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A large segment of popular consumer electronic devices (personal computers, cellular phones, personal digital assistants, etc.) have microprocessors acting as brains. These microprocessors consume a large amount of power and must be actively cooled in order to function reliably. The currently available heat sinking equipment needed to cool the electronics is bulky, inefficient, and costly. The TMT MicroSink E-Team developed low cost, high performance heat removal technology that blows air through a microscale heat sink without the use of moving parts, allowing large amounts of heat to be removed cheaply and efficiently. The new technology enables the development of chip-coolers that are considerably smaller, lighter, and quieter than currently available heat sink-fan combinations.
The E-Team included two doctoral students specializing in physics, mechanical engineering, and energy engineering. A faculty advisor with expertise in mechanical engineering supported the students along with two industry experts.
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On Sunday morning, England joins the rest of the UK in banning smoking inside most public spaces - from bars to clubs, restaurants, shops, offices and factories.
Smokers will have to head outdoors for a cigarette - or stay at home
Anyone wanting to light up will have to stay at home, brave the elements, or travel to the last remaining bastions of smoking in the British Isles - Alderney, Sark or the Isle of Man.
It's a move that affects most Britons, from the non-smokers happy to leave the pub without smelling of cigarettes, to the millions of puffers whose habits will have to change.
HOW MANY PEOPLE SMOKE?
About 10 million people in the UK smoke cigarettes, according to anti-smoking charity Ash. It says a further two million - the vast majority of them men - smoke cigars, pipes or both.
In 1948, when surveys were first conducted, eight out of 10 British men smoked - the highest level recorded. Among women the peak was almost five out of 10, in 1966.
The proportion of smokers fell rapidly during the 70s and 80s and continues to decline steadily.
About one in four Britons over the age of 16 now smokes, with the rate slightly higher among men than women.
Sweden, where fewer than one in five people partakes, has the EU's lowest smoking rate. Greece, where almost half the adult population smokes, has the highest.
A person's age, whether they visit pubs and even their marital status is closely connected to the likelihood that they smoke.
By age group, it is 20- to 24-year-olds who are most likely to light up, with about a third considered smokers. As people get older they become less likely to smoke, with the rate falling to 14% for the over 60s.
About four out of 10 people who visit pubs smoke, and there is a strong link between smoking and social group, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Manual workers and their families are almost twice as likely to smoke as those with a managerial or professional background (31% compared with 17%). And people living together are twice as likely to smoke as those who are married (35% compared with 18%).
Across the country, the greatest proportion of smokers is found in the North East (30%).
Many smokers start early in the morning. About one third of people who get through more than 20 cigarettes a day light up within five minutes of waking.
Among this group, eight out of 10 people say they would struggle to go 24 hours without a cigarette. Among all smokers, more than half would find the task a challenge.
Nevertheless, seven out of 10 smokers say they would like to quit. The proportion wanting to stop is highest among those who smoke 10 to 19 cigarettes a day. It is suggested many heavy smokers believe stopping would be too difficult.
The average male smoker is thought to get through 14 cigarettes a day, while women smoke 13.
SMOKING AND HEALTH
Hundreds of thousands of deaths could be prevented by England's smoking ban, medical expert Sir Richard Peto said shortly before its introduction.
Anti-smoking campaigns repeatedly highlight the health risks
"Half of all smokers are going to be killed by tobacco. If a million people stop smoking who wouldn't otherwise have done so then maybe you'll prevent half a million deaths."
According to the charity Cancer Research, 50,000 cancer deaths and a further 70,000 deaths from heart disease and strokes are caused by smoking each year. It estimates that six million people have been killed in the past 50 years.
Supporters of a ban argue that it will protect many non-smokers from the effects of passive smoking.
But it has also been suggested that many children will be more likely to be exposed to smoke, as their parents will light up at home instead.
UP IN SMOKE
Smoking is good news for the Treasury, with about £4.10 of the £5.50 cost of a packet of cigarettes taken in taxes.
UK'S BEST-SELLING CIGARETTES
1) Lambert & Butler King Size - 13.5% (Imperial)
2) Benson & Hedges Gold - 7.3% (Gallaher)
3) Mayfair King Size - 7.1% (Gallaher)
4) Richmond Superkings - 6.6% (Imperial)
5) Richmond King Size - 4.9% (Imperial)
6) Marlboro Gold King Size - 4.4% (Philip Morris)
7) Regal King Size - 3.5% (Imperial)
8) Royals King Size Red - 3.4% (BAT)
9) Superkings - 3.3% (Imperial)
10) Silk Cut Purple - 3.2% (Gallaher)
Figures for 2004. Source: Ash
Excluding VAT, this earned the Treasury more than £8bn in 2004-5, Ash says.
Treating diseases caused by smoking is costly, however. The campaign group says the NHS spends £1.5bn a year, including hospital admissions, GP consultations and prescriptions. There are further costs in the form of benefits.
It is thought that about 3,000 people are employed by the tobacco industry in the UK, which is home to three of the five biggest tobacco companies in the world.
While it has been suggested that the smoking ban will hit manufacturers hard, others point out that cigarette prices have already been put up to offset any fall in sales.
"Smokers will continue to choose to smoke," said Imperial Tobacco ahead of the ban.
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August 03, 2011
Using its rapid deforestation detection system INPE found 312.7 square kilometers were cleared in June. Nearly 40 percent of deforestation occurred in the state of Pará. The states of Mato Grosso (26 percent), Rondonia (21 percent), and Amazonas (13 percent) also saw significant forest loss.
Entering the peak deforestation months — July through September/October — deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon in 2011 is so far outpacing last year's rate, which was the lowest since annual record-keeping began in the late 1980s.
Most observers expected to see an increase in deforestation this year due to higher commodity prices and anticipation of changes to Brazil's Forest Code, which requires private landowners to maintain forest cover on the majority of their holdings. Another contributing factor is continuing dry conditions across much of the Amazon basin, which increase the risk of fires spreading from agricultural areas into forest zones.
Brazilian government: Amazon deforestation rising
(06/30/2011) Satellite data released today by the Brazilian government confirmed a rise in Amazon deforestation over this time last year.
Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon continues to rise; clearing highest near Belo Monte dam site
(06/17/2011) Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon continued to rise as Brazil's Congress weighed a bill that would weaken the country's Forest Code, according to new analysis by Imazon.
Brazil confirms big jump in Amazon deforestation
(05/18/2011) New data from the Brazilian government seems to confirm environmentalists' fears that farmers and ranchers are clearing rainforest in anticipation of a weakening of the country's rules governing forest protection. Wednesday, Brazil's National Space Research Agency (INPE) announced a sharp rise in deforestation in March and April relative to the same period last year. INPE's rapid deforestation detection system (DETER) recorded 593 square kilometers of forest clearing during the past two months, a 473 percent increase over the 103.5 sq km chopped down from March-April 2010.
Huge surge in Amazon deforestation
(05/17/2011) Analysis by Imazon, a research institute, has confirmed a huge surge in deforestation in a critical part of the Brazilian Amazon.
Brazil's forest code debate may determine fate of the Amazon rainforest
(05/05/2011) Brazil's forest code may be about to get an overhaul. The federal code, which presently requires landowners in the Amazon to keep 80 percent of their land forest (20-35% in the cerrado), is widely flouted, but has been used in recent years as a lever by the government to go after deforesters. For example, the forest code served as the basis for the "blacklists" which restricted funds for municipalities where deforestation has been particularly high. To get off the blacklist, and thereby regain access to finance and markets, a municipality must demonstrate its landowners are in compliance with environmental laws.
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With the tragic events that have unfolded in Japan following the catastrophic earthquake off the country's coast, some have raised the idea of using robotics to aid human efforts within disaster zones.
According to Antonio Espingardeiro, a robotics expert at the IEEE, more could have and should be done to use the possibilities offered by robots to help limit the effects of the Japanese disaster and the effects of the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
“In this situation, if there was better preparation with the appropriate technology then perhaps circumstances could already be improved,” he told TechEye.
Espingardeiro believes that risks could be lowered through the increased use of robots such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which can, for example, be equipped with radiation sensors for the purposes of monitoring and analysing air quality.
However it is a predominantly human crew that is working in the radioactive atmosphere to deal with the disaster, although preparations are being made to introduce more robotic devices for tasks such as inspecting underwater infrastructure.
“More needs to be done in the future to ensure that the relevant robotic technologies are available in disaster zones such as that of Japan,” said Espingardeiro.
“Japan has had to call for international help in order to provide appropriate robotics that can be used in the situation, with the US providing the main supply of hardware with its thermal imaging UAVs and other robotic technology.”
According to Espingardeiro, it is up to governments across the world to put more emphasis on the use of robotics in such situations to mitigate risks in the future.
“There is certainly a culture of change within views towards the use of robotics, but there needs to be more done to ensure that the relevant quality and quantity of hardware is available when it is needed.
“Many governments are just starting to realise the potential of robotics in such situations.”
Espingardeiro believes that the problem lies in the lack of suitable equipment available, alongside a lack of investment in the relevant training of personnel in the operation of robots on a large scale.
One of the stumbling blocks lies in the fact that the majority of cutting edge robotics technologies are the sole preserve of militaries, which account for large numbers of the hardware.
“While there are maybe 10-15 units in use in the Japanese disaster, there were for example 6,000 robots used in the Iraq war,” he said.
Espingardeiro thinks it's necessary that production is moved away from the military sphere so that commercialisation will allow current technologies to become more cost effective and not just for the defence budget-backed militaries.
“It is natural that technologies are more expensive initially, for example a number of years ago GPS was only used by the military, but I expect that robotics technology will also become more easily accessible.
“This will mean that rather than having a small number of units available in a particular situation which may cost over a million dollars, you might have one hundred.
“Therefore the inherent dangers that can be found in an environment such as in Japan, which could easily damage the cameras or sensors of a robot, would not cause any hesitation in use of a robot for a specific task.
"But it is very difficult to get your hands on a robot currently, even if you have the money."
Of course as Espingardeiro notes, the reduction in costing is something that will gradually come down due to market prices for relevant chips, sensors and motors, but with more investment in direct development of robotics technologies he believes that the timescale for the next generation of robots could be reduced from the expected ten to fifteen years.
In the longer term this will enable the use of significantly more sophisticated technology which would mean improved effectiveness in high risk situations.
“There are already examples of robots that have greatly increased dexterity compared to the gripper mechanisms of the current robots which are used in search and rescue missions,” he says.
One example Espingardeiro points to is NASA’s ‘Robonaut’ which utilises highly sophisticated dexterous touch that would enable precise control far away from dangerous areas, with particular use in the Japanese case.
Again, while this remote technology is available to some degree, more research needs to be done to solve bug problems and to make it more attainable.
As another longer term contingency plan, Espingardeiro believes that future nuclear reactors should place much more emphasis in their design on facilitating the use of robots.
The ideas can't be implemented in immediate or even short term time scales, but Espingardeiro says that as governments begin to fully realise the potential for robotics in disaster situations more can be done to use the technology to save lives - by sending in the robots straight away.
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A Great American Historical Moment Is Auctioned
Bidder Pays $2.1 Million for a Pivotal U.S. Document
By Jay Zimmer
There were 48 original copies of the great Emancipation Proclamation, all signed by President Abraham Lincoln in the closing months of 1862. The Civil War was raging, and at that point in the conflict, things were not going well for the Union forces.
Lincoln’s proclamation stated that as of the first day of 1863, all slaves in states then in rebellion were free, and that all offices of the United States including the federal government and the military were mandated to protect that freedom. It was pivotal in American history. Politically, Lincoln had no authority in the South; those states in rebellion had declared their own government, much as the original 13 colonies had done “fourscore and seven years” before.
Lincoln’s action was meant to sting and unsettle the Confederate government, concentrate their forces on finding and returning slaves who would run away upon hearing of the measure, and become an irritant to the South’s ability to wage war. Eventually it would lead to Army companies composed of African American troops who would fight their former masters in the blue uniform of the United States.
A hundred years later – almost exactly – another president, Lyndon Johnson, invoked the power of his predecessor’s proclamation saying that equality between the races was still an unfulfilled promise, as he sent his proposed the Voting Rights Act to Congress.
The Emancipation Proclamation was Lincoln’s defining moment, much as the firing of the air traffic controllers was for Reagan, the Cuban Missile Crisis for Kennedy, the China trip for Nixon, the Camp David Accord for Carter.
The forty-eight original copies were given by Lincoln to the Sanitary Commission, which later morphed into the Red Cross. The Commission sold the documents privately and used the money to care for Union soldiers during the war.
About half of those original copies survive, including one that was owned by the late Senator Robert Kennedy, which was auctioned by his family several years ago.
This latest copy was purchased for $2.1 million dollars by David Rubenstein, a managing director of the investment firm, The Carlyle Group. The seller’s name was not disclosed. The price paid was the second highest (after the $3.8 million paid for Kennedy’s copy) ever paid for a copy of this document.
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Transforming scar tissue into beating heart muscle may help repair cardiac damage
Washington, Apr 19 (ANI): Researchers including one of Indian origin have declared a research breakthrough in mice that shows promise to restore hearts damaged by heart attacks-by converting scar-forming cardiac cells into beating heart muscle.
Gladstone Institutes scientists previously transformed such cells into cardiac muscle-like cells in petri dishes.
But Gladstone postdoctoral scholar Li Qian, PhD, along with researchers in the laboratory of Deepak Srivastava, MD, has now accomplished this transformation in living animals-and with even greater success.
The results may have broad human-health implications.
"The damage from a heart attack is typically permanent because heart-muscle cells-deprived of oxygen during the attack-die and scar tissue forms," said Dr. Srivastava, who directs cardiovascular and stem cell research at Gladstone, an independent and nonprofit biomedical-research institution.
"But our experiments in mice are a proof of concept that we can reprogram non-beating cells directly into fully functional, beating heart cells-offering an innovative and less invasive way to restore heart function after a heart attack."
In laboratory experiments with mice that had experienced a heart attack, Drs. Qian and Srivastava delivered three genes that normally guide embryonic heart development-together known as GMT-directly into the damaged region.
Within a month, non-beating cells that normally form scar tissue transformed into beating heart-muscle cells. Within three months, the hearts were beating even stronger and pumping more blood.
"These findings could have a significant impact on heart-failure patients-whose damaged hearts make it difficult for them to engage in normal activities like walking up a flight of stairs," said Dr. Qian, who is also a California Institute for Regenerative Medicine postdoctoral scholar and a Roddenberry Fellow.
"This research may result in a much-needed alternative to heart transplants-for which donors are extremely limited. And because we are reprogramming cells directly in the heart, we eliminate the need to surgically implant cells that were created in a petri dish."
"Our next goal is to replicate these experiments and test their safety in larger mammals, such as pigs, before considering clinical trials in humans," said Dr. Srivastava, who is also a professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), with which Gladstone is affiliated.
"We hope that our research will lay the foundation for initiating cardiac repair soon after a heart attack-perhaps even when the patient arrives in the emergency room," Dr. Srivastava added.
The study has been published in the journal Nature. (ANI)
Read More: Kashmir University | Ingram Institute Edbo | Agriculture Institute | Kamla Nehru Institute | Haffkin Institute Po | Science Institute Lsg So | Karnata Health Institute | Indian Institute Of Technology | Central Institute Of Technolog | Vellore Institute Of Technolog | Pasteur Institute | Calicut University | Kochi University | Jadavpur University | Health Institute Po | Kolkata University | Vidyasagar University So | North Bengal University So | Assam Engg. Institute | Birouli Rural Institute
MONEY SPINNING IPL SHOULD BE BANNED - PASWAN
May 18, 2013 at 9:44 PM
CBI SUPERINTENDENT SENT TO THREE DAY POLICE REMAND
May 18, 2013 at 9:42 PM
SIDDARAMAIAH EXPANDS CABINET, ENSURES NO WATER CRISIS
May 18, 2013 at 9:41 PM
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Excessive use may make bird flu drug useless
Washington, Jan 8 (IANS) Overuse of cheap and popular drugs like Tamiflu may make the avian flu virus resistant to it. Scientists in the US have warned against their use after their failure to stop the flu virus in Asia.
The scientists say that excessive antiviral drug can accelerate drug resistance in viruses, and that resistance can spread rapidly. The results should serve as a warning to those who consider Tamiflu the great antiviral medication, researchers warned.
Researchers analysed almost 700 genome sequences of avian influenza strains to document where and when the virus developed resistance to a class of antiviral drugs called adamantanes and how far the resistance spread.
In order to prepare for a long-feared pandemic flu outbreak, especially in the event that avian flu mutates enough to infect and be easily transmitted among humans, Tamiflu has become a standard to avoid it.
'We can't necessarily say what we've seen in adamantanes is predictive of what will happen with Tamiflu. But in the larger dynamic, perhaps it serves as a cautionary tale,' said Daniel Janies, study co-author and an associate professor of biomedical informatics at Ohio State University.
Seasonal Influenza in Asia had developed resistance against the antiviral drug adamantanes and this was discovered in 2002 but by 2006 the drug was declared worthless as a treatment for the flu because more than 90 percent of the strains had developed a resistance to the drugs, said an Ohio release.
Janies analysed hundreds of avian flu genomes isolated from avian, feline and human hosts between 1996 and 2007 and found that every third of the samples carried mutations enabling the virus strains to resist the effects of adamantane drugs.
Read More: Charkhari State | Sarila State | Badrinath Seasonal | Bampa Seasonal | Malari Seasonal | Kumaon University Nainital | Mahdaiya State | Gorakhpur University | Agra University | Ayurvedic University | Bundelkhand University So | Mds University Ajmer Dtso | Bhopal University | University | Jiwaji University | State Bank Of Hyderabad | State Bank Of India | State Bank Of Mysore Colony | State Bank Colony | State Farm Colony
MONEY SPINNING IPL SHOULD BE BANNED - PASWAN
May 18, 2013 at 9:44 PM
CBI SUPERINTENDENT SENT TO THREE DAY POLICE REMAND
May 18, 2013 at 9:42 PM
SIDDARAMAIAH EXPANDS CABINET, ENSURES NO WATER CRISIS
May 18, 2013 at 9:41 PM
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Did you miss our G+ Hangout with a National Geographic inventor? Watch our video, then check out TH Culhane’s blog for detailed instructions on how to make your own motor and generator!
What could you make with a scouring pad, a paper towel, drain cleaner, and an aluminum can tab?
How about enough electricity to power a flashlight?
Join us for our next Google+ Hangout with NG Explorer and Google Science Fair judge TH Culhane at his laboratory in Germany for a do-it-yourself build-along event! In support of Girlstart’s DeSTEMber focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, we’re building an electric motor, a lemon battery, and a soda can tab that produces electricity with materials mostly found at home. The best part? You can build along with TH!
Here is the list of what you will need to get beforehand:
Safety First… Gloves and goggles!
1. Super Simple Electric Motor
C cell battery (any battery will do, AA, or AAA or D, but C is easy to hold)
A dry wall screw
A round neodymium magnet (get the big one, splurge, they only cost 3 bucks but they spin better)
A piece of wire
2. Lemon Battery
A penny (for copper)
A nail (for zinc)
Various low voltage LEDs
3. Joule Thief
A Blue or White LED (Other colors are fine, too)
2N3904 Transistor or equivalent
1k Resistor (Brown-Black-Red)
Thin wire, two colors (magnet wire works, .6mm)
Alligator clips and/or a breadboard
4. Electricity From a Soda Can Tab
Aluminum can tab (or aluminum foil)
Stainless steel scouring pad
A paper towel or a thin cleaning sponge to separate the stainless steel and the aluminum
Some drain cleaner
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Creature Feature: The Bald Eagle!
If you've ever seen a bald eagle, you'll have probably noticed something a little bit strange - they aren't bald! This is because the name actually comes from an old English word, "balde", meaning white.
Bald Eagles are found in North America, and have been the national symbol of the United States since 1782. But did you know that these beautiful birds were once on the brink of extinction because of hunting and pollution? Luckily, laws created almost 50 years ago have helped protect them, and they've made a comeback. Yeah!
One of the most awesome sights in nature is a bald eagle swooping down from the sky to grab a fish. They can soar over a 3,048m high (that's over nine times the height of the Eiffel tower!), and their great eyesight lets them see fish up to 1.6km away. When they attack, they drop down, glide just above the water, snag a fish with their feet, and fly off to eat it.
Babies, called eaglets, are born light grey then turn brown as they get older. When they are four to five years old, they develop their normal white heads and tails.
Eagle nests are called aeries. Bald eagles build their nests at the very top of tall trees so the eggs will be safe. Some parents come back year after year to the same nest, adding more sticks, twigs and grass each time.
- These carnivorous birds can only lift about half their body weight. If they catch a fish that weighs more than that, they might hang onto it with their claws and "swim" to shore using their huge wings.
- The average female bald eagle has a wingspan of 1.8m to 2.4m, and weighs 4kg.
- In the wild, bald eagles can live up to 35 years old.
- Female bald eagles are larger than males. Their bodies can grow up to 1m long, and their wingspan can be up to 2.4m across (that's about the distance from the floor to the ceiling!).
Adapted from text by Scot Hoffman.
Images: Getty Images UK.
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Subsequent smaller folds would include the assumptions associated with the theory. The finished object might resemble a silhouette of two people connected to one another, alluding to the ongoing nurse and client interaction required for deliberative care to effectively take place.
Dynamic Nurse-Patient Relationship
Know the THEORIST
Distinguish the THEORY
“Nurse, can you give me my morphine,” cried out Mrs. So. “Can you tell how painful it is using the 0 ‐10 pain scale, where 0 being not painful and 10 being severely painful?”replied the nurse. “Ummm... I think it’s about 7. Can I have my morphine now?” “Mrs. So, I think something is bothering you besides your pain. Am I correct?” Mrs. So cried and said, “I can’t help it. I’m so worried about my 3 boys. I’m not sure how they are or who’s been taking care of them. They’re still so young to be left alone. My husband is in Yemen right now and he won’t be back until next month.” “Why don’t we make a phone call to your house so you could check out on your boys?” Mrs. So phoned his sons. “Thank you nurse. I don’t think I still need that morphine. My boys are fine. Our neighbour, Mrs. Yee, she’s watching over my boys right now.”
The focus of Orlando’s paradigm hubs the context of a dynamic nurse-patient phenomenon constructively realized through highlighting the key concepts such as : Patient Behavior, Nurse Reaction , Nurse Action.
1. The nursing process is set in motion by the Patient Behavior. All patient behavior, verbal ( a patient’s use of language ) or non-verbal ( includes physiological symptoms, motor activity, and nonverbal communication) , no matter how insignificant, must be considered an expression of a need for help and needs to be validated . If a patient’s behavior does not effectively assessed by the nurse then a major problem in giving care would rise leading to a nurse-patient relationship failure. Overtime . the more it is difficult to establish rapport to the patient once behavior is not determined. Communicating effectively is vital to achieve patient’s cooperation in achieving health.
Remember : When a patient has a need for help that cannot be resolved without the help of another, helplessness results
2. The Patient behavior stimulates a Nurse Reaction . In this part, the beginning of the nurse-patient relationship takes place. It is important to correctly evaluate the behavior of the patient using the nurse reactions steps to achieve positive feedback response from the patient. The steps are as follows:
The nurse perceives behavior through any of the senses -> The perception leads to automatic thought -> The thought produces an automatic feeling ->The nurse shares reactions with the patient to ascertain whether perceptions are accurate or inaccurate -> The nurse consciously deliberates about personal reactions and patient input in order to produce professional deliberative actions based on mindful assessment rather than automatic reactions.
Remember : Exploration with the patient helps validate the patient’s behavior.
3. Critically considering one or two ways in implementing Nurse Action. When providing care, nursing action can be done either automatic or deliberative.
Automatic reactions stem from nursing behaviors that are performed to satisfy a directive other than the patient’s need for help.
For example, the nurse who gives a sleeping pill to a patient every evening because it is ordered by the physician, without first discussing the need for the medication with the patient, is engaging in automatic, non-deliberative behavior. This is because the reason for giving the pill has more to do with following medical orders (automatically) than with the patient’s immediate expressed need for help.
Deliberative reaction is a “disciplined professional response” It can be argued that all nursing actions are meant to help the client and should be considered deliberative. However, correct identification of actions from the nurse’s assessment should be determined to achieve reciprocal help between nurse and patient’s health. The following criterias should be considered.
- Deliberative actions result from the correct identification of patient needs by validation of the nurses’s reaction to patient behavior.
- The nurse explores the meaning of the action with the patient and its relevance to meeting his need.
- The nurse validates the action’s effectiveness immediately after compelling it.
- The nurse is free of stimuli unrelated to the patient’s need (when action is taken).
Remember : for an action to have been truly deliberative, it must undergo reflective evaluation to determine if the action helped the client by addressing the need as determined by the nurse and the client in the immediate situation.
Learn more about the THEORYMETAPARADIGM CONCEPTS
Human/Person An individual in need. Unique individual behaving verbally or nonverbally. Assumption is that individuals are at times able to meet their own needs and at other times unable to do so.
Health Assumption is that being without emotional or physical discomfort and having a sense of well-being contribute to a healthy state. She further assumed that freedom from mental or physical discomfort and feelings of adequacy and well being contribute to health. she also noted that repeated experiences of having been helped undoubtedly culminate over periods of time in greater degrees of improvement
Environment Orlando assumes it as a nursing situation that occurs when there is a nurse-patient contact and that both nurse and patient perceive, think, feel and act in the immediate situation. any aspect of the environment, even though its designed for therapeutic and helpful purposes, can cause the patient to become distressed. She stressed out that when a nurse observes a patient behavior, it should be perceived as a signal of distress.
Nursing A distinct profession "Providing direct assistance to individuals in whatever setting they are found for he purpose of avoiding, relieving, diminishing, or curing the individual's sense of helplessness" (Orlando, 1972, p. 22). Professional nursing is conceptualized as finding out and meeting the client’s immediate need for help.
Cite the Applications of the THEORY
In Nursing Research
in Nursing Education
- In a Veterans Administration (VA) ambulatory psychiatric practice in
Providence, RIShea, McBride, Gavin, and Bauer (1987) used ’s theoretical model with patients having a bipolar disorder.Their research results indicate that there were: higher patient retention, reduction of emergency services, decreased hospital stay, and increased satisfaction. They recommended its use throughout the VA system.Currently Orlando ’s model is being used in a multi-million dollar research study of patients with a bipolar disorder at 12 sites in the VA system (McBride, Telephone interview, July, 2000). McBride and colleagues continue its use in practice and research at the Orlando Veteran Administration Hospitalin . Providence, RI
- In a pilot study, Potter and Bockenhauer (2000) found positive results after implementing
’s theory. These included:positive, patient-centered outcomes, a model for staff to use to approach patients, and a decrease in patient’s immediate distress. The study provides variable measurements that might be used in other research studies. Orlando
in Nursing Practice
's theory has a continuing influence on nursing education. Through e-mail communication it was found that the Orlando Midwestern State Universi tyin Wichita Falls, Texas, is using 's theory for teaching entering nursing students. According to Greene (e-mail communication, June, 2000) she became aware, when taking a doctoral course about nursing theories, that it was Orlando theory used by its school. Orlando
- Through networking the author found that for over 10 years South Dakota State University in Brookings, SD has been using Haggerty’s (1985) description of the communication based on Orlando’s theory for entering nursing students as well as re-enforcing it in their junior year (e-mail communication, (J. Fjelland, June, 2000). Joyce Fjelland, MS, RN. After working with Schmieding at
Boston City Hospital, Lois Haggerty used Orlando’s theory in her teaching of students and in conducting a research study of students’ responses to distressed patients at Boston Collegein . Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
From an ICU nurse: “Patients have an initial ability to communicate their need for help”. Consider a case of an immediate post Coronary Artery Bypass Graft (CABG) patient. Once relieved from the effects of anesthetic sedation, though intubated, you would realize his excruciating retort from the sternotomy incisional pain through implicit cues. Morphine Sulfate 1 to 2 mg To be given via slow IV push every 1 to 2 hours or Ketorolac 15 mg IV every 6 hours is the typical pro re nata (PRN) order of a cardiac intensivist to relieve the client from pain. Automatic response of a nurse is to calm the client and encourage relaxation through deep breathing while splinting the chest with a pillow. Being Deliberate in your actions include knowing the pharmacokinetics of an ordered drug in relation to the client’s physiologic standing. If the creatinine level were elevated, would you administer ketorolac? If the client is on respiratory precaution, would you administer Morphine? You would ask yourself, what other alternatives do I have to ease my client from pain? “The client’s behavior is meaningful”. If such “need” would be fittingly dealt with, the intervention is thriving. “When patient’s needs are not met, they become distressed.”Analyze the THEORY
A relative of a patient at the emergency room went to the nurse’s station and began complaining in a loud shouting voice that their patient being a charity case is not being given the same quality of care as that of the other patients who are under private consultants. He claimed that their patient who was hyperventilating and was complanining of difficulty of breathing due to neurocirculatory astheinia was just forced to sit in the cubicle, while the rich-looking patient was a gomey.
How will you handle this kind of situation and avoid conflict? How can
’s dynamic nurse-patient interaction theory be utilized in this type of situation? Orlando
This Group Blog is Submitted to Ms. Sheila Bonito, FIC,
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements in N207.
Manager: Aux Lizares
Editor: Maria Mae Juanich
Katrina Anne Limos
Ginno Paulo Maglaya
Diana Jasmin Lee
AcknowledgmentWe would like to acknowledge the following people: Ma’am Shiela Bonito, for coming up with this group work which really challenged not only our knowledge, understanding and creativity but also our ability to stay connected despite the distance, Ms. Aux Lizares, for diligently sorting out the articles, Ms. Maria Mae Juanich, for organizing the articles into a working blog, and for Ms. Katrina Anne Limos, Mr. Gino Paulo Maglaya, and Ms. Diana Jasmin Lee, for tirelessly contributing their thoughts, ideas, and resources. Without all of you, this blog would have never been possible. Thank you very much!!!
Let us learn together. Have we done justice to Ida J. Orlando in presenting her theory this way? We would like to invite you to share with us your thoughts, feelings, comments or reactions on our blog entitled, “Understanding Ida Jean Orlando-Pelletier’sDynamic Nurse-Patient Relationship.” Thank you for your participation!Regards,
I.J. (1972). The discipline and teaching of nursing process: An evaluative study. : G. P. Putnam. New York
George, J.B. (2002). Nursing Process Discipline: Ida Jean Orlando. In George, J.B. (Ed.). Nursing Theories: the Base for professional nursing practice (5th Ed.).
: Prentice Hall, pp. 189-208. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey (2002). Ida Jean Orlando (Pelletier): Nursing Process Theory. In Tomey, A.M., & Alligood, M.R.. Nurse theorists and their work (5th Ed.). St. Louis: Mosby, pp. 399-417. Schmieding, N.J.
Orlando, I.J. (1961). The dynamic nurse-patient relationship, function, process and principles. New York: G. P. Putnam.]
Haggerty, L.A. (1985). A theoretical model for developing students’ communication skills. Journal of Nursing Education, 24(7), 296-298.
Haggerty, L.A. (1987). An analysis of senior nursing students’ immediate responses to distressed patients.. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 12, 451-461.
Nancy M. Shea, Linda McBride, Christopher Gavin, and Mark Bauer
Bauer, M. S. (2001). The collaborative practice model for bipolar disorder-Design and implementation in a multisite randomized controlled trial. Bipolar Disorders 3(5), 233-244. Bauer, M.S., & McBride, L.(2002). Structured group psychotherapy for bipolar disorder (2nd Ed). New York: Springer Publishing Co. Shea, N. M., McBride, L. Gavin, C., & Bauer, M. (1997). The effects of ambulatory collaboration practice model on process and outcome of care for bipolar disorder. Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association 3(2), 49-57. Mertie. L. Potter, ND, ARNP, CS and Barbara Jo Bockenhauer, MS, RNC
Potter, M.L. & Bockenhauer, B.J. (2000). Implementing Orlando’s nursing process theory: A pilot study. Journa
l of Psychosocial Nursing nd Mental Health Services, 38(3), 14-21
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Marine Wildlife Encyclopedia
Acoel Flatworm Waminoa species
The diminutive acoel flatworms look like colored spots on the bubble coral on which they live. Their ultra-thin bodies glide over the coral surface as they graze, probably eating organic debris trapped by coral mucus. Acoel flatworms have no eyes and instead of a gut, they have a network of digestive cells. They are able to reproduce by fragmentation, each piece forming a new individual. The genus is difficult to identify to species level and the distribution of acoel flatworms is uncertain.
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is Concept Attainment?
Attainment is an indirect instructional strategy that uses a structured
inquiry process. It is based on the work of Jerome Bruner. In concept
attainment, students figure out the attributes of a group or category
that has already been formed by the teacher. To do so, students
compare and contrast examples that contain the attributes of the
concept with examples that do not contain those attributes. They
then separate them into two groups. Concept attainment, then, is
the search for and identification of attributes that can be used
to distinguish examples of a given group or category from non-examples.
is its purpose?
attainment is designed to clarify ideas and to introduce aspects
of content. It engages students into formulating a concept through
the use of illustrations, word cards or specimens called examples.
Students who catch onto the idea before others are able to resolve
the concept and then are invited to suggest their own examples,
while other students are still trying to form the concept. For this
reason, concept attainment is well suited to classroom use because
all thinking abilities can be challenged throughout the activity.
With experience, children become skilled at identifying relationships
in the word cards or specimens. With carefully chosen examples,
it is possible to use concept attainment to teach almost any concept
in all subjects.
make connections between what students know and what they will
how to examine a concept from a number of perspectives
how to sort out relevant information
their knowledge of a concept by classifying more than one example
of that concept
go beyond merely associating a key term with a definition
concept is learned more thoroughly and retention is improved
do I do it?
of Concept Attainment:
and define a concept
positive and negative examples
the process to the students
the examples and list the attributes
a concept definition
the process with the class
the teacher chooses a concept to developed. (i.e. Math facts that
by making list of both positive "yes" and negative "
no" examples: The examples are put onto sheets of paper or
Examples: (Positive examples contain attributes of the concept
to be taught) i.e. 5+5, 11-1, 10X1, 3+4+4, 12-2, 15-5, (4X2)+2,
Examples: (for examples choose facts that do not have 10 as
the answer) i.e. 6+6, 3+3, 12-4, 3X3, 4X4, 16-5, 6X2, 3+4+6, 2+(2X3),
one area of the chalkboard for the positive examples and one area
for negative examples. A chart could be set up at the front of
the room with two columns - one marked YES and the other marked
the first card by saying, "This is a YES." Place it
under the appropriate column. i.e. 5+5 is a YES
the next card and say, "This is a NO." Place it under
the NO column. i.e. 6+6 is a NO
this process until there are three examples under each column.
the class to look at the three examples under the YES column and
discuss how they are alike. (i.e. 5+5, 11-1, 2X5) Ask "What
do they have in common?"
the next tree examples under each column, ask the students to
decide if the examples go under YES or NO.
this point, there are 6 examples under each column. Several students
will have identified the concept but it is important that they
not tell it out loud to the class. They can however show
that they have caught on by giving an example of their own for
each column. At this point, the examples are student-generated.
