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Ecologists have found a disturbing side-effect caused by the world’s rapidly shrinking glaciers. As the ice gets thinner, pockets of methane that have been trapped beneath it are being released. Once this occurs, the methane heads into the atmosphere adding to the Greenhouse Effect. A team of scientists are attempting to map these gas pockets and, if it’s viable, ignite them. So far, they’ve found over 150,000.
Speaking to Discovery News, Katey Walter Anthony, an aquatic ecosystem ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, methane is 25 times stronger than a single molecule of carbon dioxide. Her team has found fame on Youtube by igniting the methane pockets and creating fireballs over Alaskan lakes. Now, she and her colleagues are publishing their findings in Nature Geoscience.
For the first time, Anthony and her colleagues combined Arctic aerial survey data with ground-based measurements to document widespread methane seeps along melting glaciers and permafrost. The team studied both superficial methane seepage from shallow lakes and wetland, and seepage from thicker ice caps – which are continuing to melt.
The team discovered 77 subcap seep sites that had never been documented before, as well as more than 150,000 single bubble streams of methane.
“In a warmer world, thawing permafrost and wastage of glaciers and ice sheets could lead to a significant transitional degassing of subcap methane,” the authors wrote in Nature Geoscience. “Our findings imply that in a warming climate, disintegration of permafrost, glaciers and parts of the polar ice sheets could facilitate the transient expulsion of C-depleted methane trapped by the cryosphere cap.”
In layman’s terms, if the glaciers continue to melt, these gas pockets will be completely free to release their contents into the atmosphere, or even worse, ignite unchecked.
Via Discovery News
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Yet, since the High Middle Ages, the kings, dukes and princes of the empire managed to gain power at the expense of the emperors and over time became nearly autonomous rulers in their territories. The northern states became Protestant after the early 16th century Protestant reformation, while the southern states remained Roman Catholic. In the 17th century, the opponents clashed in the Thirty Years' War, leaving the empire devastated and vast areas depopulated. Of the abundant German states (Kleinstaaterei), Prussia managed to become the largest and dominating state of the North, while Austria united with Hungary forming a multi-ethnic empire in the south.
During the Napoleonic Wars, the French dissolved the Holy Roman Empire. They did not only reorganize the German territories and thereby significantly reduced the number of states to 39, but also enforced a political system influenced by the ideals of the French revolution. After Napoleon's defeat, the German states loosely allied in the Austrian-led German Confederation in 1815, aimed at restoring the pre-Napoleonic state. Within this confederation, Prussia included most German states in her Zollverein free trade area, that excluded Austria. Opposition to the restoration by burghers and students led to the unsuccessful 1848 March Revolution.
In 1866, the Prussian-led North German Confederation replaced the German Confederation, leaving Austria outside. From this confederation, the German Empire was declared in 1871, led by the Kaiser and his chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The empire underwent industrial revolution and promoted nationalistic ideas. In the First World War, Germany aimed to gain a status equalling the most successful nation states of the time, Great Britain and France, yet after the 1918 armistice she instead faced territorial losses, war reparations and other harsh conditions resulting from the Treaty of Versailles. The Kaiser had to resign and democracy was introduced, Germany became a republic.
This Weimar Republic was abandoned, when the prussian government was ousted by a coup (Preussenschlag) in 1932 (lasting nominally until 1933), when in 1933 the Nazis took over Germany with Adolf Hitler becoming chancellor of the Third Reich. The Nazis imposed drastic changes on German society and administration, they initiated the Holocaust, annexations and finally the devastations of World War II. After Nazi Germany's defeat, the Potsdam Agreement left Germany partitioned by the allies and deprived her of all territory east of the Oder-Neisse line, from which nearly all Germans were expelled along with the other Germans living outside post-war Germany.
From May 1945 to 1949, the Allied Occupation Forces ruled over all of Germany and in 1949 the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) was made up from the US, UK and French zones, while the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) evolved from the Soviet zone. While West Germany was a democracy that joined NATO and the European Union, East Germany was part of the Soviet-controlled Eastern Bloc, separated from the West by the iron curtain with its most prominent part, the Berlin wall. In 1989, in the course of the peaceful Wende revolution the East German government was overthrown and the wall opened. In 1990, East Germany was reunited with West Germany.
The ethnogenesis of the Germanic tribes is assumed to have occurred during the Nordic Bronze Age, or at the latest, during the Pre-Roman Iron Age. From southern Scandinavia and northern Germany, the tribes began expanding south, east and west in the 1st century BC, coming into contact with the Celtic tribes of Gaul as well as Iranian, Baltic, and Slavic tribes in Eastern Europe. Little is known about early Germanic history, except through their recorded interactions with the Roman Empire, etymological research, and archaeological finds.
Under Augustus, the Roman General Publius Quinctilius Varus began to invade Germania (a term used by the Romans running roughly from the Rhine to the Urals), and it was in this period that the Germanic tribes became familiar with Roman tactics of warfare while maintaining their tribal identity. In AD 9, three Roman legions led by Varus were defeated by the Cheruscan leader Arminius in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Modern Germany, as far as the Rhine and the Danube, thus remained outside the Roman Empire. By AD 100, the time of Tacitus' Germania, Germanic tribes settled along the Rhine and the Danube (the Limes Germanicus), occupying most of the area of modern Germany. The 3rd century saw the emergence of a number of large West Germanic tribes: Alamanni, Franks, Chatti, Saxons, Frisians, Sicambri, and Thuringii. Around 260, the Germanic peoples broke through the Limes and the Danube frontier into Roman-controlled lands.
From 772 to 814 king Charlemagne extended the Carolingian empire into northern Italy and the territories of all west Germanic peoples, including the Saxons and the Bajuwari (Bavarians). In 800 Charlemagne's authority in Western Europe was confirmed by his coronation as emperor in Rome. The Frankish empire was divided into counties, and its frontiers were protected by border Marches. Imperial strongholds (Kaiserpfalzen) became economic and cultural centres (Aachen being the most famous).
Between 843 and 880, after fighting between Charlemagne's grandchildren, the Carolingian empire was partitioned into several parts in the Treaty of Verdun, the Treaty of Meerssen and the Treaty of Ribemont. The German empire developed out of the East Frankish kingdom, East Francia. From 919 to 936 the Germanic peoples (Franks, Saxons, Swabians and Bavarians) were united under Duke Henry of Saxony, who took the title of king. For the first time, the term Kingdom (Empire) of the Germans ("Regnum Teutonicorum") was applied to a Frankish kingdom, even though Teutonicorum at its founding originally meant something closer to "Realm of the Germanic peoples" or "Germanic Realm" than realm of the Germans.
In 936 Otto I the Great was crowned at Aachen. He strengthened the royal authority by appointing bishops and abbots as princes of the Empire (Reichsfürsten), thereby establishing a national church. In 951 Otto the Great married the widowed Queen Adelheid, thereby winning the Lombard crown. Outside threats to the kingdom were contained with the decisive defeat of the Magyars of Hungary near Augsburg at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955 and the subjugation of Slavs between the Elbe and the Oder rivers. In 962 Otto I was crowned emperor in Rome, taking the succession of Charlemagne and establishing a strong Frankish influence over the Papacy.
During the reign of his son Henry III the Holy Roman Empire supported the Cluniac reform of the Church - the Peace of God, the prohibition of simony (the purchase of clerical offices) and the celibacy of priests. Imperial authority over the Pope reached its peak. An imperial stronghold (Pfalz) was built at Goslar, as the Empire continued its expansion to the East.
In the Investiture Dispute which began between Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII over appointments to ecclesiastical offices, the emperor was compelled to submit to the Pope at Canossa in 1077, after having been excommunicated. In 1122 a temporary reconciliation was reached between Henry V and the Pope with the Concordat of Worms. The consequences of the investiture dispute were a weakening of the Ottonian National Church Reichskirche, and a strengthening of the Imperial secular princes.
From 1100, new towns were founded around imperial strongholds, castles, bishops' palaces and monasteries. The towns began to establish municipal rights and liberties (see German town law), while the rural population remained in a state of serfdom. In particular, several cities became Imperial Free Cities, which did not depend on princes or bishops, but were immediately subject to the Emperor. The towns were ruled by patricians (merchants carrying on long-distance trade). The craftsmen formed guilds, governed by strict rules, which sought to obtain control of the towns. Trade with the East and North intensified, as the major trading towns came together in the Hanseatic League, under the leadership of Lübeck.
The German colonization and the chartering of new towns and villages began into largely Slav-inhabited territories east of the Elbe, such as Bohemia, Silesia, Pomerania, and Livonia (see also Ostsiedlung).
Between 1152 and 1190, during the reign of Frederick I (Barbarossa), of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, an accommodation was reached with the rival Guelph party by the grant of the duchy of Bavaria to Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony. Austria became a separate duchy by virtue of the Privilegium Minus in 1156. Barbarossa tried to reassert his control over Italy. In 1177 a final reconciliation was reached between the emperor and the Pope in Venice.
From 1184 to 1186 the Hohenstaufen empire under Barbarossa reached its peak in the Reichsfest (imperial celebrations) held at Mainz and the marriage of his son Henry in Milan to the Norman princess Constance of Sicily. The power of the feudal lords was undermined by the appointment of "ministerials" (unfree servants of the Emperor) as officials. Chivalry and the court life flowered, leading to a development of German culture and literature (see Wolfram von Eschenbach).
Between 1212 and 1250 Frederick II established a modern, professionally administered state in Sicily. He resumed the conquest of Italy, leading to further conflict with the Papacy. In the Empire, extensive sovereign powers were granted to ecclesiastical and secular princes, leading to the rise of independent territorial states. The struggle with the Pope sapped the Empire's strength, as Frederick II was excommunicated three times. After his death, the Hohenstaufen dynasty fell, followed by an interregnum during which there was no Emperor.
Beginning in 1226 under the auspices of Emperor Frederick II, the Teutonic Knights began their conquest of Prussia after being invited to Chełmno Land by the Polish Duke Konrad I of Masovia. The native Baltic Prussians were conquered and Christianized by the Knights with much warfare, and numerous German towns were established along the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. From 1300, however, the Empire started to lose territory on all its frontiers.
The failure of negotiations between Emperor Louis IV with the papacy led in 1338 to the declaration at Rhense by six electors to the effect that election by all or the majority of the electors automatically conferred the royal title and rule over the empire, without papal confirmation.
The Golden Bull of 1356 stipulated that in future the emperor was to be chosen by four secular electors (the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg) and three spiritual electors (the Archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne).
After the disasters of the 14th century, early-modern European society gradually came into being as a result of economic, religious and political changes. A money economy arose which provoked social discontent among knights and peasants. Gradually, a proto-capitalistic system evolved out of feudalism. The Fugger family gained prominence through commercial and financial activities and became financiers to both ecclesiastical and secular rulers.
The knightly classes found their monopoly on arms and military skill undermined by the introduction of mercenary armies and foot soldiers. Predatory activity by "robber knights" became common. From 1438 the Habsburgs, who controlled most of the southeast of the Empire (more or less modern-day Austria and Slovenia, and Bohemia and Moravia after the death of King Louis II in 1526), maintained a constant grip on the position of the Holy Roman Emperor until 1806 (with the exception of the years between 1742 and 1745). This situation, however, gave rise to increased disunity among the Holy Roman Empires territorial rulers and prevented sections of the country from coming together and forming nations in the manner of France and England.
During his reign from 1493 to 1519, Maximilian I tried to reform the Empire: an Imperial Supreme Court (Reichskammergericht) was established, imperial taxes were levied, the power of the Imperial Diet (Reichstag) was increased. The reforms were, however, frustrated by the continued territorial fragmentation of the Empire.
Around the beginning of the 16th century there was much discontent in the Holy Roman Empire caused by abuses such as indulgences in the Catholic Church and a general desire for reform.
In 1517 the Reformation began with the publication of Martin Luther's 95 theses; he had posted them innocuously in the town square, and copies of them to German nobles, but never nailed them to the church door in Wittenberg as is commonly said. Rather, an unknown person decided to take the 95 theses from their obscure posting and nail them to the Church's door. The list detailed 95 assertions Luther believed to show corruption and misguidance within the Catholic Church. One often cited example, though perhaps not Luther's chief concern, is a condemnation of the selling of indulgences; another prominent point within the 95 theses is Luther's disagreement both with the way in which the higher clergy, especially the pope, used and abused power, and with the very idea of the pope.
In 1520 Luther was outlawed at the Diet of Worms. But the Reformation spread rapidly, helped by the Emperor Charles V's wars with France and the Turks. Hiding in the Wartburg Castle, Luther translated the Bible from Latin to German, establishing the basis of the German language.
In 1515 the Frisian peasants rebellion took place. Led by Pier Gerlofs Donia and Wijard Jelckama, thousends of Frisians (a Germanic race) fought against the supression of their lands by Charles V. The hostilities ended in 1523 when the remaining leaders were captured and decapitated.
In 1524 the Peasants' War broke out in Swabia, Franconia and Thuringia against ruling princes and lords, following the preachings of Reformist priests. But the revolts, which were assisted by war-experienced noblemen like Götz von Berlichingen and Florian Geyer (in Franconia), and by the theologian Thomas Münzer (in Thuringia), were soon repressed by the territorial princes.
From 1545 the Counter-Reformation began in Germany. The main force was provided by the Jesuit order, founded by the Spaniard Ignatius of Loyola. Central and north-eastern Germany were by this time almost wholly Protestant, whereas western and southern Germany remained predominantly Catholic. In 1546, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V defeated the Schmalkaldic League, an alliance of Protestant rulers.
In 1556 Charles V abdicated. The Habsburg Empire was divided, as Spain was separated from the Imperial possessions.
From 1618 to 1648 the Thirty Years' War ravaged in the Holy Roman Empire. The causes were the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, the efforts by the various states within the Empire to increase their power and the Emperor's attempt to achieve the religious and political unity of the Empire. The immediate occasion for the war was the uprising of the Protestant nobility of Bohemia against the emperor (Defenestration of Prague), but the conflict was widened into a European War by the intervention of King Christian IV of Denmark (1625-29), Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (1630-48) and France under Cardinal Richelieu, the regent of the young Louis XIV (1635-48). Germany became the main theatre of war and the scene of the final conflict between France and the Habsburgs for predominance in Europe. The war resulted in large areas of Germany being laid waste, a loss of approximately a third of its population, and in a general impoverishment.
The war ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, signed in Münster and Osnabrück: Imperial territory was lost to France and Sweden and the Netherlands left the Holy Roman Empire after being de facto seceded for 80 years already. The imperial power declined further as the states' rights were increased.
From 1640, Brandenburg-Prussia had started to rise under the Great Elector, Frederick William. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 strengthened it even further, through the acquisition of East Pomerania. A system of rule based on absolutism was established.
Meanwhile Louis XIV of France had conquered parts of Alsace and Lorraine (1678-1681), and had invaded and devastated the Palatinate (1688-1697). Louis XIV benefited from the Empire's problems with the Turks, which were menacing Austria. Louis XIV ultimately had to relinquish the Palatinate.
In 1683 the Turks were defeated outside Vienna by a Polish relief army led by King Jan Sobieski of Poland while the city itself was defended by Imperial and Austrian troops under the command of Charles IV, Duke of Lorraine. Hungary was reconquered, and later became a new destination for German settlers. Austria, under the Habsburgs, developed into a great power.
In the War of Austrian Succession (1740-1748) Maria Theresa fought successfully for recognition of her succession to the throne. But in the Silesian Wars and in the Seven Years' War she had to cede Silesia to Frederick II, the Great, of Prussia. After the Peace of Hubertsburg in 1763 between Austria, Prussia and Saxony, Prussia became a European great power. This gave the start to the rivalry between Prussia and Austria for the leadership of Germany.
From 1763, against resistance from the nobility and citizenry, an "enlightened absolutism" was established in Prussia and Austria, according to which the ruler was to be "the first servant of the state". The economy developed and legal reforms were undertaken, including the abolition of torture and the improvement in the status of Jews; the emancipation of the peasants began. Education was promoted.
In 1772-1795 Prussia took part in the partitions of Poland, occupying western territories of Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, which led to centuries of Polish resistance against German rule and persecution.
The French Revolution sparked a new war between France and several of its Eastern neighbors, including Prussia and Austria. Following the Peace of Basel in 1795 with Prussia, the west bank of the Rhine was ceded to France.
Napoleon I of France relaunched the war against the Empire. In 1803, under the "Reichsdeputationshauptschluss" (a resolution of a committee of the Imperial Diet meeting in Regensburg), he abolished almost all the ecclesiastical and the smaller secular states and most of the imperial free cities. New medium-sized states were established in south-western Germany. In turn, Prussia gained territory in north-western Germany.
The Holy Roman Empire was formally dissolved on 6 August 1806 when the last Holy Roman Emperor Francis II (from 1804, Emperor Francis I of Austria) resigned. Francis II's family continued to be called Austrian emperors until 1918. In 1806 the Confederation of the Rhine was established under Napoleon's protection.
After the Prussian army was defeated by the French revolutionary forces at Jena and Auerstedt, the Peace of Tilsit was signed in 1807: Prussia ceded all its possessions west of the Elbe to France and the kingdom of Westphalia was established under Napoleon's brother Jérome. Some of the territories Prussia conquered from Poland were regained by Duchy of Warsaw.
From 1808 to 1812 Prussia was reconstructed, and a series of reforms were enacted by Freiherr vom Stein and Freiherr von Hardenberg, including the regulation of municipal government, the liberation of the peasants and the emancipation of the Jews. A reform of the army was undertaken by the Prussian generals Gerhard von Scharnhorst and August von Gneisenau.
In 1813 the Wars of Liberation began, following the destruction of Napoleon's army in Russia (1812). After the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, Germany was liberated from French rule. The Confederation of the Rhine was dissolved.
After the fall of Napoleon, European monarchs and statesmen convened in Vienna in 1814 for the reorganization of European affairs, under the leadership of the Austrian Prince Metternich. The political principles agreed upon at this Congress of Vienna included the restoration, legitimacy and solidarity of rulers for the repression of revolutionary and nationalist ideas.
On the territory of the former "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation", the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) was founded, a loose union of 39 states (35 ruling princes and 4 free cities) under Austrian leadership, with a Federal Diet (Bundestag) meeting in Frankfurt am Main.
In 1817, inspired by liberal and patriotic ideas of a united Germany, student organisations gathered for the "Wartburg festival" at Wartburg Castle, at Eisenach in Thuringia, on the occasion of which reactionary books were burnt.
In 1819 the student Karl Ludwig Sand murdered the writer August von Kotzebue, who had scoffed at liberal student organizations. Prince Metternich used the killing as an occasion to call a conference in Karlsbad, which Prussia, Austria and eight other states attended, and which issued the Karlsbad Decrees: censorship was introduced, and universities were put under supervision. The decrees also gave the start to the so-called "persecution of the demagogues", which was directed against individuals who were accused of spreading revolutionary and nationalist ideas. Among the persecuted were the poet Ernst Moritz Arndt, the publisher Johann Joseph Görres and the "Father of Gymnastics" Ludwig Jahn.
In 1834 the Zollverein was established, a customs union between Prussia and most other German states, but excluding Austria.
Growing discontent with the political and social order imposed by the Congress of Vienna led to the outbreak, in 1848, of the March Revolution in the German states. In May the German National Assembly (the Frankfurt Parliament) met in St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt am Main to draw up a national German constitution.
But the 1848 revolution turned out to be unsuccessful: King Frederick William IV of Prussia refused the imperial crown, the Frankfurt parliament was dissolved, the ruling princes repressed the risings by military force and the German Confederation was re-established by 1850.
In 1862 Prince Bismarck was nominated chief minister of Prussia - against the opposition of liberals, who saw him as a reactionary.
In 1863-64, disputes between Prussia and Denmark grew over Schleswig, which - unlike Holstein - was not part of the German Confederation, and which Danish nationalists wanted to incorporate into the Danish kingdom. The dispute led to the Second War of Schleswig, in the course of which Prussia, joined by Austria, defeated Denmark. Denmark was forced to cede both the duchy of Schleswig and the duchy of Holstein to Austria and Prussia. In the aftermath, the management of the two duchies caused growing tensions between Austria and Prussia, which ultimately led to the Austro-Prussian War (1866). The Prussians were victorious in this war, carrying a decisive victory at the Battle of Königgratz under the command of Helmuth von Moltke.
In 1866 the German Confederation was dissolved. In its place the North German Federation (German Norddeutscher Bund) was established, under the leadership of Prussia. Austria was excluded, and would remain outside German affairs for most of the remaining 19th and the 20th centuries.
The North German Federation was a transitory group that existed from 1867 to 1871, between the dissolution of the German Confederation and the founding of the German Empire, led by Otto Von Bismarck who was declared chancellor. With it, Prussia established control over the 22 states of northern Germany and, via the Zollverein, southern Germany.
Differences between France and Prussia over the possible accession to the Spanish throne of a German candidate — whom France opposed — was the French pretext to declare the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). Due to their defensive treaties, joint southern-German and Prussian troops, under the command of Moltke, repelled French troops which had occupied Saarbrücken and proceeded to invade France in August 1870. After a few weeks, the French army was finally forced to capitulate in the fortress of Sedan. French Emperor Napoleon III was taken prisoner and the Second French Empire collapsed, yet the new republic decided to prolong the war for several months. Months after the Siege of Paris was lifted, the Peace Treaty of Frankfurt was signed: France was obliged to cede what became known as Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. The ceded area consisted of Alsace and parts of Lorraine. The fact that many small, French-speaking areas were included was used by France to denounce the new border as hypocrisy, since Germany had justified it by the native Germanic dialects and culture of the areas inhabitants.
During the Siege of Paris, the German princes assembled in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles and proclaimed the Prussian King Wilhelm I as the "German Emperor" on 18 January 1871. The German Empire was thus founded, with 25 states, three of which were Hanseatic free cities, and Bismarck, again, served as Chancellor. It was dubbed the "Little German" solution, since Austria was not included.
Bismarck's domestic policies as Chancellor of Germany were characterized by his fight against perceived enemies of the Protestant Prussian state. In the so-called Kulturkampf (1872–1878), he tried to limit the influence of the Roman Catholic Church and of its political arm, the Catholic Centre Party, through various measures — like the introduction of civil marriage — but without much success. Millions of non-Germans subjects in the German Empire, like the Polish, Danish and French minorities, were discriminated against and a policy of Germanization was implemented.
The other perceived threat was the rise of the Socialist Workers' Party (later known as the Social Democratic Party of Germany), whose declared aim was the establishment of a new socialist order through the transformation of existing political and social conditions. From 1878, Bismarck tried to repress the social democratic movement by outlawing the party's organization, its assemblies and most of its newspapers. Through the introduction of a social insurance system, on the other hand, he hoped to win the support of the working classes for the Empire.
Bismarck's priority was to protect Germany's expanding power through a system of alliances and an attempt to contain crises until Germany was fully prepared to initiate them. Of particular importance, in this context, was the containment and isolation of France, because Bismarck feared that France would form an alliance with Russia and take revenge for its loss of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany.
The Three Emperor's League was signed in 1872 by Russia, Austria and Germany. It stated that republicanism and socialism were common enemies and that the three powers would discuss any matters concerning foreign policy. Bismarck needed good relations with Russia in order to keep France isolated.
In 1879, Bismarck formed a Dual Alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary, with the aim of mutual military assistance in the case of an attack from Russia, which was not satisfied with the agreement reached at the Congress of Berlin.
The establishment of the Dual Alliance led Russia to take a more conciliatory stance, and in 1887, the so-called Reinsurance Treaty was signed between Germany and Russia: in it, the two powers agreed on mutual military support in the case that France attacked Germany, or in case of an Austrian attack on Russia.
In 1882, Italy joined the Dual Alliance to form a Triple Alliance. Italy wanted to defend its interests in North Africa against France's colonial policy. In return for German and Austrian support, Italy committed itself to assisting Germany in the case of a French military attack.
For a long time, Bismarck had refused to give in to Crown Prince Wilhelm II's aspirations of making Germany a world power through the acquisition of German colonies ("a place in the sun", originally a statement of Bernhard von Bülow). Bismarck wanted to avoid tensions between the European great powers that would threaten the security of Germany at all cost. But when, between 1880 and 1885, the foreign situation proved auspicious, Bismarck gave way, and a number of colonies were established overseas: in Africa, these were Togo, the Cameroons, German South-West Africa and German East Africa; in Oceania, they were German New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and the Marshall Islands. In fact, it was Bismarck himself who helped initiate the Berlin Conference of 1885. He did it "establish international guidelines for the acquisition of African territory," (see Colonisation of Africa). This conference was an impetus for the "Scramble for Africa" and "New Imperialism".
In 1888 Kaiser Wilhelm I died at age 91, and his terminally ill son Friedrich III ruled for only 99 days before his death. The 29 year old and ambitious Wilhelm II, Friedrich's son, acceded to the throne. Political and personal differences between Bismarck and the new monarch, who wanted to be "his own chancellor", eventually caused Bismarck to resign in 1890.
When Bismarck resigned, Wilhelm II had declared that he would continue the foreign policy of the old chancellor. But soon, a new course was taken, with the aim of increasing Germany's influence in the world (Weltpolitik). The Reinsurance Treaty with Russia was not renewed. Instead, France formed an alliance with Russia, against the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. The Triple Alliance itself was undermined by differences between Austria and Italy.
From 1898, German colonial expansion in East Asia (Jiaozhou Bay, the Marianas, the Caroline Islands, Samoa) led to frictions with the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan and the United States. The construction of the Baghdad Railway, financed by German banks and heavy industry, and aimed at connecting the North Sea with the Persian Gulf via the Bosporus, also collided with British and Russian geopolitical and economic interests.
To protect Germany's overseas trade and colonies, Admiral von Tirpitz started a programme of warship construction in 1898. This posed a direct threat to British hegemony on the seas, with the result that negotiations for an alliance between Germany and Britain broke down. Germany was increasingly isolated.
Imperialist power politics and the determined pursuit of national interests ultimately led to the outbreak in 1914 of the First World War, sparked by the assassination, on June 28, 1914, of the Austrian heir-apparent Franz Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo, in the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina by a Serbian nationalist. The theorized underlying causes have included the opposing policies of the European states, the armaments race, German-British rivalry, the difficulties of the Austro-Hungarian multinational state, Russia's Balkan policy and overhasty mobilisations and ultimatums (the underlying belief being that the war would be short). Germany fought on the side of Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire against Russia, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan and several other smaller states. Fighting also spread to the Near East and the German colonies.
In the west, Germany fought a war of attrition with bloody battles. After a quick march through Belgium, German troops were halted on the Marne, north of Paris. The frontlines in France changed little until the end of the war. In the east, despite there being initially no decisive victories against the Russian army, the trapping and defeat of large parts of the Russian contingent at the Battle of Tannenberg, followed by smaller Austrian and German successes led to a breakdown of Russian forces and an imposed peace. The British naval blockade in the North Sea had crippling effects on Germany's supplies of raw materials and foodstuffs. The entry of the United States into the war in 1917 following Germany's declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare marked a decisive turning-point against Germany.
At the end of October, units of the German Navy in Kiel, in northern Germany, refused to set sail for a last, large-scale operation in a war which they saw as good as lost. On November 3, the uprising spread to other cities. So-called workers' and soldiers' councils were established.
Kaiser Wilhelm II and all German ruling princes abdicated. On November 9, the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a Republic. On November 11, an armistice ending the war was signed at Compiègne.
On 28 June 1919 the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Germany was to cede Alsace-Lorraine, Eupen-Malmédy, North Schleswig, and the Memel area. Poland was restored and most of the provinces of Posen and West Prussia, and some areas of Upper Silesia were reincorporated into the reformed country after plebiscites and independence uprisings. All German colonies were to be handed over to the Allies. The left and right banks of the Rhine were to be permanently demilitarised. The industrially important Saarland was to be governed by the League of Nations for 15 years and its coalfields administered by France. At the end of that time a plebiscite was to determine the Saar's future status. To ensure execution of the treaty's terms, Allied troops would occupy the left (German) bank of the Rhine for a period of 5–15 years. The German army was to be limited to 100,000 officers and men; the general staff was to be dissolved; vast quantities of war material were to be handed over and the manufacture of munitions rigidly curtailed. The navy was to be similarly reduced, and no military aircraft were allowed. Germany and its allies were to accept the sole responsibility of the war, in accordance with the War Guilt Clause, and were to pay financial reparations for all loss and damage suffered by the Allies.
The humiliating peace terms provoked bitter indignation throughout Germany, and seriously weakened the new democratic regime.
The two biggest enemies of the new democratic order, however, had already been constituted. In December 1918, the German Communist Party (KPD) was founded, followed in January 1919 by the establishment of the German Workers' Party, later known as the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). Both parties would make reckless use of the freedoms guaranteed by the new constitution in their fight against the Weimar Republic.
In the first months of 1920, the Reichswehr was to be reduced to 100,000 men, in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles. This included the dissolution of many Freikorps - units made up of volunteers. Some of them made difficulties. The discontent was exploited by the extreme right-wing politician Wolfgang Kapp. He let the rebelling Freikorps march on Berlin and proclaimed himself Reich Chancellor (Kapp Putsch). After only four days the coup d'état collapsed, due to lack of support by the civil servants and the officers. Other cities were shaken by strikes and rebellions, which were bloodily suppressed.
Faced with animosity from Britain and France and the retreat of American power from Europe, in 1922 Germany was the first state to establish diplomatic relations with the new Soviet Union. Under the Treaty of Rapallo, Germany accorded the Soviet Union de jure recognition, and the two signatories mutually cancelled all pre-war debts and renounced war claims.
When Germany defaulted on its reparation payments, French and Belgian troops occupied the heavily industrialised Ruhr district (January 1923). The German government encouraged the population of the Ruhr to passive resistance: shops would not sell goods to the foreign soldiers, coal-mines would not dig for the foreign troops, trams in which members of the occupation army had taken seat would be left abandoned in the middle of the street. The passive resistance proved effective, insofar as the occupation became a loss-making deal for the French government. But the Ruhr fight also led to hyperinflation, and many who lost all their fortune would become bitter enemies of the Weimar Republic, and voters of the anti-democratic right. See 1920s German inflation.
In September 1923, the deteriorating economic conditions led Chancellor Gustav Stresemann to call an end to the passive resistance in the Ruhr. In November, his government introduced a new currency, the Rentenmark (later: Reichsmark), together with other measures to stop the hyperinflation. In the following six years the economic situation improved. In 1928, Germany's industrial production even regained the pre-war levels of 1913.
On the evening of November 8 1923, six hundred armed SA men surrounded a beer hall in Munich, where the heads of the Bavarian state and the local Reichswehr had gathered for a rally. The storm troopers were led by Adolf Hitler. Born in 1889 in Austria, a former volunteer in the German army during WWI, now a member of a new party called NSDAP, he was largely unknown until then. Hitler tried to force those present to join him and to march on to Berlin to seize power (Beer Hall Putsch). Hitler was later arrested and condemned to five years in prison, but was released at the end of 1924 after less than one year of detention.
In October 1925 the Treaty of Locarno was signed between Germany, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom and Italy, which recognized Germany's borders with France and Belgium. Moreover, Britain, Italy and Belgium undertook to assist France in the case that German troops marched into the demilitarised Rheinland. The Treaty of Locarno paved the way for Germany's admission to the League of Nations in 1926.
The stock market crash of 1929 on Wall Street marked the beginning of the Great Depression. The effects of the ensuing world economic crisis were also felt in Germany, where the economic situation rapidly deteriorated. In July 1931, the Darmstätter und Nationalbank - one of the biggest German banks - failed, and, in early 1932, the number of unemployed rose to more than 6,000,000.
In addition to the flaggling economy came political problems, due to the inability by the political parties represented in the Reichstag to build a governing majority. In March 1930, President Hindenburg appointed Heinrich Brüning Chancellor. To push through his package of austerity measures against a majority of Social Democrats, Communists and the NSDAP, Brüning made use of emergency decrees, and even dissolved Parliament. In March and April 1932, Hindenburg was re-elected in the German presidential election of 1932.
Of the many splinter parties the NSDAP was the largest in the national elections of 1932. The Prussian government had been ousted by a coup (Preussenschlag) in 1932. On July 31, 1932 the NSDAP had received 37.3% of the votes, and in the election on 6 November 1932 it received less, but still the largest share, 33.1, making it the biggest party in the Reichstag. The Communist KPD came third, with 15%. Together, the anti-democratic parties of right and left were now able to hold the majority of seats in Parliament. The NSDAP was particularly successful among young voters, who were unable to find a place in vocational training, with little hope for a future job; among the petite bourgeoisie (lower middle class) which had lost its assets in the hyperinflation of 1923; among the rural population; and among the army of unemployed.
Eleven thousand Communists and Socialists were arrested and brought into concentration camps, where they were at the mercy of the Gestapo, the newly established secret police force (9,000 were found guilty and very many executed). Communist Reichstag deputies were taken into protective custody (despite their constitutional privileges).
Despite the terror and unprecedented propaganda, the last free General Elections of March 5 1933, while resulting in 43.9% failed to bring the majority for the NSDAP that Hitler had hoped for. Together with the German National People's Party (DNVP), however, he was able to form a slim majority government. With accommodations to the Catholic Centre Party Germany, Hitler succeeded in convincing a required two-thirds of a rigged Parliament to pass the Enabling act of 1933 which gave his government full legislative power. Only the Social Democrats voted against the Act. The Enabling Act formed the basis for the Dictatorship, dissolution of the Länder; the trade unions and all political parties other than the National Socialist (Nazi) Party were suppressed. A centralised totalitarian state was established, no longer based on the liberal Weimar constitution. Germany left the League of Nations. The coalition Parliament was rigged on this fateful 23 March 1933 by defining the absence of arrested and murdered deputies as voluntary and therefore cause for their exclusion as wilful absentees. Subsequently in July the Centre Party was voluntarily dissolved in a quid pro quo with the Holy See under the anti-communist Pope Pius XI for the Reichskonkordat; and by these maneuvers Hitler achieved movement of these Catholic voters into the Nazi party, and a long-awaited international diplomatic acceptance of his regime. The Communist Party was proscribed in April 1933 .
However, many leaders of the Nazi SA were disappointed. The Chief of Staff of the SA, Ernst Röhm, was pressing for the SA to be incorporated into the Wehrmacht under his supreme command. Hitler felt threatened by these plans. On the weekend of June 30 1934, he gave order to the SS to seize Röhm and his lieutenants, and to execute them without trial (known as the Night of the Long Knives).
The SS became an independent organisation under the command of the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler. He would become the supervisor of the Gestapo and of the concentration camps, soon also of the ordinary police. Hitler also established the Waffen-SS as a separate troop.
The regime showed particular hostility towards the Jews. In September 1935, the Reichstag passed the so-called Nuremberg race laws directed against Jewish citizens. Jews lost their German citizenship, and were banned from marrying Germans. About 500,000 individuals were affected by the new rules.
Hitler re-established the German air force and reintroduced universal military service. The open rearmament was in flagrant breach of the Treaty of Versailles, but neither the United Kingdom, France or Italy went beyond issuing notes of protest.
In 1936 German troops marched into the demilitarised Rhineland. In this case, the Treaty of Locarno would have obliged the United Kingdom to intervene in favour of France. But despite protests by the French government, Britain chose to do nothing about it. The coup strengthened Hitler's standing in Germany. His reputation was going to increase further with the 1936 Summer Olympics, which were held in the same year in Berlin and in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and which proved another great propaganda success for the regime.
After Austria, Hitler turned to Czechoslovakia, where the 3.5 million-strong Sudeten German minority was demanding equal rights and self-government. At the Munich Conference of September 1938, Hitler, the Italian leader Benito Mussolini, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier agreed upon the cession of Sudeten territory to the German Reich by Czechoslovakia. Hitler thereupon declared that all of German Reich's territorial claims had been fulfilled. However, hardly six months after the Munich Agreement, in March 1939, Hitler used the smoldering quarrel between Slovaks and Czechs as a pretext for taking over the rest of Czechoslovakia as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. In the same month, he secured the return of Memel from Lithuania to Germany. British Prime Minister Chamberlain was forced to acknowledge that his policy of appeasement towards Hitler had failed.
In six years, the Nazi regime prepared the country for World War II. The Nazi leadership attempted to remove or subjugate the Jewish population of Nazi Germany and later in the occupied countries through forced deportation and, ultimately, genocide now known as the Holocaust. A similar policy applied to the various ethnic and national groups considered subhuman such as Poles , Roma or Russians. These groups were seen as threats to the purity of Germany's Aryan race. There were also many groups, such as the mentally handicapped and those who were physically challenged from birth, which were singled out as being detrimental to Aryan purity. After annexing the Sudetenland border country of Czechoslovakia (October 1938), and taking over the rest of the Czech lands as a protectorate (March 1939), the German Reich and the Soviet Union invaded Poland on first September 1939 predominantly as part of the Wehrmacht operation codenamed Fall Weiss. The invasion of Poland began World War II.
By 1941, the Germans were having the upper hand, but the tide turned in December 1941 after the invasion of the Soviet Union stalled in front of Moscow and the USA joined the war. Because of the invasion (see Operation Barbarossa) , the Soviets joined the Allies.The tide turned further after the Battle of Stalingrad. By late 1944, the United States and Great Britain were closing in on Germany in the West, while the Soviets were closing from the East. In May 1945, Nazi Germany collapsed when Berlin was taken over by Soviet and Polish forces. Hitler committed suicide when it seemed inevitable that the Allies would win.
By September 1945, the German Reich (which lasted only 10 years) and its Axis partners (Italy and Japan) had been defeated, chiefly by the forces of the Soviet Union, the United States, United Kingdom, France and Canada. Much of Europe lay in ruins, over sixty million people had been killed (most of them civilians), including approximately six million Jews and five million non-Jews in what became known as the Holocaust. World War II resulted in the destruction of Germany's political and economic infrastructure and led directly to its partition, considerable loss of territory (especially in the east), and historical legacy of guilt and shame.
Germans frequently refer to 1945 as the Stunde Null (zero hour) to describe the near-total collapse of their country. At the Potsdam Conference, Germany was divided into four military occupation zones by the Allies. Also in Potsdam, the allies agreed that the provinces east of the Oder and Neisse rivers (the Oder-Neisse line) were transferred to Poland and Russia (Kaliningrad oblast). The agreement also set forth the abolition of Prussia and the expulsion of Germans living in those territories, and formalized the German exodus from Eastern Europe. In the process of the expulsions, millions died, and many suffered from exhaustion and dehydration.
In the immediate post-war years the German population lived on near starvation levels, and the Allied economic policy was one of de-industrialisation (Morgenthau Plan) in order to preclude any future German war-making capability. U.S. policy began to change at the end of 1946 (Restatement of Policy on Germany), and by mid 1947, after lobbying by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Generals Clay and Marshall, the Truman administration finally realized that economic recovery in Europe could not go forward without the reconstruction of the German industrial base on which it had previously been dependent. In July, Truman rescinded on "national security grounds the punitive JCS 1067, which had directed the U.S. forces of occupation in Germany to "take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany." It was replaced by JCS 1779, which instead stressed that "[a]n orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany.
The three western occupation zones (US, UK and French zone) would later form the Federal Republic of Germany (commonly known as West Germany), while the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic (commonly known as East Germany), both founded in 1949. West Germany was established as a federal democratic republic while East Germany became a Communist State under the influence of the Soviet Union.
West Germany eventually came to enjoy prolonged economic growth beginning in the early 1950s (Wirtschaftswunder). The recovery occurred largely because of the previously forbidden currency reform of June 1948 and to a minor degree by U.S. assistance through Marshall Plan loans. West Germany joined NATO in 1955 and was a founding member of the European Economic Community in 1958 .
East Germany was an Eastern bloc state under political and military control of the USSR via her occupation forces and the Warsaw Treaty. While claiming to be a democracy, the political power was solely executed by leading members (Politburo) of the communist-controlled SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany). Their power was ensured by Stasi, a secret service of immense size, and a variety of SED-suborganizations controlling every aspect of society. In turn, the basic needs of the population were satisfied at low costs by the state. A Soviet-style command economy was set up, later the GDR became the most advanced Comecon state. While East German propaganda was based on the benefits of the GDR's social programs and the alleged constant thread of a West German invasion, many of her citizens looked to the West for political freedoms and economic prosperity. The Berlin Wall, built in 1961 to stop East Germans from escaping to West Germany, became a symbol of the Cold War.
Relations between the two post-war German states remained icy until the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt launched a highly controversial rapprochement with the East European communist states (Ostpolitik) in the 1970s, culminating in the Warschauer Kniefall on 7 December 1970. Although anxious to relieve serious hardships for divided families and to reduce friction, West Germany under Brandt's Ostpolitik was intent on holding to its concept of "two German states in one German nation." Relations improved, however, and in September 1973, East Germany and West Germany were admitted to the United Nations.
During the summer of 1989, rapid changes known as peaceful revolution or Die Wende took place in East Germany, which ultimately led to German reunification. Growing numbers of East Germans emigrated to West Germany, many via Hungary after Hungary's reformist government opened its borders. Thousands of East Germans also tried to reach the West by staging sit-ins at West German diplomatic facilities in other East European capitals, most notably in Prague. The exodus generated demands within East Germany for political change, and mass demonstrations in several cities continued to grow.
Faced with civil unrest, East German leader Erich Honecker was forced to resign in October, and on 9 November, East German authorities unexpectedly allowed East German citizens to enter West Berlin and West Germany. Hundreds of thousands of people took advantage of the opportunity; new crossing points were opened in the Berlin Wall and along the border with West Germany. This led to the acceleration of the process of reforms in East Germany that ended with the German reunification that came into force on 3 October 1990.
Together with France and other EU states, the new Germany has played the leading role in the European Union. Germany (especially under Chancellor Helmut Kohl) was one of the main supporters of the wish of many East European countries to join the EU. Germany is at the forefront of European states seeking to exploit the momentum of monetary union to advance the creation of a more unified and capable European political, defence and security apparatus. The German chancellor expressed an interest in a permanent seat for Germany in the UN Security Council, identifying France, Russia and Japan as countries that explicitly backed Germany's bid.
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In the Garden
Plant catnip in a place where your cats can rub and roll in it without hurting adjacent plants. Some cats like catnip so much that they lie on it, roll on it, and chew it to the point of destruction. If you find that to be the case, place some 1- to 2-foot-long bamboo sticks or thin dowels every 2 to 3 inches wherever you’re growing catnip to make it impossible for a cat to lie on top of the plant.
Catnip grows as a loosely branching, low perennial. In a flowerbed, you can plant catnip in front of purple coneflower, which blooms about the same time. The plant bears tiny, white blooms that are not very showy. You can also grow it in containers.
For indoor cats, grow several pots that you can rotate between outdoors and indoors. Growing catnip requires a lot of light, so you’ll need to move indoor pots back out every couple of weeks and bring in new ones.
Also consider growing catnip near the vegetable garden as a way to attract your cat and thereby keep down the rodent population.
Soil, Planting, and Care
Set out plants in the spring after the last frost, spacing them 18 to 24 inches apart. Keep plants full by pinching the growing stems and flower buds when they appear. The small white flowers that appear in the summer will form seeds that sprout; the plant also spreads via underground runners. Some cats are very rough on plants. To keep plants from being loved to death, cover each with an arch of chicken wire. The stems can grow up through the holes, yet the plant’s base and roots are protected. Or, try interspersing with bamboo stakes to prevent cats from rolling on top of the plant.
Harvest leaves by cutting the stems anytime during the growing season. The foliage keeps its scent best when air-dried.
Harvest and Storage
You can stuff sachets and cat pillows with dried leaves. Dried leaves are also popular for herbal tea.
Download our How to Grow Herbs instructions. They are in .PDF format.
I bought catnip for my cat, but she doesn’t seem to even notice it. What’s wrong?
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The key lesson of all these exercises is that you can push yourself to be better and more confident in theory by tackling simple, paradigmatic problems in an incremental way. You must put pencil to paper! You must do it regularly. But once you do, the benefits come quickly. Each mini-realization builds into knowledge. Each solved simple problem builds your intuition for understanding complex systems.
Below are solutions to the problems from last time. Looking for more? Scroll down for some additional problems.
Here are the answers to the questions from last time, which explain the connection between continuous and discrete-time kinetic descriptions.
Give the full definition of and explain why it’s dimensionless.
- This is the conditional to probability to be in state at time if a system was in state at time . Importantly, it’s completely irrelevant to where the system may have been in between and . It only matters where the system is at the times we’re “looking.” The probability is dimensionless because it’s simply a probability – the fractional chance to be in state – and not a probability per unit time like a rate constant.
If is the time-dependent probability of state , show that .
- At time , some fraction of the probability is in each state , including . Then the total probability in state at the later time is the sum of the ‘contributions’ to state from every state indexed by (including ) based on the . More precisely, is the fraction of the state probability which ends up in , implying is the fraction ‘contributed’.
Using the exact solutions to the continuous-time two-state probabilities, , which we derived previously, calculate the discrete-time transition probabilities and for transitions into state A. This problem is trickier than it sounds (though the math is easy), but don’t worry the derivation is there for you in the notes. The key trick is to write in terms of and using the fact that for any/all .
- For this, please just look at the notes. It’s written out carefully there.
Going forward, here are some key problems you should solve.
- Demonstrate the correctness of the (differential) continuity equation in one dimension by integrating the probability over a small increment.
- Derive the diffusion equation via a Taylor expansion of the time-varying probability distribution. See my online notes.
- Derive the Smoluchowski equation via a Taylor expansion of the time-varying probability distribution. See my online notes.
- Show that the stationary distribution of the Smoluchowski equation is the Boltzmann distribution.
- Show that overdamped dynamics lead to the Boltzmann distribution. For hints, see Sec. IIB of this paper by Chandler’s group.
- Derive the replica-exchange Metropolis acceptance criterion. For hints, see Ch. 12 of my textbook.
- Explain why one takes a linear average of MD or MC snapshots (equally spaced in time) to obtain a Boltzmann-weighted average. See Ch. 2 of my textbook.
- Derive the ideal gas partition function from scratch. See Ch. 5 of my textbook.
