoning
Symbolic and Non-Symbolic
Research goals for developing the UNIT
Develop a nonverbal test (no receptive or expressive language)
Create a test that truly assess general intelligence
Create an assessment that is not culturally loaded
Have a test that is easy to administer and take
4. Uses/Applications For children and adolescents whose intellectual abilities cannot be adequately, appropriately or fairly assessed with verbal questions
For children and adolescents with:
speech, language impairments
color vision deficiencies
different cultural or language backgrounds
those who are verbally uncommunicative
well as general intelligence and thereby broaden the concept of intellectual giftedness
Individuals with mental retardation
Individuals with language-related psychiatric disorders
5. Examinee Considerations Individuals from different cultural background
The examiner should keep in mind the examinee’s cultural standpoint; keep in mind not to make references related to the dominant culture. The UNIT does that being a nonverbal test.
Individuals with limited English
Before beginning an assessment of an examinee whose first language is not English, the examiner should learn as much as possible about the examinee’s cultural history. This may require an interpreter’s assistance.
Individuals with speech and language impairment
Working with children or adolescents with speech or language impairment within their life they have endured frustration and most a short fuse due to the lack of communication. Just be aware of the communication because it can inhibit their score.
6. Examinee Considerations (cont) Individuals with serious emotional disturbance or psychiatric disorders
The examiner should always nave knowledge on what disorders the child may have before the test begin. This will prepare the examiner and overall influence the testing in a positive way.
Individuals with physical disabilities
The UNIT allows for pointing responses or minor changes within five of its subtest. Since there are no time limits on most subtest and the rest have generous amounts of time individuals with motoric difficulties are not penalized.
7. Examiner Considerations Well-trained
Specifically with administrating the UNIT
Sensitive to examinees cultural
Examiner’s attitude and interpersonal demeanor
Develop rapport and maintain rapport
Be open and friendly, businesslike, work at a comfortable and steady pace
Be aware of examinees behavior’s
Offer breaks when needed, take a short walk around the room
Point to examinee, point to test materials, then wave both hands in a rotating fashion.
Give multiple thumbs up and positive head nods
8. Environmental Considerations Similar and standardized conditions must exist
Test administration should be fluid and no delays between items or subtests
Communicate interest, enthusiasm, and encouragement nonverbally through smiles and gestures.
Examiner should describe the procedure of the test and inform participant that questions about the test will not be answered once the test has begun
9. Environmental Considerations (cont) Test should take place in a quiet, well-lit, well-ventilated room with a comfortable temperature
Distractions should be eliminated or minimized
Lighting is critical
Competing visual stimuli should be removed
Workspace should be clear of all material except the testing stimuli
Top of test table should be smooth and flat
Examiner should sit at an angle across the corn of the table from the examinee, on the side of examinee’s dominant hand
Test materials that aren’t being used should be placed out of sight
Should only include the examiner and examinee but sometimes a third person will be allowed in the room
10. Administration Options Abbreviated battery
includes the first two subtests, symbolic memory and cube design, and may be used as a screener of intellectual functioning.
consists of the first four subtest, symbolic memory, cube design, spatial memory, and analogic reasoning... And is the most frequently administered UNIT option. The standard battery is appropriately used for making educational placement decisions.
includes all 6 subtest, that is, the four sub-tests in the standard battery plus object Memory, and mazes, and is appropriate for more in-depth diagnostic assessments.
11. Conceptual Model 2 measure breakdowns There are measures of memory Symbolic memory, spatial memory, and object memory There are measures of reasoning Cube design, analogic reasoning, and mazes
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ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder)
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a common mental illness characterized by the inability to concentrate or sit still. The condition is, of course, more involved than these two symptoms. However, when people think of ADHD, the image is of a young child squirming in his seat. The truth is that the condition manifests itself in ways that differ from one person to another. Patients are also not always kids. People who were not diagnosed as children find out about the condition as adults who have concentration and other related issues. By understanding the disorder and its symptoms, families may be able to better cope with an ADHD diagnosis in an adult or child in the household.
The myths surrounding ADHD often begin with the origins of the condition. Many people believe that children contract the disorder from eating too much sugar or watching too much television. In truth, the only thing that seems clear about the condition is that it is hereditary and develops in childhood. Properly diagnosed adults can pinpoint the symptoms in their own childhood that were left undiagnosed. The condition is now most commonly diagnosed in childhood, particularly in boys.
Another myth is that ADHD is caused by other mental health conditions. While the disorder may coexist with depression or bipolar disorder, there is little evidence that the coexisting condition caused the ADHD. The condition can appear as a lone psychiatric problem. However, this is usually not the case.
One of the most misunderstood areas of the condition is the symptom list. ADHD symptoms can make patients appear to be flaky adults, unruly children, shopaholics and procrastinators. Other mislabels for ADHD sufferers include procrastinators, impulsives, quitters and fidgeters. These labels are only description of the primary symptoms of the disorder, which can include:
- Being easily distracted
- Focus and concentration difficulties
- Task completion problems
- Being talkative
- Trouble sitting or stand still
- Moving and touching things constantly
- Being easily bored
- Difficulty listening to and following instructions
- Interruptive speaking
- Difficulty staying on topic or on task
People who have ADHD have their own collection of these symptoms that may end up disrupting their daily lives. The key to remember is that no one will have every symptom, so your ADHD diagnosis may reflect that you are a dreamer who is impatient and impulsive, but you may not be hyperactive. This is perfectly acceptable. Identifying these symptoms in a person is the most important thing. Because there are so many ways to misinterpret the symptoms and to make a diagnosis, only a doctor should do so. Just remember that hyperactivity is not the predominant symptom for the disorder. In fact, most adult patients were missed as kids because they were quiet children who did not disrupt class. However, as adults, their symptom combinations created a need to seek mental health treatment.
Medication is often thought to be the first line of defense for treating ADHD, but this is not true. Some patients use a therapy and medication combination, and others use no medication at all. The only way to treat the conditions is to identify the primary complaint for the ADHD sufferer. There are three categories of ADHD patients:
- Hyperactive-impulsive patients have most of the classic ADHD symptoms, but those symptoms are related to the hyperactivity. These patients are fidgety, impatient, talkative and have trouble focusing, for example.
- Inattentive patients primarily have symptoms that center on the inability to pay attention. They can’t focus, concentrate, follow instructions and often change topics, for example.
- The third category is a combination of the first two. Their symptoms span the ADHD symptom board with no predominant leader.
Treatment for the disorders also includes occupational therapy for those who need it. Patients who suffer from a coexisting condition also get treatment for that disorder. Bipolar disorder is a common codiagnosis that is treated with medications that also treat the ADHD. Therapies are designed to treat both conditions.
ADHD patients may try several combinations of treatments to alleviate symptoms before an effective one is found. Contrary to belief, there is no cure for the disorder and kids do not grow out of it. Many kids may find themselves seeking additional treatment as adults. Others may find ways to cope on their own. No matter which one occurs, the patient is never cured of the condition.
ADHD is often a disorder that can be managed. Severe cases exist that can be debilitating for the patients. These cases often come with other severe mental conditions that complicate the diagnosis and the patient’s life. Most ADHD patients function normally in society with no outward signs of their conditions. Adults with ADHD should watch for signs of the condition in their families, as the hereditary link to ADHD is very strong. Parents regularly pass this along to their kids. Similarly, newly diagnosed patients usually find it easy to pinpoint the condition in others in their own family.
It is a little-known fact that most ADHD sufferers are creative types. In fact, there are several celebrities that suffer from the mental condition. Justin Timberlake (singer, actor and producer) is one example.
There is evidence of high rates of ADHD among drug users. The drugs are used to slow down the thought processes so that the patient can function. However, drugs come with complications of their own, which can be hard on the impatient, impulsive, inattentive ADHD patient. Rehab takes time, a concept that many with ADHD have issues with.
ADHD may be complicated by food sensitivities and allergies. For this reason, nutritional services are often provided to children and families touched by the condition.
No matter what your condition may consist of, you can start to control the disorder with medical intervention along with some lifestyle and habit changes.
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The Appalachian region is home to more salamander species than anywhere else in the world, making it a true hotspot for salamander biodiversity. Thanks to the area’s diverse forest and freshwater ecosystems, many different salamander species have adapted to the relatively cool, mid- and high-elevation highlands. With almost half of all salamander species listed as threatened or endangered and populations already declining for unknown reasons, the Appalachian region has become a primary focus of salamander conservation research and planning.
Many of the species unique to Appalachia belong to the Plethodontidae, a family of lungless salamanders that breathe entirely through their skin. These salamanders are particularly sensitive to water quality, temperature, and changes in precipitation since they must constantly keep their skin moist and cannot move through dry areas. Unfortunately, these needs may make it especially hard for some species to adapt to a changing climate.
Climate models predict a 2-6°C increase in average annual temperature in the Appalachian region over the next century. While some salamander species may be able to adapt to warmer temperatures or extend their ranges northward, others do not have these options. High-elevation species are often specialized for cool microclimates and become easily stressed when exposed to increased temperatures or drought. This means that many mountaintop species have nowhere to go, since they will not be able to migrate down through warmer valleys to find a new, cooler environment. In addition to the direct threats of climate change, mountain-top salamanders may face increased competition as lower-elevation species expand their ranges upward.
Scientists predict that precipitation will become less frequent, with longer drought periods between short periods of intense rainfall. This pattern will reduce the amount of time salamanders are able to move around in their territory, resulting in fewer opportunities to eat and find mates. The amount of water in waterways will change dramatically and small, ephemeral pools will become fewer and more transient, further reducing breeding opportunities for salamanders that lay eggs in water. Finally, the increased number of intense rainstorms can flush pollutants into stream habitats or wash away eggs and juvenile salamanders.
Since we cannot protect salamanders from climate change in the same way we can mitigate pollution or habitat loss, we need to determine how each particular species will be affected in order to develop effective strategies to help them survive. This includes making detailed observations of the physiology of different species, their current ranges, and ability to withstand or adapt to climate change. A few species may adapt relatively easily to a warmer, more variable climate. Ensuring that “corridors” are available for migration of salamanders northward to healthy, cooler habitats may work for others. Mountaintop species may require relocation if they become too pressured by climate change or competitive species. Finally, raising salamanders in captivity will establish an assurance colony to guard against extinction in the wild and provide us with more opportunities for research.
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If this tree falls, everyone is going to hear it. The 150-year-old horse-chestnut tree in the city center of Amsterdam described in Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl is diseased and was in danger of being cut down. It has been losing a battle with fungus and a moth infestation and only a quarter of it is surviving. The Amsterdam city council declared that the tree had to be cut down on last week, but a court recently ruled against that decision and saved the tree from the chop.
"We are so happy about this," said Helga Fassbinder, a neighbor who looks down on the tree from her apartment in Amsterdam, and founder of the Committee to Save Anne Frank’s Tree.
"That tree is not just a tree," Fassbinder said. "It is one of the last living witnesses to Anne Frank and all that took place here."
Frank went into hiding in Amsterdam in 1942 to escape Nazi persecution. She could see the tree from the only window that was not blacked out in the cramped apartment she shared for more than two years with her family and several others, and she wrote about it in her diary.
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Nanowires Have the Power to Revolutionize Solar Energy
08.04.13 - Capture up to 12 times more light to produce more energy? Nanowires do just that and surpass expectations on solar energy production.
Imagine a solar panel more efficient than today’s best solar panels, but using 10 000 times less material. This is what EPFL researchers expect given recent findings on these tiny filaments called nanowires. Solar technology integrating nanowires could capture large quantities of light and produce energy with incredible efficiency at a much lower cost. This technology is possibly the future for powering microchips and the basis for a new generation of solar panels.
Despite their size, nanowires have tremendous potential for energy production. “These nanowires capture much more light than expected,” says Anna Fontcuberta i Morral about her research, published on 24 March 2013 in Nature Photonics.
Nanowires are extremely tiny filaments–in this case able to capture light–with a diameter that measures tens to hundreds of nanometers, where a nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter. These miniscule wires are up to 1000 times smaller than the diameter of human hair, or comparable in diameter to the size of viruses.
When equipped with the right electronic properties, the nanowire becomes a tiny solar cell, transforming sunlight into electric current. Anna Fontcuberta i Morral and her team built a nanowire solar cell out of gallium arsenide, a material which is better at converting light into power than silicon. They found that it actually collects more light than the usual flat solar cell–up to 12 times more–and more light means more energy.
The nanowire standing vertically essentially acts like a very efficient light funnel. Even though the nanowire is only a few hundred nanometers in diameter, it absorbs light as though it were 12 times bigger. In other words, it has a greater field of vision than expected.
Fontcuberta’s prototype is already almost 10% more efficient at transforming light into power than allowed, in theory, for conventional single material solar panels. Furthermore, optimizing the dimensions of the nanowire, improving the quality of the gallium arsenide and using better electrical contacts to extract the current could increase the prototype’s efficiency.
Arrays of nanowire solar cells offer new prospects for energy production. This study suggests that an array of nanowires may attain 33% efficiency, in practice, whereas commercial (flat) solar panels are now only up to 20% efficient. Also, arrays of nanowires would use at least 10 000 times less gallium arsenide, allowing for industrial use of this costly material. Translating this into dollars for gallium arsenide, the cost would only be $10 per square meter instead of $100 000.
Free to the engineer’s imagination to mount these nanowires onto a variety of substrate panels, be it lightweight, flexible or designed to withstand the harshest of conditions. In a world where energy consumption is on the rise, these nanowires may one day power everything from your favorite gadget to space missions to Mars.
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The Town of Hinton was named for William P. Hinton, Vice President and General Manager of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. The community was named in 1911 and remained a hamlet for the next 45 years.