Ask the class if anyone else has the concept in mind. Students
who have not yet defined the concept are still busy trying to
see the similarities of the YES examples. Place at least three
more examples under each column that are student-generated.
the process with the class. Once most students have caught on,
they can define the concept. Once they have pointed out that everything
under the YES column has an answer of 10, then print a new heading
at the top of the column (10 Facts). The print a new heading for
the NO column (Not 10 Facts).
can I adapt it?
activity can be done on the chalkboard, chart paper or overhead
projector to a large or small group. It also works well as one-on-one
work. Rather than starting with the teacher's concept, use a student's
concept. Concept attainment can be used to introduce or conclude
a unit of study.
on the Concept Attainment Model
all of the positive examples to the students at once and have
them determine the essential attributes.
all of the positive and negative examples to the students without
labeling them as such. Have them group the examples into the two
categories and determine the essential attributes.
the students define, identify the essential attributes of, and
choose positive examples for a concept already learned in class.
the model as a group activity.
and Evaluation Considerations
write the definition from memory.
positive and negative examples from a given group.
their own examples of the concept.
a learning log
an oral presentation
a web, concept map, flow chart, illustrations, KWL chart, T chart
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- Linking behaviour and physiology of female bonobos (Pan paniscus) (2005)
- The present study investigates sexual behaviour and the importance of dominance in female bonobos. Detailed behavioural studies were carried out on four mixed-sex captive bonobo groups; morphological data and faecal samples were collected to allow non-invasive assessment of physiological parameters. First, I addressed the background for the variability in patterns of menstrual and swelling cycles in bonobos. The duration of menstrual intervals was influenced by reproductive history. Menstrual cycles and phases of maximum tumescence of the sexual swelling lasted longer in lactating females. Parity did not influence cycle patterns. Further, the variability of the duration of intermenstrual intervals was found to be mainly caused by variability in follicular phase length. The luteal phase, contrastingly, was much less variable and did not influence the length of intermenstrual intervals. This raises the question whether sexual swellings serve as a reliable indicator of ovulation in bonobos. Hormone analyses showed that the day of ovulation could not be predicted from the onset of maximum tumescence. Also detumescence of the swelling was no clear sign that ovulation had occurred. Nonetheless, sexual interactions were found to vary according to the degree of tumescence, being most frequent at maximum tumescence. The frequency of sexual interactions did not change in the peri-ovulatory phase and no difference between was seen between follicular and luteal phase. This indicates that sexual swellings are not a reliable signal of ovulation. Rather, they could be a graded signal that advertises the probability of ovulation which allows females to follow a mixed strategy of confusing and biasing paternity. Next, the context and function of same-sex sexual interactions among female bonobos were investigated. Genital rubbing took place more often between non-related than between related females. Females were able to get hold of and defend monopolisable food items without the help of other females in feeding experiments. No relationship between genital rubbing and food sharing was found and no female-female coalitions were formed during these experiments. Interventions in conflicts outside the feeding experiments were observed mainly in heterosexual conflicts but females supported each other irrespective of preferences for genital rubbing. The frequency of genital rubbing did not vary in dependence of the degree of genital swelling and the solicitation of genital rubbing was not asymmetric in dependence of the relative degree of swelling of the two partners. The degree of tumescence did not influence the frequency of received or overall aggression for a female. Although most female dyads were involved in same-sex conflicts, genital rubbing was observed in less than half of the dyads after the conflict. No increase of gg rubbing occurred 15 minutes after a conflict compared to 15 minutes before. High-ranking females took the male position during genital rubbing significantly more often than low ranking ones. The direction of initiation of genital rubbing was not influenced by social status. The data do no support the hypothesis that genial rubbing serves to form or maintain alliances, to reduce competition among females or to reconcile former opponents. However, genital rubbing may be a display of social status or may serve to reduce tension. Finally, the correlation of physiological parameters and social status in female bonobos was studied. I investigated whether females differ in their excretion pattern of the glucocorticoid 11-ketoetiocholanolone (DOA) in dependence of their social status. Based on displacements, females were categorised to either high or low social status. During the feeding experiments carried out on one group, high social status transferred in access to monopolisable food, the low ranking female was not successful in monopolising the food item. However, female social status was not reflected in the faecal excretion pattern of glucocorticoid metabolites in any of the three groups analysed. In two groups the high-ranking individuals had higher levels of iDOA than low-ranking individuals, in the other group it was vice versa. The fourth group did not allow this investigation as the high ranking individual was pregnant and pregnancy was found to result in elevated glucocorticoid levels. The results indicate that also in bonobo females, high social status translates into better access to monopolizable resources. Status dependent differences in cortisol excretion may not exist in bonobos or may become obvious only during periods of social instability. Alternatively, social status may not influence adrenocortical function but other physiological parameters of the so-called stress axes. Taken together, this study provides an interdisciplinary view on bonobo female behaviour and physiology helping to better understand the adaptive significance of a species’ social and mating system.
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Early foragers and farmers made wine from wild grapes or other fruits. According to archaeological evidence, by 6000 BC grape wine was being made in the Caucasus, and by 3200 BC domesticated grapes had become abundant in the entire Near East. In Mesopotamia, wine was imported from the cooler northern regions, and so came to be known as ‘liquor of the mountains’. In Egypt as in Mesopotamia, wine was for nobles and priests, and mostly reserved for religious or medicinal purposes. The Egyptians fermented grape juice in amphorae which they covered with cloth or leather lids and then sealed up with mud from the Nile. By biblical times, wine had acquired some less dignified purposes. According to the Old Testament, Noah planted a vineyard, and ‘drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent’ (Genesis 9:21). Skip to the New Testament and here is Jesus employed as a wine consultant: ‘And no man putteth new wine into old wineskins: else the wine bursts the skins, and the wine is lost as well as the skins: but new wine must be put into new skins’ (Mark 2:22).
Many of the grape varieties that are cultivated in modern Greece are similar or identical to those cultivated there in Ancient times. Wine played a central role in Ancient Greek culture, and the vine—which, as in the Near East, had been domesticated by the Early Bronze Age—was widely cultivated. The Minoans, who flourished on the island of Crete from c.2700 to c.1450 BC, imported and exported different wines, which they used not only for recreational but also for religious and ritual purposes. Wine played a similarly important role for the later Myceneans, who flourished on mainland Greece from c.1600 to 1100 BC. In fact, wine was so important to the Greeks as to be personified by a major deity, Dionysus or Bacchus, and honoured with a number of annual festivals. One such festival was the Anthesteria, which, held in February each year, celebrated the opening of wine jars to test the new wine. Active in the 9th century BC, the poet Homer often sung of wine, famously alluding to the Aegean as the ‘wine dark sea’. In the Odyssey, he says that ‘wine can of their wits the wise beguile/ Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile’. In the Works and Days, the poet Hesiod, who lived in the 7th or 8th century BC, speaks of pruning and even of drying the grapes prior to fermentation. The Greeks plainly understood that no two wines are the same, and held the wines of Thassos, Lesbos, Chios, and Mende in especially high regard; Theophrastus, a contemporary and close friend of Aristotle, even demonstrated some pretty clear notions of terroir.
In Ancient Greece, vines were left to their own devices, supported on forked props, or trained up trees. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder describes the Ancient Greek practice of using partly dehydrated gypsum prior to fermentation, and some type of lime after fermentation, to remove acidity—but this was no doubt a relatively recent or infrequent practice. The wine was neither racked nor fined, and it was not uncommon for the drinker to want to pass it through a sieve or strainer. Additives such as aromatic herbs, spice, honey, or a small part of seawater were often added both to improve and preserve the wine—which could also be concentrated by boiling. Finished wine was stored in amphorae lined with resin or pitch, both substances that imparted some additional and characteristic flavour. Generally speaking, wine was sweeter then than it is today, reflecting not only prevalent tastes, but also the ripeness of the grapes, the use of natural yeasts in fermentation, and the lack of temperature control during fermentation. At the same time, wine did come in a wide variety of styles, some of which were markedly austere. To drink undiluted wine was considered a bad and barbarian practice—almost as bad as drinking beer like the Babylonian or Egyptian peasant classes. Wine was diluted with two or three parts of water to produce a beverage with an alcoholic strength of around 3-5%. The comedian Hermippus, who flourished in the golden age of Athens, described the best vintage wines as having a nose of violets, roses, and hyacinths; however, most wine would have turned sour within a year and specific vintages are never mentioned.
Together with the sea-faring Phoenicians, the Ancient Greeks disseminated the vine throughout the Mediterranean, and even named southern Italy Oenotria or ‘Land of Vines’. If wine was important to the Greeks, it was even more so to the Romans, who thought of it as a daily necessity of life and democratized its drinking. They established a great number of Western Europe’s major wine producing regions, not only to provide steady supplies for their soldiers and colonists, but also to trade with native tribes and convert them to the Roman cause. In particular, the trade of Hispanic wines surpassed that even of Italian wines, with Hispanic amphorae having been unearthed as far as Britain and the limes Germanicus or German frontier. In his Geographica (7 BC), Strabo states that the vineyards of Hispania Beatica (which roughly corresponds to modern Andalucia) were famous for their great beauty. The area of Pompeii produced a great deal of wine, much of it destined for the city of Rome, and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD led to a dramatic shortage. The people of Rome panicked, uprooting food crops to plant vineyards. This led to a food shortage and wine glut, which in 92 AD compelled the emperor Domitian to issue an edict banning the planting of vineyards in Rome.
The Romans left behind a number of agricultural treatises that provide a wealth of information on Roman viticulture and winemaking. In particular, Cato the Elder’s De Agri Cultura (c. 160 BC) served as the Roman textbook of winemaking for several centuries. In De Re Rustica, Columella surveyed the main grape varieties, which he divided into three main groups: noble varieties for great Italian wines, high yielding varieties that can nonetheless produce age-worthy wines, and prolific varieties for ordinary table wine. Pliny the Elder, who also surveyed the main grape varieties, claimed that ‘classic wines can only be produced from vines grown on trees’, and it is true that the greatest wines of Campania, such as Caecuban and Falernian, nearly all came from vines trained on trees—often elms or poplars. Both Caecuban and Falernian were white sweet wines, although there also existed a dry style of Falernian. Undiluted Falernian contained a high degree of alcohol; so high that a candle flame could set it alight. It was deemed best to drink Falernian at about 15-20 years old, and another classed growth called Surrentine at 25 years old or more. The Opimian vintage of 121 BC, named after the consul in that year Lucius Opimius, acquired legendary fame, with some examples still being drunk more than 100 years later.
The best wines were made from the initial and highly prized free-run juice obtained from the treading of the grapes. At the other end of the spectrum were posca, a mixture of water and sour wine that had not yet turned to vinegar, and lora, a thin drink or piquette produced from a third pressing of grape skins. Following the Greek invention of the screw, screw presses became common on Roman villas. Grape juice was fermented in large clay vessels called dolia, which were often partially sunk into the ground. The wine was then racked into amphorae for storing and shipping. Barrels invented by the Gauls and, later still, glass bottles invented by the Syrians vied as alternatives to amphorae. As in Ancient Greece, additives were common: chalk or marble to neutralize excess acid; and boiled must, herbs, spice, honey, resin, or seawater to improve and preserve thin offerings. Maderization was common and sought after; at the same time, rooms destined for wine storage were sometimes built so as to face north and away from the sun. Following the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Church perpetuated the knowledge of viticulture and winemaking, first and foremost to provide the blood of Christ for the celebration of Mass.
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Members of the Department of Paleobiology have
been leading vertebrate paleontology expeditions since before the
museum was built. The first dinosaur expeditions were led by
Othniel Marsh, then at Yale University , who collected most of the
dinosaurs on display in the main exhibit hall. He was followed by
Charles Gilmore, who served as Curator of Reptiles and Amphibians
for more than 20 years. His expeditions added dinosaurs such as
Brachyceratops tour collections.
A long hiatus in dinosaur collecting followed
Gilmore’s death in 1945, which would not end until Dr. Michael
Brett-Surman began his field work in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming
in 1992. Today the work of finding and collecting new dinosaurs
continues, with the addition of a new Curator of Dinosaurs, Dr.
Matthew Carrano. We invite you to take a tour of some of our recent
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Q. I can’t get my teenage son or daughter to really talk to me about their lives. I want to help them. What can I do to encourage communication?
A. You are not alone. It is often difficult for parents and teens to communicate effectively. Many of us have forgotten the angst of our teen years, and we unintentionally invalidate our children’s feelings or attempt to solve their problems when we should be listening and empathizing.
When you observe your teens in distress, like most parents, you are eager to help them resolve emotional pain. If you can get them to talk, avoid using statements that disparage their feelings. Remove from your vocabulary phrases such as “you’ll get over it,” “don’t be so sensitive,” or “I don’t know why something like this would upset you.” Most teens are very emotional. Give them room and permission to have those emotions.
When they do talk, teenagers often just need to vent. While it is natural for parents to want to help with their problems or fix situations, avoid doing that. Try simply listening, not offering an opinion unless asked, and empathizing with them.
Avoid asking your teens questions that are too broad. When they come home from a night out, don’t ask, “How was your night?” Most young people will say “fine” and head toward their room or the refrigerator. Instead try asking, “What did you think about the movie?” or “What did you have for dinner?” These questions often start a conversation.
For more ideas on increasing communications with your teens, I highly recommend Teenage as a Second Language by Barbara Greenberg and Jennifer Powell-Lunder.
Q. I think my 16-year-old daughter is sexually active, but I’m uncertain. I don’t want to encourage her, but I don’t want her to be unprotected?
A. Once a young person reaches a certain age, parents are no longer the decision maker about sexual activity regardless of how much control one attempts to assert or how strong a parent’s personal beliefs. The best one can hope for is that young adults will be ready in all emotional and practical aspects when they decide to become sexually active.
Since you suspect that your daughter is having sex, you should have an honest conversation with her to be certain that she is knowledgeable about protection and the risks of unsafe sex. Hopefully, you had that conversation long ago. If not, it is now time.
Your daughter and all teenagers should be informed about the dangers of unprotected sex. Every year about 25 percent of sexually active teens contract a sexually transmitted disease (STD). According to the Center for Disease Control, 38.9 percent of teens did not use a condom during their last encounter. Many teens believe that if they use a condom it means they planned to have sex. In their minds, unplanned sex is somehow less “wrong” than if the sexual encounter was planned. At that point, they are not worried about diseases.
One of the most devastating risks of unprotected sex for teens is the danger of being infected with the AIDS virus. According to the Center for Disease Control, in 2009, over 20 percent of people diagnosed with AIDS were 13 to 24. The rate of teens infected with AIDS has increased over 50 percent since the late 1980’s. One of the reasons for this increase is that many teens still have the belief that AIDS is only a homosexual disease and cannot be contracted through heterosexual contact.
Assure your daughter that she has many years to be sexually active. The teen years are not a time one should have to worry about protection, pregnancy, or diseases.
• • •
Nancy Ryburn holds a doctorate degree in psychology from Yeshiva University in New York City where she maintained a private practice for several years. If you have questions, e-mail them to email@example.com. The questions will not be answered personally, but could appear in a future column. There will be no identifying information and all e-mails remain confidential.
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US Fish and Wildlife Service has designated more than 187,000 square miles in the Arctic as critical habitat for polar bears under the Endangered Species Act.
On Nov 4 a US District Court judge ruled that the decision to list polar bears as "Threatened" and not "Endangered" in May 2008 must be reconsidered or defended.
May 28 the Government of Nunavut stated that they think polar bears are thriving, and thus they oppose the proposed uplisting of polar bears as a species of Special Concern under the Canadian Species at Risk Act.
The status table and reviews discussed and decided upon in Copenhagen in 2009 are finally available on the website.
Approximately half the members of the PBSG met in Oslo February 8-10, 2010, to meet the request from the Parties to the 1973 Agreement for input to national action plans.
The PBSG guidelines have been reviewed and all members except one have been appointed. The new guidelines and list of members have been published on the website.
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(PhysOrg.com) -- 'Fossil viruses' preserved inside the DNA of mammals and insects suggest that all viruses, including relatives of HIV and Ebola, could potentially be stowaways transmitted from generation to generation for millions of years, according to new research.
A team from Oxford University and the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center built on earlier work at Oxford that discovered the fossilised remains of an ancient HIV-like virus in the genomes of animals including sloths, lemurs and rabbits.
The teams new research, reported in this weeks PLoS Genetics, shows that many more different types of viruses are endogenous capable of being transmitted from generation to generation with fossil viruses turning up in the genomes of creatures as different as mosquitoes, wallabies, and humans.
Many of these viruses, such as the ancestors of Ebola, are far more ancient and spread across many more animal groups than anyone ever suspected, said Dr Aris Katzourakis of Oxford Universitys Department of Zoology, an author of the report. Weve demonstrated that viruses have been integrating within animal genomes for at least 100 million years.
Weve also shown that, in some cases, viral genes have been domesticated by their hosts, and put to use by the hosts for their own purposes, demonstrating that captured viral sequences may have played a larger than expected role in animal evolution.
Understanding the historical conflict between viruses and animal immune systems could lead to new approaches to combating existing viruses such as HIV and Ebola. It could also help scientists to decide which viruses that cross species are likely to cause dangerous pandemics in the future.
These viruses represent the tip of the iceberg of endogenous viral diversity, said Dr Katzourakis. We have discovered a large and diverse set of virus sequences preserved in animal genomes, which together include representatives of all known viral groups. This demonstrates a potential for endogenisation for any virus, and illustrates that viral fossil records may be uncovered for many elusive viral groups.
Explore further: New formula invented for microscope viewing, substitutes for federally controlled drug
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(Phys.org)—Controlling "mixing" between acceptor and donor layers, or domains, in polymer-based solar cells could increase their efficiency, according to a team of researchers that included physicists from North Carolina State University. Their findings shed light on the inner workings of these solar cells, and could lead to further improvements in efficiency.
Polymer-based solar cells consist of two domains, known as the acceptor and the donor layers. Excitons, the energy particles created by solar cells, must be able to travel quickly to the interface of the donor and acceptor domains in order to be harnessed as an energy source. Researchers had believed that keeping the donor and acceptor layers as pure as possible was the best way to ensure that the excitons could travel unimpeded, so that solar cells could capture the maximum amount of energy.
NC State physicist Harald Ade and his group worked with teams of scientists from the United Kingdom, Australia and China to examine the physical structure and improve the production of polymer-based solar cells. In findings published in two separate papers appearing this month online in Advanced Energy Materials and Advanced Materials, the researchers show that some mixing of the two domains may not be a bad thing. In fact, if the morphology, or structure, of the mixed domains is small, the solar cell can still be quite efficient.
According to Ade, "We had previously found that the domains in these solar cells weren't pure. So we looked at how additives affected the production of these cells. When you manufacture the cell, the relative rate of evaporation of the solvents and additives determines how the active layer forms and the donor and acceptor mix. Ideally, you want the solvent to evaporate slowly enough so that the materials have time to separate – otherwise the layers 'gum up' and lower the cell's efficiency. We utilized an additive that slowed evaporation. This controlled the mixing and domain size of the active layer, and the portions that mixed were small."
The efficiency of those mixed layers was excellent, leading to speculation that perhaps some mixing of the donor and acceptor isn't a problem, as long as the domains are small.
"We're looking for the perfect mix here, both in terms of the solvents and additives we might use in order to manufacture polymer-based solar cells, and in terms of the physical mixing of the domains and how that may affect efficiency," Ade says.
Explore further: Femtosecond 'snapshots' reveal a dramatic bond tightening in photo-excited gold complexes
More information: "From Binary to Ternary Solvent: Morphology Fine-tuning of D/A Blend in PDPP3T-based Polymer Solar Cells", Advanced Materials, 2012.
In the past decade, great success has been achieved in bulk hetero-junction (BHJ) polymer solar cells (PSCs) in which donor/acceptor (D/A) bi-continuous interpenetrating networks can be formed and in some recent reports, power conversion efficiency (PCE) even approach 8%. In addition to the intrinsic properties of active layer materials, such as band gaps and molecular energy levels, morphological properties of the D/A blends including crystallinity of polymers, domain size, materials miscibility, hierarchical structures, and molecular orientation, are also of great importance for photovoltaic performance of the devices. Therefore, several strategies including slow growth, solvent annealing, thermal annealing, selection of solvent or mixed solvent have been applied to modify or control of the morphology of the D/A blends. Among these, binary solvent mixtures have been successfully used in morphology control. For example, the dichlorobenzene (DCB) or chlorobenzene (CB)/1, 8-diiodooctane (DIO) binary solvent system has been widely applied in PSC device fabrication process. By mixing a few volume percent of DIO with the host solvent (DCB or CB), efficiencies of many kinds of polymers can be improved dramatically. Besides DIO, other solvents, like 1, 8-octanedithiol (OT), N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP), 1-chloronaphthalene (CN), chloroform (CF), can also be used. According to these works, it can be concluded that crystallinity, as well as domain size in the blends can be tuned effectively by using binary solvent mixtures, and thus binary solvent mixtures play a very important role in high performance PSCs.
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The prevalence of mild sleep-disordered breathing in young children may fluctuate seasonally, suggests a research abstract that will be presented Monday, June 7, 2010, in San Antonio, Texas, at SLEEP 2010, the 24th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC.
Results indicate that in summer and fall the prevalence of mild sleep-disordered breathing in elementary-school children increased steadily from June (21.6 percent) through September (37.2 percent) and then decreased from September through November (6.3 percent). Controlling for potential confounders such as age, body mass index, gender and race showed that the odds of mild sleep-disordered breathing in every month was significantly lower than in September.
"What surprised us most was the dramatic impact that season had on the prevalence of SDB," said principle investigator Edward Bixler, PhD, professor and vice chair for research in the department of psychiatry at Penn State University in Hershey, Pa. "The results are significant because they underscore the importance of evaluating a child's sensitivity to seasonal allergies when diagnosing and treating a child for SDB."
The study involved a random sample of 687 children in grades K-5. Their parents completed a brief questionnaire, and each child was evaluated between June and November during an overnight sleep study in the sleep laboratory. Mild sleep-disordered breathing was defined as having an apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) of one to five breathing pauses per hour of sleep.
In a study published in the June 2009 issue of the journal SLEEP, Bixler and his research team reported that nasal problems such as chronic sinusitis and rhinitis are significant risk factors for mild sleep-disordered breathing in children. However, the extent to which allergies may promote a seasonal variation in sleep-disordered breathing still needs to be determined.
The researchers added that the results may have implications for the development of pharmacologic treatment strategies for mild sleep-disordered breathing in children.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine reports that approximately two percent of otherwise healthy young children have obstructive sleep apnea, a common form of SDB that occurs when soft tissue in the back of the throat collapses and blocks the airway during sleep. Most children with OSA have a history of snoring that tends to be loud and may include obvious pauses in breathing and gasps for breath. Parents often notice that the child seems to be working hard to breathe during sleep.
Explore further: New case of SARS-like virus in Saudi: ministry
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Newton's first law states that an object will keep doing what it is doing if left alone, in other words - The natural state of an object is static - unchanging - motion.
Newton's second law clarifies the first. Acceleration, or any change in motion, is an unnatural state for an arbitrary object left to its laurels, however it is a state that clearly exists all around us. Newton defines the "thing" that forces an object to change its state of being - a force.
In this most rigorous sense, a force is defined to be that which causes a change in motion.
The observation of a change in momentum necessitates that there is some force driving that change, so in this sense the two are equivalent (there is an equals sign there after all) - wherever you see a (net) force you will see an acceleration, wherever you see an acceleration you will find a force responsible for it. However, going back to the first law, acceleration is a change in the (kinetic) state of an object, an objects natural tendency is to statically maintain its state. The observation of an unnatural state of being would logically imply that there is a cause.
Intuitively it seems unnatural that accelerations would happen spontaneously and that the universe will invent a force just to balance the books if you will.
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Contrary to popular belief, astronauts still have weight while they are orbiting the earth. In fact, Shuttle astronauts weigh almost as much in space as they do on the earth's surface. But these astronauts are in free fall, together with their ship, and their downward accelerations prevents them from measuring their weights directly.
Instead, astronauts make a different type of measurement—one that accurately determines how much of them there is: they measure their masses. Your weight is the force that the earth's gravity exerts on you; your mass is the measure of your inertia, how hard it is to make you accelerate. For deep and interesting reasons, weight and mass are proportional to one another at a given location, so measuring one quantity allows you to determine the other. Instead of weighing themselves, astronauts measure their masses.
They make these mass measurements with the help of a shaking device. They strap themselves onto a machine that gently jiggles them back and forth to see how much inertia they have. By measuring how much force it takes to cause a particular acceleration, the machine is able to compute the mass of its occupant.
Answered by Lou A. Bloomfield of the University of Virginia
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Defects combine to make perfect devices
Jun 26, 2002
Faulty components are usually rejected in the manufacture of computers and other high-tech devices. However, Damien Challet and Neil Johnson of Oxford University say that this need not be the case. They have used statistical physics to show that the errors from defective electronic components or other imperfect objects can be combined to create near perfect devices (D Challet and N Johnson 2002 Phys. Rev. Lett. 89 028701).
Most computers are built to withstand the faults that develop in some of their components over the course of the computer’s lifetime, although these components initially contain no defects. However, many emerging nano- and microscale technologies will be inherently susceptible to defects. For example, no two quantum dots manufactured by self-assembly will be identical. Each will contain a time-independent systematic defect compared to the original design.
Historically, sailors have had to cope with a similar problem – the inaccuracy in their clocks. To get round this they often took the average time of several clocks so that the errors in their clocks would more or less cancel out.
Similarly, Challet and Johnson consider a set of N components, each with a certain systematic error – for example the difference between the actual and registered current in a nanoscale transistor at a given applied voltage. They calculated the effect of combining the components and found that the best way to minimize the error is to select a well-chosen subset of the N components. They worked out that the optimum size of this subset for large numbers of devices should equal N/2.
On this basis, the researchers say that it should be possible to generate a continuous output of useful devices using only defective components. To find the optimum subset from each batch of defective devices, all of the defects can be measured individually and the minimum calculated with a computer. Alternatively, components can be combined through trial and error until the aggregate error is minimized. Once the optimum subset has been selected, fresh components can be added to replenish the original batch and the cycle started over again.
Challet and Johnson point out that this process and the wiring together of the components will add to the overall cost of making the device. But they believe that these extra costs are likely to be outweighed by the fact that defective components can be produced cheaply en masse. Hewlett Packard, for example, has already built a supercomputer – known as Teramac – from partially defective conventional components using adaptive wiring.
“Our scheme implies that the ‘quality’ of a component is not determined solely by its own intrinsic error,” write the researchers. “Instead, error becomes a collective property, which is determined by the ‘environment’ corresponding to the other defective components.”
About the author
Edwin Cartlidge is News Editor of Physics World
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Early Teaching Experiences at PhysTEC Sites
Ball State University
Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo
Florida International University
Seattle Pacific University
University of Arizona
University of Arkansas
University of Colorado at Boulder
University of Minnesota
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Western Michigan University
Give students an opportunity to teach their peers. Several PhysTEC schools have created successful Learning Assistant programs that allow students to collaborate with faculty to make physics and physical science classes more interactive and engaging. Students may find peer teaching to be less pressure and less of a commitment than practice classroom teaching, without sacrificing the rewarding experience of helping someone learn something new.
Expose student teachers to multiple grade levels. Students may not know what grade level they want to teach, or may think they know and then change their minds.
Use early teaching experiences to prepare your pre-service teachers for student teaching. According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s “Project 2061,” “first-hand experiences in schools, teaching and mentoring experiences, and fieldwork with scientists must come early in the teacher education program. These experiences prepare prospective teachers for the content of their education courses and serve as living laboratories for formal course work.” Arizona faculty report that teacher preparation program provides pre-service teachers with “150 hours of classroom work (both targeted observations and teaching) prior to student teaching, [which makes] their transition to student teaching…much smoother. Our mentor teachers comment that our student teachers are much better prepared for student teaching than those from other programs.”
Invite practicing teachers to participate in the design of your program. Who knows better than actual teachers what preservice teachers need? Arizona reports that “Involving secondary teachers in developing curricula for the field experiences has resulted in a rich set of classroom tasks that enhance the field experiences.”
Use a Teacher in Residence or Master Teacher to coordinate early teaching experiences. Teachers In Residence are ideal early teaching experience coordinators, because they are exceptionally knowledgeable about the realities of the classroom and what preservice teachers need. In addition, they can mentor preservice teachers who are doing their student teaching, and they can sometimes use their connections with the local school district to secure excellent placements for student teachers in your program. A Ball State TIR, now back in the classroom, was able to do this for Ball State student teachers.
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What is concrete written language? It is writing that is full of words that represent things we can see, hear, taste, touch and smell. We can see clouds. We can hear sirens. We can taste beer. We can touch the skin. We can smell perfume. See what I mean?
Concrete language is the opposite of vague language.
When a writer uses too much vague language, the writing loses impact. This is why it is better to show emotion then it is to tell the reader what emotion one or more characters are feeling.
If a character is in love, don’t tell the reader that the character is in love. Show that the character is in love. And how does a writer show that a character is in love? There are several ways. Through the character’s mannerisms, actions and dialogue. And when a writer does this, that writer’s character will come alive for the reader because the reader will be able to see and hear that the character is in love.
That is much more satisfying for a reader than the writer telling the reader that the character is in love. Concrete language = show don’t tell writing.
My Ebook of show don’t tell fiction is ready for download on the Home Page of this blog.
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Individual differences |
Methods | Statistics | Clinical | Educational | Industrial | Professional items | World psychology |
"Social style" is the behavior that one exhibits when interacting with others. Being aware of your own social style helps a person develop relationships, particularly at work.
"Social Styles" is the name of a particular psychometric instrument that helps people to better understand and work with others through appreciation of their basic decision making and control needs.
Originally, Social Styles was determined by having respondents say "yes" or "no" to 150 adjectives measuring three scales: Assertiveness, Responsiveness, and Versatility.
Assertiveness: The effort a person makes to influence the thinking and actions of others. Or - the measure of whether a person appears to ask or tell in interactions with others.
Responsiveness: The extent to which a person reacts readily to influence or stimulation with a display of feelings.
Versatility: A type of social endorsement based, in part, on the extent to which others see the individual as competent, adaptable, and behaving appropriately. Versatility measures the extent to which a person appears to be working to make relationships mutually productive.
The first two trace back to Robert R. Blake and Jane Mouton's Managerial Grid Model. The two Social Style scales revealed that by combining the two dimensions, Assertiveness and Responsiveness, four patters of behavior, or "Social Styles", can be identified.
Driving: (Tell Assertive + Control Responsive) These individuals are seen as strong willed and more emotionally controlled.
Expressive: (Tell Assertive + Emote Responsive) These individuals are described as outgoing and more dramatic.
Amiable: (Ask Assertive + Emote Responsive) These individuals are seen as easy going and supportive.
Analytical: (Ask Assertive + Control Responsive) These individuals are described as serious and more exacting.
In 1964 Dr. David W Merrill and Roger Reid began research to create a model that could predict the success in selling and management careers . What the partners ended up discovering was that people's behaviors and actions are consistent. The original Social Style model was worked on by Dr. James W. Taylor, who at the time was a staff psychologist at Martin Corporation (later Martin Marietta) in Denver. Dr. Merrill obtained the rights to use the Social Styles ModelTM (whose rights are now owned by The TRACOM Group, a workplace performance company specializing in Interpersonal Skills Training and Performance Consulting, formerly a division of Reed Business Information, whose parent company is Reed Elsevier).
New Developments Edit
In 2004 The TRACOM Group created a new survey that used behavior-based statements instead of an adjective checklist - because it proved to be more valid and reliable. It continues to use the Assertiveness, Responsiveness and Versatility scales but can now provide an even greater depth of information about an individual's behavior - especially his/her Versatility - and is much more accurate, especially when translated into a variety of languages.
Robert Bolton, and Dorothy Grover Bolton (President and vice president of Ridge Consultants) wrote on and expanded upon the Social Style model, and introduced four subtypes for each style, which are blends with other styles ("Amiable-Analytical", etc.) This results in 16 types that closely match the 16 types of the MBTI.
There are a number of other similar "four type" instruments, using the same two factors of expressiveness and task/people orientation. One is The Platinum Rule Personality or "Behavioral Styles" of Dr. Tony Alessandra. Its two factors are "Indirect/Direct", corresponding to assertiveness, and "Open/Guarded" corresponding to responsiveness. The resulting four types are "the Director", "the Socializer", "the Relater", and "the Thinker". (Alessandra also similarly blended the styles into 16 types).
Another is the Interaction Styles of Dr. Linda V. Berens, PhD: "In Charge", "Get Things Going", Behind the Scenes", and "Chart the Course". These are mapped to the MBTI 16-types model by pairing Introversion and Extroversion with a factor called "Informing and Directing" which loosely corresponds to Thinking and Feeling, and also indicates people vs. task focus.
Others include FIRO-B and a Five Temperaments theory based on it. Both use scales of "expressed" and "wanted" or "responsive" behavior, but the two factors span three areas, called Inclusion, Control and Affection. Both five-temperament theory and Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (which also uses the "assertiveness" scale along with "cooperativeness") add an additional "moderate" score in both dimensions, creating a fifth behavioral or personality type.
- ↑ Reid, Roger H. and Merril, David, W. Personal Styles & Effective Performance. ISBN 0-8019-6899
- ↑ Alessandra, Tony. The Platinum Rule
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Methods | Statistics | Clinical | Educational | Industrial | Professional items | World psychology |
A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together. Typically a word will consist of a root or stem and zero or more affixes. Words can be combined to create phrases, clauses and sentences. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together is called a compound.