Good luck! Work hard, but work slow …
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The First Compilation of the Laws of St. Lucia [Saint Lucia]. Laws at Present in Force in the Island of St. Lucia. London: Printed by W. Clowes and Sons, 1853. vi, 388 pp. Octavo (9-1/2" x 6"). Contemporary calf with early rebacking, red and black lettering pieces and small paper location label to spine, upper lettering piece and endpapers renewed. Moderate rubbing to extremities, some scuffing and edgewear to boards, gilt red and black lettering pieces, light toning to text, internally clean. Ex-library. Old shelf label at head of spine, small embossed stamps to boards, inkstamps to title page. A solid copy of a scarce title. $450. * With index and side-notes. Saint Lucia was discovered by Columbus in 1502. The first group of colonists, from England, were massacred by the Caribs, but the French succeeded in colonizing the island in 1642. It passed between France and Great Britain a number of times and became a British possession in 1803. It became independent and joined the Commonwealth in 1979. As one would suspect, traces of French law remain in the island's legal system. OCLC locates 9 copies in North America. Sweet & Maxwell, A Legal Bibliography of the British Commonwealth 7:341.
Book number 60477
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Music & the Alexander Technique
In many schools, conservatories, and professional settings, patience with injured or troubled musicians is relatively short. In this very competitive profession where jobs are few, musicians who are perceived as having problems risk losing their positions. Therefore, many musicians keep silent when they experience difficulty and tend to be secretive about their problems. Many also find it difficult to find appropriate and effective help. Making music can be surprisingly cruel to the body, the mind, and the emotional life of the musician. Music offers cathartic satisfaction that few other human occupations can match, but for many it exacts a heavy price in the form of chronic afflictions of acute tendonitis, repetitive motion injuries, musculoskeletal disorders, and perhaps most worrisome of all, the debilitating burdens of mental stress, stage fright, and the unrelenting pressures to excel.
An Alexander Technique student learns to identify the habits of thought and movement that create strain (which F.M. Alexander called the “misuse of the self”). The student learns to reorganize himself by freeing his head and neck and by lengthening and widening his back, allowing the entire organism to function with greater ease. Everyday habits are magnified many times over in performance, therefore it is important for the student to learn how to “re-think in the moment” over a wide range of activities, minimizing needless tensions and restoring energy in daily life as well as in performance.
Good use of the self is characterized by an overall pattern of economy and freedom of movement. It means, for example, using no more and no less tension than necessary for a bow stroke or a chord at the piano, or having the time to breathe with the phrase. The Alexander Technique develops skills that prevent useless habits and self-defeating ideas, all the while awakening the student to his remarkable capacity for change and growth.
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Malaria is a public health problem for more than 2 billion people globally. About 219 million cases of malaria occur worldwide and 660,000 people die, mostly (91%) in the African Region despite decades of efforts to control the disease. Although the disease is preventable, it is life-threatening and parasitically transmitted by the bite of the female Anopheles mosquito. A deterministic mathematical model with intervention strategies is developed in order to investigate the effectiveness and optimal control strategies of indoor residual spraying (IRS), insecticide treated nets (ITNs) and treatment on the transmission dynamics of malaria in Karonga District, Malawi. The effective reproduction number is analytically computed, and the existence and stability conditions of the equilibria are explored. The model does not exhibit backward bifurcation. Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle which uses both the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian principles with respect to a time dependent constant is used to derive the necessary conditions for the optimal control of the disease. Numerical simulations indicate that the prevention strategies lead to the reduction of both the mosquito population and infected human individuals. Effective treatment consolidates the prevention strategies. Thus, malaria can be eradicated in Karonga District by concurrently applying vector control via ITNs and IRS complemented with timely treatment of infected people.
"Optimal (Control of) Intervention Strategies for Malaria Epidemic in Karonga District, Malawi." Abstr. Appl. Anal. 2014 (SI37) 1 - 20, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/594256
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Colorado looks to RFID to protect elk herds
Meanwhile, an agribusiness group is eyeing a private database to track cattle and other livestock
Computerworld - The state of Colorado is testing radio frequency identification (RFID) tags as one way to help protect elk herds from contagious disease.
Working with three ranchers and a vendor of animal-tracking systems, the state last month wrapped up a pilot test that involved tracking animals using passive RFID tags. Now the state is looking to launch another test with active RFID tags, which will hopefully extend the tracking range, said Scott Leach, a field investigator for the Colorado Department of Agriculture. Active RFID tags are battery powered and can send out a signal at predetermined intervals. Passive tags only transmit data when scanned and tend to have a smaller range.
As part of his job, Leach tracks chronic wasting disease (CWD), a degenerative neurological illness endemic in Colorado and some other states. CWD is viewed as a very serious threat to both captive and wild cervids -- elk and deer -- and the state wants an automated system to track and isolate any CWD outbreaks to protect elk herds.
The system must also meet federal National Animal Identification System (NAIS) specifications. The NAIS has been promoted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture since 2003 as a way to automate the tracking of cattle and other animals infected with mad cow and other diseases (see "U.S. Effort to Create Animal ID System Lags").
Among the NAIS stipulations is that each animal have a unique identification that will allow it be tracked from place to place, said Leach. The RFID tags must also be affordable to ranchers, and must be able to track the animals over a wide area without causing them injury. Although the state is still investigating the technology, Leach said RFID is the preferred tagging method. If the agency finds that such a tracking system works well for the elk and deer populations, it may use RFID tracking for other species, such as range cattle.
To start the process, the state in late 2004 tagged a herd of 130 elk in a pilot rollout using an identification system from Calgary, Canada-based Advanced ID Corp., which makes RFID and animal tracking systems. According to Leach, the pilot went well, with handheld readers able to get test results from the elks' ear tags from a distance of up to eight feet. He acknowledged, however, that the percentage of elk that came into range was low, and he said there are plans to launch another pilot in March using active tags. No vendor for that project has yet been selected, Leach said.
In other efforts to use technology
- 15 Non-Certified IT Skills Growing in Demand
- How 19 Tech Titans Target Healthcare
- Twitter Suffering From Growing Pains (and Facebook Comparisons)
- Agile Comes to Data Integration
- Slideshow: 7 security mistakes people make with their mobile device
- iOS vs. Android: Which is more secure?
- 11 sure signs you've been hacked
- The Critical Role of Support in Your Enterprise Mobility Management Strategy Most business leaders underestimate the importance of tech support when they choose an EMM solution. Here's what to put on your checklist.
- Separating Work and Personal at the Platform Level: How BlackBerry Balance Works BlackBerry® Balance™ separates work from personal on the same mobile device, right at a platform level. Find out how it can work for...
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| 0.898796 | 1,035 | 2.671875 | 3 |
Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) are sometimes challenged about their legitimacy to speak out on issues such as world poverty. Oxfam's authority to do so is based on the following:
- Oxfam's experience is wide-ranging and in-depth.
- We have worked with poor people in developing countries for more than 60 years.
- Currently, we're working with more than 1,000 partners in more than 70 countries.
- We employ local people who understand the issues that keep local communities trapped in poverty.
- Our development and humanitarian work is respected by the international community, southern and northern governments, our partner organisations, allies, and other agencies.
- More than 400,000 people in the UK support Oxfam's work through monthly giving.
- Oxfam is an independent charity, and as such does not align itself to any governments.
Oxfam also carries out important advocacy and policy work, to make sure that governments and international organisations understand the needs of poor people, and work towards improving their lives. Members of the public who campaign for Oxfam help us to convey these messages and to increase awareness of our work.
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| 0.964858 | 236 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Psoriasis is a very unpleasant-looking and irritating skin disease. Usually it appears as reddish, scaly patches on the scalp, and this skin ailment sometimes spreads to other parts of the head. Although it poses no threat to life psoriasis still brings a great deal of misery. People become very self-conscious if their appearance is disfigured by disease. Even though psoriasis cannot be passed between persons not everyone knows this fact. Many seem to look at it as a form of leprosy so they don’t want to get too close to a psoriasis sufferer.
Medical experts don’t know for sure what causes psoriasis but they suspect it may be hereditary. They also think that it is linked with some defect in the immune system. Although there is no known cure many measures can be taken to control the disease and reduce the suffering.
7 Active QuestionsAdd a Question
There is some evidence that weight reduction reduces psoriasis risks and makes the condition less severe. Since weight loss has many other benefits to the body there is everything to gain from adopting a more healthy diet.
Some alternative medicine experts recommend mediation as a way to reduce stress and eventually relieve psoriasis. Others praise exercise as the most effective stress reducing tool. There is no firm medical evidence that these methods work but there is nothing to lose from giving them a try
The FDA authorizes several kinds of psoriasis medications, including Salicylic acid and various kinds of steroids. The patient needs to rub the ointment into their scalp for maximum effectiveness. It often takes as long as two months for the ointment to clear the psoriasis. Shampooing the hair regularly with a medicated shampoo also helps.
Despite the lack of firm scientific evident attempts to relieve psoriasis through herbal medications are very popular. Suggested herbal medications include rubbing the scalp with Australian tree oil and taking a bath in oats. Some claim that psoriasis outbreaks can be kept under control by adding the turmeric herb to foods, but the FDA warns you that more than three grams of turmeric each day could be dangerous. Some psoriasis sufferers find adding Dead Sea salts to cold baths removes scaling and relieves psoriasis itches.
The pain primarily takes an emotional form with the sufferer upset over their hideous appearance. Usually they have to cope with an awful itching sensation that is sometimes so strong that they cannot get to sleep at night. Lack of sleep adds to the stress psoriasis sufferers endure. Some of them might also experience temporary hair loss from scratching at infected parts of their scalp.
Some doctors recommend steroid injections. Sometimes they suggest exposing the infected skins areas to ultra-violet light. If these treatments are done consistently they can have a degree of success. Another conventional medical approach involves oral medication. However, some of these medicines have their own dangers with liver damage one of the most frightening possible side effects. For these reasons, only consider taking treatments under the care of a psoriasis specialist.
Believe it or not rubbing the scalp with cooking oil is one of the traditional ways of treating psoriasis. Believers claim that this is just as good as the moisturizers sold in pharmacies. Since keeping the scalp well-moistened helps control psoriasis cooking oil might be just as effective as those more expensive pharmaceutical products. Cold showers of less than ten minutes also seem to help, but hot baths are a definite “No Go” area for psoriasis sufferers.
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| 0.966443 | 720 | 2.84375 | 3 |
WELCOME TO THE ALL 4 KIDS UK BEDWETTING PAGE. BELOW YOU'LL FIND HELPFUL TIPS AND ADVICE
Bedwetting - Don't despair, there is a solution.
If your child wets the bed, don't despair, modern bedwetting alarms are medically proven to cure 90% of children.
One in seven children between the ages of 5-18 wake each morning to a wet bed and a feeling of disappointment. Most doctors cannot refer a child to an enuresis (bedwetting) clinic until the age of 7; then there is a 2-10 month waiting list. The irony is, for most children there is a simple yet effective method of curing the problem at home. Comfort and confidence are essential so that the child goes to bed as usual undisturbed by any change of routine.
ENURESIS - BEDWETTING - WHY DOES IT OCCUR?
Bedwetting is, in the majority of cases, caused by a simple lack of control over the bladder whilst the patient is asleep. Although there are other causes, such as bladder infections and bladder defects, these are very rare. Bladder control in a child is obtained in two stages. Children first learn to maintain control during the day by 'holding on' if necessary and continuing to do so until they reach a toilet. They then learn to maintain control during the night and this is achieved when they are able, whilst asleep, either to 'hold on' until the morning or awaken themselves when the pressure in the bladder reaches an uncomfortable level. With children who wet their bed, the brain reacts to the first feelings of discomfort by simply allowing the sleeping child to release the contents of the bladder into the bed without disturbing the child's sleep. If control is not obtained naturally. this trouble can, and often does, continue for many years, even into adult life. The condition is normally made worse by threat or punishment.
HOW CAN IT BE STOPPED?
If the patient can be awakened by an alarm each and every time wetting occurs, then the brain will quickly realise that remaining undisturbed by wetting the bed is no longer possible (as the patient will be awakened by the alarm any way!) The extra disturbance caused by also having to deal with a wet bed will be such that the brain will recognise that it is now easier to cause the patient to 'hold on' whilst asleep or to awaken if the bladder pressure becomes excessively uncomfortable. Dry nights will start to occur almost immediately. Once this pattern has been reliably established, wet beds will cease and use of the alarm can be discontinued. The child will remain dry at night.
IS IT SAFE?
YES. IF IT IS A CLASS 1 MEDICAL DEVICE COMPLIANT WITH MDA DIRECTIVE (Annex VII) 93/42 EEC.
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| 0.941977 | 589 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Approximately 70% of our planet is covered by water, and less than 1% of more than 350 million square kilometres of ocean surface corresponds to the Mediterranean Sea. However, about 700 species of marine fishes, cetaceans, crabs, sea turtles, molluscs and plants are developing within its waters, and some groups, like the sharks and rays, are more highly diversified within this semi-enclosed sea than globally.
Strange undersea life
The under-surface landscape is not a uniform universe. An amazing variety of underwater worlds can be found, including sandy stretches, forests of giant kelp, hydrothermal springs, canyons, abysses, and open-sea. Within this context, the oceans host thousands of species, from the tiniest bacteria to the biggest whales.
About one third of the species were assessed as Data Deficient, meaning that there is insufficient information to determine at which level of threat they are.
Reaching the limits
Over the centuries, humans thought that oceans were an unlimited resource, providing food and absorbing waste. However, during the last 50 years, dramatic decreases in fisheries have shown that human activities are having a significant impact.
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| 0.955617 | 243 | 3.640625 | 4 |
(plural acoustic couplers)
- An interface device for coupling electrical signals by acoustical means — usually into and out of a telephone instrument.
- A terminal device used to link data terminals and radio sets with the telephone network.
acoustic coupler - Computer Definition
A device that connects a terminal or computer to the handset of a telephone. It contains a shaped foam bed that the handset is placed in, and it also may contain the modem.
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| 0.883096 | 95 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Higher Food Prices in Sub-Saharan Africa: Poverty Impact and Policy Responses
AbstractThe spike in global food prices in 2008 led to significantly higher food prices across the developing world. Global commodity prices have since fallen but remain volatile, and local food prices remain high in many countries. The authors review the evidence on the potential impact of higher food prices on poverty, focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa, and examine the extent to which policy responses are able to protect the poor. They show that rising food prices are likely to lead to higher poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa as the negative impact on net consumers outweighs the benefits to producers. A recent survey shows that the most common policy response in Sub-Saharan African countries in 2008 was reducing taxes on food, while outside the region subsidies were the most popular measure. Sub-Saharan African countries also have a higher prevalence of food-based safety net programs, some of which were scaled up to respond to rising prices. The review suggests that the benefits from reducing import tariffs on staples are likely to accrue largely to the nonpoor. Safety net programs can be more effective, but geographic targeting and other investments to strengthen safety nets are necessary to ensure that fewer people are affected by future crises. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.
Download InfoIf you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Bibliographic InfoArticle provided by World Bank Group in its journal The World Bank Research Observer.
Volume (Year): 25 (2010)
Issue (Month): 1 (February)
Contact details of provider:
Postal: Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK
Phone: (202) 477-1234
Fax: 01865 267 985
Web page: http://wbro.oxfordjournals.org/
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| 0.911109 | 552 | 2.9375 | 3 |
Editors and translators have long recognised the dramatic element in Plato's work. It might seem superfluous to take up this subject in detail; but the detail in some aspects does not, in fact, appear to have been closely studied or recorded.
The desire to honour the personality and to perpetuate the method of Socrates is an obvious motive for Plato's choice of the dialogue form as medium for his own published expositions of philosophic thought. Such thought takes naturally, for him, the form of Socratic inquiry and response. But much more than this, in interest, inspiration, and technique, goes to the making of the Platonic dialogue. It is this background and this execution that are now to be considered.
We have the familiar tradition, recorded by Diogenes Laertius (III. 6) as received from Dicaearchus, that Plato wrote dithyrambs, lyrics, and tragedies, and was about to compete with a tragedy in the theatre of Dionysus when, still at an early age, he ‘heard’ Socrates, burnt his poems, and took up philosophy.
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| 0.979551 | 227 | 3.109375 | 3 |
By Hannah Brown
Web Content Contributor
Dating back to the inspirational influences and contributions from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas alike, February has cemented itself as the month of celebrating and recognizing the triumphs of African Americans throughout history.
Audience members have been able to enjoy moving pictures since 1895. In 1903, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was the first film to feature a Black actor. Sidney Poitier, born in 1927, served as a transitional figurehead during his time in Hollywood. He became the first African American to win the Best Actor Oscar in 1964, which would not happen again until 2002 when Denzel Washington won the Academy Award.
Early portrayals of Black Americans were reserved to housekeepers, farmers, butlers and slaves. On various levels, cinema has forever been intertwined with racism. This is shown even today, with Hollywood continuously revisiting harsh stereotypes and dated portrayals of importance with little to no advancement to the plot. Examples of this are tropes with Black characters being shown as criminals, being aggressive by nature, having less education or being used as the best friend who’s only purpose is to support the main character and provide comedic relief.
The 21st century continues to bring much promise and has given many leading roles to African Americans. Countless people have paved the way for this success and become household names, role models and representatives for their culture.
Whether your goal is to watch a film that depicts real-life events or to educate yourself on Black History through a fictional lens, many of these influential people have worked together to create timeless pictures and have shaped the entertainment industry in innovative ways.
The early 2000s is home to classic staples with messages of determination like “The Pursuit of Happyness” or action-packed flicks like the sequel to “Bad Boys.” Eddie Murphy, Ice Cube, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are a few actors whose entertaining performances gave us many memorable movies.
One way we celebrate triumphs and educate ourselves about the past is through real-life adaptations. For instance, 2013 was a year of honoring and remembrance shown through “42”, starring Chadwick Boseman, about Jackie Robinson who was the first African American to play in Major League Baseball. “12 Years a Slave,” where a free man from New York was taken and sold into slavery, also came out the same year.
Other biopics include chronicles from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s march for voting rights called “Selma” and “Hidden Figures,” the story of three African American women who played vital roles in the early years of NASA.
More recent biopics include a story of a civil rights defense attorney, played by Michael B. Jordan, freeing a wrongfully convicted man called “Just Mercy” and “King Richard,” about the upbringing of Venus and Serena Williams.
The importance of this genre allows viewers to become more knowledgeable about someone’s story that we may or may not have already been familiar with, and to preserve these stories for future generations.
Actor, writer and producer Jordan Peele has created remarkable fiction works in recent years, playing with genre and revitalizing how stories are told. Most notably, his works “Get Out” and “Us” feature Black leads and have received numerous awards.
Arguably the best blockbuster hit for representation within the Black community has been “Black Panther” starring Chadwick Boseman, who became a role model along with the other men and women of Wakanda, with a diverse crew and predominantly Black cast.
Angela Bassett is known for playing powerful women like Coretta Scott King and Rosa Parks. She also starred in “Malcolm X” with Denzel Washington. Other actors who have changed the way that women of color are looked at in the industry include Octavia Spencer and Taraji P. Henson who were featured in “Hidden Figures”. Oprah Winfrey was in Lee Daniels’ “The Butler” and produced “Selma” and Viola Davis won an Academy Award for her role as a loving mother in “Fences” also opposite Denzel Washington.
Unfortunately, there is an abundant disproportion of recognition for women of color in Hollywood. When thinking about these men and women, there is a good chance that your mind goes to well-known actors like Morgan Freeman or Idris Elba among the many previously mentioned. It is important to put the spotlight on more women who have played just as many influential roles yet may not come to mind as often.
Another thing to celebrate is the influx of movies targeted towards a younger demographic that depict a main character of color as the hero, allowing more kids the opportunity to watch a movie and see someone who looks like them.
Miles Morales from “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” provides more representation for kids of color to see themselves as not only Spider-Man with the mask, but the superhero behind the mask as well. The creation of Tiana in “The Princess and the Frog,” Disney’s first Black princess and animated protagonist, shifted the idea of what a princess should look like.
While accomplished movies on their own, and a step up from side characters like Frozone from “The Incredibles,” these animated films still present their own identifiable issues like limited screen time and having the characters transform into something other than themselves. The character Tiana was only on screen for 40 minutes of the 1 hour and 37 minute run time, 17 minutes of which she was a human and 23 minutes she spent as a frog.
Avoiding past mistakes in animation while also avoiding making a character of color “just because” was important to Kemp Powers, who co-directed Pixar‘s “Soul,” however his vision was not accurately portrayed. Opening with a whimsical off-key take on “When You Wish Upon a Star,” Joe Gardner, a middle school band teacher voiced by Jamie Foxx aspires to become a jazz musician.
Unfortunately, when his goal is finally within reach, he dies. Being the first Black-led animated film created by Pixar, this film had the opportunity to focus on his life and his journey of chasing his dreams. Instead, it centered on his encounters with people of non-color where he ultimately sacrificed his second chance at his dream for his snarky sidekick. Unbeknownst to him at the time, he would still be given another chance at life, where he then decided he would live his life to the fullest.
There have also been live-action family movies like “Akeelah and the Bee” starring Keke Palmer and Laurence Fishburne, that do a wonderful job displaying the problems that Black communities and public-school systems face. “Joyful Noise” starring Palmer and Queen Latifah along with Disney’s “Let It Shine” are other positive movies celebrating music from hip hop to gospel.
In an interview with Variety, Anthony Mackie (who you may know as Falcon from the Marvel Cinematic Universe), voiced his disappointment at Marvel for their lack of a diverse crew. In the seven movies he has been a part of, there was a huge lack of diversity. Only for “Black Panther” was there anyone of color behind the scenes.
These films and actors have created significant contributions for the 21st century, carrying messages of importance in their work on screen and off. While the representation of people of color has drastically improved in the past several decades, there is still much room for improvement which we will hopefully see sooner than later.
Featured Image By Hannah Brown
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8 Amazing Health Benefits of Handwriting
For many people these days, handwriting is a lost art. It’s simply faster and easier to use a keyboard. With the voice technology of smartphones, it’s possible to skip writing completely. Don’t ditch your pen and paper, though! Research shows that writing by hand has important health benefits that keyboards just can’t replace.
The Benefits of Writing by Hand
Handwriting offers many advantages, whether you’re taking notes at work or writing your thoughts in a journal.
1. Cognitive Exercise
Did you know that handwriting exercises more areas of your brain than typing? With a keyboard, all you do is press different keys. The process is purely mechanical, like a tool.
On the other hand, writing is artistic. It requires making fine hand movements, choosing words, remembering the shape of letters and applying the ideal pressure for every stroke.
This kind of mental workout keeps your mind sharp. You get even more cognitive benefits with activities such as crossword puzzles.
2. Mental Focus
If you’re having trouble focusing on work, try breaking out a notebook and jotting down a few ideas. Like going back into a room to remember why you went there, the act of handwriting jumpstarts your mind.
3. Learning and Memory
Writing things down helps you remember them better. You’ve probably noticed this with to-do lists.
Taking notes when studying topics helps you recall the most important points. You’re learning twice — once when you hear the information and a second time when you write it down.
Writing lends itself to creative habits that aren’t possible with a keyboard. When some people have a hard time coming up with ideas, they scribble on the page to get their creative juices flowing. Brainstorming by hand is far more effective than using a laptop.
5. Personal Expression
Developing a handwriting style you’re proud of can boost your self-esteem. Writing is closely linked with personality, and different styles can communicate boldness, playfulness, professionalism, elegance and artistic talent.
6. Stress Relief
Putting ideas into writing can help you view problems from a different perspective. Organizing your thoughts this way makes it easier to find practical solutions. It gives you control over situations that seem crazy or chaotic. Plus, when you express what you’re thinking on paper, you may realize that the issue isn’t as serious as you first imagined.
7. Relaxation and Sleep Quality
Many people enjoy writing as a hobby. They use their journal as a place to have fun and express themselves artistically. Poetry, humor, insightful thoughts and famous quotes are all therapeutic.
Writing a little before bed is a great way to wind down physically and mentally for a good night’s sleep. It keeps you focused on positives instead of negatives.
8. Emotional Benefits
Some scientists think that the process of writing by hand involves areas of the brain related to emotions. Handwriting is essentially art, and it can provide similar emotional effects as painting, drawing or listening to music. Keeping a journal can be almost as amazing for your heart as talking through issues with a good friend.
You don't need to be proud of your handwriting to get started with a journal. That said, if you want to have better handwriting, all it takes is practice. Find a style you like and imitate it. Slow down and teach your hand to make the curves you see. After a while, it happens automatically.
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| 0.940539 | 739 | 2.671875 | 3 |
Contrary to what usually is claimed in Washington, American foreign policy has rarely been directed by calculations of national interest. That policy is shaped by nationalism, fear, consideration of commercial interests, political ideology, or prejudice, but-for better or worse-the dominant force has always been a vision of national destiny, into which all the rest is subsumed. This sense of destiny has to be understood in order to acquire a sense of where the country is now headed. The victory in Afghanistan, following the Bush administration’s declaration of war on terrorism in September, provides a tangible realization of ideas that have a long history in the United States.
American foreign policy has always rested on the belief that modernization, Westernization, and Americanization are integrally related and unalloyed benefits, necessary factors in the establishment of good order in human society. In contrast, terrorism-violence against civilians in a political cause-is understood as an expression of disorder.
From the beginning, the American nation has operated on the conviction that it is destined to lead the way for humanity. This has been fundamental to the American conception of the nation’s historical role ever since 1629 when persecuted Anglican dissenters assumed control of the Massachusetts Bay Company and set out to establish on virgin land a community formed in a new religious dispensation, meant to provide a model for humanity. From this moral and intellectual foundation, the logical conclusion Americans have drawn has been that the world is eventually destined to become integrated into an elaboration of the American system, whose superiority is additionally demonstrated today by its economic strength and productivity, and its technological dynamism and unmatched record of innovation.
The superiority of American political values and standards is taken to be self-evident. The triumph of the American model and the fall of its social and political rival, the Soviet Union, are understood as demonstrations of the inevitable emergence of a new form of international society guided if not ultimately governed by the United States.
The debate in the United States over extending the so-called war against terrorism to countries other than Afghanistan ended with the Bush administration’s decision to intervene in the Philippines. If we are to believe the president’s State of the Union declarations concerning what he described as the "axis of evil," Iraq, Iran, and North Korea (formerly described as rogue nations) together with what remains of the Al Qaeda camps and membership, more is to come. Once again a long struggle is promised, and an unending national mobilization demanded.
It remains unclear, however, exactly what this means. It is possible that this course, whatever it does prove to mean in practical terms, could ultimately have consequences unacceptable to the American public, and there could be eventual recoil. Frustration or defeat in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia caused past American retreats from foreign involvements. (However, it is significant that those episodes failed to produce a permanent policy redirection; since World War II, interventionism has remained the dominant tendency.)
Global economic intervention, the promotion of a "globalized" international economy, has been Washington’s policy since the 1980s, but simultaneously there has been a less well-publicized globalization of the American military presence. Since the end of the cold war the United States has steadily built up an international military infrastructure of regional commands, base agreements, and relationships with foreign military forces that assumes a permanent and global American military presence. U.S. forces are currently deployed in some forty countries, and there are intimate command and staff relationships with exchanges and training missions in nearly all of Europe and the former Soviet states, and in much of Asia and parts of Latin America.
Before the Afghanistan war was even over, construction had begun on American installations in Uzbekistan and Pakistan. These were meant to support an American presence in Central Asia which, according to the Pentagon at the time, "could last for years." The State Department declared that it had found "a new commitment-a recommitment-of the government of Uzbekistan" to democracy, and U.S. aid to that country in 2002 will be triple that of last year. (After Russia indicated its hostility to the extension of the American military base system to this former Soviet republic, the United States denied that the bases were meant to be permanent.)
The current strategic doctrine of the Pentagon is to keep the battlefield as far as possible from the United States, restoring that defensive distance so dramatically lost on September 11, and achieving everywhere in the world, in the Pentagon’s phrase, "full-spectrum dominance."
It is nonetheless important to note that the United States’ underlying or "normal" and historical relationship with the external world has been isolationist and morally isolated, in contrast to today’s energetic commitment to intervention. However, the national separatism of the nineteenth century was itself an expression of national mission, being intended to protect the country from contamination by the old order of "power politics." The internalized American consciousness responsible for the country’s historical isolationism was formed by the experience of geographical as well as political isolation, the latter fundamentally linked to the nature of the American political experiment, itself meant to break with European history and create a new and redemptive political association of free men and women, untainted by the Old World’s history.
Though two world wars were necessary to force the United States out of that isolationism, Americans had already shown dissatisfaction with the policy before the end of the nineteenth century. The war with Spain in 1898, entered into more for moralistic and ideological than political reasons (accompanied by no little religious prejudice against Catholic Spain), marked out an imperialist and colonialist ambition, in the fashion of the period. The United States acquired control of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico (plus Hawaii, which had nothing to do with Spain), while exercising effective control of a nominally independent Cuba (until 1934, the Platt Amendment gave Washington a right to unilateral intervention). Colonialism proved controversial, however, but while the United States decided in 1934 that the Philippines should be given eventual independence, American military bases were not withdrawn until the 1990s. A new military relationship has now been created there in the antiterrorist cause.
The isolationist impulse was reawakened by World War I, which the United States entered only after Woodrow Wilson had identified intervention as the war to end war. After the war and the death of Wilson, a disillusioned Congress refused to make a permanent commitment to Western Europe’s security. The fear of being corrupted by a European engagement persisted. There was no great enthusiasm for intervention in World War II until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, providing the casus belli in the Pacific, and Hitler, honoring his obligation to Japan, drew the United States into the war in Europe. A precipitous military demobilization took place just after World War II, halted only when threatening Soviet conduct, followed by the 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the attack in Korea, confirmed the arrival of the cold war. The liberal internationalism which followed lasted until the Soviet collapse, although increasingly affected by American exceptionalism and unilateralism, indirect expressions of the isolationist temperament. The latter qualities have now prevailed in the administration of George W. Bush.
The new president took office declaring the cold war finished and insisting that American policy would henceforth be governed by a strict conception of national interest. That seemed reversed in the immediate aftermath of September 11, but it rapidly became apparent that, while the United States would turn to alliances to buttress its political position, its intention was to act entirely on its own. The war against terrorism has been unilateralist in conception and execution, and Washington’s principal allies have become increasingly troubled by the conduct and extension of that war.
From 1990 and the collapse of the Soviet Union until this past September, the most important element in the American relationship with other nations was economic and commercial policy. General deregulation of the world economy, pursuit of open international investment and trade regimes, and the promotion of American-style corporate management and business practices were seen as the way to promote international progress towards what Francis Fukuyama called the "end of history." The main emphasis in foreign policy became deregulation and trade liberalization. The end of the cold war had shifted the country’s national perception of interest from the military and political spheres to economic and commercial ones, to which the first Bush and the Clinton administrations responded, both of them dominated by business interests.
During the 1990s globalization became a generalized phenomenon. Originally, it had been a technology-driven integration of societies and economies, expressing forces that were politically, economically-and morally-neutral. In essential respects, the process hardly differed from the technological transfers of the past, which sovereign political societies and economies accommodated with generally positive effect, and without being subverted.
What happened in the 1990s was that the United States mobilized its immense political as well as economic power to deregulate the international economy, opening foreign economies and industries to American investment or ownership, making foreign markets, raw materials, and labor available to American business, so as to expand an international free-trade economy operating under essentially American norms and responsive to American interests. Globalization thus began to resemble colonialism (which itself was originally conceived as a force for progress). The goal of globalism is utopian (as John Gray of the London School of Economics has argued), in that a universal economy, freed from government regulation, self-governed by the supposedly impartial and uniquely efficient mechanisms of the market, is held to generate the greatest overall wealth, measured as productivity and gross national product, and therefore, in principle, to produce the greatest material well-being for the greatest number of people.
Such a result, even in theory, could only be achieved at the expense of diversity and pluralism in the economic sphere, undermining or destroying both in the course of the drive for productivity and maximum stockholder return (the postulated measure of efficiency) in not only manufacturing but all that vast zone of human culture directly connected with economic activity, including not only popular entertainment, broadcasting, publishing, and journalism, but the arts-and perhaps most significant, if indirectly, politics.
By its nature, globalization is disruptive, in that it is indifferent or hostile to the historical world and its inherent constraints, and to idiosyncratic custom and culture-to the world of the olive tree in the reductive term of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. As the writer David Rieff has said (in World Policy Journal) of the utopian conception of globalization, "purportedly hard-headed and optimistic..., it is, however unconsciously, callous, ignorant, complacent, nationalistic and contemptuous of other cultures and other philosophical traditions." Gray describes it as a legitimate successor to that other secular utopian project, the Marxist version of dialectical materialism. It rests intellectually upon an impregnable parochialism and a bias against the past.
The utopianism of globalization has been essential in its appeal to Americans. Even among Democrats and liberals, there was remarkably little controversy over the Clinton administration’s adoption of a policy of international economic deregulation at the very beginning of its first term. Globalization was recognized as an expression of economic values and practices that had become taken for granted in American life at least since the Reagan years, in striking contrast to the values of previous Democratic and liberal Republican administrations (including that of Richard Nixon, who in domestic social policy was a progressive).
The new ideas held that augmenting the stockholder value of business corporations should be the ruling objective in the conduct of business, with the claims of the public, and of the other actors in the corporate equation-employees and community "stakeholders"-subordinated to those of the stockholders. Under this business doctrine, which has prevailed in the business schools of the United States since the 1970s (and might be said to have achieved an apocalyptic reductio ad absurdum in the Enron corporation), Western economies have on average grown very rapidly. Critics have observed, of course, that this growth has mainly benefited the already rich countries, where neoliberal ideology has dominated social choices and social and employment policy at the price of wage stagnation, the need for multiple wage-earning households, and actual destitution on the one hand combined with enrichment of economic elites on the other.
The influence of this doctrine on the non-Western societies drawn into the globalized economy has been to reproduce or enlarge social and economic divisions, and to substitute internationalized business and employment norms and production for export markets for traditional social choices, artisanal enterprises, and self-sufficiency farming. The neoliberal argument contends, of course, that all this follows from market dictates, and that the harm it does in the short run will eventually produce benefit for all-the moral (or immoral) rationalization of all past utopian projects.
With the 1975 defeat in Vietnam, American foreign policy entered a new epoch, which September 11, 2001 would seem to have ended. After Vietnam, military interventions were considered a threat to domestic political stability and to the good order of American armies; hence the doctrine that emerged, eventually called the Powell Doctrine, held that the only feasible interventions were those in which the United States deployed overwhelming force and had a convincing exit strategy. The military record, nonetheless, did not, on the whole, prove a positive one.
The Balkan interventions offered the best ratio of positive to negative consequences, but were reluctantly undertaken and their outcomes remain fragile even today. No one would argue that the 1995 Daytona Accord for Bosnia, the improvised international trusteeship that now governs Kosovo, whose permanent status remains unresolved, and the fragile coalition of political forces recently achieved in Macedonia, are enduring solutions. Elsewhere, in Lebanon, Panama, Nicaragua, and Somalia, as well as during the Gulf War and the quasi-war that followed against Iraq, American military interventions, whether overt or clandestine, usually left behind worse long-term conditions than had existed before. The consequences were and are often damaging to the United States itself.
The sources of Islamic terrorism lie partially in the Israeli repression of the Palestinians, which the United States has indirectly supported. They also include the interventionist roles assumed by the United States in Iran under the Shah, and in Saudi Arabia, an alliance with another fragile and repressive monarchy. In Iran and Saudi Arabia, policy rested on the belief that intimate involvement of the United States in the decisions of these governments would be a liberalizing political force. It also mistakenly assumed that promoting a major military role for Iran as a regional American auxiliary, and building a permanent American base structure in the Persian Gulf and inside Saudi Arabia itself, would promote and defend Western values rather than undermine them.
The crisis in Afghanistan began with an ostensibly Communist coup d’état in 1978, led by a member of the traditional Afghan elite. The Soviet military intervention that followed in support of this new regime brought on an expedient Washington policy of support for international Islamic militancy, until then a negligible political force. We know the consequences for the Soviet Union, for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States, and potentially for Saudi Arabia and other Islamic states in the future.
Before September 11, nearly all Americans took for granted that the nation’s involvement in global affairs had a constructive overall effect. A division nonetheless had opened in recent years in the policy community, as figures on both left and right of the political party division formulated a new version of the old national messianism. They proposed a deliberate program to exploit the nation’s post-1990 supreme power in order to establish a new version of that benevolent world order first proposed to Americans by Woodrow Wilson, who said that God had created the United States "to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty." This "New Wilsonianism" was held not only to be a defense of the United States against the alleged menace of rogue states and terrorism, or of a resurgent China or Russia (the assumed threats of a decade ago), but as the creation of a benevolent global hegemony in which Americans could find lasting security. Other nations, it was said, would accept it because they know that they have "little to fear or distrust from a righteous [America]" (as one advocate of the idea, Joshua Muravchik, ingenuously wrote in 1996). President Bush has more recently said, "We know how good we are!"
A minority in the American policy community has opposed this hegemonic program, seeing in it that folly of grandeur, and the same self-intoxicated national messianism, about which the past offers eloquent and cautionary lessons. At the same time, the American electorate until recently had also seemed, on the whole, unreceptive to the idea that the United States should attempt to impose its leadership on international society. That majority seems now to have been overruled.
Contemporary history is generally assumed by American policymakers to be a natural if troubled progression from international disorder toward enlightened order, hence fundamentally congenial to the United States as the embodiment of progressive forces. Historical pessimism-a decidedly minority position among Americans-would argue the contrary, that current American policies and interventions, meant to replace the governing regimes of so-called rogue states, or "failed states," with friendly governments, and to tighten American alliances and reinforce U.S. authority inside the alliances, extending American military power through systems of regional commands and close association with the military forces of client countries, have tended to create disorder rather than order.
The United States, simply by being the sole superpower and the most powerful national economy, undermines the established order, which is not a system of unity, and which naturally resists hegemonic power, as has consistently been the case historically. An imbalance of international power has "usually provoked wars," as the Israeli statesman Abba Eban has observed, and "has never consolidated peace." Yet these American interventions that generate instability and conflict continue to be carried out in the belief that they actually promote stability, progress, democracy, growth and development, and humane social standards: hence when they have negative consequences, efforts must be redoubled. The destiny of other nations, it is held, eventually will converge with American destiny.
International society now is confronted with a paradox. Its most powerful member, the United States, conceiving of itself as the model of modern civilization, responsible for international order and progress, practices economic and military-political policies that are inherently or even deliberately destructive of central elements in the existing apparatus of international law and arms control, and the existing norms of international cooperation and order, which it condemns as largely outmoded, if not hostile to American national interests. It does so with mounting emphasis on military solutions and diminishing attention to international precedent and opinion. Even among its allies, this stance has provoked uneasiness, even fear of the unpredictability of American actions, and of their ruthlessness (demonstrated currently by the exclusion of foreign prisoners held in the United States for immigration irregularities from the common law protection afforded by writs of habeas corpus; the apparent determination to incarcerate permanently some uncharged prisoners outside the territorial United States-or until the war against terrorism "is over"; and the illegal transfer of still others to national jurisdictions where torture is tolerated).
The paradox is unlikely to be resolved without an eventual crisis in America’s relationship with international society. That will necessarily throw into question the nation’s own understanding of the meaning of the American national experiment. That will have unforeseeable consequences.
Albert Camus wrote in 1958, concerning France’s war in his native Algeria, that the role of the intellectual is "to clarify definitions in order to disintoxicate minds and to calm fanaticisms." The United States is not at war with "evil," a moral or metaphysical reality. It is at war with a limited and self-motivated group of individuals, possessing limited resources, who employ terrorism against the United States for mixed political and religious reasons. Their principal religious motivation, that in their view the United States is responsible for an assault on the values of their society, by globally propagating a systematic materialism and a nihilistic and narcissistic hedonism, are accusations that might equally be made by readers of this magazine.
The enemy consists of such individuals, and of several weak states under dictatorial or oligarchic rule, pursuing nationalistic, ideological, or religious agendas hostile to the United States. They are conceivably capable of manufacturing or acquiring weapons of mass destruction in order to deter American attack against them. In the American strategic community it is taken for granted that such weapons have no offensive utility against the United States. While individuals may become inspired by religious or ideological fanaticisms to commit suicide in order to harm America (or Israel, America’s ally), governments are collectively ruled and administered by self-interested persons. Even the seeming nihilism of Hitler had a plan behind it.
The first obligation on the citizen is to disintoxicate the American debate. The second is to reduce the unprecedented influence of the military in Washington, not because military thinking is intrinsically objectionable-it is not-but because the Pentagon is now the most important bureaucratic actor in Washington, and in combination with the defense and aerospace industries, Washington’s most important lobby. It exercises overwhelming influence on administrations and Congress to look for military solutions to nonmilitary problems. This is very dangerous to the United States itself, as well as to international society.
The third obligation is to rescue American government from money, whose influence has transformed American democracy (or the American representative republic, to be exact) into a grossly unrepresentative plutocracy. The role of money in American government has always been very large, but since advertising on commercial television became the dominant medium of American political communication, and since the 1976 Supreme Court ruling (Buckley v. Valeo) that held that spending money on political advertising is a constitutionally protected form of free speech, a means test has been imposed on political candidates. Corporate interest has become by far the most important influence on foreign and domestic policy, all but eliminating the influence, or even the widespread articulation, of the concept of general or public interest in our national affairs. It remains to be seen the effect of recently signed legislation on campaign finance, and whether even these strictures will be supported in court.
The final obligation is to comprehend that American nationalism, wedded to American messianism, has currently acquired overpowering force in American life, in that it drives a military program of total military domination everywhere, among allies and neutrals as well as enemies, and a political program of suppressing any resistance to perceived American interest in any matter at all, whatever the cost to allied interests, international community, or international law or precedent. Behind this seems to lie what I would describe as an unarticulated, unintended, yet culpable denial that any sovereign interest exists, beyond American interest-which is an implicit blasphemy.
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The snail kite (Rostrhamus sociabilis) is a bird of prey within the family Accipitridae, which also includes the eagles, hawks, and Old World vultures. Its relative, the slender-billed kite, is now again placed in Helicolestes, making the genus Rostrhamus monotypic. Usually, it is placed in the milvine kites, but the validity of that group is under investigation.
Snail kites are 36 to 48 cm (14 to 19 in) long with a 99–120 cm (39–47 in) wingspan. They weigh from 300 to 570 g (11 to 20 oz). There is very limited sexual dimorphism, with the female averaging only 3% larger than the male. They have long, broad, and rounded wings, which measure 29–33 cm (11–13 in) each. Its tail is long, at 16–21 cm (6.3–8.3 in), with a white rump and undertail coverts. The dark, deeply hooked beak, measuring 2.9–4 cm (1.1–1.6 in) is an adaptation to its diet. The tarsus is relatively long as well, measuring 3.6–5.7 cm (1.4–2.2 in).
The adult male has dark blue-gray plumage with darker flight feathers. The legs and cere are red. The adult female has dark brown upperparts and heavily streaked pale underparts. She has a whitish face with darker areas behind and above the eye. The legs and cere are yellow or orange. The immature is similar to adult female, but the crown is streaked.
It flies slowly with its head facing downwards, looking for its main food, the large apple snails. For this reason, it is considered a molluscivore.
Lerner and Mindell (2005) found R. sociabilis sister to Geranospiza caerulescens, and that those two along with Ictinea plumbea were basal to both the buteogallus and buteo clades. They concluded that Rostrhamus belonged in Buteoninae (sensu stricto) and not in Milvinae, but noted that more investigation was needed.
The snail kite breeds in tropical South America, the Caribbean, and central and southern Florida in the United States. It is resident all-year in most of its range, but the southernmost population migrates north in winter and the Caribbean birds disperse widely outside the breeding season.
It nests in a bush or on the ground, laying 3–4 eggs.
The snail kite is a locally endangered species in the Florida Everglades, with a population of less than 400 breeding pairs. Research has demonstrated that water-level control in the Everglades is depleting the population of apple snails. However, this species is not generally threatened over its extensive range.
In fact, it might be locally increasing in numbers, such as in Central America. In El Salvador, it was first recorded in 1996. Since then, it has been regularly sighted, including immature birds, suggesting a resident breeding population might already exist in that country. On the other hand, most records are outside the breeding season, more indicative of post-breeding dispersal. In El Salvador, the species can be observed during the winter months at Embalse Cerrón Grande, Laguna El Jocotal, and especially Lago de Güija. Pomacea flagellata apple snails were propagated in El Salvador between 1982 and 1986 as food for fish stocks, and it seems that the widespread presence of high numbers of these snails has not gone unnoticed by the snail kite.
This is a gregarious bird of freshwater wetlands, forming large winter roosts. Its diet consists almost exclusively of apple snails.
Snail kites have been observed eating other prey items in Florida, including crayfish in the genus Procambarus and black crappie. It is believed that snail kites turn to these alternatives only when apple snails become scarce, such as during drought, but further study is needed. On 14 May 2007, a birdwatcher photographed a snail kite feeding at a red swamp crayfish farm in Clarendon County, South Carolina.
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sovereign immunity, federal law, Eleventh Amendment, damages, state actor
Constitutional Law | Law
In her Popular Government article "When You Can't Sue the State: State Sovereign Immunity" (Summer 2000), Anita R. Brown-Graham described a series of recent decisions in which a sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court barred individuals from suing states for money damages for certain violations of federal law, such as laws prohibiting discrimination against employees because of their age. In the response that follows, William Van Alstyne argues that this barrier to relief is neither unduly imposing nor novel. The debate over the significance of these decisions is likely to continue. In February 2001, in another case decided by a five-to-four vote (Board of Trustees of University of Alabama v. Garrett), the Supreme Court again barred an individual's suit for damages against a state entity, this time for a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
William W. Van Alstyne, When Can a State Be Sued?, 66 Popular Government 44-46 (2001).
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Title: A Comparison of the Wellbeing of Orphans and Abandoned Children Ages 6–12 in Institutional and Community-Based Care Settings in 5 Less Wealthy Nations
Authors: Kathryn Whetten, Jan Ostermann, Rachel Whetten, Brian Pence, Karen O’Donnell, Lynne Messer, Nathan Thielman, The Positive Outcomes for Orphans (POFO) Research Team
Leaders are struggling to care for the estimated 143,000,000 orphans and millions more abandoned children worldwide. Global policy makers are advocating that institution-living orphans and abandoned children (OAC) be moved as quickly as possible to a residential family setting and that institutional care be used as a last resort. This analysis tests the hypothesis that institutional care for OAC aged 6–12 is associated with worse health and wellbeing than community residential care using conservative two-tail tests.