Settlement in the area was scattered along a line some twelve kilometres (7.5 mi) in length. A site along Hardisty Creek, is where an aboriginal group from the Jasper area had left members stricken with smallpox while the rest of the group travelled to Lac Ste. Anne to find medical aid for the smallpox epidemic which was ravaging the indigenous population in Alberta. The area was thus dubbed Cache Picote (Smallpox Camp) in 1870. In 1888 Jack Gregg established a trading post at Prairie Creek to serve travellers along the Jasper trail. The creek is now known as Muskuta Creek after an incorrect interpretation of the Cree name by white settlers. The construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway saw the establishment of a construction camp at the mouth of Prairie Creek (at the Athabasca River) in 1908. A trestle was built over the creek and is still in use by CN today. In 1911 the Grand Trunk Pacific built a station house at mile 978 west of Winnipeg. The station was named Hinton, and the community was born. The Canadian Northern Railway also established a station called Bliss in 1914. The Canadian Northern Railway ran north of the Grand Trunk Pacific line and the Bliss station was located about 4 miles east of Hinton in the Athabasca River valley. In 1916 when the Grand Trunk Pacific rail line was temporarily closed, Dalehurst became the postal station for Hinton. Entrance (formerly Dyke), another important centre to Hinton, served as its communications centre. The original community known as Entrance was so named due to its location at the entrance to Jasper National Park and was located on the Canadian Northern rail line north of the Athabasca River from where Entrance (formerly Dyke) is located. The original site of Entrance is now known as Old Entrance.
The Canadian National Railway became the owner of both rail lines, the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk pacific and various portions of both lines were used by the new mother company. The company, however, abandoned the use of the rail line through Bliss in 1926 and once again the rail line through Hinton was opened.
The population of Hinton experienced a boom during the 1930s when American entrepreneur Frank Seabolt and two partners opened the Hinton coal mine in 1931. Shortly thereafter, a recession caused the population to dwindle to fewer than 100 people, but the town began to rebound in 1955 with the construction of a pulp mill. The mill brought rapid growth to Hinton and a new village was developed and was named the Village of Drinnan in 1956. The two communities amalgamated on April 1, 1957, to form the present Town of Hinton.
In 1986, 23 people were killed in the Hinton train collision.
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Building America: Minnesota's Iron Range, U.S. Industrialization, and the Creation of World Power
The weeklong workshop will be based on national history standards and the national social studies standards. In addition, the workshop will be organized around three central themes that align with those standards. These three themes are: 1) Natural History of the Landmark: Geography and Geology; 2) The Mines and their Contributions to American History; and 3) The People and the Mines.
Each week, 40 participants from across the nation will explore the Iron Range and the people who worked, sacrificed, and died in the mines to build industrial America and help win two world wars.
When will the workshops take place?
Two one-week residential workshops will be conducted in northern Minnesota's Iron Range during the weeks of June 13-18 or August 1-6, 2010.
Who is eligible to participate?
Classroom teachers and librarians in public, private, parochial, and charter schools, as well as home-schooling parents are eligible to participate. Other K-12 school personnel, including administrators, substitute teachers, and classroom paraprofessionals, are also eligible to participate, subject to available space.
How much does the workshop cost?
here is no registration fee for NEH-funded Landmarks of American History and Culture summer programs.
More detailed information is available on our website.
Mallory Wessel, Coordinator of Professional Development
Minnesota Humanities Center
987 Ivy Ave E
St. Paul, MN 55106
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The Supreme Court’s decision in Harris v. Quinn, a major case regarding the power of public sector unions, was a significant setback for the nation’s powerful teachers unions, but fell short of being the crushing blow that many labor leaders feared. (RELATED: Supreme Court Deals Blow To Unions)
The case concerned a lawsuit by Pam Harris, who was being paid by the state of Illinois on a contract basis to provide home health care for her sick son, Josh. This contractual relationship technically made her a state employee, and state law in Illinois made it mandatory for Harris to pay a representation fee to the Service Employees International Union, which represents Illinois’ home caregivers in collective bargaining with the government. Harris objected to paying the representation fee and sued.
Such mandatory representation fees are referred to as “closed shop” or “union shop” laws, and are designed to eliminate a “free rider” problem that emerges when state employees benefit from union collective bargaining, but do not financially support the bargaining themselves. Laws which forbid such arrangements and allow all employees to be hired without joining a union are referred to as “right to work” laws by supporters.
Under the previous precedent, 1977’s Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the Supreme Court had ruled that closed-shop public sector unions, including those that exist for public school teachers in many states, were completely legal. In the Harris decision, Justice Samuel Alito narrowed that allowance, finding that home health-care workers like Harris were not “full-fledged public employees” and therefore could not be compelled to pay representation fees.
“You [definitely] put this in the loss column for public employee unions,” Michael Brickman, national policy director for the educational think tank Fordham Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
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An alarming number of Americans may have to work until they die.
The youngest and the poorest are the least likely to be putting money aside. Fifty-six percent of all 18- to 34-year-olds are not saving at all for retirement, according to the study. In addition, just 23 percent of Americans earning less than $50,000 per year contributed at least $2,500 to their retirement accounts over the past year.
"In order to have the adequate savings necessary to meet their financial needs in retirement -- which could last 20 or more years -- it is critical that these individuals begin saving systematically early in their working years," said Matthew Drinkwater, associate managing director at LIMRA, according to CNN Money.
Unfortunately, most young Americans do not start saving early. Just one in three Americans begin putting away money for retirement in their 20s, according to Bankrate.
Meanwhile, retiree health care costs have risen 6 percent a year since 2002. Health care bills now run to $240,000 for a 65-year-old couple over a 20-year-period, according to a recent study by Fidelity Investments cited by USA Today.
As they face high living costs and low bank balances, more and more older Americans are finding themselves in tough financial positions. The number of senior citizens who are working has doubled over the past 15 years to a record 7.2 million, according to The New York Times. More than nine million senior citizens cannot pay their bills, and 60 percent of older women cannot afford basic expenses, according to two recent studies from the group Wider Opportunities for Women.
At the same time, many younger Americans simply cannot afford to start saving for retirement. Just one in two recent college graduates have full-time jobs, according to a study by Rutgers released on Thursday. And the average debt burden of twenty-somethings is $45,000, according to a recent study by PNC Bank.
That financial insecurity lasts throughout the lives of many. Forty-three percent of all American households are one crisis away from poverty, according to a recent study -- meaning saving for retirement is all but impossible.
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If you are a Shar-Pei owner, chances are that you already know about Shar-Pei fever, but it never hurts to brush up on the basics. And non-Shar-Pei owners – or those of you who may be considering getting one of these adorable, wrinkled loves – consider this a primer on Familial Shar-Pei Fever, or FSF, for short.
Familial Shar-Pei fever is a hereditary inflammatory disorder. This means that it is passed down from generation to generation.
We’ve talked about inflammation before and its role in healing, as well as its role in other diseases such as amyloidosis. Inflammation is the body’s normal response to foreign cells, be they bacteria, viruses, or even cancer cells. Dogs with FSF have a problem with the way their inflammation is regulated, resulting in a constantly high inflammatory state. High levels of pro-inflammatory proteins, including serum amyloid A, circulate through the body at all times, and can eventually lead to amyloidosis of the kidney.
Part of what we love about Shar-Peis is their wrinkles, and it seems that they may indirectly play a part in this disease process. The genetic mutation that causes those wrinkles also causes an over-production of a substance called hyaluronon, which is pro-inflammatory.
The classic signs of Shar-Pei fever include episodic fevers and joint swelling. The fevers that come with FSF are not your run-of-the-mill fever; temperatures can reach as high as 105 to 107oF, so these dogs feel terrible. As if that weren’t bad enough, these poor pups can have painful, hot joint swelling in their legs and sometimes at the wrist. This makes walking extremely painful.
Sometimes mild vomiting and diarrhea occur, and to top it all off, abdominal pain usually plagues them as well. Needless to say, these dogs feel pretty crummy. And due to the cyclic nature of the disease, even when they recover, it can happen all over again many times.
Unfortunately, there are currently no laboratory tests for FSF, though ongoing research will surely produce one soon. Instead, veterinarians rely on the history and physical signs to arrive at a diagnosis. If kidney values are elevated, biopsies may reveal amyloidosis.
Short term treatment centers on the management of clinical signs – fever and joint pain. Fluids and non-steroidal anti-inflammatories are used for this purpose, and the patient’s temperature is followed very closely for several days. For the long term, affected Shar-Peis will likely be started on a drug called colchicine. This medication was found to be effective in humans with a similar condition called Familial Mediterranean Fever, and it seems to also work well in our canine friends. Colchicine delays amyloidosis and reduces the number of FSF episodes.
Because FSF is hereditary, affected dogs should not be bred. Responsible breeders take this disease very seriously. Do your homework regarding your breeder of choice, and don’t be afraid to question your breeder regarding the presence of FSF in his or her lines to make sure your new friend is as healthy as possible before he comes home with you.
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>>> What is Karate ? <<<
What is karate? Karate is a martial art developed in the Ryukyu Islands in what is now Okinawa, Japan. It was developed partially from indigenous fighting methods called te and from Chinese kenpo. Karate is a striking art using punching, kicking, knee and elbow strikes, and open-handed techniques such as knife-hands. Grappling, locks, restraints, throws, and vital point strikes are taught in some styles.
A karate practitioner is called a karateka. There are several different styles of karate, most of them stemming from the same genealogical tree, and some others acquiring the name "karate" for practical reasons while actually deriving from a mix of other martial arts.
Each style of karate stresses some techniques more than others, or has some differences in performing the same techniques from what other styles do. However, most karate schools and styles adhere to the same basic principles, and use the same basic attire, stances and terminology. (more...)
Inside this application :
- Dojo Kun
5. Karate & Its Influence Outside Japan
- United Kingdom
6. Film Stars
- Videos (Dojo kun, Stances, Punches, Chokuzi, Maegeri, Kata Pinan Sono, Kumite Techniques, 5 Exercises for kids at home)
Tags: tecniche karate
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| 0.90531 | 296 | 2.921875 | 3 |
Etiquette for Use with People Who Have Hearing Impairments
When you are with a person who is deaf or has hearing problems:
- Look directly at the person you are speaking to. If you are working with a sign language interpreter, talk directly to the person who is deaf, not to the interpreter. While working, the interpreter is not a participant in the conversation, but a transmitter for the person who is deaf.
- Don't cover your mouth, and don't create shadow on your face by standing with your back or side to a bright light or window.
- Speak at a slow to moderate rate and don't use exaggerated lip movement. Some people's voices are easier to understand. Women with soft voices can be more difficult to understand.
- If there is a misunderstanding about something you've said, repeat the same idea using different words.
- Keep paper and pen nearby. If communication is difficult, feel comfortable resorting to writing key words or brief phrases—and writing phone numbers or addresses is often a good idea.
- Don't shout—it won't help. Hearing aids make sounds louder, not clearer.
- To get a person's attention, gently tap the Deaf/hard of hearing person on the arm or elbow and make sure they are looking at you before you speak.
- Be aware that being able to hear conversation in a crowd and/or with background noise is most difficult.
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History of the family crest
The most important accessory of the arms is the crested helm representing the family crest. Like the arms it has its pre-heraldic history in the crests of the Greek helmets, the wings, the wild boar’s and bull’s heads of Viking headpieces. A little roundel of the arms of a Japanese house was often borne as a crest in the Japanese helmet, stepped in a socket above the middle of the brim.
The 12th-century seal of Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders, shows a demi-lion painted or beaten on the side of the upper part of his helm. Crests, however, came slowly into use in England,. Of the long roll of earls and barons sealing the famous letter to the pope in 1301 only five show true crests on their seals. Two of them are the earl of Lancaster and his brother, each with a wyver crest like that of Quincy. One, and the most remarkable, is John St John of Halnaker, whose crest is a leopard standing between two upright palm branches. Ralph de Monthermer has an eagle crest, while Walter de Moncy’s helm is surmounted by a fox-like beast. In three of these instances the crest is borne, as was often the case, by the horse as well as the rider. Others of these seals to the barons’ letter have the fan-shaped crest without any decoration upon it. But as the furniture of tournaments grew more magnificent the crest gave a new field for display, and many strange shapes appear in painted and gilded wood, metal, leather or parchment above the helms of the jousters.
The Berkeleys, great patrons of abbeys, bore a mitre as their crest painted with their arms, like crests being sometimes seen on the continent where the wearer was an advocate of a bishopric or abbey. The whole or half figures or the heads and necks of beasts and birds were employed by other families. Saracens’ heads topped many helms, that of the great Chandos among them. Astley bore for his crest a silver harpy standing in marsh-sedge, a golden chain fastened to a crown about her neck. Stanley took the eagle’s nest in which the eagle is lighting down with a swaddled babe in his claws. Burnell had a burdock bush, La Vache a cow’s leg, and Lisle’s strange fancy was to perch a huge millstone on edge above his head. Many early helmets repeat the arms on the sides of a fan-crest. Howard bore for a crest his arms painted on a pair of wings, while simple bushes or feathers are seen in great plenty. The crest of a cadet is often differenced like the arms, and thus a wyver or a leopard will have a label about its neck. The Montague griffon on the helm of John, marques of Montague, holds in its beak the gimlet ring with which he differenced his father’s shield.
It is often stated that a man, unless by some special grace or allowance, can have but one crest. This, however, is contrary to the spirit of medieval armory in which a man, inheriting the coat of arms of another house than his own, took with it all its belongings, crest, badge and the like. The heraldry books, with more reason, deny crests to women and to the clergy, but examples are not wanting of medieval seals in which even this rule is broken. It is perhaps unfair to cite the case of the bishops of Durham who ride in full harness on their palatinate seals;family crest example but Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich, has a helm on which the winged griffon’s head of his house springs from a mitre, while Alexander Nevill, archbishop of York, seals with shield, supporters and crowned and crested helm like those of any lay magnate. Richard Holt, a Northamptonshire clerk in holy orders, bears on his seal in the reign of Henry V a shield of arms and a mantled helm with the crest of a collared greyhound’s head. About the middle of the same century a seal cut for the wife of Thomas Chetwode, a Cheshire squire, has a shield of her husband’s arms parted with her own and surmounted by a crowned helm with the crest of a demi-lion; and this is not the only example of such bearings by a woman.