Difficulty in defining the term Edit
The precise definition of what a word is depends on which language the definition is for, and the dividing line between words and phrases is not always clear. In most writing systems, a word is usually marked out in the text by interword separation such as spaces or word dividers used in some languages such as Amharic. In other languages such as Chinese and Japanese, and in many ancient languages such as Sanskrit, word boundaries are not shown.
Even in writing systems that use interword separation, word boundaries are not always clear; for example, even though ice cream is written like two words, it is a single compound because it cannot be separated by another morpheme or rephrased like iced cream or cream of ice. Likewise, a proper noun is a word, however long it is. A space may not be even the main morpheme boundary in a word; the word New Yorker is a compound of New York and -er, not of New and Yorker. In English, many common words have historically progressed from being written as two separate words (e.g. to day) to hyphenated (to-day) to a single word (today), a process which is still ongoing, as in the common spelling of all right as alright.
Words in different classes of languages Edit
In synthetic languages, a single word stem (for example, love) may have a number of different forms (for example, loves, loving, and loved). However, these are not usually considered to be different words, but different forms of the same word. In these languages, words may be considered to be constructed from a number of morphemes (such as love and -s).
In polysynthetic languages, the number of morphemes per word can become so large that the word performs the same grammatical role as a phrase or clause in less synthetic languages (for example, in Yupik, angyaghllangyugtuq means "he wants to acquire a big boat"). These large-construction words are still single words, because they contain only one content word; the other morphemes are grammatical bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone.
Matters seem easier for analytic languages. For these languages, a word usually consists of only a root morpheme, which is often single-syllable. However, it is common even in those languages to combine roots into a compound stem.
Complexity of word boundaries in speech Edit
In spoken language, the distinction of individual words is even more complex: short words are often run together, and long words are often broken up. Spoken French has some of the features of a polysynthetic language: je ne le sais pas ("I do not know it") tends towards /ʒənələsepa/. As the majority of the world's languages are not written, the scientific determination of word boundaries becomes important.
Determining word boundaries Edit
There are five ways to determine where the word boundaries of spoken language should be placed:
- Potential pause
- A speaker is told to repeat a given sentence slowly, allowing for pauses. The speaker will tend to insert pauses at the word boundaries. However, this method is not foolproof: the speaker could easily break up polysyllabic words.
- A speaker is told to say a sentence out loud, and then is told to say the sentence again with extra words added to it. Thus, I have lived in this village for ten years might become I and my family have lived in this little village for about ten or so years. These extra words will tend to be added in the word boundaries of the original sentence. However, some languages have infixes, which are put inside a word. Similarly, some have separable affixes; in the German sentence "Ich komme gut zu Hause an," the verb ankommen is separated.
- Minimal free forms
- This concept was proposed by Leonard Bloomfield. Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves. This correlates phonemes (units of sound) to lexemes (units of meaning). However, some written words are not minimal free forms, as they make no sense by themselves (for example, the and of).
- Phonetic boundaries
- Some languages have particular rules of pronunciation that make it easy to spot where a word boundary should be. For example, in a language that regularly stresses the last syllable of a word (like Hebrew), a word boundary is likely to fall after each stressed syllable. Another example can be seen in a language that has vowel harmony (like Turkish): the vowels within a given word share the same quality, so a word boundary is likely to occur whenever the vowel quality changes. However, not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules, and even those that do present the occasional exceptions.
- Semantic units
- Much like the abovementioned minimal free forms, this method breaks down a sentence into its smallest semantic units. However, language often contains words that have little semantic value (and often play a more grammatical role), or semantic units that are compound words.
In practice, linguists apply a mixture of all these methods to determine the word boundaries of any given sentence. Even with the careful application of these methods, the exact definition of a word is often still elusive.
- Function word
- Lexical access
- Lexical decision
- Morphology (language)
- Nonsense word
- Word recognition
- Word meaning
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The poems translated here belong to the category of padams —short musical compositions of a light classical nature, intended to be sung and, often, danced. Originally, they belonged to the professional caste of dancers and singers, devadasis or vesyas (and their male counterparts, the nattuvanar musicians), who were associated with both temples and royal courts in late medieval South India. Padams were composed throughout India, early examples in Sanskrit occurring in Jayadeva's famous devotional poem, the Gitagovinda (twelfth century). In South India the genre assumed a standardized form in the second half of the fifteenth century with the Telugu padams composed by the great temple-poet Tallapaka Annamacarya, also known by the popular name Annamayya, at Tirupati. This form includes an opening line called pallavi that functions as a refrain, often in conjunction with the second line, anupallavi . This refrain is repeated after each of the (usually three) caranam verses. Padams have been and are still being composed in the major languages of South India: Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada. However, the padam tradition reached its expressive peak in Telugu, the primary language for South Indian classical music, during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries in southern Andhra and the Tamil region.
In general, Telugu padams are devotional in character and thus find their place within the wider corpus of South Indian
bhakti poetry. The early examples by Annamayya are wholly located within the context of temple worship and are directed toward the deity Venkatesvara and his consort, Alamelumanga, at the Tirupati shrine. Later poets, such as Ksetrayya, the central figure in this volume, seem to have composed their songs outside the temples, but they nevertheless usually mention the deity as the male protagonist of the poem. Indeed, the god's title—Muvva Gopala for Ksetrayya, Venugopala for his successor Sarangapani—serves as an identifying "signature," a mudra , for each of these poets. The god assumes here the role of a lover, seen, for the most part, through the eyes of one of his courtesans, mistresses, or wives, whose persona the poet adopts. These are, then, devotional works of an erotic cast, composed by male poets using a feminine voice and performed by women. As such, they articulate the relationship between the devotee and his god in terms of an intensely imagined erotic experience, expressed in bold but also delicately nuanced tones. Their devotional character notwithstanding, one can also read them as simple love poems. Indeed, one often feels that, for Ksetrayya at least, the devotional component, with its suggestive ironies, is overshadowed by the emotional and sensual immediacy of the material.
The Three Major Poets of the Padam Tradition
Tallapaka Annamacarya (1424-1503), a Telugu Brahmin, represents to perfection the Telugu temple-poet. Legend, filling out his image, claims he refused to sing before one of the Vijayanagara kings, Saluva Narasimharaya, so exclusively was his devotion focused upon the god. Apparently supported by the temple estab-
lishment at Tirupati, located on the boundary between the Telugu and Tamil regions, Annamayya composed over fourteen thousand padams to the god Venkatesvara. The poems were engraved on copperplates and kept in the temple, where they were rediscovered, hidden in a locked room, in the second decade of this century. Colophons on the copperplates divide Annamayya's poems into two major types—srngarasankirtanalu , those of an erotic nature, and adhyatmasankirtanalu , "metaphysical" poems. Annamayya's sons and grandsons continued to compose devotional works at Tirupati, creating a Tallapaka corpus of truly enormous scope. His grandson Cinatirumalacarya even wrote a sastra -like normative grammar for padam poems, the Sankirtanalaksanamu .
We know next to nothing about the most versatile and central of the Telugu padam poets, Ksetrayya (or Ksetraya). His god is Muvva Gopala, the Cowherd of Muvva (or, alternatively, Gopala of the Jingling Bells), and he mentions a village called Muvvapuri in some of his poems. This has led scholars to locate his birthplace in the village of Muvva or Movva, near Kucipudi (the center of the Kucipudi dance tradition), in Krishna district. There is a temple in this village to Krishna as the cowherd (gopala ). Still, the association of Ksetrayya with Muvva is far from certain, and even if that village was indeed the poet's first home, he is most clearly associated with places far to the south, in Tamil Nadu of the Nayaka period. A famous padam by this poet tells us he sang two thousand padams for King Tirumala Nayaka of Madurai, a thousand for Vijayaraghava, the last Nayaka king of Tanjavur, and fifteen hundred, composed in forty days, before the Padshah of Golconda. This dates him securely to the mid-seventeenth century. Of these thousands of poems, less than four hundred survive. In addition to
Muvva Gopala, the poet sometimes mentions other deities or human patrons (the two categories having merged in Nayaka times). Thus we have poems on the gods Adivaraha, Kañci Varada, Cevvandi Lingadu, Tilla Govindaraja, Kadapa Venkatesa, Hemadrisvami, Yadugiri Celuvarayadu, Vedanarayana, Palagiri Cennudu, Tiruvalluri Viraraghava, Sri Rangesa, Madhurapurisa, Satyapuri Vasudeva, and Sri Nagasaila Mallikarjuna, as well as on the kings Vijayaraghava Nayaka and Tupakula Venkatakrsna. The range of deities is sometimes used to explain this poet's name—Ksetrayya or, in Sanskritized form, Ksetrajna, "one who knows sacred places"—so that he becomes yet another peripatetic bhakti poetsaint, singing his way from temple to temple. But this explanation smacks of popular etymology and certainly distorts the poet's image. Despite the modern stories and improvised legends about him current today in South India, Ksetrayya belongs less to the temple than to the courtesans' quarters of the Nayaka royal towns. We see him as a poet composing for, and with the assumed persona of, the sophisticated and cultured courtesans who performed before gods and kings. This community of highly literate performers, the natural consumers of Ksetrayya's works, provides an entirely different cultural context than Annamayya's temple-setting. Ksetrayya thus gives voice, in rather realistic vignettes taken from the ambience of the South Indian courtesans he knew, to a major shift in the development of the Telugu padam .
If Ksetrayya perhaps marks the padam tradition at its most subtle and refined, Sarangapani, in the early eighteenth century, shows us its further evolution in the direction of a yet more concrete, imaginative, and sometimes coarse eroticism. He is linked with the little kingdom of Karvetinagaram in the Chittoor district of
southern Andhra and with the minor ruler Makaraju Venkata Perumal Raju (d. 1732). Only some two hundred padams by this poet survive in print, nearly all of them addressed to the god Venugopala of Karvetinagaram. A few of the poems attributed to Sarangapani also appear in the Ksetrayya collections, despite the palpable difference in tone between the two poets.
These names by no means exhaust the list of padam composers in Telugu. The Maratha kings of Tanjavur figure as the patron-lovers in a rich literature of padams composed at their court. Similar works were sung in the palaces of zamindars throughout South India right up to modern times. With the abolition of the devadasi tradition by the British, padams , like other genres proper to this community, made their way to the concert stage. They still comprise a major part of the repertoire of classical vocal music and dance, alongside related forms such as the kirttanam (which is never danced).
A Note on the Translation
We have selected the poems that follow largely on the basis of our own tastes, from the large collections of padams by Annamayya, Ksetrayya, and Sarangapani. We have also included a translation of Kandukuri Rudrakavi's Janardanastakamu , a poem dating from the early sixteenth century and linked thematically (but not formally) with the emerging padam tradition. An anonymous padam addressed to Konkanesvara closes the translation. To some extent, we were also guided by a list prepared by T. Visvanathan, of Wesleyan University, of padams current in his own family tradition. Some of the poems included here are among the most popu-
lar in current performances in South India; others were chosen because they seemed to us representative of the poets, or simply because of their lyrical and expressive qualities.
In general, we have adhered closely to the literal force of the Telugu text and to the order of its sentences. At times, though, because of the colloquial and popular character of some of these texts, we have allowed ourselves to paraphrase slightly, using an English idiom or expression. We have also frequently removed, as tedious in translation, the repeated vocatives that dot the verses—as when the courtesan speaks to her friend, who is habitually referred to by conventional epithets such as vanajaksiro , "woman with lotus-eyes," or komaliro , "delicate lady." Telugu is graced with a truly remarkable number of nouns meaning "woman," and these are amply represented in our texts. The heroine is sometimes referred to by stylized titles such as kanakangi , "having a golden body," epithets that could also be interpreted as proper names. For the most part, this wealth of feminine reference, so beautifully evocative in the original, finds only pale and reductive equivalents in the English.
The format we have adopted seeks to mirror the essential features of the original, above all the division into stanzas and the role of the pallavi refrain. While we have always translated both pallavi and anupallavi in full, we have usually chosen only some part of these two lines—sometimes in connection with a later phrase—for our refrains. We hope this will suggest something of the expressive force of the pallavi and, in some cases at least, its syntactic linkage with the stanzas, while eliminating lengthy repetition. The headings provide simple contexts for the poems. We have attempted to avoid heavy annotation in the translations, preferring to let the
poems speak for themselves. Where a note seemed necessary, we have signaled its existence by placing an asterisk in the text. The source for each poem, as well as its opening phrase in Telugu and the raga in which it is sung, appear beneath the translation.
Editions Used as Base Texts
P. T. Jagannatha Ravu, ed., Srngara sankirtanalu (annamacarya viracitamulu ), vol. 18 of Sritallapakavari geyaracanalu . Tirupati: Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam Press, 1964.
Gauripeddi Ramasubbasarma, ed., Srngara sankirtanalu (annamacarya viracitamulu ), vol. 12 of Tallapaka padasahityamu . Tirupati: Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam Press, 1976. (Cited as GR.)
Vissa Apparavu, ed., Ksetrayya padamulu . 2d ed. Rajahmundry: Saraswati Power Press, 1963. (Unless otherwise noted, all the Ksetrayya texts are taken from this edition.)
Mancala Jagannatha Ravu, ed., Ksetrayya padamulu . Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh Sangita Nataka Akadami, 1978.
Gidugu Venkata Sitapati, ed., Ksetraya padamulu . Madras: Kubera Printers Ltd., 1952. (Cited as GVS.)
Srinivasacakravarti, ed., Ksetrayya padalu . Vijayavada: Jayanti Pablikesansu, 1966.
Veturi Prabhakara Sastri, ed., Catupadyamanimanjari . Hyderabad: Veturi Prabhakara Sastri Memorial Trust, 1988 .
Nedunuri Gangadharam, ed., Sarangapani padamulu . Rajahmundry: Saraswati Power Press, 1963.
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• SetFree[dropcon, options] builds a FreeSystem object containing the mathematical equations required to find equilibrium conditions of the current model. The dropcon argument is used to specify the constraint(s) that are dropped to make the system underconstrained.
• The format of dropcon is identical to that used by the Constraints function.
• The FreeSystem object is solved with SolveFree.
• The following options can be given:
• If InitialGuess or InitialCondition is unspecified, SetFree uses the current model initial guesses, as obtained from LastSolve.
• InitialCondition can also be specified in SolveFree.
• If Solution->Static is given, the model must have some nonzero applied loads for a static equilibrium position to exist.
• If Solution->Kinematic is given, the model must have velocity-dependent loads applied, or no equilibrium velocity can exist.
• If Solution->Dynamic is given, the model must have nonzero masses applied to at least one moving body with SetBodies.
• See also: SetCouple.
Load the Modeler2D package and define a simple model.
Here we build a FreeSystem object that can be used to simulate the underconstrained motion of the help model when the constraint that controls the rotation of the crank has been removed. Before calling SetFree, a velocity solution is generated with SolveMech so that initial conditions for the location and velocity of each body will be available.
Because the help model has only one body with nonzero mass and one applied load (the link body has a 10-unit mass and a 10-unit applied load in the X direction), the instantaneous free acceleration is somewhat predictable. The X acceleration of the link body, X3dd, is equal to 1.0.
Here we integrate the free acceleration of the help model with respect to time for four seconds.
Here is a plot of the X position of the link. The link is initially decelerating until its X coordinate reaches a local minimum, and then it accelerates the other way.
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Photo by Eddie Adams
“And she struggles to pay that first loan and then the second installment due the following week. And when she has paid completely, she can say, ‘I did it!’ It’s not just a monetary transaction that has been completed, it is nothing less than the transformation of that person."
Founder of the Grameen Bank, the world’s largest and most successful microcredit institution, Muhammad Yunus was born in one of the poorest places on earth, the country (then part of Pakistan) of Bangladesh. As a professor of economics, he was struck by the discrepancy between the economic theory taught in universities and the abject poverty around him. Recognizing the poor remained poor because they had no access to capital, no collateral for loans, and borrowing requirements so modest that it was not cost-effective for large banks to process their needs, Yunus started experimenting with small collateral-free loans to landless rural peasants and impoverished women. In 1983, he founded the Grameen Bank. Its rules were strict and tough. Clients find four friends to borrow with. If any of the five default, all are held accountable, building commitment and providing community support. Initial loans are as little as ten dollars, and must be repaid with 20 percent interest. Nearly twenty years later, this revolutionary bank is flourishing, with more than 1,050 branches serving 35,000 villages and two million customers, 94 percent of them women. Ninety-eight percent of Grameen’s borrowers repay their loans in full, a rate of return far higher than that of the rich and powerful. More importantly, the clients are transforming their lives: from powerless and dependent to self-sufficient, independent, and politically astute. The real transformation will be felt by the next generation: a generation with better food, education, medication, and the firsthand satisfaction of taking control of their lives, thanks to Yunus’s vision, creativity, and confidence.
Among many awards, Dr. Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. Together with Nelson Mandela, fellow Defender Archbishop Desmond Tutu and select other prominent statesmen, human rights leaders and public figures, Yunus is a member of the “Global Elders” group.
When I started the Grameen program to provide access to credit for the poor, I came upon two major obstacles. First, commercial banks were institutionally biased against women. Secondly, they had absolutely blocked credit to the poor by demanding something no poor person has access to: namely, collateral.
After overcoming the second issue, I addressed the first. I wanted half of the borrowers from banks in my program to be women—a challenge. At first, women were reluctant to accept loans. They said, "No, no, I have never touched money in my life. You must go to my husband. He understands money. Give the money to him." So I would try to explain why a loan would benefit her family. But the more I tried to approach women, the more they ran away from me. My colleagues and I worked hard to come up with a way we could build trust in women so that they would accept loans from men. We slowed down our work just to include more women, since this trust-building took time.
Six years later, proud that half our loans were to women, we began to see something very remarkable. Money that went to families through women helped the families much more than the same amount of money going to men. Unlike men, women were very cautious with money and passed benefits on to their children immediately. They had learned how to manage with scarce resources. And women had a longer vision; they could see a way out of poverty and had the discipline to carry out their plans. Perhaps because women suffer so much more from poverty than men, they are more motivated to escape it.
In contrast, men were looser with money. They wanted to enjoy it right away, not wait for tomorrow. Women were always building up things for the future, for themselves, their children, their families. We saw a number of such differences between men and women.
We decided to make a concerted effort to attract women clients because we got much more mileage out of the same amount of money. So I created incentives for our loan officers because they had such a hard time convincing women to borrow money from the bank. Today, 94 percent of our loans go to women.
It has worked in ways we never anticipated. For instance, women borrowers decided to commit themselves to a set of promises that they called the "sixteen decisions." These are commitments to improve the welfare of the borrowers and their families above and beyond the loans. They agreed to send their children to school, they decided to maintain discipline, to create unity, to act with courage, and to work hard in all their endeavors. They agreed to keep their families small, to send their children to school, to plant as many seedlings as possible, even to eat vegetables. These are some of the resolutions created by the women, not imposed by the bank. These aspirations were critical to their lives. Listening to them, you see what a difference women make.
A typical initial loan is something like thirty-five dollars. The night before a woman is going to accept that money from the bank, she will be tossing and turning to decide whether she is really ready for it. She is scared that maybe something terrible will happen to her. And finally in the morning her friends will come over and they will try to persuade her: "Let’s go through with it. If you don’t go, we can’t. We can’t always worry. It was not easy coming to this point. Let’s go." And finally, with their encouragement, she will come to the bank.
When she holds that money, it is such a huge amount in her hands, it is like holding the hope and treasure that she never dreamt she would achieve. She will tremble, tears will roll down her cheeks, and she won’t believe we would trust her with such a large sum. And she promises that she will pay back this money, because the money is the symbol of the trust put in her and she does not want to betray that trust.
And then she struggles to pay that first loan, that first installment, which is due the following week, and the second installment, which is payable the following week, and this goes on for fifty weeks in sequence, and every time that she repays another installment she is braver! And when she finishes her fiftieth installment, the last one, and she has now paid in full, she can say, "I did it!" She wants to celebrate. It’s not just a monetary transaction that has been completed, it is nothing less than a transformation of that person. In the beginning of it all, she was trembling, she was tossing and turning, she felt she was nobody and she really did not exist. Now she is a woman who feels like she is somebody. Now she can almost stand up and challenge the whole world, shouting, "I can do it, I can make it on my own." So it’s a process of transformation and finding self-worth, self-esteem. Proving that she can take care of herself.
You see, if you only look at the lending program of Grameen, you have missed most of its impact. Grameen is involved in a process of transformation. The sixteen decisions is an example: we found that Grameen children attend school in record numbers because their mothers really take that commitment seriously. And now many of the children are continuing in colleges, universities, going on to medical schools, and so on. It is really striking to see young boys and girls go on to higher levels of education. The program has been so successful that we now foresee a big wave of students needing loans, so we recently came up with another loan product to finance higher education for all Grameen children in professional schools. Now they don’t have to worry about whether their parents will be able to pay for their higher education when tuition is so expensive.
A recent study in Bangladesh showed that children in Grameen families are healthier than non-Grameen children. Scientific American did a study of population growth in Bangladesh showing that the average number of children per family twenty years back was seven, but now it has been reduced to three. What happened? Why did it happen? Scientific American has spurred controversy by claiming the change is due to our program. As women become empowered, they look at themselves and at what they can do. They are making economic progress and alongside that, making decisions about their personal lives and how many children they choose to have. And of course Article 16, Decision 1, says that we should keep our families small. So this is an important part of the equation. At the population summit in Cairo all the sessions spoke of the Grameen model, because the adoption of family planning practices of women in our program is twice as high as the national average. Now, we are not a population program, but this is a beneficial side effect.
There are other side effects. Starting seven years back we encouraged Grameen borrowers to participate in the political process by voting. Their first reaction was negative. They said, "The candidates are all devils, so why should we vote for them?" It was very depressing that people looked at their electoral process in that way.
So we replied, "Okay, yes, they are all devils, but if you don’t go and vote, the worst devil will get elected. So go sit down in your centers, discuss who could be the worst, what could happen if he gets elected, and if you find this prospect terrible, then you have an opportunity to choose among all the devils, the least evil." People immediately got excited, and we had almost 100 percent participation in that first election.
It was very well organized. All the Grameen families met the morning of the elections, and went to the voting place together, so the politicians would take note of their large numbers, so that they were taken seriously. In the next elections we organized Grameen families to vote themselves and also to bring their friends and neighbors to vote, particularly the women.
The result was that in the 1996 election in Bangladesh voter participation was 73 percent, the highest percentage ever. And what shocked everybody was that across the board more women voted than men. In fact, women waited for hours, because when the voting arrangements were made, the authorities had expected only half the number to show up.
The outcome changed the political landscape. In the previous parliament, the fundamentalist religious party had seventeen seats; in the 1996 election, their number was reduced to three, because women found nothing interesting in the fundamentalist party’s program. So that was very empowering, very empowering indeed.
Then, in last year’s local elections, we were shocked to see that many Grameen members themselves got elected. So I went around and talked to those people, and asked why they chose to run for office. They said, "You told us to select the least of the devils, and we tried, but it was such an ugly job that we got fed up, and we started looking at each other, thinking, ‘Why are we looking for the least devil, when we are good people here? Why don’t we run ourselves?" And that started the snowball effect which ended with more than four thousand Grameen members elected into local office. That’s amazing. And the way they talk is completely different. I never heard women in Bangladesh talking like this. They are challenging the government. They say, "The government can’t tell us how to vote. We made commitments to our electorate." This is the kind of thing that happens. So in health care, in political participation, in the relationship between mother and child and between husband and wife, there are transformations of society.
Now you can open up, you can do things, you can discover your own talent and ability and look at the world in a very different way than you looked at before. Because Grameen offers a chance to become part of an institution, with some financial support to do your own thing. Our customers are in a kind of business relationship, but one that makes such a difference to their lives.
Of course there is resistance. The first resistance came from the husbands who felt insulted, humiliated, threatened that their wives were given a loan and they were not. The tension within the family structure sometimes led to violence against the women. So we paused for a while and then came up with an idea. We started meeting with the husbands and explaining the program in a way where they could see it would be beneficial to their family. And we made sure to meet with husbands and wives together so everyone understood what was expected. So that reduced a lot of initial resistance by the husbands.
Neighborhood men also raised objections, and cloaked the fact that they felt threatened by women’s empowerment in religious trappings. We carefully examined whether our program was in some way antireligious. But they were hiding behind religion instead of admitting that they felt bypassed. It was the male ego speaking in religious terms.
Our best counterargument was just to give it time. It soon became clear that our borrowers were still attending to their religious duties, at the same time earning money and becoming confident. Women started confronting the religious people. They said, "You think taking money from Grameen Bank is a bad idea? Okay, we won’t take any more—if you give the money yourself. We don’t care who gives it to us, but without money we cannot do anything." And of course the religious advocates said, "No, no, we can’t give you money." So that was the end of that.
We also received criticism from development professionals who insisted that giving tiny loans to women who do not have knowledge and skill does not bring about structural change in the country or the village and therefore is not true development at all. They said development involves multimillion dollar loans for enormous infrastructure projects. We never expected opposition from the development quarter, but it happened, and became controversial. Because what we do is not in their book. They cannot categorize us, whether right, left, conservative, or liberal. We talk free market, but at the same time we are pro-poor. They are totally confused.
But if you are in a classroom situation, you wander around your abstract world, and decide microcredit programs are silly because they don’t fit into your theoretical universe. But I work with real people in the real world. So whenever academics or professionals try to draw those conclusions, I get upset and go back and work with my borrowers—and then I know who is right.
The biggest smile is from one of those women who has just changed her existence. The excitement she experienced with her children, moving from one class to another, is so touching, so real that you forget what the debate was in the ballroom of the hotel with all the international experts, telling you that this is nothing. So that’s how I’ve got the strength—from people.
Grameen Bank is now all over Bangladesh, with 2.4 million families. Even in hard times, like this year’s terrible flood, people are willingly paying and we’re getting really good loans. That demonstrated the basic ability of the people to do something that they believe in, no matter what others say. People ask, what is the reason that we succeeded, that we could do it, when everybody said it couldn’t be done. I keep saying that I was stubborn. So when you ask if it took courage, I would instead say it took stubbornness. No matter what kind of beautiful explanation you give, that’s what it takes to make it happen.
Speak Truth to Power (Umbrage, 2000)
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Last week, our children and youth as well as some of you participated in an intergenerational service and shared stories about the births of three individuals - - Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus. This week, I want to delve a little more deeply into the story of the birth of Jesus.
Before I get too far, though, let’s get a few things straight. We don’t have to take this story literally to take it seriously. Modern day biblical scholarship tells us the historical Jesus probably was most likely born in or near Nazareth, not Bethlehem. He was probably born in a house, not in a manger. I would say that the chances that he was born on December 25 are about 1 in 365. There were most likely no shepherds, magi, or little boys playing drums while cattle lowed. But the biblical writers of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke weren’t trying to write history. What were they trying to tell us? I think it’s like this…
Before, during, and after Jesus’s lifetime, the Jewish people were having a very difficult time. They were being violently oppressed and exploited by the Roman Empire. They were waiting for a leader, someone who would united the Jewish people and lead them in a military rebellion against their Roman oppressors. They didn’t use the word “leader” though. They used the title “anointed one.” Or in Hebrew, messiah. Or in Greek, christos. Someone who had been anointed by God to lead the Jewish people toward a better way of life.
But when Jesus came around, most people reacted the same way a lot of Republican primary voters are reacting to the current crop of presidential candidates - - “You’ve gotta be kidding me! Can’t we do any better than this?” After all, Jesus looked more like a homeless person than a future king - - probably because he was a homeless person - - and he talked more about love and forgiveness than the violent overthrow of the government. To put it bluntly, he wasn’t the kind of guy most people were expecting.
Many years after Jesus died, when the writers of the gospels of Luke and Matthew sat down to write his “backstory,” so to speak, they wrote these stories to make the point that the world sometimes doesn’t work in the way we expect it to work, that life sometimes surprises us, and that sometimes hope for our own lives and for our world comes in the most unlikely of times and the most unlikely of places and in the most unlikely of ways.
After all, nobody expected a savior to his people to be born to such poor parents in such humble beginnings. Nobody expected such an auspicious event to be announced to shepherds, people of the lowest stature in first century Jewish society. And nobody expected a baby, born during a time of oppression, exploitation, and violence, would grow up to practice and preach a gospel of love, justice, and peace. The biblical stories about Jesus’s birth are all about the reversals of expectations. More than reminding us of some literal truth about Jesus, their purpose is to remind us of that possibility in our own lives and in our own world.
As your minister, though, I know that even during the month of December, I can only make so many biblical references with Unitarian Universalists before your eyes start to glaze over so they look like the frosting on Christmas cookies. So let me tell another story, a much more recent story about much more recent events. It’s a bit of a convoluted story, but it begins like this…
In October 2007, a young man named Bradley Manning, originally from a small town in Oklahoma, joined the U.S. Army. He trained as an intelligence analyst and was eventually sent to Iraq in 2009. Manning, though, was a troubled young man in many ways. He didn’t support the U.S. military’s mission in Iraq. He also says he was harassed and bullied for being gay.
Within a few months of being sent to Iraq, Manning allegedly downloaded thousands of classified documents to his personal computer and eventually provided them to Wikileaks, an organization that publishes leaked documents on the Internet. Among the documents Manning allegedly provided to Wikileaks were 250,000 U.S. State Department cables, some of which documented both rampant corruption and opulent spending by government leaders in the northeastern African nation of Tunisia.
The spread of news within Tunisia about this rampant corruption and opulent spending was at least a contributing factor, if not a major factor, in the overthrow of that nation’s government in January 2011 - - less than a year ago, and the overthrow of the government of Tunisia was the beginning of what has come to be known as the Arab Spring, the
the popular uprisings in the Arab world that have so far toppled governments in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya during the past year.
In July of this year, staff at the Adbuster’s Foundation, a Canadian-based organization best known for its anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters, were inspired by the events of the Arab Spring, so much so that in a blog post, they proposed a peaceful occupation of Wall Street and suggested the establishment of a presidential commission “to separate money from politics.”
The blogpost went viral and led to the start of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, which led to the start of the “Occupy Seattle” movement, which led even to the start of the “Occupy Federal Way” movement. The growing inequalities of wealth and the inequities of power in this country have been apparent to anybody paying attention for the past 30 years, but somewhat miraculously, people in this country are talking about it more than every before in the past 100 years.
Where will all of this lead?
Will the Arab Spring eventually lead to more democracy in the Middle East, more freedom, equality, and peace for millions of people, or will it lead to the rise of more Islamic fundamentalism in those countries and the oppression and exploitation of women?
I don’t know. I think it’s too soon to tell.
Will the “Occupy” protests in this country continue to sizzle and bring about needed limits on corporate power and the unjust influence of money on politics, or will the protests fizzle as protesters are evicted from parks and the weather turns cold?
I don’t know. I think it’s too soon to tell.
What’s my point in telling this convoluted story? It’s not to make Bradley Manning into any kind of a hero. I don’t think he is one. It’s not to point out how interconnected everything in the world is, though this is certainly true.
My point - - similar to the gospel writers’ point, I suppose - - is that despite how much we say we know about everything, despite how boringly predictable our lives and the world in which we live sometimes seems, I want to suggest that our lives and our world are a little less predictable than we imagine. To the very best of my knowledge, I don’t remember any predictions about anything like the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street. I especially don’t remember anybody making any predictions about the way all of this would happen.
To be fair, some of you may have questions about the way I’ve told this story. If Bradley Manning hadn’t been harassed for his sexual orientation, would he have leaked the secret documents? If he hadn’t leaked the secret documents, would the revolution in Tunisia and the rest of the Arab Spring still happened? If the Arab Spring hadn’t happened, would the Occupy Wall Street protests have occurred? I don’t know the answer to these questions either.
Here’s what I do know though…in ancient Greek, there are two words for time - - chronos and kairos. Chronos is regular, linear, predictable time. It’s the root of the English word “chronology.” Kairos, though, refers to special time. To use more traditional theological language, it’s when the power of the divine breaks into history to bring about something new and totally unexpected. To use less traditional language, it’s when the events of the universe, the events of history, the events of life, serendipitously conspire to bring about something totally new and totally unexpected in our lives, often in a totally unexpected way, and sometimes even something good.
What I want to suggest for your consideration this morning is that too often, I suspect most of us live our lives according to a chronos mentality rather than living with a kairos mentality.
The biblical stories of Jesus’ birth were originally written to inspire us toward a kairos mentality - - but in our 21st century culture these stories are usually not understood too literally, but even among skeptics, the stories have become so familiar to us that they’ve lost their power to jar and jolt us out of a chronos mentality. “That’s the way, it was supposed to happen!” we say when we hear a story about a baby being born in a manger growing up to change the world.
Many of the events of 2011 seem to help me think with more of kairos mentality, which is why I shared them with you this morning. Just to be clear, I’m not arguing for a world view in which divine providence pulls our strings like a master puppeteer, but as I said, a world view in which life sometimes serendipitously conspires to bring about something new and totally unexpected in our lives, often in a totally unexpected way.
But why is this important? What’s wrong with a chronos mentality? What’s so important about a kairos mentality? For me, it’s like this..
Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” I think there is a lot of wisdom in these words, but ultimately, I think Einstein was wrong.
Sometimes we do the same thing over and over again - - and we do the same thing over and over again because it’s the best thing we know how to do and because we’re doing it the best we can - - and we get the same results over and over again. Following Einstein’s thinking, we’re tempted to give in to despair and adopt the motto of unhappy people everywhere - - “I’m no good. My world is bleak. My future is hopeless.”
But we shouldn’t give in to that temptation because sometimes we do the same thing over again, and every once in a while, somehow, something different happens.
I think of the person who has been out of work for a long time and send outs hundreds or even thousands of resumes and is rejected time after time after time. Or even worse is not even rejected, but indifferently ignored, but one day life serendipitously conspires and the person is offered the job that he or she has always dreamed of.
I think of my wife’s best friend from high school and college. She was a bridesmaid in our wedding 15 years ago. She’s a wonderful, sensitive, funny, and beautiful woman but has been unlucky in her relationships. After being married and divorced once and having several unsuccessful relationships, she began to wonder if she would ever find somebody to love and who would love her. Then this past year, life serendipitously conspired and she did. She and her husband were married in November and she seems happier than she has ever been.