The Positive Outcomes for Orphans (POFO) study employed two-stage random sampling survey methodology in 6 sites across 5 countries to identify 1,357 institution-living and 1,480 community-living OAC ages 6–12, 658 of whom were double-orphans or abandoned by both biological parents. Survey analytic techniques were used to compare cognitive functioning, emotion, behavior, physical health, and growth. Linear mixed-effects models were used to estimate the proportion of variability in child outcomes attributable to the study site, care setting, and child levels and institutional versus community care settings. Conservative analyses limited the community living children to double-orphans or abandoned children.
Health, emotional and cognitive functioning, and physical growth were no worse for institution-living than community-living OAC, and generally better than for community-living OAC cared for by persons other than a biological parent. Differences between study sites explained 2–23% of the total variability in child outcomes, while differences between care settings within sites explained 8–21%. Differences among children within care settings explained 64–87%. After adjusting for sites, age, and gender, institution vs. community-living explained only 0.3–7% of the variability in child outcomes.
This study does not support the hypothesis that institutional care is systematically associated with poorer wellbeing than community care for OAC aged 6–12 in those countries facing the greatest OAC burden. Much greater variability among children within care settings was observed than among care settings type. Methodologically rigorous studies must be conducted in those countries facing the new OAC epidemic in order to understand which characteristics of care promote child wellbeing. Such characteristics may transcend the structural definitions of institutions or family homes.
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Title: Effects of stigma on the mental health of adolescents orphaned by AIDS
Authors: Lucie Cluver, Frances Gardner, Don Operario
By 2010, an estimated 18.4 million children in Sub-Saharan Africa will be orphaned by AIDS. Research in South Africa shows that AIDS orphanhood is independently associated with heightened levels of psychological problems. This study is the first to explore the mediating effects of stigma and other factors operating on a community level, on associations between AIDS orphanhood and mental health. We assessed the associations of four risk factors that can potentially be addressed at a community level (bullying, stigma, community violence, and lack of positive activities) with psychological problems and orphanhood status.
One thousand twenty-five participants aged 10-19 were recruited from deprived urban settlements in South Africa. The sample included adolescents orphaned by AIDS (n = 425), adolescents orphaned by non-AIDS causes (n = 241), and nonorphaned adolescents (n = 278). Participants were interviewed using standardized psychological measures of depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress, peer problems, delinquency, and conduct problems. Information on risk factors and demographic characteristics were also assessed.
AIDS-orphaned adolescents reported higher levels of stigma and fewer positive activities than other groups. There were no reported differences on bullying or community violence. All community-level risk factors were associated with poorer psychological outcomes. Multivariate analyses controlling for age and gender showed that experience of stigma significantly mediated associations between AIDS orphanhood and poor psychological outcomes.
Reduction of AIDS-related stigma could potentially reduce adverse psychological outcomes among AIDS-orphaned adolescents.
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Study Title: Pathways to health and well-being: social networks of orphans and abandoned youth
Context: Globally, 153 million children are estimated to have been orphaned as defined by the death of one or both parents due to diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, maternal mortality, unintentional injuries, natural disasters and armed conflict: AIDS accounts for 16.6 million of these children. Little is known, however, about the social networks that have been informally established that may assist orphaned and abandoned children (OAC) as they transition from structured family care or residential facility settings to their adult lives.
Study aims: The primary goal of this study is to determine key factors that may put youth at a disadvantage as they transition from structured care settings into their adult lives and those that support positive transitions. To accomplish this, researchers will study existing education and employment support networks as well as sexual communities. Researchers will then be able to determine how certain characteristics of these networks are associated with OAC health outcomes, including poor education, ability to generate income, and HIV risk-taking behaviors. Based on prior OAC-related research, this study expects to find that OAC networks are small and lack variability, leading to reduced access to education, fewer positive employment opportunities, and increased sexual-risk behavior. Findings will be used to construct potential interventions to promote OAC health and well-being.
Methods: This study will use a “network analysis approach” to identify major characteristics of OAC social and sexual networks. Researchers will then examine the association between network factors and OAC outcomes in two steps: examining the relationships between social network characteristics and education and income-generation outcomes, and between sexual network characteristics and HIV-risk outcomes. Researchers expect to learn which social and sexual network features are associated with poor outcomes, such as educational accomplishment, obtaining employment, and high sexual risk behavior. Such risk behaviors include an early age of sexual debut, a high number of sexual partners, and certain characteristics of the sexual partners themselves. This research will provide the basis for designing interventions to prevent disenfranchisement as OAC enter their adult lives. With this research, we will be able to learn how to effectively design community networks for OAC to prevent poor health and lifestyle outcomes.
- To determine if OAC network features account for success in educational, income generation, and sexual risk-taking behaviors
- To provide the basis for social network and sexual network interventions to reduce damage done to OAC to prevent disenfranchisement as OAC become adults.
Principal Investigator: Lynne Messer (Duke University)
Investigators: Bernard Agala (Duke University), Cyrilla Amanya (ACE Africa, Kenya), Misganaw Eticha (SVO Ethiopia), Amy Hobbie (Duke University) Dafrosa Itemba (TAWREF, Tanzania), Rachel Manongi (KCMC, Tanzania), Jim Moody (Duke University), Vanroth Vann (Homeland, Cambodia), Augustine Wasonga (ACE Africa, Kenya), Kathryn Whetten (Duke University), Rachel Whetten (Duke University)
Contact: [email protected]
Study Title: Improving Outcomes for Orphaned Youth: Implementation of Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Childhood Traumatic Grief
Context: Approximately 50 million orphaned and abandoned adolescents currently live in sub-Saharan Africa. Previous studies have indicated that many of these children and adolescents, who often have mental health problems associated with parental loss, have high rates of other traumatic experiences and ongoing trauma exposure. Because the gap in mental health care is large in sub-Saharan Africa, with few individuals in need of treatment receiving even minimal support, more information regarding how to best implement effective interventions, like Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) for orphaned and abandoned children (OAC) is needed. Cognitive behavioral therapy approaches have been shown to be effective in low- and middle-income countries with adults and in wealthier nations with children and adolescents. More research on the effectiveness of CBT approaches effect resource-poor settings is needed. It is also critical to identify what level of provider and supervisor support is needed for maximum effectiveness and local feasibility.
Study Aims: This research will examine the effectiveness of TF-CBT for treating unresolved grief and traumatic stress for OAC and adolescents in two East African countries, Tanzania and Kenya. The randomized trial will examine the effectiveness of TF-CBT compared to receipt of services as usual in these countries. The study involves collaboration with local organizations in Tanzania and Kenya, in which nine local counselors in each country will be trained by both a US-based TF-CBT expert and Tanzanian lay counselors who gained TF-CBT expertise in a previous feasibility study of TF-CBT for OAC, to deliver group-based TF-CBT for childhood traumatic grief to children ages 7-13. This study will evaluate the effectiveness of TF-CBT compared to existing services as usual orphan supports. The study will also examine the impact of implementation factors (e.g., intervention fidelity, lay counselor-supervisor relationship, child/guardian attendance) to study how enhanced local involvement and responsibility (i.e., Tanzanian lay counselor involvement in co-training and supervision) impacts outcomes.
Methods: This study build on previous work demonstrating that TF-CBT is a feasible and acceptable approach for OAC and adolescents by including a control group to properly examine the effectiveness of the TF-CBT approach. The 18 counselors who are trained in TF-CBT will deliver the treatment in 20 groups in each country, 10 rural and 10 urban, resulting in a total of 320 children and adolescents receiving the treatment (40 groups). TF-CBT and mental health experts will oversee the training of the lay counselors and the treatment given to the groups.
- The study will examine the effectiveness of TF-CBT treatment for OAC and adolescents, as compared to receipt of services as usual in two East African Countries.
- Incorporating experienced lay counselors in providing training and supervision in TF-CBT will inform future efforts to build local expertise and sustainability. This work will inform not only TF-CBT for CTG efforts but also efforts for scale up of other mental health interventions.
- Generate important recommendations for OAC treatment and training approaches that are effective in low- and middle-resource settings.
M-Principal Investigators: Shannon Dorsey (University of Washington) and Kathryn Whetten (Duke University)
Investigators: Dafrosa Itemba (TAWREF), Kevin King (University of Washington), Rachel Manongi (KCMC), Karen O’Donnell (Duke University), Augustine Wasonga (ACE Africa)
Contact Information: [email protected]
Study Title: Positive Outcomes for Orphans (POFO): Longitudinal study of orphaned and abandoned children (OAC) from ages 6-12 to ages 15-21 living in 6 diverse settings
Context: International policymakers are struggling to find solutions for the estimated 153 million children worldwide who have had at least one parent die, largely due to high mortality rates from conditions such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and pregnancy complications. Millions more do not know the whereabouts of their parents. In light of the large presence of orphaned and abandoned children, especially in low- and middle-income countries continued research is needed that allows policy makers and providers to understand and develop locally feasible and appropriate ways to care for the children.
Study Aims: Positive Outcomes for Orphans (POFO) is longitudinal study conducted in five countries over a period of 9-10 years thanks to 2 consecutive National Institutes of Child Health and Development (NICHD) funded studies. OAC were ages 6-12 at baseline and will be ages 15-21 at the conclusion of the study. This unique population-based study is the only one of its kind that follows orphaned and abandoned children (OAC) for up to 9 years in culturally and structurally diverse settings allowing for a glimpse into what current care options are and the effects of that care and other life events over time on: health, cognition, emotion, educational attainment, labor force participation (including forced labor), sexual risk taking, marital patterns and community engagement.
Methods: OAC ages 6-12 and living in family settings were recruited from six diverse study areas in five countries: Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Bungoma District (Kenya), Kilimanjaro Region (Tanzania), Battambang District (Cambodia), and Hyderabad and Nagaland (India) (N=1480). The sampling strategy involved the selection of 50 sampling areas (‘‘clusters’’) at each site and five OAC from each cluster. From comprehensive lists of residential facilities in study area, 83 facilities were randomly selected for including in the study with 1,357 OAC then randomly selected from lists of children of the appropriate age from each facility. Baseline assessments were collected for children and caregivers being in May 2006: enrollment continued for 22 months. OAC were defined as children who had at least one parent die or who were abandoned by both parents. In households with multiple eligible children, one child was selected as the child whose first name started with the earliest letter in the alphabet. Interviews with children’s self-identified primary caregivers were conducted in their respective native language in the child’s residence. Six-month follow-up assessments were conducted in 5 of the 6 study sites and 12-months follow-up assessments in all sites. Interview windows for follow-up assessments were open from one month prior to two months after the scheduled follow-up date.
- The study seeks to determine which environmental characteristics (e.g. home, community, culture, social networks, etc.) promote positive and negative outcomes for OAC as they transition through to young adulthood. With this knowledge, more appropriate local, national and international policies can be created for this age group and appropriate care options can be more actively supported.
- The study will seek to examine how personal factors, including life events, (e.g. number of potentially traumatic events experienced, emotional health, and cognitive development) affect orphans and identify potential interventions that could improve outcomes for the adult lives of orphans.
Principal Investigator: Kathryn Whetten (Duke University)
Investigators: Bernard Agala (Duke University), Cyrilla Amanya (ACE Africa, Kenya), Misganaw Eticha (SVO Ethiopia), Amy Hobbie (Duke University), Dafrosa Itemba (TAWREF, Tanzania), Rachel Manongi (KCMC, Tanzania), Lynne Messer (Duke University), (KCMC, Tanzania), Karen O’Donnell (Duke University), Jan Ostermann (Duke University), Brian Pence (Duke University), Nathan Thielman (Duke University), Vanroth Vann (Homeland, Cambodia), Augustine Wasonga (ACE Africa, Kenya), Rachel Whetten (Duke University)
Contact Information: [email protected]
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The Identification of an Intellectual Disability, an A to H Framework (IDID A2H©)
The following alphabetical framework is designed as an aide memoire for the identification of an Intellectual Disability (in children, young people or adults). It will help identify available information sources, gaps in knowledge about an individual’s ability and guide decision making regarding a likely diagnosis and generating a needs-based plan. Making a ‘diagnosis’ of an Intellectual Disability is the remit of psychologists and medically trained professionals. The framework can be used by other professional groups to ‘formulate’ and gather the appropriate information to establish a likelihood of an Intellectual Disability and guide diagnostic processes or access to appropriate services. It is a longer version of the IDID A2H: short version© and the IDID A2H: Parent version©. The Professional IDID A2H Evidence Collection Framework© is an editable version that can be used as a tool for gathering evidence and planning.
It has been created by the author and is free to use clinically. It can be reproduced for non-commercial uses. Any publication in hard copy or electronically requires permission from the author, acknowledgement of the copyright and authorship. No reasonable request will be refused. Contact email@example.com.
Evidence from education is helpful for understanding an individual’s level of functioning. This may be current or predicted attainment or historical information. If in education, it is useful to consider current and past attainment. This may be compared against established expectations for an age group e.g. national curriculum levels. Information may be gained from school or college reports, direct communication with a teacher or results of tests e.g. examinations or specific learning ability tests.
If the person is out of education, it is important to consider how much education was received, whether it was in an appropriate setting and what attainments were made.
Diagnoses may have already been made e.g. of a learning difficulty. Care should be taken to establish whether these are specific e.g. dyslexia or more generalised and what level of difficulty has been assigned. A general rule of thumb is that a generalised moderate to profound and multiple learning difficulty, equates to a mild to profound intellectual disability.
Attendance and engagement in education is also an important factor. Not attending, not engaging, having a specific learning difficulty or behavioural/emotional difficulties that interfere with learning and attainment, or not receiving appropriate education to meet an individual’s needs, are likely to contribute to lower attainment irrespective of level of intelligence. It is therefore important to understand the context.
Behaviours of daily living
These are also known as adaptive behaviours or activities of daily living. They reflect a range of skills that are learnt and develop over time. These behaviours include managing personal hygiene, dressing skills, eating, toileting, ambulating, engaging in leisure activities, skills in domestic living to name a few. These behaviours may be assessed in different environments e.g. home and school.
To make a diagnosis of an intellectual disability, evidence of significant delay in adaptive behaviours is required. There are various tests that can contribute towards understanding the degree of delay in adaptive behaviours e.g. ABAS (Pearson website, 2015), ABS (Assessment Psychology Online website, 2001) and Vineland (Pearson website, 2005). Training in the administration of these tests and their interpretation may be required. Direct observation is also important.
Formal assessments of cognition are important in making an accurate diagnosis of an intellectual disability. Formal assessment will calculate a full-scale IQ score and will also produce sub- section scores that describe different areas of skill or difficulty. The IQ score classifies an individual as having an intellectual disability and also gives a reference range of IQ scores that an individual might lie within, with a high degree of certainty.
A variety of IQ tests are available covering different ages or levels of verbal ability. E.g. WIPPSI (Pearson website, 2012), WISC (Pearson website, 2014), WAIS (Pearson website, 2010), or WNV (Pearson website, 2006). These tests are carried out by appropriately trained psychologists. In the UK, Educational Psychologists may also use the BAS (Fountas & Pinnell Literacy website, n.d.).
There are some limitations to cognitive assessments. IQ is supposed to be stable over time however it can worsen if an individual is losing skills or ability e.g. if they have a neurodegenerative condition or if they are choosing or not able to engage with the formal testing e.g. if they are refusing to engage, or deliberately underperforming, if their primary language is not English or if they are not able to communicate or focus.
Short screening IQ tests are available e.g. Ammons and Ammons (Frank & George, 1971) or the KBIT (Pearson Clinical website, 2004); however, they do not produce the level of information that is important to understand an individual’s strengths and difficulties. They may be useful for briefly establishing the likelihood of an intellectual disability e.g. by non-psychologists.
Development occurs in a range of areas and at different rates. Physical development includes growth, fine motor, and gross motor and sensory development. Socio- emotional development includes social skills, the development of attachments, play and behaviours. Other areas of development include sleep, speech and language and communication. Investigation and assessment may point towards specific delays or more generalised delays. The degree of these should be considered and needs based plans generated.
There are formal tests to assess these areas e.g. CELF for speech and language (Pearson website, 2013), development scales e.g. Denver and Schedule of Growing skills (GL Assessment website, n.d.) and assessments of behaviours e.g. Adaptive Behaviour Assessment System (Pearson website, 2018) and Adaptive Behaviour Scale (Pearson website, 2005). Some of these can only be carried out by appropriately qualified professionals.
The presence of differing patterns of developmental delay may indicate other conditions e.g. speech, language or communication disorders or other neurodevelopmental disorders.
It is important to consider the influences around an individual. This may include understanding the different environments that they live and operate within. The most obvious is the home environment (including the general socio-economic setting) and whether it is supportive of development and learning. In children and young people, school is often the other major influence on development and learning. The therapeutic influence on development of significant time spent in differing settings should also be considered. E.g. if an individual is being neglected and are in an inappropriate educational setting, the likelihood of an individual meeting their academic and developmental potential is less than if they were in an educational setting that did meet their needs.
Other factors may be present either as a cause of the intellectual disability e.g. genetic conditions or in addition to the intellectual disability. These may either be masked by the intellectual disability or mask the intellectual disability itself. This is called diagnostic overshadowing. Other neurodevelopmental conditions e.g. ADHD or ASD are likely candidates for diagnostic overshadowing.
Mental Health and Behavioural disorders as well as physical health problems are more common in individuals with intellectual disabilities and presentations may be atypical. E.g. tooth ache may present as behaviour that challenges others or a mood disorder may present with more biological symptoms e.g. sleep, appetite or energy level disturbance, rather than clear psychological symptoms. Neurological disorders are common e.g. epilepsy.
Attachment difficulties may also present following early childhood adversity and/or differences in parental responses to a child with a disability. The incidence of abuse and need for safeguarding may also be higher in young people with ID than the general population.
The above factors should be considered holistically, alongside an understanding of the young person’s IQ and adaptive behaviours, so that their unique strengths and difficulties and environmental challenges are understood.
The 3 main outcomes for use of the IDID A2H© are:
- Not an Intellectual Disability i.e. IQ and/or adaptive functioning are within normal range
- Possible Intellectual Disability i.e. further investigation is required over time
- Confirmed Intellectual Disability i.e. IQ is 70 or below and there are significant difficulties with adaptive functioning
It is important to be clear about what terminology is being used and the meaning of this and to communicate this understanding to the individual and involved parties (if appropriate).
The diagnosis may be supplemented by a formulation to understand the factors involved e.g. how is the individual presenting? What has caused or contributed to the diagnosis and what is protective or supportive.
How to meet an individual’s needs
In partnership with the person and their parent/carer, generate a person centred multiagency, multidisciplinary care plan to meet the needs identified in A to G. Plans should include recommendations for the interventions or adaptations required to meet the identified needs (irrespective of the diagnostic outcome). It is important to communicate the findings and plan to others in the individual’s networks e.g. family/carers, education, social care and health.
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The Science of Human Laughter: Unlocking the Secrets Behind Our Love for Pranks
Laughter, an innate and contagious human behavior, has intrigued scientists and researchers for centuries. Despite being a natural and pervasive part of our lives, the science of human laughter remains enigmatic. The desire to uncover the reasons behind our love for pranks adds another layer of complexity to the subject.
Websites like Gags Network – NakedandFunny – showcase our fascination with pranks and humor. This article delves into the science behind the laughter, the allure of jokes, and their intricate connection.
The Science of Laughter
The physiology of laughter
The science of laughter, also known as gelotology, investigates the neural and physiological processes involved in laughter. The brain plays a crucial role in laughter, with several regions, including the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex, working together to process and produce humor. The physical act of laughter involves the coordinated contraction of facial, respiratory, and vocal muscles.
Theories of laughter and humor
Numerous theories aim to shed light on the science of humor and the reasons behind our ability to find things funny. Each theory provides a unique perspective on the underlying mechanisms that contribute to laughter:
- The superiority theory: According to this theory, laughter arises from feelings of triumph or superiority over others. Philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Hobbes suggested that we laugh when we perceive someone else’s misfortune, mistakes, or shortcomings, as it makes us feel better about ourselves in comparison.
- The relief theory: Developed by thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Herbert Spencer, the relief theory proposes that humor serves as a release valve for pent-up tension, stress, or energy. Laughter, in this context, provides a means for our minds and bodies to let go of repressed emotions, offering a sense of relief and relaxation.
- The incongruity theory: The incongruity theory posits that laughter occurs when we encounter unexpected or absurd situations that disrupt our cognitive patterns. Philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer supported this theory, which suggests that humor stems from the sudden realization of incongruity between our expectations and the reality of a situation.
- The benign violation theory: Introduced by researchers Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren, the benign violation theory integrates aspects of the previous theories. This approach asserts that humor arises when a situation is perceived as a violation of norms, rules, or expectations while simultaneously being harmless or non-threatening. In other words, the event must be both “wrong” and “okay” for it to be considered humorous.
Examining these theories of humor and laughter allows us to gain a better understanding of the complex cognitive and emotional processes that contribute to our ability to find things funny. Each theory provides a unique perspective on the various mechanisms involved in humor, and together they offer a more comprehensive understanding of this fascinating and enigmatic human behavior.
The psychological and social functions of laughter
Laughter provides numerous psychological and social benefits:
- Stress relief and mental health benefits: Laughter releases endorphins, which can reduce stress, boost mood, and alleviate pain.
- Social bonding and communication: Laughter facilitates social connections, strengthening bonds and fostering cooperation among individuals.
The Love for Pranks
What makes a prank successful?
A successful prank typically contains the following elements, which work together to create a humorous outcome:
- Elements of surprise and incongruity: The foundation of a successful prank lies in its ability to catch the victim off-guard, creating a sense of surprise. This unexpected event disrupts the victim’s cognitive expectations, resulting in an incongruous situation. The more unpredictable the joke, the stronger the surprise and the greater the potential for laughter.
- The role of the prankster and the victim: A delicate balance must be struck between the prankster’s intent and the victim’s reaction. The prankster should plan and execute the joke in a way that is entertaining and engaging without causing harm or distress. The victim’s reaction is also crucial; a lighthearted response can contribute to the overall success of the prank. In essence, the prankster’s creativity and the victim’s ability to take the prank in stride together create a successful and humorous experience.
- The audience’s engagement: The reaction of bystanders or viewers plays a vital role in determining the success of a prank. A prank that evokes laughter and amusement from the audience is more likely to be considered successful. As such, the prank must be easily relatable and resonate with the target audience to evoke the desired response.
- Timing and context: A successful prank relies on impeccable timing and an appropriate context. The joke should be executed at a moment when the victim is most susceptible to being surprised or caught off-guard. Additionally, the context should be fitting for the prank, ensuring that it is appropriate and well-received by both the victim and the audience.
The psychology behind enjoying pranks
Our fascination with jokes can be attributed to several psychological factors:
- The release of tension: Similar to the relief theory, pranks provide a platform for releasing pent-up emotions and stress, both for the prankster and the audience.
- Establishing social hierarchies: Pranks can reinforce social structures by allowing individuals to assert dominance or playfully challenge authority.
- Emotional regulation and empathy: Participating in or witnessing pranks can enhance emotional intelligence by encouraging individuals to navigate complex social situations and understand others’ perspectives.
The cultural aspects of pranks
Pranks are a cultural phenomenon with various traditions from around the world. In the digital age, jokes have evolved, and platforms like Gags Network showcase these humorous antics, allowing users to enjoy and share them globally.
Pranks and Laughter: A Complex Relationship
How pranks trigger laughter
Pranks capitalize on the theories of laughter by incorporating surprise, incongruity, and benign violations. The interplay of these elements can elicit laughter from both the prankster and the audience.
The ethical considerations of pranks
While pranks can provide humor and entertainment, it’s essential to balance humor with potential harm. Consent and boundaries must be respected to ensure that jokes remain enjoyable and ethical for all parties involved.
The therapeutic potential of pranks
Laughter, as a form of therapy, has been recognized for its health benefits. Pranks, when executed in a respectful and harmless manner, can serve as a means of team building and stress relief. By promoting laughter and fostering social connections, pranks can contribute to improved mental well-being and emotional resilience.
Understanding the science of human laughter and our fascination with pranks reveals the intricate relationship between these two phenomena. By exploring the physiological, psychological, and cultural aspects of laughter and jokes, we can better appreciate their roles in our lives. As we continue to uncover the secrets behind laughter and humor, new opportunities for therapeutic applications and social understanding may emerge. Ultimately, respecting ethical boundaries and embracing the positive aspects of laughter and pranks can lead to a happier, more connected world.
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Nature & Science
Click here for a partial species list (200 Kb PDF) of one small section of Anacostia Park for an idea of what you might see here.
For over 70 years, Anacostia Park has been an experiment in providing recreational opportunities through a managed flood plain. In those years the economy has had its ups and downs. The Park Service has learned more on the importance of flood plain resources, and wetland restorations have been occurring as funding allows. The latest restoration finished was at Kingman Lake, but other restorations of wetlands are occurring for wildlife habitat, flood control and bio-diversity for the future. All of these decisions take place in the public eye. Feel free to contact the park staff for more information on past or planned restorations.
The Decision Notice and Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) for the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail project was signed to approve the project.
Please click on the Animals and Plants buttons to the left for additional information for National Capital Park-East sites in the Anacostia River Watershed.
Did You Know?
Cattails may be among the most useful plants in North America. Almost all parts of the plant were eaten providing year round food. The brown fuzzy part has shown antibacterial properties. The leaves can be made into many household goods including shingles for the house. More...
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Landscape design is mainly focus on designing a landscape in a property to make the entire area with an aesthetic, natural beauty. An expert landscape designer with creativity in his landscape deigns helps to improve the look of a house that a perfect landscape design frames a house. The landscape design also has a major role in making and designing an outdoor garden in a manner which completely planned and designed with the landscape elements. The main duty of a landscape designer is to do the integrated landscape planning of a property in the sense of creating a garden or a lawn for play. Designing a landscape involves setting or installing specific landscape elements and plants in a garden. The landscape design includes the components such as meeting the aesthetic, environmental and horticultural sustainability, and these factors will help to merit the design of landscapes. The main job responsibility of a landscape designer is to design the landscape architecture to make the beauty of nature with merging the technology and buildings.
In actual a perfect landscape design with merging of art and science makes a building or your home to have an outstanding look. A landscape designed should have possessed the knowledge of geography, soils, surveying, architecture, landscape contracting and some sort of civil engineering. A landscape designer can make a home look beautiful with displaying its good features and hiding the rashes or rough edges with using a perfect landscape design. When designing an constructing a landscape at a property the landscape designers should consider the environmental aspects in the sense of making an analysis of current plans, checking the soil conditions, the overall view of finished project, plants and other garden elements to be included and the architectural style of home or building. Many landscape designer who interested in designing and constructing garden which makes your home a perfect look. Although in garden designing and construction the plant selection and its maintenance is an important task.
A landscape designer with using creativity design and construct an aesthetically pleasing, landscape area. The main areas where to design and construct a landscape or landscaped garden include parks, walkways, personal lawns etc. A perfectly designed landscape would be a great factor to make increase the livability of a house. A landscape designer should have involvement in designing landscape, landscape management, plan evaluation, gardening direction, property estimation etc. However, some group of landscape designers who involved in the designing and construction of garden landscapes around a house, a park or other public areas. That they might have interest in doing landscape gardens professionally and for their own use. Thus they integrate this landscape gardening idea with their landscape design practice and do the construction with hiring a landscape contractor. But the construction and design of a landscape garden should start depend on the client's needs and inclinations. By creating an outdoor garden and living space in the outside portion of a home make your home more worthy than a normal un-landscaped house or property.
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The Iran Nuclear Deal made headlines across the globe as a landmark historical agreement between extreme opponents. The accord came after months of preparation, two weeks of final intensive discussions in Vienna and with eight parties involved, the final result was an agreement with five annexes. However, the agreement has been challenging to keep intact and appears that it could be dead altogether.
The Beginnings of the Deal
The deal laid out a lengthy process spanning over 15-25 years that would be supervised by an eight-member committee, including Iran, the United States of America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and the European Union. In a nutshell, the agreed-upon nuclear deal aimed at limiting Iran's ability to produce a nuclear weapon, in exchange for the removal of various sanctions imposed on the country internationally.
However, the deal got a significant shake-up under U.S. President Donald Trump, who on May 8, 2018, announced that the U.S. would be pulling out of the deal and issuing fresh sanctions against Iran.
- The Iran nuclear deal was designed to curb Iran's ability to produce nuclear weapons, in exchange for the removal of sanctions on Iran.
- In May 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would be pulling out of the deal and issuing sanctions on Iran.
- In early 2019 President Trump ordered the killing of General Qasem Soleimani, who was one of Iran's top military leaders.
- In response, Iran announced it would no longer comply with the nuclear deal that President Obama had signed in 2015.
Iran Nuclear Deal Background
Based on the revelations of an Iranian exile group in 2002, Iran was suspected of having nuclear facilities. Following inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and subsequent discoveries, Iran continued to proceed with nuclear developments despite international opposition. In 2006, the United Nations imposed sanctions on Iran, which were followed by similar actions from the U.S. and the EU. Bitter confrontations then broke out between Iran and the world powers.
These sanctions–primarily on Iran's oil business, weapons sales, and financial transactions–had severely hurt Iran’s economy. As one of the largest producers of crude oil, prices went through a volatile period as the outcome was largely unknown.
The Parties Involved
The deal was negotiated between Iran and a group of counterparts that included the U.S., Russia, Britain, Germany, France, China, and the European Union (EU).
The supporters of the nuclear deal affirm benefits, which include the best-possible guarantee from Iran that it will refrain from producing a nuclear arsenal. It was, at the time, an important step toward establishing peace in the Middle East region, particularly in the context of ISIS and the role of oil in Middle East economies.
The Main Points
To make nuclear bombs, the uranium ore mined from earth needs enrichment to either uranium-235 or plutonium. Uranium ore mined from the earth is processed via devices called centrifuges to create uranium-235. Uranium ore is processed in the nuclear reactors which transform it into plutonium.
Under the deal, Tehran would reduce the number of centrifuges to 5,000 at the Natanz uranium plant–half the current number. Nationwide, the number of centrifuges would reduce from 19,000 to 6,000. The enrichment levels would be brought down to 3.7%, which was much lower than the 90% needed to make a bomb. The stockpile for the low-enrichment uranium would be capped to 300 kilograms for the next 15 years, down from the present 10,000 kilograms.
All these measures served to restrict Iran's capability to make a nuclear bomb and would ensure nuclear power usage is limited to civilian use only.
Next Steps and Timeline
As the deal was finalized, a UN Security Council resolution was agreed upon.
By August 15, 2015, Iran would submit written responses to the questions raised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), about its nuclear program and developments. Additionally, it allowed monitoring of its facilities by IAEA inspectors on or before October 15, 2015.
Removal of Sanctions
First, the oil embargo that prevented the import of oil from Iran was removed, which was not without its effects. The U.S. and EU lifted oil and trade-related sanctions. Foreign companies began to purchase oil from Iran, U.S. companies located outside the United States were authorized to trade with Iran, and imports of selected items from Iran were permitted, which had a particular effect on international business.
Simultaneously, sanctions on Iran’s banking and financial systems were dropped. It enabled the immediate release of around $100 billion currently lying frozen in Iranian bank accounts overseas.
Immediately after the announcement, government officials from major European countries began visits to Iran to explore business opportunities.
Some of the main challenges faced by Iran during the sanction period were Iran's shrinking GDP, high inflation (between 50% to 70% in 2013), and the nation being cut-off from world economic systems. All such economic challenges drastically improved after the agreement.
Lifting sanctions would allow the movement of huge supplies of oil from Iran, which was thought to be sitting on large stockpiles due to years of imposed sanctions. International oil companies like France’s Total and Norway’s Statoil operated in Iran for years before sanctions were imposed, changing the tide for those countries and other top oil producers in the world.
European car manufacturers like Peugeot and Volkswagen were market leaders in Iran prior to the sanctions. Although a few sectors like auto, oil, and infrastructure had significant interest from foreign companies in the pre-sanction era, the reality was that foreign businesses had limited presence in Iran since the 1979 Revolution. In essence, the Iranian markets had remained largely unexplored by international businesses across many other industry sectors.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama claimed that the deal would make the U.S. and the world a safer place. However, concerns remained.
Challenges included administrating and monitoring the atomic facilities and developments in Iran. Complete awareness was required about the existing labs, establishments, underground sites, research centers, and military bases associated with nuclear developments. Though Iran agreed to provide the IAEA higher levels of information and deeper levels of access to all nuclear programs and facilities in the country, the picture remained murky.
Opposition to the Iran Nuclear Deal
The deal, although welcomed by a larger group of nations across the globe, also had opposition from a few prominent world leaders. Israeli leader Netanyahu said the deal "paves Iran's path to the bomb." His vehement opposition to the deal came on the basis of Iran’s history of being a nuclear-capable challenge for the Middle East region.
Additionally, Netanyahu said the deal was a platform to fund and nurture a nuclear-capable, religious-extremist country, saying a strengthened Iran could hinder peace and security in the region.
President Donald Trump and Iran
After the election of President Trump in November 2016, proponents of the deal feared the agreement, which they saw as a win for world peace, would be in jeopardy.
In May of 2018, President Trump announced that the U.S. would pull out of the deal and by the end of the year had reinstated sanctions on Iran. European countries, including Germany, France, and the U.K. disagreed with the sanctions.
As a result, Iran's economy struggled, leading to protests in the streets. Iran responded when Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced that the country was rolling back some of the restrictions that had been previously agreed to under the 2015 deal.
Iran would stop complying with the caps for stockpiles of enriched uranium. The Iranian president also announced the country would also halt any sales of surplus supplies overseas.
In early 2019 President Trump ordered the killing of General Qasem Soleimani, who was one of Iran's top military leaders. In response, Iran announced it would no longer comply with the nuclear deal that President Obama had signed in 2015.
In May 2019 Iran's Atomic Energy Organization stated that they would quadruple the production or output of low-enriched uranium, which was later confirmed by the IAEA as reported by BBC news.
The Bottom Line
The pros and cons of such a landmark deal were hotly debated. Most views, claims, and allegations were often politically tuned. European leaders still hold out hope that a deal can be reimplemented in an effort to constrain Iran's nuclear ambitions. However, for the time being, it appears that the Iran nuclear deal is on life support.
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COVID CPR Safety Measures Don't Lessen Survival: Study
MONDAY, Nov. 9, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- The effectiveness of CPR isn't compromised when EMS crews and others take recommended safety precautions against the new coronavirus, researchers say.
Interim guidance issued by the American Heart Association and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says health care providers should take extra precautions during the pandemic. That includes using personal protective equipment and other protocols when administering cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to patients at risk of cardiac arrest.
This guidance has been widely adopted during emergencies involving patients with known or suspected COVID-19.
But concerns have also been raised about whether the guidance puts added strain on health care providers and whether the use of additional protective equipment reduces the effectiveness of CPR.
To answer those questions, the researchers analyzed outcomes among patients who received CPR at a Kentucky medical center from March to May of 2019 and between March and June 2020.
None of the 41 patients in the 2019 group had COVID-19. Of 53 patients in the 2020 group, 10 had COVID-19 and 43 did not.
On average, CPR continued for significantly more time for the COVID-19 patients. But there was no significant difference in survival rates during the event that required CPR (for example, a heart or breathing emergency): 50% among those with COVID-19 and 64% among those without COVID-19.
However, only one patient with COVID-19 (10%) survived to hospital discharge, compared to 25% of patients without COVID-19, the study found.
Outcomes for patients in 2019 and 2020 were similar, which suggests that additional safety precautions taken by health care professionals because of the pandemic don't harm the quality of CPR, the researchers concluded.
The findings are to be presented at a virtual meeting of the American Heart Association Nov. 14 to 16. Research presented at meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
"The increased precautions taken by health care professionals are for their own safety and for the safety of other patients in the hospital, and help the greater community," said lead author Priyanka Sheth, a graduate student at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.
"Based upon this analysis, the use of equipment such as N-95 face masks, face shields and protective gowns do not appear to be degrading the quality of patient care, at least specifically during CPR procedures," Sheth said in a heart association news release.
The American Heart Association has more on CPR.
SOURCE: American Heart Association, news release, Nov. 9, 2020
The news stories provided in Health News and our Health-E News Newsletter are a service of the nationally syndicated HealthDay® news and information company. Stories refer to national trends and breaking health news, and are not necessarily indicative of or always supported by our facility and providers. This information is provided for informational and educational purposes only, and is not intended to be a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
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Summer academy energizes future scientists
As she surveyed two arrays of solar panels on an upper deck of Princeton's Engineering Quadrangle one recent morning, 12-year-old Olivia honed her skills of skeptical inquiry by peppering her tour guide with questions.
"Which panels worked best, the black or the blue?" she asked. "If everyone had solar panels, would that be good or bad? Are scientists and engineers making solar panels that everyone can afford?"
Olivia, a seventh-grader at Grice Middle School in Hamilton, was among 11 students from Princeton-area middle schools who toured the solar facility as part of a pilot outreach program of the Princeton University Materials Academy.
This pilot program, which runs from July 20-31 and is sponsored by the Princeton Center for Complex Materials and Community House, intends to stimulate interest in science among underrepresented students through hands-on experiments and exposure to scientists and engineers. Participants learn some of the skills required of scientists -- including the importance of asking tough scientific questions.
The Center for Complex Materials, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, offered the materials science academy to high school students in past summers and expanded this year to include middle schoolers.
"If you really want to close the achievement gap in science, you have to interest students before they get to high school," said Daniel Steinberg, education outreach director for the center "We're trying to open their eyes to science. Not all of them will become scientists, but some of them will and hopefully they all will have a better appreciation of science and engineering. This is a first step."
Each morning the students conduct experiments, talk with Princeton scientists and tour research facilities. In the afternoons, they attend a writing workshop taught by Chris Collins of Princeton High School and sponsored by Community House, a University program focused on closing the achievement gap among children in the Princeton area.
"People think of Princeton as a rich community, but we have a lot of the same problems of poverty and inequality as more urban areas like Trenton," said Yemi Olorunnipa, a rising junior at Princeton majoring in sociology who works with the students as part of a summer internship with Community House.
Olorunnipa said the students had the most fun during the experiments. Earlier in the week they studied how kinetic energy could be turned into electric energy by putting together a machine that used a hand crank to power a light bulb. In another experiment, lead teacher Steve Carson of John Witherspoon Middle School in Princeton placed a heated platinum rod and alcohol in a beaker. The rod repeatedly ignited the alcohol fumes converting chemical energy into heat.
"It sounded like a little explosion and gave off a flash of light," Olorunnipa recalled. "There were a lot of oohs and aahs."
The tour of the solar panels was given by Darren Hammell, the executive vice president of Princeton Power Systems, an energy company he co-founded with two other Princeton engineering graduates in 2001, the same year he graduated.
The company produces a device called a "grid-tied inverter," which allows raw electricity generated by solar panels to flow smoothly into the main power grid. As the students gathered near the panels, Hammell explained that the company installed the arrays on the EQuad so they could research how to make them more efficient.
Chris, a sixth-grader from Melvin H. Kreps Middle School in East Windsor, touched the warm surface of one of the panels. "I think I can feel the energy going through me," he joked.
In response to Olivia's questions, Hammell said that more research was needed if solar power is to provide a significant percentage of the world's energy demands, but that he thought that day would come. Yes, he told her, the price of solar panels should drop as scientists figure out better ways to make them. And as for the different solar arrays, the blue panels generated more power for their size, but they were more expensive than the black panels.
"So if you don't have a lot of space, the blue panels are better," he said. "If you have lots of space, like in a desert, you'll probably go with the cheaper panels."
The students were scheduled for a visit later in the week to an ultra-clean laboratory where Princeton scientists fabricate tiny structures used in nanotechnology. They would have to wear special suits to prevent contaminating the delicate instruments with dirt.
Khalil, also a sixth-grader at Kreps Middle School, initially seemed less impressed with the solar panel tour. "You could say that Khalil's parents forced him to come to science camp," Khalil said.
But he perked up when Steinberg told him the students were slated to build their own low-cost solar panels with Craig Arnold, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, using just conductive glass, toothpaste and berry juice.
"Can it make electricity?" Khalil asked.
"A little," Steinberg said.
"Maybe I'll use it to light my TV."
"If you can get it to do that," Steinberg said, "you'll be rich and famous."
"And then," Khalil said. "I'll get it to run my PlayStation."
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Skip to Main Content
We have witnessed the Fixed Internet emerging with virtually every computer being connected today; we are currently witnessing the emergence of the Mobile Internet with the exponential explosion of smart phones, tablets and net-books. However, both will be dwarfed by the anticipated emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which everyday objects are able to connect to the Internet, tweet or be queried. Whilst the impact onto economies and societies around the world is undisputed, the technologies facilitating such a ubiquitous connectivity have struggled so far and only recently commenced to take shape. To this end, this paper introduces in a timely manner and for the first time the wireless communications stack the industry believes to meet the important criteria of power-efficiency, reliability and Internet connectivity. Industrial applications have been the early adopters of this stack, which has become the de-facto standard, thereby bootstrapping early IoT developments with already thousands of wireless nodes deployed. Corroborated throughout this paper and by emerging industry alliances, we believe that a standardized approach, using latest developments in the IEEE 802.15.4 and IETF working groups, is the only way forward. We introduce and relate key embodiments of the power-efficient IEEE 802.15.4-2006 PHY layer, the power-saving and reliable IEEE 802.15.4e MAC layer, the IETF 6LoWPAN adaptation layer enabling universal Internet connectivity, the IETF ROLL routing protocol enabling availability, and finally the IETF CoAP enabling seamless transport and support of Internet applications. The protocol stack proposed in the present work converges towards the standardized notations of the ISO/OSI and TCP/IP stacks. What thus seemed impossible some years back, i.e., building a clearly defined, standards-compliant and Internet-compliant stack given the extreme restrictions of IoT networks, is commencing to become reality.
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Saturday, November 02, 2013
Comet C/2013 R1 Lovejoy is Visible in Binoculars (3 November - 8 November 2013)
While all eyes have been on comet C/2012 S1 ISON, another comet has been quietly brightening. C/2013 R1 Lovejoy is Australian Terry Lovejoy's 4th comet (you may remember C/2011 W3 Lovejoy). It has been over performing, and is currently magnitude 7 and easily visible in binoculars. It is a good target if you are up early looking for ISON.
The comet should brighten more over the coming week, and will be very close to the iconic Beehive cluster on the 7th and 8th of November. This should be a great photo opportunity. The comet has a distinct coma, and a very thin tail which is really only visible on long exposure images with telescopes. In binoculars it will look like a fuzzy blob.
This week the comet is to the right of Jupiter between two of the main stars of the constellation Cancer, Beta and Delta Canceri, so sweeping with binoculars or a telescope between these stars should net you the comet. The best time to see it is in the early monring, before Astronomical twilight (90 minutes before local sunrise). As I mentioned above it will be very close to the iconic Beehive cluster on the 7th and 8th of November.
A printable PDF chart is here.
The comet is closest to Earth on 19 November, but it will be too deep in the twilight to see from Australia. We should see it brighten to unaided eye visibility (magnitude 6) by the middle of November.
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Urban wildlife sanctuaries, including an overgrown Capp Street backyard, are helping bring a tiny frog’s once-familiar bellow back to San Francisco.
“At one time, the chorus frog was the sound of the Bay Area,” said Jim McKissock, who has seeded The City in recent years with the young of the only remaining local population. “Now they’re virtually all gone.”
McKissock said local vernal habitats of the Pacific chorus frogs — which are also known as Pacific tree frogs — have been almost entirely paved over for new developments in San Francisco, and that the frogs have been nearly “weed-whacked out of existence” in overmanaged parks and lawns.
Frogs from a healthy, successful Brisbane population shouldn’t be brought to San Francisco, according to McCkissock, who wants to protect local strains of the species. “If we lose these here, we’ll never be able to bring them back,” he said.
McKissock, who founded the local conservation nonprofit Earthcare, said he chose to use some of the precious few local tadpoles to establish a population in a Mission back yard maintained by Ned McAllister.
“It’s lush and overgrown,” McKissock said. “That also encourages a lot of insects — the frogs eat the insects, and the insects need a place to live, too.”
McAllister estimated that 40 to 45 frogs have grown up from the 100 tadpoles introduced in May to his backyard pond. They’ve ventured from the pond to distant corners of the yard, where they crawl oncactus, vines and flowering plants.
Although the frogs and tadpoles are still too rare to be given to anyone who wants them, McAllister said he hasn’t needed to stock his yard with wildlife for it to quickly fill with amphibians, including salamanders, and a smorgasbord of other types of little-noticed wildlife.
“It’s just about letting it go,” McAllister said, “and getting past the concepts of creating a highly manicured, nice garden.”
The professional reptile breeder said that to create an urban wildlife refuge, dead plants should not be raked up, but should instead be left to cover and leach their nutrients back into the soil. He also said pesticides, fertilizers and other chemicals are “absolutely deadly to any kind of amphibian” and should not be used.
The frogs need abundant sunshine, water and plenty of cover, said McAllister, who has hung mirrors from a fence to reflect sunlight back into the yard. He is also building a series of small, vegetated, mosquito-proof ponds throughout the yard, which he hopes to vegetate with native grasses. One lies under a hammock.
“You basically want to try to invite the wildlife into your yard,” he said. “Things will land in your yard if you just leave it, like mosses, and who knows what else.”
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|Freshwater Mussels of the Upper Mississippi River System|
Mussel Conservation Activities
2005 Highlights: Possible fish predation of subadult Higgins eye was observed in the Upper Mississippi River, Pools 2 and 4.