Before passing from the crest let us note that in England the juncture of crest and helm was commonly covered, especially after the beginning of the 15th century, by a wreath of silk, twisted with one, two or three colors. Coronets or crowns and hats of estate often take the place of the wreath as a base for the crest, and there are other curious variants. With the wreath may be considered the mantle, a hanging cloth which, in its earliest form, is seen as two strips of silk attached to the top of the helm below the crest and streaming like pennants as the rider bent his head and charged. Such strips are often displayed from the conical top of an uncrested helm, and some ancient examples have the air of the two ends of a stole of a bishop’s mitre. The general opinion of antiquaries has been that the mantle originated among the crusaders as a protection for the steel helm from the rays of an Eastern sun; but the fact that mantles take in England their fuller form after the crusading days were over seems against this theory.
When the shield and crested fashion for shattering the edges of helm with hat and clothing came in, the edges of the mantle of Thomas of mantle were slitted like the edge Hengrave (1401). of the sleeve or skirt, and, flourished out on either side of the helm, it became the delight of the painter of armories and the seal engraver. A worthless tale, repeated by popular manuals, makes the slitted edge represent the shearing work of the enemy’s sword, a fancy which takes no account of the like developments in civil dress. Modern heraldry in England paints the mantle with the principal color of the shield, lining it with the principal metal. This in cases where no old grant of arms is cited as evidence of another usage. The mantles of the king and of the prince of Wales are, however, of gold lined with ermine and those of other members of the royal house of gold lined with silver. In ancient examples there is great variety and freedom. Where the crest is the head of a griffon or bird the feathering of the neck will be carried on to cover the mantle. Other mantles will be powdered with badges or with charges from the shield, others checkered, barred or paled. More than thirty of the mantles enameled on the stall-plates of the medieval Garter-knights are of red with an ermine lining, tinctures which in most cases have no reference to the shields below them.
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Wild parsnip (Pastinaca sativa) is a member of the carrot family with origins in Europe and Asia. It’s not known how it came to this country—if it was brought over as a possible food source by immigrants or if a seed was transported accidentally. The first records of this aggressive plant in Wisconsin date back to 1894.
An Invasive Species
Wild parsnip is found throughout Wisconsin in sunny areas along roadsides, bike trails, fence rows, abandoned fields, and prairies. The plant is an invasive species that will spread quickly providing a threat to native plants.
Besides being invasive, wild parsnip has serious health hazards when it comes in contact with human skin. If exposed skin comes in contact with the sap from any part of the plant in the presence of sunlight, the sap will cause a severe burn with blistering, typically 24 to 48 hours after exposure; this reaction is referred to as phytophotodermatitis. Don’t mistake the burn of wild parsnip for the itchy rash of poison ivy.
About Wild Parsley
During July, wild parsnip is one of the dominant yellow-flowered weeds along the roadsides. When flowering, the plant will be between 3 to 6 feet tall. The stem is thick, hairy, grooved, and hollow with leaves arranged alternately on the stem. There are hundreds of tiny yellow flowers with five petals, in flat-topped umbrella like clusters called umbels at the tops of the stems and branches. Besides the hundreds of flowers, one plant will also produce hundreds of flat, oval, ¼ inch seeds. The seeds are dispersed in September and can remain viable in the soil for four years. Wild parsnip seedlings are among the first plants to green up early in the spring. The first year or so, wild parsnips will be a rosette about 6 inches tall. When conditions are right, a flower stalk is sent up; blooms, and then the plant will die
How to Control
There are a few different ways to control wild parsnip. If detected early, the taproot of each plant can be cut with a spade just below ground level, for a larger patch a power brush-cutter could be used. Mowing should be done before seed formation with follow up mowing throughout the summer. Burning is not very effective for controlling wild parsnip; plants will just re-sprout. Herbicides such as those containing glyphosate are effective with the right timing of treatment. Always wear gloves, long pants, and long sleeves when working with wild parsnip. When using a brush-cutter, it’s also advisable to add a face shield.
Wild parsnip can be confused with the endangered native prairie parsley (Polytaenia nuttallii). The websites for the Wisconsin DNR (http://dnr.wi.gov), UW-Extension (http://hort.uwex.edu/), and Invasive Plant Association of Wisconsin (http://ipaw.org/) provide photos and detailed descriptions of wild parsnip for accurate identification of this annoying plant.
Certified Master Gardener
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And the winner is: 'Education'
On 28 August 2003, ESA presented the winners of the SUCCESS 2002 Students Contest at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany. After the final selection, 40 proposals remained and their authors were invited to the award ceremony. Sitting in the auditorium, they eagerly awaited the results of the scientific jury.
"I did not expect to win the first prize at all", said Adalberto Costessi, the winner of the first prize of the SUCCESS 2002 Student Contest. He was busy inserting fresh batteries into his digital camera to photograph the winner when they called out his name. It had not crossed his mind that he himself might be the lucky winner.
Costessi learned about the contest from a ESA poster displayed at the University of Triest in Italy. Studying Biotechnology and being interested in astronomy and black holes since his childhood he was looking for a subject for his thesis. It occurred to him that very few things were known about the phenomenon of bone loss in astronauts in space.
To better understand the cellular mechanisms of osteoblast cells, which produce bone, he proposes introducing a well-established tool for analysing proteins for the first time in space. This method will help to identify the difference between signal transduction proteins of osteoblasts during weightlessness and on Earth. Costessi hopes that this will shed some light on how the osteoblast cells sense gravity.
A scientific jury found his proposal to be the most convincing of all and awarded him the first prize. "It took me some time to realise what happened. Looking at the certificate I realised I was going to spend one year at ESTEC to make my proposed experiment fly on the ISS!" said an excited Costessi.
The second prize was also awarded to an Italian student: Roberto Rusconi, from the Technical University of Milan, for his proposal 'Thermal Lens Measurement of the Soret Effect'. The third prize went to a French student, Eric Belin de Chantemèle from the University of Lyons. He proposed a comprehensive evaluation of energy and water metabolism adaptations to spaceflights.
"I would like to congratulate the winners," said Jörg Feustel-Büechl, Director of the ESA Human Spaceflight Directorate, "but also I would like to point out that ESA is very pleased of the high quality of the proposals it received. This clearly calls for maintaining and elaborating our efforts to support students in using our microgravity facilities for their experiments".
For further information on the SUCCESS 2002 Student Contest, visit the SUCCESS website at http://spaceflight.esa.int/users/success
ISS Utilisation and Promotion Division
Directorate of Human Spaceflight
European Space Agency
Noordwijk, the Netherlands
Phone: +31 (0)71 565 4820
Fax: +31 (0)71 565 3663
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An examination of the brain of an 18-year-old high school football player who collapsed and died showed degenerative brain disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The boy had suffered numerous concussions playing football.
Recent evidence suggests that most NFL players suffer brain damage during their careers. A Boston University study of six brains from players who died between ages 36 and 50 showed that five of them had it. NFL players, particularly linemen, tend to die young, both from brain damage and heart disease brought on by their 300-pound-plus bodies.
A sixth player, Tom McHale, formerly of the Bucs, Eagles, and Dolphins, and who died of a drug overdose last year at 45, also has been diagnosed with CTE.
It's an epidemic. Players even in high school are much, much bigger, faster, and meaner than they have ever been. High school football is destroying young mens' brains. Why is this permitted? Not only permitted but encouraged and lavished with spending?
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C Kameswara Rao
Foundation for Biotechnology Awareness and Education, Bangalore, India
There are two kinds of ‘gene flow’, the natural processes of transfer of genes from one species/variety to another. Gene flow through natural interspecific or intervarietal hybridization mediated by pollen is ‘vertical gene flow’, which results in the transfer of entire genomes. The genes are transferred from the parent to the offspring and express only in the next generation, the offspring.
The other kind is ‘horizontal or lateral gene flow’, which is a rare natural biological event that transfers a few genes at a time from one species to an unrelated species, without involving sexual reproduction.
Crossability Barriers and Reproductive Isolation
Species and even their varieties do not cross with each other freely. They are reproductively isolated, with their identity being maintained through several genetically controlled physical and/or physiological crossability (reproductive) barriers. Species and varieties differ in chromosome number and structure, and genetic constitution, which are often serious impediments to the fertility of the offspring of hybrid crosses. Reproductive barriers may also operate at one or more stages of pollen germination, viability, fertilization, embryo development and seed germination. When reproductive isolation from reproductive barriers is strong, even persistent attempts at artificial hybridization have failed. When such restrictions are weak, natural intervarietal or interspecific hybridization and gene transfer may occur. Even intergeneric gene transfer such as known from wheat (Triticum aestivum) to a distant wild relative (Aegilops peregrina) is a possibility, though extremely rare. Repeated (back) crossing with the donor parent results in introgression, the stable incorporation of genes from one differentiated gene pool into another.
Biosecurity of Genetically Engineered Products
Biosecurity, the safety of genetically engineered (GE) products as food and feed and the safety of the environment, is a matter of concern both for the biotechnologists and the critics. It was the scientists, not the anti-GE activists, who first thought of biosecurity issues, investigated the extent of risk and devised means to mitigate any possible risk. Before commercialization, each GE product is subjected to a very lengthy and stringent biosecurity regime and only when the product is found to be safe and has a favorable risk-benefit ratio, it is released for public use.
The opponents of GE (transgenic) crops and products made gene flow a contentious issue and raised several biosecurity concerns in their anti-GE arguments.
Vertical gene flow
The apprehension is that pollen from the transgenic crops pollinate non-GE varieties (gene escape) causing genetic contamination or pollution. According to the anti-tech activists such an event would cause untold horrors to the crops and the environment. The activists argue that the non-target organisms would be affected and the transgenics would become super weeds.
Issues of gene flow should take into consideration several factors related to the reproductive biology of the species involved. Vertical gene flow requires a) populations of two different varieties/species that grow together in the same geographical area (sympatric), b) they should be synchronous in flowering time, pollen viability and stigma receptivity, and c) be genetically compatible allowing random mating (panmictic) between the two populations, which means that there are no reproductive barriers preventing hybridization or at least that they are weak.
The means of pollination, extent of natural cross-pollination, duration of pollen viability and stigma receptivity, extent of cross-fertilization, embryo survival and seed and fruit set are the critical events in gene flow. The degree of fertility of the hybrids depends upon the degree of genetic compatibility. Analysis of the hybrids would indicate the extent of gene transfer. If the transferred genes add to the competence of the species/variety (adaptive value), and if there is repeated back crossing with the donor parent, the genes will be fixed in the population (introgressed) which in course of time differentiates as a new variety or even a new species.
Gene flow can occur between transgenics and the isogenic varieties of a crop, to the same extent as was happening earlier between non-transgenic populations of that crop. Transgenes do not promote promiscuity. Unintended transgenic hybrids resulting from gene flow from GE crops to wild or weedy relatives is possible, but cannot easily or routinely occur.
Hybridization experiments have shown that intercrossing among the indica varieties of rice was 3.9 per cent and among japonica varieties it was 3.6 per cent, while practically there was no intercrossing between indica and japonica varieties. Gene flow of an herbicide resistant gene from a cultivated rice variety to a weedy rice variety was 0.011 to 0.046 per cent and from a cultivated variety to a wild variety was 1.21 to 2.19 per cent.
A comparative analytical study of GE and non-GE corn has shown that the transgenic content of a non-GE population was 0.9 per cent at 10 m from the GE population. The claim that corn transgenes have introgressed into native corn varieties in Mexico was disproved.
In Canola, the presence of an herbicide resistant gene in a non-GE population was 0.1 per cent at 5 m, 0.02 per cent at 10 m and zero at more than 15 m distance, from the GE variety.
Since the conditions under which these experiments were conducted do not exist in nature, the possibility of gene flow and of the impact of such an event would be even less.
The mere presence of a transgene in a plant is of no consequence. The question is what is the impact of few miniscule weedy populations with rapidly deteriorating vigor in agronomic terms? A Bt gene has no impact if the intended pest is not present and an herbicide tolerant gene is of no consequence if an appropriate herbicide is not sprayed. The gene should introgress and should impart an advantage to the recipient population over the others which do not have the transgene.
Horizontal gene flow
The other set of anti-GE arguments relate to the horizontal or lateral gene flow, raised in the context of antibiotic resistance genes used as selectable markers in GE technology. It is argued that these genes would be taken up by soil pathogens which would become resistant to the antibiotics, and people infected by them cannot be cured by that antibiotic, leading to incurable diseases and death.
In horizontal gene flow which does not involve sexual reproduction and bypasses reproductive isolation, the few genes transferred can express in the same cell generation. In nature, horizontal gene flow is a fundamentally prokaryotic (organisms with no nucleus or cell organelles such as bacteria) phenomenon. Other natural examples of horizontal gene flow relate to endoparasites and their hosts, which share several genes as a result of millions of years of co-habitation and co-evolution.
Horizontal gene flow occurs through one of five different biological processes known as transformation, conjugation, transfection, lysogenization and transduction. Recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology that involves transformation is a good example of artificial horizontal gene transfer that makes transgenics possible irrespective of genetic relationship.
The issue of horizontal transfer of antibiotic resistance marker genes from transgenic plants to bacteria was discussed in depth at an international symposium on the Biosafety of GE organisms in 2000. The consensus was that such an event is very unlikely and even if it happens it would not contribute significantly to the horizontal spread of the genes in question, for three reasons: a) the antibiotic resistance genes are already widespread in bacterial populations, b) there was no experimental evidence for horizontal gene transfer from plants to bacteria, and c) horizontal gene transfer events from transgenic plants to bacteria have not been detected. There is no change in this position till to date.