I think of everything [my wife] and I did to become parents. For about seven years we tried becoming parents by the old-fashioned way and by some of the new-fangled ways made possible by medical science. For seven years, none of our efforts were successful. Then we decided to adopt. We were told it would take about one year, but after one year, we were still childless. After two years, we were still childless. It was only after waiting nearly three years that life serendipitously conspired and we received a referral for a healthy 15-month-old boy from Medellin, Colombia. [my son]is five now, and [my wife] and I couldn’t be any happier with how our lives have turned out.
This past week, I had a conversation with Mark Miloscia. As some of you know, Mark represents Federal Way in the state legislature and is now running for state auditor. I like Mark because he has been one of the champion’s of campaign finance reform in our state, an issue that’s important to me. Every year for many years now, Mark has introduced a campaign finance reform bill, and it has failed, but will it always, or one day will life serendipitously conspire so that enough people realize everyone should have an equal voice in making important decisions about our country.
In Christian scripture, whenever anybody asks Jesus when the Kingdom of God will arrive, he says that nobody except God knows and one shouldn’t believe anybody who says he or she knows. Instead, Jesus says, always be ready for it.
I don’t interpret Jesus’ words to be a doomsday prediction about the end times but an expression of an existential truth about human existence - - that none of us knows when or where or how life is going to serendipitously conspire to bring about something new and different and unexpected in our lives but that we should live in anticipation, in preparation, in readiness, in openness to possibility.
I think the poet Emily Dickinson was saying much the same thing when she wrote, “Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.”
One of the reasons I’m always excited when we welcome new members into this congregation is that I never know life is going to serendipitously conspire so that your participation in this congregation may lead to something totally unexpected and totally new in our shared lives together.
I recently read about a man who saw a woman stopped along the side of the road. The woman was trying to change the tire on her car and was having trouble. He stopped to help. After helping her, he got back in his car and kept on driving. A few miles down the road he had a heart attack. Then the same woman stopped her car, called for help, and performed CPR on him until an ambulance arrived, saving his life.
This morning we’re selling items in the Welcoming Room to raise funds for another microbank. If we’re able to fund another bank, that bank may be able to make a small loan to a woman trying to run her own business. Then that woman may be able to afford to send a child to school. Then that child may grow up to make an incredible contribution to his community, to her nation, or even to humanity as a whole, perhaps even doing something that will save the life of somebody in this congregation. Do I have any guarantees of that? Absolutely none at all. But as I’ve been saying, none of us knows when, where, or how life may serendipitously conspire to bring about something totally unexpected and totally new. The most any of us can do is be ready, play our part, and not refuse to do the something we can do.
My friends, not knowing when the dawn will come, let us open every door. Now and always, let us live with hope, courage, perseverance, patience, and faith in the goodness of things yet to come. Let us live in anticipation that somewhere, something incredible is waiting to happen, in our own lives and in the world. And if there is a time in any of our individual lives when our own hope wanes, when our own flame flickers, may it be renewed here in this religious community we share with one another.
So may it be. Amen.
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WASHINGTON, DC — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the launch of a website, DOepatents, which allows search and retrieval of information from a collection of more than 20,000 patent records. The database represents a growing collection of patents resulting from R&D supported by DOE and demonstrates the Department’s considerable contribution to scientific progress from the 1940s to the present.
“From helping the blind to see again to identifying hidden weapons through holographic computerized imaging technology, the U.S. Department of Energy has supported and will continue to support research addressing some of the world’s most pressing scientific challenges,” Under Secretary for Science Dr. Raymond L. Orbach said. “Content within DOepatents represents a truly impressive demonstration of DOE research and development and technological innovation.”
Highlighted at DOepatents is a compilation of noteworthy DOE innovations from the past few decades. These technologies have improved quality of life and provided national economic, health and environmental benefits. One such invention is the Artificial Retina, a collaborative research project between DOE national laboratories, universities and the private sector aimed at restoring vision to millions of people blinded by retinal disease. Another invention is the DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s pioneering multi-junction solar cell. A cell based on this design set a world efficiency record in converting sunlight to electricity. The DOepatents database also includes inventions of Nobel Laureates associated with DOE or its predecessors such as Enrico Fermi, Glenn Seaborg and Luis Alvarez, along with other distinguished scientists.
patents consists of bibliographic records, with full text where available via either a PDF file or an HTML link to the record at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The DOepatents database is updated quarterly with new patent records. The website is updated on a regular basis with news and information about significant and recent inventions. Resource links for inventors are included at the site, as well as Recent Inventions and Patent News pages. DOepatents was developed by the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) and may be viewed at http://www.osti.gov/doepatents/.
OSTI, a part of the DOE Office of Science, accelerates discovery by making research results rapidly available to scientists and to the public. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the nation.
Jeff Sherwood, DOE, (202) 586-5806
Cathey Daniels, OSTI, (865) 576-9539
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Launch Date: December 02, 1997
Mission Project Home Page - http://www.mpe-garching.mpg.de/EQS/eqs_home.html
EQUATOR-S was a low-cost mission designed to study the Earth's equatorial magnetosphere out to distances of 67000 km. It formed an element of the closely-coordinated fleet of satellites that compose the IASTP program. Based on a simple spacecraft design, it carries a science payload comprising advanced instruments that were developed for other IASTP missions.
Unique features of EQUATOR-S were its nearly equatorial orbit and its high spin rate. It was launched as an auxiliary payload on an Ariane-4, December 2nd, 1997. The mission was intended for a two-year lifetime but stopped transmitting data on May 1, 1998.
The idea of an equatorial satellite dates back to NASA's GGS (Global Geospace Science) program, originally conceived in 1980. The equatorial element of the program was abandoned in 1986 and several subsequent attempts to rescue the mission failed, leaving a significant gap in both NASA's GSS and the international IASTP programs.
The Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik (MPE) decided to fill this gap because of its interest in GSS and the opportunity for a test of an advanced instrument to measure electric fields with dual electron beams. In addition to MPE-internal funds and personnel, the realization of EQUATOR-S was possible through a 1994 grant from the German Space Agency DARA (meanwhile part of DLR).
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More on those rorquals: part I is required reading. To those who have seen this stuff before: sorry, am going through a busy phase and no time for new material (blame dinosaurs and azhdarchoid pterosaurs… and baby girls). Oh, incidentally, I recently registered Tet Zoo with ResearchBlogging: I haven’t done this before because ‘blogging on peer-reviewed research’ is the norm at Tet Zoo, not the exception. It seems to take ages for posts to be uploaded to ResearchBlogging – like, hours. Is this normal? Anyway…
This time we look at the basics of rorqual morphology and at their feeding behaviour. The rostrum in rorquals is long and tapers to a point (though it is comparatively broad in blue whales) and, in contrast to other mysticetes, a stout finger-like extension of the maxillary bone extends posteriorly, overlapping the nasals and abutting the supraoccipital (the shield-like plate that forms the rear margin of the skull). The dorsal surfaces of the frontals (on the top of the skull) possess large depressions while the ventral surfaces of the zygomatic processes (the structures that project laterally from the cheek regions) are strongly concave, again unlike the condition in other mysticetes [painting above by Valter Fogato].
Rorqual lower jaws are gigantic, beam-like bones that bow outwards along their length. The symphyseal area (the region where the jaw tips meet) is unfused, as is the case in all mysticetes (even the most basal ones) but not other cetaceans, meaning that the two halves of the jaw can stretch apart at their tips somewhat. Exceeding 7 m in blue whales, rorqual lower jaws are the largest single bones in history (ha! Take that Sauropoda).
A section of blue whale jaw was once ‘discovered’ at Loch Ness and misidentified as the femur of a gigantic, hitherto undiscovered tetrapod. Occasionally rorqual skulls have been discovered in which the long lower jaws have been stuck wedged inside various of the skull openings and with their tips protruding like tusks. People unfamiliar with cetacean skulls have then naively assumed that the skull belonged to some sort of tusked prehistoric sea monster. Ben Roesch once discussed the case of the Ataka carcass of 1956: a giant beached animal possessing divergent ‘tusks’ that are in fact the separated halves of a rorqual’s lower jaw (see adjacent image).
I’ve come across another case of this sort of thing. The accompanying newspaper piece, from The Telegraph of June 29th 1908, features a skull trawled up by the Aberdeen vessel Balmedie (sailing out of Grimsby), and thought by the article’s writer to be that of ‘some prehistoric monster’, apparently with tongue preserved. It’s clearly a rorqual skull, and the pointed, narrow rostrum and posterior widening of the mesorostral gutter indicates that it’s a minke whale skull [for other cases in which whale carcasses have been mistaken for 'sea monsters' see the Tecolutla monster article].
Moving back to the morphology of the rorqual lower jaw, a tall, well-developed coronoid process – way larger than that of any other mysticete – projects from each jaw bone and forms the attachment site for a tendinous part of the temporalis muscle, termed the frontomandibular stay.
All of these unusual features are linked to the remarkable feeding style used by rorquals. How do they feed? Predominantly by lunge-feeding (also known as engulfment feeding): by opening their mouths to full gape (c. 90º), and then lunging into a mass of prey. Those depressed areas on the frontals and zygomatic processes house particularly large temporalis and masseter muscles, the muscles involved in closing the jaw. The frontomandibular stay provides a strong mechanical linkage between the lower jaw and skull and primarily serves to amplify the mechanical advantage of the temporalis muscles.
As a rorqual lunge-feeds, a huge quantity of water (hopefully containing prey) is engulfed within the buccal pouch, transforming the whale from ‘a cigar shape to the shape of an elongated, bloated tadpole’ (Orton & Brodie 1987, p. 2898). While a rorqual uses its muscles to open its jaws, the energy that powers the expansion of the buccal pouch is essentially provided by the whale’s forward motion, and not by the jaw muscles. In other words, the engulfing process is powered solely by the speed of swimming. Orton & Brodie (1987) noted that the engulfed water ‘is not displaced forward or moved backward by internal suction, but is simply enveloped with highly compliant material’ (p. 2905). Rorquals do not, therefore, set up a bow wave as they engulf (UPDATE: by complete coincidence, Paul Brodie told me in a recent email [28th Feb 2009] that he’s just completing a long-in-the-pipeline manuscript containing field data on Sei whale. Wow, I really look forward to seeing this).
A rorqual may engulf nearly 70% of its total body weight in water and prey during this action, which in an adult blue whale amounts to about 70 tons (Pivorunas 1979). In order to cope with this, the tissues of the buccal pouch must be highly extensible and able to cope with massive distortion. The ventral surface of the pouch is covered by grooved blubber, on which the 50-90 grooves extend from the jaw tips to as far posteriorly as the umbilicus. The ventral grooves can be extended to 4 times their resting width, and to 1.5 times their resting length. Internal to the grooved blubber is the muscle tissue of the buccal pouch, and this is unique, containing large amounts of elastin, and consisting of an inner layer of longitudinally arranged muscle bands and an outer layer where the bands are obliquely oriented (Pivorunas 1977).
When a rorqual lunges, delicate timing is needed, otherwise the buccal pouch will rapidly fill with seawater and not with prey. How then do rorquals get their timing just right? It seems that rorquals possess batteries of sensory organs within and around the buccal pouch: there are laminated corpuscles closely associated with the ventral grooves that might serve a sensory function, and located around the edges of the jaws, and at their tips, are a number of short (12.5 mm) vibrissae. Long assumed to be vestiges from the time when whale ancestors had body hair, it now seems that these structures have a role in sensing vibrations.
Once a mass of prey is engulfed, a rorqual then has to squeeze the water out through its baleen plates while at the same time retaining the prey. Rorqual baleen plates number between 219 to 475 in each side of the jaw (the number of plates is highly variable within species, with sei whales alone having between 219 and 402), and each plate ranges in length from 20 cm (in the minkes) to 1 m (in the blue). As the whale stops lunging forward, the pressure drops off, allowing deflation of the buccal pouch. Passive contraction of the blubber grooves and active contraction of the muscle layer within the buccal pouch also occurs at this time [adjacent image, showing engulfment process in Fin whale, by Jeremy Goldbogen and Nicholas Pyenson and taken from the UC Berkeley news site. Goldbogen et al.'s research is discussed in the next article. See also Pyenson's site and Goldbogen's site].
For an outstanding sequence of photos illustrating engulfment in action, see Randy Morse’s photos of a feeding blue whale.
So that’s the basics. But there’s so much more to the subject than this. How is it that, during lunge feeding, agile, highly reactive prey remain within the mouth cavity prior to the mouth’s closure? Why do some rorquals make loud noises during lunge-feeding? Why, given their giant size and theoretical high aerobic dive limit, do big rorquals not spend more time lunge-feeding beneath the surface? Why do some rorquals exhibit strongly asymmetrical patterns of pigmentation? And don’t forget that not all rorquals lunge-feed. More on these issues in the following post.
Refs – -
Orton, L. S., Brodie, P. F. (1987). Engulfing mechanisms of fin whales Canadian Journal of Zoology, 65, 2898-2907
Pivorunas, A. 1977. The fibrocartilage skeleton and related structures of the ventral pouch of balaenopterid whales. Journal of Morphology 151, 299-314.
- . 1979. The feeding mechanisms of baleen whales. American Scientist 67, 432-440.
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Günter Archenhold is forced out of office due to his Jewish origin by the Nazis.
The family is also ousted from the observatory, their life's work, under the most shameful of circumstances. The observatory was transferred without compensation to the possession of the city of Berlin and subordinated to the school administration.
A civil servant became administrative chairman, who was completely unacquainted with astronomy. The observatory was closed due to construction work.
Up till then, the observatory had a total number of 2,666,567 visitors, since its opening.
F.S. Archenhold died in Berlin on the 14th of October, 1939. Archenhold’s wife Alice and their daughter Hilde died in the concentration camp Theresienstadt. The sons Günter and Horst found refuge and were able to emigrate to England.
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PHP is considered an insecure language to develop in not because of secret backdoors put in by the PHP language developers, but because it was initially developed without security as a major concern and compared to other languages/web frameworks its difficult to develop securely in it.
E.g., if you develop a LAMP/LAPP (linux+apache+mysql/postgresql+PHP) web app, you have to manually code in input/output sanitation to prevent SQL injection/XSS/CSRF, make sure there are no subtle calls to
eval user-supplied code (like in
preg_replace with a '/e' ending the regexp argument), safely deal with file uploads, make sure user passwords are securely hashed (not plaintext), authentication cookies are unguessable, secure (https) and http-only, etc.
Most modern web-frameworks simplify many of these issues by doing most of these things in a secure fashion (or initially doing them insecurely and then getting secure updates).
The risk of there being a secret backdoor in an open-source PHP is small; and the risk is present in every piece of software (windows/linux/apache/nginx/IIS/postgresql/oracle) you use -- both open-source and closed-source. The open-source ones at least have the benefit that many independent eyes look at it all the time and you could examine it if you wanted.
Also note in principle, even after fully examining the source code and finding no backdoors and fully examining the source code of your compiler (finding no backdoors), if you then recompile your compiler (bootstrap by using some untrusted existing compiler) and then compile the safe source code with your newly compiled "safe" compiler, your executable code could still have backdoors brought in from using the untrusted existing compiler to compile the new compiler. See Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust. (The way this is defended against in practice is by using many independent and obscure compilers from multiple sources to compile any new compiler and then compare the output).
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The Bigger Picture: Visual Archives and the Smithsonian
Now Open to the Public (in 1922) - Museum of the American Indian
On November 14, 1922, George Gustav Heye opened to the public the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation in New York City to display his collection of Native American artifacts. Heye, a mining engineer, began collecting Native American artifacts while working in Arizona in 1896. The museum, founded in 1916, was located at Audubon Terrace and there was also a research branch in the Bronx where collections were available for research and study.
After Heye's death in 1957, the future of the museum was in doubt. Some thoughts were to transfer the collection to the American Museum of Natural History in New York or possibly for it to be purchased by businessman, H. Ross Perrot. Neither of these options came to pass.
It was not until the 1980s when discussions began with the Smithsonian that a home would be found for the Museum of the American Indian. On November 18, 1989, President George H. W. Bush signed legislation creating the National Museum of the American Indian as part of the Smithsonian. Today the museum consists of the George Gustave Heye Center in New York City (unfortunately because of Hurricane Sandy the Heye Center is temporarily closed), the Cultural Resources Center facility in Maryland, and the museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C.
- History of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution Archives
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Written by Kara Fleck, Simple Kids editor and Rockin’ Granola mama.
As we wind down Summer and prepare to say “hello” to Fall days, here are a few ways to play, learn, and explore during the month of September.
Ways to play, learn, and explore in September
September’s flower is the Aster. The word “aster” comes from the ancient Greek for “star.” Sometimes the aster is called the Michaelmas Daisy. There are some activities and a poem for the Michaelmas Daisy at The Flower Fairies Official website.
While you and your kids are learning about Autumn flowers, why not try your hand at a few of these felt sunflowers from Living Crafts?
The wonderful Se7en has a free printable September calendar for you.
Although September is the ninth month, the word September comes from the Latin “septi” for seven because in the Roman calendar it was the seventh month.
Talk Like a Pirate Day is September 19th (which also happens to be the day after my husband Christopher’s birthday, what fun!). Right now you can pick up a copy of Captain No Beard for your kindle for 99 cents from Amazon (you can pick up the printed version, too) – and if you are an Amazon Prime member you can borrow it for free! Love that!
The Autumnal Equinox occurs on September 22nd. The leaves will begin to change colors, the air will become cooler, and the hours of daylight a little shorter.
Here are a few fun leaf-related activities:
Why not try out an Autumn recipe or two with your kids this month?
- Maple Pecan Baked Apples ::: Simple Bites
- Pumpkin Butterscotch Cookies ::: Joy the Baker
- Healthy After-School Snacks: Popsicles ::: Playful Learning
How will you and your kids be playing, learning, and exploring this September?
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The cerebral cortex, a layer of neural tissue surrounding the cerebrum of the mammalian brain, has been known to play various roles in memory, language, thought, attention, and consciousness. Up until now, no invertebrate equivalent
to the cerebral cortex has been encountered, but Detlev Arendt, Raju Tomer, and colleagues may have found an evolutionary counterpart. The obvious answer is hidden in one simple creature– the worm. Wait, what? Yeah, you heard me. The marine ragworm, found at all water depths, has been shown to possess a tissue resembling that of our mysterious cerebral cortex.
Arendt and his colleagues used a technique called cellular profiling to determine a molecular footprint for each kind of cell in this particular type of ragworm. By utilizing this technique, they were able to uncover which genes were turned on and off in each cell, providing a means for cellular categorization. Surprisingly, mushroom bodies, regions of the ragworm’s brain that are thought to control olfactory senses, show a striking similarity to tissue found in our cerebral cortex. This intriguing discovery may provide remarkable insight into the evolutionary basis of what has developed into an incredibly important cerebral structure.
Read more about this review here, or see the original article in Cell.
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Note on ω: You may also hear omega pronounced like long o in English go.
Note on ῳ: This is a so-called long diphthong, because it is a combination of long vowel ω and ι. The recommended pronunciation reflects postclassical practice. In the fifth century this was a true diphthong, but the iota part of the sound weakened during the fourth century to a glide and then disappeared. Click on the image of inscription ΟΙ to hear an approximation of the original diphthong and the weakened diphthong.
The iota in the three long diphthongs is presented in most texts as a subscript under the long vowel (iota subscript: ᾳ, ῃ, ῳ), a convention developed in medieval Greek manuscripts and imitated in the typographic conventions of Greek since the Renaissance. The earlier practice was to write iota in normal position at normal size after the vowel (iota adscript: αι, ηι, ωι). (For a short time around the 12th century some scribes wrote a slightly smaller iota just to the right of the vowel and slightly lowered.) In some modern editions you will see iota adscript.
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Object Pool Design Pattern
Object pooling can offer a significant performance boost; it is most effective in situations where the cost of initializing a class instance is high, the rate of instantiation of a class is high, and the number of instantiations in use at any one time is low.
Object pools (otherwise known as resource pools) are used to manage the object caching. A client with access to a Object pool can avoid creating a new Objects by simply asking the pool for one that has already been instantiated instead. Generally the pool will be a growing pool, i.e. the pool itself will create new objects if the pool is empty, or we can have a pool, which restricts the number of objects created.
It is desirable to keep all Reusable objects that are not currently in use in the same object pool so that they can be managed by one coherent policy. To achieve this, the Reusable Pool class is designed to be a singleton class.
The Object Pool lets others “check out” objects from its pool, when those objects are no longer needed by their processes, they are returned to the pool in order to be reused.
However, we don’t want a process to have to wait for a particular object to be released, so the Object Pool also instantiates new objects as they are required, but must also implement a facility to clean up unused objects periodically.
The general idea for the Connection Pool pattern is that if instances of a class can be reused, you avoid creating instances of the class by reusing them.
<strong>Reusable</strong>- Instances of classes in this role collaborate with other objects for a limited amount of time, then they are no longer needed for that collaboration.
<strong>Client</strong>- Instances of classes in this role use Reusable objects.
<strong>ReusablePool</strong>- Instances of classes in this role manage Reusable objects for use by Client objects.
Usually, it is desirable to keep all
Reusable objects that are not currently in use in the same object pool so that they can be managed by one coherent policy. To achieve this, the
ReusablePool class is designed to be a singleton class. Its constructor(s) are private, which forces other classes to call its getInstance method to get the one instance of the
A Client object calls a
acquireReusable method when it needs a
Reusable object. A
ReusablePool object maintains a collection of
Reusable objects. It uses the collection of
Reusable objects to contain a pool of
Reusable objects that are not currently in use.
If there are any
Reusable objects in the pool when the
acquireReusable method is called, it removes a
Reusable object from the pool and returns it. If the pool is empty, then the
acquireReusable method creates a
Reusable object if it can. If the
acquireReusable method cannot create a new
Reusable object, then it waits until a
Reusable object is returned to the collection.
Client objects pass a
Reusable object to a
releaseReusable method when they are finished with the object. The
releaseReusable method returns a
Reusable object to the pool of
Reusable objects that are not in use.
In many applications of the Object Pool pattern, there are reasons for limiting the total number of
Reusable objects that may exist. In such cases, the
ReusablePool object that creates
Reusable objects is responsible for not creating more than a specified maximum number of
Reusable objects. If
ReusablePool objects are responsible for limiting the number of objects they will create, then the
ReusablePool class will have a method for specifying the maximum number of objects to be created. That method is indicated in the above diagram as setMaxPoolSize.
Do you like bowling? If you do, you probably know that you should change your shoes when you getting the bowling club. Shoe shelf is wonderful example
of Object Pool. Once you want to play, you’ll get your pair (
aquireReusable) from it. After the game, you’ll return shoes back to the shelf (
ObjectPoolclass with private array of
releasemethods in ObjectPool class
- Make sure that your ObjectPool is Singleton
Rules of thumb
- The Factory Method pattern can be used to encapsulate the creation logic for objects. However, it does not manage them after their creation, the object pool pattern keeps track of the objects it creates.
- Object Pools are usually implemented as Singletons.
Object Pool code examples
|This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License|
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Beat the Heat: Heat Illness in Children
It has been an extremely hot summer so far in all parts of the United States. Record highs are being set all over the country. Today we will discuss exertional heat illness in children so you can be better prepared to identify and prevent this in our children as they continue to be active throughout the summer months.
Why is temperature regulation important?
Our bodies are made to function at an optimal core temperature of 98.6°F (37°C). The “thermal neutral” zone in which we operate is 36.5 – 37.5°C . When the temperature deviates too much from that, temperature sensitive structures such as body enzymes and other proteins begin to denature, and essential processes start to fail. Extreme cold slows down metabolic processes and at temperatures below 33°C we lose consciousness. In extreme heat, temperatures above 42°C are not compatible with life.
How do we temperature regulate?
Even without activity, our body is generating heat at a rate that would increase our core temperatures by over 1°C per hour. When we are exercising hard, that heat generation can increase 10-fold. Therefore our bodies are equipped under normal circumstances to dissipate the heat. The main methods of heat dissipation are: radiation, convection, conduction, and evaporation. Radiation is the primary way in which heat is dissipated when the skin temperature is greater than air, but when air temperature exceeds the skin temperature, evaporation becomes the primary method of cooling. This happens in the form of sweating (humans), and panting (dogs). When normal functions of heat dissipation are not working correctly, or when heat generation exceed heat loss, the body is in danger of a spectrum of heat-related illnesses from heat cramps, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke.
Why are children at greater risk than adults?
Children are more susceptible to heat illness because they have:
1. Greater surface area to body mass ratio
2. Lower rate of sweating
3. Higher temperature at initiation of sweating
4. Slower rate of acclimatization to heat
Tips on beating the heat?
1. Stay indoors or in a shaded area during the hottest part of the day. Schedule practices or events before 11am and after 6pm.
2. Pre-hydrate! Dehydration increases the risk of EHI.
3. Hydrate on a regular schedule during and after exercise. Thirst is a poor indication of hydration status, especially in children. A good starting point is 4 to 6 ounces of fluid every 15 minutes for a 90-lb child.
4. Check the weight! Checking your child’s weight before and after exercise will give you an idea if hydration was adequate. Weight loss of greater than 2.5% indicates dehydration.
5. Get acclimatized. The body can take 1-2 weeks to get adjusted to the heat, so avoid strenuous practices in the beginning. Start light and gradually increase.
6. Wear appropriate clothing. Keep it light on the hottest days.
7. Know the symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke:
Heat exhaustion: Athletes can be sweaty, ashen in color and complaining of weakness, headache, dizziness, irritable, nauseous or vomiting.
Heat stroke: Athletes can have similar symptoms as heat exhaustion, but can also be dry, hot, and flushed, and will also have confusion, delayed response or other change in mental status. Rectal temperature if taken will be >104°F.
8.If your child has any medical problems that may affect their ability to temperature regulate, discuss with your pediatrician.
What should you do if you suspect heat exhaustion or heat stroke?
1. Get the athlete out of the sun, and indoors or into a shaded area.
2. Oral hydration and cooling with active cooling techniques such as removing excess clothing, drinking cool water, sponging the body with cool water, placing ice pack in the armpits, and groin.
3. Have the athlete evaluated by a medical professional as soon as possible.
4. If there is any change in responsiveness or other mental status change, be concerned about heat stroke. Call 911 and initiate rapid cooling if possible.
Wishing everyone a safe, happy, and fun summer!
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STATS ARTICLES 2010
Why any ol' diet will work (if your BMI is high enough): A case study in regression toward the mean
Rebecca Goldin, PhD, February 10, 2010
Understanding regression toward the mean
Imagine a city where, from year to year, the overall height of the population is stable. There are no sudden growth spurts or frantic attempts by parents to give their children growth hormones, or movements of very short people in or very tall people out of the city limits. Now consider the following statistical conundrum: if you measure the tall people in the city, they will tend to have children who are shorter and, similarly, the short people will tend to have children who are taller. Other strange things are happening too. Though the city's school test scores are not improving overall, the children with the worst test scores last year, appear to be doing better this year.
What you are witnessing is called "regression toward the mean," and it means that whenever you measure something more than once in a population, the extremes tend to move more toward the average. Consider height: Suppose the range of adult heights (the minimum to maximum heights) is four feet to seven feet, and stays the same over several generations. If we look at just those who are 7 feet tall, we will find that they have children who are shorter, since if these children grow to be taller than 7 feet, the height range of the population would change. If the range stays the same, the 7-feet people cannot have children who are taller than themselves!
You might ask: but where do we get the new 7-feet tall people if the tallest people have shorter kids? First, a maximum height individual might have a same-heigh child. Second, invariably, some tall people who are not quite at the maximum will have taller children - for example, someone 6 feet 6 inches could have a child who grows to be 7 feet tall. These kids will become the next generation of “tallest.”
“Height of children” is an example of a measurement that has some random fluctuation, that has nothing to do with genetics at all. Regression toward the mean describes the behavior of such randomness. Unfortunately, it can lead to some bias in observational studies, and understanding its effects is an important defense against false conclusions. Just as we may be misled about what is happening to our society’s height if we only observe the heights of the children of very tall people (thinking that they are shrinking) we may be misled about social progress and medical success if we do not recognize the phenomenon.
How bias sneaks in: an experiment in regressing
We can set up an experiment that illustrates the phenomenon without having to wait generations to see the result. Take a random group of people and ask them each to flip a coin 100 times and record the result. We would expect to find that many people got close to 50 heads and 50 tails. But we would also find that a few people got many more heads than tails and vice versa.
Suppose we did the experiment again with just those who got the outlying results. Let’s call someone a “head-flipper” if he/she got at least 60 heads, and we only include head-flippers in our second experiment. We would still expect these people to have, on average, 50 heads and 50 tails in second set of flips. The head-flippers would generally not be head-flippers any longer. As these experiments are independent of each other, we do not expect head-flippers to be particularly likely to flip heads the second time they participate in the experiment.
Now imagine I have noted the first set of results and decided that what the world needed was a medication that improved one's ability to flip tails (imagine I'm crazy). Of course, I am only interested in what this medicine does to head-flippers, since they are the ones with the very serious problem of over-flipping heads. What will I find if I give all the head-flippers the medicine and run my test again? Amazingly, most of them will no-longer flip at least 60 heads - I will have proven success! Of course, the medication is illusory, as this purported increase in tail-flipping is only in comparison to those people who were chosen because they had flipped a lot of heads. We have simply observed regression toward the mean.
Regression toward the mean is a fundamental notion in statistics, and important to account for in experiments. It can create bias in poorly done observational studies. If the score on the coin flips were replaced by blood pressure measurements, for example, we should expect that people with the highest blood pressure readings are also those whose pressure will go down at the next measurement, whether they are given a medication or not. This is why it is so important to compare the medicine with a placebo, so that random errors are not confused with true benefit.
But when the test results are correlated, does regression toward the mean still occur?
The skeptical reader will note that blood pressure is very different from flipping a coin. In fact, blood pressure readings are highly correlated with one another. In the absence of medicinal or lifestyle intervention, a person with high blood pressure now will almost certainly have high blood pressure in a year.
However, regression toward the mean is still occurring, just in a less spectacular way. Consider, the following examples blood pressure readings, adapted from Dicing with Death by Stephen Senn.
Each dot represents a person with two measurements: a first blood pressure measurement (along the vertical axis), and a second blood pressure measurement (along the horizontal axis). Dots above the red line indicate that the first measurement was high. In general, it is clear that people with elevated blood pressure on first reading will also have elevated levels on second reading, as we would expect. The average measurement is also the same in both the first and second measurement. However, those with the highest readings the first time are not necessarily those with the highest readings the second time.
In particular, if scientists study only those people with blood pressure above a critical level in the first measurement (represented by the red line), they will find that many of them have a level of blood pressure below the critical level on the second measurement (represented by being left of the vertical blue line).
Pictured above, there are ten people whose blood pressure is above critical on the first reading. Of these, six people improved on second reading, and are below critical level, left of the blue line! If we only look at people above the red line, we would think that serious progress had been made.
The trick is that by only considering those people who had high blood pressure the first time around, we did not register the people who were below critical on the first reading, and measured above critical the second reading. The situation becomes much clearer when we look at the whole picture.
By looking at the whole graph, we see there were five people below the red line, but to the right of the blue line, who had non-critically high blood pressure on the first reading, but above critical on the second. These people whose condition “worsened” from one reading to the next will compensate for those who “improved,” so that we see an average of no change.
The point of a clinical trial is to get rid of the (random) bias introduced by regression toward the mean. A randomized clinical trial would compare groups of people with high blood pressure readings, by giving one group the medicine and the other not. It would then observe whether there is more benefit for the group that takes the medicine. Alternatively, one could introduce a regimen for everyone without regard to blood pressure levels (such as an exercise routine) and see whether the average changes.
Weight Loss and Regression toward the Mean
By the same principle, the heaviest people are in a good position not to be heaviest at the next weigh-in. Suppose that in February, 2010, we observe the weight of a population of people whose overall average weight and distribution of weights does not change. At the end of the year, the people with the highest BMI are likely to have decreased their weight while those with the smallest are likely to increase. These changes which are attributed to "regression toward the mean" should be understood to be the changes due to random fluctuations of the weight measurement -- it could be because our weights do fluctuate some without any intervention on our part, or because the scales we use have some random error. If the population as a whole does not have an increased average or change its weight distribution, then as people below the average will tend to put on weight, while those who have a very high BMI will be likely to go down in weight. [Keep in mind that the average BMI may well be over 25, classifying the average person as overweight - regression toward the mean doesn't do anything for the average!]
Now throw "going on a diet to lose weight" into the picture, something that typically only overweight people do, and this effect should be exaggerated. On average, attempting to lose weight has a positive impact on losing weight.
Of course there are many aspects of changing BMI levels that are more complicated than we have presented here. In particular, American BMI is not standing still; it is increasing. And factors such as aging can increase the BMI among people in a fixed group. However, regression to the mean is a powerful force that can skew the results.
In the context of claims made by diets (from Atkins to pills that target the Cocaine Amphetamine Regulatory Track), it is important to note that some success is to be expected because of regression to the mean. What diets do not advertise is that people with the highest BMI people are (on average) losing weight even without a diet - though they may well hover at a very high BMI. For full disclosure: the random variance of weight measurements may in fact be very small.
For people with higher-than-average BMI trying to shed some pounds, regression to the mean is an encouraging thought -- but of course, it's only reduced calorie consumption and exercise that will shed pounds instead of ounces
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How CyberKnife Works
CyberKnife uses image guidance technology and computer controlled robotics to continuously track, detect and correct for tumor and patient movement throughout the treatment. Because of its extreme precision, CyberKnife does not require invasive head or body frames to stabilize patient movement, vastly increasing the system's flexibility.
Unlike traditional radiosurgery systems that can only treat tumors in the head and neck, CyberKnife can treat tumors both intracranial (inside the brain) and extracranial (outside the brain). In fact, extracranial treatments currently represent more than 50 percent of CyberKnife procedures in the United States, including those of the spine, lung, prostate, liver and pancreas.
CyberKnife provides an additional option to many patients diagnosed with previously inoperable or surgically complex tumors.