Subadult Higgins eye pearlymussels (Lampsilis higginsii) from the Upper Mississippi River, Pools 2 and 4. Shell damage may be due to predation by fish (i.e. common carp or freshwater drum). Top photo by Mike Davis, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources; bottom photo by Gary Wege, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Species Identification and Location • Threatened and Endangered Mussels • Life History • Ecology • Mussel Harvest on the River • Current Threats • Mussel Conservation Activities • Ongoing Studies and Projects • Multimedia • Teacher Resources • Frequently Asked Questions • Glossary • References • Links to Other Mussel Sites
Privacy • FOIA • FirstGov • Contact
Department of the Interior • U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service • U.S. Geological Survey
|Last updated on
December 21, 2006
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English as an Additional Language
We are delighted that our school represents a rich cultural diversity, with children that speak many different languages as well as English. At Riverbridge, we are committed to tailoring our provision of teaching for pupils with English as an Additional Language, to help raise their achievement to meet their targets. We identify individual pupil's needs and work hard to ensure all pupils are able to progress, regardless of their language or ability.
Support at school
We have access to Surrey's Race Equality and Minority Achievement (REMA) team services where necessary, which focuses on supporting identified pupils. The type and extent of intervention is negotiated and agreed to reflect the specific requirements of our school and the learning needs of our pupils. The team also provides language assessments and advises our school on working with parents from minority ethnic/language communities, asylum seekers and refugees, and with bilingual pupils who also have Special Educational Needs. Direct teaching support may be provided to enhance bilingual learners’ English language acquisition and access to the curriculum.
How can you provide support at home?
- Understand that many children will go through a ‘silent’ period at some stage, sometimes for an extended period. Be patient during this time and continue to expect that they will respond.
- Children with the same first language should not be discouraged from sharing their language whilst playing.
- Explore different ways to be exposed to the English language at home such as playing games and listening to English nursery rhymes and music.
- Modelling language is important for introducing children to a new language, so try communicating in English, repeating phrases and words and giving lots of praise.
- Stories based on personal experience can be a powerful medium for supporting children’s personal, social and emotional development as well as their communicative and linguistic skills.
Useful link: http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/
This website is a great resource to help support children who are learning English. It is created by the British Council and there are lots of online games, songs, stories and activities to try. They also have some information for parents about supporting children to learn English and how to use English at home.
If you or your child need help with any aspect of English as it is not your home language, please come and speak to us. The class teacher will be pleased to offer advice and can also refer to our EAL leader for further support if necessary.
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In simple words, ‘ rent’ is used as a part of the produce which is paid to the owner of land for the use of his goods and services.
But, in economics, rent has been differently defined from time to time.
Thus rent refers only to make payments for factors of production which are in imperfectly elastic supply. For instance, it is the price paid for the use of land.
Definition of Rent:
The concept of rent has been defined as follows:
“Rent is that portion of the produce of earth which is paid to landlord for the use of original and indestructible powers of the soil.” -Ricardo
“Rent is the income derived from the ownership of land and other free gifts of Nature.” He further called it ‘Quasi Rent’ which arises on the manmade equipment’s and machines in the short period and tend to disappear in the long run. – Marshall
“Rent is the price paid for the use of land.” –Prof. Carver
Economic rent is also termed as surplus as it is received by landlord without any effort. Prof. Bounding termed it as “Economic Surplus.” Moreover, modern economists comprising of Mrs. Joan Robinson, Boulding etc. opined that part of the income of each factor can be rent.
Income alone received by land cannot be rent. It is so because different factors have different uses. As such, each factor will be used for that purpose in which its income is maximum. Opportunity cost of a factor for its use in the work yielding maximum income is the price of output that the factor concerned can earn by working in next alternative use.
Definition of Economic Rent:
The definitions of economic rent can be grouped into two parts as:
“Economic rent is the payment for the use of scarce natural resources”. – Jacob Oser
“Economic rent is that portion of a landlord’s income which is attributable to his ownership of land.” – Anatol Murad
“Economic Rent may be defined as any payment to a factor of production which is in excess of the minimum amount necessary to keep the factor in its present occupation.” – Boulding
“Rent is the difference between actual payment to a factor and its supply price or transfer earnings.” – Hibdon
Types of Rent:
The main types of rent are as under:
1. Economic Rent:
Economic rent refers to the payment made for the use of land alone. But in economics the term rent is used in the sense of economic rent. In the words of Ricardo and other classical economists, economic rent refers to the payment for the use of land alone It is also called Economic Surplus because it emerges without any effort on the part of landlord. Prof. Boulding termed it “Economic Surplus”.
2. Gross Rent:
Gross rent is the rent which is paid for the services of land and the capital invested on it.
Gross rent consists of:
(1) Economic rent. It refers to payment made for the use of land.
(2) Interest on capital invested for improvement of land.
(3) Reward for risk taken by landlord in investing his capital.
3. Scarcity Rent:
Scarcity rent refers to the price paid for the use of the homogeneous land when its supply is limited in relation to demand. If all land is homogeneous but demand for land exceeds its supply, the entire land will earn economic rent by virtue of its scarcity. In this way, rent will arise when supply of land is inelastic. Prof. Ricardo opined that land was beneficial but it was also scarce. Productivity of land was indicative of the generosity of nature but its total supply remaining more or less fixed symbolized niggardliness of nature.
4. Differential Rent:
Differential rent refers to the rent which arises due to the differences in the fertility of land. In every country, there exists a variety of land. Some lands are more fertile and some are less fertile. When the farmer’s are compelled to cultivate less fertile land the owners of more fertile land get relatively more production. This surplus which arises due to difference in fertility of land is called the differential rent. This type of rent arises under extensive cultivation. According to Ricardo, “In order to increase production on same type of land, more units of labour and capital are employed.”
5. Contract Rent:
Contract rent refers to that rent which is agreed upon between the landowner and the user of the land. On the basis of some contract, which may be verbal or written, contract rent may be more or less than the economic rent.
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Pictures of tularemia and disease information have been excerpted from VisualDx clinical decision support system as a public health service. Additional information, including symptoms, diagnostic pearls, differential diagnosis, best tests, and management pearls, is available in VisualDx.
Tularemia (also known as rabbit fever) is caused by Francisella tularensis, an aerobic gram-negative coccobacillus. Tularemia is ubiquitous in the northern hemisphere between 30 and 71° N latitude. Some 100 species of wild mammals, 25 species of birds, several species of fish and amphibians, and more than 50 arthropods have been found to be naturally infected. Humans are extremely susceptible. Humans acquire the infection either after direct contact with the bodily fluids of animal carriers or, more significantly, through ticks and deer flies. Water contaminated by voles, beavers, and muskrats has been responsible for outbreaks. Laboratory workers and farm workers may be at risk of infection from aerosolization. A number of cases spread by cat bites have been reported. Person-to-person transmission is not known to exist.
The CDC has classified tularemia as a Class A bioterrorism agent due to its ease of dissemination, morbidity, and ability to infect with as few as 10 bacterial organisms. The former Soviet Union developed weaponized antibiotic- and vaccine-resistant strains of F. tularensis. Francisella tularensis is so infective that exposure to an open culture plate can cause human infection. Tularemia is not directly contagious person to person. Aerosol dissemination of F. tularensis has been projected to result in the abrupt onset of large numbers of cases of acute nonspecific febrile illness with pleuropneumonitis as the predominant finding.
Tularemia has an extremely variable presentation. The incubation period may range from a few hours to 21 days, with a mean of 4.5 days. Typically, a patient has an abrupt onset of fever, headache, chills and rigors, myalgia (especially the low back), coryza, and sore throat. In 42% of patients, a pulse-temperature dissociation has been observed. The cough may be dry or slightly productive, and there may be substernal pain or tightness. Signs of pneumonia may or may not be obvious. Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea may also occur.
Francisella tularensis usually produces a marked reaction at the portal of entry. There are 7 major clinical patterns: glandular, ulceroglandular, oculoglandular, typhoidal, pneumonic, oropharyngeal, and septicemic. Any form of tularemia can be complicated by hematogenous spread resulting in secondary pleuropneumonia, sepsis, or meningitis (rare).
Postexposure prophylaxis is not recommended for natural exposure but can be used for patients with aerosol exposure who are identified early in the incubation period (due to the short incubation period of inhalational tularemia). Isolation is not recommended for tularemia patients due to the lack of human-to-human transmission. However, because of the risk of secondary arthropod transmission, ambient ticks, fleas, lice, and mosquitoes should be controlled.
The geographic distribution includes North America, Europe, the former republics of the USSR, Japan, and Spain. Tularemia is present throughout the United States but is most prevalent in Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, South Dakota, and Kansas. Prevalence is greatest from June through August (more tick-related infections) and in the fall (during hunting season).
Hunters, game wardens, trappers, and campers are particularly susceptible. Animals known to have transmitted tularemia include rabbits (most common), foxes, squirrels, skunks, muskrats, beavers, voles, and even fish. Other routes of infectivity include contact with contaminated water or mud and aerosol droplets.
Typhoidal: Gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms (diarrhea, pain) may be the most prominent feature. Systemic symptoms and signs are seen without lymphadenitis or cutaneous or mucosal lesions.
Ulceroglandular (70%-80%): A papule appears at the site of inoculation, most commonly at an inguinal or axillary site. The papule eventually becomes pustular and then ulcerates within a few days. An eschar may or may not form at the inoculation site. There is typically regional lymphadenopathy; the nodes may become fluctuant and rupture.
Oculoglandular (1%-5%): This form results in a purulent conjunctivitis. Small yellow nodules develop on the conjunctiva and ulcerate. They are usually unilateral. This may be accompanied by severe eyelid edema, vasculitis, and regional lymphadenitis.
Glandular (10%-15%): The glandular form is characterized by lymphadenopathy without cutaneous manifestations. It is identical to the ulceroglandular type except that a primary lesion cannot be identified.
Oropharyngeal: The oropharyngeal form can present with stomatitis or an exudative pharyngitis or tonsillitis. There may also be ulcers and cervical lymphadenopathy. It may present with cervical nodes resembling the "bull neck" of diphtheria.
Pneumonic: This form is rare in naturally acquired infection. Lymphohematogenous spread is the usual pathogenesis. Symptoms include dry cough, pleuritic chest pain, and dyspnea. Signs include rales and pleural friction rubs, pharyngitis, and hilar lymphadenitis along with other signs of systemic illness. X-ray or CT may show bronchial infiltrates, pleural effusions, and hilar lymphadenopathy.
Septicemic: This is the most severe form of tularemia. In addition to the GI presentation of the typhoidal form, central nervous system symptoms such as confusion or coma may occur.
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Stories are a powerful medium for teaching children important character traits. A well-written story brings the trait to life in a meaningful and memorable way. Here are three of my favorite children’s picture books that demonstrate the character trait of courage.
The Empty Pot
The Empty Pot by Demi is a beautifully illustrated tale of a little boy named Ping. The Emperor has decided to choose his successor and announces that the flowers will do the choosing. He gives a special seed to every child in the kingdom who wishes to have one. They must care for the seed for a year and bring back their best at the end of the year. Whoever grows the most beautiful flower will be chosen by the Emperor to succeed him.
Ping receives his seed and cares for it throughout the entire year. When he plants it and nothing happens, he replants it in a bigger pot with better soil. And still nothing happens. When the time comes to bring his plant to the Emperor, he is embarrassed to bring his empty pot when all of the other children have amazingly beautiful plants to present. When the Emperor asks Ping why he brought an empty pot to him, Ping tells the truth that nothing would grow from the seed he received. The Emperor then declares that he has found the one person worthy of being Emperor. No one knew that the seeds had all been boiled and could not possibly grow. Ping was the only one with the courage to tell the truth and is rewarded with the honor of becoming Emperor.
When Jessie Came Across the Sea
When Jessie Came Across the Sea by Amy Hest and illustrated by P.J. Lynch is the lavishly illustrated story of one girl’s experience of immigrating to the United States to New York City’s Lower East Side in the early 1900’s. Jessie is selected by the village rabbi to use the one ticket he has to America. She must leave her beloved grandmother in Eastern Europe and sail the ocean to America.
After arriving in America, Jessie works hard to learn English and save enough money to buy her grandmother a ticket as well. Her path crosses three years later with a young man from the ship and a friendship and eventual romance ensues. The story is a beautiful telling of courage, hope and love that is greatly enhanced by the gorgeous oil painting illustrations.
Brave Irene by William Steig is the delightful tale of Irene, a young girl who goes on a very important errand for her mother. Her mother has sewn a beautiful ball gown for the duchess but is too sick to deliver it through the cold and snow in time for the ball. Irene assures her mother that she will get it to the palace in time.
Irene encounters many obstacles along the way while trudging through the snow and cold, but she continues on with great courage and determination. At last she is able to deliver the dress and is rewarded with the opportunity to attend the ball herself before going home the next morning.
Three Great Children’s Picture Books about Courage
The Empty Pot, When Jessie Came Across the Sea, and Brave Irene are excellent children’s picture books that convey the important message of courage in the face of difficulty and adversity. Illustrated in three distinctly different styles, each book has a compelling story that children will find enjoyable, though-provoking and memorable.
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Changes to your weight, what you eat, how much you exercise, smoking habits and alcohol intake can all be made to increase your chances of becoming pregnant. These factors are known to impact on the fertility of both men and women.
If you are trying to conceive, it is important to be a sensible weight. The best available evidence indicates that being underweight or overweight can impact the fertility of both men and women. In women, excess weight can affect the healthy development of eggs by the ovary and can also affect the implantation of a fertilised egg in the womb. A healthy weight is also needed for the normal production of hormones (oestrogen and testosterone) in both males and females. A healthy weight can increase your chances of becoming pregnant naturally and improve the success of pregnancy while receiving fertility treatment.
If you are trying to conceive, we recommend that you calculate your Body Mass Index (BMI). This can be calculated by dividing your weight in kilograms (kg) by your height in metres squared (your height in metres multiplied by itself). While trying to conceive both you and your partner should have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of between 20 and 24.9. A BMI of above 25 is considered overweight and above 29 is considered obese.
If you have a BMI of more than 29, weight loss of 5% to 10% can significantly increase your success of pregnancy. If you are underweight (BMI of less than 18.5), you are likely to experience irregular periods. Gaining weight can kick-start your ovaries to work properly again and increase your chances of pregnancy. To achieve a healthy weight it is important to eat a balanced diet and exercise regularly.
A healthy, balanced diet is essential when trying to become pregnant. If you are overweight, a healthy diet is essential to achieve weight loss and increase your chances of pregnancy. A healthy diet also reduces your risk of complications during pregnancy such as the development of diabetes and high blood pressure. What you eat before and during pregnancy can also influence the long-term health of your baby. A poor diet can result in low-birth weight and development of heart disease and non-insulin dependent diabetes in adult life. A balanced diet in men is needed to keep sperm production at an ideal level and so increase chances of pregnancy. Here are some tips for healthy eating:
You are also advised to monitor your caffeine intake (coffee, fizzy drinks). Research has shown links between high caffeine levels and an increase in the time it takes to become pregnant and an increased risk of miscarriage. It is recommended for both you and your partner to limit your caffeine intake to less than two cups of coffee per day.
If you are a woman you may also think about supplementing your diet with vitamins and minerals. We recommend women to take folic acid (400ug) while trying to become pregnant and during the first three months of pregnancy. This will reduce the risks of birth defects in your developing baby. Be careful with your intake of Vitamin A as high intake of this vitamin can cause birth defects. Avoid Vitamin A supplements and limit your intake of liver and liver products such as liver pate and cod liver oil supplements.
How much should I exercise when trying for a baby?
Regular exercise is needed for a healthy body and mind when trying to conceive. This is particularly important if you have an increased BMI and are trying to achieve a healthy weight. Adults are recommended to take part in 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise at least 5 times per week. Moderate intensity exercise includes activities such as brisk walking, cycling, tennis and gardening.
Trying for a baby can be a stressful time in your life, regular exercise can help relieve some of this stress by promoting your body to release endorphins ('happy hormones').
Be aware of the dangers of over-exercising. Too much exercise can lead to excessive weight loss and irregular periods.
Smoking affects the fertility of both men and women. If you or your partner are a cigarette smoker you are strongly advised to quit smoking. Available research indicates that the rate of infertility is higher, and the time it takes to become pregnant is longer, in smokers than in non-smokers. In men, cigarette smoke is thought to affect the quality of sperm. In women, smoking has been linked to damage to the ovaries, changes in hormone levels needed for pregnancy and earlier onset of the menopause. If you do become pregnant, smoking is linked with increased risk of miscarriage and low birth weight of the baby.
You may also want to reconsider your alcohol intake while trying to become pregnant. How alcohol influences your fertility remains unclear. However, alcohol has been linked with reduced ovulation and impaired development of a fertilised egg in women. In men, heavy alcohol intake has been linked with decreased testosterone production and quality of sperm.
It is not known how much alcohol you need to drink before it will affect your fertility. Therefore we recommend you to significantly decrease your alcohol intake or to totally avoid drinking alcohol while trying to become pregnant. If you are a woman you should not drink more than 1 or 2 units of alcohol once or twice a week (1 unit = small glass of wine or half a pint of beer). If you are a man, avoid drinking more than 3-4 units a day.
If you want more information or advice on healthy eating, losing weight and quitting smoking, please refer to our fact sheets on these topics, available in the Cork Fertility.
Other useful information on the topics discussed above can be found on websites including:
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Interested in working with me? Call me at 888-929-5292 or fill out this quick form and I will contact you within 24 hours!
Bird strikes are often found to be a cause in aircraft accidents. A bird strike happens when an airborne animal collides with the aircraft, normally to the windshield, structural surface, or into one or both engines. Most of the accidents solely result in damage to the aircraft, however on occasion there have been accidents that have resulted in fatalities caused by these bird strikes. One of the most well-known accidents was the event of the US Airways flight that was forced to land in the Hudson River after loss of both engines due to a bird strike. However, there have been numerous other accidents that outcomes were not as fortunate, and resulted in fatalities.
The reporting of bird strikes is voluntary, so complete details about where all encounters take place may not be complete. The most recent statistics provided by the Federal Aviation Administration tell that 92% of the bird strikes to commercial aircraft happened at or below 3,500 feet above ground level. Between the years 2006-2010 there was an average of 26 bird strikes reported every day. Wildlife management teams will attempt to identify the remains to collect further information for research purposes. Continuing research on the successful methods of identifying and collecting this information is still in progress.
There are several procedures in place help prevent and deal with bird strikes. First the design of the engine and aircraft has proved to be an important factor to the way it may respond to a bird strike. Currently, engines have to be designed to be able to safely shut down in the event of a bird strike to that engine. The aircraft should be designed to be able to safely proceed with one engine. The event of a bird strike to both engines is an ongoing concern. Strikes to other parts of the aircraft such as the windshield are also a concern. However, most aircraft components are built to a standard to be able to safely withstand most bird collisions. Although bird strikes occur at any altitude, most occur at lower altitudes and upon takeoff and landing. In response to this, most airports will have a designated Wildlife Management Plan to detour or eliminate the birds from the premises and premises surrounding the airport. Birds are not the only wildlife that have been involved in accidents during takeoff and landing, as on occasion other animals will find their way onto the runways and airport premises. Many airports should have plans in place to safely handle such incidents and remove the threat. The tracking of bird migration and their flight paths in the civil aviation sector is done by a program called The Avian Hazard Advisory System. The system is a risk assessment tool that takes the collected information from bird strikes in the area, weather information and predictive models to locate bird activity. Even with numerous preventative measures in place, pilots must also remain vigilant and alert at all times to be able to respond if a wildlife encounter is presented.
When a bird strike causes an accident, who is liable is not always easily identifiable. The involved parties may try to immediately defend the accident by asserting it was an “Act of God”. Many times there are other parties that can be found liable. Failure to participate in the above procedures to avoid bird strikes may cause liability. The parties at fault can vary from the airport for their possible failure of control and advisement of wildlife, to the manufacturer for not following the design guidelines put forth by the FAA.
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by Elyse DeFranco, University of California
A new study published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin examines the risks of consuming wild harvested oysters from San Diego Bay. Pacific oyster (Crassostrea gigas), an Asian species brought to the west coast for aquaculture, has been colonizing the coastline of southern California in recent years. The farmed delicacies, which are rigorously regulated and tested for safety, are shucked from their shells and served in restaurants around the world, but after growing up in an urban bay, are they safe to eat?
“We see feral Pacific oysters cropping up more and more in coastal bays in the area, and they can get big, just like what you would get in a restaurant,” said Theresa Talley, the California Sea Grant Extension Specialist who co-led the study. “There were a lot of studies on contamination in finfish, but there was this gap of knowledge for shellfish.”
Shellfish, like oysters and mussels, eat by filtering small food particles from the water, which can lead to bioaccumulation of contaminants and makes them good environmental indicators. The state had been monitoring contaminant levels in mussels up until 2003, when the California State Mussel Watch Program ended due to funding challenges.
To fill this research gap, Talley teamed up with Chad Loflen of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, San Diego Region (San Diego Water Board), and David Pedersen, an anthropologist at the University of California, San Diego. With funding from California Sea Grant and SWAMP, California’s Surface Water Ambient Monitoring Program, the project team sought to build on these data by including feral Pacific oysters and emerging chemical contaminants, such as microplastics, phthalates, newer pesticides and pharmaceuticals. The team also wanted to collect data to update existing guidelines for consuming fish and shellfish from San Diego Bay (see A guide to eating fish from San Diego Bay).
The researchers set out to understand where the oysters were colonizing and the types of contaminants they carried across seasons. They visited 11 sites in San Diego Bay in summer 2018 and winter 2019 to collect oysters and examine their contaminant concentrations. Much of the San Diego Bay shoreline is lined with large rocks to reduce the eroding impact of wave action: Pacific oysters are spreading across the higher tidal elevations of this new habitat and are now the dominant species found.
Concentration levels for a total of 165 compounds were measured, and oysters at every site surveyed showed a wide range of contaminants. Oysters in all sites sampled through the year had anywhere from 7 to 11 types of contaminants. Summer brought with it high levels of PCBs and pesticides. Some compounds that bind with sediments and plastics were more abundant in the winter. At some locations, the winter increase in plastics per oyster more than doubled compared to summer samples. According to Talley, with the winter comes rains causing runoff and flows that move the contaminated sediments and larger particles like plastics from upstream into the bay.
“With climate change, we have these longer droughts where pollutants build up on the roads,” Talley said. “Then all of a sudden a big torrential storm hits, and where does it all go? It washes down through the storm drains into the bay.”
The good news is that some of the older, banned contaminants, such as tributyltin, mercury, and DDT, seem to be relatively low in the oysters. Other contaminants, like copper and zinc, were elevated compared to historic mussel data. This may be linked to changes in use, as copper replaced tributyltin as a boat bottom paint and both copper and zinc are found in– and subsequently released from– car brake pads and tires. There were also detections of newer compounds, such as neonicotinoid and pyrethroid pesticides.
The health effects of many of the emerging contaminants are only starting to be realized leaving us a ways off from having consumption guidelines for these compounds. As for the consumption guidelines we do have, the oysters were below some, but not all, published thresholds. The baywide average PCB concentrations in the oysters fell into a “one to two servings per week” guideline for adults while concentrations in some individual sites were above a “Do Not Eat” threshold. Some oysters also were above thresholds for PAHs, including Benzo[a]pyrene (BAP). Another area of uncertainty is the additive health effects of different contaminants—even those that fall below thresholds on their own but together may have uncertain health impacts.
The range in oyster contamination between seasons and specific locations makes it difficult to make sweeping advisories in the San Diego Bay, according to Talley.
“You can’t just look at Bay-wide data and say, ‘here’s the average, it’s safe.’ You need to consider location, season, species and what the maximum values are,” adds project co-lead, Chad Loflen. “The results show the need for longer-term monitoring efforts to both assess risks to consumers and also track improvements in the bay over time as pollution controls are put into place.”
Contaminant levels in San Diego Bay, like many urban bays in the country, are improving with efforts from State and local agencies. For instance, most recently, the San Diego Water Board has required the cleanup of 13 locations in San Diego Bay, which has resulted in the remediation of nearly 500,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment, while also requiring actions be taken to eliminate landside sources, particularly for banned chemicals like PCBs. While cleanups have traditionally focused on industrial areas as pollution hot spots, this study confirms that pollutants and contaminants are transported via the food web throughout San Diego Bay. It’s heartening to see that levels of some banned chemicals, like the historic pesticide DDT, are low, but more information is needed on newer contaminants like neonicotinoid pesticides and microplastics.
In addition to the clean-up efforts at industrial sites, the San Diego Water Board is also working with local Tribes and subsistence anglers to improve fishing conditions. This initiative will strive to address concerns about environmental justice by considering the designation of areas throughout the San Diego Region, including San Diego Bay, for tribal beneficial uses and subsistence fishing. The Board is also conducting a pilot study in partnership with Tribal representatives and stakeholders to better characterize pollutant concentrations in species of concern to Tribes and subsistence anglers, including in San Diego Bay.
Studies like this one are critical for understanding what chemicals exist in the environment around us and are impacting food and water sources. This study confirmed that Pacific oysters are important for assessing the fish and shellfish consumption beneficial uses of San Diego Bay water, and they are included in the San Diego Water Board’s Unified Assessment and Strategic Monitoring Approach for San Diego Bay released in December 2021. With this information, scientists can examine the health effects and pass this information on to managers and policymakers.
“For the project team, engaging with community members will be an important next step in helping us craft guidelines, management actions, and other solutions,” Talley said.
About California Sea Grant
NOAA’s California Sea Grant College Program funds marine research, education and outreach throughout California. Headquartered at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, California Sea Grant is one of 34 Sea Grant programs in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Department of Commerce.
Reference (open access)
Theresa Sinicrope Talley, Chad Loflen, Rich Gossett, David Pedersen, Nina Venuti, Julie Nguyen, Richard Gersberg. Contaminant concentrations and risks associated with the Pacific oyster in the highly urbanized San Diego Bay. Marine Pollution Bulletin, Volume 174, 2022, 113132, ISSN 0025-326X. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2021.113132
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Richard Muller: Skeptical Climate Science
Physicist Richard Muller challenges scientific data used in deductions about global warming, and comes to his own conclusions on a variety of energy issues.
Richard Muller, Professor of Physics, UC Berkeley
In conversation with Greg Dalton, Founder of Climate One, moderator
Greg Dalton: This is Climate One, I’m Greg Dalton. Today we’ll look in to the complex and contentious realm of climate science. The effective gases that trap the sun’s heat on the earth’s atmosphere were discovered in 1824 by Joseph Fourier, then investigated and validated by scientists over the next hundred years. In the 1950s, United States military conducted tests to understand how the greenhouse gas effect impacted missile navigation systems. In recent decades, climate science has become a highly visible and politicized field of inquiry. The vast majority of climate scientists who published peer reviewed articles agreed that the rising temperatures are disrupting the earth’s life support system and burning fossil fuels is a major cause. But science trades improbabilities rather than absolute certainties, and there’s a lot that scientists don’t know. For the next hour, we’ll talk about scientific understanding of the earth’s disruptive climate with our live audience here at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Our featured guest is Richard Muller, professor of Physics at UC Berkeley, and founder of a research effort called Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature or BEST. He’s the recipient of a MacArthur genius prize and author of the new book “Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines”. Please welcome Richard Muller to Climate One.
Richard Muller: Thank you.
Greg Dalton: Richard Muller, welcome. Thanks for coming.
Richard Muller: Delighted to be here.
Greg Dalton: So, you did your PhD in particle physics. Tell us how you kind of got from there into earth sciences and into the climate realm.
Richard Muller: I think I have somewhat of a reputation working on one disaster after another. I started in particle physics but I quickly moved into astrophysics. I started out several cosmology projects, one, to measure the cosmic microwave background, and another, to look at supernovas for the expansion of the universe. I was fascinated though and intrigued by what Luis and Walter Alvarez were doing on what killed the dinosaurs, and I did some work on that. After that work, I began working on other natural disasters, things that had big effects on the earth, volcanic eruptions, climate change. What’s going on with the ice ages? Were they caused by impacts? What was the story there? So I wound up spending 10 years of my life doing research on the cycles of the ice ages. Now, I would go and give talks on this at various scientific meetings. Invariably, all the questions at the end came on global warming, that the people were interested in climate, that was their concern.
Greg Dalton: What time frame was this?
Richard Muller: I guess I finished my work around 2001. And that -- because of that, I was really -- felt I had to do research on -- in global warming. I began reading the papers. I didn’t get seriously involved in it until just three years ago.
Greg Dalton: But in 2004, you wrote critically about the famous hockey stick, the idea that the temperatures are rising exponentially. For people who saw “An Inconvenient Truth”, that’s when Al Gore gets on the cherry picker and goes up. And there’s an article by Michael Mann, a professor back East. Tell us about your concern about the hockey stick ‘cause that was quite of a [crosstalk].
Richard Muller: Well, when I wrote my book in year 2000, I wrote a technical book on the ice ages. Plot number one, I put in Michael Mann’s plot of a hockey stick.
And then before -- when I was doing the proofs, I looked over to my book and I said, “I need to put it. I don’t want anything in this book that I won’t believe in 10 years. Let me look hard at this.” And I looked at his original papers and realized, now these aren’t convincing. I wound up pulling that plot and then putting in a plot of my own where I had used my own data to show that temperatures were rising. When the Climategate scandal broke, I was horrified to learn how these plots had been manipulated and changed with the goal of convincing the public that the conclusions they had drawn should be clear and incontrovertible.
Greg Dalton: But the hockey stick, you had some issues with the shapes of the handle or some statistical methods for defining the contours of the stick. But isn’t it true that there are 12 studies subsequently concluded that the warmest decade in a thousand years was probably at the end of the 20th century, that the hockey stick has been validated by the National Research Council [crosstalk]--
Richard Muller: No, no, no. I was on that National Research Council panel; I was a referee for their paper. I agree with everything they said, but they didn’t validate it. What they were referring to there, the hockey -- what they said about the Michael Mann hockey stick was that he could not go back more than 300 years because the error bars were so large. Now, we already knew back 300 years that the temperature had gone up like that, there was nothing new there. The -- what was compelling about what he had done was that he had argued that the signal went back a thousand years, that was shown invalid by the National Academy study, and that it was evident in a wide range of world data. In fact, what had been discovered was that the hockey stick that Michael Mann did was derived almost entirely from a few tree ring data sets that were from North America.
So, basically, the end of the National Academy study, although it was kind on Mr. Mann, it said that none of the new things that he had come up with in his papers in 1998, 1999, none of them proved out to be correct.
Greg Dalton: But Roger Pielke, who’s a critic of the IPCC and a professor in Colorado, said that the National Research Council was, quote, “a near-complete vindication of Michael Mann”, so it sounds like--
Richard Muller: I think he misread the report. I think some people have characterized it that way and it certainly wasn’t. I think if you read the report, you’ll see that although the report is very polite to Mr. Mann, it does not -- nothing that he came out with, none of the key conclusions that he drew in his 1998, 1999 work really held up once the National Academy reviewed it.
Greg Dalton: But is it true that other reports have validated the basic premise which is that warming is increasing?
Richard Muller: Oh, that wasn’t the premise of the Mann work, that wasn’t what the National Academy was about. The National Academy said nothing about global warming. I know that because I was the referee. The Mann work, based on what are called proxies -- a proxy is an indirect measure of temperature. What made that so striking was that it showed that the current era is unusual over the past thousand years, and it turned out not to be true. What we do believe is that we have had warming. My own work substantiates that we have had warming over the past 50, 100, 150 years. That’s not new and that’s not what the National Academy report was about.
Greg Dalton: Is it true that the warmest decade in a thousand years was probably at the end of the 20th century?
Richard Muller: No. No scientist -- the National Academy said -- would say the following. Now, the report was done a few years ago, but they would say that the recent decade was the warmest it’s been on record for the past 300 years.
Greg Dalton: Okay. So, 300, not a thousand, okay. So, the warmest decade--
Richard Muller: But that was known back in 1980.
Greg Dalton: Okay, so--
Richard Muller: So, that was still warmer. Even in 1980, it was still warmer than it had been for 300 years, nothing new there.
Greg Dalton: In 2000 -- then you moved on the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. There’s three main groups around the world that collect earth surface temperatures in different ways, using different methodologies, different measurements and stations, and you decided to test or validate that. Why did you think that was necessary?
Richard Muller: Well, the temperature measurements are made by thousands of people all around the world using different criteria and different kinds of thermometers. These data are then gathered together, primarily by the NOAA group, although--
Greg Dalton: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration?
Richard Muller: Yeah, yeah. And that’s their job. They collected raw data which is virtually unusable, then they analyzed it, and much of their data is then used also by the NASA group, and there’s some independent work done in the UK. What -- but in the process of doing this analysis on the data, all three groups were doing a lot of adjustments to the data. And the data have to be adjusted. We see records in which it’s clear the temperature jumps from zero degrees all the way up to 32 in one hour. Well, no, someone just started to switch from Celsius to Fahrenheit. So you have to go look at the data and make those adjustments.
But there were problems with this. There were undocumented station location changes. There were -- only a small fraction of the data were being used. Of the stations that were available -- of the nearly 40,000 stations that are available, the group, the NOAA group was using only 8,000 of them. The group in the UK was only using 2,000. There were issues of how they were selecting these. If they were selecting them because they had long records, which was the method that they said they were using, then there’s a danger that records with long records were once rural. If they are 200 years old, they almost certainly were once rural. But now they may be deeply buried inside of the city and there’s the urban heat island effect. So there are all of these questions, and when I read the papers, I could not find adequate answers to these questions that bothered me. I wanted to know whether global warming was real and whether it’s caused by humans. And I could not convince myself when I carefully scrutinized the data.
Greg Dalton: That was a couple years ago. Last fall, you came out and said you have scrutinized the data. And what was the conclusion?
Richard Muller: That the global warming of the past 50 years was very close to what the prior groups had claimed it was.
Greg Dalton: So they were right?
Richard Muller: On this issue they were right. That’s right. And I -- my reaction was that the issues that they did not answer, that they didn’t answer in their papers and that they didn’t answer publicly were issues that they had put a great deal of careful scientific thought into. And they were able to answer it to the standards necessary. Now, there’s a difference between being able to come to a conclusion and being able to convince every skeptic that you’ve come to that conclusion. The details of this get so complex, that their failing was not in the work they had done. Their failing, I felt at the end, was in their ability to address openly all of the issues that had been addressed in such way that an unbiased outside observer coming in would be compelled to accept their conclusions.
Greg Dalton: Which is you’re talking about a communication issue and scientists are often not--
Richard Muller: That’s right.
Greg Dalton: --the best communicators, they agree with what they don’t know rather than what [crosstalk].
Richard Muller: So they were right.
Greg Dalton: There’s a whole set of issue there.
Richard Muller: On the measurement of the temperature change, they were right.
Greg Dalton: And what was the reaction to your report? You previously were known as a climate skeptic or a denier, and there were some pretty strong words for you. Among some people, you were called a media whore; some people thought you were, you know, a convert. So what was the reaction?
Richard Muller: Well, actually, if these had all happened 15 years ago, you wouldn’t have such quotes. These days we have the internet--
Greg Dalton: Thank God for blogs.
Richard Muller: And anybody can use the strongest language that they want and put it on. And then even if they retracted, it’s there.
Greg Dalton: Yeah, that was -- so--
Richard Muller: So, yeah, a lot of people misunderstood. They -- people still today confuse media reports of what, let’s say, I have done with what I have done. And it’s like this famous painting, “This is Not a Pipe”, it’s a painting of a pipe. So people would respond to what people had said I had said, not to what our group, our Berkeley Surface Temperature group had actually said. To try to avoid this, we -- our goal was not just to test the conclusions of the prior groups, but to do it in a far more transparent and open way. So even though they had not yet been accepted for publication, we put them online -- Jim Hanson [crosstalk]--
Greg Dalton: And you were criticized for putting out non-peer-reviewed literature by people saying, “Hey, this is--
Richard Muller: Despite the fact that that’s the longest tradition in science. People have done this; we used to call them preprints. And it was -- traditionally I was raised in by Nobel laureate, Luis Alvarez. You send your papers out and you get peer review--
Greg Dalton: Right.
Richard Muller: --before you even submit them to the journal.
And this was what I learned was peer review. And now, some people have decided, no, that’s not peer review. Now, it’s only the journals who decide what’s peer review.
Greg Dalton: And what was the response of some of the funders? The funders of this include Charles Koch with the Koch Industries, Bill Gates, Ann and Gordon Getty. How did they respond to the results?
Richard Muller: I haven’t had anything other than expressions of pleasure that we were able to do what we proposed to do.
Greg Dalton: And so you validated the basic measurement of the earth’s surface temperature is warming.
Richard Muller: That’s right. That’s right.
Greg Dalton: That’s right.
Richard Muller: And we were able to measure with greater accuracy. We were able to address what we felt in an open and clear way the objections that had prevented me from reaching this conclusion in the past. This included the fact that we were able to use all the stations. I have a -- my -- person we hired to do much of the math and computing named Robert Rohde, who is one of the few geniuses I’ve ever met in my life. And he did a superb job on the statistical analysis on the data -- data work. And we were able to show that the station -- we were able to use all the stations which previous groups couldn’t do. We were able to directly look at -- because we could use all the stations, we could pick a subset of the stations that were all rural, none of them in cities. And we could get the global temperature solely from the rural stations. This is the most direct way to address the urban heat island effect. We got the same answer. We can do this because we’re using all the stations.
Greg Dalton: So the science is sound -- you’ve written about -- there’s skeptics, which all scientists should be skeptics, and there’s closed-minded deniers. So, talk about the difference then. Did you convince anyone -- did your work convince anyone who’s like, “Uh, okay, well, if this guy says it, it must be true.”
Richard Muller: Well, it’s hard to know, but there are deniers on both sides. I mean, they are -- I call the deniers the people who pay no attention to the science.
They don’t care -- they start with the assumption that there’s a great conspiracy, and that whatever’s happening in the climate is good.
Greg Dalton: If Al Gore says it, it’s got to be wrong.
Richard Muller: That’s right. Now, on the other side, there are the exaggerators who are just as bad as the deniers.
Greg Dalton: The doomsdayers of the world is going to end and – right. Okay.
Richard Muller: Yeah, that includes Al Gore. And so he’s on the other extreme, he doesn’t pay any attention to the science on one side, and the deniers don’t pay it on the -- in the middle. There are -- and even close to the middle, there are the skeptics who’ve done a really wonderful job of pointing out the flaws in the science. They are what I call the warmists. The warmists are people who have – actually, many of them have done really good work, but have convinced themselves that this is now a really dangerous thing and they become political activists. But there are -- I see the symmetric, I see that there are equally -- equal denier -- in my book, I refer to Al Gore as a skeptic. I should have called him a denier because he doesn’t even accept what the IPCC says. He thinks it’s wrong, it’s too cautious. He goes way beyond. If you watch his movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, you’ll discover he has many, many things in that that are not in the IPCC report, but you wouldn’t know that by watching the movie.
Greg Dalton: Our guest at Climate One today is Richard Muller, professor of Physics at UC Berkeley. So, on the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which won the Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago, many people say that that’s a consensus driven organization, that every sentence in their synthesis reports are reviewed by committees. And if a number of people disagree with a sentence, they form a committee and they go outside and they hammer it out. It’s a tedious, laborious process. So, everything that gets into those reports has gone through by many scientists from around the world which leads to naturally kind of consensus--
Richard Muller: Yeah, I wish that were true.
Greg Dalton: No comment on that--
Richard Muller: I wish that were true.
I mean, we take the outstanding case of the melting of the Himalayas, which was in their 2007 report.
Greg Dalton: A non-peer-reviewed work that got in there that--
Richard Muller: Well, it was an--
Greg Dalton: Advocacy organization?
Richard Muller: The fact is that the reviewer for the IPCC stated that this cannot be put in the report because it is not based on scientific study; moreover, it’s certainly wrong. This is what the referee for the IPCC report said.
Greg Dalton: So that’s one piece of data--
Richard Muller: But wait a minute. I’m not finished.
Greg Dalton: --a one flaw in -- that’s one typo in Moby Dick.
Richard Muller: Well, wait a second, wait a second. I was addressing the process. The author of that section overrode the referee. Now, if you have a report in which referees are only advisory, it’s not really a refereed report.
Greg Dalton: And has the IPCC acknowledged they messed up on this one?
Richard Muller: Yes.
Greg Dalton: That’s one of the celebrated cases of -- they--
Richard Muller: Now, you say that this is just one little fact, that’s been their response too. The trouble is that one little fact was absolutely key. This was the thing that made the newspaper headlines. This is the thing that got the public attention.
Greg Dalton: But in most cases, does the IPCC go through and sentence by sentence, word by word, people--
Richard Muller: No, not at all. Not at all.
Greg Dalton: --go through that. Because I’ve talked to people who are -- have you been part of the IPCC?
Richard Muller: I’m just from the outside. But I’ve talked to many people who’ve been on the IPCC.
Greg Dalton: And so have I, and it’s -- it sounds torturous and painful.
Richard Muller: It is torturous and painful but it’s not science. And they don’t claim it science. If they want to know, for example, what confidence level to put on a certain claim, now a scientist would do this through a calculation, through mathematics, and he’ll be able to show it to you. They did it by vote. How many people are in favor of a 90% confidence level, how many people want 95, how many people want 67? So they voted on it. This isn’t science and they don’t claim it’s science. It’s not meant to be science, it’s meant to be policy and with -- affected by science.
Greg Dalton: So there’s a -- the IPCC doesn’t do original science, they synthesize the literature--
Richard Muller: That’s not what I said.
Greg Dalton: That’s part of it, and they do policy recommendations, and that’s what you’re talking about.
Richard Muller: When you said they don’t do original science, you threw in a word that was unnecessary. They don’t do science and they don’t claim they do.
Greg Dalton: They aggregate science and [crosstalk]--
Richard Muller: They read science and they try to reach conclusions based on this but they don’t consist of scientists. Most of their sections are written by a group of policy and specialists. People don’t sign off on the entire report, not the scientists, they can’t. They haven’t -- they can’t verify most of what’s in that report, this is a policy report affected by science, and it doesn’t follow the standards of peer review. It’s a great thing that they do.
Greg Dalton: But there are many scientists who participate in the IPCC.
Richard Muller: Oh, yeah.
Greg Dalton: Not all of them are.
Richard Muller: Yeah.
Greg Dalton: But many--
Richard Muller: They participate.
Greg Dalton: And – okay. So, the general consensus is you agree that the earth is warming.
Richard Muller: Earth is warming.
Greg Dalton: How big a risk is this to civilization as we--
Richard Muller: Now, you’re outside of my area of expertise, but I will talk about it anyway, once I had that -- once I say I’m no longer speaking as a scientist now but as a concerned human. I think it’s a big risk, a big danger. I think -- let’s assume for the moment that the IPCC conclusion is right, that most of the warming is caused by humans. Then, we’re -- if that’s the case, then the increase in carbon dioxide that we project for the future will cause several degrees of global warming which will be unprecedented, it will be warmer. Right now, I don’t think it’s the warmest it’s ever been in a thousand years. My own guess is that a thousand years ago was equally warm, but we will surpass that.
Greg Dalton: But you acknowledge it’s the warmest it’s been in 300 years?
Richard Muller: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Greg Dalton: Okay.
Richard Muller: But we -- some issue of it is at the end of natural causes, there are lots of fluctuations that takes place. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that it’s caused by humans.
In that case, it will keep on going up. I think that’s plausible just from a theoretical point of view, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, I have no doubts about it being a greenhouse gas. How much it affects the climate depends on some feedback mechanisms about which I do have some doubts. But let’s assume it’s going to go up. If it does go up, if the carbon -- carbon dioxide will go up unless we do something really drastic. And it’s not we, we can’t do it on our own, we have to get China involved. If China continues to add one new gigawatt of coal every week as they have been doing now for the last decade, if they continue doing that, whatever we do in the United States is irrelevant. The greenhouse gases will go up, and under our assumption, we will have several -- we will have an unprecedented degree of global warming. We haven’t had it yet. We’ve only had two-thirds of one degree Celsius of global warming, that’s according to the IPCC, two-thirds of one degree.
Greg Dalton: And is there a delay of fact that is that what we put up there today stays up there a very long time and will continue to warm the atmosphere, so that there -- so, you know, it’s like a tanker--
Richard Muller: Yeah.
Greg Dalton: --it takes a long time to slow or to--
Richard Muller: Yeah, there’s so much misinformation on that subject that it’ll be a whole another discussion. Like in the carbon dioxide, there are statements from scientists who should know better saying it stays up there for hundreds of years. The fact is if you dump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, half of it disappears in the first year, and the rest will probably get mixed out over the next 20 to 25 years.
Greg Dalton: So you’re saying we could reduce it quickly and sharply--
Richard Muller: We could reduce it.
Greg Dalton: Okay.
Richard Muller: But we can’t, not you and me, it has to be China.
Greg Dalton: So most of the future emissions will be in the developing world.
Richard Muller: That’s right.
Greg Dalton: Most of the current emissions are red, white and blue.
Richard Muller: No. No.
Greg Dalton: Because the historic emissions, Britain and the United States have contributed most of the historic emissions--
Richard Muller: But you’re assuming that those emissions have stayed up there for so long. Yeah, let me just accept that for the -- just for the sake of argument. Let’s say that best testament is one quarter to one-fifth of the warming is due to the United States so far. Of that, the warming, according to the IPCC, is .6 degree Celsius. So let’s say, .15 degree Celsius is due to the US. So one-eighth -- one-sixth of one degree Celsius is due to US. Yes, US has done that. Of the three or four or five as -- well, it’s -- I’m switching between Celsius.
Greg Dalton: Yeah, stick in Fahrenheit because that’s what Americans understand.
Richard Muller: Oh, okay. Well, of what Dianne Feinstein said in that clip, virtually all of that is going to come from the developing world. So you can compare that to the fraction of a degree that we have already done, and say we are to blame, we are guilty for two-tenths of a degree -- well .15 Celsius.
Greg Dalton: So what to do about future missions from developing economies who say, “Look, we’re not going to pay for the sins of your grandfathers. We have an equal right to economic developments. Why should we pay more than you did. You grew dirty, so why should we pay more to grow clean?”
Richard Muller: The fact that we happen to be so much more populist than you means we will put a lot more in. By the way, by 2025, at the current rate of growth, China will be emitting more emissions per person than the US.
Greg Dalton: Right now there are -- in your book you have their measure as a percentage of GDP is this much higher, but per person in the US is still much higher than Europe and some--
Richard Muller: So higher -- it’s much -- but you have to recognize, we are a small country, and we can take unilateral action but it won’t solve the problem.