A recent paper in Transgenic Research (June, 2007) concluded, supported by numerous studies, most of which are commissioned by some of the very parties that have taken a position against the use of antibiotic selectable marker gene systems, is that there is no scientific basis to argue against the use and presence of selectable marker genes in transgenic plants.
February 22, 2008
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WWAP and the UNESCO Education for Sustainable Development Week
This year the UNESCO Education for Sustainable Development week is dedicated to water. This initiative represents an opportunity to raise awareness of water resources, inform on the state of the planet's resources, and enable participation and consultation mechanisms.
This unique week is part of the Education Decade for Sustainable Development 2005-2014, a global campaign by the United Nations and coordinated by UNESCO. The Italian National Commission of UNESCO invites national organizations and institutions to carry out initiatives in favor of the theme.
UN World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) at World Water Week, Stockholm, 2011
WWAP convened a Side Event during World Water Week 2011 where it presented the early findings of the 4th edition of the UN World Water Development Report (WWDR4) - to be launched on the first day of the 6th World Water Forum in Marseille 2012 - and discussed the reports from Phase 1 of the WWAP Global Water Scenarios Project. The event took place in the main conference centre and was chaired by Zafar Adeel, Chair of UN WATER. There was a high level of interest for the event, and it was well attended despite its late hour.
WWAP at the World Water Week
The World Water Week in Stockholm, the annual meeting place for the planet’s most urgent water-related issues, will take place from the 21st to the 27th of September. The thematic scope frames the key issues and discussion points related to the 2011 theme: "Water in an Urbanizing World".
During the week, WWAP will host a side event on the 24th of August at 17:45, to present the early findings of the United Nations World Water Development Report (WWDR4) and the new WWAP Global Water Scenarios Project.
Second UNESCO UCI Groundwater Conference 2011
WWAP has been invited by the International Hydrological Programme of UNESCO to be listed as a cooperating institution of the Second UNESCO-UCI International Conference on 'Groundwater Resources Management: Adaptation Measures to Water Scarcity; Science and Policy Responses'. The Conference will take place from 30th November - 3rd December 2011, at the University of California, Irvine.
"Water for Life" UN-Water Best Practices Award, second edition
The United Nations Office to Support the International Decade for Action "Water for Life" 2005-2015/UN-Water Decade Programme on Advocacy and Communication (UNW-DPAC) and the UN World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) organize the second edition of "Water for Life" Best Practices Award. Nominations are now open from 30 June to 30 September 2011.
WWAP involvement in the EIRIS investment conference: 'A Drought in Your Portfolio?'
James Winpenny, independent economic consultant, and regular consulting author to the World Water Assessment Programme, last week made the keynote speech on behalf of Mr. Olcay Unver, WWAP Coordinator, at the EIRIS investors' conference 'A drought in your portfolio'. The conference explored the investment case for considering the risks and opportunities arising from water scarcity as part of a wider sustainable investment strategy, and heralded the launch of the EIRIS' Global Water Risk report.
"Water, Climate and… Action!" finalists at Ecozine International Environmental Film Festival
The 10 finalists of the short film contest 'Water, Climate and… Action!' were presented at Ecozine, the International Environmental Film Festival in Zaragoza, Spain, from 13-21 May. The contest was organized last December by UN WWAP and TheWaterChannel.tv, with the support of the Mexican National Water Commission (CONAGUA) and the Mexican Consejo Consultivo del Agua on the occasion of COP16. This Festival takes place every May to raise awareness on environmental issues and to promote respect and good habits for a sustainable environment.
Perugia Green Days 2011: 4 days to support green economy
From the 12th to the 15th of May 2011, the city of Perugia, in Italy, hosted the first edition of "Perugia Green Days", a set of meetings and exhibitions that involved local Institutions, Universities and private companies, to promote sustainable development and the green economy.
UN WWAP was involved in the round table "Water resources, a common good to preserve", where the UN WWAP Deputy Coordinator, Michela Miletto, discussed the availability, the future and the opportunities of world water resources.
WWAP asserts a stronger commitment to mainstreaming gender equality
Gender equality is a priority for the international community and the UN system. Promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women worldwide is specially one of UNESCO’s two global priorities for 2008-2013. The World Water Assessment Programme is proud to announce the creation of an Advisory Group on Gender Equality that will serve through WWAP’s fourth phase (until the end of 2012) and is chaired by Ms Gülser Corat, UNESCO and Ms Kusum Athukorala, NetWater and comprises 9 members from different countries and background.
WWAP participation in the Fourth United Nations Conference on Least Developed Countries
In partnership with FAO, IFAD, and the Tajikistan and Bangladesh Permanent Missions to the UN, UNESCO-WWAP co-organised a Special Event entitled: 'Water Issues in the Least Developed Countries'.
The Event was held on 11th May from 8am-10am in Tophane Hall, ICC and it was the most prominent water event at the IV UN Conference on LDCs in Istanbul.
Earth Day 2011: a free concert for raising awareness on the Earth’s health
On April 20th the United Nations World Water Assessment Programme (UN WWAP) joined Earth Day Italy and other partners to celebrate the 41st edition of Earth Day, which was this year dedicated to forests. This event represents an educational and formative occasion to discuss global environmental issues.
Conference on Guarani Aquifer System "The Management of the Guarani Aquifer System: An Example of Cooperation": Call for Abstracts
In August 2010 Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, countries that share the Guarani Aquifer System (GAS), signed a new agreement for the management of this complex system.
The management of the GAS will benefit from a debate about the steps that have been taken until now, and about the challenges that lie ahead.
National Water Commission of Mexico (CONAGUA): Call to Action
The National Water Commission of Mexico (CONAGUA) has issued a call to action to continue raising awareness and increasing the common understanding on the important interdependence between the water cycle and climate change. It is vital that this interdependence is fully understood for the benefit of many economic sectors that depend upon the quantity and quality of water resources, such as energy generation, food production and environmental protection.
Rotary International Conference: 16th April 2011 Assisi 'Sorella Aqua'
This important Rotary International event, with over 1000 participants, highlighted the commitment to the future of global water by major international agencies in addition to highlighting the contribution of human, financial and professional resources made by the 10 Italian Rotary Districts in 2010/11.
Dr. Olcay Unver, Coordinator of the United Nations World Water Assessment Programme and the Director of UNESCO Programme Office on Global Water Assessment, was first from the international agencies to make a speech.
Call for Abstracts related to Water, food security and energy nexus and the related impacts on health
The 'Water and Health: Where Science Meets Policy Conference', to be held October 3-7, 2011 at UNC Chapel Hill in North Carolina, USA, will have a session featuring Water, food security and energy nexus and the related impacts on health research. We are seeking high quality abstracts for oral and poster presentation. Abstracts should be submitted via the conference website. The deadline for the submissions has been extended to May 16.
WWAP celebrates World Water Day 2011
On the occasion of the World Water Day, held every year on 22 March, WWAP is organizing a series of activities to highlight the importance of our freshwater resources, in particular in the framework of rapid urbanization, the theme of this year’s edition.
The Secretary General’s Message on World Water Day
WWAP and UN-HABITAT Briefing Note "Water for Sustainable Urban Human Settlements" now available in French and Spanish
In June 2010, WWAP and UN-HABITAT jointly published a Briefing Note on Water for Sustainable Urban Human Settlements. Already today, half of the world’s people live in urban areas and by the middle of this century all regions will be predominantly urban.
"Water for Life" Best Practices Award: Winners announced on World Water Day
22 March 2011 - The ‘Las Pinas-Zapote River System Rehabilitation Programme’, Philippines, and the project ‘A Participatory and Learning Based Approach to Raising Awareness on Water and Sanitation’, Durban, eThekwini Municipality, South Africa, have been awarded with the ‘Water for Life’ Best Practices Award during a ceremony that has taken place in Zaragoza, Spain, on World Water Day.
International Women’s Day 2011: Overcoming gender constraints in water management
In order to celebrate International Women’s Day 2011, WWAP would like to mark the occasion by highlighting the vital, and often undervalued, role women play in water management in the developing world.
UN-Water has identified 'Water and Gender' as a thematic priority area in its 2010-2011 work-plan, which has also been identified as one of the central themes for the 'Water for Life' Decade.
Rio 2012: green economy depends on water
UN-Water and the Secretary-General's Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation (UNSGAB) are organizing an official side event to the second Rio 2012 Preparatory Committee: How the Green Economy depends on Water. March 7, in Conference Room 4, New North Lawn Building, UNHQ, New York
The side event will articulate the linkages among water (including drinking water and water resources management), sanitation and the multiple facets of the green economy while providing a forum to discuss how water issues feature on the Rio 2012 agenda.
The UN World Water Assessment Programme is building a roster of authors and writers with specific knowledge of key water-related sectors and relevant topics
WWAP has decided to build a roster to identify individuals who are able and willing to contribute to the processes of writing, reviewing and/or revising material for eventual inclusion in a WWAP publication.
World Water Day 2011, Tuesday 22 March
World Water Day is celebrated annually on 22 March as a means of focusing attention on freshwater. This year, the official celebrations will take place in Cape Town, South Africa from 20 to 22 March. On this occasion, WWAP is also organizing a series of activities and events in its premises of Villa La Colombella, Perugia and in the area.
"Water for Life" Best Practices Award: submissions until 15 February 2011
The United Nations Office to Support the International Decade for Action "Water for Life" 2005-2015/UN-Water Decade Programme on Advocacy and Communication (UNW-DPAC) and the UN World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) are pleased to invite you to submit your application for the 1st edition of the "Water for Life" Best Practices Award.
Sustainable Water Management in Cities: Engaging stakeholders for effective change and action - 13-17 December 2010. Zaragoza, Spain
Sustainable, efficient and equitable management of water in cities has never been as important as in today's world. It requires that we institutionalize and act upon lessons learnt in the arena of urban water management and urban development. Capacities to make change happen in water are typically diffused among many different stakeholders, however, including the different publics in our cities.
Press release "Water, Climate and…Action!" short film contest 2010
On the occasion of the 16th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the United Nations World Water Assessment Program and TheWaterChannel.tv, with the support of the Mexican National Water Commission and the Mexican Consejo Consultative del Agua, A.C., organized a three-minute short film contest "Water, Climate and.. Action!"
COP16: Cancun, Mexico from 29 Nov to 10 Dec
In the framework of the 16th Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the National Water Commission of Mexico (CONAGUA) is organizing the "Dialogs for Water and Climate Change", a series of events and activities taking place during the COP16 to push forward the understanding of the effects of climate change on water and adaptation strategies.
Promoting water cooperation and dialogue for achieving the MDGs
On 30 November 2010, the Republic of Tajikistan, represented by its First Deputy Minister, will host a side event in New York City on "Promoting water cooperation and dialogue for achieving the Millennium Development Goals".
Water for the Millennium Development Goals: Why managing water resources wisely is key to achieving the MDGs
The eight development goals that emerged from the UN Millennium Declaration in 2000 galvanized an unprecedented coordination of efforts on the part of the world’s nations to improve the situation of the world’s poorest by 2015.
3rd Africa Water Week: WWAP and UN-Water/Africa jointly host a side event on water assessment in Africa
Africa Water Week takes place from 22 to 26 November 2010 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. On 24 November, WWAP will co-convene with UN-Water/Africa a side event on water monitoring and assessment.
Professor Soroosh Sorooshian wins 2008-2010 Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Water Prize
WWAP would like to extend our heartfelt congratulations to Professor Soroosh Sorooshian, who has been awarded the prestigious 2008-2010 Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water, Specialized Branch Prize for "Water Resources Management and Protection".
October 24: United Nations Day
The United Nations was formally established on 24 October 1945, after a majority of its founding members ratified a treaty setting up the world body.
The anniversary of the entry into force of the United Nations Charter on 24 October 1945 has been celebrated as United Nations Day since 1948.
Outside the Water Box: a WWAP review
In an effort to ensure that the messages of the United Nations World Water Development Report 3: Water in a Changing World reach the policy- and decision-makers whose actions most influence the use and management of our planet’s freshwater resources, WWAP has commissioned a review of on-going political processes and events of global or regional significance with a particular focus on their impacts on and interactions with water.
Contribute to the UN World Water Development Report
In an ongoing effort to make the United Nations World Water Development Report more relevant to all of its target audiences, the World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) is carrying out regular consultations with stakeholders from all fields to identify specific needs or issues and emerging challenge areas. We invite you to register yourself or others from your network who may be interested in the consultation process.
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In 1966, the Syrian government's Ministry of Endowments solicited plans for a building to replace a 14th-century Mamluk mosque in Martyr's Square in the center of Damascus. A young architect proposed a design for a 5-star hotel and new mosque. In 1971, his plans were scrapped. In 1982, a building began to be built. Hospital? Parking garage? Military housing? The project—now called the Basel al-Asad Center—has been the subject of much rumor and speculation. As of 2007, the building remains unfinished. In this documentary video, an architect recounts the chronicle of the building and considers its possible future.
single channel video, color, NTSC, 2007
Produced by Julia Meltzer, Directed by Julia Meltzer and David Thorne
Written by David Thorne
Edited by Catherine Hollander
Music and Sound Design by Chris Kubick
Camera by Raed Sandeed
This project is distributed by Video Data Bank.
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| 0.958185 | 202 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Many problems can occur after painting. Sometimes, they occur simultaneously during painting. Understanding the causes of some of these defects can make the paint job easier. Here are some common paint defects and their solutions:
Blistering: Blistering or Swelling of paint is caused due to the trapping of air, moisture or solvent between the surface and the paint film.The solution– Remove any unstable paint films and allow the wall to dry thoroughly. Then repaint with a recommended paint. Avoid painting under direct sunlight.