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Heel Bursitis is another type of heel pain. The sufferer of this kind of heel pain experiences pain at the back of the heel when the patient moves his joint of the ankle. In the heel bursitis type of heel pain there is swelling on the sides of the Achilles’ tendon. In this condition the sufferer may experience pain in the heel when his feet hit the ground. Heel bruises are also referred as heel bumps they are usually caused by improper shoes. The constant rubbing of the shoes against the heel.
What is bursitis?
Bursitis is the inflammation of a bursa. Normally, the bursa provides a slippery surface that has almost no friction. A problem arises when a bursa becomes inflamed. The bursa loses its gliding capabilities, and becomes more and more irritated when it is moved.
When the condition called bursitis occurs, the normally slippery bursa becomes swollen and inflamed. The added bulk of the swollen bursa causes more friction within an already confined space. Also, the smooth gliding bursa becomes gritty and rough. Movement of an inflamed bursa is painful and irritating.
“Itis” usually refers to the inflammation of a certain part of the body, therefore Bursitis refers to the constant irritation of the natural cushion that supports the heel of the foot (the bursa). Bursitis is often associated with Plantar Fasciitis, which affects the arch and heel of the foot.
What causes bursitis?
- Bursitis and Plantar Fasciitis can occur when a person increases their levels of physical activity or when the heel’s fat pad becomes thinner, providing less protection to the foot.
- Ill fitting shoes.
- Biomechanical problems (e.g. mal-alignment of the foot, including over-pronation).
- Rheumatoid arthritis.
Bursitis usually results from a repetitive movement or due to prolonged and excessive pressure. Patients who rest on their elbows for long periods or those who bend their elbows frequently and repetitively (for example, a custodian using a vacuum for hours at a time) can develop elbow bursitis, also called olecranon bursitis. Similarly in other parts of the body, repetitive use or frequent pressure can irritate a bursa and cause inflammation.
Another cause of bursitis is a traumatic injury. Following trauma, such as a car accident or fall, a patient may develop bursitis. Usually a contusion causes swelling within the bursa. The bursa, which had functioned normally up until that point, now begins to develop inflammation, and bursitis results. Once the bursa is inflamed, normal movements and activities can become painful.
Systemic inflammatory conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis, may also lead to bursitis. These types of conditions can make patients susceptible to developing bursitis.
- Cold presses or ice packs.
- Anti-inflammatory tablets.
- Cushioning products.
- Massaging the foot / muscle stimulation.
- Stretching exercises.
- Insoles or orthotics.
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Select the product you need help with
- Internet Explorer
- Windows Phone
- More products
Description of the way that Excel saves files
Article ID: 814068 - View products that this article applies to.
When you save an existing file in Excel, Excel creates a temporary file in the destination folder that you specify in the Save As dialog box. The temporary file contains the whole contents of your workbook. If Excel successfully saves the temporary file, the temporary file is renamed with the file name you specify in the Save As dialog box.
This process of saving files makes sure that the original file is not damaged. The original file is useful if the save operation is not successful.
When Excel saves a file, Excel follow these steps:
Important Points About Saving
Additional InformationFor additional information, click the following article numbers to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214073/ )You receive an error message when you try to save a file in Excel
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289273/ )Description of the AutoRecover functions in Excel 2002
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324521/ )XL2002: How to Recover a Lost Worksheet or Lost Version of a Worksheet
Article ID: 814068 - Last Review: September 19, 2011 - Revision: 6.0
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Green building facts
- Buildings consume 32% of the world’s resources including 12% of fresh water and 40% of the world’s energy (7).
- In Australia commercial buildings produce almost 9% of our national Greenhouse gas emissions (8).
- To make way for the new Law School the Edgeworth David building and the Stephen Roberts lecture theatre were demolished in 2006. Over 80% of the materials from these buildings were recycled including the valuable copper from the roof of the lecture theatre
The new Law School Building
7. “Environmentally Sustainable Buildings: Challenges and Policies” OECD (2003)
8. “Australia State of the Environment Report” Department of Environment & Heritage (2001)
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The re-introduction of wolves in a US National Park in the mid-1990s is not helping quaking aspens (Populus tremuloides) to become re-established, as many researchers hoped.
In a study published in the journal Ecology showed that the population of wolves in Yellowstone Park was not deterring elks from eating young trees and saplings.
It was assumed that the presence of wolves would create a “landscape of fear”, resulting in no-go areas for elks.
Researchers writing in the Ecological Society of America’s (ESA) journal said that the aspens were not regenerating well in the park as a result of the elk eating the young trees.
However, they added that the conventional wisdom suggested that as the wolves were predators of the elk, it was thought that the elk would eventually learn to avoid high-risk areas in which the wolves were found.
This would then allow plants in those areas – such as aspen – to grow big enough without being eaten and killed by the elk. And in the long-term, the thinking went, the habitat would be restored.
In this latest study, lead author Matthew Kauffman – a US Geological Survey scientist – suggested the findings showed that claims of an ecosystem-wide recovery of aspen were premature.
“This study not only confirms that elk are responsible for the decline of aspen in Yellowstone beginning in the 1890s, but also that none of the aspen groves studied after wolf restoration appear to be regenerating, even in areas risky to elk,” Dr Kauffman explained.
Because the “landscape of fear” idea did not appear to be benefiting aspen, the team concluded that if the Northern Range elk population did not continue to decline (their numbers are 40% of what they were before wolves), many of Yellowstone’s aspen stands were unlikely to recover.
“A landscape-level aspen recovery is likely only to occur if wolves, in combination with other predators and climate factors, further reduce the elk population,” observed Dr Kauffman.
The paper, Are wolves saving Yellowstone’s aspen? A landscape-level test of a behaviorally mediated trophic cascade, has been published online in Ecology. The authors of the paper are: Matthew Kauffman (USGS), Jedediah Brodie (University of Montana) and Erik Jules (Humboldt State University).
Source: ESA press release
Filed under: animals, biodiversity, conservation, research | Tagged: aspen, ecological society of america, ecology, ecosystem, elk, environment, esa, habitat, landscape of fear, national park, poplar tremuloide, predation, quaking aspen, research, science, trees, US, us geological survey, wolf re-introduction, wolves, yellowstone, yellowstone park | Leave a Comment »
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Both Texas A&M and the University of Missouri have acclaimed veterinary colleges, and the two schools have frequently collaborated on work involving animals. A current project could have a huge impact on the beef industry.
James Womack, the W.P. Luse Endowed and Distinguished Professor in Texas A&M’s College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, has partnered with Missouri colleague Jerry Taylor to work on a five-year grant to study bovine respiratory disease, commonly called BRD. It is a $9.2 million project to find ways to prevent the disease and funding comes from the Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
For cattle owners, BRD is major threat – it is the leading cause of disease in beef and dairy cattle and it annually causes losses approaching $1 billion in the cattle industry.
“It’s a disease that can really be devastating for ranchers,” Womack says of the project. “It can sometimes be fatal, but the overall lack of production from cattle that have the disease is often the biggest concern.
“It is the No.1 health problem in the cattle industry. It affects about 10 percent of the cattle in the country, so when you consider all of the millions of cattle in the United States, it results in numbers that are staggering.”
Womack says he and Missouri’s Taylor will look at the disease from a genetic viewpoint and examine the causes of BRD, and will do DNA testing on at least 6,000 cattle.
“We’ll take DNA samples from cattle that have the disease, and also from those that don’t,” Womack explains. “Then we’ll look at variations on over 700,000 genomes and do a comparative study. We have known for years that individual cattle vary in their response to the pathogens that cause BRD and that much of that variation is genetic.
“We hope this project will be a model for the power of cooperation of research and educational institutions and animal industries to make basic discoveries, train professionals in the application of these discoveries, and to translate this new knowledge into economic gain along with improved animal health and welfare.”
Texas A&M and Missouri are key partners in the project, but other schools, such as Washington State, UC-Davis, New Mexico State, Colorado State and Wisconsin are also involved in the work.
“Partnering with Missouri and these schools has been excellent for all concerned,” Womack adds. “We are proud to be associated with the Missouri team and Jerry Taylor and their outstanding work.”
Taylor holds the Wurdack Chair in Animal Genomics at the University of Missouri.
Womack adds that Texas and Missouri are also collaborating on another cattle grant, this one also from the Department of Agriculture, totaling $5 million to study feed efficiency in cattle. The study will focus on specific bacteria that reside in the stomach of cattle and how these aid in food digestion.
Contact: Keith Randall, News & Information Services, at (979) 845-4644
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Posted on February 27, 2012 by Ollie Dreon
Recently, I attended a workshop where the presenter talked about the importance of conducting course and program level assessment. “We need to better assess what students are doing and to what extent they’re doing it,” she explained. “But the students aren’t the only ones we should be assessing. As educators, we need to reflect on our instructional techniques and learn from our work. We’re all students by nature. This should be part of our DNA.”
The idea that “we’re all students by nature” really resonates with me, not only for what it says about us as a profession but also for what it says about our ability as educators to succeed in the future. More than one report has identified some challenging years ahead for educational institutions. For instance, Educause recently published its 2012 Horizon report which examines several emerging technologies that will play a role in our educational future. From tablet computers to learning analytics to gesture-based computing, there are some exciting technologies on the horizon. What effect will these technologies have on how we teach and how students learn? It really depends on us. “The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet,” the Horizon report states “is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators.”
But revisiting our roles as educators means that we have to assess what we’re doing, embrace our natural tendencies as students and learn. I know this isn’t a foreign concept to many of my colleagues. I’m blessed to work with so many creative people who are willing to take risks and try out new pedagogical techniques. Like the many outstanding students I’ve had the pleasure to work with, they are true inspirations.
But the Horizon report also identifies significant obstacles for educators “who are students by nature.” “Institutional barriers,” the authors write, “present formidable challenges to moving forward in a constructive way…. Much resistance to change is simply comfort with the status quo, but in other cases, such as in promotion and tenure reviews, experimentation with or adoptions of clearly innovative applications… is often seen as outside the role of researcher or scientist.”
While challenges exist in almost an institution, especially institutions of higher education, I see real promise in the making. People are starting to embrace the scholarship of teaching and learning as a critical aspect of our work. While the philosophy may be new to some, it’s really just about cultivating a culture where educators and “students by nature” can thrive.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Posted on February 20, 2012 by Ollie Dreon
Innovation is another buzz word you’ll hear around the water cooler these days. Everyone is promoting innovative teaching practices or trying to promote innovative solutions to the big problems facing schools, education and society. Lost in the discussion of innovation, however, is the fact that being innovative requires a great deal of risk taking and possibly some failure. As a culture, we struggle with the idea of failure which limits our desire to take risks and innovate. But perspective is everything. Take Thomas Edison. Arguably one of the greatest American innovators of the 19th Century, Edison tried almost a thousand times to build the incandescent light bulb before eventually getting it right. When asked about failing so many times, Edison reportedly replied “I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb.” It’s all about perspective.
Or look at Michael Wesch. Wesch is an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University and has been an advocate for using technology instructionally to engage students actively in classroom content. Wesch has given TED talks and created several technology-based videos that have gone viral. For instance, Wesch’s Vision of Students Today which describes the digital lives of collegiate students has been watched over 4 million times. He’s a world renowned technology leader and educator.
Last week, the Chronicle of Higher Education featured Wesch in an article titled “A Tech-Happy Professor Reboots After Hearing His Teaching Advice Isn’t Working.” While Wesch has been advising colleagues to use Twitter and blogs in their teaching, his colleagues have not reported the same level of success as Wesch has had. “It was chaos,” one of Wesch’s colleagues said after implementing Wesch’s strategies.”It just didn’t work.”
But it’s all about perspective. Innovation requires risk taking and involves educators learning from their efforts. Rather than focusing on his colleagues’ failures and dismissing technology outright, Wesch chose to re-examine its use and learn from their mistakes. Educators need to have a purpose for integrating technology and focus on establishing relationships with students, Wesch now recommends.
Wesch’s story teaches us a lot about teaching, learning and instructional technology. But it also offers us so much more. Innovation is about trying new things and promoting positive change. But we don’t always hit the mark. We learn from our mistakes.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Posted on February 14, 2012 by Ollie Dreon
Regular readers of the 8 Blog know that I talk about collaboration a lot. Over the last few years, I’ve written about wikis, Google Docs, Crocodocs, and Stixy (and many other applications) and discussed how different tools can be used to foster collaboration in classroom environments. But why is collaboration so important? In their book on 21st Century Skills, Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel identify collaboration as a critical skill for individuals to “survive and thrive in a complex and connected world.” In a recent New York Times article, Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president, writes that collaboration is the “inevitable consequence of the knowledge explosion.” The world is becoming a more open place, Summers writes, and businesses are placing a greater value on the ability to work together.
With the world becoming increasingly connected and people working and learning from a distance, collaboration needs to be a curricular focus in our courses and cultivated in our classrooms, schools and institutions. We just can’t expect students to know how to collaborate. It’s a skill that needs to be developed. But cultivating collaboration isn’t easy, especially in educational settings. Like so many concepts, collaboration skills are best learned socially. Students learn to collaborate by directly communicating and working with their classmates, either physically, face-to-face or virtually through technology. We as educators must support their collaboration and help them learn from their collaborative experiences. But is this happening in our schools? Summers doesn’t seem to think so. Examining the current state of America’s institutions of learning, Summers writes, “the great preponderance of work a student does is done alone at every level in the educational system… For most people, school is the last time (students) will be evaluated on individual effort.”
But cultivating collaboration isn’t just a curricular challenge. We as educators must be models of collaboration ourselves. We can’t just talk the talk. We must walk the walk. We must break free of our respective silos and learn to collaborate with one another. In his book called Collaboration, Morten Hansen identified four barriers to collaboration that institutions may face. These barrier include:
- The not invented-here barrier: people are unwilling to reach out to others and reject the ideas from the outisde
- The hoarding barrier: people are unwilling to provide help or keep information close at hand because they are competing with one another
- The search barrier: people are not able to find what they are looking for because information is spread across the institution
- The transfer barrier: people are not able to work with people, especially ones they don’t know well.
I’m sure Hansen’s barriers will resonate with many readers but they can be overcome. And they need to be overcome. Not only to be better educational models for our students, but also so we can be more productive, more creative and more innovative. Collaboration is more than a bridge between two ideas. It is the catalyst that spawns a multitude of new ideas. And that needs to be valued, cultivated and celebrated.
Filed under: Collaboration | Leave a Comment »
Posted on February 8, 2012 by Ollie Dreon
A few weeks ago, I discussed the new iBooks Author app and also outlined some of my concerns with the End User Licensing Agreement for the application. If you recall, some people were interpreting the EULA as Apple claiming some ownership of any content that is authored using the iBooks Author app, whether it is uploaded onto the iBookstore or not. They compared it to Microsoft claiming some ownership of every document written with MS Word or any presentation created with PowerPoint.
Enough people expressed their concerns that Apple recently modified its EULA to clarify their intentions. Looking at the revised EULA, authors will retain all of their rights for the content of their work but are not able to sell the specific iBooks files anywhere but through the iBookstore. To check out the EULA for yourself, visit the App Store Preview. For an in-depth analysis of the EULA language, check out this post from AppAdvice.
Filed under: eTexts, iPads | Leave a Comment »
Posted on February 7, 2012 by Ollie Dreon
After featuring Apple-related topics in the last two posts on the 8 Blog, many readers may be ready for something different. Before moving on, however, there is one more important feature of the Apple Education event that I feel needs to be discussed. Besides the release of the iBooks Author app and the dedicated iTunesU portal, Apple also showcased the course management tools that are now available through iTunesU. While I’m really excited that iTunesU is giving educators the ability to build online courses for free, I’m a little concerned about the message Apple is sending with their online tools.
Recent studies show that online learning is becoming a prevalent option for collegiate and K-12 students. For instance, in its recent study on technology use by American collegiate students, Educause reported that over 30% of students have enrolled in at least one online course during the collegiate career. The National Council of Education Statistics released a report last fall which examined online education in public secondary schools. With over 2300 school districts across the country participating, the NCES reported that 55% of schools offered some distance learning options for students and over 1.8 million students were enrolled in some sort of online course. As the tools become easier to use, these numbers will continue to grow. And that’s where Apple steps in.
With the iTunesU course management tools, an educator has the ability to create entire courses by wrapping posts, assignments and materials around recorded lectures. While these options are intended to help educators provide “content and context” to their course, the message that Apple is clearly sending is that online learning is an endeavor that students should undergo independently. None of the course management tools allow students to communicate with one another or directly to educators. There is also no way for educators to provide feedback to their students or to assess their students’ learning. Since Apple is not a degree granting institution (at least not yet…), I understand why it may have avoided including these features. But then again, maybe Apple didn’t feel communication and assessment tools were necessary. Looking at Apple’s Course Creation Guidelines, they offer several “Best Practices” for course construction. The list includes displaying content with “short titles for posts and assignments so students see the most important information at a glance.” The focus is clearly on the presentation and organization of content. While this is important stuff, online education should be more than this. As an online educator, I take great pride in interacting with my students and creating online learning communities for students to engage with and learn from their peers. Learning is social process. As a company that has tried so hard to build social opportunities into their tools, Apple should know better.
Filed under: eTexts, iPads | 1 Comment »
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When I was 15 I had a burning ambition to learn BSL (British Sign Language) I went to classes for the next two years, whilst attending school and sixth form. I had no relatives or friends who were deaf at that point, I just felt the need to be able to communicate with the deaf community. It is a beautiful language and both of my daughters know key words in Makaton, and attended Tiny Talk classes. I now have friends and relatives who have hearing difficulties and have (though small) an understanding of the extremely important need to communicate effectively, and the effects of not being able to communicate can have.
So fast forward to last month and being asked, as a blogger to be involved in the Time To share campaign for the Tots 100. I received an email that my charity would be The Ear Foundation, (Nottingham) I could not be more delighted to work with such an amazing charity.
The Ear Foundations Vision :
All deaf children, young people and adults have the opportunity to hear, communicate and develop spoken language using the latest technological interventions.
The Ear Foundation – bridging the gap between clinic-based services, where today’s exciting hearing technologies, such as cochlear implants are fitted, and home, school and work where they are used in daily life.
The Ear Foundation was first set up in 1989, the first person to receive an implant Michael Blatt, who still an advocate to other people thinking of having the operation. At first the Ear Foundation was set up to bring the new technique of cochlear implantation to the UK, making it possible for profoundly deaf children to hear.
Now the Ear Foundation is a unique charity providing support for children across the UK with cochlear implants and hearing aids, and they do this through information, community education, resources, and research & development.
So what is a Cochlear implant?
A cochlear implant is an electronic medical device that replaces the function of the damaged inner ear. Unlike hearing aids, which make sounds louder, cochlear implants do the work of damaged parts of the inner ear (cochlea) to send sound signals to the brain.
So through the charities hard work, they are able to help children, young adults and adults.
Here is a summary of the work that they do:
- Family Programme: Connect & Communicate in Marjorie Sherman House
- Continuing Education Programme in Nottingham, throughout the UK, internationally and on the web
- Sound Advice Programme helping to make the most of the technology
- Advocacy and Lobbying Programme supporting access to the use of appropriate hearing technologies for all who need them
- Family and User-led Research Programme providing evidence-base from our activities
So how can I help as a blogger?
Through the Connect and Communicate Family Programme at Marjorie Sherman House (Nottingham) at the programme there are a wide range of activities/opportunities to learn together with other families about hearing technologies.
- Small Talk – Babies
- Ready Steady Go – Pre-school children
- Leaping! – Primary aged children
- Special Branch – for children with additional and complex needs and cochlear implants
- Xtra Connections – for children with additional and complex needs – in London
- To Infinity – 11-18 year olds
- Sound Advice – Adults
I will be attending the Small Talk, Babies morning on the 18th June 2012. Following that I shall be writing a post to try to explain a little further some of the amazing work that the Ear Foundation carries out in the community. Hopefully this will raise awareness of the charity in the Nottingham community.
I want to leave you with a link to the donation page, and fundraising page on the site, and the thought that a donation to the foundation can help support a child, young person or adult on their journey of communication.
Thank you for reading
Time to Share invites parent bloggers to share an hour or more of their time with a good cause, and write about it. The aim is to help raise the profile of charities across the UK, while giving much-needed practical support to those charities, and highlighting the amazing work being done across the UK by charity volunteers. June is National Volunteering Month, and we’re asking as many bloggers as possible to support the Time to Share campaign by giving some of their time, and helping to share the word about volunteering.
Incoming search terms:
- charity quotes
- charity catchphrases
- quotes on charity
- the ear foundation nottingham
- the Hear Foundation nottingham
Category: The Blog
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Friends on the Brain
Posted by Adam Benforado on October 27, 2011
Have a lot of friends on Facebook?
Think that makes you special?
Well, researchers at University College London suggest that you might just be right.
According to a new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Facebook users with the largest number of pals had greater brain density in areas of the brain associated with social perception and associative memory.
For anyone who has been following the debate over whether technology has been changing our brains, it’s worth a read, although the research doesn’t answer the question of whether the brain differences in the sample were an effect or a cause of individuals having more online friends.
An abstract of the paper appears below:
The increasing ubiquity of web-based social networking services is a striking feature of modern human society. The degree to which individuals participate in these networks varies substantially for reasons that are unclear. Here, we show a biological basis for such variability by demonstrating that quantitative variation in the number of friends an individual declares on a web-based social networking service reliably predicted grey matter density in the right superior temporal sulcus, left middle temporal gyrus and entorhinal cortex. Such regions have been previously implicated in social perception and associative memory, respectively. We further show that variability in the size of such online friendship networks was significantly correlated with the size of more intimate real-world social groups. However, the brain regions we identified were specifically associated with online social network size, whereas the grey matter density of the amygdala was correlated both with online and real-world social network sizes. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that the size of an individual’s online social network is closely linked to focal brain structure implicated in social cognition.
Related Situationist posts:
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America’s housing crisis is one of the biggest problems plaguing the economy, as the country’s homes have lost $7 trillion in cumulative value over the last five years. Four million Americans are either behind on their payments or in foreclosure, and a quarter of the nation’s homeowners are underwater on their mortgage. Those foreclosures have driven down home values in communities across the country.
According to a new report by the Center on Responsible Lending, however, the foreclosure crisis isn’t finished yet. In fact, with 3.6 million households at immediate risk of losing homes, we’re not even halfway through it. Even more damning from the report, though, is the fact that the housing crisis has disproportionately affected minority voters. Though more whites — who make up a larger share of homeowners — have been plagued by foreclosure, the percentage of blacks and Latinos affected is nearly twice as high:
Although the majority of affected borrowers have been white, African-American and Latino borrowers are almost twice as likely to have been impacted by the crisis. Approximately one quarter of all Latino and African-American borrowers have lost their home to foreclosure or are seriously delinquent, compared to just under 12 percent for white borrowers. Asian borrowers have fared better as a whole than Latino and African-American borrowers, but they, too, have been disproportionately affected, especially in some metropolitan areas.
Wall Street banks and lenders took advantage of consumers throughout the lead-up to the housing crisis, and this report shows that the lending, at times, was even more predatory when targeting blacks and Latinos. ThinkProgress reported on this disparity in 2009, when bailed-out banks were found to have pushed many minorities who qualified for prime loans into higher-priced subprime loans, which can add more than $100,000 in interest payments over the life of a loan. In fact, 30.9 percent of Latinos and a whopping 41.5 percent of blacks were given higher-priced loans by large banks, compared to just 17.8 percent of white borrowers.
As with almost everything coming out of the banking industry regarding the financial crisis, the report only makes the case stronger for the newly-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency tasked with targeting and ending predatory lending and banking excess. Discriminatory lending is illegal, and yet for years, the banks have largely been able to get away with it. If the CFPB is allowed to operate as it was envisioned, perhaps those days can finally come to an end.
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Distance Calculator – How far is it?
The Distance Calculator can find distance between any two cities or locations available in The World Clock
The distance is calculated in kilometers, miles and nautical miles, and the initial compass bearing/heading from the origin to the destination. It will also display local time in each of the locations.
Help and example use
- See cities close to a location
- Day and Night World Map – See which parts of the Earth are currently illuminated by the Sun
- About the Distance Graph
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This tree diagram shows the relationships between several groups of organisms.
The root of the current tree connects the organisms featured in this tree to their containing group and the rest of the Tree of Life. The basal branching point in the tree represents the ancestor of the other groups in the tree. This ancestor diversified over time into several descendent subgroups, which are represented as internal nodes and terminal taxa to the right.
You can click on the root to travel down the Tree of Life all the way to the root of all Life, and you can click on the names of descendent subgroups to travel up the Tree of Life all the way to individual species.close box
Insects have a large number of unique, derived characteristics, although none of these are externally obvious in most species. These include (Kristensen, 1991):
- lack of musculature beyond the first segment of antenna.
- Johnston's organ in pedicel (second segment) of antenna. This organ is a collection of sensory cells that detect movement of the flagellum.
- a transverse bar forming the posterior tentorium inside the head
- tarsi subsegmented
- females with ovipositor formed by gonapophyses from segments 8 and 9
- annulated, terminal filament extending out from end of segment 11 of abdomen (subsequently lost in most groups of insects)
One notable feature linking Thysanura + Pterygota is the presence of two articulations on each mandible. Archaeognathans have only one mandibular condyle or articulation point; they are "monocondylic". Thysanura + Pterygota, with their two mandibular condyles, are sometimes called Dicondylia. The many other apomorphies linking Dicondylia are described in Kristensen (1991).
It is possible that the thysanurans are not themselves monophyletic; Thysanura (exclusive of the family Lepidothricidae) plus pterygotes may be monophyletic, with lepidothricids sister to this complex (Kristensen, 1991).
Beutel, R. G. and S. N. Gorb. 2001. Ultrastructure of attachment specializations of hexapods, (Arthropoda): evolutionary patterns inferred from a revised ordinal phylogeny. Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research 39:177-207.
Bitsch, J. and A. Nel. 1999. Morphology and classification of the extinct Archaeognatha and related taxa (Hexapoda). Annales de la Société entomologique de France 35:17-29.
Boudreaux, H. B. 1979. Arthropod Phylogeny with Special Reference to Insects. New York, J. Wiley.
Carpenter, F. M. 1992. Superclass Hexapoda. Volumes 3 and 4 of Part R, Arthropoda 4 of Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology. Boulder, Colorado, Geological Society of America.
Carpenter, F. M. and L. Burnham. 1985. The geological record of insects. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 13:297-314.
Caterino, M. S., S. Cho, and F. A. H. Sperling. 1999. The current state of insect molecular systematics: a thriving tower of Babel. Annual Review of Entomology 45:1–54.
Chapman, R. F. 1998. The Insects: Structure and Function. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., New York.
Daly, H. V., J. T. Doyen, and A. H. Purcell III. 1998. Introduction to Insect Biology and Diversity, 2nd edn. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Dindall, D. L. 1990. Soil Biology Guide. New York, John Wiley & Sons.
Engel, M. S. and D. A. Grimaldi. 2004. New light shed on the oldest insect. Nature 427:627-630.
Evans, H. E. 1993. Life on a Little-Known Planet. New York, Lyons & Burford.
Gereben-Krenn, B. A. and G. Pass. 2000. Circulatory organs of abdominal appendages in primitive insects (Hexapoda : Archaeognatha, Zygentoma and Ephemeroptera). Acta Zoologica 81:285-292.
Grimaldi, D. 2001. Insect evolutionary history from Handlirsch to Hennig, and beyond. Journal of Paleontology 75:1152-1160.
Grimaldi, D. and M. S. Engel. 2005. Evolution of the Insects. Cambridge University Press.
Hennig, W. 1981. Insect Phylogeny. New York, J. Wiley.
Kjer, K. M. 2004. Aligned 18S and insect phylogeny. Systematic Biology 53(3):506-514.
Klass, K. D. 1998. The proventriculus of the Dicondylia, with comments on evolution and phylogeny in Dictyoptera and Odonata (Insecta). Zoologischer Anzeiger 237:15-42.
Kristensen, N. P. 1975. The phylogeny of hexapod "orders". A critical review of recent accounts. Zeitschrift für zoologische Systematik und Evolutionsforschung 13:1–44.
Kristensen, N. P. 1981. Phylogeny of insect orders. Annual Review of Entomology 26:135-157.
Kristensen, N. P. 1995. Forty years' insect phylogenetic systematics. Zoologische Beiträge NF 36(1):83-124.
Kukalová-Peck, J. 1987. New Carboniferous Diplura, Monura, and Thysanura, the hexapod ground plan, and the role of thoracic lobes in the origin of wings (Insecta). Canadian Journal of Zoology 65:2327-2345.
Labandeira, C. C., and J. J. Sepkoski, jr. 1993. Insect diversity in the fossil record. Science 261:310–315.
Larink, O. 1997. Apomorphic and plesiomorphic characteristics in Archaeognatha, Monura, and Zygentoma. Pedobiologia 41:3-8.
Merritt, R. W. and K. W.Cummins, eds. 1984. An Introduction to the Aquatic Insects of North America, Second Edition. Kendall-Hunt.
Naumann, I. D., P. B. Carne, J. F. Lawrence, E. S. Nielsen, J. P. Spradberry, R. W. Taylor, M. J. Whitten and M. J. Littlejohn, eds. 1991. The Insects of Australia: A Textbook for Students and Research Workers. Volume I and II. Second Edition. Carlton, Victoria, Melbourne University Press.
Pass, G. 2000. Accessory pulsatile organs: Evolutionary innovations in insects. Annual Review of Entomology 45:495-518.
Snodgrass, R. E. 1935. Principles of Insect Morphology. McGraw-Hill, New York. 667 pp.
Snodgrass, R. E. 1952. A Textbook of Arthropod Anatomy. Comstock Publishing Associates, Ithaca, N.Y. 363 pp.
Stehr, F. W. 1987. Immature Insects, vol. 1. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendal/Hunt. 754 pp.
Stehr, F. W. 1991. Immature Insects, vol. 2. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendal/Hunt. 974 pp.
Wooton, R. J. 1981. Paleozoic insects. Annual Review of Entomology 26:319-344.
- Smithsonian Institution Department of Entomology.
- Entomology Department of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology
- Entomology Department. California Academy of Sciences.
- The Essig Museum of Entomology. Berkeley, California.
- Insect Division. University of Michigan Museum of Zoology.
- Bishop Museum Hawaii Entomology Home
- Introduction to Insect Biology & Classification. The University of Queensland.
- Virtual Exhibit on Canada's Biodiversity: Insects.
- Entomological Data Information System (EDIS). Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart, Germany.
- Compendium of Hexapod Classes and Orders. North Carolina State University.
- Nomina Insecta Nearctica. A Checklist of the Insects of North America.
- Common Names of Insects in Canada. Entomological Society of Canada.
- The Canadian National Collection (CNC) of Insects, Arachnids and Nematodes.
- Singing Insects of North America. By Thomas J. Walker (crickets and katydids) and Thomas E. Moore (cicadas).
- Entomology Database KONCHU. Species Information Database on Japanese, East Asian and Pacific Insects, Spiders and Mites.
- A Catalogue of the Insects of South Africa.
- CSIRO Entomology Home Page.
- General Entomology Resources from Scientific Reference Resources:
- Entomological Society of America.
- Chemical Ecology of Insects. John A. Byers, USDA-ARS.
- elin. Entomology Libraries and Information Networks.
- Entomological Glossary.
- Popular Classics in Entomology. Colorado State University.
- Forensic Entomology Pages, International.
- Book of Insect Records. University of Florida.
- Alien Empire. Companion piece to a PBS Nature program.
- Entomology Index of Internet Resources. Iowa State University.
- Entomology on the WWW. Colorado State University.
- Entomology on the WWW. Michigan State University.
- BIOSIS BiologyBrowser: Insecta.
Images and Other Media:
- BugGuide.Net. An online community of naturalists who enjoy learning about and sharing observations of insects, spiders, and other related creatures.
- Hawaiian Insect Image Galleries. Bishop Museum.
- Entomology Image Gallery. Iowa State University.
- Very Cool Bugs.
- Dennis Kunkel's Microscopy.
- The Virtual Insectary.
- Thais in 2000: Entomology.
- Reference Library of Digitized Insect Sounds. Richard Mankin, Center for Medical, Agricultural and Veterinary Entomology, Gainesville, Florida.
- Meganeura. Palaeoentomological Newsletter.
- Eocene Fossils.
- Fossil insects from Florissant (Colorado). Peabody Museum of Natural History.
- Stewart Valley Fossil Insects. California Academy of Sciences.
- Amber and Copal: Their Significance in the Fossil Record. Hooper Virtual Natural History Museum.
- The Natural History of Amber. 3 Dot Studio.
- Frozen Dramas. Swedish Amber Museum.
- Nature's Preservative--Organic Flypaper: Amber Gives a Green Light to Study of Ancient Life. The Why files. University of Wisconsin.
- Amber Home. Gary Platt.
- Baltic Amber Inclusions. Wolfgang Wiggers.
- Dominican Amber Fossils. ESP Designs.
- The Amber Room. Steve Kurth.
- Thomas Say (1787-1834), father of American entomology.
- Charles Darwin (1809-1882), AboutDarwin.com.
- Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1915) e-museum.
- Famous Entomologists on Postage Stamps.
For young entomologists:
- bugbios. Shameless promotion of insect appreciation by Dexter Sear.
- O. Orkin Insect Zoo. National Museum of Natural History. Smithsonian Institution.
- Bug Camp. Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago.
- Insectclopedia. Links to websites about insects.
- Bugscope. Educational outreach project of the World Wide Laboratory.
- The Bug Club for Young Entomologists. UK Amateur Entomologists' Society.
- The Wonderful World of Insects.
- Class: Insecta. Spencer Entomological Museum at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
Page copyright © 2002
All Rights Reserved.
Citing this page:
Tree of Life Web Project. 2002. Insecta. Insects. Version 01 January 2002 (under construction). http://tolweb.org/Insecta/8205/2002.01.01 in The Tree of Life Web Project, http://tolweb.org/
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5th Grade Oral Language Resources
Students will:• Learn about the concept of whales.
• Access prior knowledge and build background about whales.
• Explore and apply the concept of whales.
Students will:• Demonstrate an understanding of the concept of whales.
• Orally use words that describe different types of whales and where they live.
• Extend oral vocabulary by speaking about terms that describe whales and whale body parts.
• Use key concept words [inlet, humpback, ocean, fins, underwater; submerge, ascend, Baleen, mammal].
Explain• Use the slideshow to review the key concept words.