Greg Dalton: But does that mean we shouldn’t do anything?
Richard Muller: Of course not. We want to do something that means -- makes a difference, not something that’s meaningless. What really bothers me is there are so many meaningless things out there. People say let’s get all electric automobiles.
The US is responsible for .15 degree Celsius. Of that, US automobiles are responsible for one quarter of that which is .05 degree -- .04. So, US automobiles have contributed almost nothing to global warming, and they will contribute almost nothing in the future. And if we think the thing for us to do is to make electric automobiles -- well, electric automobiles in China produce more carbon dioxide than gasoline automobiles in China because they are based on coal.
Greg Dalton: Right. The Economist did a story on that recently--
Richard Muller: Yeah, and I was delighted at that.
Greg Dalton: So -- but the transportation sector is accounting for 30, 40% of greenhouse gases in the United States. There’s trucks, there’s a lot of things, so--
Richard Muller: I know, but you keep on mentioning United States. United States is not the problem.
Greg Dalton: Is there a point in leadership?
Richard Muller: Yes, and we have to show -- we have to show leadership, we have to take actions that will be meaningful in China. Building Tesla automobiles is not a leadership step. They will never be adopted in China. China is a poor country; they cannot afford $100,000 automobiles.
Greg Dalton: Well, they got one that’s coming out now that’s 50 and sexy and beautiful but--
Richard Muller: They can’t afford that either. And it is not sexy and beautiful when you realize--
Greg Dalton: The first time I saw a Maybach, $100,000 Mercedes was in Beijing. So there’s a lot of money in China, lot of our money in China right now.
Richard Muller: Well, there’s -- there are wealthy people in China, that’s true. But this is not addressing the issue of the danger of global warming.
Greg Dalton: So, point taken about scale. New things need to happen at scale, so you believe that switching China from coal to natural gas will be--
Richard Muller: It’s the only thing. The only thing on the horizon that has any realistic chance of making a big difference is to get them to switch their economy from one new gigawatt of coal every week, 50 gigawatts a year. I mean, it makes their solar program miniscule. The actual solar delivered power that they’re adding every year is a tenth of a gigawatt.
And they’re adding one -- they’re adding 50 gigawatts of coal, that’s the big thing. And if you think somehow, solar is going to catch up, well, it’s so--
Greg Dalton: So let’s get to coal, but solar -- China has done a tremendous -- created a public good by driving down the price of photovoltaic solar, makes it much more affordable for people for -- maybe it’s not for climate change but it’s because they want cheaper or more reliable electricity in California or elsewhere. They’ve had a tremendous market impact by driving down the price of a PV solar. Now, there’s a trade spat going on between the US and China right now, but they can have tremendous impact, that’s not a bad thing.
Richard Muller: Well, not completely bad. They say -- US says they’re subsidizing theirs, they say we’re subsidizing ours.
Greg Dalton: Right.
Richard Muller: I don’t expect that solar photovoltaic will really be centrally important in the United States for the following reasons. I think the cost of the solar cells is getting so low and will soon be even lower that they’ll be basically free.
Greg Dalton: And -- well, now they’re price competitive with traditional electricity.
Richard Muller: Well, actually they’re not, not yet.
Greg Dalton: Getting close?
Richard Muller: No, no. You’re confusing again the peak power with the average power they deliver. So you can -- yes, you can install a new gas burning plant or a dollar for watt. Yes, you can install a solar cell for 75 cents a watt. But that’s peak watt. And that delivers it only in midday, when the sun is out and overhead. In fact, you lose typically a fact -- in China, they’re finding about a loss of 90% of that.
Greg Dalton: Because they got so much air pollution. So, solar, you don’t see as a--
Richard Muller: Actually, air pollution, of course, is due to the coal.
Greg Dalton: Right, yeah.
Richard Muller: And that’s not the problem. The problem is the sun isn’t out during the night and it’s often cloudy.
Greg Dalton: So you’re not a big fan of solar even though the price has come down?
Richard Muller: Oh, no, no, no, no. I am a big fan of solar. I think solar has a great future particularly in China.
Because part of the expense of solar is going to be the installation cost, it’s a lot cheaper to do that there, the maintenance cost. I mean, they can brush off the dust at a much lower cost than we have. And there are also large areas that you can build the solar and you don’t require the infrastructure to get it there. So I think solar is going to have a big impact in China. I think it will have niche market in the United States. I think it’ll be very important in the United States. It’s just not going to really solve the global warming problem.
Greg Dalton: Well, nothing -- no single thing is going to solve the global warming problem. There has to be some--
Richard Muller: No, but there are big things and there are little things.
Greg Dalton: Right. And there’s big -- there’s Silver Buckshot, No Silver Bullets, and there’s these different size wedges which people at Princeton and other places has written about, so--
Richard Muller: The wedges thing, I think, is misleading because it seems to imply that anything you do will be a big help. I regard that as misleading because it says, “Hey, what I’m going to do is I’m going to buy a Tesla Roadster and I’m doing my part.” The wedges thing, I think, can be misinterpreted by the public. It’s saying, “Let’s just do our part.” In fact, what we need is a big program that can really address the big issue or it’s just not going to happen. It’s not going to add up.
Greg Dalton: So, what you seem to be saying is individual action doesn’t matter, it requires policy.
Richard Muller: Yes, exactly. Unless that individual action sets an example. But the examples that we’re setting with electric automobiles are -- and overly expensive and nonworking solar arrays like Solyndra, those examples don’t set an example that will be useful for stopping global warming.
Greg Dalton: So I have an electric car, I’m paying much less now for power that I use to--
Richard Muller: But you don’t. Let me correct you on that--
Greg Dalton: People love to come up and say, “Ooh, no gas, that’s cool.”
Richard Muller: Yeah. When you include in the cost of the battery replacements, the expense per mile--
Greg Dalton: I’m not planning on owning it until the battery needs to be replaced.
Richard Muller: Are you going to sell it as used car?
Greg Dalton: Yeah.
Richard Muller: Well, you’re not going to get much money for it because the battery will need to be replaced.
Electric cars -- I go to the numbers in my book here. A typical automobile in the United States cost 10 cents per mile to drive, mostly gasoline. The electric cars, the Volt -- the Chevrolet Volt, the Nissan Leaf, they cost between 50 cents and 70 cents per mile to drive when you include the fact that the batteries are only good for 500 recharges. So you’re not saving money. You may be doing something good for the environment. Assuming you’re not charging it from coal, you’re doing something good for the environment, but you’re probably burning it in California, most of it is natural gas.
Greg Dalton: Yeah. I don’t think it’s fair to include the cost of a replace battery that will be borne by a subsequent owner of that car, but let’s--
Richard Muller: Oh, I would let every one of our listeners decide that on their own. I mean, your battery, after 500 recharges, will have to be replaced, that’s typically after 30,000 miles.
Greg Dalton: Five hundred recharges, that could be 500 days.
Richard Muller: That’s -- it could be -- yeah, it’s like a refill. It’s 500 refills, that’s a -- and then you have to replace it. To think that this is way off in the future, you’re going to keep your car for how long? I mean, I keep my car for 10, 15 years, you will need several battery replacements during that period, and that will drive up the cost. These batteries, these are lithium ion batteries. Replace your battery in your computer and it will cost you a $100 per pound. The Tesla Roadster has a half ton, a thousand pounds of these things in it.
Greg Dalton: The little guy’s got --
Richard Muller: Well, yeah, on a discount, of course. So--
Greg Dalton: No, they’re not -- let’s come back and we’ll drive my car around and see how much it costs.
Richard Muller: When you replace the battery.
Greg Dalton: The – okay. I might ask you for a loan. Then, you said that we need big policy. So, what big policy do you think will be needed to actually address the big policy?
Richard Muller: I think the only hope is to kick-start the conversion in China and the rest of the developing world, India, into natural gas.
They have enormous reserves, they can be exploited, we have enormous knowhow. I’ve talked at length with one of our great oil and gas experts in the United States, Marlan Downey, and he and I are working together. What we would like to see is to share freely with China -- I talked about this in China when I was there just a few weeks ago -- freely share our knowhow on the new gas technologies with China, so they can begin the conversion at a rapid rate from coal to natural gas. Whether or not you believe in global warming, this is worth doing, because China, as you pointed out, is choking from the soot and the sulfur dioxides and the other pollutions from coal. It -- just for humanitarian reasons alone, they should switch. We should help them switch to natural gas, but I think this is the most important thing we can do. And I think it’s so much larger than anything else I’ve heard suggested that I’m hoping it has some chance of going ahead.
Greg Dalton: And natural gas is quite cheap right now at least in the United States. It’s much more expensive in Asia and other places. So you’re talking about exporting hydraulic fracturing technology that’s happening along the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, elsewhere in New York to China, so they can get these unconventional deposits of natural gas and get off coal.
Richard Muller: Exactly right.
Greg Dalton: And the policy or the market mechanisms that would enable that are--
Richard Muller: I think we need the President of the United States to talk to our industry and say, “This is in our national best interest. What we would like you to do is to invite -- we will invite a hundred Chinese engineers, their best oil and gas engineers to come to the United States to work with you. I want you to hold no secrets back. We have to show them how do to this and get them -- when they go back, they’ll be able to jumpstart their industry in natural gas.” But the problem isn’t the patents; we don’t have special patents on this.
I’ve discussed this at some length with the experts. The problem is what do you do when you’re drilling and suddenly something doesn’t work? And we had that worked out. We’ve worked it out over the last 30 years.
Greg Dalton: But surely lots of US energy companies would love to get into that business in China. They don’t need the President to say that there’s a market there that--
Richard Muller: China won’t allow that. China does not want US companies to come in and own the fields of China. So there’s -- I mean, they regard that as a new form of technological colonialism. And I can understand that point of view.
Greg Dalton: Let’s talk about oil. We haven’t talked a lot about oil. In your previous book, “Physics for Future Presidents”, you wrote on page 91 about the end of oil, and I’d like to read you a quote from Fatih Birol, who’s the chief economist of the International Energy Agency, one of the world’s foremost authorities on energy. And he says, quote, “One day we will run out of oil. It is not today or tomorrow, but one day, we will run out of oil and we will have to leave oil before oil leaves us. And we have to prepare ourselves for that today. The earlier we start, the better.” Do you disagree or agree with that?
Richard Muller: No. I agree. I mean, the issue now, what its timeline is. My current feeling in the new book -- “Physics for Future Presidents” was written four years ago. This book, I’ve learned a lot about the new things that can happen to oil. Back then I talked about converting coal to oil, which is a well known technology. If we do that, we’re not going to run out of oil for several hundred years.
Greg Dalton: And then there’s shale oil, which is in the process for doing that--
Richard Muller: And then there’s shale oil which is relatively recent, still not a big deal. It’s the most -- for people -- there are people who simply oppose fossil fuels because they’re fossil fuels and because they invariably will -- they don’t believe in clean coal, they don’t believe that we can stop emitting carbon dioxide. But in my mind, I draw a distinction between power generation and locomotion.
Greg Dalton: Transportation.
Richard Muller: In the United States -- we have a crisis in the United States of oil, of gasoline, not of coal, we have plenty of coal, we have -- and that can be addressed by manufacturing coal -- rather manufacturing gasoline out of coal. But there’s this new-
Greg Dalton: So that’s how we’re going to get our oils by making coal into oil?
Richard Muller: That’s what I thought four years ago. Now, what’s happening is that several companies have developed remarkably good methods for extracting oil from shale. And this is a revolution that is currently taking place.
Greg Dalton: In Canada and elsewhere and--
Richard Muller: No, no. That’s the -- the Canadian work are the oil sands, sometimes called tar sands. But in the United States, these are in shale rock, and they’re in the same kind of formations in which we have the gas. And the techniques that are used are similar to the tracking technology that we use for gas. But Shell, for example, has developed a remarkable way of heating the shale oil under the ground, leaving it there for three years, in which case the long complex carbon chains break up and become short ones. They turn from heavy oil to sweet oil underground, and then they can extract those out. So this is a rapidly breaking technology now.
Greg Dalton: So, you see that as the future domestic sources rather than Saudi Arabian or Venezuelan oil with different kinds of American oil, that’s the kind of oil that we ought to be using.
Richard Muller: Our oil imports have actually dropped for the first time and--
Greg Dalton: Domestic production is up.
Richard Muller: Domestic production is up partly -- most of it is not due to this new technology; most of it is simply due to what’s called enhanced oil recovery. But I think we -- the Hubbert’s peak, this peak in oil is something that we may get beyond by using advanced oil extraction methods.
Greg Dalton: But you agree that we need to get away from foreign oil, that seems to be what you’re saying.
Richard Muller: Oh, I’m not opposed to using foreign oil. I’d much rather use foreign oil and keep our own reserves for as long as possible. The problem is that half of our balance of payments deficit is coming from importing oil. And that’s something -- it’s better this week because the price of foreign oil has dropped. If we start a large production of our own oil, then the price of the world oil will go down at that point and we’d say “Import as much as possible.”
Greg Dalton: Our guest today at Climate One is Richard Muller, a professor of Physics at UC Berkeley. I’m Greg Dalton. You also wrote in your previous book that the average automobile at that point got about 25 miles per gallon. The US Senate proposed a bill in 2007 that require automakers to sell cars with an average fuel consumption of 35 miles per gallon by 2020. Seems like a reasonable approach but it’s the kind of -- to take if you feel there’s no crisis, we feel it were more -- if we felt that were more important, we could soon be doing much better. Well, that in fact happened, now there’s 56 miles. Do you think that’s enough, the 56 miles?
Richard Muller: No, no. We should go up – well, I would like to go up to 100. I think we can get 100 miles per gallon.
Greg Dalton: So, that was done by President Obama. How do you think he’s done on energy efficiency? That was one of the signature achievements--
Richard Muller: Oh, yeah, one of the best things he’s done has been on energy efficiency. I think energy efficiency is just not mentioned enough. I think energy conservation got a bad name because--
Greg Dalton: Of Jimmy Carter’s sweater.
Richard Muller: -- because of Jimmy Carter saying, “Hey, let me invade your home and have you turn down the thermostat in winter.” He never should have done that. It was really unfortunate -- he gave energy efficiency -- he should have said, “Hey, let me subsidize some insulation in your walls, then you could turn your thermostat up wherever you want.” That would have been really smart. Energy efficiency is one of the big things that doesn’t get enough attention. And I think in the future, it’s the only thing that is order of magnitude the same size as switching China from coal to natural gas.
It could have that big of an effect.
Greg Dalton: Our guest is Richard Muller, professor of Physics at UC Berkeley. We’re going to go put a microphone up here and invite your participation -- invite your participation with one-on-one part question or comment, and I’ll be here to help you if you need some help with that one-on-one part and brief. And while we’re getting that set up, I’m going to ask one more question about the insurance industry. Here’s a quote from an executive of the insurance industry. He says, “From our industry perspective, the foot prints of climate change are around us and the trend of increasing damage to property and threat to lives is clear.” That’s Franklin Nutter, President of the Reinsurance Industry Association of America in March of this year. So, insurance industry is seeing more damages--
Richard Muller: Now, he says that. I would be interested in knowing what their scientific analysis of that really is. I learned years ago, when I had automobile insurance that -- back when I was -- when I was just young, that automobile insurance companies didn’t pay up. It was hard, you had a dent on your car and they don’t want to pay. Then they learned something--
Greg Dalton: Shocking. Yeah.
Richard Muller: They learned something. They discovered – now, they’ll pay up real fast because then their rates can go up. And now, they’re all, “We’ll pay you right away.” But you wind up paying much, much higher rates than we used to. So, insurance companies are in the business of wanting people to insure things that are in danger. If you say he doesn’t have a conflict of interest in trying to encourage people to get insurance, then maybe I would take his statement more at face value.
Greg Dalton: So you’re saying climate change is good for the insurance industry--
Richard Muller: Of course.
Greg Dalton: --because they get to create new products--
Richard Muller: No, no, no, no. No, no.
Greg Dalton: --and raise rates?
Richard Muller: Not that the climate change is good but that the perception of climate change is good. You get people to insure against climate change and then they make more money.
That’s certainly true, whether or not -- if the climate actually does change, they’ll make more money anyway because they have more things to insure. And if it doesn’t change, they make a whole lot more money.
Greg Dalton: Let’s go to our -- let’s have our audience questions. Yes, sir.
Male Speaker 1: Yeah, I just had a quick question about the electric car thing. We had a program here a couple of weeks ago, and they were talking about how it’s not really -- we don’t know yet enough how long batteries are going to last because electric cars haven’t really been around that long. So I’m just wondering if, you know, you’re not taking into account the fact that technology is advancing for batteries and maybe that will be surpassed, gas will be surpassed by that.
Richard Muller: In fact, the optimism for electric cars depends completely on having batteries that will recharge 5,000 times instead of 500 times. Even investors in the Tesla Motors are doing that on the basis of this kind of optimism. So as a result, I looked into that with some care. We have a battery research group at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory who study this. And the problem with batteries is simply that the hard thing is to get them to recharge many, many times. There are batteries that can be recharged many times. The sodium -- ion sodium or the sulfur batteries can go up to 5,000 times. These were in static environments at high temperatures. Automobile was really tough. So I’ve talked to battery experts, and the progress has been very slow. Five years ago, there’s a battery called the A123 battery that was claiming it could be recharged many, many, many times. It’s now on the market. Now it’s being limited by five to 700 times. It hasn’t improved over that time. The trouble is when you’re recharging a battery, what you’re doing is moving molecules back and forth across the electrolyte, and they have to go back to the same place or a similar place where they were.
They start growing little dendrites, and that eventually shorts out the battery, and that’s been a really difficult problem. So what they do is they put in -- they use nanotechnology to try to prevent those dendrites from growing. It’s really difficult. And my guess, based on the experts in the field that I’ve talked to, is that this is not going to happen in the next 10 years. We all saw a rapid battery development with our personal computers. In fact, there wasn’t that much rapid battery development. What happened was that once we had personal computers and cell phones for the first time, people are willing to spend $100 for a pound of battery. And so technologies that existed that were well known to the battery industry suddenly became commercially viable. But there really aren’t any new chemistries available; they’re all listed in the battery handbook. What are needed are ways to be able to recharge them many, many, more times. That’s not an exponentially growing technology. That tends to be linear. It’s not a Moore’s Law.
Greg Dalton: Let’s have our next question for Richard Muller.
Male Speaker 2: Professor Muller, I wonder if you could help me, as a ordinary citizen not a scientist, sort of understand how we get to the concept of global warming. I was a pilot, and I studied meteorology a little bit, and it just appears that there is -- there are so many data points. For example, if you, you know, attribute the atmosphere of 10 miles, most of the atmosphere, the water surface which is the largest part of the earth, and the land mass, and think of the whole thing, there are so many data points that it’s hard for me to imagine that, in fact, we can measure very many of them. And so we must be making assumptions about what we cannot measure. And so, can you tell me how then we can ultimately conclude, and also over a relatively brief period of time, like you say 50 years--
Richard Muller: Yeah.
Male Speaker 2: --that is a very short period of time and climate. For weather, that’s a big period of time, but for climate, it’s a small period of time. And so, how do we actually reach those conclusions and what assumptions could we make?
Richard Muller: What makes it so difficult; one of the things we have in our papers is a plot of the United States. And of these, we took all the stations that have had temperature measurements extending over 70 years. If you look at this plot, we marked the ones that have warmed, two-thirds of the stations have warmed over 70 years, one-third of them have cooled. People are shocked at this because they say, “Hey, global warming, you just got to walk outside and you see global warming.” No, no, no, no. No human can sense global warming. Global warming is so much variation from year to year, from month to month, from hour to hour that it’s impossible to sense it. But just as scientists can measure the number of molecules in a pint of water, if you get enough data -- and we love data, when there’s lots of data, you do lots and lots of averages -- then we can actually get down to an accuracy of a tenth of degree Celsius. And we have done this by doing lots of averages. You take advantage of the fact stations that are several miles apart aren’t that different on average. They go up and down and storms go by, but you really have to take all that into account and do an average. And only when you do that average can you see it. Nobody can sense global warming. Nobody in this room has sensed it. And if you know someone who has, they are fooling themselves. The global warming we’re seeing is two-thirds of one degree Celsius, and the average between day and night may be 20 degree Celsius or 10. You can’t see things like that. And California, the local climate of California is -- the hurricanes, they’re determined by El Niño, and by the Gulf Stream, not by global warming. So you -- the trick is to be able to measure thousands of points, see how correlated they are with each other, just count that correlation where it’s inappropriate and do the mathematics of it.
But it’s actually the fact that we have so much data that enables us to see this relatively small change. I can’t adequately answer that question in under four hours.
Greg Dalton: And the global warming suggests that it’s all one direction, and that it’s gradual, whereas other people use the term climate disruption or climate change because some places warm, some places cool, pattern changes not all in one direction.
Richard Muller: Well, even the global warming, only if you average it over 10 years, is it moving in the same direction. Even then, there was a period in the 1940s and ‘50s when it was going down. So what we see is a pattern that’s going up like this and then goes down a little bit and then it goes up. And even if we assume global warming is smooth, there’s still the ups and downs which may be related to variability in the ocean currents.
Greg Dalton: Right. So, just like the stock market goes up and down everyday but it’s the monthly or the long term pattern--
Richard Muller: That’s a good comparison.
Greg Dalton: --that matters. Let’s have our next audience question for Richard Muller.
Sarah: Hi. My name is Sarah. I’m actually an intern here at Climate One. And my question is, so, you say policy is the answer to global warming, but what do you suggest the average person do to alleviate, is there anything we can do or--
Richard Muller: Raise the issue of global warming as a more important criterion for who you vote for. Let that be -- let that -- in the end, no, you can’t do anything. I’m sorry, you can’t. I mean, I own a Prius, and I get up before my class, and they applaud me for owning a Prius. And I groan, they don’t understand, I own a Prius because I love the technology, but I can’t do anything. What I can do for global warming is come to groups like this and try to talk about it. I can go to Washington DC and talk about it. I can help clarify the issues so that if there had been valid questions raised about global warming such as urban heat islands, if I can go and talk to people who are bothered by that and say, “I believe we’ve answered this. Let me show you how.”
Science is that one realm of knowledge that we can agree on. Things -- there are lots of realms of knowledge. There’s literature, there’s history. There’s always going to be disagreement on those things, but science is -- can almost be defined as that realm of knowledge over which everybody can agree. So let’s agree on the science, but we don’t do that by consensus, we don’t do this by vote; we do this by addressing the issues raised by other people. And when you address those issues, I find myself remarkably capable of convincing skeptics that global warming is real. Then they say, “Well, okay, I’ve always accepted that. The question is how much is caused by humans.” And you asked me earlier, how many people we convinced. I can’t -- and anybody who says, Well, we always accepted global warming. The question is how much is human,” as, you know, a success in my part.
Greg Dalton: And there -- that’s movement but it’s not movement fast enough. I mean, that could have been said 20, 30 years ago. In fact--
Richard Muller: My approach in the meantime -- I’ve written with Marlan Downey, an op-ed piece was submitted to a major newspaper, we hope that it’ll get -- on this fracking issue. And our argument is I don’t care whether you believe in global warming or not. What we need to introduce and kick start fracking in China. If you believe in global warming, then this is obviously a good thing to do. You have -- going to have overcome your reluctance to approve fracking and fossil fuels, but that’s what we have to do as the only real solution. If you don’t believe in global warming, then it’s worth doing for humanitarian piece -- reasons alone because there are 50,000 people dying every year in China just from the pollution. And so we can address that. It’s a good thing to do whether you believe in global warming or not.
Greg Dalton: Let’s have our next audience question for Richard Muller.
Male Speaker 3: How urgent do you feel the climate change problem is? And do you feel there’s time for us to respond adequately?
Richard Muller: Working on the assumption that the IPCC is right, that the global warming that we verified--
We’re now doing work to study how much of this is due to humans, but we don’t have a conclusion we’re prepared to announce yet. Let’s assume that the IPCC is right, that most of the warming is due to humans, then I regard it as an urgent problem. On the other hand--
Greg Dalton: And something we can do -- do something about.
Richard Muller: And something we could do something about.
Greg Dalton: If we’re causing it, we can correct it.
Richard Muller: But I think it hurts the problem if we rush and do the wrong things. If you say there’s a fire, and it’s urgent -- the old story of the fire in the movie theater, it’s urgent, you do something about the fire, so shout out top -- at the top of your lungs, “Fire! Fire!” It’s the wrong thing to do. We need to do something that really will work. And so I think it’s urgent but we have to do the right thing. I think the two big ones are -- the biggest of all is the global, is the natural gas in China, and the second biggest one is energy efficiency and conservation.
Greg Dalton: Richard Muller is a professor of Physics at UC Berkeley. I’m Greg Dalton. Let’s have our next question. Welcome.
Ann Devero: Hi. My name is Ann Devero, and I’m a new member here at the Commonwealth Club. You’ve mentioned nuclear gas, but what about -- I mean, you mentioned natural gas, what about the nuclear issue in China? They’re building hundreds of nuclear plants. Does that have an impact or will it have an impact?
Richard Muller: The impact that they’re having on climate change will be substantial but it’s not enough. Now, let me just say a few things about nuclear because there’s so much misinformation. And in Fukushima, a little over a year ago, there was a horrendous event in which a earthquake created tsunami that killed 15,000 people. There was also a nuclear reactor that was damaged and had leaked a lot of radioactivity, not enough to cause anywhere near the damage of the tsunami.
Best estimate, I put the numbers in and I do the calculations, is that it’s almost certainly fewer than a hundred excess cancers caused by the radiation leak. Nonetheless, Japan is overreacting. They are shutting down -- they have shut down most of their nuclear power. Nuclear power should be an important part of our energy future and the energy future of the world. And it’s unfortunate that Japan is leading the world in overreacting when the real danger to the future of Japan is not from nuclear reactors, it’s from tsunamis. And if they’re going to build 30-foot walls around their entire country including the Tokyo Harbor, I have yet to hear about that, but that’s 15,000 people. Let’s not forget that. I think if you kill 100 people from an accident that kills 15,000, let’s worry about that accident. In fact, I think the nuclear reactors at Fukushima did amazingly well given their -- how horrendous the bigger event was.
Greg Dalton: And there are now known design flaws that they had. Let’s have our next question. Yes, sir.
Scott Westbrook: Hi. My name is Scott Westbrook. And what I recall from the graphs I’ve seen for the carbon dioxide plots, every year it goes up and up, but it also goes down, especially when the -- summer in the Northern Hemisphere. It makes me wonder if we should be paying more attention to deforestation in the third world, how much impact that is having, and if we were doing more to solve that problem, what we actually have is much of a climate change issue.
Richard Muller: Okay. Well, deforestation, particularly in Brazil, has been a major contributor to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And I, too -- it’s been a major contributor. I’m not -- I don’t know off the top of my mind recall how much it is, but probably more than 10% and less than 20%.
I mean, the good news and the bad news is we’re going to run out of Brazil. The warming we see in the future is going to come from the burning of fossil fuels. I believe in preserving Brazil more importantly for preserving Brazil. I’ve been there, it’s a wonderful country, it’s a wonderful rainforest, and it’s something we need to preserve. Other people argue we need the diversity of life that you find in Brazil. But in the long term, it’s not going to have a big impact on global warming. The worst that can happen from global warming is to burn all of Brazil. And then, global warming will take off after that from the burning of the fossil fuels. I don’t mean to sound cynical about that, but it’s not a happy story.
Greg Dalton: Yes, sir. Welcome.
Male Speaker 4: Hi there. This is a pretty simple question. I know natural gas is cleaner than oil, but how much cleaner is it than oil?
Richard Muller: Cleaner than oil by about a factor of two, a bigger factor than that compared to coal. The reason is simply that coal is carbon, you burn a carbon, you get a CO2. Natural gas is CH4. You burn that, you get a carbon, but you also get -- the H is burning, to make water. Water is completely innocuous as far as human caused global warming is concerned. And so, you wind up getting, I believe the number is two and a half times more energy for carbon from natural gas than you do from coal.
Greg Dalton: Let’s ask you about -- you talked earlier about political leaders and using people as leverage to get at political leaders. In this political season, politicians from both parties rarely mention climate change. And, in fact, particularly in the Republican Party, people who previously acknowledged the science now have backed away from it.
I’d like -- interested in your comment on that.
Richard Muller: Well, I predicted this back when I first saw “An Inconvenient Truth”. I predicted that people would discover that most of what is in that movie is either misleading or wrong. And when they discovered that, people are deeply offended and they overreact. The fact is climate change is a serious problem, but they were oversold with distortions and exaggerations.
Greg Dalton: So it’s Al Gore’s fault?
Richard Muller: Not just Al Gore, but certainly he played a big role on that. I’ve had people come up to me after meetings like this and say, “What do you mean the polar bears aren’t dying due to global warming?” I said, “Well, the studies have been done. We tag the polar bears, we watch them from satellites. None have died from the retracting of ice.” And this woman said to me, “But that’s the reason I got involved in global warming.” I feel one has to trust the public, one should never exaggerate. When I say that we’ve verified the global warming as real, and I’m really concerned about it, but hurricanes had been decreasing in number and intensity, that the tornados have actually been going down. I can show you the data on that. It doesn’t mean that’s not a problem.
Greg Dalton: But you’re saying -- the Republican Party and Democrats, to some extent too, will no longer talk about climate change as a real problem. You’re saying that that’s Al Gore’s fault, that they’re overreacting to Al Gore. Al Gore’s fault--
Richard Muller: No, they’re not overreacting. The public has overreacted and it’s become a subject on which they no longer trust anybody. And as a result, the politicians don’t want to take stance on that. The Democrats have a problem because in the past they have said, “Well, look at Hurricane Katrina.” Now, you can demonstrate -- the scientists will demonstrate Hurricane Katrina was not due to global warming. They talk about the tornadoes and the increase in hurricanes--
Greg Dalton: And any specific event cannot be attributed, right, to a--
Richard Muller: The things -- the specific events that grab the public imagination are the ones that cannot be attributed to global warming.
That’s the problem. If we had simply said, “The temperature is going up,” people might have said, “Ho-hum.” But the other events, those are not attributable to global warming, and they can’t be defended.
Greg Dalton: Do we have another -- we have time for one more audience question, if you want to – if they want to--
Gary Malesi: The young lady got up here -- Gary Malesi. The young lady got up here and asked about what can the individual do. I think it’s the activity of the individual that’s creating the problem. People are adopting the western lifestyle. And I see as the only way you’re going to correct it is through individual activity, not through government, which is contrary to what your belief system. I’d like you to comment on that.
Greg Dalton: Governments haven’t done much so far.
Richard Muller: Well, I think the idea of setting an example and having very low energy consumption, what I keep in mind is what can I do that would do that, that would impact the source of the future global warming in the developing world. And becoming a vegetarian wouldn’t work because they’re already vegetarians in much of the world and it doesn’t affect the carbon dioxide. So what can I do? I could give up the automobile in hopes that somehow I will set an example in the United States and nobody will use automobile, won’t use electricity, they won’t use air conditioning. These are the things that we -- if this is the intention, you can set an example and maybe people will follow it. But I think in China, what we’re seeing in China is an increase in liberty, an increase in freedom of speech, just not like it is here, but it certainly has increased. We’re seeing more improved health. We’re seeing better education. All this is happening and they all associate that with the use of energy.
And to convince them that that doesn’t depend on energy, I think, is – well, you’re right, I don’t agree with it, I don’t believe it. You can set that as an individual example, but it’s hard to convince the world by setting in -- by not using energy yourself. It’s hard to convince the world that therefore an up and coming civilization like China doesn’t need to use energy.
Greg Dalton: Well, they could use energy in a more efficient and wise--
Richard Muller: Well, that we have to do.
Greg Dalton: --than we have. To not develop the way that we did, to develop--
Richard Muller: You mean, that we used to use it. Right now, we’re pretty efficient and would love to have them be as efficient -- energy efficient as we are now. We are far more energy efficient than they are.
Greg Dalton: Then we -- well--
Richard Muller: So we’re setting an example on that.
Greg Dalton: And in some ways China is leading us. They have some leading technologies and energy--
Richard Muller: Oh, yeah, they have technologies, but I say as a country, we are far ahead of them. Matter of fact, we have two or three in energy efficiency right now.
Greg Dalton: Let’s it end there. Our thanks to Richard Muller, professor of Physics at UC Berkeley and founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. I’m Greg Dalton. Thanks for listening to Climate One. The full podcast of this and other programs is available in the iTunes store.
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Here’s what you need to know to help keep your heart healthy:
Cholesterol is a waxy, fat-like substance found in the cells of your body. Your body needs some cholesterol to make hormones, vitamin D, and substances that help you digest foods. Though your body makes cholesterol, it’s also found in some of the foods you eat. Saturated fats, trans fats, fatty meats, egg yolks, and dairy increase the amount of cholesterol in your cells. Too much cholesterol will make the cells stick to the arteries in your heart and elsewhere in your body. This can cause your blood vessels to narrow, making it harder for blood to flow through the arteries, which may result in a heart attack.
The American Heart Association recommends that all adults ages 20 and older have a blood test to check their cholesterol levels every four to six years. Results can be affected by your diet, age, alcohol use, medical history, pregnancy, and medication. Here is what your test results could mean:
- Less than 200 mg/dL: Low risk for heart disease
- 200 mg/dL to 239 mg/dL: Some risk for heart disease
- 240 mg/dL or higher: High risk for heart disease
Blood pressure is the measure of the force of blood pushing against blood vessel walls. When you have high blood pressure, your heart works harder to pump blood to the body. High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, is the most common risk factor for heart attack and stroke.
Testing your blood pressure includes using a manual or digital blood pressure monitor. Here is what your test results could mean:
- Less than 120 over 80 (120/80): Normal
- 120-139 over 80-89: Pre-hypertension
- 140-159 over 90-99: Stage 1 high blood pressure
- 160 and above over 100 and above: Stage 2 high blood pressure
- 150 and above over 90 and above: High blood pressure in people over age 60
Family history, age, kidney disease, and adrenal or thyroid disorders can affect blood pressure, but the exact cause of high blood pressure is unknown. Ways to reduce risk of high blood pressure include making lifestyle changes involving diet, exercise, weight, stress management, and medication.
El Camino Hospital offers free blood pressure screenings every Friday from 10:30 – 11:30 a.m. at the Health Library & Resource Center on its Mountain View Campus.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 30 million Americans have diabetes. Adults with diabetes are two to four times more likely to die from heart disease, and the American Heart Association considers diabetes to be one of the seven controllable risk factors of heart disease.
Those with diabetes are at risk for heart disease for several reasons, including high cholesterol and blood pressure. Other factors include obesity and lack of physical activity.
- Obesity: Weight strongly influences insulin resistance in the body, contributing to heart disease. Those who are obese are also susceptible to high blood pressure. People are considered obese if their weight is at least 20 percent higher than it should be or if their BMI is over 29. People generally become obese by consuming too many calories, living a sedentary lifestyle, not sleeping enough, having a poor metabolism, taking certain medications, or having certain genetics. Learn more about healthy weight.
- Lack of physical activity: Being physically inactive is a major risk factor for heart disease, high blood pressure, heart attack, and stroke. The American Heart Association recommends at least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity at least five days per week, 25 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity at least three days per week, or a combination of the two. Good physical activity strengthens heart muscle, helps blood pressure, and keeps plaque from building in your arteries.
The Norma Melchor Heart and Vascular Institute at El Camino Hospital offers advanced heart and vascular care, from prevention to diagnosis, to treatment and rehabilitation. The institute has earned awards and professional accreditations, but its greatest accomplishment is helping people achieve optimal health.
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Choose a species that you can afford and have the time, resources and space for. Some ants require specialised environments such as the hot humid climates found in the rain forests, others are not so fussy, and only require room temperature. Again Lasius niger are ideal as you can keep them in a simple tub filled with lightly dampened soil. If you want to be able to see into their nest then consider a slim style ant farm, glass or plastic, (I prefer the former as glass is clearer than plastic and doesn’t warp -
Finally you need to consider what your species eat. Some species eat seeds, other insects, whilst others eat fungus grown by themselves from chewed up leaves.
Once again I will champion the cause for good old Lasius niger, which, are, in fact, my favourite species of all. Lasius are ideal for the following reasons:
Identifying the Queen
To make sure you have a queen and not a large worker, look at the shape of the thorax (the middle part of the ant where the legs are); if it is large and just as wide, if not wider than the head, and if the abdomen (the back part of the ant) is large, then it’s a queen. Worker ants’ thoraxes are slimmer than their heads. Here is a picture, for comparison, of a worker and queen of Formica fusca, a large black ant found in the UK and Europe. Not the difference in size, especially how the thorax of the queen is much large in comparison to her head than that of the worker.
It is very important that you do not simply take one of the winged ants from the main nest as she will not be mated, and therefore will not produce a colony.
It takes about 8-
Please note that with many ant species, such as Lasius niger, once the queen has made her burrow she will seal herself in and will not emerge ever again. She does not require food at this stage so do not be tempted to open her burrow and out food in. She has enough body reserves in her to sustain herself and her brood. Once her first workers start foraging you can start to feed them. The same situation stands with water; you don’t need to provide your queen with water until her first workers start to forage.
Here you can see a queen surrounded by her workers. Note the size difference but, more importantly, the size of the queen’s thorax compared to her head; it’s as wide, if not wider. The workers on the other hand have slender thoraxes.
This picture was taken from the Planetinfo website.
So, what food do you give them once it’s time to do so, and how do you give your ants water? The food you give them depends on the species of ant you have. Most ants like Lasius niger eat all kinds of insects such as flies, crickets, cockroaches, wax worms, meal worms and other soft-
The best way to give water is either in a reservoir, such as in the downloadable guide I have, or you can use a spray mist bottle to squirt fine water droplets on the inside edge of your ant farm, or put a damp cotton wool ball on a small plastic lid; just ensure it’s damp enough so that when you touch it your finger comes away damp but not to much that it creates puddles at its base as the ants may drown in it.
So, let’s assume that you have decided to go for my favourite species; Lasius niger. Yay!
You can either order a colony of ants from a supplier or you can start a colony of as it does in the wild; with a single mated queen -
As mentioned on the previous page you can use something as simple as a plastic tub filled with soil, but the only problem with this is that you won’t be able to see into the nest. Therefore the best thing to use is a slim style “ant farm” which you can get from various suppliers, including Toys R Us and Amazon. I prefer the glass types personally, though they are more expensive. The good thing about these sort of ant farms is that as your colony grows you can attach more ant farms onto your original to allow the ants to expand out. They also allow you, more or less, full view of the inside of an ant nest, which is a fascinating thing to see.
Here are some links to ant farms available on the Internet:
Amazon UK -
Ants UK -
Ant Store -
So, you have your ant farm, but how do you set it up? Well, I have made a guide to show you how to set your ant farm up. You ant farm may not look exactly like mine but you can adapt the instructions to your own ant farm. Click HERE to read the document,(you’ll need a pdf reader which most computers and tablets and smart phones have these days). Please accept my apologies in advance -
I find the best way to put your ants into your ant farm is to simply place them into the foraging box, if you have one attached to your ant farm, or to attach the test tube, which most sellers despatch their ants in, directly onto the port of the ant farm itself. The downloadable guide shows how to do this. Allow your ants to move in in their own good time, do not try to rush them into it. If you do decide to pour them from their tube into the ant farm then please do so gently.
Right, you have your ant farm set up, but where do you get your ants from? Well, as I mentioned earlier there are two main ways I suggest you get your ants; from a seller of live ants such as Ants UK or Antstore , or you can wait until the annual mating flights (when you see all those awesome flying ants emerging from their nests) and capture a newly mated queen. The queen has to be mated so the best thing to do is wait until you see the flying ants actually flying. Wait for an hour or so and then take a walk outside, keeping your eyes to the ground. You’ll soon start to notice some wingless, larger than normal ants scurrying about on the ground. Chances are these are newly mated flying ants that have removed their wings and are looking for a new nesting site. Pick one of them up and put them into your ant farm, making sure there are no other ants in it. Leave her alone and she will eventually starting digging a burrow, lay some eggs and produce her first workers.
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|Origin:||Latin agilis, from agere; AGENT|
able to move quickly and easily:
Dogs are surprisingly agile.
someone who has an agile mind is able to think very quickly and intelligently:
He was physically strong and mentally agile.
—agility noun [uncountable]
With surprising agility, Karl darted across the road.
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Women who use birth-control pills or other contraceptives containing oestrogen, hormone important for sexual and reproductive development in females, are likely to improve their vitamin D levels, a study says.
The findings, after adjusting for seasonal exposure to sunlight, showed that the use of contraceptive pills, patch or ring containing oestrogen was associated with a 20 per cent higher 25-hydroxy vitamin D level.
"The study found that women who were using contraception containing oestrogen tended to have higher vitamin D levels," said lead author, Quaker E. Harmon from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina, USA.
On the other hand, "such levels are likely to fall when they cease to use such contraceptives," Harmon added.
Women who stop the use of contraceptives containing oestrogen may run the risk of developing vitamin D deficiency just when they want to become pregnant, the researchers said in the work published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.
"For women who are planning to stop using birth control, it is worth taking steps to ensure that vitamin D levels are adequate while trying to conceive and during pregnancy," Harmon suggested.
About 10 per cent of the body's vitamin D supply comes from food, including fatty fish and milk fortified with the vitamin.
During pregnancy, women produce increased amounts of the active form of vitamin D to support formation of the foetal skeleton.
As a result, pregnant women face an increased risk of developing vitamin D deficiency, according to the Endocrine Society's Clinical Practice Guideline on Vitamin D deficiency.
For the study, the team conducted a data analysis of 1662 African-American women between the ages of 23 and 34.
Inputs from IANS
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Inheritance of purity
Jonathan M Davis
jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Sun Feb 26 04:17:53 PST 2012
On Sunday, February 26, 2012 13:02:14 deadalnix wrote:
> Thinking more about this, I did notice that I almost never do a const
> and a non const version of the same function when coding (either the
> functionality require const or it doesn't, so the const and non const
> version will do something very different, which is confusing).
> Is it common ? If it is, it open the door to limiting override
> possibilities when it come to const.non const, with the advantage of
> being able to infer const in way more place than it is actually. I could
> expand about that.
It's common for some stuff. A classic example would be iterators (or ranges).
If you have a const reference or pointer to a container, then the iterator (or
range) that you get out of it must give you const access to the elements,
whereas a non-const reference or pointer to a container should be able to give
you an iterator or range with mutable access to the elements.
One place that overloading on const in D could be very useful where it's of
little use in C++ would be for caching. If you called a non-const version of a
function, then the result could be cached (or the cached result used if the
result isn't dirty), whereas while the const one could also use the cached
version if it wasn't dirty, if the cached value was dirty, it would have to do
the calculation without caching the result, since the object is const, and so
it can't alter the cached value.
It _is_ true, however, that there are a lot of cases where it makes no sense
to have both a const and non-const version of a function.
- Jonathan M Davis
More information about the Digitalmars-d
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The 21st century’s hypercompetitive marketplace demands more than just product quality and cost-effectiveness. Businesses must demonstrate ethical conduct, social responsibility, and a commitment to sustainability. This indicates the importance and value of a comprehensive CSR analysis.
Understanding Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a self-regulating business model that helps a company be socially accountable— to itself, its stakeholders, and the public. The benefits are multi-layered, impacting communities, the environment, and bolstering a company’s reputation in the marketplace.
The Pillars of CSR
CSR is generally recognized as being built on three key pillars: economic, cultural, and environmental clauses. These pillars feed into a company’s strategy, and their interaction often results in improved profitability and value creation over the long term.
The Economic Pillar
The economic pillar of CSR seeks to balance the interests of its diverse stakeholders such as investors, employees, customers, business partners, the government and the community. This implies that economic responsibility means providing a fair return on investment for shareholders, proffering rewarding and well-paying jobs for employees, producing high-quality products or services for customers, and contributing to the economic development of the community.
The Cultural Pillar
The cultural or social pillar of CSR focuses on your company’s internal and external relationships and how it impacts the local and global community. It encompasses diversity in the workplace, customer relations, philanthropy, volunteerism and encourages a greater understanding and acceptance of cultural differences.
The Environmental Pillar
The environmental pillar generally gets the most attention. Showing respect for all forms of life implies a commitment to minimizing environmental impact and improving environmental quality.
Importance of CSR Analysis
CSR analysis is an important tool for businesses to evaluate their performance in these areas and to determine how they can improve. This works best when incorporated into day-to-day business operations and decision-making.
Carrying out CSR Analysis
Identifying stakeholders’ concerns forms the basis of a constructive CSR analysis. There’s a need to engage with the different parties relevant to your business operations and understand their concerns and needs.
Benchmarking CSR Practices
Benchmarking practices is a critical step in a CSR analysis. This involves evaluating your company’s performances against well-established standards by businesses that are leaders in CSR.
Quantifying and Documenting CSR Initiatives
After understanding stakeholders’ concerns and benchmarking business practices, the next step concerns at quantifying and documenting CSR initiatives. The major goal here is transparency in doing so; it provides a comprehensive depiction of businesses’ CSR activities.
Developing an Action Plan
On the basis of the insights gathered, a business should develop an action plan. This plan needs to encapsulate the actions necessary to improve CSR practices, their benefits, and how they can be implemented.
Benefits of CSR Analysis
Enhanced Business Reputation
Implementing an effective CSR strategy can increase the competitiveness of a business. It helps to build and maintain the reputation of the business as a responsible entity.
Customer Retention and Acquisition
Through CSR, businesses provide clear evidence that they subscribe to a broader social and environmental mandate. This practice is appealing to both existing and potential customers, making it a key differentiator in the market.
CSR can contribute significantly to employee morale, productivity, and commitment. Employees take pride in working for a company that cares about global issues and the welfare of others.
Sustainable Business Growth
CSR is not just about doing good; it’s about creating a sustainable business. By aligning CSR strategies with business goals, companies can achieve lasting growth and success.
Comprehensive CSR analysis is pivotal in creating a sustainable business model. This detailed understanding of CSR and its underlying pillars can help implement good practices, create robust action plans, and realize multiple benefits that endorse a healthy bottom-line and a vibrant social image.