Bittiness: Bittiness is caused by dirt from the atmosphere or the surface or from brushes that are inadequately cleaned or due to bits of dried-up paint that gets stirred in. The Solution– Use clean brushes and paint on clean surface and strain the paint through a cloth before use.
Algae/Fungus growth: Algae and fungus can grow when the surface is continually damp and dirty. Insufficient fungicide/ algaecide in the paint can also worsen the situation. The Solution – Remove algae / fungus by high-pressure washing. Wash again to remove any residue and allow the wall to dry before applying with recommended paint.
Brush marks: Brush marks are caused due to under-thinning of paints or due to poor application of the final coat of paint or due to poor quality brush. The Solution – Ensure paint of the right viscosity is applied using a good brush.
Chipping: Chipping of paint film is due to excessive use of putty or due to very thick coat of paint or defective surfaces. The Solution – Regulate the use of putty and paint.
Chalking: Chalking occurs when ultraviolet rays cause the paint binder to disintegrate. It can happen when interior paints are used for exterior surfaces. The solution- Remove any unstable paint films. Allow the wall to dry thoroughly, and repaint with a recommended paint. Make sure the paint is not adulterated with foreign materials.
Cissing: Cissing or tiny craters are caused by oily or greasy surface/due to water based paints being applied over glossy or smooth enamel paints. The Solution- Clean the surface thoroughly with soap solution and water. Roughen the enamel paint with Sandpaper or use a barrier coat of matt primer.
Efflorescence: Efforescence or formation of white powdery deposit on walls after painting is caused due to salts present in the building material like brick and mortar, which surface later on. The Solution- Give a long time gap between plastering and painting (about 6 months including one monsoon) Use paint with a porous film like emulsions and distempers.
Loss of gloss: Loss of gloss is caused due to poor surface preparation or due to presence of oil or due to over thinning of paint. The Solution– Clean surface thoroughly and take all recommended steps for surface preparation.
Discolouration: After paint is applied, it may fade or discolour. This is caused by particles in the wall reacting with the paint when it is drying. Discolouration could also be caused by water seepage, or by contaminants in metal or wood. The Solution – Repair water seepage. Make sure the surface is dry before painting and apply an alkaline-resistant or oil-based paint.
Flaking: Flaking-off of paint film is due to improper application of primer coat over putty, and not being completely covered. It can be due to application of paint on insufficiently dry surfaces. It can also be due to shrinkage or expansion of a surface causing the paint film to move. The Solution-Ensure that there are no gaps in covering putty with primer coat. Also ensure that the surface is dry and clean.
Patchiness: Patchiness or uneven finish is caused due to the highly absorbent nature of the surface. The Solution– Apply an extra coat of primer or use well-sealer.
Peeling: Peeling is caused by moisture on the wall, poor surface preparation or using an incorrect painting system. This defect happens on walls as well as wood or metal surfaces.
The solution for Walls –Check and repair water seepage. Ensure walls are dry before painting. Use an alkali-resistant basecoat or sealer. Patch surface defects with putty.
The solution for Wood – Prime wood before painting, sand surface and clean off dust.
The solution for Metal – Remove all paint from metal before re-painting. Prime surface and re-coat with suitable paint.
Sagging: Sagging happens when the paint droops downward after being applied on the surface. It is caused by the pigment separating from the paint and settling at the bottom of the container and comes as a result of insufficient stirring or shaking during storage or storing for too long or under too much heat or faulty thinning. The Solution– Avoid storing in hot locations for long periods. Store in accordance with the manufacturer’s recommendations. Thin only with appropriate recommended thinners.
Wrinkling: Wrinkling happens when the paint forms film-like undulating waves. Applying too much paint or drying during high temperatures or painting on a topcoat before the undercoat is dry can cause this defect to happen. The Solution-Avoid applying too much paint. Make sure no paint accumulates around bolts, rivets, etc. Wait until each coat dries before you re-coat.
Slow drying: Non-drying or slow drying of paint film is caused due to humidity, poor air circulation, low temperature or presence of oil or grease on the surface or due to alkalinity of the surface. The Solution- Reduce the impact of atmospheric conditions to the extent possible; Scrub oil or grease off with a rag soaked in white spirit and wash with water and soap.
After the painting is completed, it is important to maintain the painted surface so that the building remains/continues to look good. Here are some tips for paint upkeep and to make the painted surface last:
Also read about:
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2 [transitive]informalto decide not to do something that you had planned [= cancel]:
We scrubbed the idea in the end.
scrub something ↔ out
DHCto clean the inside of a place thoroughly:
The rooms are all scrubbed out once a week.
MHto wash your hands and arms before doing a medical operation
WORD FOCUS: clean WORD FOCUS: clean washwith soap and water wipewith a damp cloth brushwith a brush to remove the dirt polishby rubbing with a cloth scrubby rubbing hard sweepwith a broom mopwith water and a mop (a tool with a long handle) vacuumalsohooverBritish Englishwith a machine that sucks up dust disinfectusing chemicals to kill germs cleanseto clean your skin using a special cream rinseto put water on to remove dirt or soap dustto remove dust, for example with a cloth ➔ See alsoclean
Definition of scrub from the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English within the topic CLEANING
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| 0.847838 | 216 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Are We Already Farming Enough Land to Feed 9 Billion People?
Humanity has reached peak farmland.
It’s a chilling phrase, isn’t it? Not like peak oil, which we’re long-used to hearing by now. And much more poignant than recent reports of peak fertilizer. (Which is really about peak phosphorous, and certainly is critical, but it doesn’t conjure up quite the same pastoral image.) No, peak farmland is something you can actually envision, and the pronouncement comes at a time when we’re closing in on a global population of 9 billion hungry mouths.
But hang on one minute...this new study is not another doomsday prediction. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
“We believe that humanity has reached Peak Farmland, and that a large net global restoration of land to nature is ready to begin,” writes Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at the Rockefeller University in New York, and author of the study, said in a speech. “Happily, the cause is not exhaustion of arable land, as many had feared, but rather moderation of population and tastes and ingenuity of farmers.”
As reported by Reuters, Ausubel’s study, “Peak Farmland and the Prospects for Sparing Nature,” goes so far as to say that “a geographical area more than twice the size of France will return to its natural state by 2060 as a result of rising yields and slower population growth.”
Unfortunately, the new report doesn’t jive with existing data produced by the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and leans on a number of wild cards like continued use of biofuels, rates of meat consumption and rising crop yields. And, all that optimism doesn’t fit with a new report published in Nature Communications today, either—one that shows yields of important staple crops like rice and wheat are not increasing globally.
“Their report is about a world that could be, not a world that we have,” Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, tells TakePart.
“Yes, we can supply the world’s calories and nutrition with the farmland we have, or even less. That is correct. We can deliver more calories with less land, water and chemicals. No question. But the trends we’re talking about…the trends in the real world are going in the opposite direction. Yields are stagnating.”
Still, there is good news to cling to in Ausubel’s report. China and India are indeed setting aside land. And while calorie consumption increases with wealth, the researchers point out that after an initial burst, meat consumption in China rose only moderately; and meat consumption in India changed little. And as many scientists and organizations point out, there's a link between meat consumption and climate change—whether it promotes the clearning of land for intense monocropping, or simply gassy cows contributing to CO2.
“Consumers may spend more in restaurants, but they will not eat more potatoes, even as they spend more per potato. Satiety will relieve a considerable portion of upward pressure of population and affluence on cropland expansion,” says Ausubel.
How exactly we’ll get to this rosy future is the real question, says Foley.
“We’re pretty good at making more corn in Iowa, but we have a lot more work to do,” he says.
Similar stories on TakePart
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Rio Tinto’s titanium dioxide-ilmenite business extends back to the 1950s and has been part of its long-standing strategy within the industrial minerals area.
The company sees titanium dioxide as a good business to be in.
It is a low-cost producer and roughly produces a third of the world’s titanium dioxide feedstock capacity.
Rio Tinto recovers more than a third of the sector’s cash flows and net incomes, which is consistent with the company’s strategy.
The company sees its titanium dioxide business as continuing to develop for decades.
In 1989, Rio Tinto acquired Quebec Iron & Titanium (QIT), which for long has been the leading producer of titanium oxide feedstocks for the pigment industry. About 95% of titanium oxide goes into paints and plastics as pigment.
During the course of the 1950s, QIT came up with a new process for producing a feedstock, referred to as slag, for the pigment sector.
During the 1960s, regulations forbade the use of lead carbonate in paint and at that time titanium dioxide, which is benign to the human body and nonhazardous, became the mineral of choice in paints and products that enter the body, like toothpaste.
From the 1960s onwards, the use of titanium dioxide for the purpose of pigmentation has continued to grow.
During the course of the 1970s, QIT identified ilmenite sands in South Africa, near Richards Bay, which, at that stage, had been generally undeveloped.
QIT established Richards Bay Minerals and brought in the then South African mining company, Gencor, which evolved into BHP Billiton, which holds 50% of Richards Bay Minerals.
Richards Bay Minerals has both a sand-mining process and it also has ilmenite smelting facilities.
The sands in South Africa and Madagascar, where Rio Tinto will be producing ilmenite before the end of the year, have small black ilmenite particles, which represent titanium and iron in an oxide form.
The particles of ilmenite are melted, the oxygen is removed, as much iron as possible recovered and a titanium dioxide product is produced.
Generally, the ilmenite contains between 85% and 94% titanium dioxide.
That goes into the chemicals industry to produce a pure titanium dioxide, which then goes into the paint sector.
QIT obtains ilmenite from rock containing 3% to 35% titanium dioxide. The ilmenite at Richards Bay Minerals is about 42% titanium dioxide
What makes QIT Madagascar Minerals (QMM), in Madagascar, unique is its high quality at 60% titanium dioxide.
This high quality also means that there are fewer residues when this titanium dioxide is used in paint making.
Generally, paint factories are in industrialised areas and are limited by permit conditions for their residue produced.
There is thus a great expansion in value of use beyond the increase in grade.
QMM was thus identified in the 1980s as an attractive resource and began to develop slowly over a period of 20 years, along with biodiversity science around operating in Madagascar, a sensitive location for biodiversity.
For the past ten years, Rio Tinto has been establishing best biodiversity practice on Madaga-scar.
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The Tolkāppiyam (தொல்காப்பியம் in Tamil) is a work on the grammar of the Tamil language. Written in the form of poems(or short hymns), around 200 BC by Tolkāppiyar, is said to be the world's oldest surviving grammar for any language.
All the words, poems and literature that came in Tamil language after that followed the grammar as explained by Tolkāppiyam. The name Tolkāppiyam can be split as Tolkāppiyam = Tonmai + kāppiyam. Tonmai means archeologically old and Kappiam is a literature master piece or epic.
Over the centuries, many books came interpreting and clarifying Tolkāppiyam. Some of which where the ones written by "Ilampooranar", "Deivachilaiyaaar", "Natchinaarciniyar" etc. They were called as "Urai-asiriyargal"or equivalently explanatory commentators.These commentators explained Tolkāppiyam in their own view and expressed their opinions on the subjects dealt by Tolkāppiyam, in their own times. Many grammar works came in Tamil after Tolkāppiyam, based on that.However,One that is most popular and used in place of Tolkāppiyam now is "Nannūl" written by "Pavananti Munivar".
The Tolkāppiyam classifies the Tamil language into "senthamil" and "kotunthamil". The former refers to the classical Tamil used exclusively in literary works and the latter refers to the colloquial Tamil, spoken by the people. The book is based on the analysis of both spoken and written Tamil.
- 1 Scientific treatment to Natural Language Grammar
- 2 Chapters
- 2.1 Ezhuththathikaaram
- 2.2 Sollathikaaram
- 2.3 PoruLathikaaram
- 3 External links
Scientific treatment to Natural Language Grammar
The classification of the alphabet into consonants and vowels by splitting the conso-vowels was a scientific breakthrough. Grammatising this phenomenon was also an achievement of that time. The Tolkāppiyam starts by defining the alphabet for optimal writing, grammatises the use of words and syntaxes and moves into higher modes of language analysis. The style and structure of narration of these rules is similar to that of the Backus-Naur form, which was formalised only as recently as 1963. The Tolkāppiyam formulated thirty characters and three diacritic like symbols for Tamil. The 12 vowels combine with the 18 consonants bringing the total tally of characters to <math>247 (12 +18 + (12 x 18) + 1 = 247)</math>. The alphabet has evolved since then. For a detailed treatment of the alphabet see Tamil alphabet. Though the alphabet has evolved largely, the language as such has remained mostly intact earning the sobriquet, kannith thamil, which can mean ever-young Tamil or "virgin Tamil".
The Tolkāppiyam is organised into the following three chapters each of which is sub divided into 9 sections.
Ezhuththathikaaram is further subdivided into the following 9 sections.
1. Nuul Marabu
2. Mozhi Marabu
5. Thokai Marabu
7. Uyir Mayangial
8. PuLLi Mayangial
This section enumerates the characters of the language, organises them into consonants, vowels and diacritic symbols. The vowels are sub classified into short and long vowels based on duration of pronunciation. Similarly, the consonants are sub classified into three categories based on the stress.
This section defines rules which specify where in a word can a letter not occur and which letter can not come after a particular letter.
It also describes elision, which is the reduction in the duration of sound of a phoneme when preceded by or followed by certain other sounds. The rules are well-defined and unambiguous. They are categorised into 5 classes based on the phoneme which undergoes elision.
- Kutriyalukaram - the (lip unrounded) vowel sound u
- Kutriyalikaram - the vowel sound i(as the vowel in 'lip')
- Aiykaarakkurukkam - the diphthong ai
- Oukaarakkurukkam - the diphthong au
- Aaythakkurukkam - the special character (aaytham)
Also, the visual representation of the letters is explained.