• Explain that students are going to learn about:
• Where whales live.
• Parts of a whale's body.
Model• After the host introduces the slideshow, point to the photo on screen. Ask students: What kind of animal do you see in this picture? (whale). What do you know about these animals? (answers will vary).
• Ask students: What are the dangers facing whales? (too much hunting, polluted environment).
• Say: In this activity, we're going to learn about whales. How can we protect whales? (not pollute the environment, join groups that are concerned with their safety).
Guided Practice• Guide students through the next two slides, showing them examples of whales and the way whales live. Always have the students describe how people are different from whales.
Apply• Play the games that follow. Have them discuss with their partner the different topics that appear during the Talk About It feature.
• After the first game, ask students to talk about what they think a whale's living environment is like. After the second game, have them discuss what they would like and dislike about having the body of a whale.
Close• Ask students: How do you move in the water?
• Summarize for students that since whales are mammals, they have to come above water to breathe. Encourage them to think about how they breathe underwater.
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This page is based on the 1993 Jepson Manual.
Please see the Jepson eFlora for up-to-date information about California vascular plants.
|Jepson Flora Project: Jepson Interchange|
|TREATMENT FROM THE JEPSON MANUAL||
previous taxon |
Jepson Interchange (more information)
©Copyright 1993 by the Regents of the University of California
Print edition is available from the University of California Press
|The second edition of The Jepson Manual (2012) is available from the University of California Press|
|See also the Jepson eFlora, which parallels the Second Edition|
Perennial, shrub, tree
Stem: bark often peeling distinctively
Leaves simple, generally cauline, alternate, opposite, rarely whorled, evergreen or deciduous, often leathery, petioled or not; stipules 0
Inflorescence: raceme, panicle, cyme, or flowers solitary, generally bracted; pedicels often with 2 bractlets
Flower generally bisexual, generally radial; sepals generally 45, generally free; petals generally 45, free or fused; stamens 810, free, filaments rarely appendaged, anthers awned or not, dehiscent by pores or slits; nectary generally at ovary base, disk-like; ovary superior or inferior, chambers generally 15, placentas axile or parietal, ovules 1many per chamber, style 1, stigma head- to funnel-like or lobed
Fruit: capsule, drupe, berry
Seeds generally many, sometimes winged
Genera in family: ± 100 genera, 3000 species: generally worldwide except deserts; some cultivated, especially Arbutus, Arctostaphylos, Rhododendron, Vaccinium
Reference: [Wallace 1975 Wasmann J Biol 33:188; 1975 Bot Not 128:286298]
Subfamilies Monotropoideae, Pyroloideae, Vaccinioideae sometimes treated as families. Nongreen plants obtain nutrition from green plants through fungal intermediates.
Shrub, small, glabrous to hairy
Stem decumbent or prostrate, often rooting
Leaves opposite, appressed, evergreen, leathery or thin
Inflorescence: flowers solitary in upper leaf axils; bracts 0; bractlets 46; pedicels jointed to flower
Flower: sepals 45, free; petals 45, ± 2/3 fused, generally white; stamens 10, anthers dehiscent by gaping pores, awns elongate; ovary superior, chambers 5, placentas near top
Fruit: capsule, loculicidal
Seeds several per chamber
Species in genus: ± 14 species: s&e Asia, North America
Etymology: (Greek: mother of Andromeda)
Plant low, densely branched
Stem < 3 dm, glabrous or finely hairy
Leaf ± peltate, 25 mm, boat-shaped, elliptic, concave, leathery, glabrous; lower surface not grooved; margin entire, ciliate or minutely glandular, not rolled under
Inflorescence: pedicels glabrous or hairy
Flower: corolla widely bell-shaped, white, lobes 5; filaments glabrous
Ecology: Moist, subalpine slopes, around rocks and areas of late snow
Elevation: 18003505 m.
Bioregional distribution: Klamath Ranges, High Cascade Range, High Sierra Nevada
Distribution outside California: to Alaska, w Canada, Montana
Plants have been assigned to subsp. californica Piper [leaf 35 mm, margin minutely glandular-ciliate; s CaRH (Lassen Peak), SNH] or subsp. ciliolata Piper [leaf 23 mm, margin with white, ephemeral hairs; KR], but study needed
Horticultural information: IRR: 1, 2 &SHD: 6, 7, 14, 15, 16, 17; SUN: 4, 5; DFCLT.
|YOU CAN HELP US make sure that our distributional information is correct and current. If you know that a plant occurs in a wild, reproducing state in a Jepson bioregion NOT highlighted on the map, please contact us with that information. Please realize that we cannot incorporate range extensions without access to a voucher specimen, which should (ultimately) be deposited in an herbarium. You can send the pressed, dried collection (with complete locality information indicated) to us (e-mail us for details) or refer us to an accessioned herbarium specimen. Non-occurrence of a plant in an indicated area is difficult to document, but we will especially value your input on those types of possible errors (see automatic conversion of distribution data to maps).|
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UFOs and Natural Selection
If there is anything that is true about the UFO phenomenon it is the observation that the hallucinated or real crafts seen over the years (from ancient history to today) have, like animated species of the Earth, have evolved, albeit at a faster pace than the biologic entities that make up life here.
Flying anomalies of the past, the airships of the 1890s, the flying saucers of the 50s, and UFOs, right up to now, have all assumed a physical shape just one step ahead of what mankind created to fly.
Some suggest that the progenitors of UFOs (aliens or “divinities’) have been using the phenomenon to enlighten humans about the possibilities of flight; namely airfoil designs that enhance lighter-than-air craft.
We pose the possibility that UFOs, whether a figment of the imagination, actual aircraft (from sources yet unknown), or mental stimulations from the creators and/or manipulators of human beings, have evolved according to the theory of Darwin: natural selection (or survival of the fittest).
Early UFOs were depicted or written about as if they were chariots, sometimes astronomical phenomena (suns, comets, meteors, et cetera).
While there was a dearth of UFO sightings during the Enlightenment period [1700s], the resurgence in sightings or visions picked up in the late 1800s.
(That dearth during a period of intellectual stimuli is grist for investigation.)
With the airship mystery at the turn of the century – 1890-1899 – UFOs presented an evolutionary set-back however, since earlier UFOs were more aerodynamic (sleek and futuristic).
(This may be likened to the throwback in the evolution of man, when Neanderthals appeared but couldn’t compete, evolutionarily, with Cro-Magnon man, the first real homo sapiens.)
The lacunae of dynamic UFO sightings, from 1900 to 1947 – there were some but not many – indicates, to us, a re-evaluation of, an adaptation by, the phenomenon.
For what reason or by what instigation is anyone’s guess.
Nonetheless, the UFO phenomenon then progressed through the flying disk stage to the cigar shape and back to the saucer shape before settling on an egg-like configuration in the 1960s.
After that the phenomenon evolved into delta or triangular shapes, some transfiguring into blobs of transient light.
Today the phenomenon has regressed, in the mind of man or actually, to the 1950/1960 configurations, only a bit less hardware bound or mechanical in appearance.
The natural selection of UFOs became blunted by something in the late 1980s and 1990s. What stymied the evolution is yet to be determined, but it is palpable, if witness reports and authentic video/film are authentic.
We’ll pose an hypothesis, however, upcoming….
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Fri 23 Sep, 2011
Tags: 1920s, 1930s, Agness "Aggie" Underwood, gold diggers, Hazel Glab, Herald-Examiner, Los Angeles Record, murder, Robert J. James, snake handlers, William Randolph Hearst
Los Angeles has always had more than its share of creative felons, so it stands to reason that it would take an equally creative, gutsy, and dedicated reporter to cover them. One of the most revered reporters who ever worked in Los Angeles was Agness “Aggie” Underwood.
Underwood began her career at the LOS ANGELES RECORD in the 1920s. She was sharp, but there were lots of sharp people in the news business at that time. What made Aggie great were her instincts. She seemed to know just how to approach a story to get the most from it. By relying on her gut feelings she managed to keep several paces ahead of her competition, and to earn a reputation for solving crimes.
When the Los Angeles Record folded in the mid-1930s Aggie, who by this time loved the newspaper business (and needed the money), agreed to work for William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles daily, THE HERALD-EXAMINER.
Her decision to join Hearst’s paper was the making of her career. Twelve years after joining the paper she was promoted to editor. Agness Underwood was the first woman in the U.S. to become the editor of a major metropolitan newspaper.
Aggie Underwood’s work as a reporter inspired the lecture that I’m going to give on October 8, 2011, 2 p.m., in the Taper Auditorium at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles.
The lecture is entitled “GOLD DIGGERS & SNAKE HANDLERS: Deranged L.A. Crimes from the Notebook of Aggie Underwood” and it is sponsored by Photo Friends. Photo Friends is a non-profit whose mission is to promote and to preserve the photographs in the collection of the Los Angeles Public Library.
I hope that you’ll join me as I examine two murder cases from 1936, both of which were covered by Aggie Underwood.
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Authors: Glen Gilchrist
Comments: 6 Pages.
The impact of video games on adolescent behaviour is well studied, with literature reporting both negative and positive relationships. This paper demonstrates a link between video game playing and time to complete a manual task. We conclude that the playing of 1 hour of video games has a dramatic effect on assembly time, more than halving the time to assemble the equipment, from 8 seconds to 4 seconds.
Category: General Science and Philosophy
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The Conflicted Economics of 'Star Trek'
In honor of today's long-awaited (by The Ticker) premiere of "Star Trek," the 11th film in the canon and a prequel to the original series, it seemed a good time to examine the economics of Star Trek.
As envisioned by creator Gene Roddenberry and first aired in 1966, "Star Trek" depicted a humanistic utopia set in the 23rd century, a time when technology had eradicated poverty and hunger and, largely, crime.
Because of this, Roddenberry's universe had little need for ownership of private property or even money, and accumulation of wealth was depicted as anti-social. Those who attempted it were portrayed as vulgar at best and dangerous at worst. (Think Harry Mudd.)
This sentiment carried forward through the following four live-action television series and the so-far 10 films.
Just in case Roddenberry was unsure that fans were getting his point, he gave avarice its own non-human species in the second TV series, "Star Trek: The Next Generation," which aired during Wall Street's (first) "greed is good" era of the late '80s and early '90s.
The Ferengi were savvy, snarling, sharp-toothed, big-eared short aliens who coveted nothing more than profit. (It has been observed, and not without some justification, that the Ferengi embodied disturbingly stereotypical Semitic traits.)
The Ferengi currency was based on something called "gold-pressed latinum" and their Bible was the Rules of Acquisition, an ever-growing list of merciless rules of business, such as: "Never place friendship above profit."
And even though Star Trek's enlightened characters competed for currency in various games -- including five-card stud -- it remains unclear, in Roddenberry's universe, where the money came from to build those fleets of glorious star ships.
As with many visionaries, from Rosseau to Hemingway to Mailer, Roddenberry was unable or unwilling to live by his principles.
Though he used his creation to denigrate the accumulation of personal wealth -- lecturing that the religion of technology would unshackle enlightened future humans from greed -- Roddenberry was not above using a Ferengi-like tactic to line his own pockets.
Many people know the instrumental theme song to the original Star Trek, the music that underlies William Shatner's monologue that begins, "Space: the final frontier..."
What most people don't know is that the song has lyrics written by Roddenberry -- purely as a device to secure performance royalties into perpetuity.
The lyrics, which you can see here, are dreadful and were never meant to be recorded or performed. Worse, they are unnecessary. And Roddenberry wrote them and laid claim to the royalties after the show's first season.
So outraged by Roddenberry's tactic that Alexander Courage, the composer of the memorable theme, scored some first-season episodes of Star Trek and then refused to pen another note for the franchise.
So even though the father of Star Trek created a hopeful future largely devoid of suffering and war, as a man, he turned out to be more Gorden Gekko than Jean-Luc Picard.
May 8, 2009; 4:58 PM ET
Categories: The Ticker | Tags: Ferengi, Gene Roddenberry, Jean Luc Picard, Star Trek
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There are two types
of logical argument, inductive and deductive.
In an inductive argument, the reader holds up a specific
example, and then claims that what is true for it
is also true for a general category. For instance,
"I have just tasted this lemon. It is sour.
Therefore, all lemons are probably sour." Deductive
reasoning works in the opposite manner; it begins
with a general or universal rule accepted by most
people ("all lemons are sour") and then applies that
claim to a specific example. ("That is a lemon. Therefore,
it too must be sour.") A third type of logic is reductive or eliminatory logic, in which a conclusion is reached by a process of elimination. For example, "The only ways out of the building are the front door, the window, and the fire escape. Since the burglar did not take the front door or the window, he must have used the fire escape."
The other types of
persuasive appeal are pathos
Click here to return
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Injectable nanogel can monitor blood-sugar levels and secrete insulin when needed.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.-In work that recasts archaeologists' thinking aboutpeoples living in the western region of ancient Mexico, MIT researchershave shown that these people had a significant impact on other culturalgroups by producing large numbers of metal artifacts and distributing themto centers as far south as Belize.
Because the majority of these artifacts, such as bells andtweezers, were symbols of sacred and political power, by exporting them theWest Mexican peoples not only affected economic systems but also influencedreligious and ritual behavior.
"They were exporting a religious ideology," said Dorothy Hosler,Associate Professor of Archaeology and Ancient Technology in the Departmentof Materials Science and Engineering. Professor Hosler and Andrew W.Macfarlane, a research affiliate in the department and an associateprofessor at Florida International University, are authors of an article onthe work in the September 27 issue of Science.
West Mexican peoples were one of many cultural groups, includingthe Aztec and Maya, who lived in a region archaeologists call Mesoamerica.This region encompassed central and southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize,western Honduras, and El Salvador. Until now, archaeologists had thoughtthat the West Mexicans were relatively isolated and had little impact onother Mesoamerican peoples.
The new work, which links copper and bronze artifacts excavated atmany sites in Mesoamerica to West Mexican ore deposits, "is the firstevidence we have that West Mexican peoples were interacting intensivelywith other Mesoamerican groups," Professor Hosler said. "So it alters ourthinking about the economic and social networks in this period [~A.D.1200-1521]."
In the summer of 1995 Professor Hosler spent two months in Mexicocollecting ore samples from 15 deposits in West Mexico, Oaxaca, and EasternMexico (Veracruz). With a permit granted by Mexico's National Institute ofAnthropology and History, she also took samples of 171 copper artifactsfrom a variety of Mesoamerican archaeological sites. "I came back to MITwith boxes and boxes of artifact and ore samples," said Professor Hosler,who is also a member of the MIT Center for Archaeological Materials.
The researchers then determined the ratios of lead isotopes in eachsample (isotopes of an element have different atomic weights). Lead isotopeanalysis, a standard technique, "can be used to identify ore sources forartifacts made from copper and copper alloys by matching the isotopicsignatures of ore lead to those of the artifacts," the researchers write inScience.
Professor Hosler notes that MIT undergraduate Jennifer Pinson, nowa junior in materials science, played a key role in the analysis. "Sheworked all last year on the project; at one point she went to Florida tohand-deliver ore samples to Professor Macfarlane because we were afraid wemight lose them if we shipped them." (The samples were analyzed atProfessor Macfarlane's lab.)
The lead-isotope results showed that most of the Mesoamericanartifacts sampled were indeed made of metal smelted from West Mexican ores.These analytical data combined with historical and archaeological evidencetherefore show that the West Mexicans were exporting artifacts throughoutthe Mesoamerican region.
Among the archaeological evidence that supports this conclusion isthat "as far as we know, other Mesoamerican peoples did not develop thetechnical expertise to make these artifacts," Professor Hosler said. Shenoted that West Mexican bells, for example, are difficult to cast. "Last January, MIT Professors Sam Allen, Linn Hobbs, and I led a class in ancientMexican bell casting. The students spent two weeks trying to cast copies ofthese bells, and we don't have it exactly right yet."
Professor Hosler concluded that although she had suspected that theWest Mexicans played a major role in the production and distribution ofmetal artifacts, "until the lead isotope analysis we had no way ofsubstantiating what we thought might be true."
For more information about MIT research on the history ofmaterials, go to:<http://tantalum.mit.edu/dmse_research/CRAbrochure/History_of_Materials.html>.
The work reported in Science was supported by a grant from GrupoMexico (Industrial Minera Mexico), American Smelting and Refining Company,and Southern Peru Copper.
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Influenza pandemics are natural phenomenon that have occurred from time to time for centuries – including three times during the last century. They present a real and daunting challenge to the economic and social wellbeing of any country, as well as a serious risk to the health of its population.
There are important differences between 'ordinary' winter flu and pandemic flu. These differences explain why we regard pandemic flu as such a serious threat.
Pandemic influenza is one of the most severe natural challenges likely to affect the UK, but sensible and proportionate preparation and collective action by the Government, essential services, businesses, the media, other public, private and voluntary organisations and communities can help to mitigate its effects.
These inter-pandemic years provide a very important opportunity to develop and strengthen our preparations for the potentially devastating impact of an influenza pandemic, and the Government will continue to take every practical step to prepare for and mitigate its health and wider socio-economic effects.
The Department of Health (DH) [External website] is the lead department for planning for a human influenza pandemic. However, given the wide impacts of a pandemic all government departments are involved in planning to mitigate its impacts.
This website brings together available information on a possible influenza pandemic in order to support planning at all levels of society.
However well developed, plans are unlikely to be successful without the active support of individuals and communities. Therefore, a key part of the response will be to encourage the public to follow government advice and adopt basic hygiene measures to manage or reduce their own risk of catching or spreading the virus. Ensuring that all of us are fully aware of the necessary precautionary and response measures, are prepared to cooperate actively with them and accept responsibility for helping themselves and others must therefore be an integral part of our overall preparedness strategy.
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Older patients can donate kidneys, study finds
The thousands of people waiting for a new kidney may find hope in a new study that finds older people can safely donate the organs.
Johns Hopkins doctors found that kidney transplants performed using organs from live donors over the age of 70 are safe for the donors and help save lives of those who recieve them.
Although the study found that kidneys from older donors were more likely to fail within ten years of transplant when compared with kidneys from donors ages 50 to 59, patients who received older donated kidneys were no more likely to die within a decade of transplantation than those whose kidney donors were between 50 and 59.
“A lot of people come up to me and say, ‘I wish I could donate a kidney, but I’m too old’,” Dr. Dorry Segev, an associate professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “What our study says is that if you’re in good health and you’re over 70, you’re not too old to donate a kidney to your child, your spouse, your friend, anybody.”
Segev acknowledged that “it’s better if you have a younger donor. But not everyone has a younger donor. And an older live donor is better than no live donor at all.”
The research looked at records from 219 living people over age 70 who donated a kidney in the United States between 1990 and 2010. The team matched those donors with healthy people in the same age group and found that the donors actually lived longer than those who had both of their kidneys.
More than 90,000 patients are on the waiting list for kidneys from deceased donors in the United States, and many die waiting for an organ to become available. In some parts of the country, the wait for a kidney can be as long as 10 years, and those who can often turn to living donors, both relatives and friends, to ask for organs.
People can function normally with one working kidney.
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Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. Typically held during the last week of September, it highlights the value of free and open access to information. Banned Books Week brings together the entire book community –- librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types –- in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.
The books featured during Banned Books Week have all been targeted with removal or restrictions in libraries and schools. While books have been and continue to be banned, part of the Banned Books Week celebration is the fact that, in a majority of cases, the books have remained available. This happens only thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, students, and community members who stand up and speak out for the freedom to read.
In honor of Banned Books Weeks, the Public Libraries of Suffolk County are holding a contest featuring six different books over six days via Live-brary social media, including Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Today's book is "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. Here’s how the contest works: http://bit.ly/QnAl0B
Facebook contestants should “Like” the post to be entered into a random drawing that day for the chance to win a book by that featured banned book author.
Twitter contestants should “re-Tweet” the post to be entered into a random drawing that day for the chance to win a book by that featured banned book author.
Pinterest contestants should “re-pin” the post to be entered into a random drawing that day for the chance to win a book by that featured banned book author.
Finally, all users that Like, re-Tweet and/or re-pin will be entered into a random drawing to win a SONY e-Reader at the end of the week.
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Aggersborg N56 59 43 E9 15 17
Fyrkat N56 37 23 E9 46 13
Trelleborg N55 23 39 E11 15 55
The Trelleborg fortresses include Trelleborg near Slagelse, Fyrkat near Hobro, Aggersborg near Løgstør and Nonnebakken in Odense, of which only the former three have been preserved for posterity. The Trelleborg fortresses are characterised by having a circular rampart with a moat and four roofed gates. The fortresses have a severely geometrical street system, the inner area being divided into squares, each with four longhouses arranged in a quadrangle. The architecture of all four fortresses is uniform and strictly symmetrical, as clearly illustrated by the circular shape of the fortifications and the location of the gates at the four points of the compass - apparently without regard to the terrain.
Dendrochronological tests and C14 tests have shown that the Trelleborg fortresses were built around 980. But the fortresses probably did not last very long, perhaps only 10 to 20 years. For example, Fyrkat was destroyed by fire and was not rebuilt. As the Trelleborg fortresses were all built around 980, they have traditionally been linked to Harald Bluetooth's efforts to unify Denmark and Norway and make the Danes Christian in accordance with his runic stone proclamation. Another interpretation links the fortresses to the conquest of England and therefore to Harald Bluetooth's son, Sweyn Forkbeard. Whatever the case, the fortresses must be viewed as a monumental and military manifestation of the central power of the late Viking era.
Research and dissemination in outline.
Following the recognition in the 1930s of Trelleborg near Slagelse as a fortress complex of the past, an archaeological excavation of this discovery and the three other fortresses was subsequently carried out and completed by the mid-1960s. The archaeological excavations are documented in several monographs and articles of a high professional standard. Apart from minor exploratory digging, no further archaeological investigations of the fortresses themselves have been conducted after the completion of the extensive archaeological excavations. However, since 2007 the Royal Fortresses project has focused on excavations in the wetlands near the fortresses in order to possibly relate the fortresses to the naval power of their time.
The three fortresses are all listed, and they are owned by the National Museum of Denmark (Trelleborg and Fyrkat) and the Danish Forest and Nature Agency (Aggersborg), respectively. Together with the local authorities, these institutions are in charge of the necessary management of the fortresses and adjoining areas.
On completion of the excavations, work was carried out at Trelleborg and Fyrkat to mark the ramparts, moats and holes for posts from the fortress longhouses. At Aggersborg this work was restricted to the ramparts and the moat. In addition, a reconstruction of a longhouse was built outside the Trelleborg fortress complex in the early 1950s and at Fyrkat from 1980. Besides, a museum was built at Trelleborg in 1995, presenting the finds from the fortress and finds from the Viking era in general. A small complex of reconstructed Viking era houses was built next to the museum. About one kilometre from Fyrkat a reconstruction of a Viking era farm from the time of the fortress was built from 1992 to 2002. Information about both the farm and the fortress is presented here. A small museum was erected at Aggersborg to accommodate an exhibition about the fortress and its age, as well as welfare facilities.
The three preserved fortresses all form part of the recreational areas of their respective regions. Signposts have been put up, and other material to guide visitors is available. Good access, parking and welfare facilities are provided at the fortresses, although the quality of the facilities varies from fortress to fortress.
Individual elements of the property and their mutual relationship, including to the landscape.
Today, the visible elements are the fortifications, which include the ring fortress and the related defences and, at Trelleborg, a perimeter fort and moat. The original ramparts consisted of a complex oak-wood structure with an inner skeleton and outer lathing. As any buildings on the parapet and above the gates can only be reconstructed on a hypothetical basis, the fortresses are only visible in the landscape today in the form of reconstructed embankments without woodwork or moats. In addition, reconstructions of the longhouses traceable in the fortresses have been built at Fyrkat and Trelleborg, respectively.
The fortresses are all located in landscapes typical of their respective regions, in river valleys and relatively close to the coast. At both Trelleborg and Fyrkat extensive nature restoration projects have been conducted over the last decade in order to recreate the natural conditions prevailing at the time of the fortresses. The landscapes surrounding the fortresses thus clearly demonstrate the strategic location of the fortresses and the military reasons for building them at what must be described as Viking era junctions.
Justification de la Valeur Universelle Exceptionelle
Justification of the significance (in terms of cultural history) of the property in a North-European or global perspective.
The ring fortresses, Trelleborg, Aggersborg and Fyrkat, represent the most prominent archaeological evidence of the monumental defences of the Viking era in present-day Denmark. No contemporary counterparts exist in either the Nordic countries or Europe. The fortresses should probably be viewed in relation to the unification of Denmark and Norway referred to on the large runic stone in Jelling and therefore as part of the lengthy process that resulted in the integration of the Nordic countries into the European community of culture and the establishment of the Scandinavian states. Furthermore, having been built around 980, the fortresses should be viewed in relation to the contemporary expansion of Dannevirke, which forms part of the transnational application for inscription on the World Heritage List.
Satements of authenticity and/or integrity
Archaeological investigations of large parts of the fortresses have been conducted and presented in several scientific publications of a high standard. The archaeological investigations documented that the fortresses were largely unaffected by later use, apart from cultivation. Following the archaeological investigations, the collapsed ramparts at Trelleborg and Fyrkat were marked in the terrain, and the moats were cleared. At Aggersborg, where the original embankments had to a wide extent been levelled by ploughing, the rampart and the moat were re-established. All these works and the marking of other structures inside or near the fortresses were conducted on the basis of the complete and detailed documentation provided as a result of the excavations.
In connection with the final submission of an application for inscription on the World Heritage List, efforts are being made to provide a general overview of the management and dissemination plans, establishing whether the fortresses are affected by development-related conditions and their status in terms of management.
Comparison with other similar properties
No similar fortresses from the Viking era exist. Therefore, it is hardly possible to tell what inspired the construction of the Trelleborg fortresses.
The Trelleborg fortresses cannot be viewed in isolation; they must be considered in a historical context that includes the Jelling burial mounds and the Kovirke defences at Dannevirke. Jelling should be considered because the construction of the Trelleborg fortresses is traditionally ascribed to Harald Bluetooth, who buried his parents in Jelling and erected a runic stone for them describing his own achievement of consolidating the realm. It is believed that the Trelleborg fortresses were of great significance in this respect.
Based on the straight line of Kovirke and its C14 dating to the time around 980, this defence embankment located a few kilometres south of Dannevirke is considered to have been constructed at the same time and possibly by the same builder as the Trelleborg fortresses.
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Embrace mistakes in your artwork.
Wade Guyton created Untitled with the help of an Epson inkjet printer, similar to but larger than printers you may have in your classroom or home. Guyton used black ink to print the large rectangles onto linen, and although the large black and white spaces dominate the painting, there are also faint lines that are a result of Guyton folding or feeding the fabric through the printer. Guyton embraces these mistakes, considering them to be integral parts of his work.
In preparation for this project, have your students save all the artwork they make in your class, including the ones upon which they feel that they’ve made mistakes. After discussing Guyton’s work as a class, ask your students to pull out their collection of work. What kind of mistakes did they think they made? Thinking about Guyton’s strategy of embracing mistakes, have your students embrace a mistake in one of their works. How can that mistake become an important part of the work? How does it change the work?
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By Chris Wickham
LONDON (Reuters) - Large-scale engineering projects aimed at fighting global warming could radically reduce rainfall in Europe and North America, a team of scientists from four European countries have warned.
Geoengineering projects are controversial, even though they are largely theoretical at this point. They range from mimicking the effects of large volcanic eruptions by releasing sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, to deploying giant mirrors in space to deflect the sun's rays.
Proponents say they could be a rapid response to rising global temperatures but environmentalists argue they are a distraction from the need to reduce man-made carbon emissions.
Critics also point to a lack of solid research into unintended consequences and the absence of any international governance structure for such projects, whose effects could transcend national borders.
A small geoengineering experiment in the UK was recently abandoned due to a dispute over attempts by some of the team involved to patent the technology.
In this new study scientists from Germany, Norway, France and the UK used four different computer models that mimic the earth's climate to see how they responded to increased levels of carbon dioxide coupled with reduced radiation from the sun.
Their scenario assumed a world with four times the carbon dioxide concentration of the preindustrial world, which lead author Hauke Schmidt says is at the upper end, but in the range of what is considered possible at the end of this century.
They found that global rainfall was reduced by about 5 percent on average using all four models.
"Climate engineering cannot be seen as a substitute for a policy pathway of mitigating climate change through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions," they said in the study, published in Earth System Dynamics, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union.
Under the scenario studied, rainfall diminished by about 15 percent, or about 100 millimeters per year, compared to pre-industrial levels, in large areas of North America and northern Eurasia.
Over central South America, all the models showed a decrease in rainfall that reached more than 20 percent in parts of the Amazon region.
(Editing by Mark Heinrich)
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ExplorationCounting Consonants!Think about some of the words you know how to read or write. Look at them in a book or write them down on a piece of paper.Count the number of vowels and the number of consonants in each word you examine. What do you notice about the number of consonants versus the number of vowels? Do some words have lots of consonants, while others have lots of vowels? Do most words seem to have at least a few of each?? What do you think would be different if there were more or fewer consonants in each word?
Sources & links
Bickford, J. Albert and David Tuggy. “The principle organs of articulation.” The Summer Institute of Linguistics in Mexico. 05 Sep. 2009 <http://www.sil.org/mexico/ling/glosario/E005bi-OrgansArt.htm> "vocal tract." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. 05 Sep. 2009. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/vocal tract>. "consonant." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2009. ”¨<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consonant> "consonant." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 05 Sep. 2009 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/133627/consonant>
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The Da Vinci Code
The Da Vinci Code is a novel by Dan Brown published in 2003. It has sold over 60 million copies to date and a film version was released in 2006. The book's popularity in part derived from its sensationalistic claims about the history of Christianity, which are in large part based on an earlier non-fiction work, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. The text of the novel is prefaced with a claim that all documents and artwork referenced in the novel really exist, and within the context of the story many of the book's claims are presented as being common knowledge among historians. However, The Da Vinci Code does not represent the views of mainstream Biblical scholarship, the liberal wing thereof, or informed skeptics of Christianity.
Claims About the Bible
The Da Vinci Code alleges that Constantine commissioned a massive re-write of the New Testament for political reasons. Jesus, supposedly, really was an important historical figure, but Constantine's rewrite made him much less human by, among other things, removing all reference to his marriage to Mary Magdalene and the child he had by her. It is suggested that the various non-canonical gospels could provide important insights into the life of Jesus.
There are a large number of New Testament manuscripts dating from 200 A.D. onwards. While comparison of these various manuscripts reveals isolated instances of tampering, there is no evidence of a massive re-write in Constantine's era or any other. Also, the canonicity of the various books had been largely decided by Constantine's era, though the status of Revelation was still hotly disputed.
The surviving non-canonical gospels appear to have been written after the canonical ones, and portray Jesus in a much more exalted light. While the historical content of the canonical gospels is debatable, scholars agree that they are much more likely to contain historical information than the later books.
The Da Vinci Code also refers to a book called Q, which it suggests may have been written by Jesus himself and is currently being kept hidden away in a vault somewhere. Scholars have indeed concluded that Matthew and Luke did indeed copy some of their works from a now-lost collection of sayings, and this is referred to in the literature as Q. However, there is no reason to believe that Q was written by Jesus himself, nor is there any reason to think that a secret copy has survived somewhere.
The Priory of Sion
The Da Vinci Code claims that there is a secret society called the Priory of Sion, whose mission is to protect the bloodline of Jesus, and that the existence of this society is documented by papers found in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. These papers do exist, and claim among the Priory's members Leonardo Da Vinci. Dan Brown spins this into the idea that gave his book its title, that Da Vinci put clues about the conspiracy in his paintings. However, the papers have been proven to be forgeries, created by a right-wing French organization in an attempt to give itself a more impressive history than it actually has.
- Baigent, Michael; Richard Leigh; and Henry Lincoln. Holy Blood, Holy Grail. New York: Dell Publishing, 1983
- Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code. Doubleday, 2003
- Ehrman, Bart. Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine. Oxford University Press, 2004
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From LawGuru Wiki
Template:CrimPro In United States constitutional law, the exclusionary rule is a legal principle holding that evidence collected or analyzed in violation of the U.S. Constitution is inadmissible for a criminal prosecution in a court of law (that is, it cannot be used in a criminal trial). The exclusionary rule does not apply to all violations of the Fourth, Fifth, or Sixth Amendments. An example of this is the 2006 Supreme Court ruling Hudson v. Michigan,
The Exclusionary Rule is designed to provide a remedy and disincentive, short of criminal prosecution, for prosecutors and police who illegally gather evidence in violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments in the Bill of Rights, which provide for protection from unreasonable searches and seizure and compelled self-incrimination.
The Exclusionary Rule applies to all citizens or aliens (illegal or documented) that reside within the United States. It is not applicable to aliens residing outside of U.S. borders. United States v. Alvarez decided that property owned by aliens in a foreign country is admissible in court. Certain persons in the U.S. receive limited protections, such as prisoners, probationers, parolees, and persons crossing U.S. borders. Corporations, by virtue of being, also have limited rights under the Fourth Amendment (see corporate personhood).
The fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine holds that any evidence discovered indirectly through an illegal search or seizure is inadmissible in court. The rationale is that the evidence would not have been found were it not for the violation of the Fourth Amendment and therefore must be suppressed because it is the "fruit of the poisonous tree." If the prosecution can prove that the evidence in question would have been discovered even without the illegal search, then this evidence is admissible. This principle is known as inevitable discovery.
History of the Rule
The exclusionary rule was created in 1914 in the case of Weeks v. United States. This decision, however, created the rule only on the federal level. It was not until Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961) that the exclusionary rule was also held to be binding on the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees due process. This landmark decision was considered by former Justice Potter Stewart as "the most important search and seizure decision in [American] history."
The Court's rationale for its holding in Hudson is that a search whose only illegality is the failure to announce cannot uncover any evidence that would not have been uncovered if the announcement had been properly made, and therefore the suppression of evidence is not an appropriate remedy.
Exceptions to the Rule
The exclusionary rule does not apply in a civil case, in a grand jury proceeding, or in a parole revocation hearing. In any of these circumstances, illegally obtained evidence will not be barred by the rule. Furthermore, such evidence can be admitted to impeach the credibility of the defendant's trial testimony; however, this exception applies only if the defendant testifies, and the evidence is relevant to call into question the truthfulness of the defendant's testimony.