- Understanding ESG and CSR: A Comprehensive Insight Into Investment and Responsibility
- Broadening the Horizons: An Indepth Exploration of Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability
- Comprehensive Study and Breakdown of Corporate Social Responsibility Research
- Understanding and Enhancing Corporate Responsibilities in Today’s Business World
- Mastering The Mighty: The Starbucks’ Corporate Social Responsibility Journey
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Chapter 95 Glutamine
Glutamine (Figure 95-1) is the most abundant amino acid in blood and muscle tissue. It comprises approximately 6% of mixed whole body protein and is unique among amino acids in that it is a preferred fuel of rapidly dividing cells, such as intestinal and immune cells, and is important in maintaining pancreatic function.1–3 Glutamine is involved in the transport of circulating amino nitrogen and is an important intermediary that allows for accelerated gluconeogenesis from amino acids that are released by the skeletal muscle during stress states.4 In addition, glutamine is used as a precursor for DNA and glutathione synthesis.5 As one of the principal fuels used by the cells of the intestinal lining, it accounts for 35% of enterocyte energy production.
Although readily available in the diet and synthesized in the body from glutamate and ammonia, supplementation is known to enhance the energy metabolism of the gastrointestinal mucosa, thus stimulating regeneration.6 Although glutamine is not considered essential in healthy people, there is evidence that the increased need for glutamine in stressed states such as burns, septicemia, endotoxemia, intestinal failure, and critical illness may result in it being “conditionally essential.”3,7,8
Typical food sources of glutamine include animal and plant proteins. Typical foods are cabbage, beef, chicken, fish, legumes, miso (a salty, fermented bean product), and dairy products.
The nomenclature of L-glutamine and glutamine are used interchangeably. D-glutamine is the stereoisomer of L-glutamine and does not have any known biological activity. L-glutamine is not soluble in water, and aqueous solutions are unstable at temperatures of 22° C to 24° C. As a result, the more soluble and more stable dipeptides such as alanyl-glutamine are used as delivery forms of L-glutamine in total parenteral nutrition solutions.9,10
Intestinal Repair and Protection
Animal and human studies suggest that glutamine stimulates intestinal mucosal growth11 and protects from mucosal atrophy. Glutamine prevents intestinal mucosal damage and was shown to decrease bacterial leakage across the intestines after they are damaged, presumably by stimulating repair.12 Glutamine is thought to accomplish this by strengthening epithelial tight junctions and also by preventing paracellular permeabilities through an epidermal growth factor receptor–dependent mechanism.
In one tissue culture experiment, intestinal epithelium cells were treated with acetaldehyde to compromise barrier function. These cells were treated with L-glutamine, D-glutamine, L-asparagine, L-arginine, L-lysine, or L-alanine. Only the L-glutamine demonstrated a benefit by decreasing aldehyde effects on transepithelial resistance. Furthermore, L-glutamine–treated cells decreased permeability that was dose dependent. L-glutamine reduced the acetaldehyde-induced disturbance of transmembrane structures, such as occludin, zonula occludens-1, E-cadherin, and β-catenin from the intercellular junctions. Lastly, L-glutamine induced a rapid increase in the tyrosine phosphorylation of the epidermal growth factor receptor. No other amino acids demonstrated this effect.13
Acid Base Balance
Glutamine plays an important role in acid-base homeostasis.14 Glutamine is synthesized from glutamate and the toxic alkaline waste product ammonia by the enzyme glutamine synthetase, which requires magnesium and adenosine triphosphate. When ammonia levels are elevated, the body effectively removes ammonia from the blood by synthesizing glutamine. Conversely, if the blood is too acidic, the glutamine can be broken down into glutamate and ammonia, which increases blood pH. Ammonia can bind hydrogen ions to produce ammonium cations, which are excreted in the urine along with chloride anions. Bicarbonate ions are simultaneously released into the bloodstream. Clinical studies showed that relatively small oral doses of glutamine can elevate plasma bicarbonate concentrations in healthy adults.
In one study, 2 g of glutamine were dissolved in a cola drink and ingested over a 20-minute period 45 minutes after a light breakfast. Control subjects were given soda only. Blood samples were taken 1 week before, at baseline, and subsequently at three separate 30-minute intervals after ingestion of the glutamine drink or placebo. Eight of nine subjects responded to the oral glutamine load with a significant increase in plasma glutamine at 30 and 60 minutes before returning to the baseline value at 90 minutes. Ninety minutes after the glutamine was administered, plasma bicarbonate concentration was found to be increased. Circulating plasma growth hormone concentration was elevated as well. Concomitant with enhanced renal acid secretion, glutamine ingestion also caused an increase in the glomerular filtration rate.15
The authors of this study explained that their results showed that it was unlikely L-glutamine was a direct precursor of bicarbonate. Instead, L-glutamine appeared to play an indirect role in accelerating acid secretion through mechanistic changes in the kidneys. Human studies showed that urinary ammonium excretion is altered by changes in glutamine intake.16
Chronic metabolic acidosis is a common clinical problem encountered in catabolic states such as sepsis, shock, and diabetes, and is a major factor in many biological derangements.17 Because glutamine becomes an essential amino acid in catabolic states when the increased demand exceeds the body’s capability to synthesize it,18 glutamine supplementation may be quite useful to maintain pH homeostasis in patients with acidotic conditions.
Glutathione is a tripeptide consisting of glutamate, cysteine, and glycine. As a reservoir source for glutamate in the body, the availability of glutamine appears crucial for the regeneration of glutathione stores in the liver during hepatic injury; in skeletal muscle after major trauma, sepsis, or surgery; and in chemotherapy-injured heart muscle.19–21 Glutamine can enhance intracellular repletion of glutathione, an important scavenger of reactive oxygen species.22 Rat studies demonstrated that during 5-fluorouracil–induced free radical–mediated hepatic injury, glutamine increased glutathione biosynthesis and preserved the glutathione stores in hepatic tissue.19 Seventeen patients who underwent a standardized surgical procedure were prospectively given 0.56 g/kg body weight/day of glutamine or a placebo. Using percutaneous muscle biopsies and blood samples, there were no significant decreases in total or reduced glutathione in the glutamine-supplemented group 24 and 72 hours after the operation. In contrast, the placebo group experienced total muscle glutathione losses of 47 ± 8% and 37 ± 11%, as well as reduced glutathione decreases of 53 ± 10% and 45 ± 16% at 24 and 72 hours, respectively.
Glutamine is a regulator of muscle proteolysis,23 and supplementation can attenuate loss of protein in the muscle. Experiments using animal cancer models demonstrated decreased protein loss and simultaneous protection of immune and gut-barrier function during radiation therapy in patients with advanced cancer.5 In children with severe muscle wasting, 5 hours of oral glutamine was shown to have protein-sparing effect (see later discussion on “Cachexia”).24
Although poorly understood, it appears that glutamine has an immune-modulating effect by enhancing interleukin (IL)-6 levels25 and lymphocyte function.26 IL-6 plays an essential role in the final differentiation of β-cells into immunoglobulin-secreting cells, nerve cell differentiation, and acute phase reactants in hepatocytes. Exercise by itself is known to induce an eleven-fold increase in plasma IL-6. Glutamine supplementation further enhances IL-6 levels.25 The ability of lymphocytes to proliferate and generate lymphokine-activated killer cell activity in vitro was found to be glutamine dependent.27 Additionally, glutamine-enriched parental nutrition demonstrated enhanced lymphocyte activity in patients who received high doses of chemotherapy after stem cell transplantation for hematologous malignancy.
Intestinal Permeability–Related Conditions
A number of conditions are linked to intestinal permeabilities, including chronic urticaria,28 inflammatory bowel disease (Crohn’s disease),29–31 celiac disease,32 liver and biliary cirrhosis and cases of portal hypertension,33,34 systemic sclerosis,35 diabetes,36 rheumatologic disorders,37,38 cystic fibrosis,39 alcohol overuse,40 adult and child asthma,41 human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immune deficiency syndrome,42 nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drug–treated arthritis patients,43 moderate to major burn injuries,44 corticosteroid use,45 cardiopulmonary bypass patients,46,47 and acute metal toxicities.48 To evaluate these permeabilities, sucrose serves as a marker for gastroduodenal permeability and the urinary lactulose/mannitol ratio for intestinal permeability, after administration of these sugars.28 From a naturopathic perspective, the underlying cause of many of these conditions may stem from food allergies that contribute first to chronic inflammation in the intestinal tract28 and then to systemic endotoxemia. Certain conditions such as cardiopulmonary bypass can cause intestinal ischemia,49 which is then the primary insult that causes permeabilities in these patients. The use of glutamine can help heal these permeabilities, thus removing a mode of pathogenesis in these variegated conditions.
Animal models showed the usefulness of glutamine in diarrhea to augment sodium and water absorption and to enhance blood glucose and body weight.50 A rat model of cholera toxin–induced diarrhea showed that glutamine was able to improve water and electrolyte intestinal absorption even better than traditional glucose solutions.10 One placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized trial human study evaluated glutamine to treat acute diarrhea in 128 otherwise healthy children. Of these 6- to 24-month-olds, 63 received 0.3 g/kg per day of glutamine and 65 controls received a placebo for 7 days. The average duration of diarrhea in the glutamine-treated group was significantly shorter than that of the placebo group (3.40 ± 1.96 vs 4.57 ± 2.48 days, respectively). However, no differences in serum IL-8 and secretory immunoglobulin-A were found between groups at the beginning of treatment or 1 week later.51
Clearly, glutamine holds promise for enhancing repair of mucosal injury caused by a wide range of infections or toxic agents and thus has great potential as a nutritional therapeutic for patients with enteric infection.52
Postsurgical Complications of the Gastrointestinal Tract
Patients undergoing abdominal surgeries such as gastrectomies, sigmoidectomies, cholecystectomies, colectomies, and rectal resections are at risk for the development of intestinal failure or short bowel syndrome (SBS). In SBS, a serious malabsorption of fluid, electrolytes, and other nutrients can occur, placing the patient at higher morbidity and mortality risk.53 Trauma from abdominal surgery may also compromise the intestinal mucosa to the point where bacteria and endotoxins can easily transfer through the intestinal wall and invade tissue and blood in an event called bacterial translocation. Through inflammatory mechanisms, bacteria, and endotoxic septic conditions, the intestinal mucosal barrier can be adversely affected and cause further damage, thus forming a vicious circle. Severe cases result in systemic inflammatory response syndrome and multiple organ dysfunction syndrome.54
In a regimen that includes growth hormone and diet changes, glutamine can help difficult cases to enhance bowel adaptation. In one study of 10 patients with SBS who previously failed to adapt to enteral nutrients, 8 subjects received exogenous growth hormone, supplemental glutamine, and a modified high-carbohydrate, high-fiber diet. Two patients were treated with the modified diet alone. Three weeks of treatment with growth hormone, glutamine, and a modified diet significantly increased total caloric absorption from approximately 60% to 75%, protein absorption from 49% to 63%, and carbohydrate absorption from 60% to 82%. Water absorption increased from 46% to 65%, and sodium from 49% to 69%. Fat absorption did not change. Diet alone did not influence nutrient absorption or stool output. After 28 days of therapy, the patients were discharged and instructed to continue the diet and glutamine treatment.55 It is unknown whether glutamine and diet changes alone, without concomitant growth hormone administration, would have the same positive effect.
In a second study, 20 patients who underwent abdominal surgery were randomized into two groups receiving oral administration of 30 g of glutamine or a placebo in divided doses for 7 days. Serum glutamine concentration was significantly decreased in the placebo group and increased in the glutamine group after 7 days. Markers of intestinal permeability were significantly increased in the placebo group and decreased in the glutamine group. Additionally, the serum markers of endotoxin, diamine oxidase, and malondialdehyde concentrations were significantly decreased in the glutamine group compared with those in the placebo group. Temperatures, heart rates, and white blood cell counts were also significantly lower in the glutamine group.54
Ischemia reperfusion of the gut is also a common event in various clinical conditions, such as trauma, burn, septic shock, cardiac or aortic surgery, and liver or small bowel transplantation, and is associated with a high death rate. Intestinal ischemia reperfusion can cause edema and disruption of the structural integrity and function of the intestinal mucosa and associated vascular tissue. It may set the stage for endotoxemic translocation of a number of bacterium, including Escherichia coli, Enterococcus, Pseudomonas, Proteus, and Staphylococcus. Studies of animal models demonstrated that glutamine, when supplemented as total parenteral nutrition, protected the intestines from morphologic and functional mucosal injury after intestinal ischemia reperfusion. Furthermore, intestinal permeabilities and the incidence of bacterial translocation in intestinal ischemia reperfusion animals were also prevented in a dose-dependent manner by glutamine supplementation.56,57
The gastrointestinal tract is susceptible to SBS, severe intestinal permeabilities, ischemia perfusion damage, systemic inflammatory response during trauma, various medical conditions, and abdominal postoperative periods. Glutamine can decrease intestinal permeability, maintain an intestinal barrier, and attenuate systemic inflammatory response in early postoperative patients.
Chemotherapy and Radiation Side Effects
Standard cancer therapies often include the use of chemotherapy and radiation, which can injure rapidly dividing intestinal cells. It was shown that during chemotherapeutic and radiotherapy insult, glutamine reduced degeneration of intestinal mucosa in rats, prevented intestinal mucosal injury,56 protected liver function through enhanced glutathione biosynthesis and storage in hepatic tissue, increased immune function, and reduced permeability of the gut.19,26
In one investigation, 70 patients with colorectal cancer were randomly assigned to oral glutamine at 18 g/day or placebo before the first regimen of 5-fluorouracil and folinic acid administered intravenously for 5 days. Glutamine was given 5 days before, during, and after chemotherapy. Using D-xylose urinary excretion and cellobiose/mannitol evaluation, damage to the intestines was assessed at baseline, as well as 4 and 5 days after the end of the first cycle of chemotherapy. After one cycle of chemotherapy, the reduction in D-xylose absorption and reduction of mannitol was significantly greater in the placebo group (7.1% vs 3.8% and 9.2% vs 4.5%, respectively). Urinary recovery of cellobiose was not different between the study arms. Accordingly, the cellobiose/mannitol ratio increased more in the placebo treatment group. Furthermore, diarrhea parameters, as well as the average number of antidiarrheal opiate loperamide tablets needed, were reduced in the glutamine arm, thus supporting the positive clinical effect of this low-cost supplement.11
Oropharyngeal mucositis, or mouth sores, and accompanying swallowing difficulty are other untoward results of radiotherapy and can be a major source of suffering in patients with head and neck cancer. Glutamine during and after chemotherapy appears to be an excellent way to safely decrease the incidence of mouth sores. One investigation of 17 patients with head and neck cancer who received primary or adjuvant mouth irradiation for 5 days a week were randomized to either adjunctive glutamine suspension of 16 g in 240 mL normal saline or a saline placebo. Patients were instructed to swish the test solutions (30 mL) four times daily. The duration of objective oral mucositis was significantly shorter in the glutamine arm.58 A second randomized, double-blind crossover trial observed 24 patients who were given a glutamine or placebo suspension to swish and swallow on days of chemotherapy administration and for at least 14 days after therapy. Significant improvement was observed in the glutamine group. Additionally, the duration of mouth pain was 4.5 days less in chemotherapy courses with concomitant glutamine supplementation. The severity of oral pain was reduced so significantly when glutamine was used that a patient could venture past soft foods 4 days sooner compared with placebo.59
Glutamine studies validating its use are also beginning to emerge in other areas of oncology. In a study of esophageal cancer patients, 13 patients were randomized into two groups, controls and a group that received oral glutamine supplemented at a dosage of 30 g/day for 4 weeks. It was observed that supplementation of glutamine enhanced lymphocyte mitogenic function and reduced permeability of the gut during radiochemotherapy.5 Patients who underwent bone marrow transplant and myelosuppressive chemotherapy for acute myeloid leukemia also found that parenteral glutamine therapy could improve neutrophil recovery, although no change in neutropenic fever was shown.60 Given that glutamine improves the structure and function of the gut, it is understandable that multiple parameters and markers of healthy physiologic function will improve with its use.
It should be noted that glutamine’s efficacy may depend on a number of other factors, including the specific chemotherapeutic prescribed and dosage. A study of 65 patients with advanced breast cancer receiving doxifluridine were prescribed 30 g/day of glutamine in three divided doses of 10 g each or a placebo for 8 consecutive days during each interval between chemotherapy, which was administered from days 1 to 4. In this case, there was no statistical difference with regard to diarrhea morbidity, nor did glutamine affect the severity and duration of tumor growth.61 Interestingly, a study of bone marrow transplantation patients found that allogeneic transplantation patients (those receiving bone marrow from another individual) did not have the same beneficial mouth pain reduction that autologous transplantation patients (those who donated their own marrow) experienced when receiving glutamine support. However, in the work mentioned previously, the amounts of glutamine were less than those used in other studies.
It was also theorized that methotrexate use in the allogeneic patients might have been responsible for the decreased protection. Nevertheless, in the allogeneic patients, the 28-day survival was still increased.62 A third multicenter study of 129 patients found no protection against diarrhea when used adjunctively with pelvic radiation therapy. These patients received 4 g of glutamine or a placebo by mouth, which was also a significantly lower dose than the more successful studies employed.63
Although intestinal function is greatly compromised with chemotherapy and radiation treatment, cardiac function is commonly affected as well. The use of doxorubicin therapy for breast cancer is often limited by cardiomyopathic heart changes that often result in congestive heart failure. One rat study simulated doxorubicin treatment with and without glutamine support and found that oxidative damage to the heart was diminished in the glutamine-treated group, probably as a result of glutamine’s ability to maintain cardiac tissue glutathione levels (see later discussion on “Cardiac Disease”).21
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Depicting Devotion: Illuminated Books of Hours from the Middle AgesWashington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, St. Louis, Winter 2001-2001
Table of Contents
Section II: Gospel Lessons
Although it is difficult to ascribe a particular order to the sections of Books of Hours, the Evangelists (literally “those who announce the gospel or the good news”) frequently appear after the Calendar . The Evangelists serve as an introduction to the Book of Hours, and St. John appears first, followed by St. Luke, St. Matthew, and St. Mark. An illuminated portrait of each saint introduces a brief Gospel Lesson. These lessons, which are extracts from the medieval Missal—the service book used by the clergy—celebrate the Church's four great feasts: Christmas, Annunciation, Epiphany, and Ascension.
Standard iconography represents the Evangelists writing their Gospels, accompanied by their symbol. The illuminations in this case show St. John with his symbol the eagle. Literary texts and the historical interpretation of these texts created the symbolism associated with the Evangelists. In the Apocalypse (Revelation) of St. John a vision of the throne of God contains four living creatures and round about the throne, were four living creatures… And the first living creature was like a lion: and the second living creature like a calf: and the third living creature, having the face, as it were, of a man: and the fourth living creature was like an eagle flying. (The Apocalypse 4:6-7)
St. Jerome applied these symbols to the Evangelists with the following
the human-faced figure represented Matthew, because of Matthew's genealogy of the humanity of Christ; the lion-faced figure represented Mark, because of Mark's mention of the voice of the Baptist in the desert; the ox-faced figure represented Luke, because of Luke's mention of the Jewish priest Zachary; and the eagle-faced figure represented John, because of the soaring flight of John's prologue. (New Catholic Encyclopedia, v. 5, 654).
In some instances, the symbols stand on their own, but more frequently, the symbols accompany its Evangelist. Tools of the trade, the instruments a medieval scribe would have used, appear in the illumination. St. John holds a stylus while the eagle holds an inkwell in his beak. These portraits serve two primary purposes: to present the Evangelists in a recognizable depiction, and to represent the defining characteristic of each Gospel by its symbol (eagle, lion, ox, and winged man).
St. John with the chalice of snakes
St. John on the island of Patmos writing
St. John on Patmos with demon stealing his writing instruments
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Although 5G does live up to its hype when it comes to drastically increased bandwidth, faster speeds, and lower latency, it will not come seamlessly. The full rollout will be longer, more complex, and more expensive than industries, government, and citizens would like. However, no matter how long it takes or how much it costs,
Edge computing is growing exponentially and is part of a cybersecurity landscape with new risks that organizations must be aware of and prepared for. As the need for edge computing in IoT environments grows, so will the need to connect to local, interconnected data centers. Colocation facilities can provide the low latency and processing speeds
No matter how vibrant and modern your workforce may be, the success of IoT invariably depends on ultra-low latency, two-way connectivity between sensors and devices. Traditional cloud and legacy networks can’t adequately respond to and serve an ever-growing number of IoT devices. This means that interconnected data centers will be crucial to the success of
In order to meet the needs and expectations of a technology-empowered populace, government needs to function in a modern, data-driven way. When it comes to providing services in a timely, efficient, and cost-effective manner, edge computing is essential, not optional. As edge computing becomes a necessity for government entities, so will connection to local, interconnected
As the IoT revolution transforms modern agriculture, farms will generate a tremendous amount of data that the cloud simply won’t be able to accommodate. It is estimated that the average farm will generate over four million data points a day by the year 2034. In order to feed the planet, farms in the near future
In preparation for the 5G data onslaught, content delivery players - industry stalwarts such as Akamai and growing players such as Fastly - are designing scalable solutions powered by strategic edge Points of Presence (PoPs) to enable the seamless distribution of rich media content to the end users.
Gaming has evolved from challenging the person sitting next to you, to competing with players around the globe. Without ultra-low latency, such competition is simply not possible. And, with emerging technologies such as augmented reality (AR), the importance of low latency will increase even further.
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BANFF NATIONAL PARK — Mirjam Barrueto snowshoes through knee-deep snow into the backcountry just off the Icefields Parkway, breaking a trail as she pinpoints the spot with a hand-held GPS. She carries a large pack with a frozen, skinned beaver on her back.
As she trudges along, she hunts for animal tracks.
After trekking for about 600 meters, Barrueto, a research associate with Wolverine Watch, finds the tracks she’s seeking.
“Those look fresh,” she says, suggesting they’re only a few days old.
The wolverine tracks — about the size of a large dog — lead directly to the Bow River site, one of 51 locations being studied as part of an ongoing research project.
It’s an extensive survey of the elusive animals that spans 6,000 square kilometres in Banff, Kootenay and Yoho national parks.
The $1.7-million project, which includes Parks Canada, the Miistakis Institute in Calgary and the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University, concludes this year after starting in 2009.
For a rare and important species, it’s been vital work.
“We don’t know how many we have and we don’t know whether we have a well-connected population or whether it’s being split in half by the Trans-Canada Highway,” says Trevor Kinley, a road ecologist with Parks Canada. “Of course, it’s absolutely critical to maintain those populations together.
“As populations become smaller, they are much more susceptible to disappearing.”
Wolverines, elusive carnivores known for being a sly predator, are the largest member of the weasel family. They weigh between six and 16 kilograms, and have razor-sharp teeth and strong jaws.
The western population is listed as a species of special concern by the federal Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada because of their low reproductive rate and the amount of space they require to maintain viable populations.
Alberta also acknowledges that they could be at risk and require special management considerations.
This month, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service announced it would consider protecting the North American wolverine as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. There are between 250 to 300 wolverines in the U.S., but climate change is reducing their habitat and threatening the species with extinction.
Not much is known about the wolverines living in Canada’s Rocky Mountains.
They are rarely seen in the wild.
Since 1970, however, there have been four wolverines killed on highways in the parks — including two on the Trans-Canada Highway in 1988 and 1997, and two on Highway 93 in Kootenay National Park in 1990 and 2012.
Wolverines have also been captured on remote cameras 14 times as they use the wildlife crossings (mostly underpasses) in Banff National Park, all west of the Sunshine road turnoff.
The research has so far identified at least 22 different wolverines in the Rockies — although they expect to have better numbers once this year’s field work is complete.
“That’s not the entire population, obviously,” says Tony Clevenger, project manager and senior wildlife research scientist with the Western Transportation Institute. “But, just with those numbers, it suggests it is a relatively healthy population.
He estimates there’s about 30 wolverines in total.
The project, which includes four researchers, relies on the work of volunteers to go out to each of the 51 hair trap sites four times this winter.
It’s gruelling work.
Barrueto, who’s responsible for co-ordinating volunteers, spends several days a week in the field — skiing up to 20 kilometres in difficult terrain and even camping overnight to work at some of the sites.
On this particular day, she snowshoes into the Bow River site, relatively close to Highway 93 North.
Barrueto breaks the trail with ease — despite carrying the 10- to 15-kilogram frozen beaver carcass in her backpack for the 600-meter trek.
It’s immediately clear at least one wolverine has been in the area.
In addition to the tracks, the beaver carcass left a month earlier as bait has been completely devoured.
Barrueto drops her pack, retrieves some equipment from the pack carried by a volunteer and starts looking for hair samples on the tree, which is wrapped in barbed wire.
“There isn’t much hair, but we’ll find some,” she says, finding about a dozen samples that are carefully placed in small envelopes for DNA testing.
The barbed wire, which doesn’t hurt the wolverines, is cleaned before putting up new bait.
Barrueto prepares the beaver on the ground, hammering large nails part of the way into carcass and tying a rope around it to raise it almost two meters up the tree.
“If it’s low, wolves and lynx get at it,” she explains.
The beaver is then hammered into the tree and wrapped in wire to make it difficult for the wolverines to pull down and ensure hair samples are collected on the barbed wire as they go up and down the tree for the food.
“This is a really good one. There’s lots of fat,” says Barrueto. “They can just lick it off, like beaver ice cream.”
To ensure they return, she adds a lure — a strong skunk-like scent used to attract wildlife — on a nearby tree.
She then checks the remote camera set up on another tree and makes sure it’s operating properly to capture images of any animals, preferably wolverines, visiting the site.
The photos, which are later uploaded at the Parks Canada wildlife lab in Banff, show at least one wolverine has visited the site several times in the previous month.
Barrueto says it’s exciting to see the elusive animal in photos, but she’d love to be able to observe one in the wild.
“I do all of this work and all I get to see is photos, which is good enough,” she says, noting she likes that the research isn’t bothering the wolverines. “But still, as a biologist often you love animals, and it would be cool to run into one at one point.”
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Legs and feet are very important for stability and locomotion. With them we can run, walk, jump, and kick. It is also important for self-defense in order to: run away, increase or decrease distance, and hit powerfully opponents. Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu has several kicking techniques (what also depends on the school), and most of them are well-known.
Reading Ten Chi Jin Ryaku no Maki (the book of heaven, earth and human-being strategy) of Hatsumi Sensei, many basic kicks and counterattacks can be found. According Hatsumi Sensei, the knee has a very important point on kicking techniques and you can practice pulling it up to chest and holding the knee with both hands before practice basic kicks.
There also are two important points to practice kicks. First at all, avoid to stretch completely your leg and stuck the knee violently, it could injury you. Second: along the movement drop a little bit your hip. It is also suggested to train kicks pointing feet fingers to your own body (as beginner practice) along the performance.
Several coordination exercises should be practiced. Robert Renner Shihan of Bujinkan Zero Point Dojo produced DVDs that describes very interesting exercises to improve the control and coordination of whole body. It improves the Taijutsu.
Recently, I watched “Saigo no Jissen” movie again and there Hatsumi Sensei shows some pictures of Takamatsu Sensei describing how to hit with hands and feet.
Like everything in martial arts, kicking is connected to posture, distance, and timing. Usually, timing and distance are considered. However, if you are not well positioned (bad posture or bad distance, for example) your kick will not be effective. A simple test to do is to kick a punching bag assuming a balanced, but not structured posture.
During solo training, prepare and coordinate all of aspects of the kicking techniques. A punching bag could be used. Practice dozens of basic Bujinkan kicks, feeling different angles (controlling distance), weight changes, and coordinating all movement phases.
In order to kick effectively, always regard 急所 (kyusho, vital/vulnerable points) during practice and research. There are several points on the body, but each one could be attacked on a specific way, and with specific hit. In this case, a specific kick. When a vulnerable point is attacked, opponent assumes a specific posture as body reaction. That is also the reason you should practice and understand it in order to control the flow of the combat. Always moving one step ahead without forget the balance.
When practice with partner, it is also important to know how to react after to be kicked. Several Ukemi waza (receiving techniques) are well-known for these purposes and should be practiced deeply. Still, do not forget receiving techniques with weapons.
Some weapons could embarrass default kicking movement (while kicking or after that). Sometimes, it requires adaptation. Even when you are using a weapon and receiving a kick, the receiving technique probably will need dynamic adaptation. Go ahead. Try.
Try to explore all kicking possibilities, regarding all variables related and improving your Taijutsu. Kicks are very important to improve self-defense understanding and body perception.
(Ninja no Kokoro Ninpo Ikkan)
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Born in 1926, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wanted to be a doctor but her father forbade it. She left home at 16, was a hospital volunteer in WWII and finally entered medical school in 1951. She studied terminal illness, publishing her groundbreaking book On Death and Dying in 1969. The book outlines the five stages that dying patients experience: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
Author, psychiatrist. Born on July 8, 1926, in Zurich, Switzerland. Through her ground-breaking research and writings, Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross helped revolutionize how the medical community cared for the terminally ill. She had a fragile start in life as a triplet, weighing only two pounds when she and her two other siblings were born. Developing an interest in medicine at a young age, Kübler-Ross encountered intense resistance from her father about her career aspirations. He told her that she could be a secretary in his business or go become a maid.
Defying her family, Kübler-Ross left home at the age of 16 and worked a series of jobs. She also served as a volunteer during World War II, helping out in hospitals and caring for refugees. After the war, Kübler-Ross volunteered to help in numerous war-torn communities. She was profoundly affected by a visit to the Maidanek concentration camp in Poland and the images of hundreds of butterflies carved into some of the walls there. To Kübler-Ross, the butterflies—these final works of art by those facing death—stayed with her for years and influenced her thinking about the end of life.
Kübler-Ross began pursuing her dreams to become a doctor in 1951 as a medical student at the University of Zurich. While there, she met Emanuel Robert Ross, an American medical student. They married in 1958, a year after she graduated, and moved to the United States where they both had internships at Community Hospital in Glen Cove, Long Island. (In 1976, she and her husband divorced, and he died in 1992.) Then she went on to specialize in psychiatry, becoming a resident at Manhattan State Hospital.
In 1962, Kübler-Ross and her husband moved to Denver, Colorado, to teach at the University of Colorado Medical School. She had been disturbed by the treatment of the dying throughout her time in the United States and found nothing in the medical school curriculum at the time that addressed death and dying. Filling in for a colleague one time, Kübler-Ross brought in a 16-year-old girl who was dying from leukemia into the classroom. She told the students to ask the girl any questions they wanted. But after receiving numerous questions about her condition, the girl erupted in anger and started asking the questions that mattered to her as a person, such as what was it like to not be able to dream about growing up or going to the prom, according to an article in The New York Times.
Moving to Chicago in 1965, Kübler-Ross became an instructor at the University of Chicago’s medical school. A small project about death with a group of theology students evolved into a series of well-attended seminars featuring candid interviews with people who were dying. Building upon her interviews and research, Kübler-Ross wrote On Death and Dying (1969), which identified the five stages that most terminally ill patients experience: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The identification of these stages was a revolutionary concept at the time, but has since become widely accepted.
A Life magazine ran an article on Kübler-Ross in November 1969, bringing public awareness to her work outside of the medical community. The response was enormous and influenced Kübler-Ross’s decision to focus on her career on working with the terminally ill and their families. The intense scrutiny her work received also had an impact on her career path. Kübler-Ross stopped teaching at the university to work privately on what she called the “greatest mystery in science”—death.
Writing and Criticism
During her career, Kübler-Ross wrote more than 20 books on death and related subjects, including To Live Until We Say Goodbye (1978), Living with Death and Dying (1981), and The Tunnel and the Light (1999). She also traveled around the world, giving her “Life, Death, and Transition” workshops. Funded by the profits from her books, workshops, and talks, she established Shanti Nilaya, an educational retreat, in Escondido, California, in 1977. Around that same time, she formed the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Center, which was later moved to her Virginia farm in the mid-1980s. Working with AIDS patients during the early days of the epidemic, she tried to create a hospice for AIDS-afflicted children, but dropped the plan after encountering much opposition.
In the later part of her career, Kübler-Ross became increasingly interested in the issues of life after death, spirit guides, and spirit channeling, which was met with skepticism and scorn by her peers in the medical and psychiatric circles.
Death and Legacy
For one who wrote so extensively on dying and death, Kübler-Ross’s transition from this life was not a smooth one. She retired to Arizona after series of strokes in 1995 left her partially paralyzed and in a wheelchair. “I am like a plane that has left the gate and not taken off,” she said, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times. “I would rather go back to the gate or fly away.”
In 2002, Kübler-Ross moved into a hospice. She died on August 24, 2004, of natural causes, surrounded by friends and family. Not long before her death, she had finished work on her final book, On Grief and Grieving (2005), which she wrote with David Kessler. Kübler-Ross was survived by her two children and two grandchildren. In 2007, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame for her work. Kübler-Ross helped start the public discussion on death and dying and campaigned vigorously for better treatment and care for the terminally ill.
We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us!
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Information about Public Water Systems
Providing safe drinking water is a partnership that involves EPA, the states, tribes, water systems, and water system operators. The public drinking water systems regulated by EPA and delegated states and tribes provide drinking water to 90 percent of Americans.
A public water system provides water for human consumption through pipes or other constructed conveyances to at least 15 service connections or serves an average of at least 25 people for at least 60 days a year. A public water system may be publicly or privately owned.
There are over 148,000 public water systems in the United States. EPA classifies these water systems according to the number of people they serve, the source of their water, and whether they serve the same customers year-round or on an occasional basis.
EPA has defined three types of public water systems:
- Community Water System (CWS): A public water system that supplies water to the same population year-round.
- Non-Transient Non-Community Water System (NTNCWS): A public water system that regularly supplies water to at least 25 of the same people at least six months per year. Some examples are schools, factories, office buildings, and hospitals which have their own water systems.
- Transient Non-Community Water System (TNCWS): A public water system that provides water in a place such as a gas station or campground where people do not remain for long periods of time.
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A hobo spider bites are often described as causing necrotic dermatologic wounds. But it is not an easy thing to tell these arachnids from their very similar siblings – brown recluses, which are much more dangerous.
Hobo Spider Identification
Tegenaria agrestis is a species of the Agelenidae arachnid family that originated from Europe in the beginning of the XX century. It is most distributed in Washington, Idaho, Utah and other states of the western Pacific part of the USA.
The Hobo spider is rather big. Males are 7-13 mm; females are about 9-16 mm in body length. They live both indoors and outdoors choosing dark, calm places to spin their web. The threads are non-sticky. The form is funnel-typed. It is placed horizontally.
Most commonly hobo species are characterized the following way:
- The absence of bands or circles on their legs. Instead, we observe uniform-colored limbs.
- The presence of tiny hairs on the cephalothorax, abdomen, and legs. Shiny and bold spiders cannot be Tegenaria Agrestis.
- Brown hues of any shades are mostly typical for this type of spiders. Additionally, they own a pattern on the back consisting of light spots.
- A presence of a bright stripe on the sternum and absence of any spots in this area.
Hobo spiders are ground level arthropods. That is why an arthropod high above the floor of on the ceiling is definitely not a hobo one.
Like many other siblings Tegenaria agrestis species are not aggressive to humans and tend to flee rather than fight. But in cases with no escape, they may bite. This usually occurs from July to October and more often males are on blame. They wander around the area seeking a mate and can appear inside the human dwelling. Females prefer to live not far from their webs.
How Dangerous are Hobo Spider?
The question of hobo spiders’ bite and their impact on humans is still disputable. One group of scientists is sure that Tegenaria Agrestis causes skin swelling and necrosis. Others consider them innocent in those terrible bites and insist that hobo spiders’ victims among humans suffer only pain, redness, and itching.
The Hobo Spider Bites Stages
The stages of the eight-legged arthropod (at the worst scenario) include:
- Erythema or redness, which usually goes off in a few hours.
- Hardened place at the bite site. It much resembles a common mosquito bite.
- In very rare cases after 1 or 2 days, there may be blistering appeared in the wounded place.
- In a day the blister ruptures showing an erosive place.
- Later the ulster covers with a scab.
- Within approximately 45 days after the bite the scab is deleted, and the wound completely heals up.
- Wash the bitten place with cold water and antibacterial soap.
- Dress it in a clean bandage or cold compress.
- In the case of severe pain, you may take a pain-reducing medicine.
- Consult a doctor.
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After watching the collection of talks on Ecofying Cities, read a thoughtful recap of the major points in this TED Study, and learn where experts believe things are headed.
The TEDTalks in Ecofying Cities touch on many of the questions which are front-and-center for urban planners, policy makers, environmentalists and others. How can we promote healthy urban lifestyles for our aging and urbanizing populations? Are we ready to relinquish our car keys and support transit-oriented, walkable cities and suburbs? What are the most practical alternatives to fossil fuels, and what measures will wean us from the non-renewable resources that currently maintain and enable our unsustainable ways of life? Can we make big environmental changes without stronger leadership from the public sector? How can we design sustainable buildings that contribute positively to the city's metabolism and that improve the quality of life of users?
And while we're working on answers to these questions, we'll be wrestling with the dilemma of whether we should be building new at all. As several of the TED speakers suggest, we would do well to reuse and retrofit existing buildings, neighborhoods and brownfield, rather than plow under additional greenfield sites.
In the future, with enough political and economic will, we may harness the power of the sun and wind and find that energy supply's no longer an issue. The real issues will likely be depleted non-renewable resources and those renewables (forests, for example) which may not be able to keep pace with consumption in a world of economic inequity and ecological unbalance. Embracing cradle-to-cradle recycling of non-renewable resources, recalibrating our demand for energy and material goods, and increasing the large-scale production of renewable energy are what's called for in order to achieve a sustainable future.
In his TEDTalk, Michael Pawlyn quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupery: "If you want to build a flotilla of ships, you don't sit around talking about carpentry. No, you need to set people's souls ablaze with visions of exploring distant shores." Pawlyn is quite right — the language surrounding sustainable cities and buildings often focuses on limiting, reducing, minimizing and scaling down. But when we utilize ecological design strategies, long-term thinking and renewable resources, as William McDonough envisions, we can design buildings and cities in ways that are restorative, exciting and that focus on abundance.
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June 7,
...When they both had left the house, Henryk stole out through the window in order not to have to cross the yard... He returned the same way from the barbers, but a Volksdeutsche woman called Podgorska watched Henryk from an upper balcony as he stole in and out. As it turned out later, she had long suspected Teresa of harboring a Jew. She ran at once to the Gendarmerie post and within a few minutes the house was surrounded. The Gendarmes broke open the door and found only Henryk. They beat him but he said nothing. He pretended he was mute. They waited for the owner of the apartment.
The occupants of the house decided to warn Teresa with the help of their children. When she learned what had happened she returned home instead of escaping. It had seemed that she was an ordinary and rather empty-headed person, but she proved to be a courageous girl. It had seemed to her that if she gave evidence that she had known Henryk for a number of years and believed him to be an "Aryan" she would be able to save him. She did not think about herself. When she entered, Henryk, who was bleeding badly, gave her to understand that he had said nothing. An investigation was begun to find out who he was and why he did not speak. She explained: "He must have been frightened." She also explained that she had known him for two years and that he was a Pole. She was asked why he had climbed out through the window, and she replied that they had agreed that he would do so when she was not at home. One of the Germans then gave an order, without hesitating, to examine Henryk in a brutal manner in Teresa's presence. They were both taken away. Henryk was killed. Teresa was saved with great effort by Volksdeutsche relations who had connections. She was sent to a concentration camp.
W. Bartoszewski and Z. Lewinowna, eds., Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej Polacy z pomoca Zydom 1939-1945, Cracow, 1969, p. 951. (English version: Righteous Among the Nations: How Poles Helped the Jews, 1939-1945, London, 1969.)
* Sabina Dluzniewski.
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by Stephanie Schollaert Uz / Woods Hole, MA /
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. To truly understand the whole, however, we need to analyze its parts. That is the mission of the ambitious North Atlantic Aerosols and Marine Ecosystems Study (NAAMES), whose scientists left port Wednesday with the outgoing tide on the research vessel Atlantis.
During this second of four cruises, the ship is in a rush against time and mother nature to reach its northernmost station before the cyclical, massive spring bloom of phytoplankton spreads across the North Atlantic. This is a time when phytoplankton, microscopic algae at the base of the marine food web, grow faster than other things can eat them. The bloom occurs as sunlight increases and nutrients are plentiful at the water’s wind-mixed surface layer. Once their predators catch up, the phytoplankton decline.
The North Atlantic bloom normally peaks in May. Toby Westberry, of Oregon State University, has been watching satellite imagery carefully for the past few weeks and is worried that the bloom is early and already progressing northward. Westberry and NAAMES principal investigator Mike Behrenfeld, also of Oregon State, worked with the ship’s captain and chief engineer to put additional engines on the Atlantis. They hope to cut the week-long transit time to their first station by a few days so that they don’t miss this short window in the phytoplankton’s annual cycle.
NAAMES’ interdisciplinary, multi-institutional science team will take a comprehensive suite of measurements of biological and physical properties in the ocean and also measure the atmosphere for particles and trace gases associated with the spring bloom. This floating laboratory has more sophisticated science equipment per square foot than I have ever seen before. Not to mention an abundance of talented minds to collect and analyze the data through multiple methods from many perspectives.
One of the key goals of the mission is to observe the structure of the phytoplankton community in these ocean blooms to better understand the role of sunlight, predation, and disease by viruses and bacteria. There is a lot of diversity among microscopic phytoplankton and – believe it or not – there is a chance we may be able to distinguish kinds of phytoplankton (their different taxonomic levels) from satellites one day. Data collected by this cruise will assist with that effort.
The other key goal is to determine how plankton interact with the air by releasing small particles and trace gases that can lead to cloud formation. The role of airborne particles in trapping or reflecting sunlight and through cloud formation is one of the biggest open questions in understanding Earth’s climate.
The interdisciplinary ocean and atmospheric science questions of NAAMES parallel those of the upcoming Plankton, Aerosols, Clouds and ocean Ecosystems (PACE) satellite mission to study Earth as a system using an airborne hyperspectral ocean color instrument and polarimeter. Ship-based and airborne measurements will provide valuable information for scientists to develop and test analytical tools to use with future satellite data from PACE.
And that will bring the project full-circle. The NAAMES field campaign was conceived through analysis of the first continuous ocean color satellite record that Behrenfeld published in 2010. In that study, he noticed the annual phytoplankton spring bloom seemed to start much earlier than previously assumed. Subsequent field campaigns and modeling studies confirmed the basic idea but led to more questions. NAAMES hopes to answer these through its four field campaigns during different phases of the annual life cycle of phytoplankton. Better understanding these important Earth processes will lead to better modeling, that will enable us to more accurately predict and prepare for the future.
Because going to sea is such a precious opportunity, this cruise is packed to the gills with sophisticated sensors and scientists who will study the spring bloom from multiple angles. For the next three weeks, the R/V Atlantis will measure the living ocean along with a C-130 airplane that will fly over the ship collecting measurements of the sea and sky.
When asked about their favorite aspect of going to sea, the food and the camaraderie of shipmates are at the top of most scientists’ lists. Craig Carlson of the University of California at Santa Barbara said, “You’re living in the midst of focused science 24/7. The internet is slow and there are minimal distractions.”
Liz Harvey of the University of Georgia at Skidaway added, “With 16-20 hour days, getting enough sleep is a challenge.”
“Sleep is precious and you build your day around food,” said Graff in agreement. “You’re living on coffee, great food and adrenaline.”
If you’ve spent much time near the ocean, you understand how it can pull you in. And if you haven’t, well, you should.
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“Courage in the face of evil. Hope for a brighter future. These characteristics describe the life and legacy of Anne Frank and her message to us today.”
-John Allen Riggins, a Senior at Little Rock Central High School, 2009
Few locations in the United States more clearly embody the courage and resilience of children like Anne Frank than Little Rock Central High School. Little Rock Central High School stood at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1957, nine African American students—known as the Little Rock Nine—risked their lives to get an equal education at the previously all white high school. For years, the students faced racism and bigotry, as well an organized effort by the State’s Governor to deny them admission. Yet thanks to their courage and bravery, these nine students succeeded in triggering a national uproar that ultimately ensured desegregation would take place.
Today, Central High offers testament to the courage and perseverance of the Little Rock Nine and children across the United States who dare to stand up to injustice. Among the tributes that will join Anne’s tree, are the Silent Witnesses—trees that oversaw the struggles of the little Rock Nine. United with Anne’s, these trees provide a powerful reminder of the consequences of intolerance and the failure to confront it.
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Attracting Hummingbirds to you is important and a lot easier than trekking across fields with a pair of Binoculars.
A good way to attract the hummingbirds is to plant a hummingbird garden following the instructions in the Garden section of this website. A hummingbird garden can be rather large rolling across several acres, to very small such as a window-box planter or a couple of plants and feeder on a porch. Hummingbirds have no sense of smell, so what the flower smells like doesn't really matter. Choose trumpet flowers like those on Honeysuckle plant, or a Trumpet Vine. If you don't know the name of a particular flower, don't worry. We have compiled a Hummingbird Garden Catalog with photos that will help you choose the best flowers for your location.
Hummingbirds love to drink nectar from flowers and feeders. Hummingbird feeders can be purchased and come in all shapes and sizes, or, you can make your own hummingbird feeder using old bottles and other things around your home. We have listed our favorite feeders and recommendations in the Feeders section of this website. The recipe for hummingbird nectar can be found in the Nectar section of this site.
As much as hummingbirds need nectar as part of their daily diet, you will also need water to attract them. Hummingbirds need water to drink and bathe. It is easy to incorporate water into your hummingbird garden by adding a water mister that will not only water the plants, but allow the hummingbirds to take a quick shower. Hummingbirds are also attracted to birdbaths with fountains. There are some really nice hummingbird birdbaths in our hummingbird shop. A solar fountain added to a birdbath will not only make the hummingbirds happy, but your pocketbook as well.
Hummingbirds are attracted to an area that has lots of little bugs to eat. Hummingbirds need protein to survive and eating tiny bugs like gnats and spiders give them that needed protein. Don't use pesticides around hummingbirds; let the hummingbirds will take care of those annoying little bugs for you. If you want to try to attract more bugs, see the Bugs section of this website.