This section talks about the changes to words due to the following word i.e. it specifies rules that govern the transformations on the last phonem of a word (nilaimozhi iiRu) because of the first phonem of the following word (varumozhi muthal) when used in a sentence.
Template:Stubsection This section talks about the word modifiers that are added at the end of nouns and pronouns when they are used as an object as opposed to when they are used as subjects.
Sollathikaaram deals with words and parts of speech. It classifies Tamil words into four categories -
1. iyar chol - Words in common usage
2. thiri chol - Words used in Tamil literature
3. vata chol - Words borrowed from Sanskrit
4. thisai chol - Words borrowed from Other Languages
There are certain rules to be adhered to in borrowing words from Sanskrit. The borrowed words need to strictly conform to the Tamil phonetic system and be written in the Tamil script.
The chapter Sollathikaaram is sub divided into the following 9 sections.
This section deals with nouns.
This section deals with verbs.
The Tolkāppiyam is possibly the only book on grammar that describes a grammar for life. PoruLathikaaram gives the classification of land types, and seasons and defines modes of life for each of the combinations of land types and seasons for different kinds of people. This chapter is subdivided into the following 9 sections. 1. AkaththiNaiyiyal 2. PuRaththiNaiyiyal 3. KaLaviyal 4. KaRpiyal 5. PoruLiyal 6. Meyppaattiyal 7. Uvamayiyal 8. SeyyuLiyal 9. Marabiyal
This section defines the modes of personal life i.e. life of couples.
This section defines the modes of one's public life.
The name Uvamayiyal literally translates to the nature or science of metaphors.
- Tolkāppiyam Complete
- Tolkāppiyam PoruLatikaaram
- Tolkāppiyam partial list
- Tolkāppiyar's Literary Theory - Research paper (1996)
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There is more to the cactus plant than just a prickly house ornament to collect and admire. Studies reveal that cactus extract contains important phytochemicals, the cancer-fighting nutrient found in some fruits and vegetables, and also nutrients that strengthen the immune system.
Nature’s Most Perfect Food
Cactuses or cacti are drought-resistant plants found mostly in hot and dry regions. Cactus fruits are considered by some as “nature’s most perfect food”, with a large percentage of water, sugar, and minerals contained in the soft and gel-like flesh. The fruit performs a laxative function, increasing the frequency and ease of bowel movements. The gel extract is also used in some parts of the world as a remedy for non-insulin dependent diabetics.
Another experiment conducted on the wound-healing properties of cactus juice produced a positive effect. Cactus juice prevents scar forming and inflammation of the wounded area. The results of the experiment also show that cactus also improves circulation and wound healing.
A popular edible cactus is known as nopales or cactus pads. Nopales are the fleshy oval leaves of the nopal or prickly pear cactus. This vegetable is popular in Mexico and other Central American countries. Its popularity is increasing in the United States where it can be found at Mexican grocery stores, specialty produce markets and farmer’s markets. With a soft but crunchy texture that becomes a bit sticky (not unlike okra) when cooked, nopales taste similar to a slightly tart green bean, asparagus, or green pepper. Food value? Nopales contain beta carotene, iron, some B vitamins, and are good sources of both vitamin C and calcium.
Availability, Selection, and Storage
Nopales are available year-round with a peak in the mid-spring and the best season from early spring through late fall. When buying, select small, firm, pale green cacti with no wrinkling. Be sure to pick cacti that are not limp or dry. Nopales can be refrigerated for more than a week if wrapped tightly in plastic.
Trim off spines or prickers with a vegetable peeler. Trim off any dry or fibrous areas and rinse thoroughly to remove any stray prickers and sticky fluid. Nopales may be eaten raw or cooked. To cook, steam over boiling water for just a few minutes (if cooked too long they will lose their crunchy texture). Then slice and eat. Alternatively, sautèe in butter or oil for a few minutes. Steamed cactus can be added to scrambled eggs and omelets, or diced fresh and added to tortillas. They can also be substituted for any cooked green in most dishes. Nopales can be served as a side dish or cooled and used in salads. They taste especially good with Mexican recipes that include tomatoes, hot peppers and fresh corn.
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"A football team consists of 20 offensive and 20 defensive players. The players are to be paired in groups of 2 for the purpose of determining roommates. If the pairing is done at random what is the probability that there are no offensive-defensive pairings?"
My first thoughts were that there are (40Cr2)=720 possible pairings although i'm told its much larger than this...
Any ideas? Any prods in the right direction would be much appreciated.
using patterns i would imagine the amount of OOs and DDs is
(20!)/((2^10))(10!)) and that the probability would be this divided by your number.
However could you explain how you arrived at this expression?
(p.s. is there a tutorial anywhere on how to use the Math Input function on this forum... the thing denoted by the capital Sigma)
Here is a very quick and dirty way to explain this.
Say we have a class of 20 freshmen.
If we divide them up into four study groups: biology, mathematics, literature, and history.
That can be done in ways. ( N choose k.)
Those are known as ordered partitions. Because it makes a difference to a student which group he/she is in.
Think a class of 20 freshmen is calculus.
If we divide them up into four groups to review a just returned test.
Those are known as unordered partitions because only content matters.
This can be done ways.
The details are a bit much to into.
But I hope you can begin to get the idea.
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What's in your child's lunchbox?
As we slide all too swiftly toward the school year, I wanted to write a handy guide to packing nutritious school lunches. I know firsthand how tricky it is to craft meals that provide the right the number of calories and mix of food groups -- and that kids will actually eat.
Andrea Giancoli, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, shared this lunch-planning template based on the federal government's Dietary Guidelines for Americans: The meal should have a fruit, a vegetable, two servings of grain, two ounces of meat or beans, a serving of dairy and a smidge of healthful fat. The guidelines suggest seeking foods low in sugar, salt and "solid" fats (those that, like butter, are solid at room temperature).
Giancoli also steered me toward MyPyramid.gov, a USDA tool that shows people how to incorporate the dietary guidelines into their lives. The site includes a menu planner that, once you register (for free), allows you to adjust for variables such as age, sex, height, weight and level of physical activity. The site can be a bit frustrating (I couldn't find raw green beans, for instance), but playing with it helps you get the hang of putting together a decent meal.
Here are some ideas for three age groups. For extremely active kids, you'll want to provide more food, but not in the form of sugary, salty snacks, sodas or sports beverages. Instead, choose extra items that will help meet the day's food-group needs: another piece of fruit, a second sandwich.
And you'll want to invest in an insulated lunchbox or bag and a freezer pack so food will stay cool till lunchtime. Vegetarians, vegans and others who follow special diets should tool around on MyPyramid to find options that meet their nutritional needs.
The dietary guidelines say a sedentary teenage girl should have 1,800 calories per day and an active one up to 2,400. For teen boys, that range is 2,200 to 3,200. Lunch should account for roughly a third of those calories, Giancoli says: Maybe 650 for her, 900 for him.
Sample lunch: Teens might enjoy something more sophisticated than a sandwich. Try a handful (12 crackers) of whole-wheat Triscuits with four one-inch cubes of low-fat cheddar or Swiss cheese, three-quarters cup of chicken vegetable soup, a cup of cantaloupe balls, a serving (about a third of a cup) of egg salad made with a hard-boiled egg and a tablespoon of regular mayonnaise, and a cup of reduced-sodium V-8 juice. That covers the food groups for about 690 calories.
Cafeteria advice: Your teen may balk at carrying lunch to school, preferring to buy what's offered in the cafeteria. Most districts post secondary-school lunch menus on their Web sites; check them out with your teen and talk about making smart selections in the food line.
Rather than tell your teen he can't choose certain items, steer him toward the more healthful ones. If a salad bar or taco bar is available, it's easy to make a meal that contains vegetables (go for a rainbow of colors), fruit, meat or beans, dairy (but go easy on the cheese) and whole grains (a corn taco). Some schools have vegetarian and vegan options; explore these with your teen, as they often are the most healthful choices.
A sedentary preteen girl needs 1,600 calories a day, while an active girl needs up to 2,200. A boy's range is 1,800 to 2,600. Divide by three!
Sample lunch: A sandwich made with two pieces of whole-grain bread, two slices of deli turkey, a dab of mayonnaise and a slice of cheese. Add an apple and a cup of baby carrots, plus one or two tablespoons of reduced-fat dressing and some reduced-fat milk (or calcium-fortified soy or almond milk). That's about 630 calories.
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Amphidromous. Refers to fishes that regularly migrate between freshwater and the sea (in both directions), but not for the purpose of breeding, as in anadromous and catadromous species. Sub-division of diadromous. Migrations should be cyclical and predictable and cover more than 100 km.Characteristic elements in amphidromy are: reproduction in fresh water, passage to sea by newly hatched larvae, a period of feeding and growing at sea usually a few months long, return to fresh water of well-grown juveniles, a further period of feeding and growing in fresh water, followed by reproduction there (Ref. 82692).
No one has provided updates yet.
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Melbourne, the second largest Australian city, straddles the Yarra River near the mouth where it joins Port Phillip Bay. The location of Melbourne’s central business district is adjacent to the first waterfall (since removed) at the site of the Princes Bridge, built in 1888. The Port of Melbourne, Australia’s busiest port, is located at the mouth of the Yarra River. Port Phillip Bay is a large bowl with a narrow opening into Bass Strait which separates Australia from Tasmania. Melbourne is named after William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, a British Prime Minister. The Yarra River is named after an aboriginal (Wurundjeri people) word ‘Yarrak’, meaning waterfall. Port Phillip Bay is named after Arthur Phillip, the first Governor of New South Wales who arrived with the ‘First Fleet’ in Sydney Harbour in 1788.
There are many bridges across the Yarra River which include pedestrian bridges and vehicle bridges. Since the port is located downstream and the Yarra water level does not vary appreciably, the bridges in the central business district are quite low and the boats need to be correspondingly low to the water. Melbourne, like Brisbane and Sydney have parks and bikeways along the waterways with tour boats that ply the waterways. They have an annual Moomba Festival which celebrates the river. Melbourne has a Southbank precinct with entertainment venues and museums across the Yarra River from the business district. Melbourne’s iconic Flinders Street Station is along the Yarra River, and it is a busy transportation hub for the city.
On a boat ride from downtown to the Port of Melbourne, I could see Melbourne Cricket Ground, the largest cricket stadium in Australia that has hosted many famous sporting events. The Rod Laver Arena (in Melbourne Park) is also located along the Yarra River, the site of the annual Australian Open tennis tournament. Melbourne hosted the 1956 Summer Olympics. The Melbourne Aquarium is on the Yarra River, as well various modern residential buildings with river views and marinas in the Melbourne Docklands section. There were live aboard boats along a stretch of the river near the Port of Melbourne. The container port area was active with container ships being loaded and unloaded, tugboats and a cement ship heading upriver.
The Yarra River is very brown and muddy, sometimes referred to as the ‘river that runs upside down’. The catchment is not particularly large, but the clay soils and urbanized land use contribute to the brown water color. There are litter traps along the river and regular occurrences of bacterial contamination. It has been estimated that some 350,000 cigarette butts find their way into the river every year. Ian Kiernan, the man responsible for a very successful program called “Clean Up Australia Day“, told me a few years ago that cigarette butts had become the largest litter item collected.
Port Phillip Bay is a fairly circular bowl, except for Geelong Arm at the nine o’clock position. Melbourne and the Yarra River are located at the twelve o’clock position and the mouth of the Bay connecting it to Bass Strait is located at the seven o’clock position. The mouth of Port Phillip Bay has Point Lonsdale on the west near the town of Queenscliff and Point Nepean on the east near the town of Sorrento. A vehicular ferry regularly crosses the mouth, which saves a long drive through Melbourne around the Bay. The European discovery of Port Phillip Bay was by John Murray and shortly followed by Matthew Flinders in 1802.
Considering the long residence time of Port Phillip Bay (circa 400 days), and the large size of Melbourne (4+ million residents), the most amazing thing is the relatively good environmental condition of Port Phillip Bay. Melbourne residents regularly travel to the St. Kilda beaches via their famous trams for a swim. The biggest problem is the rapidly changeable weather due to Bass Strait fronts, but the swimming beaches are remarkably safe and clean. One of the most forward thinking engineering works by Melbourne Water was to purchase a large tract of Port Phillip Bay beach front in the ten o’clock position, over 10,000 hectares in size. The Western Treatment Plant, located near the town of Werribee, has been able to grow as Melbourne grew, develop advanced wastewater treatment techniques, use large treatment ponds and land application of wastewater. The success of the Western Treatment Plant shows that if you have a long residence time in receiving waters, it is necessary to have long residence times in wastewater treatment (thereby reducing the nutrient release).
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Make an octopus's garden
If there's one thing we've all learned from Playschool, it's that egg cartons and toilet rolls are the cornerstone of craft activities. Just add an ice cream container and you've got an Octopus's Garden! Sure it's not to scale, but neither is Henry the Octopus.
Number of players:
What you need:
- 1 x 4L ice cream container
- Beaded starfish
- Egg carton jellyfish
- Toilet roll octopus
- Pompom sea anenome
- egg carton crab
- Flat half of an egg carton
- Green paper
- 1 x toilet roll cut in half
- Sticky tape
- Wiggly craft scissors
Watch the video below to find out how to make your octopus's garden.
Make lots of ocean creatures to go in the octopus's garden.
Once you've made them:
Cut the front half out of the icecream container to make a 'window' into the octopus's garden
Fringe cut your green paper and use it to line the three walls of the garden.
Using your two halves of a toilet roll, wrap each one in green paper, then fringe-cut it from the top down to make a seaweed tree.
Now get the flat half of the egg carton (the one without the cup shapes in it) and use it to make a rock shelf at the back of the garden - just cut a rough curved edge to it and sticky tape it to the garden floor.