The inevitable discovery doctrine was adopted first by the United States Supreme Court in Nix v Williams in 1984. It holds that evidence obtained through an unlawful search or seizure is admissible in court if it can be established, to a very high degree of probability, that normal police investigation would have inevitably led to the discovery of the evidence. This decision was upheld because given the fact that the exclusionary rule was created specifically to deter police and state misconduct, excluding evidence that would inevitably (hypothetically) have been discovered otherwise would not serve to deter police misconduct. In People v. Stith, the Court stated that this doctrine may not be used to admit primary evidence but only secondary evidence, i.e. evidence found as a result of the primary evidence.
The attenuation exception to the exclusionary rule is that evidence may be suppressed only if there is a clear causal connection between the illegal police action and the evidence. The evidence must result from the unlawful conduct. A three-pronged test was created in People v. Martinez to determine whether there was sufficient attenuation of this connection (i.e. the lack of connection between the disputed evidence and the unlawful conduct): (1) the time period between the illegal arrest and the ensuing confession or consensual search; (2) the presence of intervening factors or event; and (3) the purpose and flagrancy of the official misconduct.
The independent source exception allows evidence to be admitted in court if knowledge of the evidence is gained from a separate, or independent, source that is completely unrelated to the illegality at hand. This rule was formally accepted in People v. Arnau.
The good-faith exception may allow some evidence gathered in violation of the Constitution if the violation results in only a minor or technical error. If a magistrate is erroneous in granting a police officer a warrant, and the officer acts on the warrant in good faith, then the evidence resulting in the execution of the warrant is not suppressible. However, there are a number of situations in which the good faith exception will not apply:
- No reasonable officer would have relied on the affidavit underlying the warrant.
- The warrant is defective on its face for failing to state the place to be searched or things to be seized.
- The warrant was obtained by fraud on the part of a government official.
- The magistrate has "wholly abandoned his judicial role."zh:證據排除法則
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The atoll is closed to the public and travel to the island is not allowed.
Both the US and the Kingdom of Hawaii annexed Johnston Atoll in 1858, but it was the US that mined the guano deposits until the late 1880s. Johnston and Sand Islands were designated wildlife refuges in 1926. The US Navy took over the atoll in 1934, and subsequently the US Air Force assumed control in 1948. The site was used for high-altitude nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s, and until late in 2000 the atoll was maintained as a storage and disposal site for chemical weapons. Munitions destruction is now complete. Cleanup and closure of the facility was completed by May 2005. Toxic waste from both operations is buried on the island.
The Fish and Wildlife Service and the US Air Force are currently discussing future management options, in the interim Johnston Atoll and the three-mile Naval Defensive Sea around it remain under the jurisdiction and administrative control of the US Air Force.
Tropical, but generally dry; consistent northeast trade winds with little seasonal temperature variation.
Strategic location in the North Pacific Ocean; Johnston Island and Sand Island are natural islands, which have been expanded by coral dredging; North Island (Akau) and East Island (Hikina) are manmade islands formed from coral dredging; egg-shaped reef is 34 km in circumference some low-growing vegetation. Highest point: Summit Peak, at 5 meters
Get in
By plane
There is an abandoned airstrip on Johnston Island.
By boat
[add listing] Buy
There is currently no economic activity on Johnston Atoll.
[add listing] Sleep
There are no public accommodations on Johnston Atoll.
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Troubleshooting problems while in safe mode
Safe mode is a troubleshooting option for Windows that starts your computer with only basic services and functionality. If an existing problem does not reappear when you start Windows in safe mode, you can eliminate the default settings and basic device drivers as possible causes.
If you haven't installed any new programs or hardware recently, you can use the process of elimination to help you find the problem. Try starting all of the programs you commonly use, including the programs in your Startup folder, one by one to see if a program might be the cause of the problem.
The program might be incompatible with this version of Windows. Try using System Restore to restore your system to a point in time when it worked correctly. For more information, see What is System Restore?
The driver for the device might be incompatible with this version of Windows. For information about uninstalling a device driver, see Tips for fixing common driver problems.
If uninstalling or restoring the driver back to a previous version does not fix the problem, try uninstalling or removing the hardware, and then restarting your computer.
Try restarting your computer using Safe Mode with Networking, the only safe mode option that allows networking and Internet capabilities. If you can't connect using this option, be sure to rule out hardware issues by restarting your computer and also any network hardware you are using, such as a modem or router. For more information, see Troubleshoot Internet connection problems.
System Restore can return your system files to a previous point in time before you noticed a problem. For more information, see What is System Restore?
If System Restore does not fix the problem, try running Startup Repair from your Windows installation disc. For more information, see Startup Repair: frequently asked questions.
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Wed June 6, 2012
Children Getting CT Scans At Higher Risk For Cancer
Originally published on Wed June 6, 2012 7:29 pm
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
New research out today indicates that a popular medical test may increase the risk for some forms of cancer. A large international study found that CAT scans, which are also known as CT scans, can increase the risk for leukemia and brain cancer in children.
NPR's Rob Stein joins us now to talk about the new findings. And, Rob, I understand the concerns about these scans have been building for a long time. So what's the specific source of worry here?
ROB STEIN, BYLINE: Well, the concern, really, is about radiation. X-rays emit very low levels of radiation, but CT scans use a lot of X-rays. And so that can build up and accumulate over time and expose people to fairly significant amount of radiation. And if you get enough CT scans, you get exposed to a significant amount of radiation and can potentially boost your risk for cancer.
CORNISH: So this is the first study really, directly, to look at the safety of CT scans. And tell us exactly how they did this.
STEIN: That's right. Previous studies that have tried to take a look at it are really based on extrapolations of data collected for other reasons. It really was based mostly on data collected from the survivors of the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. And they would extrapolate from that data to try to determine what their radiation risk was.
In this study, for the first time, they looked directly at patients who are getting CT scans and then followed up to see if they developed any kinds of cancers, in this case, the - it was based on 180,000 patients in Britain who got CT scans.
CORNISH: And these findings are pretty alarming. I mean, what exactly did they find out?
STEIN: Right. What they found was that for kids, it seemed to increase the risk for two types of cancer: leukemia and brain cancers. And based on the findings, they calculated that kids who got two or three CT scans of the head would have three times the risk of brain cancer than people got exposed to less radiation than that. And if you got five to 10 CT scans of the head, your increased risk for leukemia would be tripled.
CORNISH: Now, the takeaway from this hasn't been that people shouldn't do CT scans, but why is that?
STEIN: Well, there are really two reasons. One is that the risk, even though it is - seems to be elevated, is still very low. Leukemia and brain tumors are fairly rare cancers. So even if you increased the risk by a factor of three, the risk is still very, very low. And on the other side of the ledger sheet is the fact that CT scans are very valuable medical tools, and they can save a lot of lives by being - enabling doctors to diagnose and treat patients very quickly.
CORNISH: So, Rob, in the end, what should we understand about the study?
STEIN: Well, really, the take-home message is that doctors should be much more selective in how to use CT scans. Like everything else, CT scans can have a lot of benefits, but they can have a potential downside. And so doctors should just think twice about CT scans when they order one. There's an estimate that maybe 80 million CT scans are done each year in the United States, and maybe half of those may be unnecessary.
So their thinking is that doctors could just pick and choose a little bit more carefully and think, do I really need to do this test? Or is there another test that I could use that has less radiation? And that way, everybody will be safer.
CORNISH: NPR's Rob Stein, thank you.
STEIN: Oh, thank you, Audie. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.
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From Socialist Worker UK: http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=25015
Tue 7 Jun 2011
Women’s oppression and violence against women are features of our society. But can we get rid of them? Sadie Robinson looks at the roots of sexism and offers some answers
The world can be a bad place to be a woman. Women make up a staggering 70 percent of the world’s poor. Being female shapes every aspect of women’s lives—from things like work, housing, health and education to our most intimate relationships.
In Britain, the most obvious evidence of women’s oppression is the 17 percent pay gap between men and women. But the most sickening signs are acts of rape and violence—and the widespread tendency to blame the victims.
The shocking nature of sexual violence can make many people think that humans are inherently brutal. They despair of ever creating a world without sexual violence and systematic oppression.
The level of violence against women is appalling. It’s estimated that at least 47,000 women are raped in Britain every year—while the conviction rate for reported rapes is just 6.5 percent.
But the vast majority of men do not rape women. And most men are not violent towards women.
Rape doesn’t happen because of men’s “natural” instincts. It results from the way that class society distorts sexuality and alienates people from each other and themselves.
Women’s oppression benefits capitalism—it plays an ideological and an economic function.
People create the environments and the societies we live in—but because we feel we have no control over it, the world appears as an alien entity.
We become alienated from ourselves and from each other. Rape and sexual violence are some of the most extreme forms that this alienation takes.
This combines with a view of sexuality that sees sex as a commodity like any other, which can be bought and sold—or taken.
Nearly a third of people in Britain think that a woman was at least partly to blame if she was raped while she was drunk.
Dominant ideas about sexuality blame women for “encouraging” rape and treat men as little more than animals unable to control themselves.
So justice secretary Kenneth Clarke’s recent comments, which seemed to dismiss some rapes, such as date rape, as barely rapes at all, unfortunately came as no surprise.
Clarke’s comments did cause an enormous outcry, and his views are heavily contested.
But those at the top of society—politicians, judges, those who own the media, and so on—promote sexist ideas. Those who own newspapers and TV stations fill them with images depicting women as sex objects, not people in their own right.
And it’s normal for rape trials to raise what a victim was wearing, if she was out late, if she had been drinking and if she’d had sex with the rapist before.
Of course, lots of women, and men, do challenge sexist ideas and fight for reforms to improve women’s lives.
But sexist ideas are widespread because of women’s position in society and how our society distorts sexuality.
The revolutionary Karl Marx described how the dominant ideas in any society are the ideas of the ruling class. This doesn’t mean they are the only ideas—but it means they are the strongest.
But why would the ruling class want to encourage this view of women? What do they get out of it?
Women’s oppression hasn’t always existed. It emerged when human societies began to form into classes.
Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels identified the family under class society as the key to women’s oppression. Engels described the emergence of the family as “the world historical defeat of the female sex”.
They saw that how people secure their basic existence shapes human behaviour and ideas.
The family emerged alongside private property and the state. Before that, women and men lived in hunter-gatherer societies where they did different but equal work and had an equal say in decision-making. Marx and Engels called this “primitive communism”.
As societies developed, they began to produce a surplus in excess of what they needed to meet their basic needs—something that could be stored and controlled.
And the production techniques that created it tended to prioritise men’s labour over women’s for the first time.
Once a ruling class developed the men who came to dominate wanted “legitimate” heirs to pass the surplus on to. Control of women and sexual relationships became key to owning it.
The family unit developed with an ideology that treats women as second-class citizens and as a form of property to be controlled by men.
These ideas help legitimate and encourage violence against women.
That doesn’t mean that nothing ever changes in class societies. A woman’s position in a family under capitalism is very different from how it was under feudalism.
And even under capitalism women have fought to transform their lives over the past century.
Most women in Britain today work outside the home. People have more sexual freedom than they did in the past.
And changes in women’s lives and ideas have had an impact on men too. So it’s much more common for men to do jobs that would have previously been seen as women’s work such as nursing.
Men spend more time caring for their children today than they did in the past. Housework is no longer the sole responsibility of women in many homes.
Huge changes have occurred within capitalism, partly due to the changing needs of the system and partly because of mass pressure and struggle from ordinary people.
These changes show that the idea that men and women have fixed, unchanging roles is wrong.
But important as the changes are, women’s oppression remains. And our rulers are constantly trying to roll back the gains we have made.
So being a wife and mother is still seen as key to a women’s identity.
Society overemphasises sexual relationships—and tells women that unless they nab themselves a man they’re a failure.
And women who don’t want children are still often seen as inexplicably strange.
Women’s oppression, like other oppressions, serves to divide the working class. Instead of ordinary people seeing themselves as having a common interest against the rich, women and men can be sucked into seeing each other as the main enemy. This is highly useful for our rulers—and they know it.
The family also plays a key economic function for capitalism. Women are expected to maintain the current workforce and nurture the future one—while often being part of that workforce at the same time.
They raise children, care for sick or elderly relatives, and maintain a household. They save capitalism a fortune by providing all of these services for free.
This isn’t to say that every home and every relationship is simply a weight around women’s necks.
Often people value their personal relationships and home life above all else, because they seem to offer a haven from the stresses of the outside world.
But that doesn’t change the role the family plays under capitalism. And for a lot of the time, people looking for comfort and sanctuary in the family are disappointed.
The haven they hoped to find ends up being a pressure cooker where built-up tensions are unleashed—and women often bear the brunt of them.
The key role that the family plays explains why our rulers hate criticism of it and attack anyone who falls outside it. That’s why there is homophobia, panic over single parents and pressure on single people to get married.
This also shapes the way people think about rape. Most women who are raped know their attacker, and violence is more likely to happen within families—yet the most common view of rape is of a shadowy stranger leaping out of a bush late at night.
Sexist ideas are so ingrained because women’s oppression has existed for thousands of years, since the rise of class societies. This is why it seems so natural and permanent.
But some of those who argue that we can’t challenge oppression do so because they have an interest in maintaining it. And it helps them to focus on individual acts of violence, because that distracts from the systemic oppression at the heart of capitalism.
We can end women’s oppression—but to do it we need to get rid of the system that props it up.
Oppression affects all women, but the impact is vastly different depending on class.
It is key to a system that ruling class women do very well out of—which is why we can’t rely on alliances with rich women to win change.
Ordinary people have a common interest in getting rid of capitalism. It wrecks the lives of working class women and men.
It relies on oppression to divide and weaken the working class. And it atomises us and distorts even our most intimate relationships.
In the process of creating a new world, people transform themselves. They throw off what Marx called the “muck of ages” and ideas that have survived for centuries start to fall away.
And in every revolutionary movement, women come to the forefront to lead the struggle.
Revolution isn’t a fairytale. Already this year we’ve seen revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia that have thrown out dictators and raised the prospect of workers’ control of society.
Collectively, we have the power to smash the system and create real equality and freedom for everybody.
© Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original.
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Supersonic without the Boom
Sonic booms usually mean something cool. The space shuttle is coming in for a landing or a jet fighter is flying overhead. We don’t hear them very often, so when we do it’s an event.
But imagine if aircraft manufacturers designed and built a vehicle that carried passengers or cargo at supersonic speeds over land. Sonic booms would be happening all the time; and they’re loud and annoying. That’s why the Concorde flew over the ocean. Noise regulations in most countries wouldn’t allow it to fly over land because of the sonic booms it generated.
Sonic booms are keeping a new era of supersonic cruise flight from happening.
For us to ever be able to enjoy the benefits of flying people or cargo over land at super-fast speeds, we have to figure out how to turn down the volume on sonic booms.
NASA has been doing flight tests and simulations and ground experiments — with cool names like “Quiet Spike,” “SonicBOBS,” “SonicBREW,” “LaNCETS,” “House VIBES,” “Low Boom/No Boom” – to help find answers.
continue reading: nasa
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This brightly colored salamander can be locally abundant where forested habitat remains intact, but quickly declines or disappears when woodlands are cleared or disturbed by cutting or invasive species. Moist, closed canopy woodlands are preferred habitat. They tend to avoid swamp forests subject to flooding, and are absent in disturbed forests that have been recently grazed, burned, or harvested for timber. Temporary or semi-permanent ponds either within or adjacent to the woods are critical habitat elements. Spotted Salamanders spend most of their time in burrows underground – up to four feet below the surface. They are occasionally found under or within rotting logs, leaf litter, and other moist places. Hibernation occurs on land, usually near breeding ponds. They have granular glands that produce secretions which can repel some predators. Most glands are located behind the eyes and on the tail.
Reproduction and Growth
Migration to breeding ponds occurs in late May to mid-April, and is triggered by thawing of the ground and higher humidity. This species returns to the same breeding ponds each year, and uses established routes when traveling to and from breeding ponds – even entering and leaving ponds at same point each time. Eggs are laid one to several days after sperm transfer. The female can lay 50-300 eggs in one large mass or several smaller clusters attached to sticks or vegetation, egg masses form a symbiotic relationship with some types of algae – algae provide larvae with additional oxygen, while benefiting from carbon dioxide released by embryos.
Eggs hatch in 20-60 days and metamorphose in 60-90 days, although some larvae may over-winter. Females reach sexual maturity at 3-5 years old, while males reach maturity at 2-3 years old. They may live more than 20 years.
Their future depends on presence of undisturbed woodlands and associated temporary and semi-permanent ponds Any human activity that opens forest canopies (i.e. elective logging) can lower humidity creating unsuitable conditions Construction of roads running between wooded uplands and lowland breeding sites can lead to mass mortality of migratory salamanders. Sometimes collected for biological supply and the pet trade, persistent exploitation could threaten local populations. Acidic precipitation is another concern as eggs and larvae may be sensitive to pond acidification.
- Ephemeral wetlands.
- Permanent wetlands.
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Scientists are issuing a stark new warning for people who have had a heart attack and continue to use popular painkillers like Advil (ibuprofen) or Celebrex (celecoxib): Don't take them unless you absolutely have to.
Danish researchers report that taking these nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs — or NSAIDs — after a heart attack greatly increases the risk of death or a second heart attack, and the risk persists for years.
"It's very frightening. There seems to be no safe treatment window" for NSAIDs once you've had a heart attack, said Anne-Marie Schjerning Olsen, a cardiologist at Copenhagen University Hospital Gentofte who, along with colleagues, reviewed the records of nearly 100,000 patients who had suffered a heart attack between 1997 and 2009. About 44 percent of them received at least one prescription for an NSAID. Among people who didn't take NSAIDs, Olsen says, the cardiovascular risk after a first heart attack declines rapidly during the first year. "After five to 10 years it's almost the same" as the general population, she says. But heart attack survivors who took any NSAID other than low-dose aspirin had a higher risk of having a second heart attack or dying. The overall death risk rose 59 percent one year after the heart attack and 63 percent five years after, she said. Similarly, the risk of coronary death or a second heart attack rose 30 percent one year after the initial heart attack and 41 percent five years after.
What this means in absolute terms is that during the first year there were 20 deaths per 100 people among the NSAID users, compared with only 12 deaths per 100 people among non-NSAID users.
In their analysis, published in Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association, the Danish researchers accounted for other medical conditions and medications that patients might have been taking, Olsen said. They could only estimate the dosages people took, but on the average they seemed to be taking standard doses as prescribed on the label, she added.
In addition to ibuprofen and celecoxib, they studied rofecoxib (Vioxx), diclofenac (Voltaren) and naproxen (Aleve), of which naproxen was found to pose the least cardiovascular risk. But as Olson points out, it can cause stomach bleeding. "It's not easy," she says. "You have to look at each individual patient and find out what kind of pain treatment they need."
Wayne Ray, a professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University who also has studied NSAIDs and heart health, said the Danish study provides further evidence of the risks involved in taking these drugs after a heart attack.
The Danish researchers found that, compared with earlier studies, the risks are even "a bit higher than others have found," he said. Celecoxib and diclofenac clearly carry the highest risk (rofecoxib was pulled from the shelves in 2004). "These generally should be the last alternatives for this patient population," Ray said.
For older patients with muscle or skeletal pain, doctors should first try nondrug remedies, such as physical therapy or exercise, he said. Topical medications, such as analgesic heat rubs, can also reduce pain. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) can be a good option, if taken in the proper dose, although it is risky for people with liver disease and those who drink heavily.
Finally, Ray says, "If NSAIDs are necessary, use the safest NSAID, in the lowest effective dose for the shortest time period."
Olsen, meanwhile, says that even as NSAID risks have become clear, many doctors and patients have not gotten the word. "Somehow, more education is needed," she says. "We have to find how to get the message out."
Go to the AARP home page for tips on keeping healthy and sharp, and great deals.
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Listen to this week's lesson about the origins of the ukulele and then take the online quiz.
Your lesson this week: Origins of the ukulele - from Madeiran guitar to Hawaiian icon.
Your teacher is Steve Roberts from the Blue Mountains Ukulele Club.
Listen to the podcast and then take this week's Self Improvement Quiz.
You can also subscribe to Self Improvement Wednesday by copying this address into your podcast application:
1.In 1879, immigrants from which archipelago reportedly entertained Honoluluans with nightly street concerts?
c) Tierra del Fuego
2. Santo, Nunes and Dias were primarily what type of tradesmen?
d) Cabinet makers
3.What was an early name for a four-stringed Madeiran guitar?
4.Which is a common translation for the word ukulele?
a) Flying fox
b) Angry ant
c) Jumping flea
d) Busy bee
5.Which author's step-daughter wrote the only known first-hand account of the Hawaiian king playing the ukulele?
a) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
b) Mark Twain
c) Thomas Hardy
d) Robert Louis Stevenson
6. Who along with his sons Leonardo and Julius started a production company claiming to have invented the ukulele?
a) Jose do Espirito Santo
b) Manuel Nunes
c) Augusto Dias
d) King David Kalakaua
7. Which expo is historically credited with popularising the ukulele and Hawaiian music on the mainland?
a) The Great Exhibition of 1851
b) Columbian Exposition of 1893
c) Exposition Universelle of 1900
d) Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915
8.In the early 20th century, ukuleles began to be manufactured en masse with which affordable material?
c) Koa wood
Answers: 1.b) 2.d) 3.a) 4.c) 5.d) 6.b) 7.d) 8.a)
Next week: Time in the ancient world with Dr Anne Rogerson from the University of Sydney.
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Australian Bureau of Statistics
1384.6 - Statistics - Tasmania, 2005
Previous ISSUE Released at 11:30 AM (CANBERRA TIME) 22/04/2004
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The mean relative humidity exceeds 50% throughout the year at most Tasmanian stations, the exceptions being inland stations in summer. Relative humidity is generally higher in the morning than the afternoon, and higher in coastal areas than inland. Days of high temperature combined with uncomfortably high humidity are rare, and usually associated with a north-easterly airstream. In the east, south-east and the Fingal Valley, warm dry winds from a west or north-west direction may occasionally have a relative humidity as low as 10%. This is a result of air descending from just above mountainous terrain into lowlands.
This page last updated 21 November 2006
Unless otherwise noted, content on this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia Licence together with any terms, conditions and exclusions as set out in the website Copyright notice. For permission to do anything beyond the scope of this licence and copyright terms contact us.
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In 2009-10 the gross value of total Victorian agricultural production was $10,347.3 million, an increase of 1.4% (or $146.8 million) from 2008-09. At the same time, the local value of Victorian agricultural production increased by 0.7%.
In 2009-10 livestock disposals contributed 29.0% to the total gross value of Victorian agricultural production, followed by livestock products with 24.2% and fruit with 11.7% respectively.
Do you know how the value of your state or territory's agricultural output is determined?
The gross value of agricultural commodities produced (VACP) is the value placed on recorded agricultural production at the wholesale prices realised in the market place.
The local value is the value placed on commodities at the point of production (i.e. farm gate). It is calculated by deducting marketing costs from the gross value of commodities produced. Marketing costs may include freight, cost of containers, commission and other marketing charges.
Quantity data for most agricultural commodities are collected from ABSagricultural surveys or the Agricultural Census. Remaining commodity data are obtained from non-ABS sources, and are comparable across time.
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Unless otherwise noted, content on this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia Licence together with any terms, conditions and exclusions as set out in the website Copyright notice. For permission to do anything beyond the scope of this licence and copyright terms contact us.
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Fairness for All - The Work of the Immigrants' Rights Project
Make a Difference
Your support helps the ACLU defend immigrants’ rights and other civil liberties.
Why WE DEFEND
The constitutional protections of due process and equal protection apply to everyone in the United States, including non-citizens – even those not here lawfully. However, politically disenfranchised immigrants are an especially vulnerable group and are routinely denied these basic rights embodied in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Eroding the fundamental rights of immigrants is dangerous for us all. When the government has the power to deny legal rights and due process to one group, all Americans’ rights are severely threatened.
DUE PROCESS AND EQUAL PROTECTION IN THE IMMIGRATION PROCESS
Our nation has the authority to control its borders and to regulate immigration but not in a way that denies immigrants their fundamental rights. The United States must exercise the awesome power to exclude or deport immigrants in a manner consistent with the rule of law, the fundamental norms of humanity and the requirements of the Constitution. Unfortunately, immigrants are routinely denied their constitutional right to a day in court. Moreover, immigration laws require the automatic deportation of even longtime lawful residents for many minor offenses, regardless of how long they have lived here or whether they have a citizen spouse or children.
Detention is increasingly being used as an immigration enforcement strategy, and immigrants, including those with legal status, are detained for prolonged periods – sometimes several years – without any legal determination that they pose a danger to society or a flight risk that would justify their detention. In addition to being cruel and unnecessary, prolonged detention makes it nearly impossible for individuals to fight their immigration cases, including those with strong claims to remain in the U.S.
Most immigrants held in detention have never been convicted of a crime, and those who have committed crimes have already served their sentences been released.
Nonetheless, immigrants in deportation proceedings, including those seeking asylum, are held in conditions almost identical and in many cases worse than the conditions imposed on prisoners serving sentences for violent criminal offenses. Dozens of immigrants have died in immigration detention because of inadequate medical care and a lack of minimal standards and oversight.
In states, towns, cities and counties across the U.S., there is a growing movement to introduce anti-immigrant laws that attempt to drive out undocumented immigrants and their families and punish those who employ or rent to them. In addition to violating the Constitution and federal civil rights laws, these laws promote distrust of immigrants, including those here legally, and fuel xenophobia and discrimination.
Business owners, local law enforcement, landlords, city employees and hospital staff are forced to take on the unfair burden of acting as immigration agents, though they lack the skills and training to determine an individual’s immigration status or the authenticity of immigration-related documentation. As a result, people who are perceived as looking or sounding foreign – whether or not they are here legally or are U.S. citizens – are refused employment, medical treatment and housing and are harassed by the police.
Immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility and local anti-immigrant ordinances only hurt city economies and community relations. Rather than waste resources on unlawful and mean-spirited laws, responsible officials should seek to fight discrimination and ensure that their laws are fair for all of their residents.
Immigrant workers, who often lack knowledge of U.S. labor laws and afraid to assert their legal rights as employees, are commonly exploited by employers who refuse to pay them minimum wage or over-time.
Laws meant to curtail the hiring of undocumented workers often end up as major roadblocks to gainful employment for U.S. citizens and other legal residents. Federal contractors and businesses in several states must check the eligibility of all potential workers – U.S. citizens and immigrants alike – against E-Verify, a flawed federal database program with a high error rate. Using such an error-ridden database leads to problems for lawful workers who must persuade multiple bureaucracies to fix their records if they want to keep their jobs.
Rather than run the risk of suffering the laws’ penalties, many employers would simply rather not hire individuals they perceive as foreign-born resulting in widespread employment discrimination.
Looking Latino and speaking Spanish is far from the probable cause the police must have to question and arrest a person. Yet that’s exactly what happens to many Latinos in this country, whether they are U.S. citizens or non-citizens who are legal residents. These types of stops are rampant and violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of warrantless searches and seizures, which applies to everyone regardless of immigration status.
Recently, the Department of Homeland Security has expanded programs that allow certain state and local law enforcement agencies to engage in federal immigration enforcement activities. The programs have led to illegal racial profiling and civil rights abuses, including the unlawful detention and deportation of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. At the same time, they divert scarce resources from traditional local law enforcement functions and distort immigration enforcement priorities.
The programs have drawn sharp criticism from police chiefs, federal lawmakers, and community groups who point out that such efforts not only fuel discrimination against people based on the color of their skin, their appearance or their accent, but also undermine everyone’s safety by making immigrant communities afraid to report crimes as victims and witnesses.
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In Writing Secure PHP, I covered a few of the most common security holes in websites. It's time to move on, though, to a few more advanced techniques for securing a website. As techniques for 'breaking into' a site or crashing a site become more advanced, so must the methods used to stop those attacks.
Most hosting environments are very similar, and rather predictable. Many web developers are also very predictable. It doesn't take a genius to guess that a site's includes (and most dynamic sites use an includes directory for common files) is an www.website.com/includes/. If the site owner has allowed directory listing on the server, anyone can navigate to that folder and browse files.
Imagine for a second that you have a database connection script, and you want to connect to the database from every page on your site. You might well place that in your includes folder, and call it something like connect.inc. However, this is very predictable - many people do exactly this. Worst of all, a file with the extension ".inc" is usually rendered as text and output to the browser, rather than processed as a PHP script - meaning if someone were to visit that file in a browser, they'll be given your database login information.
Placing important files in predictable places with predictable names is a recipe for disaster. Placing them outside the web root can help to lessen the risk, but is not a foolproof solution. The best way to protect your important files from vulnerabilities is to place them outside the web root, in an unusually-named folder, and to make sure that error reporting is set to off (which should make life difficult for anyone hoping to find out where your important files are kept). You should also make sure directory listing is not allowed, and that all folders have a file named "index.html" in (at least), so that nobody can ever see the contents of a folder.
Never, ever, give a file the extension ".inc". If you must have ".inc" in the extension, use the extension ".inc.php", as that will ensure the file is processed by the PHP engine (meaning that anything like a username and password is not sent to the user). Always make sure your includes folder is outside your web root, and not named something obvious. Always make sure you add a blank file named "index.html" to all folders like include or image folders - even if you deny directory listing yourself, you may one day change hosts, or someone else may alter your server configuration - if directory listing is allowed, then your index.html file will make sure the user always receives a blank page rather than the directory listing. As well, always make sure directory listing is denied on your web server (easily done with .htaccess or httpd.conf).
Out of sheer curiosity, shortly after writing this section of this tutorial, I decided to see how many sites I could find in a few minutes vulnerable to this type of attack. Using Google and a few obvious search phrases, I found about 30 database connection scripts, complete with usernames and passwords. A little more hunting turned up plenty more open include directories, with plenty more database connections and even FTP details. All in, it took about ten minutes to find enough information to cause serious damage to around 50 sites, without even using these vulnerabilities to see if it were possible to cause problems for other sites sharing the same server.
Most site owners now require an online administration area or CMS (content management system), so that they can make changes to their site without needing to know how to use an FTP client. Often, these are placed in predictable locations (as covered in the last article), however placing an administration area in a hard-to-find location isn't enough to protect it.
Most CMSes allow users to change their password to anything they choose. Many users will pick an easy-to-remember word, often the name of a loved one or something similar with special significance to them. Attackers will use something called a "dictionary attack" (or "brute force attack") to break this kind of protection. A dictionary attack involves entering each word from the dictionary in turn as the password until the correct one is found.
The best way to protect against this is threefold. First, you should add a turing test to a login page. Have a randomly generated series of letters and numbers on the page that the user must enter to login. Make sure this series changes each time the user tries to login, that it is an image (rather than simple text), and that it cannot be identified by an optical character recognition script.
Second, add in a simple counter. If you detect a certain number of failed logins in a row, disable logging in to the administration area until it is reactivated by someone responsible. If you only allow each potential attacker a small number of attempts to guess a password, they will have to be very lucky indeed to gain access to the protected area. This might be inconvenient for authentic users, however is usually a price worth paying.
Finally, make sure you track IP addresses of both those users who successfully login and those who don't. If you spot repeated attempts from a single IP address to access the site, you may consider blocking access from that IP address altogether.
One excellent way to make sure that even if you have a problem with someone accessing your database who shouldn't be able to, you can limit the damage they can cause. Modern databases like MySQL and SQL Server allow you to control what a user can and cannot do. You can give users (or not) permission to create data, edit, delete, and more using these permissions. Usually, I try and ensure that I only allow users to add and edit data.
If a site requires an item be deleted, I will usually set the front end of the site to only appear to delete the item. For example, you could have a numeric field called "item_deleted", and set it to 1 when an item is deleted. You can then use that to prevent users seeing these items. You can then purge these later if required, yourself, while not giving your users "delete" permissions for the database. If a user cannot delete or drop tables, neither can someone who finds out the user login to the database (though obviously they can still do damage).
PHP contains a variety of commands with access to the operating system of the server, and that can interact with other programs. Unless you need access to these specific commands, it is highly recommended that you disable them entirely.
For example, the eval() function allows you to treat a string as PHP code and execute it. This can be a useful tool on occasion. However, if using the eval() function on any input from the user, the user could cause all sorts of problems. You could be, without careful input validation, giving the user free reign to execute whatever commands he or she wants.
There are ways to get around this. Not using eval() is a good start. However, the php.ini file gives you a way to completely disable certain functions in PHP - "disable_functions". This directive of the php.ini file takes a comma-separated list of function names, and will completely disable these in PHP. Commonly disabled functions include ini_set(), exec(), fopen(), popen(), passthru(), readfile(), file(), shell_exec() and system().
It may be (it usually is) worth enabling safe_mode on your server. This instructs PHP to limit the use of functions and operators that can be used to cause problems. If it is possible to enable safe_mode and still have your scripts function, it is usually best to do so.
Finally, Be Completely and Utterly Paranoid
Much as I hate to bring this point up again, it still holds true (and always will). Most of the above problems can be avoided through careful input validation. Some become obvious points to address when you assume everyone is out to destroy your site. If you are prepared for the worst, you should be able to deal with anything.
Ready for more? Try Writing Secure PHP, Part 3.
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Electrical workers by Shutterstock
- It is undeniable that the unemployment rate would be lower if fewer government jobs had been cut.
- Private sector employment is important for the simple fact that state & local tax revenues fund public sector salaries.
- The private sector, despite turbulent economic times and uncertainty, continues to be the engine of economic growth.
Editor's note: This article originally appeared in The New York Times' Room for Debate in response to the question: Are government layoffs the problem? What effect have public-sector job cuts had on the economy? Could governments have responded to the recession in any other way?
It is undeniable that the unemployment rate would be lower, and the recovery more pronounced, if fewer government jobs had been cut. But if the private sector is "doing fine," as President Obama famously said, could one reason be those losses in state and local jobs? The answer is yes.
During 2009 and 2010, President Obama and Congress spent 2.6 percent of gross domestic product at the state and local level primarily through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. But despite this huge stimulus spending, the share of G.D.P. contributed by state and local governments has collapsed since 2007.
While state and local spending accounted for nearly 13 percent of G.D.P. in 2008, barely 11 percent of G.D.P. comes from state and local spending today.