Hummingbirds love to play around in the sunshine and even take a little sun bath, however, they also need shade and wind protection. Hummingbirds are attracted to areas that have both. They need the sunshine just like we do. However they need the shade to rest, perch, and nest.
Hummingbirds can feel more fearless than other birds simply because of their speed. Hummingbirds can even become accustom to certain people they know. They can, in time, zip all around someone's heads and ankles without a care.
To a hummingbird, you are a 90 foot tall monster that can eat them. Hummingbirds don't know that you would never hurt them until you can prove it. When you move, make sure your movements are slow and deliberate. Try sitting out with the hummingbirds on a daily basis (like morning Coffee time). Change the feeders during daylight hours so they can see who is providing such good nectar. After a while, sit with a feeder right next to you and watch them drop by for a drink. Eventually, they may start to think of you as a perch. See also the Bugs section of this website.
If you are having problems attracting hummingbirds, be patient. Hummingbirds will be in virtually every part of the Americas at one time or another. Here are some other tips you might want to try to help you attract the most hummingbirds.
- Try placing your hummingbird feeders near flowers that hummingbirds like.
- Run strings or line to create a place for the hummingbirds to perch.
- Spread feeders out, or place a lot of feeders bunched together so that a territorial hummingbird cannot monopolize all of them.
- Place the feeders as a variety of heights. Some hummingbirds feel more comfortable feeding at higher levels of fourteen (14) feet or so, while others like to feed at ground level.
- Try to decorate your feeder and surrounding areas with Color-Coded Flagging Tape. The florescent tape mimics the reflections of the hummingbird's iridescent coloring.
As you can see, with a little thought and patients attracting hummingbirds is not all that hard.
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Artist's conception of the SPRINT-A spacecraft.
Update: Japan's first Epsilon rocket launch carrying the SPRINT-A satellite was canceled Tuesday, Aug. 27, due to an unspecified glitch. Read the full story here: Japan Cancels 1st Launch of Next-Generation Epsilon Rocket
A new satellite will bundle observations of Venus, Mars and Jupiter into one mission — without needing to leave Earth's orbit.
A Japanese probe called SPRINT-A (Spectroscopic Planet Observatory for Recognition of Interaction of Atmosphere), which is scheduled to launch on Tuesday (Aug. 27) aims to better understand how planets in the solar system were formed. Checking out the magnetosphere and atmosphere of other planets could provide a window into Earth's early history, Japanese space agency officials said.
Its long-term observations of these planets will be the first of their kind ever conducted from Earth orbit, according to the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). [Our Solar System: A Photo Tour of the Planets]
The puzzle of Mars and Venus
SPRINT-A has a prime mission of one year. At 771 pounds (350 kilograms), it weighs about 30 times less than NASA's venerable Hubble Space Telescope, which can also observe the planets from its perch in Earth orbit.
Unlike Hubble, however, SPRINT will examine planets in extreme ultraviolet rays (UV rays) with a very short wavelength. These rays can only be detected from space, as they are absorbed by Earth's sheltering atmosphere. They're also rarely used in astronomy, leading to likely "innovative discoveries," JAXA officials said in a statement.
Extreme ultraviolet rays are ideally suited for examining how particles and plasma from the sun (also known as the solar wind) interact with planetary atmospheres. If a planet lacks a strong magnetic field that would deflect the particles, over time the solar wind can cause the atmosphere to bleed gas.
Tracking this process could help scientists better understand, for example, why Mars lost so much of its atmosphere in the past few million years. Multiple missions have detected evidence of ancient water on the planet's surface and even washing through underground canyons. As the atmosphere fled, however, the surface water mostly disappeared except for reserves in the ice caps.
Venus is also a puzzle to scientists. While Venus has a weak magnetic field, unlike Mars, it has an abundance of pressure — about 90 times what is present at the surface level of Earth. The planet is completely cloud-covered, with a runaway greenhouse effect happening underneath. It also has a surface temperature of about 872 F (467 C).
Several Soviet Union probes reached the surface of Venus in past decades, but succumbed within minutes due to the intense heat and pressure there.
Spying on Jupiter
From zones of weak magnetic fields, SPRINT-A will also probe spots in the solar system where this force is quite strong. Jupiter has the most abundant magnetic field and will serve as a spot to examine "the penetration path and depth of solar wind energy," JAXA officials said.
Jupiter also has a volcanic moon, Io, that trails a plasma torus in its orbit. This cloud surrounds Jupiter. As ions and electrons crash into each other, energy is released in the form of ultraviolet light. This is similar to how auroras on Earth are created, according to the University of Arizona's ultraviolet spectroscopy and imaging group.
SPRINT-A will launch aboard the first spaceflight of Japan's Epsilon rocket, a booster that can do many its own health checks. JAXA officials hope the artificial intelligence onboard, among other measures, will lead to cheaper rocket launches in the future.
You can watch the Epsilon rocket launch live online via JAXA webcast streams.
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What we do
UNICEF has been a champion of children’s rights in Liberia for close to 30 years
UNICEF's work in Liberia
UNICEF has been working in Liberia for close to 30 years, turning our vision for children into practical action.
With our child-focused mandate, country presence and operational capacity, we support the Government of Liberia and other partners to help every child reach their full potential.
The goal of our current country programme for 2013-2019 is to:
- Make sure that every child and adolescent has access to basic education and a variety of post-basic education and improved learning outcomes.
- Improve the health, nutrition and welfare of children and women on an equitable basis.
- Increase access to the basics of life – safe water, sanitation and hygiene
- Protect the poorest and most vulnerable children and women from all forms of violence.
Our interventions are supported by a robust monitoring and evaluation system that helps us track and improve results for children. Behaviour change communication is a key strategy across all our programmes, while advocacy and resource mobilization ensure that policies and funding are in place to bring about positive change for children in Liberia.
UNICEF Liberia Programmes
Child, maternal and neonatal health
With the aim of ensuring no child or mother dies of preventable causes, UNICEF is working to increase access to healthcare services for all. UNICEF supports efforts to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV, reduce child and maternal deaths, and prevent deaths from vaccine preventable diseases.
UNICEF is working to prevent children and mothers suffering from malnutrition, by promoting improved nutrition
intake or treatment for those suffering from malnutrition,
and preventing health effects or deaths.
Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH)
UNICEF's WASH interventions help increase children’s access
to safe water, sanitation and hygiene.
Accelerating improvements in access to quality
education for all children is one
of the most urgent priorities
for UNICEF in Liberia.
UNICEF works to improve the policies and services that protect and empower children and youth in Liberia. We aim to make Liberia a safe and inclusive place for children to grow.
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Alternative fuel is the preference of a particular fuel other than traditional choices, gasoline and diesel. According to Elvers (2008), the goals of attempting to use alternative fuel are;
- To increase national security
- To alleviate environmental problems
- To assist a nation become energy independent.
- To increase the use of fuel that greatly minimizes harmful exhaust emissions.
- To diversify in other forms of energy other than gasoline and diesel.
- To use a type of fuel that is less costly.
- To assist consumers learn more on how crude oil usage impacts their lives and the benefits of advancing and utilizing alternative fuels.
Miller and McBrewster (2009) note that significant amounts of oil are used to run all cars, tracks, buses, trains, boats, and planes. They are also used in powering devices and stationery engines that are portable. Oil has involved in people's lives for many years. As a fuel, it was initially used as kerosene for lighting thus replacing vegetable, animal and coal oils. Oil also came to be utilized in furnaces. However, its biggest application came with the enhancement of automobile.
Buy Alternative Fuel is not the Solution essay paper online
Currently almost every form of locomotion such as trucks, cars, ships, planes, buses and trains are fueled by oil, diesel or gasoline. Of late, fuel oil is being burned to generate electricity, even though this has often been purely coal's job. Miller and McBrewster (2009) say that there are other forms of fuel that are normally used as an alternative to oil. The main alternative fuels that are usually used are ethanol, solar power, natural gas, wind power and diesel. The use of alternative fuels provides various ecological benefits over other energy's sources, specifically other fossil fuels. Though several alternative fuels have been introduced, it is good to maintain oil use since oil is the planet's most versatile fuel that produces a large quantity of other products if further processing is applied. Oil is also relatively simple to store and transport between source and end-user. Oil use need to be maintained since oil is always cleaner and easier to burn as compared to coal (Elvers, 2008).
Alternative fuel and why it cannot be used as a main fuel
Ethanol fuel is an energy resource that is sustainable. It is planned to offer a more economically and environmentally friendly option to fossil fuels, that is, diesel and gasoline. It is also an alternative to petroleum based fuels and is considered to be better for the surroundings. Not all vehicles can operate on 100 percent ethanol, but most of them can operate on small ethanol percentage blends that are common at many gas stations. Ethanol, an alcohol-based fuel, is made by fermenting and distilling crops such as corn that have starch. It can also be manufactured from cellulosic biomass such as grasses and trees. Ethanol fuel can be mixed with gasoline at various rates or can be utilized in its pure form as E100.Therefore, as an alternative to gasoline, ethanol fuel is produced from conversion of carbon based feed stocks sugar beets, switch grass, sugar cane, corn and barley. Ethanol use can minimize foreign oil dependence and greenhouse gas emissions. Ethanol fuel is very common since it is being employed as an oxygenate additive for gasoline.
The use of ethanol is not 100% friendly with the environment since it is a particulate-free burning fuel source that combusts well with oxygen to form water and carbon dioxide. It always releases similar quantity of carbon dioxide as gasoline but less carbon monoxide. Ethanol is not economically good since it is extremely expensive fuel. By considering all the energy from fossil fuels that are required to operate farm equipment, fertilize, harvest and transport corn to ethanol plants and then distilling the corn into ethanol, it takes as much energy to produce ethanol as it offers. It is therefore factual that it is more costly to produce a gallon of ethanol than gasoline's gallon, even if tax incentives are available. Ethanol has almost seventy percent of gasoline's energy content. This therefore implies that flexible-fuel cars that utilize E-85 percent ethanol and fifteen percent gasoline normally make several stops at filling stations since this type of cars consume fuel with fewer miles per gallon than gasoline (Miller & McBrewster, 2009).
Ethanol does not give much energy as gasoline. It has lower energy content than gasoline. Almost one-third more ethanol is needed to move the same distance as when using gasoline. Other ethanol characteristic incorporates a high octane rating, resulting into enhanced engine effectiveness and performance. In low-percentage mix with gasoline, ethanol results in enhanced vapor pressure that can be adjusted for formulation process and managed with on-board motor vehicle systems. Flexible fuel vehicles are motor vehicles that utilize up to 85 percent level of ethanol. The vehicles are built with special fuel system components that are designed to be compatible with advanced ethanol concentrations. Ethanol cannot be used as a main fuel because it is expensive to produce and does not provide much energy as gasoline.
Diesel fuel is a heavy oil mineral that is utilized as fuel in diesel engines. It refers to fuel oils that are planned for compression ignition engines. Diesel is made from crude oil or petroleum fuel. Crude oil is found naturally in the earth. The moment crude oil is refined at refineries it can be differentiated into various types of fuels, incorporating jet fuel, gasoline, kerosene and finally diesel. Therefore diesel is made by refining crude oil. Diesel and gasoline are not similar. Diesel fuel is normally heavier and oiler. It evaporates at a lower rate than gasoline.
The boiling point of diesel fuel is much higher than that of water. Diesel fuel is too oily thus being referred as diesel oil. Diesel fuel has a higher boiling point since it is heavier. It has a lot of carbon atoms in longer chain as compared to gasoline. It is cheaper than gasoline since little refining is required to produce it. Diesel fuel has more energy density than gasoline thus providing more energy. On average, one gallon of diesel fuel has about 155 x 106 joules, while one gallon of gasoline has 132 x 106 joules. Combination of this with enhanced effectiveness of diesel engines, describes why diesel engines obtain better mileage than similar gasoline engines.
Diesel fuel is normally utilized to power a broad variety of motor vehicles and operations. Due to its high energy content, diesel is normally applied in fueling heavy trucks, boats, city buses, school buses, cranes, farming equipment, trains and different emergency response generators and vehicles. Diesel is not good for the economy. It is highly applicable in heavy machines, but not light machines thus its application is not spread equally across the economy (Miller 2009).
In terms of environment, diesel fuel is not 100% friendly with the environment. It has some pros and cons. The pros, that is, diesel normally releases very small quantity of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons that result to global warming. The cons, that is, high quantities of nitrogen compounds and particulate substance are normally emitted from burning diesel fuel thus leading to acid rain, smog and health conditions that are not good. Diesel cannot be used as a main fuel because it greatly pollute environment thus resulting into poor health conditions through global warming.
Natural gas is one of the main sources of energy that are normally applied in the daily requirements and activities. It is a crucial component of the globe's supply of energy. Natural gas is the cleanest, safest and most effective among all other sources of energy. It is capable of producing significantly fewer dangerous emissions than diesel. The formation of natural gas can be explained by various theories. The theory that is broadly accepted states that fossils fuels are made when organic matter such as plants and animals remains, are compressed beneath the earth at high pressure for along period of time. This is known as thermogenic methane. Similar to how oil is formed, thermogenic methane is produced from organic elements that are below the mud and other sediment. With time, several sediment and mud can pile above the organic matter. The sediment and debris exerts a great deal of pressure upon the organic matter thus compressing it.
The compression, together with high temperatures that are found underneath the earth, weakens the carbon bonds within the organic matter. The temperature becomes higher and higher as one enters deeper and deeper into the earth's crust. A lot of oil relative to natural can be produced at low temperatures. However, at higher temperatures, a lot of natural gas is produced as opposed to oil. Due to this, naturally gas is normally linked with oil deposits that are about one to two miles beneath the earth's crust. Deeper deposits that are very far below the earth surface normally have primarily natural gas and in several instances, pure methane. Natural gas is not 100% friendly with the environment (Fitzgerald & Voege, 2010).
Burning of natural gas normally results in fewer emissions of about all forms of air pollutants and carbon dioxide per unit of heat released than coal or refined products from petroleum. Approximately one hundred and seventeen pounds of carbon dioxide are usually emitted per million Btu equivalent of natural gas relative to over two hundred pounds of carbon dioxide per million Btu of coal and over one hundred and sixty pounds per million Btu of fuel oil. The clean burning features have lead to enhance in natural gas use for electricity production and as transportation fuel for many motor vehicles. Naturally gas mostly contains methane that is very strong green house gas (Chandra 2006).
A number of methane normally links from oil and gas wells, coal mines, natural gas tanks, processing plants and pipelines into the atmosphere. The leaks contribute to approximately 25% of total methane emissions and approximately 3% of total greenhouse gas emissions thus natural gas is not 100% good for environment. Naturally gas is not good for the economy. The gas is very expensive to generate and it cannot be applied in gas form in all machines. Natural gas, for instance, must be converted into liquid gas before it is used in motor vehicles. Natural gas cannot be effectively applied in commercial, residential, industrial and transportation sector. It does not provide as much energy as gasoline since it has little concentration of energy than gasoline. Natural gas cannot be used as the main alternative fuel because its leak can easily cause a serious explosion. It therefore requires some strict regulations and industry standards for it to be safely transported, stored, usage and distribution (Mokhatab 2006).
Wind power is an energy produced from wind turbines and wind mills. Wind power illustrates the process by which wind is utilized to produce mechanical power or electricity. In the process of creating wind power, wind turbines normally converts kinetic energy into mechanical power. The mechanical energy can be utilized for particular tasks such as pumping water and grinding grain. A generator can then convert the mechanical energy into electricity. Generation of wind power largely depends on wind. Winds are brought about by the uneven heating of the environment, the abnormalities of the surface of earth and earth's rotation. Wind flow patterns can be modified by terrain of the earth, vegetation and water bodies.
Human beings normally utilize the wind flow or energy in motion for sailing, flying a kit and electricity production. A wind turbine works differently from a fan. Unlike fan, it does not use electricity to produce wind instead it utilizes wind to generate electricity. The blades are turned by wind which then connects to a generator that finally generates electricity. Wind power is normally converted to electricity by magnets that move past motionless coils of wire. The stationary coils of wire are known as stator. As the magnetic move past the stator, AC electricity is released. The AC is then converted to DC electricity that can be utilized to charge batteries that store electrical energy (Benduhn 2008).
Wind power is 100% friendly with the environment. It is a clean energy source that human beings can rely on for along period of time. A wind turbine normally develops dependable, cost-effective and pollution free energy. Wind energy is inexpensive, clean and sustainable. A single wind turbine is enough to produce energy for household. Since wind power is a source of energy that does not pollute environment and are renewable, it normally produce power without employing fossil fuels thus it does not emit green house gases or toxic waste. This therefore implies that wind power minimizes global warming.
Wind energy is not good for the economy since generation of wind power depends entirely on the amount of wind produced in a given area. This therefore implies that without wind an economy may be stagnant due to lack of energy from wind power. Wind power does not produce as much energy as gasoline. The amount of energy produced by wind power depends entirely on the strength of wind. Wind power cannot be used as a main fuel since wind energy cannot be generated every where. The energy can only be harnessed well in areas with heavy wind (Fitzgerald 2010).
Solar power refers to conversion of sunlight into electricity. The conversion can be done openly using photovoltaic or indirectly using concentrated solar power. Concentrated solar power systems normally utilize tracking systems and lenses or mirrors to focus a wide area of sunlight into small beam.
Photovoltaic changes light into electric current by employing photoelectric effect. Energy generation by the use of solar energy is the future of energy requirement of the world. The free energy from the sun can be converted easily into electrical energy to minimize the costs of energy and provide electricity in rural areas where infrastructure is scarce. Solar power is made by gathering sunlight and changing it into electricity. The conversion is done by utilizing solar panels that are large and flat. The panels are made up of several individual solar cells. Solar energy is mostly used in remote areas though it is becoming even more common in urban areas (Morris 2006).
Solar energy is not hundred percent friendly with the environment. The generation of solar cells entails the use of toxic heavy metals that are harmful to the environment. The cells have such material and batteries that stores solar energy that has toxic lead acid. The technology needs a huge deal of space to work. Solar energy is not good for the economy since it is completely applicable in areas with sunlight. Its production does not produce any air pollution and can be done purely without assistance of auxiliary fuels. Solar power does not produce as much energy as gasoline since it purely uses sunlight to produce energy. It cannot be used as a main alternative fuel because it is cannot be effectively applied in areas with little sunlight (Benduhn 2008).
From the discussion, it is clear that staying with oil is the best solution for many reasons. The alternatives fuels such as solar power, wind power, natural gas, diesel and ethanol cannot be used as main fuel. Oil can be used as main fuel as long as more researches can be done to minimize the emission of toxic waste. Alternative fuels do not produce as much energy as oil or gasoline. Apart from diesel, they have little energy concentration thus making them to have energy that is not as much as that of gasoline. Ethanol, an alternative fuel, does not provide much energy as oil. It has lower energy content as compared to gasoline. About one-third more ethanol is needed to move equal distance as when using gasoline. Alternative fuels are not a hundred percent friendly with the environment. The production of alternative fuels such as ethanol and diesel normally results to emission of carbon dioxide thus causing global warming.
Solar energy on the other hand is also not 100% friendly with the environment since its generation normally entails the use of heavy toxic metals that are dangerous to the environment. Solar energy generation needs a lot of space. Burning of natural gas normally results in fewer emissions of about all forms of air pollutants and carbon dioxide per unit of heat released than coal or refined products from petroleum.
Alternative fuels are not good for the economy. Alternative fuels such as ethanol are very expensive. It is more expensive to generate a gallon of ethanol than a gallon of gasoline, even if tax incentives prevail. Though Wind power might appear to be cost effective it is not also good for the economy since its generation depends entirely on wind. This therefore implies that in areas that lack wind, the technology cannot be applied. This can greatly affect the economy. Alternative fuels therefore cannot be used as main fuel.
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What About Those Other Terms?
You’ll encounter a lot of other confusing acronyms, initialisms, and terms when reading about digital displays. There are too many technical terms and marketing buzzwords to list them all, but here’s a brief description of some of the more common ones.
LED: The light behind an LCD panel is one of two major varieties. The first type is CCFL (cold cathode flourescent lamp), a technology that's sort of like the fluorescent bulbs in your home, only thin and flat. The other type is LED (light-emitting diode). Using LEDs typically gives a TV a wider color range, a longer life, and lower power consumption. Some TVs have LEDs only along the edge (marketed as “edge-lit LED”), which is less desirable because it makes achieving high brightness and even lighting difficult.
TFT: A thin-film transistor is a thin substrate, like glass, coated with various thin films of metal, silicon, or plastic. The idea is to form a big sheet of very small switching transistors and capacitors. It’s simply a means of changing the current applied to individual pixels on a display--virtually all active-matrix displays, from AMOLED displays to nearly all LCDs, use TFTs.
Active matrix: This is a system for individually controlling each subpixel with a series of transistors and capacitors (see: TFT). It allows for more precise voltage control and faster switching than passive-matrix technology does. Nearly all digital displays today are active matrix.
Passive matrix: This technology controls the voltage of individual subpixels with a simple grid of conductive materials. Almost no LCD uses this form of addressing subpixels anymore, since the price of TFTs has dropped and the quality has improved. Passive-matrix technology generally produces less precise control over color and pixel response than active-matrix technology does.
Subpixel: On all digital displays, a single pixel (one picture element meant to be able to represent any color) is actually formed of several smaller subpixels. Typically each pixel consists of red, green, and blue subpixels; the display alters the brightness of these three colored subpixels to produce any color or shade. Because the subpixels are too small to see individually, our eyes see the combination of the three subpixels as one blended color. Some displays have a fourth subpixel color (usually white or yellow), but that isn't very common.
PenTile: The red, green, and blue subpixels that form a single pixel on a digital display are usually long, evenly sized rectangular stripes. In PenTile displays, the subpixels are not identical, but instead have different sizes and shapes. The PenTile arrangement works in conjunction with a specially designed display controller that takes the irregular number and size of these subpixels into account. The goal is to produce a greater number of effective pixels with fewer subpixels.
Defining the resolution of a PenTile display has been the subject of some controversy, as the technology relies on using some subpixels in two neighboring pixels. The Google Nexus One smartphone prominently featured an AMOLED display with a PenTile subpixel arrangement. PenTile is a trademark of Samsung.
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IBAs in Mongolia
Important Bird Areas (IBA) or Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas are internationally important areas for the conservation of birds and other biodiversity. They are identified using objective, internationally accepted criteria, and are used to guide conservation planning, action and sustainable development. As well as their importance for biodiversity, IBAs provide a range of ecosystem goods and services important to human communities, and provide a focus for birdwatching, wildlife photography and other recreational activities. Currently, there are 70 IBAs identified in Mongolia.
As a group, birds have many features that make them good indicators for the selection of important sites that also have wider biodiversity importance, for example:
- They contain high numbers of globally threatened and restricted-range species, and their distributions overlap with those of other globally threatened and endemic, but less well-known, taxa;
- They are widely distributed at all elevations, in almost all habitats (including those that are semi-natural) and throughout all geographical regions;
- They have well understood distributions and habitat requirements, and are relatively easy to record and identify in the field;
- They are good indicators of habitat condition and human disturbance, and provide a means of relatively easily monitoring ecological changes over time;
- Criteria exist (and have been developed over a period of over 20 years) for the objective identification of important sites for birds at global and regional scales;
- They can act as flagships for conservation, and there is a large community of people, amateur and professional, who are motivated to work for their conservation.
Birds are also an important conservation focus in their own right. They perform ecological roles essential to the function of ecosystems, such as seed-dispersal and pollination, and they have economic values, particularly as a basis for nature based tourism, a growing industry in parts of Mongolia.
Link to a special page on IBAs in Mongolia, http://wscc.org.mn/iba.html
From this page, boundary polygons and center points of Mongolia's IBAs can be downloaded in several formats. GIS shp files are in UTM projection (zone N48).
|Google Earth, kml file (68KB)||polygon||download|
|Google Earth, kml file (3KB)||points||download|
|ArcView, shp file (156KB)||polygon||download|
|ArcView, shp file (4KB)||points||download|
|JPG file (423KB)||polygon||download|
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APRIL 10, 2020 — The COVID-19 pandemic represents a looming crisis for patients with severe mental illness (SMI) and the healthcare systems that serve them, one expert warns.
However, Benjamin Druss, MD, MPH, from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta, Georgia, says there are strategies that can help minimize the risk of exposure and transmission of the virus in SMI patients.In a viewpoint published online April 3 in JAMA Psychiatry, Druss, professor and chair in mental health, notes that “disasters disproportionately affect poor and vulnerable populations, and patients with serious mental illness may be among the hardest hit.”In an interview with Medscape Medical News, Druss said patients with SMI have “a whole range of vulnerabilities” that put them at higher risk for COVID-19.
These include high rates of smoking, cardiovascular and lung disease, poverty, and homelessness. In fact, estimates show 25% of the US homeless population has a serious mental illness, said Druss.
“You have to keep an eye on these overlapping circles of vulnerable populations: those with disabilities in general and people with serious mental illness in particular; people who are poor; and people who have limited social networks,” he said.
Tailored Communication Vital
It’s important for patients with SMI to have up-to-date, accurate information about mitigating risk and knowing when to seek medical treatment for COVID-19, Druss noted.
Communication materials developed for the general population need to be tailored to address limited health literacy and challenges in implementing physical distancing recommendations, he said.
Patients with SMI also need support in maintaining healthy habits, including diet and physical activity, as well as self-management of chronic mental and physical health conditions, he added.
He noted that even in the face of current constraints on mental health care delivery, ensuring access to services is essential. The increased emphasis on caring for, and keeping in touch with, SMI patients through telepsychiatry is one effective way of addressing this issue, said Druss.
Since mental health clinicians are often the first responders for people with SMI, these professionals need training to recognize the signs and symptoms of COVID-19 and learn basic strategies to mitigate the spread of disease, not only for their patients but also for themselves, he added.
Ensuring the safety and well-being of mental health care providers is “a clear priority,” he said. “Any given provider is going to be responsible for many, many patients, so keeping physically and mentally healthy will be vital.”In order to ease the strain of COVID-19 on community mental health centers and psychiatric hospitals, which are at high risk for outbreaks and have limited capacity to treat medical illness, these institutions need contingency plans to detect and contain outbreaks if they occur.
“Careful planning and execution at multiple levels will be essential for minimizing the adverse outcomes of this pandemic for this vulnerable population,” Druss writes.
Voice of Experience
Commenting on the article for Medscape Medical News, Lloyd I. Sederer, MD, distinguished advisor for the New York State Office of Mental Health and adjunct professor at the Columbia School of Public Health in New York City, commended Druss for highlighting the need for more mental health services during the pandemic.
However, although Druss “has made some very good general statements,” these don’t really apply “in the wake of a real catastrophic event, which is what we’re having here,” Sederer said.
Sederer led Project Liberty, a massive mental health disaster response effort established in the wake of the September 11 attacks in New York. Druss seems to infer that the mental health workforce is capable of expanding, but “what we learned is that the mental health system in this country is vastly undersupplied,” said Sederer.
During a disaster, the system “actually contracts” because clinics close and workforces are reduced. In this environment, some patients with a serious mental illness let their treatment “erode,” Sederer said.
While Druss called for clinics to have protocols for identifying and referring patients at risk for COVID-19, Sederer pointed out that “all the clinics are closed.”
However, he did note that many mental health clinics and hospitals are continuing to reach out to their vulnerable patients during this crisis.
On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Sederer and colleagues published an article in Psychiatric Services that highlighted the “lessons learned” from the Project Liberty experience. One of the biggest lessons was the need for crisis counseling, which is “a recognized, proven intervention,” said Sederer.
17 Everyday Ways to Ease Depression
Such an initiative involves trained outreach workers, identifying the untreated seriously mentally ill in the community, and “literally shepherding them to services,” he added.
In this current pandemic, it would be up to the federal government to mobilize such a crisis counselling initiative, Sederer explained.
Sederer noted that rapid relief groups like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) do not cover mental health services. In order to be effective, disaster-related mental health services need to include funding for treatment, including focused therapies and medication.
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Sources: JAMA Psychiatry. Published online. Full text
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Learning how to sustain and preserve the environment is possible by gaining higher education. Colleges and universities offer degree programs in environmental engineering that provide students with several options for academic study. Students should learn a number of things prior to enrolling in an online program.
Training provides the latest knowledge on how to work with the
environment. The procedures to protect the environments air, water, and
land resources make up the majority of schooling in this degree field.
The goal is to continue to provide drinkable water, breathable air, and
livable land by removing harmful pollutants and other threats. In order
to improve the negative affects of waste, radiation, and more, colleges
train students in science, math, and engineering to provide the best
protection possible. Students can enter training from an associate
degree to a doctorate degree from numerous colleges that offer this
2) To enter a career as an assistant, technology
consultant, or entry-level engineer students should strongly consider
beginning education with an associate's degree or a bachelor's degree.
In most cases an associate's degree prepares students to support
environmental engineers in the developing of indoor and outdoor
pollution control systems. Training focuses on introductory engineering
practices and technical principles. Students can expect to work through a
program with a curriculum on safety systems, testing practices,
sampling procedures, preparation of reports, and laboratory skills. The
knowledge learned enables students to conduct studies on hazardous
materials taken from contaminated sites. Working through a bachelor's
degree program prepares students to be able to design, develop, and
operate environmental systems. Training encompasses how to work with
hazardous materials and design systems that work to eliminate the source
of a problem. The work done by completing a program teaches students
how to conduct engineering procedures in compliance with regulation
standards. Curriculum provides an in depth look at how to work with
areas that include ground water and acid rain. Air quality, water
chemistry, and environmental microbiology are some courses that
establish the needed information to conduct work. Students are taught to
understand the global climate to develop solutions to problems and
stabilize different environments.
3) Advanced studies at the
master's degree and doctorate level provide the opportunity for students
to enter top-level engineering, teaching, and researching careers.
Studies enable students to learn how to identify if an environmental
project is needed. This training is coupled with advanced techniques and
knowledge on how to develop and implement a project. Wastewater
microbiology, energy analysis, environmental policy, and treatment
design are some courses that teach students how to work in advanced
careers and manage projects. Training in designing, marinating, and
controlling pollution at the doctorate degree level prepares students to
work as researchers. Civil engineering, public health, mechanical
engineering, and chemistry are some advanced studies that can be used in
many engineering fields as well as teaching.
Working to directly
improve the environment is a needed skill set that can only be learned
through an accredited college degree program. Agencies like the
Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (abet.org/) are
approved to fully accredited schools that offer the quality education
students seek. Students can enter a training program and step into a
lucrative career as an environmental engineer.
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1800 16 11 09
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Glossary Term The Aboriginal Child Placement Principle (c. 1983 - )
- c. 1983
- Policy and Stolen Generations
- Alternative Names
- ACPP (Acronym)
The Aboriginal Child Placement Principle (ACPP) was established to govern the practice of child protection services in Victoria, and to strengthen Aboriginal children's connections with their family, community and cultural identity particularly in response to previous detrimental policies. It was first incorporated into legislation in Victoria in 1989.
The Aboriginal Child Placement Principle (ACPP) governs the practice of child protection services in Victoria. It is endorsed by the SNAICC and is incorporated into the Victorian government's Children, Youth and Families' Act 2005. The ACPP aims to strengthen Aboriginal children's connections with their family, community and cultural identity particularly in response to previous detrimental policies.
All Aboriginal children who become involved with child protection services which results in their removal from their families are governed by the ACPP to ensure that their identity as an Aboriginal is preserved. The purpose of the ACPP is to enhance and preserve Aboriginal children's sense of identity as an Aboriginal by ensuring that Aboriginal children and young people are maintained within their own biological family, extended family, local Aboriginal community, wider Aboriginal community and maintaining their connections to their Aboriginal culture.
The Aboriginal Child Placement Principle promotes a hierarchy of placement options as outlined below:
- Removal of any Aboriginal child must be a last resort
- If, after consultation with a community controlled Aboriginal welfare organisation, removal of a child from its family is unavoidable then the authorities must have regard to the direction of the Aboriginal welfare organisation
- If such a removal is necessary, then the child must be placed within the extended family, or if this is not possible, the child may be placed within the Aboriginal community within close proximity to the child's natural family
- If there is not an Aboriginal placement available, then in consultation with Aboriginal and Islander Child Care Agencies (AICCAs), the child may be placed with a non-Aboriginal family on the assurance that the child's culture, identity and contact with the Aboriginal community are maintained
Prepared by: Cate O'Neill
Created: 12 February 2009, Last modified: 13 June 2012
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Sarah Zimmerman is an undergraduate at Columbia University studying Sustainable Development and Human Rights, who interned at GRACE in spring 2012. Originally from Philadelphia, Sarah is personally committed to GRACE’s mission of creating more transparency in the food system.
“They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat.”
This quip, heard at most every Jewish celebration, is epitomized in the traditions of Purim.
The story of Purim, for those who are unfamiliar, is a story of the deliverance of the Jewish people. A Jewish woman named Esther becomes the queen of Persia, and, at the insistence of her uncle Mordechai, keeps her faith a secret. Angered after Mordechai refuses to bow down to him, the evil vizier Haman asks the king for permission to kill every Jew in the empire after Mordechai refuses to submit to him. With extraordinary courage, Esther manages to persuade the king to save the Jews. Purim is a joyous celebration of Jewish salvation.
A typical Purim basket might include soda and chips. Not such a healthy gift, for the recipient or the environment—though at age 11, it made Purim my favorite holiday.
The traditions of Purim are special and can even get silly. From yelling and stamping your feet each time the word “Haman” is uttered, to getting too drunk to know the difference between Mordechai and Haman, it is a time of festive revelry. Children dress up as characters from the Book of Esther and eat traditional foods like Hamantaschen, shaped to look like Haman’s hat.
There are more serious traditions, however, that epitomize what I love about Judaism: mitzvah. Simply, a mitzvah is a commandment from God, but today its definition has evolved to mean any good deed. Mitzvot is central to Purim. There are two major mitzvot involved in the holiday: giving to the poor and giving to neighbors.
The practice of giving baskets of food to friends, mishlach manot, is possibly the most iconic image of Purim. Each adult must give at least two different foods to at least one person, and everything in the Purim basket must be premade. A typical Purim basket might include soda and chips. Not such a healthy gift, for the recipient or the environment—though it made Purim my favorite holiday at age 11.
How does one send a greener Purim basket, when everything has to be ready to eat? Here are a couple of ideas, in order of convenience:
- An organic Purim basket: Finding organic prepared foods is easier than ever. Stroll down the organic aisle at your local grocery and see what you can find.
- A local, sustainable Purim basket: Search the Eat Well Guide for a local bakery that makes organic Hamantaschen.
- A DIY Purim basket: Just because the baskets need to include pre-prepared items doesn’t mean that you can’t make them yourself. Try making your own Hamantaschen with homemade fillings. Our resident expert, Elisa Schorr, doesn’t use a recipe, and instead makes "whatever cookie batter [her] kids request at the moment and just shape it into the Hamentaschen and fill it." She also gets creative with the filling, sometimes using chocolate or peanut butter mini chips or chopped up bits of caramel. For an easy how-to on folding, check out this video.
More important than delicious cookies, however, is the sense of community food responsibility that mishlach manot fosters. As Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, described: Purim is about “building bonds of connection and community, without which none of us can live fully.” Food gifts are a way to connect with those we love.
The power of food is great. It can bring a community together, acting as a link across boundaries both physical and spiritual. What’s more, giving food to the poor and hungry is the purest form of altruism. This sense of working together to eat better is central to the celebration of Purim, and the rest of the world could learn a lesson or two from its teachings.
Giving food as a present is different than traditional gift giving. However, giving junk food like soda and chips seems to take most of the personal aspect of the tradition away. Make the ritual more personal with our above suggestions for a greener Purim. Finally, age-old traditions like these sometimes require updates: perhaps the creation of a new tradition, like getting together with friends to make your own Purim baskets! Bake some fresh hamantashcen, then pull out the Manischewitz and drink until Haman sounds like Mordechai.
Although I don’t believe in everything my religion has to say, this Purim, I will think of both friends and strangers, and the responsibility we have to both. I will recognize the power of food in bringing us together, and the potential of community-minded eating. In that, Purim can teach us much.
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Bogotá's fight for public water
Maria Teresa Ronderos
1st March, 2004
How the Colombian capital Bogotá defied the World Bank and the multinationals, refused to privatise and turned its water services into the best in the country
Residents of the more low-lying areas of the Colombian capital Bogotá used to perform a rather strange ritual before going to work. They would dress in old, ragged clothes and rubber boots and wade through the flooded and muddy streets of their neighbourhoods until they reached friends’ homes on dry land, where they would change into their suits and dresses for work.
The cause of this rush-hour costume change was a scarcity of drainage sewers. What few sewers existed often backed up because their outflow pipes were below the level of the Bogotá River, into which the pipes emptied, and the streets would be flooded with sewage.
Bogotá is a fast-growing city of 7 million people that is spread across a broad plateau, the Sabana de Bogotá, 2,600 metres above sea level in the Andes. High forest-green mountains frame the Sabana. The city gets most of its water from tropical highlands about 4,000 meters above sea level, which act as a natural sponge – sucking moisture out of the clouds and mists. The water drains to rivers and lakes, from where it is channelled down into the city.
Each year, the city’s population grows by about 180,000. The new residents include people seeking jobs or refuge from war-torn rural areas. Many settle in ever-expanding slum areas on the southeastern slopes of the sprawling metropolis, sometimes on land as many as 400 metres higher than Bogotá. Others invade the flatlands to the west, areas below the level of the river and which have no access to public services.
For public utilities, keeping pace with such rapid and disorderly growth and meeting the difficult challenges posed by a high-altitude city have been costly. By 1993 Bogotá’s public sewer and water company, the Empresa de Acueducto y Alcantarillado de Bogotá (EAAB), was practically bankrupt. Staffed with political cronies who often changed with each new government, it didn’t have the professional management needed to run a large utility. So in the early 1990s, the World Bank began recommending privatisation as the solution to bad public management.
What happened next rattled the foundations of World Bank policy and challenged the privatisation mantra that only big multinationals have the expertise and capital to deliver clean drinking water efficiently and at affordable prices.
Convinced that water is a public resource, the city of Bogotá bucked the privatisation trend, turned its back on the World Bank’s money and transformed the city’s water service into the most successful in Colombia.
In the late 1990s Bogotá underwent a political revolution, with voters electing new independent and progressive governments.
Against World Bank advice, the current and previous mayors of Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa and Antanas Mockus, decided the public’s interest would be better served by strengthening the EAAB than by privatising it.
Now the EAAB is the most successful utility in Colombia, an example of a crippled company that turned itself around. In 1993, 78 per cent of the people of Bogotá had clean drinking water and 71 per cent had sewers. By the end of 2001, 95 per cent had water services and 87 per cent had sewers.
The EAAB’s success came despite continued pressure to privatise from the World Bank. In August 1998 utility officials and Bogotá’s then mayor Peñalosa met in Washington with World Bank officials to discuss new credit for financing the EAAB expansion plans.
The bank’s representatives explained that their policy was to approve new loans to those water utilities that dismantled subsidies and privatised. They argued that private companies were more efficient than public companies, which they said were slower and more cumbersome in making decisions. They also said it was easier for poor countries to get fresh capital for such projects from the private sector.
Tendering contracts to private firms to run water systems would, the World Bank said, enhance competition and lower costs. ‘[Peñalosa] said he firmly believed that the state had an obligation to the inhabitants of the shantytowns to offer them water and sanitary services, and that no private company would accomplish this task,’ recalls Carlos Sandoval, who was present at the meeting as Bogotá’s then finance secretary.
Keeping the World Bank at bay
Even after the turnaround in the performance of the EAAB, the World Bank still insists that the company should be privatised. Menahem Libhaber, the World Bank’s chief water and sanitation engineer in Latin America, says that its costs are too high. ‘The salaries are huge. The employees get a lot of benefits – health and education, which is OK. I’m for socialism. But this is very expensive. People cannot pay the water bill. The company needs private sector involvement.’
Bogotá’s water utility would be a major prize for private investors. The EAAB has $1.5 billion in assets, and is the largest landowner in Bogotá. If privatised, all these lands could be developed and built upon. That would include the unique tropical highlands, the source of most of Bogotá’s drinking water.
Unlike private companies, which pay big dividends to shareholders, the EAAB reinvests its profits. In 2001, it spent about $180m in public works – mostly in poor neighbourhoods. That represented 40 per cent of all water-sector investment in Colombia. Despite the large investments, the company maintains a healthy balance sheet. The Colombian subsidiary of the international credit rating agency Duff and Phelps awarded the utility an AA+ debt rating: the second highest rating possible. The key to the EAAB’s improvement, says Peñalosa, has been a clear vision of the importance of keeping it strong and public.
The company’s officials acknowledge that success has not come without a certain amount of hardship for the poor. Rates for the poorest residents of Bogotá have risen by 422 per cent in the last seven years, while those for the richest have risen by only 83 per cent. This is partly because the Colombian national government began in 1995 to cut subsidies that meant the poor used to pay only about 5 per cent of the real cost of their water.
Even so, Bogotá’s water services are subsidised by 78 per cent for the city’s poorest residents and by 24 per cent for the middle class. The subsidies are financed partially by the wealthy, who pay 87 per cent to 167 per cent more than the real cost of their water. By 2005, as required by law, only the two poorest strata of Colombian society will receive subsidies – of 50 per cent and 40 per cent, respectively – in their water bills.
Water conservation has also been a major EAAB priority. A campaign begun in 1997 to save water has reduced consumption to an international low. Average consumption has stabilised at about 109 litres per person per day. By comparison, the average per-person consumption in the US is 578 litres per day; in the UK it is 334 litres a day. The low level of consumption has reduced the need for major investments to improve and expand treatment plants, tunnels and pipes to transport more water from sources far in the mountains and to treat it.
Among its main projects, the EAAB invested $38m in the fiscal year 1999-2000 on constructing water tanks, a treatment plant, pumps and 37 kilometres of pipelines to supply potable water to 350,000 additional people. The company’s goal is to reach 100 per cent of the Bogotá population by 2010.
The EAAB is also building the Cundinamarca Channel, which will take the run-off and sewage from hundreds of neighbourhoods in west Bogotá and lift it through an elevation plant to the level of the Bogotá River. The project should end the flooding of streets in low-lying areas. No more forced dressing in the homes of friends on higher ground.
One thing that the EAAB won’t prevent is the interest of the corporations. The stench of the sewers may have gone, but the smell of money remains.
Maria Teresa Ronderos is the editor-in-chief of Semana, Columbia's leading news-magazine.
She wrote this article for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of the Center for Public Integrity.
This article first appeared in the Ecologist March 2004
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Fun Fact 1
Approximately one-third of all milk produced every year goes toward making cheese.
Fun Fact 2
All dairy goods are antibiotic free. If a cow requires treatment with antibiotics, numerous safety measures are in place to ensure her milk never enters the food supply.
Fun Fact 3
Since 1944, the dairy industry produces a gallon of milk using 90% less land, 65% less water and 75% less manure.
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As we enter the fall of the year, it is a perfect time to address soil acidity.
While we can apply limestone to raise pH anytime, fall months are ideal for most. During the fall, most warm season forages begin going dormant. Fall months are typically when we receive adequate rainfall and moisture that is important to the reaction of limestone.
Plants need 16 elements to grow normally. Carbon (C), Hydrogen (H), and Oxygen (O) are found in air and water. Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), Potassium (K), Magnesium (Mg), Calcium (Ca), and Sulfur (S) are found in the soil. Important for plant growth and development; however, not needed in large amounts are Zinc (Zn), Iron (Fe), Molybdenum (Mo), Boron (B), Copper (Cu), Manganese (Mn), and Chlorine (Cl).
Soil pH is a measure of the hydrogen ion (H+) activity in the soil solution. A soil pH ranges from 0 to 14 with 7 being neutral. Anything below 6.5 on the pH scale is considered on the acid side. Anything above 7.4 on the pH scale is considered on the alkaline side. Most grass species for forage production prefers a pH of 6.0 to 7.0 to perform at the optimum level. This is a great time to perform a soil test on your property. Soil testing laboratories base the rates of limestone recommended on the use of 100 percent effective limestone material on a dry weight basis.
Limestone particle size is important as well. The speed at which limestone reacts in a soil can also be largely determined by the particle size. Crushed limestone is screened through a series of sieves to determine particle size. Smaller particles have more surface area to contact soil therefore a more rapid change in soil pH.
The Effective Calcium Carbonate Equivalence (ECCE) value is a combination of fineness efficiency rating (ER) and the calcium carbonate equivalence (CCE) to estimate the percentage of effective limestone in a given product. The ECCE is calculated by multiplying the CCE times the ER. For example, if the CCE is 95 percent and the ER is 65 percent then the ECCE would be 62 percent. This means the material would be only 62 percent as effective as finely ground, pure calcium carbonate.
So how do I figure how much limestone is needed? If the soil test limestone recommendation calls for 2 tons of 100 percent ECCE limestone per acre and the 62 percent material is used, it would require 3.23 tons per acre of the 62 percent material applied. To calculate application rate in tons per acre, divide soil test lime rate (tons/acre) by the ECCE/100 to get the actual tons per acre of the desired material.
Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are all needed by the plants and a soil test will determine at what levels these nutrients are present or lacking. The lower the acidity, the less percentage of nutrient recovery of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium is available. For example, if your pH is 4.5, there is 21 percent nitrogen, 8 percent phosphorus, and 21 percent potassium available to the plant. If the pH is 7.0, there is 70 percent nitrogen, 30 percent phosphorus, and 60 percent potassium available to the plant.
So with soil acidity, do not wait until you are ready to plant to start trying to manage this. Begin now by performing a soil test and following the recommendations to prepare your soil for the desired grass species. There are a number of sources around the area that can be of service to you when you decide to apply limestone to your property.
Extension programs serve people of all ages regardless of socioeconomic level, race, color, sex, religion, disability, or national origin.
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Acute sinusitis is irritation and swelling of the sinuses. It is usually caused by a viral infection after a common cold. Your doctor can help you find relief.
What is acute sinusitis?