Now you are ready to put your creatures in the garden.
Make sure you put the octopus centre stage!
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Q: What are the origins of Lent? Did the Church always have this time before Easter?
Lent is a special time of prayer, penance, sacrifice and good works in preparation of the celebration of Easter. In the desire to renew the liturgical practices of the Church, The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of Vatican Council II stated, “The two elements which are especially characteristic of Lent — the recalling of baptism or the preparation for it, and penance — should be given greater emphasis in the liturgy and in liturgical catechesis. It is by means of them that the Church prepares the faithful for the celebration of Easter, while they hear God’s word more frequently and devote more time to prayer” (No. 109).
The word “Lent” itself derives from the Anglo-Saxon words lencten, meaning “spring,” and lenctentid, which literally means not only “springtide” but also was the word for “March,” the month in which the majority of Lent falls.
Since the earliest times of the Church, there is evidence of some kind of Lenten preparation for Easter. For instance, St. Irenaeus (d. 203) wrote to Pope St. Victor I, commenting on the celebration of Easter and the differences between practices in the East and the West:
The dispute is not only about the day, but also about the actual character of the fast. Some think that they ought to fast for one day, some for two, others for still more; some make their “day” last forty hours on end. Such variation in the observance did not originate in our own day, but very much earlier, in the time of our forefathers….” (Eusebius, History of the Church, V, 24)
When Rufinus translated this passage from Greek into Latin, the punctuation made between “forty” and “hours” made the meaning to appear to be “40 days, 24 hours a day.” The importance of the passage, nevertheless, remains that since the time of “our forefathers” — always an expression for the Apostles — a 40-day period of Lenten preparation existed. However, the actual practices and duration of Lent were still not homogeneous throughout the Church.
Lent became more regularized after the legalization of Christianity in A.D. 313. The Council of Nicea (325), in its disciplinary Canons, noted that two provincial synods should be held each year, including “one before the forty days of Lent.” St. Athanasius (d. 373) in this “Festal Letters” implored his congregation to make a 40-day fast prior to the more intense fasting of Holy Week. St. Cyril of Jerusalem (d. 386) in his Catechectical Lectures, which are the paradigm for our current RCIA programs, had 18 pre-baptismal instructions given to the catechumens during Lent. St. Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444) in his series of “Festal Letters” also noted the practices and duration of Lent, emphasizing the 40-day period of fasting.
Finally, Pope St. Leo (d. 461) preached that the faithful must “fulfill with their fasts the apostolic institution of the forty days,” again noting the apostolic origins of Lent. One can safely conclude that by the end of the fourth century, the 40-day period of Easter preparation known as Lent existed, and that prayer and fasting constituted its primary spiritual exercises.
Of course, the number “forty” has always had special spiritual significance regarding preparation. On Mount Sinai, preparing to receive the Ten Commandments, “Moses stayed there with the Lord for forty days and forty nights, without eating any food or drinking any water….” (Ex 34:28). Elijah walked “forty days and forty nights” to the mountain of the Lord, Mount Horeb (another name for Sinai)(1 Kgs 19:8). Most importantly, Jesus fasted and prayed for “40 days and 40 nights” in the desert before He began His public ministry (Mt 4:2).
Once the 40 days of Lent were established, the next development concerned how much fasting was to be done. In Jerusalem, for instance, people fasted for 40 days, Monday through Friday, but not on Saturday or Sunday, thereby making Lent last for eight weeks. In Rome and in the West, people fasted for six weeks, Monday through Saturday, thereby making Lent last for six weeks. Eventually, the practice prevailed of fasting for six days a week over the course of six weeks, and Ash Wednesday was instituted to bring the number of fast days before Easter to 40.
The rules of fasting varied. First, some areas of the Church abstained from all forms of meat and animal products, while others made exceptions for food like fish. For example, Pope St. Gregory (d. 604), writing to St. Augustine of Canterbury, issued the following rule: “We abstain from flesh, meat, and from all things that come from flesh, as milk, cheese, and eggs.”
Second, the general rule was for a person to have one meal a day, in the evening or at three in the afternoon. These Lenten fasting rules also evolved. Eventually, a smaller repast was allowed during the day to sustain one’s strength for manual labor. Eating fish was allowed, and later eating meat was also allowed through the week except on Ash Wednesday and Friday.
Dispensations were given for eating dairy products if a pious work was performed, and eventually this rule was relaxed totally. (However, the abstinence from even diary products led to the practice of blessing Easter eggs and eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday.)
Over the years, modifications have been made to the Lenten observances, making our practices not only simple but also easy. Ash Wednesday still marks the beginning of Lent which lasts for 40 days, not including Sundays. The present fasting and abstinence laws are very simple: On Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, the faithful fast (having only one full meal a day and smaller snacks to keep up one’s strength) and abstain from meat; on the other Fridays of Lent, the faithful abstain from meat.
People are still encouraged “to give up something” for Lent as a sacrifice. (An interesting note is that technically on Sundays and other solemnities like St. Joseph’s Day [March 19] and the Annunciation [March 25], one is exempt and may partake of whatever has been offered up for Lent. Nevertheless, concerning the Sunday exemption, I was always taught, “If you gave something up for the Lord, tough it out. Don’t act like a Pharisee looking for a loophole.”) Moreover, an emphasis must be placed on performing spiritual works, like attending the Stations of the Cross, attending daily Mass, making a weekly holy hour before the Blessed Sacrament, taking time for personal prayer and spiritual reading, and most especially making a good confession and receiving sacramental absolution.
Although the practices may have evolved over the centuries, the focus remains the same: to repent of sin, to renew our faith and to prepare to celebrate joyfully the mysteries of our salvation during Holy Week.
Editor’s note: This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald and is reprinted with kind permission.
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Flash-drive-sized computers revolutionise computing
The Cotton Candy PC–on-a-stick and the Raspberry PI computer the size of a credit card herald yet another reinvention of computing.
Computing power is not often measured by the inch, but it takes a mere glance to see why the Cotton Candy gets this treatment.
Marketed as “the world’s smallest computer”, this stick the size of a flash drive fits a 1.2 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM and an operating system.
Made by Norwegian start-up FXI Tech, the protoype won the Last Gadget Standing contest at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but only began shopping late last year.
It has finally arrived in South Africa. For something this size, it doesn't come cheap, retailing at R3799 for the whole package.
But this is computing at its most portable, unusual and intriguing. A micro SD card that slips into the stick is loaded with the Cotton Candy operating system, built on Google’s Android 4.0, and the device itself connects to any monitor that has a USB or HDMI port.
This means you can plug it into a high-definition TV set and play video off the internet, through Cotton Candy, onto the big screen.
It is wi-fi-enabled and comes with a wireless keyboard that allows you to run it as a standard computer, using the external screen as your monitor.
It's not the first computer on a stick, but it is by far the smallest available in South Africa, measuring 80mm long, 25mm wide and 10mm deep.
It is also the most advanced device of its kind, running substantially faster than it’s main competitor, the Chinese-made Rikomagic MK802 II Android 4.0 Mini PC – another computer the size of a memory stick.
The Cotton Candy also offers a fascinating evolution path.
According to Bluem8rix MD Noel Gissing, the next step will be the introduction of an unobtrusive sensor that detects hand movement, allowing the user to control Cotton Candy through gestures.
This can ultimately allow typing in thin air, and even action-based gaming applications.
The concept of a PC-on-a-stick is just one direction we are seeing in the miniaturisation of fully-functional computers.
Another key route is the quest for stripped-down PCs that can be built at rock-bottom cost and used in schools or by developers looking to build and program from the ground up.
The concept harks back to the birth of personal computing, when DIY kits were sold to aspirant techies.
The leader in this direction is the Raspberry PI, a single-board computer the size of a credit card. It is not as pretty as a PC-on-a-stick, since it is intended to provide a bare-bones computer that can be adapted as desired.
An operating system has to be loaded via an SD card, and a keyboard and mouse plugged into a USB port.As with the Cotton Candy, it can connect to the HDMI port of a flat-screen TV, but also runs on analogue TV sets.
It’s powered via a microUSB port of the kind on most cellphones today, but uses very little power.
Because of its bare bones approach, as well as the fact that it was developed as an educational tool by British charity the Raspberry PI Foundation, the cost is outrageously low: R300 for the Type A Board with 256MB of RAM, and R400 for the original version, the Type B with 512MB of RAM.
“This means that African entrepreneurs, educators and researchers can set up shop at a fraction of the price of buying a conventional computer,” says Philip Machanik , associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rhodes University.
“I see this as a really big game changer, in the same way as the personal computer was in the 1970s and 1980s.“ Indeed, the demand has been so high locally, the Type B is out of stock at South African distributor RS Components, and orders are placed in a queue.
These are not the kind of portable computers you will see being showed off in coffee shops and airport lounges.
But then again, that is probably their very charm: no one will even know you are carrying a computer.- gadget.co.za
Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee
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Earth & Space Science: Session 3
A Closer Look: Igneous Rocks
What are igneous rocks?
Igneous rocks are the most common rocks on Earth. All of Earth's ocean floor, its entire mantle, and much of the continental crust consists of igneous rock. Igneous rock forms as molten (liquid) rock cools and solidifies. Most of this molten rock originates under the Earth’s surface in a zone within the upper mantle where it is extremely hot but the pressure is not great enough to keep the rock solid. There are two major types of igneous rock: extrusive and intrusive.
How are different types of igneous rocks formed?
Extrusive, or volcanic igneous rock forms when magma erupts, or extrudes, onto the surface of the Earth as lava. This occurs along active plate margins, such as mid-oceanic spreading ridges and subduction zones, as well as at intraplate settings, like hot spots. Lava cools and hardens quickly at the surface of the Earth, as finely grained rock with many tiny crystals. In some cases, the lava cools so quickly that the molten material does not have enough time to arrange itself into crystalline structures. This kind of igneous rock is called volcanic glass. Another product of volcanic eruption is pyroclastic debris, which are particles formed from the gas and lava that explode into the atmosphere. Pyroclastic debris includes fine particles of volcanic glass called ash, and larger pieces of rock called, depending on their size, cinders and bombs. The most common extrusive igneous rock is basalt, which is the rock that comprises oceanic crust. Basalt accounts for more than 90% of all volcanic rock on the planet.
Intrusive, or plutonic, igneous rock forms when when magma beneath the Earth’s surface rises upward and pushes its way, or intrudes, into pre-existing crustal rocks. Features associated with this ascension of magma include sills (nearly horizontal intrusion of magma that is injected between layers of rock); dikes (nearly vertical injection of magma that cuts across layers of rock); laccoliths (when a sill domes upward, looking like a blister); and batholiths (immense, deep, dome-shaped intrusions of igneous rock). Magma cools and solidifies more slowly underground than at the Earth's surface, which produces igneous rocks with coarse crystals that can easily be seen with the naked eye. One of the most well known intrusive igneous rocks is granite, which comprises much of the continental crust.
In addition to being categorized as extrusive or intrusive, igneous rocks are also classified in other ways:
- Mafic igneous rocks are dense, and rich in iron- and magnesium-bearing minerals and are usually dark in color.
- Felsic igneous rocks are rich in less dense minerals, such as quartz, and are often light in color.
- Granular igneous rocks consist of crystals that are large enough to be easily seen, such as granite.
- Aphanitic igneous rocks are made of tiny crystals that cannot be seen with the naked eye, such as basalt.
- Glassy igneous rocks are composed mostly of volcanic glass. Obsidian is one example.
- Porphyritic igneous rocks have larger crystals embedded in a finer grained matrix.
- Pyroclastic igneous rocks are volcanic rocks that form from explosive eruptions that shatter magma and can be either cemented together or unconsolidated fragments or slivers. Pumice and ash are examples.
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http://learner.org/courses/essential/earthspace/session3/closer1.html
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|
en
| 0.942717 | 764 | 4.53125 | 5 |
Photo Essay: Kalaupapa Memories, Molokai, Hawaii
(page 1 of 10)
One of the Hawaiian words for Hansen’s disease is mai hookaawale—the disease that separates. In the 19th Century, it did just that. Sufferers were quarantined on Kalaupapa, not only isolating them geographically, but separating husbands from wives, and children from their families. The quarantine was lifted in 1969, but by that time Kalaupapa had become home, and many patients chose to stay. A new book, Ili Na Hoomanao o Kalaupapa, Casting Remembrances of Kalaupapa, tells the town’s story in detail. Here, we’ve selected images from renowned photographer Wayne Levin, who contributed to the book. All were taken between 1984 and 1987. Quotes from patients in the following pages are taken from videotaped oral histories collected by Anwei Skinsnes Law in the 1980s, and later selected for this book. At the time Levin shot the photos, about 100 residents still lived in Kalaupapa; today, it’s fewer than 20.
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<urn:uuid:cf8ca7f3-ef76-49b1-abf6-6772e42df0f7>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Honolulu-Magazine/August-2012/Photo-Essay-Kalaupapa-Memories-Molokai-Hawaii/index.php?cparticle=1&siarticle=0
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en
| 0.96332 | 244 | 2.765625 | 3 |
A story of France when Protestants and Catholics were engaged in their most desperate struggle for supremacy--but the clashing of the creeds is merely an incident in the telling of a tale of love and adventure. The hero, the Comte de Mar, is a young nobleman whose father, the Due de St. Quentin, sides with the Huguenot Henry of Navarre, who at the time holds Paris in siege; the heroine, Mile. de Montluc, "The Rose of Lorraine," is of the house of Mayenne, the head of the Catholic League; and the tale is told in the first person by Felix Broux, a page in attendance on the lover. The action of the play is confined to four days of the week preceding the Sunday on which Henry III declares his adhesion to Catholicism.
"But he is not lost. There has been no battle."
"Lost to them," said Maître Jacques, "when he turns Catholic."