Meanwhile, the private sector, despite the turbulent economic times and the recent uncertainty surrounding the fiscal cliff talks, has continued to be the engine of economic growth. Despite shedding a large number of workers at the start of the recession, the private sector has added 5.0 million new employees since June 2009 as state and local governments have dropped 682,000 jobs. Private sector G.D.P. has continued to grow as businesses innovate and become more productive, finding ways to survive and grow in a challenging business environment.
Public sector workers, particularly those involved in education, have an important role to play in the economy. In most states, they account for about 14 percent of all jobs. But real economic growth has to start in the other 86 percent of the economy, where most workers earn their living. Indeed, private sector employment is important if even for the simple fact that state and local tax revenues fund public sector salaries.
As of January, the unemployment rate for those classified as government workers by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is only 4.2 percent, compared to 8.6 percent unemployment in the private sector. Clearly, if we care about economic recovery, we should focus our efforts at combating the specter of private sector unemployment. In a study of data from 1939 to 2008 the economist Valerie Ramey concluded that an increase in government spending typically causes private spending to fall significantly.
That should mean that the current recession-driven cuts in public expenditures may be exactly the stimulus needed to get the private sector on the road to recovery.
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Teaching toward a world without war
Elizabeth Gray Vining, 1902–1999
A Philadelphia native and member of Germantown Monthly Meeting, Elizabeth Gray Vining published her first book for young adults at the age of 22, and went on to publish over 60 more in her lifetime. At the age of 42, Elizabeth wrote weekly releases on the activities of AFSC for Quaker papers and other religious publications, when she was selected to be the first woman to tutor the crown prince of Japan.
Her name had been suggested to the education commission by then Executive Secretary Clarence E. Pickett, who had visited Emperor Hirohito and heeded his request for help in finding an American tutor for the crown prince. After listing Elizabeth’s many accomplishments in a letter of recommendation, Clarence Pickett added that she was “one of the most lovely and cultured women that I have ever known,” but “she would not lift a finger to seek the appointment.”
Once chosen, the American press expressed Elizabeth’s position as an opportunity to spread the values of American democracy. But she was clear that this was an opportunity to build bridges: “I am not here in Japan as a missionary,” she declared. “I will present my views and let my pupil go on from there… I hope I can contribute to the peace and understanding of the world. The emphasis will be on a world without war, and on nations working together for peace.”
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Can a Ray of Sunshine Help the Critically Ill? Tuesday, April 3, 2012
TAU researcher finds that vitamin D deficiency is associated with increased mortality in intensive care patients
Scientists have long believed that vitamin D, which is naturally absorbed from sunlight, has an important role in the functioning of the body's autoimmune system. Now Prof. Howard Amital of Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and Sheba Medical Center has discovered that the vitamin may also affect the outcomes of patients in intensive care.
In a six-month study, Prof. Amital and his colleagues found that patients who had a vitamin D deficiency lived an average of 8.9 days less than those who were found to have sufficient vitamin D. Vitamin D levels also correlated with the level of white blood cells which fight disease.
The study, which was published in the journal QJM: An International Journal of Medicine, demonstrates further research into giving patients vitamin D could confirm that it will improve their survival outcomes.
Adding days of life
To measure the impact of vitamin D levels on the survival of critically ill patients, the researchers designed an observational study. Over the course of six months, 130 patients over the age of 18 admitted to an intensive care unit of a TAU-affiliated hospital and requiring mechanical ventilation were admitted to the study. Patients who had taken vitamin D supplements prior to admittance were excluded from the study population.
Upon admittance, patients were divided into two groups based on vitamin D concentration: those who had 20 nanograms or more of the vitamin — the amount defined as the National Institute of Health as sufficient — and those who were vitamin D deficient based on the same criteria. In total, 107 patients suffered from vitamin D deficiency.
Survival curves indicate that while patients with sufficient vitamin D survived an average of 24.2 days, those who were deemed to be deficient in vitamin D survived an average of only 15.3 days — patients with sufficient vitamin D levels survived an average of 8.9 days longer. They were also found to have a better WBC count.
Seek out sun — or supplements
These findings merit further investigation, Prof. Amital says. He suggests that the effects of vitamin D supplementation in critically ill patients be further assessed in future studies. The initial results indicate only that vitamin D concentration may be an indicator of survival, he says.
But don't wait until you're in poor health to start taking vitamin D, suggests Prof. Amital. Vitamin D appears to enhance the function of the immune system in numerous ways, and it’s becoming clear that it does have an impact on overall health and well-being.
According to research, including an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, the majority of those who live in North America and other Western countries are known to be vitamin D deficient due to limited exposure to the sun. But even if the springtime skies are gray, supplements from the pharmacy shelf will have the same benefits, Prof. Amital says.
For more diet and nutrition health news from Tel Aviv University, click here.
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BACKGROUND: A new type of stethoscope relies on ultrasound to enable doctors to hear the sounds of the body in extremely loud situations, such as during the transportation of patients in MedEVAC helicopters, or wounded soldiers in Blackhawk helicopters.
HOW IT WORKS: These new ultrasound models transmit a sound signal into the patientıs body. This sound is reflected back to the stethoscope at a slightly different frequency because it bounces off the internal organs, changing the sound wave patternı essentially, the Doppler effect. The difference in frequencies between the transmitted sound wave and the returning sound wave received by the instrument can be computed to determine the motion of the internal organs. This difference in frequency is then converted into audible sound. Ultrasound stethoscopes produce a markedly different sound than conventional ones. An acoustic stethoscope yields a ılub-dubı sound from a heartbeat with the first beat being the strongest. An ultrasound stethoscope yields a ıta-da-taı pattern with the second beat being the strongest.
THE PROBLEM: Traditional stethoscopes transmit and amplify sound within the range of human hearing: from 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz. Most body sound, such as that of the heart and lungs, fall into the 100 to 200 hertz range. Current acoustic stethoscopes detect and amplify vibrations that allow doctors to hear the heart and lungs better. However, they become difficult to use around 80 decibels ı a noise level comparable to an alarm clock or a busy street, -- and are useless above 90 decibels. Modern electronic stethoscopes improved that threshold to 95 decibels by replacing the earpieces with loudspeaker inserts, which provide a better seal over the ear canal. They also have electrical cables instead of the conventional tubing, decreasing acoustic noise. But this is still not sufficient to make the instruments useful in very noisy environments. The ultrasound stethoscope is nearly impervious to loud noise and can make accurate readings at noise levels up to 120 decibels, similar to the volume experienced in the front row at a rock concert.
THE DOPPLER EFFECT: Both sound waves and light waves exhibit the Doppler Effect. Just as a train whistle will sound higher as it approaches a platform and then become lower in pitch as it moves away, light emitted by a moving object is perceived to increase in frequency (a blue shift) if it is moving toward the observer; if the object is moving away from us, it will be shifted toward the red end of the spectrum.
The Acoustical Society of America contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.
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Why the Jews?: The Reason for Antisemitism
From the bestselling authors of "The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism" comes a completely revised and updated edition of a modern classic that ... Show synopsis From the bestselling authors of "The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism" comes a completely revised and updated edition of a modern classic that reflects the dangerous rise in antisemitism during the twenty-first century. The very word "Jew" continues to arouse passions as does no other religious, national, or political name. Why have Jews been the object of the most enduring and universal hatred in history? Why did Hitler consider murdering Jews more important than winning World War II? Why has the United Nations devoted more time to tiny Israel than to any other nation on earth? In this seminal study, Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin attempt to uncover and understand the roots of antisemitism -- from the ancient world to the Holocaust to the current crisis in the Middle East. This postmillennial edition of "Why the Jews?" offers new insights and unparalleled perspectives on some of the most recent, pressing developments in the contemporary world, including: - The replicating of Nazi antisemitism in the Arab world - The pervasive anti-Zionism/antisemitism on university campuses - The rise of antisemitism in Europe - Why the United States and Israel are linked in the minds of antisemites Clear, persuasive, and thought provoking, "Why the Jews?" is must reading for anyone who seeks to understand the unique role of the Jews in human history.
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Science Fair Project Encyclopedia
William Bligh (September 9, 1754 - December 7, 1817) was an officer of the British Royal Navy and colonial administrator. He is best known for the famous mutiny that occurred against his command aboard HMAV Bounty. After the Bounty mutiny he became Governor of New South Wales, where his stern administration engendered another insurrection, the Rum Rebellion led by John Macarthur.
Bligh was born in Plymouth, a seaport in south-west England, and went to sea at the age of eight. In 1776, he was selected by Captain James Cook for the crew of the Resolution and, in 1787, selected as commander of the HMAV Bounty. He would eventually rise to the rank of Vice Admiral in the British Navy.
William Bligh's naval career consisted of a variety of appointments and assignments. A summary is as follows:
- July 1, 1762: Ship's Boy and Captain's Servant, HMS Monmouth
- July 27, 1770: Able Seaman, HMS Hunter
- February 5 1771: Midshipman, HMS Hunter
- September 22, 1771: Midshipman, HMS Crescent
- September 2, 1774: Able Seaman, HMS Ranger
- September 30, 1775: Master's Mate, HMS Ranger
- March 20, 1776: Master, HMS Resolution
- February 14, 1781: Master, HMS Belle Poule
- October 5, 1781: Lieutenant, HMS Berwick
- January 1, 1782: Lieutenant, HMS Princess Amelia
- March 20, 1782: Lieutenant, HMS Cambridge
- January 14, 1783: Joined Merchant Service as Lieutenant
- 1785: Commanding Lieutenant, Merchant Vessel Lynx
- 1786: Lieutenant, Merchant Vessel Brittania
- 1787: Returns to Royal Navy active service
- August 16, 1787: Commanding Lieutenant, HMAV Bounty
- November 14, 1790: Captain, HMS Falcon
- December 15, 1790: Captain, HMS Medea
- April 16, 1791: Captain, HMS Providence
- April 30, 1795: Captain, HMS Calcutta
- January 7, 1796: Captain, HMS Director
- March 18, 1801: Post Captain, HMS Glatton
- April 12, 1801: Post Captain, HMS Monarch
- May 8, 1801: Post Captain, HMS Irresistible
- May 2, 1804: Post Captain, HMS Warrior
- May 14, 1805: Governor of New South Wales
- September 27, 1805: Post Captain, HMS Porpoise
- July 31, 1808: Commodore, HMS Porpoise
- April 3, 1810: Commodore, HMS Hindostan
- July 31, 1810: Appointed Rear Admiral of the Blue
- June 4, 1814: Appointed Vice Admiral of the Blue
The voyage of the Bounty
In 1787, Bligh took command of the Bounty. He first sailed to Tahiti to obtain breadfruit trees, then set course for the Caribbean, where the breadfruit were wanted for experiments to see if breadfruit would be a successful food crop there. The Bounty never reached the Caribbean, as mutiny broke out onboard shortly after leaving Tahiti. In later years, Bligh would repeat the same voyage that the Bounty had undertaken and would eventually succeed in delivering the breadfruit to the West Indies. Bligh's mission may have introduced the akee to the Caribbean as well, though this is uncertain. (Akee is now called Blighia sapida in binomial nomenclature after Bligh).
The mutiny, which broke out during the return voyage, was led by Master's Mate Fletcher Christian and supported by a quarter of the crew. The mutineers provided Bligh and the eighteen of his crew who remained loyal with a 23 foot (7 m) launch, provisions sufficient to reach the most accessible ports, a sextant and a pocket watch, but no charts or compass. Bligh disdained the obvious course of action, which would have been sailing for nearer Spanish ports where they would be repatriated to Britain after delays. Bligh was confident in his navigational skills and considering his first responsibility to be getting word of the mutiny as soon as possible to British vessels that could pursue the mutineers, so he embarked instead on a 3618 nautical mile (6701 km) voyage to Timor. In the successful 41 day voyage, the only casualty was one crewman killed by hostile natives.
To this day, the reasons for the mutiny are a subject of considerable debate. Some feel that Bligh was a cruel tyrant whose abuse of the crew led members of the crew to feel that they had no choice but to take the ship from Bligh. Others feel that the crew, after having been exposed to freedom and sexual excess on the island of Tahiti refused to return to the "Jack Tars" existence of a seaman. They hold that the crew took the ship from Bligh so that they could return to a life of comfort and pleasure on Tahiti.
After the Bounty
Bligh was buried in a family plot at Lambeth. This church is now the Museum of Garden History. His gravestone is topped by a breadfruit. Bligh's house is marked by a plaque a block east of the Museum.
- Caroline Alexander, The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty, Viking Penguin, 2003, hardcover, 512 pages, ISBN 067003133X
- A Voyage to the South Sea by William Bligh, 1792, from Project Gutenberg. The full title of Bligh's own account of the famous mutiny is: A Voyage to the South Sea, undertaken by command of His Majesty, for the purpose of conveying the bread-fruit tree to the West Indies, in his majesty's ship the Bounty, commanded by Lieutenant William Bligh. Including an account of the Mutiny on board the said ship, and the subsequent voyage of part of the crew, in the ship's boat, from Tofoa, one of the friendly islands, to Timor, a Dutch settlement in the East Indies. The whole illustrated with charts, etc.
- Portraits of Bligh in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
- There is a display devoted to Bligh at the Museum of Garden History.
The contents of this article is licensed from www.wikipedia.org under the GNU Free Documentation License. Click here to see the transparent copy and copyright details
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• excruciate •
Part of Speech: Verb, transitive
Meaning: To torment, to torture, to inflict severe physical or mental on someone.
Notes: Today's Good Word is probably most often heard in the redundant phrase excruciating pain, in other words, extremely painful pain. The participle, excruciating, is used freely as an adjective, but there is an independent noun, excruciation. The agent noun, excruciator, is very rarely used but stands ready if needed.
In Play: While torture applies to systematic physical maltreatment, today's word refers to more casual torment: "Mallory seemed to enjoy excruciating his guests with his accordion." The torment may be mental or physical: "Although Pamela felt quite fashionable at the cotillion, her new shoes excruciated her toes all night."
Word History: Today's word comes from the past participle of Latin excruciare "to torture out, crucify". It is based on ex "out" + cruciare "to crucify", a verb based on crux (cruc-s) "cross", also used by English as the crux of a problem. Since the original root behind crux meant "bent, crooked", we might think crux related to English crook. However, the [k] sounds would have been reduced to [h] or have vanished entirely in English, so no connection can be drawn. (We must be straight with Luis Alejandro Apiolaza, however, and thank him for suggesting today's Good Word, lest our oversight in any way excruciate him.)
Come visit our website at <http://www.alphadictionary.com> for more Good Words and other language resources!
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Restrictions of freedom
The Act on Protection against Family Violence of 2003 covers the issue of violence perpetrated within families and therefore covers the case of violence towards a relative with dementia. The definition of violence is very comprehensive and includes restriction of freedom of movement and presumably various coercive measures.
“Family violence is any use of physical force or psychological pressure against the integrity of a person; any other behaviour of a family member which can cause or potentially cause physical or psychological pain; causing feelings of fear or being personally endangered or feeling of offended dignity; physical attack regardless of whether or not it results in physical injury, verbal assaults, insults, cursing, name-calling and other forms of severe disturbance; sexual harassment; stalking and other forms of disturbance; illegal isolation or restriction of the freedom of movement or communication with third persons; damage or destruction of property or attempts to do so.” (Cited by the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women, 2009).
United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women (2009), The UN Secretary-General’s database on violence against women: extract on Croatia. Accessed online on 20 October 2011 at: http://webapps01.un.org/vawdatabase/searchDetail.action?measureId=6015&baseHREF=country&baseHREFId=388
Last Updated: mercredi 14 mars 2012
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Spiders: True or False?
Spiders evolved more than 300 million years ago, long before dinosaurs walked the Earth.
- True. Those ancient spiders didn't build webs but sought the safety of burrows dug underground. There, they were shaded from the Sun and protected from predators.
There are as many species of mammals as there are spiders.
- False. While there are about 6,000 mammal species, scientists have identified over 43,000 spider species so far. There may be at least as many still out there to be discovered.
Every spider sheds its exoskeleton, the inflexible outer shell, several times during its life.
- True. Most stop molting once they reach maturity, though females from some relatively primitive families of spiders continue to do so throughout their lives.
Spiders have poor eyesight.
- True. Nearly all have eight simple eyes--consisting of one lens and a retina--arranged in different ways but, for the most part, don't see very well. In most cases, spiders use other senses, like touch and smell, to help capture prey.
All spiders make webs.
- False. Only about 50 percent of known spider species do. Others hunt their prey or burrow underground. One species, Argyroneta aquatica, lives underwater.
All spider silk is the same.
- False. Spiders make many different kinds of silk, each with a property--toughness, flexibility, stickiness--specific to the task it performs.
Spiders are important predators.
- True. By one estimate, the spiders on one acre of woodland alone consume more than 80 pounds (36 kg) of insects a year! Those insect populations would explode without predators.
Not all spiders have venom.
- True. Those in the group Uloboridae don't. Instead of subduing their prey with venom, they wrap it tightly with silk.
I'm very likely to be bitten by a spider.
- False. With a few exceptions, spiders are very shy. They almost always run away rather than bite. In addition, misdiagnosis of insect bites as spider bites is very common.
Spiders don't care for their offspring.
- False. Many spiders do. For instance, a female wolf spider may carry an egg sac containing her young for weeks. Once the spiderlings hatch, she hauls as many as 100 or more of them on her back for another week or so.
Like many animals, spiders are threatened by habitat destruction and introduced species.
- True. Despite these threats, spiders and other non-vertebrates can be overlooked in conservation planning, in part because they're so small.
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by AMNH on
Don’t miss this rare view of aspects of traditional Tibetan medicine in exquisite paintings from a set in the Museum’s collections, based on illustrations from the late 17th century. On view in the Audubon Gallery on the fourth floor, these hand-painted reproductions provide a unique and rich illustrated history of early medical knowledge and procedures in Tibet, as Laila Williamson, curator of Body and Spirit, explains in this video:
The 64 paintings on display are believed to be among only a handful of such sets in existence. Each of them was painstakingly reproduced by hand in the late 1990s by Romio Shrestha, a Nepalese artist, and his students, who followed the Tibetan tradition of copying older paintings, basing their work on two published sets of medical tangkas likely painted in the early 1900s that were copies of the original set. The originals were created in the late 1600s to illustrate the Blue Beryl, an important commentary on the classic Tibetan medical text, The Four Tantras.
The Blue Beryl was written by Sangye Gyatso, regent to the Fifth Dalai Lama, who commissioned the original paintings for use as teaching aids in the medical school he founded in Lhasa, Tibet. The causes, diagnostic techniques, and treatments of illness, as well as human anatomy, are represented in nearly 8,000 extraordinarily detailed images painted on canvas using vegetable and mineral dyes. The fate of the original paintings is unknown; Shrestha based his work on published sources.
by AMNH on
Each of the Museum’s treasured habitat dioramas depicts a scene from a real place, cast in the light of a particular time of day. These re-creations are based on meticulous observations of scientists in the field and the on-site sketches of the artists who accompanied them. Last fall, Stephen C. Quinn of the Museum’s Exhibition Department took a remarkable trip to locate the exact site of the Museum’s mountain gorilla diorama and record the changes that have taken place in the 80-plus years since Carl Akeley’s final visit. Below is Quinn’s article about his journey, which originally appeared in the Summer issue of Rotunda, the Members’ magazine.
When Carl Akeley—explorer, naturalist, artist, and taxidermist who created the Museum’s Akeley Hall of African Mammals—first encountered the mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei) in 1921, it was a creature steeped in myth and folklore. Akeley, who was researching and collecting specimens to create the now-famous mountain gorilla diorama, was among the first to accurately document mountain gorillas as intelligent and social animals that, even then, were under grave threat from overhunting. His research inspired him to dedicate the last few years of his life to the conservation and protection of the mountain gorilla. Akeley convinced King Albert of Belgium to set aside 200 square miles that would be their sanctuary, creating Africa’s first national park, which today lies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the border with Uganda and Rwanda, and which has been classified a World Heritage site by UNESCO since 1979.
by AMNH on
You can now explore some of the objects identified at this year’s ID Day—including a 100-million-year-old fossilized fish and a French Navaja knife—online in the AMNH ID Day group on Flickr. You are also invited to add your own specimen photos, comments, and stories to the group. Sharing your photos is easy: just join the AMNH ID Day group and add your photos to the pool. Unidentified objects are welcome—your photo might be selected for identification by a Museum scientist in the coming months!
Click here to join the group.
by AMNH on
Blogging from west Kenya, William Harcourt-Smith, a research associate in the Division of Paleontology, is directing a 20-million-year-old paleontological site on two islands in Lake Victoria. One of these islands, Rusinga, is best known as the site of the discovery of the first fossils of Proconsul, an early ape. Harcourt-Smith’s multidisciplinary team includes physical anthropologists and geologists, and in addition to collecting fossils, researchers are trying to learn more about the evolutionary events and environmental conditions that may have influenced the emergence of Proconsul and other early ape lineages.
by AMNH on
The United States leads the world in frequency of tornadoes, with over 1,000 twisters expected to hit each year, according to the NationalClimatic Data Center. Nowhere are they more likely to occur than in Florida and a large area of the south-central U.S. known as Tornado Alley—the eponymous subject of the heart-pounding new IMAX film now showing on the big screen at the Museum’s Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak Theater.
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Search through the catalogue of ancient history books:
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The Hittites were an ancient Anatolian people who spoke a language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family and established a kingdom centered at Hattusa in on the central Anatolian plateau in the 18th century BC. The Hittite empire reached its height around 1285 BC, encompassing a large part of Anatolia, north-western Syria about as far... [continue reading]
The word civilization is related to the Latin word, civitas ”city”. The term is used in several ways, generally denoting complex human cultural development. Some scholars restrict the use of the term to urbanized societies, in other words, cultures that have achieved a development that has allowed them to create large and permanent settlements... [continue reading]
Babylon was probably the most famous city of ancient Mesopotamia. Until today the city is a symbol for wealth, power, and sin (largely due to its treatment in the Bible). The name Babylon is the Greek form of Babel of Babili, which means "the gate of the god" in Semitic, which again is the translation of the original Sumerian name Ka-dimirra... [continue reading]
Sumer (Sumerian: ki-en-ĝir "Land of the Lords of Brightness", Akkadian: Šumeru; possibly Biblical Shinar) was a civilization and historical region in southern Mesopotamia, Iraq. It is the earliest known civilization in the world and is known as the Cradle of Civilization. The Sumerian civilization spanned over 3000 years and began with... [continue reading]
The term “Aryan” has had a complicated history. The Sanskrit word ārya, the source of the English word, was mainly the self designation of the Vedic Indic people although during time it developed some secondary meanings. It has a cognate in Iranian arya, where it is also a self designation. Both the Indic and Iranian terms descend from a form ārya... [continue reading]
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Created on Day 5
April 5, 2012
Part of this creature’s defense mechanism is its bright coloring. Also, when laying its eggs, the female Spanish dancer deposits a toxin with them, which keeps predators from eating the undeveloped Spanish dancers. The information for these habits was given to this creature by its Creator.
- The Spanish dancer’s flattened body is brightly colored in shades of red, pink, or orange.
- Some are a solid color and some are patterned, depending on the location.
- This is the only nudibranch family that has six gills.
- This creature gets its name from the appearance of its swimming motion. It resembles the flaring skirt of a Spanish dancer.
- The male Spanish dancer enters dance competitions to win its mate.
- This creature is one of the most colorful in the world.
- This species was first described in the Red Sea, where its solid red form is found.
GENUS/SPECIES: Hexabranchus sanguineus
Size: Up to 1.5 ft (0.45 m)
Habitat: Shallow waters of tropical Indian Ocean and western Pacific, on coasts and reefs
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So I've been reading a LOT of Carl jung's works recently. In 'Dreams, Memories and reflections' as well as 'the archetypes and the collective unconscious', he describes in great detail various communications he has made with his unconscious mind, which manifest themselves in all sorts of figures and scenes. Many of the experiences he describes were prophetic in nature and in my opinion, his description of the archetypes is incredibly fascinating and links in with Tony's idea of the Daemon.
In 'On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry' Jung writes :-
'The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure--be it a daemon, a human being, or a process--that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . . In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history.. '
Concerning direct communication with this 'Daemon' archetype Jung came up with a method called 'active imagination', which he said he had used on himself and his patients to communicate with their subconscious (their daemon).
Copied from wikipedia:-
Active Imagination is a concept developed by Carl Jung between 1913 and 1916. It is a meditation technique wherein the contents of one's unconscious are translated into images, narrative or personified as separate entities. It can serve as a bridge between the conscious 'ego' and the unconscious and includes working with dreams and the creative self via imagination or fantasy. Jung linked Active Imagination with the processes of alchemy in that both strive for oneness and inter-relatedness from a set of fragmented and dissociated parts.
Key to the process of active imagination is the goal of exerting as little influence as possible on mental images as they unfold. For example, if a person were recording a spoken visualization of a scene or object from a dream, Jung's approach would ask the practitioner to observe the scene, watch for changes, and report them, rather than to consciously fill the scene with one's desired changes. One would then respond genuinely to these changes, and report any further changes in the scene. This approach is meant to ensure that the unconscious contents express themselves without overbearing influence from the conscious mind. At the same time, however, Jung was insistent that some form of participation in active imagination was essential: 'You yourself must enter into the process with your personal reactions...as if the drama being enacted before your eyes were real'.
Of the origination of active imagination, Jung wrote:
“It was during Advent of the year 1913 – December 12, to be exact – that I resolved upon the decisive step. I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears. Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged into the dark depths.”
Carl Jung developed this technique as one of several that would define his distinctive contribution to the practice of psychotherapy. Active imagination is a method for visualizing unconscious issues by letting them act themselves out. Active imagination can be done by visualization (which is how Jung himself did it), which can be considered similar in technique at least to shamanic journeying. Active imagination can also be done by automatic writing, or by artistic activities such as dance, music, painting, sculpting, ceramics, crafts, etc. Jung considered indeed that 'The patient can make himself creatively independent through this method...by painting himself he gives shape to himself'. Doing active imagination permits the thoughtforms of the unconscious, or inner 'self', and of the totality of the psyche, to act out whatever messages they are trying to communicate to the conscious mind.
For Jung however, this technique had the potential not only to allow communication between the conscious and unconscious aspects of the personal psyche with its various components and inter-dynamics, but also between the personal and 'collective' unconscious; and therefore was to be embarked upon with due care and attentiveness. Indeed, he warned with respect to '"active imagination"...The method is not entirely without danger, because it may carry the patient too far away from reality'. The post-Jungian Michael Fordham was to go further, suggesting that 'active imagination, as a transitional phenomenon ...can be, and often is, both in adults and children put to nefarious purposes and promotes psychopathology'.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_imagination
Has anybody tried this method or done any further research into it?
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One half of optics was missing
At optical frequencies, electromagnetic waves interact with an ordinary optical material (e.g., glass) via the electronic polarizability of the material. In contrast, the corresponding magnetizability is negligible for frequencies above a few THz, or in other words, its magnetic permeability is identical to unity (μ(ω)=1). Consequently, the optical properties of an ordinary optical material are completely characterized by its electric permittivity ε(ω) (or dielectric function). As a result, we can only directly manipulate the electric component of light with an appropriate optical device while we have no immediate handle on the corresponding magnetic component. One half of optics has been missing.
Artificial magnetism at optical frequencies
Photonic metamaterials open up a way to overcome this constraint. The basic idea is to create an artificial crystal with significantly sub-wavelength periods. Analogous to an ordinary optical material, such a photonic metamaterial can approximately be treated as an effective medium characterized by effective material parameters ε(ω) and μ(ω). However, the proper design of the elementary building blocks (or "artificial atoms" or "meta-atoms") of the photonic metamaterial allows for a non-vanishing magnetic response and even for μ<0 at optical frequencies – despite the fact that the constituent materials of the photonic metamaterial are completely non-magnetic.
Negative refractive index …
Much of the early excitement in the field has been about achieving a negative index of refraction n<0 by simultaneous ε<0 and µ<0 at near-infrared or even at visible frequencies. A negative refractive index means that the phase velocity of light is opposite to the electromagnetic energy flow (the Poynting vector). This unusual situation has inspired fascinating ideas like the so-called "perfect lens", which employs the fact that the optical path length between two spatially separate points can be made equal to zero, rendering the two points equivalent for the purpose of optics.
… and beyond
Artificial magnetism is also a necessary prerequisite for obtaining strong optical activity and circular dichroism. These phenomena are based on magnetic dipoles excited by the electric component of the light field and vice versa. Three-dimensional metal helices have been a corresponding paradigm building block in optical textbooks, but their nanofabrication has not been possible until quite recently. Such gold-helix metamaterials can be applied as compact and broadband (more than one octave) circular polarizers - the circular analogue of the good old wire-grid linear polarizer (already used by Heinrich Hertz in his pioneering experiments on electromagnetic waves in Karlsruhe in 1887) and possibly a first down-to-earth application of the deceptively simple but far-reaching ideas of photonic metamaterials.
Transforming optical space
Further flexibility for achieving certain functions arises from intentionally spatially inhomogeneous optical metamaterials. Such structures can be designed using the concepts of transformation optics, which is inspired by Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. In essence, distortions of actual space (e.g., due to heavy masses) can equivalently be mimicked by distortions of optical space, i.e., by tailoring the local index of refraction. Invisibility cloaking structures have been a demanding benchmark example for the strength of transformation optics because invisibility cloaks would have been considered "impossible" just five years ago. Today, direct laser writing has allowed for the first three-dimensional invisibility cloaking structures. Lately, even visible operation frequencies have become accessible.
A complete list of publications can be found here.
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I have long thought that drawing should and would just evolve naturally in kids, and that teaching specific skills might stunt their growth and creativity. But I've been changing my mind about this more and more over the last couple of years.
Maia has been asking for specific drawing guidance for over a year now and I've debated and struggled with this in my head during this time. However, I've finally made the plunge, partly because I worry that she might lose interest in art and drawing altogether if she becomes too frustrated with her ability to draw what she wants, and partly because of this passage from Drawing with Children:
"We don't expect children to play the piano, study dance, or learn a sport without showing them the basic components of these subjects. Why do we expect them to understand the complexities of drawing on their own?"
And, regarding the Monart method, Brookes says:
"Everyone loves to draw if they are given a nonthreatening environment with enough structure for success and enough freedom for creativity. That is what Monart provides. The particular sequence of lessons in this book builds a safe environment as it teaches students to use an alphabet of shape to analyze and break down what they see. Development of perceptual and analytical skills increases critical thinking and problem solving. Easy and quick artistic success also builds self-esteem, and this confidence is transferable to other educational areas."
Sounds good, doesn't it?
So we are beginning to work through the lessons in the Drawing with Children book, spreading the material and exercises from each lesson/chapter out over a week or two. My aim is to keep it fun and go with the flow, but with a specific focus on improving drawing skills. I'll be posting about our progress, if you'd like to follow along.
Daphne will probably draw as well during this time in her own way or play quietly (one can always hope, anyway), but I don't think that she is ready or interested in this kind of instruction yet.
So all that's by way of introduction to today's post...
Maia's drawing, before starting lessons in the book (age 7.5)
Earlier this week, Maia and I each did a drawing to determine our starting level, as outlined by Mona Brookes. I had paper and pens set out after school on Monday afternoon and we each drew a scene with a house, a tree, a person, flowers, shrubs, as well as a few other things. Brookes suggests taking at least 30 minutes for the drawing, and I think we did about that, although I didn't set a timer.
My drawing, before starting lessons in the book (age 35.9)
I'm hoping to improve my own drawing skills as well and so Maia and I are doing this together. Drawing with Children is subtitled "A Creative Method for Adult Beginners, Too." and while I don't consider myself a beginner, it's been years since I've done any drawing and I could definitely use some skill development and practice.
Mona Brookes suggests that to draw well, we need to be more observant of the 5 kinds of lines that things are composed of: dots, circles, straight lines, curved lines, and angles. To determine a starting level in the Monart method, she includes a shape replication exercise that Maia and I both completed.
Maia enjoyed the exercise and was easily able to complete the drawings in all three of the stages, minus the most detailed one from the final 3rd (probably due to a combination of difficulty and losing her interest and focus by that time).
Daphne had no interest in doing the exercise. I had copied one of the stage 1 exercises for her to try if she wanted to join us, but she wasn't able to do it and/or had no interest in trying. I didn't force it, but let her draw with her rock crayons instead (and arrange them on an upturned basket...). With her, I will follow Mona Brooks' suggestion of identifying shapes and lines in our environment for now.
We still have some more to do from lesson 1, including some warm up games and exercises and then a drawing where we pull together all the shape drawing practice we've been doing.
It'll be interesting to see how both of our drawings progress in the weeks and months to come. I'd also like to explore Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, especially for myself, but am going to focus on this book to begin with.
What do you think? Should drawing skills be taught systematically like this when the child is requesting help learning "how to draw" or should the child be left to develop her own skills naturally?
Follow along on the Drawing with Kids series:
- Drawing with Kids using the Monart Method
- Drawing with Kids with the Monart Method :: Lesson 1
- Drawing with Kids :: Lions! (Monart Method Lesson 2)
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The tiger lily is easy to grow and care for, requiring little attention. They thrive in wet soil, and are commonly found near ditches. The bulbs should be planted in early fall, and in warmer climates they can be planted in the late fall.
Because the tiger lily does not produce any seed, it needs to be propagated with the bulbous. These are the small bulbs that grow between the leaf stalk and stem. They can be planted and grown in a nursery and then later transplanted outdoors.
1) Plant the tiger lilies in an area outside with partial to full shade and in an area of soil that will not get overly wet. Plant the lilies in soil far from other flowers of the lily family because they are susceptible to disease and can quickly spread it to other lily members.
2) When the soil starts to get a bit dry, water the tiger lillies. This should be about once a week, unless it’s exceptionally dry or hot. You may need to water them twice a week.
3) A 5-10-10 fertilizer is best for tiger lilies and should be given to them monthly (you can similarly give them lily feed). You should not fertilize the lilies in the winter, but rather when they are growing and in bloom in the rest of the year.
4) When a flower dies, cut it off.
Tip: Sterilize the shears before trimming anything off the lily, because they are so prone to disease and viruses.
5) In the late autumn, when the plant starts to yellow and die, you should cut the whole plant back.
Tip: Be careful not to snip anything while the tiger lily plant is still green because this can harm its ability to grow back next season.
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