"Oh!" I cried.
"Oh!" he mocked. "You come from the country; you don't know these things."
"But the King of Navarre is too stiff-necked a heretic!"
"Bah! Time bends the stiffest neck. Tell me this: for what do the learned doctors sit in council at Mantes?"
"Oh," said I, bewildered, "you tell me news, Maître Jacques."
"If Henry of Navarre be not a Catholic before the month is out, spit me on my own jack," he answered, eying me rather keenly as he added:
"It should be welcome news to you."
Welcome was it; it made plain the reason Monsieur's change of base. Yet it was my duty to be discreet.
"I am glad to hear of any heretic coming to the faith," I said.
"Pshaw!" he cried. "To the devil with pretences! 'Tis an open secret that your patron has gone over to Navarre."
"I know naught of it."
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<urn:uuid:4fdf72b4-9be4-4d95-a46d-7008a160dcda>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://manybooks.net/titles/runkleb1421914219-8.html
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en
| 0.954551 | 430 | 2.75 | 3 |
This is the second installment of a three-part article examining techniques used to architect secure Web services. Part one introduced a fictional company, The Internet Dictionary Company (TIDC) and its customer, RegalResearch.com. Regal Research uses a Web service to integrate the TIDC functionality into its own site. The first installment also illustrated the first technique for securing the TIDC Web service, IP blocking. In this installment, we will discuss two additional techniques: user authentication and digital certificates.
User authentication is a common technique found in many types of software ranging from databases to operating systems (see Figure A). The concept is simple: Each user for the system is assigned a unique username. Access to resources or functionality associated with that username is protected by knowledge of a specific password. The ubiquity of user authentication systems is beneficial for Web services because most users are already comfortable with this security technique. Whether your Web service is being consumed by other Web developers or by the general public, this security mechanism is easily understood.
|User authentication allows individualized use of Web methods.|
Applying user authentication security to Web services is simple enough: Each Web method call requires two additional parameters, username and password. Each time a Web method is called, the first action taken will be to check that the username exists in the database. The second step is to ensure that the password provided matches the password for the specified username. If both of these checks pass, then operation of the Web method continues normally. If either of these checks fails, the Web method needs to provide some sort of error message to the calling function.
A common variation to this technique is to require just a user identification code, typically a Globally Unique IDentifier (GUID). In this case, the Web method call accepts one parameter, UserID, in addition to its standard parameters. This approach is usually just as effective as using a username/password combination because GUIDs are very hard to duplicate. In most cases, it is much more difficult to randomly determine a user's GUID than their string-based password. This is also a popular technique because many databases will automatically generate a GUID. The main detriment to this technique is that a GUID is more difficult for a user or developer to remember and is easy to mistype.
An important benefit of user authentication is the option of creating more complex authorization schemes. Remember that authentication is the process of proving the user's identity and authorization is the process of identifying resources accessible by that user. Since each Web method has to authenticate the specific user making the request, it is possible to create a complex authorization scheme where users are authorized to use only a portion of the available Web methods. In this case, after authenticating the user, each Web method would make one additional check to determine if the authenticated user should be allowed to access the given Web method. If no authorization exists, then a third type of error message would be presented to the user.
There is, of course, a downside to using user authentication to secure your Web services. The most obvious problem with this scheme is that the user has to include one or two additional parameters in every single method call. When a server-side Web application (such as ASP or JSP) is doing this work, this typically is not a problem. However, when humans are making direct calls to the Web method through a WSDL page or similar front-end, this effort quickly becomes tedious.
Another major concern when using user authentication is the requirement to store username/password combinations on the Web server. These are typically stored in a database requiring additional database storage space and requests, which can impact Web service performance. Storing this data also potentially exposes sensitive customer information to employees and hackers. With Web services that use a database for their basic functionality, this concern can be mitigated by good architecture and development. For Web services that do not require a database, the price of creating and maintaining one just for user authentication is often too steep.
Another option for securing Web services is digital certificates. Digital certificates are small pieces of software installed on client machines that verify the client's identity (see Figure B). This verification is done through a third-party such as Verisign that creates a unique certificate for every client machine using industry standard encryption. The certificate is then passed along when the client requests a Web service. The Web service checks for the presence of the digital certificate and reacts accordingly.
|Digital certificates identify a user securely.|
Digital certificates are typically used in a fashion similar to IP blocking, in an "all or nothing" prospect for the whole site. Each Web service usually calls a single function, which verifies that a certificate was passed along with the request. If the function indicates that no certificate was passed, the Web service fails and returns an appropriate error message. If the certificate is present, then functionality is executed normally. In this scenario, digital certificates work similarly to IP blocking in that server-side configuration and maintenance is easy, at the cost of flexibility.
Digital certificates have a significant benefit over IP blocking. Like user authentication, the security check for digital certificates doesn't occur until a Web method call is actually made. Thus, visitors can still view the WSDL pages for Web services or associated Web pages. This benefit comes at the cost of having to include code in each and every method that requires it. If you forget to include the code in one Web method, that method will be freely available to anyone who wants to use it.
Since you have to include authentication code in every Web method anyway, many developers take the opportunity to expand on the simple usage of digital certificates described above. Digital certificates can hold personal information about the user (presumably) sitting at the client machine, so this code can resemble the code needed for user authentication. A common piece of information contained in a digital certificate is the user's e-mail address. This can easily be used as the identifying key in the database since it is always unique. Furthermore, since the certificate is secure and unique, there's no need for the user to supply a password. The user can be authenticated with no additional effort on their part, all without sacrificing detailed auditing or method-level authorization. This is a big step toward user-friendliness.
The downside of digital certificates is that they are difficult to install. Most users are unwilling to download and install a digital certificate just to surf a Web site, so this limits certificates’ feasibility in certain situations, such as B2B communications and secure intranets. Digital certificates also limit the user to a single machine. Even if I install a certificate on my work computer, I have to install a second one before I can access the Web service from my home computer. Finally, certificates never obtain input from the user for authentication purposes: You are only authenticating the machine, not the person using the machine. If someone else sits at my desk, the Web service will assume that I am using the service.
In the final installment of this series, we will compare all three techniques for securing paid Web services side by side, as well as examine some additional techniques for providing general Web service security.
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<urn:uuid:c4d5d152-1ba1-4916-84c0-472b6d9b4351>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://www.techrepublic.com/article/secure-web-services-with-user-authentication-and-digital-certificates/
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|
en
| 0.924405 | 1,459 | 3.0625 | 3 |
Could you please tell me the date when Great Britain became the first power in the world, the day when it lost the world’s supremacy, and the date starting with we can affirm that USA is the first power in the world (please be as accurate as you can-day/month/year if you know along with historical evidence)? If historians have different views about this subject, please give the all the opinions you know. When I say ‘the first power in the world’ I mean economically and military and in the case of Great Britain, I do not necessarily mean only the period when Great Britain was an empire.
I look forward to hearing from you, and I would be grateful if you will answer these questions. Thank you very much.
? ? ?
Do you really believe that anything as monumental as a nation’s ascendancy to No.1 world power status is achieved in a single day? Such things tend to occur in increments and, given the rivals they often face, are hardly done at one stroke. In Britain’s case, one might say an important step would be with the signing of the Treaty of Paris on February 10, 1763, which ended the Seven Years War and left Britain in a dominant position in North America and India, as well as alliances with several German states starting with Hanover, from which the royal family came. In spite of the setback of the American Revolution, the Battle of Trafalgar on October 21, 1805, followed by Waterloo on June 18, 1815, left Britain a major power in Europe and the dominant world power at sea, laying the groundwork for colonial expansion that would extend Victorian Britain’s hegemony over Africa and much of Asia.
The first step toward Britain’s decline was probably the surrender of Singapore on February 15, 1942. This humiliating defeat at the hands of an Asiatic army shattered not only Britain’s aura of invincibility, but that of the white European imperialist powers in general, throughout Asia and Africa. Between that and the high cost of World War II, Britain had little choice but to grant independence to its former colonies and retain influence through the more voluntary economic benefits of the British Commonwealth.
The United States likewise underwent a gradual rise, making its first serious excursions beyond its continental borders with the Spanish-American War. The Treaty of Paris of December 10, 1898 was significant in leaving the United States with Puerto Rico and Guam as territories and the Philippines as a protectorate. The end of World War II on September 2, 1945 left the United States as one of two global powers and the number one power at sea. The dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991 eliminated that last comparable rival, leaving the United States the dominant world power. It currently retains that status militarily, although it faces a major challenge from China, which pursues a policy dating back to the Ming Dynasty of extending its influence by economic and diplomatic, rather than military means. This is a different rivalry from those of the past, however, due to the codependence of the two countries.
The Chinese could probably destroy the United States simply by demanding their money back—but the Americans have been so instrumental in China’s economic rise that it is unlikely that China would prosper, or even survive, without the United States as a trading partner. Moreover, the Chinese do not seem to want to assume the responsibilities of a military power, stepping in to broker or even settle the differences of other countries the way the United States does. Above all else, though, it is not in China’s best interests to destroy its best customer.
World History Group
More Questions at Ask Mr. History
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<urn:uuid:472b7c88-39bd-4e99-b85c-3433b389fe1f>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://www.historynet.com/britain-and-america-world-power-trajectories.htm
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|
en
| 0.959366 | 752 | 3.484375 | 3 |
Kepler-452b may be Earth's close cousin, but living on the newfound world would still be an alien experience.
A group of pioneers magically transported to the surface of Kepler-452b — which is the closest thing to an "Earth twin" yet discovered, researchers announced yesterday (July 23) — would instantly realize they weren't on their home planet anymore. (And magic, or some sort of warp drive, must be invoked for such a journey, since Kepler-452b lies 1,400 light-years away.)
Kepler-452 is 60 percent wider than Earth and probably about five times more massive, so its surface gravity is considerably stronger than the pull people are used to here. Any hypothetical explorers would thus feel about twice as heavy on the alien world as they do on Earth, researchers said. [Exoplanet Kepler 452b: Closest Earth Twin in Pictures]
"It might be quite challenging at first," Jon Jenkins, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said during a news conference yesterday. Jenkins is data analysis lead for the space agency's Kepler spacecraft, which discovered Kepler-452b.
But visitors to the exoplanet would probably be able to meet that challenge, said former astronaut John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. After all, he said, firefighters and backpackers routinely carry heavy loads, mimicking (albeit temporarily) the effect of increased surface gravity.
"If we were there, we'd get stronger," Grunsfeld said. "Our bones would actually get stronger. It would be like a workout every day."
The high-gravity environment would probably lead to significant changes in the bodies of Kepler-452b colonists over longer time spans, he and Jenkins said.
"I suspect that, over time, we would adapt to the conditions, and perhaps become stockier over a long period of many generations," Jenkins said.
Other features of life on Kepler-452b would be more familiar. For example, the exoplanet orbits a solar-type star at about the same distance at which Earth circles the sun. [Living on Other Planets: What Would It Be Like?]
"It would feel a lot like home, from the standpoint of the sunshine that you would experience," Jenkins said. Earth plants "would photosynthesize, just perfectly fine," he added.
Imagining other aspects of life on Kepler-452b requires much more speculation, since it's too far away to get a good look at. Researchers suspect that the planet is rocky, like Earth, but they don't know for sure. Kepler-452b probably has a thick atmosphere, liquid water and active volcanoes, but these are best guesses based on modeling work.
Models also suggest that Kepler-452b might soon experience a runaway greenhouse effect, similar to the one that changed Venus from a potentially habitable world billions of years ago to the sweltering hothouse it is today, researchers said.
Kepler-452b's star is apparently older than the sun — 6 billion years, compared to 4.5 billion years. It's thus in a more energetic phase of its life cycle than the sun is; indeed, the star is about 10 percent larger and 20 percent brighter than Earth's sun. (That means the sunlight on Kepler-452b, while familiar to explorers from Earth, would not be exactly equivalent.)
The increased energy output of its sun might currently be causing Kepler-452b to heat up and lose its oceans — if the planet does indeed harbor oceans — to evaporation, subsequent breakup by ultraviolet light and atmospheric escape.
Such a scenario likely won't occur on Kepler-452b for another 500 million years or so, assuming estimates for the planet's size and the star's age are accurate, Jenkins said. (The stronger gravity of larger planets allows them to hang on to their surface water for longer periods of time in such situations than smaller worlds can.)
"But, you know, we don't know exactly," Jenkins said.
So he and other members of the discovery team helped devise an artist's concept that imagines how Kepler-452b would look if a runaway greenhouse effect were beginning to unfold.
The illustration shows "not oceans, but residual bodies of water that are highly concentrated in minerals after the oceans are largely gone, and you have lakes and pools and rivers left," Jenkins said.
"It's a fascinating thing to think about, and I think it gives us an opportunity to take a pause and reflect on our own environment that we find ourselves in," he added. "We've been lucky and fortunate to live in a habitable zone for the last several billion years, and we'd like that to continue on."
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<urn:uuid:75040aaf-cfde-4363-9bba-69f4d8c08b39>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://www.space.com/30034-earth-cousin-exoplanet-kepler-452b-life.html
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en
| 0.960602 | 972 | 3.140625 | 3 |
To lower LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, eat beans, chickpeas, lentils, and split peas. A new analysis in the Canadian Medical Association Journal combined data from 26 randomized clinical trials that compared diets with and without such legumes.
It found that one daily serving of these legumes (about 2⁄3 cup cooked) reduced LDL by 5 percent, on average. Rich in fiber and protein, legumes can often replace animal protein. Many observational studies have linked higher intakes of legumes with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease.
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<urn:uuid:bd90423b-df9e-4699-b912-c62068e66fe8>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://www.berkeleywellness.com/healthy-eating/food/article/beans-cholesterol-control
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en
| 0.91765 | 113 | 2.640625 | 3 |
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