Sinuses are air-filled spaces in the skull behind the face. They are kept moist and clean by a lining of mucosa. Things such as pollen, smoke, and chemical fumes can irritate the mucosa. It can then swell up. As a response to irritation, the mucosa makes more mucus and other fluids. Tiny hairlike cilia cover the mucosa. Cilia help carry mucus toward the opening of the sinus. Too much mucus may cause the cilia to stop working. This blocks the sinus opening. A buildup of fluid in the sinuses then causes pain and pressure. It can also encourage bacteria to grow in the sinuses.
Common symptoms of acute sinusitis
You may have:
Facial soreness pain
Fluid draining in the back of the throat (postnasal drip)
Drainage that is thick and colored, instead of clear
Diagnosing acute sinusitis
Your doctor will ask about your symptoms and health history. He or she will look at your ear, nose, and throat. You usually won't need to have X-rays taken.
The doctor may take a sample of mucus to check for bacteria. If you have sinusitis that keeps coming back, you may need imaging tests such as X-rays or CAT scans. This will help your doctor check for a structural problem that may be causing the infection.
Treating acute sinusitis
Treatment is aimed at unblocking the sinus opening and helping the cilia work again. You may need to take antihistamine and decongestant medicine. These can reduce inflammation and decrease the amount of fluid your sinuses make. If you have a bacterial infection, you will need to take antibiotic medicine for 10 to 14 days. Take this medicine until it is gone, even if you feel better.
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An understanding of the environment is reached by examining lifestyles, values, societal norms, cultural heritage, and numerous other abstract concepts within a practical framework. The academic perspective on these elements is essential, but inadequate in and of itself. Understanding the concept of urban self-reliance begins when individuals re-examine their own lifestyles and take action to change.
The UEL as a working model anchors these goals in concrete application. The 100 year-old carriage house, retrofitted with superinsulation, passive solar heating, and a solar greenhouse, integrates a community center and educational facility under one roof. Working in the building, using its resources, and sharing in the responsibility of maintaining it, students attain a degree of environmental consciousness and urban self-sufficiency that a textbook or lecture could never hope to convey. Likewise, interested community members or groups can get a firsthand appreciation of "appropriate technologies" at the UEL.
See a presentation showing the renovation of the Urban Environmental Laboratory to house the Center for Environmental Studies in the early 1980's. This presentation was created for the UEL's 20th Anniversary Celebration. This show also chronicles the building of the UEL Community Garden.
Should This Building be Saved? See the Brown Alumni Magazine's feature article "What's in a Building?" in the September/October 2008 issue for more on the debate over the fate of the UEL.
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| 0.931909 | 281 | 2.8125 | 3 |
When Hernan Cortes landed in the vicinity of Mexico in 1519, he quickly began causing problems for the Aztecs by exploiting the precarious politics of the region. He first brought the disgruntled Totonac people into rebellion against Montezuma II and then marched inland to meet with the Tlaxcalans, bitter rivals of the Aztecs. The Tlaxcalans first took Hernan Cortes to be a hostile invader and responded to his presence in their land with force. After several battles, however, Cortes was able to bring the Tlaxcalans into negotiations and formed with them an alliance that would eventually topple the Aztec Empire.
While the Spaniards were staying at Tlaxcala, the locals gave Cortes and his officers women to marry, food to eat, and an abundance of intelligence information, spanning topics such as Aztec military formations, the layout of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), and an explanation of Montezuma’s water supply system. As the Tlaxcalans were in such a sharing mood, they also treated the Spaniards to some of their local curiosities. One such display was a set of huge bones which were shown to the explorers. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a member of Hernan Cortes’ expedition, described the Spanish reaction to the huge remains or fossils:
“To show us how big these giants had been they brought us the leg-bone of one, which was very thick and the height of an ordinary-sized man, and that was a leg-bone from the hip to the knee. I measured myself against it, and it was as tall as I am, though I am of a reasonable height….We were all astonished by the sight of these bones and felt certain there must have been giants in that land. And Cortes said that we ought to send the leg-bone to Castile so that His Majesty might see it, which we did by the first agents who went there” (The Conquest of New Spain, Chapter 78).
According to Bernal Díaz, the Tlaxcalans had a folklore explanation for the gigantic bones. The native story allegedly aligned with the Spaniards’ own impression that the bones belonged to an extinct group of huge humanoids. Tlaxcalan tradition, Bernal Díaz claimed, told of an evil race of giants who lived in the region in the distant past. The ancestors of the Tlaxcalans were said to have waged war against the giants and eventually drove the creatures into extinction.
Written by C. Keith Hansley
Picture Attribution: (Dinosaur Exhibit in the Houston Museum of Natural Science, Houston, Texas, USA. [Public Domain] via Creative Commons).
- The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz, translated by J. M. Cohen. New York: Penguin Books, 1963.
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Mercury is the art and craft of applying thin boards, cut and decorated and designed to create decorative patterns. It became popular in the 17th century. The craftsmen are skilled and the designs are amazing. Things designed with mercury are very expensive and can’t be afforded by ordinary people.
There are different types of chipboard used in the mercury industry. Veneers are graded by wood quality and priced accordingly. The veneer is cut depending on the wood type and designed for different and exclusive patterns.
Other materials used in veneer are bone, ivory, tortoiseshell, brass, colored straw, and mother-of-pearl. These materials are also used to assemble and create a unique design in the market. The inlay work has been done brilliantly, but being a part of the market takes time and effort.
There are light grain, medium grain, dark grain, softwood, and hardwood grain varieties. The wood box is classified into more valuable and less valuable veneers and comes in a variety of prices. All Fire people are clear about the type of wood they work with, and each has a particular preference for a particular wood.
Valuable woods are mahogany, rosewood, barley walnut, fireside walnut, and circus walnut. Each of these has a different grain and the wood is sawn in a different way. It is very expensive because the marketing work done with them is external!
Less valuable woods are elm, pine, oak, and spruce. Hard and soft boards are commonly used. Softwood is wood with straight grain. It is pine and light oak.
Hardwoods are usually dense and almost grainy. Rosewood and maple fall into this category. Hardwood also has a thick grain. This wood is used for all kinds of furniture.
The most commonly used tools for mercury are saws, knives, scalpels, and the latest blades and lasers. Now advanced techniques and modern machines contribute to the marketing industry. Many tools have also undergone major improvements.
The double-beveled mercury technique is very famous. This technique is used with scroll saws and the table is always tilted at a certain angle. An art with geometric patterns of straight lines is called parquetry.
The Boulle technique requires simultaneous cutting of all elements of the pattern, including the background. The classic approach is where designs or elements are cut separately without a background. The wood for this design was carefully selected or retained for this purpose.
Burl wood was used exclusively for these designs. In the past, the hammer cutting method was always used to cut veneer. The same tools are used for all types of wood, but the method of treating them varies by design.
Today, braided wood veneering is available. The veneer can be a matte or multi-layer finish. This chipboard work is rare and excellent.
If you are a marketer, there are many tutorials that can help you create your own designs. Tools are also available and you can check out some books for ideas. There’s also a lot of marketing work in the museum’s exhibits. Go ahead and decorate your wooden box with a delicate design or just buy a uniquely made box.
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You can live without food for about a month, but only without water for a week. We, as humans, are mostly made up of the stuff, and it’s very important we drink plenty of it. That said, you may not enjoy water and find it a bit of a challenge to drink enough—a challenge you should overcome this weekend.
First things first, you need to know how much water you need on a daily basis. Some say eight glasses, others say a little more and a little less. When we asked a doctor who took a closer look at necessary hydration, we found the numbers depended on sex. Men need about 3 liters (13 cups) and women need 2.2 (9 cups). If you exercise or spend a lot of time in the sun, you’ll need more. You don’t want to over-hydrate, as that can cause serious problems, but if you keep it around 13 or 9 (depending on your gender) you’ll be good to go. It helps to know the signs of dehydration, too, so you can listen to your body to know when you’ll need more.
The benefits of drinking water have been much discussed in the media. Water helps keep you hydrated, which is important because every single cell in your body needs it in order to absorb nutrients and expel waste products. But what are some of the less well known benefits of drinking water?
Even though it is flavorless and colorless on its own, water dissolves more substances than any other liquid. It carries chemicals, minerals and nutrients with it everywhere it travels.
Regulates Body Temperature
Everyone knows that if you’re overheated, it’s important to drink water but did you know that it’s even more important to drink it when your body is freezing? The risk of dehydration is actually higher in cold weather because your body is working harder to stay warm. Water regulates your body temperature while hydrating it.
You’ll Breathe Better
Water it keeps the tissues in your body moist. This protects you vital organs, most especially your lungs because they must maintain a healthy level of moisture. Some recent studies have even shown a connection between drinking more water and seeing relief from the affects of asthma.
You’re Made to Do It
Nearly 70% of an adult’s body is made up of water. It only makes sense that the more you fill your body with it, the better it will run.
Fill it Up
A healthy person can drink about three gallons — or 48 cups — of water each day so clearly the 8-12 cups you’re told to drink a day are a drop in the bucket compared to what your body could hold.
Detox Your Body
There are plenty of toxins floating around your body. Help flush them out without the need of some fancy detox diet by simply drinking more water. You’re in for added benefits when you mix in some lemon.
Blood Sugar Levels
Your blood sugar levels play a huge role in your diet and overall health. Help get them under control by drinking more water and eating more hydrating foods like fresh fruits instead of sugar-filled carbs.
Fight a Cold
Next time you feel a cold coming on, hydrate as much as possible. It will help get your body on the mend faster and may even cause the symptoms to pass over you entirely. A good tip is to drink water until your urine is clear!
Faster Weight Loss
A recent study done by the American Chemical Society showed that adults who drank two 8-ounce glasses of water before breakfast, lunch, and dinner ended up eating 75 to 90 fewer calories during each meal.
Get Things Running Smoothly
In addition to all of the negative things that come with a lack of proper hydration, constipation may be another horrible side effect. Consume enough water to keep things flowing smoothly.
Did you know that mild dehydration is associated with feelings of anger and depression?
Ultimate Brain Power
Having trouble planning or focusing on things? Dehydration could be the blame because long periods of dehydration could be linked to impaired brain functions.
Say Goodbye to Headaches
If you find yourself getting a lot of headaches, dehydration may be to blame. People who don’t consume enough water are more likely to suffer from cramps and other aches as well.
In addition to glowing, smooth complexion, consuming more water can actually reduce acne because it stops the bacteria from forming internally.
Water helps protect cells and enhancing overall health. Proper hydration has been linked to the prevention of everything from cancer to emotional disorders.
By keeping the body properly hydrated, you will keep your joints and muscles lubricated. This will help prevent little injuries like sprains or common running injuries.
Your body is more likely to be fatigued because when you are dehydrated, your organs have to work harder to pump oxygenated blood. So skip the coffee and get some water instead!
Looking for the fountain of youth? Well, it may actually come in the form of drinking water. Your skin will look radiant and youthful if you help yourself to more water each day.
You will be able to beat that tired feeling you sometimes get after eating a meal because your body will be able to digest the food properly.
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| 0.946876 | 1,097 | 3.046875 | 3 |
Greenland Ice Cap Optics
|Coronae are a diffraction phenomena.
Light incident on an individual droplet is scattered from its surface. The scattered light propagates outwards as spherical waves.
The waves overlap and interfere. In directions where overlapping wave crests coincide there is light. Where crests coincide with troughs of the other wave there is destructive interference - darkness.
The result in the far field is a circular diffraction pattern of a bright central aureole surrounded by ever fainter rings.
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| 0.946106 | 107 | 2.734375 | 3 |
U.N. Human Development Report Finds Significant Quality Of Life Gains Among Many Developing Countries Over Last 40 Years, But Gaps Persist
“People around the globe are healthier, richer and better educated than ever before, with most developing countries registering huge gains over the last 40 years, a U.N. report [.pdf] released Thursday shows,” the Canadian Press reports.
In its annual Human Development Report, the U.N. Development Program said quality of life improvements are often overlooked because development is traditionally only evaluated in terms of income, but its study also looks at education and health, the news service writes (Snow, 11/4). In addition to these measures, the report, which was released alongside the Human Development Index (HDI) (.pdf), introduces “three innovative indices for gender, inequality and multidimensional poverty,” a UNDP press release states. “These new indicators confirm that progress is possible even without massive resources. Among the ‘top movers’ – countries among the 135 that improved most over the past 40 years – are Ethiopia (#11), Cambodia (#15) and Benin (#18), all of which made big gains in education and public health rather than income,” the release said of the report, which is in its 20th year (11/4). Nepal has made the most improvement in human development since 1980, notes the Economist’s “Daily Chart” blog, which includes a series of graphs depicting data from the report (11/4).
“Globally, life expectancy has risen from 59 years in 1970 to 70 in 2010, the report states. Primary and secondary school enrolment has risen from 55 percent to 70 percent in the same period. While all regions shared in this progress, there were wide variations in scope; for example, life expectancy rose by 18 years in the Arab world but 8 years in sub-Saharan Africa,” the U.N. News Centre writes. In the report’s overview, the authors write: “We see great advances, but changes over the past few decades have by no means been wholly positive … The gaps in human development across the world, while narrowing, remain huge” (11/4).
The report found the progress was slower in several sub-Saharan African and former Soviet Union countries “due to the impact of AIDS, conflict, economic upheaval and other factors,” the press release notes (11/4). Latin American and the Caribbean countries “performed well, with many countries now approaching the United States and European nations in life expectancy and years of schooling, the report found,” the Canadian Press reports (11/4). “East Asia and the Pacific had by far the strongest overall HDI performance of any region in the world, nearly doubling average HDI attainment over the past 40 years,” according to the report, Inter Press Service writes. “China, the second highest achiever in the world in terms of HDI improvement since 1970, is the only country on the top 10 ‘movers list’ due to income rather than health or education achievements. China’s per capita income increased 21-fold over the last four decades, also lifting hundreds of millions out of income poverty,” IPS writes (Deen, 11/4).
In an article focusing on the report’s findings about Arab countries, Agence France-Presse writes that “Arab states make up five of the ten ‘top movers'” on the index. “Oman made the most improvement since 1970, out of the 135 countries ranked, while Saudi Arabia was fifth, Tunisia seventh, Algeria ninth and Morocco 10th, a statement on the report said” (11/4).
“The report says only three countries have a lower human development index than in 1970 – Congo, torn by conflict since the 1990s, Zambia, hit by falls in the price of copper, its main export, and Zimbabwe, where inflation reached 500 billion percent two years ago,” Reuters reports. But Jeni Klugman, the report’s lead author, said overall the findings are “actually quite positive.” Klugman said, “‘What we find is that the world is much better off than it was,’ including a doubling of incomes in real terms over 40 years” (Worsnip, 11/4).
“We have learned that while economic growth is very important, what ultimately matters is using national income to give all people a chance at a longer, healthier and more productive life,” U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said at the launch of the report on Thursday, according to the press release (11/4). Ban also said there was a “straight line from the Human Development Report to the Millennium Development Goals,” the U.N. News Centre writes (11/4).
Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, who worked on the first U.N. development report with development advocate Mahbub ul Haq, said: “Twenty years after the appearance of the first Human Development Report, there is much to celebrate in what has been achieved,” IPS reports. Sen added, “But we also have to be alive to ways and means of improving the assessment of old adversities and of recognising – and responding to – new threats that endanger human well-being and freedom” (11/4).
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Compiled and edited by Charles J. Kappler. Washington : Government Printing Office, 1941.
Treaty made and concluded on the 7th day of August one thousand eight hundred and fifty five between Garland Hurt Indian Agent for the Territory of Utah for and in behalf of the President and Senate of the United States of the one part and the Chiefs, head men, and warriors of the Sho-sho-nee Nation of Indians (commonly called Snake Diggers) occupying the northern, and middle portion of the Valley of the Humboldt River of the other part
We the Chiefs and head men of the Sho-sho-nee Nation do hereby declare that all former disputes and feelings of hostility between our people and the people of the United States are this day amicably adjusted and settled.
We guarantee to the people of the United States perfect safety to life and property at all times when peacefully sojourning in, or traveling through our country.
We give the right of way through our country to the people of the United States, that said people may pass and repass without harm to themselves or property.
We will treat all persons claiming to be citizens of the United States who may settle in our country as brothers and friends, and not as enemies.
We acknowledge the supremacy of the laws of the United States and that all persons who may hereafter commit crimes within the limits of our country shall be accounted answerable to said laws.
We will use all diligence when called to aid the officers and people of the United States in arresting and bringing to justice, all persons who may have committed crimes within the limits of our country irrespective of the tribes or nations to which the offenders may belong.
And the said Garland Hurt for, and in behalf of the President and Senate of the United States, pledges hereby the friendship and good will of the people of the said States to the Chiefs and people of the said Sho-sho-nee Nation.
For, and in consideration of the faithful observance of all the obligations above stipulated on the part of the Chiefs and people of the said Sho-sho-nee Nation of Indians, the President of the United States will give to the Chief and people of said nation, through his proper agent, the sum of three thousand dollars in presents (such as provisions, clothing and farming implements &c) to be delivered to them at some convenient point within the limits of their country, on or before the 30th day of September 1857: Provided however that if any part of the above treaty shall be violated by any of the Chiefs or people of the said Sho-sho-nee Nation the above obligations on the part of the President of the United States shall be void, or held at his discretion until such time as ample atonement shall have been made for such violation: Provided further, that if the President and Senate of the United States shall refuse to ratify this treaty, the same shall be void.
In witness whereof the said Garland Hurt and the aforesaid Chiefs and head men have hereunto subscribed their names and affixed the seals.
GARLAND HURT [SEAL]
NIM-OH-TEE-CAH (his x mark) (Man Eater) [SEAL]
SHO-COP-IT-SEE (his x mark) (Old Man) [SEAL]
PAN-TOW-GUAN (his x mark) (Diving Mink) [SEAL]
TOW-(JUAN-DAVAT-SEE (his x mark) (Young Ground Hog) [SEAL]
SHO-COP-IT-SEE JUNIOR (his x mark)[SEAL]
POW-WAN-TAH-WAH (his x mark) (Strong Smoker) [SEAL]
JAN-OUP-PAH (his x mark) (Chinning Man) [SEAL]
INK-AH-BIT (his x mark) (Head Man) [SEAL]
KO-TOO-BOT-SEE (his x mark) [SEAL]
WOT-SOW-WIT-SEE-MOT-TOW (his x mark) (The four Shians) [SEAL]
Signed in presence of A. P. Hawes, Interpreter.
C. L. CRAIG,
VAN EPPS HUGNUIN,
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| 0.926203 | 913 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Heliogen, a secretive energy startup backed by well-known people like Bill Gates, has created a way to use artificial intelligence and hundreds of mirrors to create a solar oven.
In doing so, Heliogen has harnessed the ability to generate heat above 1,000 degrees Celsius, which is about a quarter of the temperature on the surface of the sun.
The process of reflecting beams of sunlight onto a specific point in order to generate heat is known as concentrated solar power. This is the first time that humans have been able to get concentrated solar power hot enough to make it truly useful on an industrial scale.
Temperatures that hot could be used to make steel, glass and other necessary industrial products that have previously been impossible to create without the use of fossil fuels.
This breakthrough could drastically reduce global emissions, since creating these sorts of materials accounts for a large percentage of global CO2 emissions. For example, cement production accounts for 7% of worldwide emissions, according to CNN Business.
Heliogen also stated that these extreme temperatures could someday be used to create clean hydrogen, which could be turned into fuel for vehicles.
The full article from CNN Business is available here.
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| 0.939642 | 241 | 3.171875 | 3 |
Hematospermia is a pathologic phenomenon characterized by the presence of blood in semen. In certain cases it is regarded as a variant of norm. It may be accounted for by a considerable pause in the sexual life of a man. However, it is most possible that blood in semen testifies to serious disorders in the male genital system.
Hematospermia: the Main Types of the Disease
Two types of hematospermia are distinguished: a genuine and a false one. In case of the genuine hematospermia the mixing of blood with semen occurs in the following parts of genital system:
- seminal ducts;
- prostate gland;
- seminal vesicles.
In the given case semen acquires brownish color. When it is false hematospermia, the mixing of blood occurs in the urethra. Here blood streaks are observed in sperm, as the blood and semen are not mingled yet.
The Symptoms of Hematospermia
The disorder resulting in the presence of blood in ejaculate (not urine, which is another reason for concern) endangers the sexual function of a man; besides, in has an adverse effect on the whole condition of a man’s body. The first thing is to identify the causes of pathology as soon as possible as the blood in seminal fluid, most likely, is the consequence of a serious disease. The occurrence of this phenomenon among young men is to be accounted for by the inflammatory process in one of the organs of genital system: for example, epididymis, seminal vesicles, or prostate gland. In case of the inflammation of prostate the following symptoms are also observed:
- frequent urination;
- high temperature;
- premature ejaculation;
- decline in the acuity of orgasms.
If you have at least one the symptoms above, you are to visit a doctor.
The Causes of Blood in Ejaculate
According to statistics the most frequent occurrences of blood in semen are induced by inflammation of seminal vesicles (vesiculitis). Vesiculitis is the consequence of the further development of chronic prostatitis. Blood in ejaculate indicates the presence of pathological process in seminal vesicles and prostate. It is the organs participating in formation of seminal fluid. Among the symptoms is pain in the lower abdomen and fatigue. In case of vesiculitis blood appears in both blood and urine.
Hematospermia of Cancerous Character
For men of elderly age blood in semen may point to the emergence of a malignant or benign tumor in prostate. The difficulty in diagnosis lies in the absence of evident symptoms (it is not until after the early stage that they manifest themselves). It is noteworthy that if such a disease is not diagnosed in time, the further development will lead to the lethal outcome.
Hematospermia of Infectious Nature
Among other causes of hematospermia are hidden inflammatory processes and infections of genital system (urethritis and epididymitis). The symptoms of urethritis:
- Painful urination.
- Purulent discharge from urethra.
The symptoms of epididymitis:
- Inflammatory process in epididymis.
- Frequent urination.
- Swelling and soreness of scrotum.
- Discharge from urethra.
Continuous, intensive and frequent sexual acts may cause blood in seminal fluid if there is a circulatory disturbance in the male genital system.
The treatment of hematospermia is the treatment of underlying disease resulted in the presence of blood in semen. The preliminary treatment is conducted via antibacterial and anti-inflammatory medicines, which is the most common method. In the presence of multiple cases of this disease, it is necessary to undergo a detailed examination in a hospital in order to identify or exclude the causes of relapse.
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| 0.898516 | 799 | 2.75 | 3 |
Kingdom of Valencia
|This article needs additional citations for verification. (February 2009)|
|Kingdom of Valencia|
|Regne de València (Valencian)
Reino de Valencia (Spanish)
Regnum Valentiae (Latin)
|Realm of the Crown of Aragon|
Kingdom of Valencia and its administrative structure
|Languages||Valencian, Aragonese and Latin|
|Historical era||Middle Ages|
|-||Nueva Planta decrees||1707|
|Today part of||Spain|
The Kingdom of Valencia (Valencian: Regne de València, IPA: [ˈreŋne ðe vaˈlensia]; Spanish: Reino de Valencia; Latin: Regnum Valentiae), located in the eastern shore of the Iberian Peninsula, was one of the component realms of the Crown of Aragon. When the Crown of Aragon merged by dynastic union with the Crown of Castile to form the Kingdom of Spain, the Kingdom of Valencia became a component realm of the Spanish monarchy.
The Kingdom of Valencia was formally created in 1238 when the Moorish taifa of Valencia was taken in the course of the Reconquista. It was dissolved by Philip V of Spain in 1707, by means of the Nueva Planta decrees, as a result of the Spanish War of Succession.
During its existence, the Kingdom of Valencia was ruled by the laws and institutions stated in the Furs (charters) of Valencia which granted it wide self-government under the Crown of Aragon and, later on, under the Spanish Kingdom.
The conquest of what would later become the Kingdom of Valencia started in 1232 when the king of the Crown of Aragon, James I, called Jaume I el Conqueridor (the Conqueror), took Morella, mostly with Aragonese troops. Shortly after, in 1233, Borriana and Peniscola were also taken from the بلنسية Balansiyya (Valencia in the Arabic language) taifa.
A second and more relevant wave of expansion took place in 1238, when James I defeated the Moors from the Balansiya taifa. He entered the city of Valencia on 9 October 1238, which is regarded as the dawn of the Kingdom of Valencia.
A third phase started in 1243 and ended in 1245, when it met the limits agreed between James I and the heir to the throne of Castile, Alfonso the Wise, who would succeed to the throne as Alfonso X in 1252. These limits were traced in the Treaty of Almizra between the Crown of Castile and the Crown of Aragon, which coordinated their Reconquista efforts to drive the Moors southward by establishing their respectively desired areas of influence. The Treaty of Almizra established the south line of Aragonese expansion in the line formed by the villes of Biar and Busot, today in the north of the Alicante province. Everything south of that line, including what would be the Kingdom of Murcia, was reserved by means of this treaty for Castile.
The matter of the large majority of Mudéjar population, left behind from the progressively more southern combat front, lingered from the very beginning until they finally were expelled en masse in 1609. Up to that moment, they represented a complicated issue for the newly established Kingdom, as they were essential to keep the economy working due to their numbers, which inspired frequent pacts with local Muslim populations, such as Mohammad Abu Abdallah Ben Hudzail al Sahuir, allowing their culture various degrees of tolerance but, on the other side, they were deemed as a menace to the Kingdom due to their lack of allegiance and their real or perceived conspiracies to bring the Ottoman Empire to their rescue.
There were indeed frequent rebellions from the Moor population against Christian rule, the most threatening being those headed by the Moor chieftain Mohammad Abu Abdallah Ben Hudzail al Sahuir, also known as Al-Azraq. He led important rebellions in 1244, 1248 and 1276. During the first of these, he briefly regained Muslim independence for the lands South of the Júcar, but he had to surrender soon after. During the second revolt, king James I was almost killed in battle, but Al-Azraq also was finally subjugated, his life spared only because of a longtime relationship with the Christian monarch. During the third rebellion, Al-Azraq himself was killed but his son would continue to promote Muslim unrest and local rebellions remained always at sight.
James II called Jaume II el Just or the Just, a grandson of James I, initiated in 1296 a final push of his army further southwards than the Biar-Busot pacts. His campaign aimed at the fertile countryside around Murcia and the Vega Baja del Segura whose local Muslim rulers were bound by pacts with Castile and governing by proxy on behalf of this kingdom; Castilian troops often raided the area to assert a sovereignty which, in any case, was not stable but was characterized by the typical skirmishes and ever changing alliances of a frontier territory.
The campaign under James II was successful to the point of extending the limits of the Kingdom of Valencia well south of the previously agreed border with Castile. His troops took Orihuela and Murcia. What was to become the definite dividing line between Castile and the Crown of Aragon was finally agreed by virtue of the Sentencia Arbitral de Torrellas (1304), amended by the Treaty of Elche (1305), which assigned Orihuela (also Alicante and Elche) to the Kingdom of Valencia, while Murcia went to the Crown of Castile, so drawing the final Southern border of the Kingdom of Valencia.
At the end of the process, four taifas had been wiped out: Balansiya, Alpuente, Denia and Murcia. Taking into account the standards of the day, it can be considered as a rather rapid conquest, since most of the territory was gained in less than fifty years and the maximum expansion was completed in less than one century. The toll in terms of social and politic unrest which was to be paid for this fast process was the existence of a large Muslim population within the Kingdom which neither desired to become a part of it nor, as long as they remained Muslim, was given the chance to.
Modern historiography sees the conquest of Valencia in the light of similar Reconquista efforts by the Crown of Castile, i.e., as a fight led by the king in order to gain new territories as free as possible of a serfdom subject to the nobility. The new territories would then be accountable only to the king, thus enlarging and consolidating his power versus that of the nobility. This development was part of a growing trend evident in the Middle Ages (said to end in 1492 with the final acts of the Reconquista in the capitulation of Kingdom of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews) and well into the era of Habsburg Spain. It is by this historiographical approach that the repopulation of the Kingdom is assessed today. The Kingdom was initially overwhelmingly populated by Muslims and often subject to popular revolts and the serious threat of subjugation by any Muslim army assembled for this purpose in the Maghreb.
The process by which the monarchy strove to free itself from any noble guardianship was not an easy one, as the nobility still held a large share of power and was determined to retain as much of it as possible. This fact marked the Christian colonization of the newly acquired territories, governed under the Lleis de Repartiments. Finally the Aragonese nobles were granted several domains, but they managed to obtain only the interior lands, mostly mountainous and sparsely populated parts of the Kingdom of Valencia. The king reserved the fertile and more densely populated lands in the coastal plains for free citizens and the incipient bourgeoisie, whose cities were given the Furs, or royal charters, regulating civil law and administration locally, but holding them always accountable to the king.
These actions had linguistic consequences:
- The interior was mostly repopulated by speakers of the Aragonese language, a Western Romance language of the Pyrenean–Mozarabic group. Their language was a close relative of the Mozarabic language and of the Castilian language, which evolved into the Spanish language by adopting features of other Romance languages, including Aragonese, from neighbouring regions.
- The coastal lands were mostly repopulated by speakers of the Catalan language from the Principality of Catalonia. This was one of the Iberian Romance languages. The language of these settlers would evolve into Valencian, a distinctive variant of Catalan which has gained its own currency within the Catalan domain.
Another possible primary driving force, but likely to be understated by modern historiography, was religious faith. In this regard, Pope Gregory IX recognized the fight as a Crusade, and James I was known for being a devout king.
Height of power
The Kingdom of Valencia achieved its height during the early 15th century. The economy was prosperous and centered around trading through the Mediterranean, which had become increasingly controlled by the Crown of Aragon, mostly from the ports of Valencia and Barcelona.
In the city of Valencia the Taula de canvis was created, functioning partly as a bank and partly as a stock exchange market; altogether it boosted trading. The local industry, especially textile manufactures, achieved great development and the city of Valencia turned into a Mediterranean trading emporium where traders from all Europe worked. Perhaps the feature which best symbolises this flamboyant period is the Silk Exchange, one of the finest European examples of civil Gothic architecture and a major trade market in the Mediterranean by the end of the 15th century and throughout the 16th century.
Valencia was one of the first cities in Europe to install a movable type printing press as per the designs of Johannes Gutenberg. Valencian authors such as Joanot Martorell or Ausiàs March conformed the canon of classic Valencian literature to the Valencian dialect of Catalan.
Modern Era, the Germanies, and decay
In 1479, Ferdinand ascended to the throne as King of Aragon. With his earlier marriage to Queen Isabella I of Castile, the modern Kingdom of Spain was born. Valencia began a slow process of integration with the rest of Spain. When Ferdinand and Isabella's grandson Charles came to the throne, the crowns were permanently joined together in personal union. The kings of Habsburg Spain (January 23, 1516 – November 1, 1700) maintained the privileges and liberties of the territories and cities which formed the kingdom and its legal structure and factuality remained intact. A new position, Viceroy of Valencia, was created to manage the officially independent Kingdom.
Meanwhile the rising Spanish Empire had left behind its former status as a Kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula and had emerged as a Great power. The Empire shifted its focus to the Spanish colonization of the Americas and its possessions in Europe, rather than its Iberian territories.
During the 16th century, Valencia lost its status as a preeminent commercial center of Europe to the rapidly developing cities of Northern and Central Europe. Within Spain, the Atlantic trade favored the cities of Andalusia such as Cádiz. This was largely due to diminishing profits from the Mediterranean trade. The Spanish Empire was in frequent conflict with the Ottoman Empire which controlled most of the eastern Mediterranean. They prevented each other from reaching certain ports while Ottoman privateers such as Barbarossa preyed on trade ships. The Barbary pirates such as Dragut, operating out of Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, Salé and ports in Morocco, attacked shipping in the western Mediterranean, which included destructive raids in Christian ports along the coast. This decline in trade greatly inhibited the economy in Valencia, which had already been economically affected by the Alhambra decree which had expelled the Jews in 1492.
In 1519, the young King Charles I granted the Germanies (literally "brotherhoods") permission to arm themselves to fight off the Muslim raiders. The Germanies were artisan guilds who also, at first with the government's permission, served as civilian militias to fight raiding pirates. However, the Germanies also had an economic agenda favoring the commoner-dominated guilds that clashed with the aristocracy. After the recently appointed Viceroy of Valencia Diego Hurtado de Mendoza refused to seat elected officials who favored the Germanies in 1520, a full fledged revolt broke out, the Revolt of the Brotherhoods (Revolta de les Germanies). It lasted well into 1522, and shared many traits with the contemporaneous Revolt of the Comuneros in Castile. Aside from economic resentment of the aristocracy, the revolt also featured a strong anti-Muslim aspect, as the superstitious populace blamed Muslims, homosexuals, and other outcasts for a plague that struck the city. The mudéjars (Muslims) were seen as allies of the aristocracy, as they worked in the nobility's large farms and undercut the Valencians on wages making them competitors for scarce jobs. During the revolt, the agermanats killed many Muslims and forcibly baptized the rest. Even after the Germanies were suppressed it was ruled that these baptisms were valid, sparking a new revolt of the Moriscos (Muslim "converts").
Because of the exhausted forces left after clashes between the nobles and their allies in the high bourgeoisie versus the general populace and the lesser bourgeoisie, the king was able to use the power vacuum to enlarge his share of power and gradually diminish that of the local authorities. This meant that his requests for money in order to enlarge or consolidate the disputed possessions in Europe were progressively more frequent, more imperative and, conversely, less reciprocated for the Kingdom of Valencia, just as they were elsewhere for the rest of the Spanish Kingdom territories.
The expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 was the final blow for the economy of the Kingdom of Valencia, as thousands of people—mostly peasants serving the nobility—were forced to leave; in the process, entire villages were deserted and the countryside lost its main labor force. Some 125,000 people are supposed to have left the land. The expulsion was broadly welcome within the Valencian citizenry, especially for its more popular segments. The expulsion meant the loss of a cheap labor force for the nobility, and consequently a massive socio-economic destabilisation. The nobles together with the upper class bourgeoisie felt threatened by an increasingly self-confident general populace, and sought the king's protection of their privileges. As a concession to the monarchy, they had to gradually relinquish their check and balance role on its power, which had been one of the distinguishing traits of the Kingdom's autonomy before the Crown. In line with similar processes in other parts of feudal Europe, the power vacuum left by rapid socio-economic change was readily filled by an increasingly emboldened monarchy.
The Kingdom of Valencia as a legal and political entity was finally ended in 1707 as a result of the Spanish War of Succession. The local population mostly took the side of and provided troops and resources for Archduke Charles, the pretender who was arguably to maintain the legal status quo. His utter defeat at the Battle of Almansa, near the borders of the Kingdom of Valencia, meant its legal and political termination, along with other autonomous parliaments in the Crown of Aragon, as the Nueva Planta Decrees were passed and the new King Philip V of Spain of the House of Bourbon created a centralized Spain.
- Conquest of Valencia by El Cid
- List of Valencian monarchs
- Furs of Valencia
- Generalitat Valenciana
- Valencian Parliament
- Palace of the Borgias
- Robert Ignatius Burns. The Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: Reconstruction on a Thirteenth-Century Frontier. Harvard University Press, 1967.
- (Spanish) Vicente Coscollá Sanz, La Valencia musulmana
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History of Solar Panels: Who, When, How?
Among hundreds and thousands of inventions of human beings, few important ones led the entire human race one step closer to development. Design of the solar panel is one of them.
Though, lately, scientists are trying to figure out more innovative methods to boost the efficiency of solar panels.
Usage of solar energy goes thousands of years from now, but the foundation of modern solar panels took place not more 60-70 years ago. To submit an academic paper based on solar panels and how it has been developed from past ages till now, I did a small research on it, which I am going to write here in short.
Who Invented Solar Panels?
The idea of solar energy is not something new. Back in the prehistoric ages, people used to use solar energy as well. From the dawn of human civilization, people have been exploiting solar energy to accomplish their regular works.
Previously, people used to use solar energy by focusing the sun's energy through a magnifying glass to create fire for different purposes like cooking and staying warm. Later on, Greeks and Romans started to use light in different ways for religious ceremonies. Afterward, sunrooms were created for capturing solar energy.
Back in the time of Archimedes, solar energy was used to surround and besiege ships from the Roman Empire.
It is not confirmed whether usage of solar energy started from Archimedes' time, but it is undoubtedly verified that in the 1970s the procedure that Greeks supposedly used to harness solar energy was later tested by the Greek navy.
When Were Solar Panels Invented?
There is some debate about who really invented modern solar panels since several scientists contributed to conceptualization and creation of the solar panels we see today. Hence, the timeline of its invention is still pretty questionable.
Some people happen to credit French scientist Edmond Becquerel who made a point that light can multiply generation of electricity when two electrodes are placed into a conducting solution.
Later on, in 1873, Willoughby Smith discovered that selenium had potential that is similar to photo conductivity and meanwhile Richard Evans Day and William Grylls Adam saw in 1876 that, selenium actually generates electricity if it is exposed to sunlight.
A couple of years later, Charles Fritts produced the very first solar panels that are made from selenium wafers. Henceforth, some historians give credit to him as he is the one who actually invented solar cells.
Nonetheless, solar cells that we use now are basically not made with selenium but with silicon. Because of that, many think silicon photo voltaic cell is created back in 1954 by Gerald Pearson, Daryl Chaplin, and Calvin Fuller at Bell Labs. Yet, the solar power that we know was not invented before 60 years from now.
The discoveries regarding the features of the light and its conductivity made it possible to give the formation of today's solar panels.
Here is a timeline of when the factors that guided to the invention of solar panels were invented.
Photo voltaic Effect
It was discovered back in 1839 by French scientist Edmond Becquerel. The process takes place when a material absorbs light and produces electrical voltage. To create this effect, most of the new solar cells happen to use silicon crystals.
Selenium’s Photo conductivity
Photo conductivity of selenium was first discovered by English electrical engineer Willoughby Smith in 1873-1876. Selenium instigates its electrical conductivity when it gets to absorb light.
After three years from then, Richard Evans Day and William Grylls Adams got to know that, selenium can produce electricity that derives from light without the presence of any kind of moving parts and heat.
First Solar Cell
Charles Fritts, one of the inventors of New York, created the very first solar cell through wrapping selenium along with a gold layer in 1883. Its energy conversion rate is about 1-2%. Recently, most of the new solar cell's efficiency is 15-20%.
Observation of Photoelectric Effect
It was first observed by a physicist from Germany, Heinrich Hertz. In 1887, light is exploited to free electrons from the surface of a metal to creating power.
Then over time, silicon solar cells were produced in 1953-1956 which led to the usage of solar energy in space in 1958. In inclusion, a solar park was created by Arco Solar in 1982.
The part used to generate 1 megawatt of electricity per hour. Besides, research on solar cells kept on expanding into other industries. In 1995, Thomas Faludy registered a patent for a retractable awning with integrated solar cells.
On the other hand, in 1994, National Renewable Energy Laboratory made a solar cell retrieved from gallium arsenide and gallium indium phosphide that could exceed 30-percent conversion efficiency. In 2005, DIY solar panels became very popular and later on, in 2016, unless solar power is discovered.
How Did It Get Commercialized?
As mentioned before, American inventor Charles Fritz made the very first selenium solar panel and later on, Aleksandr Stoletov, a Russian Scientist built a first genuine solar panel.
And in 1891, an inventor from Baltimore namely, Clarence Kemp patented the first commercial solar water heater. Furthermore, in 1905, the whole world got to know about solar power when Albert Einstein published his paper based on the photoelectric effect and how packets of light carry energy with them.
The discoveries regarding these led by Einstein worked as leverage for Bell Labs to create first modern solar cell back in 1954. Yet, it was very much inefficient as it cost $250 to generate just 1 watt of electricity. Nevertheless, these cells were used in space in 1958.
The Vanguard 1 spacecraft used solar power as an energy source for its backup.
Recently, photovoltaic cells have 15 percent efficiency. Along with the improvement of solar technology, solar cells are getting more proficient at converting light into electricity.
If we can develop new methods and improved techniques to utilize solar energy at a low cost in our practical life, it will someday be the most proficient renewable energy technology for sure.
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Excellent teachers with leadership competencies lead teams of other teachers to meet the leaders’ standards of excellence. Teachers, including the teacher-leader, play instructional roles assigned by the leader and use the leader’s methods and tools. The teacher-leader chooses, evaluates, and develops team members, establishing each person’s roles and goals at least annually. The leader facilitates team collaboration and planning. (S)he, with the principal, dismisses team members when necessary. The leader earns more than the others—funded by the reduction of non-classroom specialists, lower pay for others with narrower instructional roles and fewer work hours, and in some cases a reduction of team size. The leader is accountable for team success and all students’ learning. Reach Effect: approximately 100%–400% more students reached by excellent teachers in charge; more with larger spans.
Examples of schools, school networks, and programs extending excellent teachers’ reach using multi-classroom leadership include Touchstone Education, Ingenuity Prep, and City Charter High School. In a variation, the Teach Plus T3 Initiative places large teams of top teachers in turnaround schools (taking 25 percent of the teaching slots), where they develop peers in collaborative teams and earn higher pay.
See our case studies of this or similar models in action:
- Leading Educators: Empowering Teacher-Leaders to Extend Their Reach by Leading Teams, a profile of one teacher’s efforts to extend her reach
- Charlotte, N.C.’s Project L.I.F.T.: New Teaching Roles Create Culture of Excellence in High-Need Schools, a study detailing the steps four schools took and the challenges they faced as they prepared to kick off their Opportunity Culture models at the beginning of the 2013–14 school year
- Charlotte, N.C.’s Project L.I.F.T.: One Teacher’s View of Becoming a Paid Teacher-Leader, a Q&A with an excellent teacher who served on one school’s design team, now set to take on one of the redesigned jobs as a multi-classroom leader
- Touchstone Education: New Charter With Experienced Leader Learns From Extending Teachers’ Reach looks at a small first-year school within a charter school organization that has big plans for growth, to see how it combined Multi-Classroom Leadership and a Time-Technology Swap for strong reading results
More detail on this model:
Financial Planning for Multi-Classroom Leadership: Describes how teacher-leaders in this school model may earn more, sustainably, with calculations of savings and costs showing how schools could increase teacher-leader pay between 67% and 134%, without increasing class sizes and within existing budgets. See more about this model here.
Teacher and Staff Selection, Development, & Evaluation Toolkit: This toolkit includes job descriptions, competencies, and companion tools that may be used to select, evaluate, and develop teachers and staff. These materials are built for six of the more than 20 school models described here. The jobs included in the toolkit cover most of the other school models as well. Some schools may combine school models, and in turn will need to alter the job descriptions and other materials accordingly. Schools must adapt these materials to fit each school setting and to incorporate additional selection, evaluation, and development priorities.
Public Impact encourages the sharing and copying of these materials. Please include “©2012 Public Impact” and “OpportunityCulture.org” on all pages where material from these documents appears.
View table with links to all school models
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True actors are not created in one day. Training with acting coaches and participation in Robert Winsor Institute acting classes can help actors to acquire much needed skills to aid them in improving in their craft. To do this, actors are required to face themselves as they truly are vulnerabilities and strengths alike, to uncover their true selves and create lifelike characters.
Both human persons and created characters share a multi-dimensionality and depth. These facets include the inherent insecurities and fears that are integral in forming our personalities, the persona that we adopt to conceal these vulnerabilities, as well as the tragic flaw. Working with an acting coach has been shown to be highly effective in helping an actor to see past his own exterior and that of his character to reveal the heart of the person within and create characters that are both real and relatable.
Our public persona, according to Carl Jung, is the image that we present to the rest of society and is designed to mask our true feelings, emotions, and insecurities. Expression of this persona occurs in all areas of our lives. Characters also have personas that they create to protect their true selves from the rest of the world and actors must learn to utilize their own personas to create those of their characters.
It is not uncommon for public personas to be initially viewed as an individual's true identity as many are highly skilled in using this creation to mask their deeper selves. The root of a person's character is grounded in their growth and development from childhood. Acting coaches are trained to teach actors to come face to face with their own childhood fears and issues in order to create a truly believable character with great depth and dimension.
That which affects us in childhood remains a part of our lives until the day we die, whether we allow it to surface or not. The same is true of created characters. Characters and real persons alike adopt public personas as a means of shielding their weaknesses and helplessness from the world.
In order to become an exceptional actor, a student must learn to remove the superficial exterior of both his and his character's public persona in order to uncover the true self. Quality coaches work to train actors in communicating the sacred and intimate core of a person's soul and being.
Every member of the audience has both a public persona as well as a deeper substance that has worked to create the exterior. Presenting a character of similar dimensions is sure to create a bond between the audience and the story being told. All great actors must learn to succeed in this form of character creation.
The Robert Winsor Institute is an institution located in Irvine, which specializes in developing acting and personal improvement skills in children. The RW Institute's performing arts programs are offered in various courses suited to your needs and schedule. We have full-time and part-time courses, short and drop-in classes. All the courses are geared towards your development as an actor.
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WASHINGTON -- A Fremont eighth-grader's science project earned her a trip to the White House this week, where she got to present her novel vision-enhancing invention to President Obama and science dignitaries from across the country.
Jessika Baral was one of 100 students selected to display her discovery at a White House event intended to demonstrate Obama's vision for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education.
As a 7th-grader, Baral noticed that her friends and family who wore glasses were straining to read iPads and iPhones, which cram text into small spaces.
So the 13-year old from William Hopkins Junior High School, created an innovative contraption that strengthens eye muscles and a byproduct, improves peripheral vision.
"I wanted to find an entertaining way to strengthen eyes and exercise them to help people keep their eyes strong," Baral said.
After testing the product on 19 subjects, whose ages ranged from 12-81, she discovered their peripheral vision had improved by as much as 87 percent.
The product is a crescent-shaped Styrofoam board with LED lights surrounding the outside border which fits neatly against the forehead. The idea is to follow the moving lights to exercise the eyes.
"I got a micro controller on top of a breadboard and I programmed it to move these LED lights from side to side so you can exercise your eyes by following the lights," she said as she placed the contraption on her head.
On display Monday in the White House Blue Room where Obama was officially inaugurated for his second term in January, her project was appraised by many notables including Interior Secretary Sally Jewel, Bill Nye "the Science Guy,'' representatives from NASA and even New York Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz.
Jessika had previously won the Marconi/Samueli Award for Innovation from the Broadcom Foundation, which carried a $10,000 prize. She hopes to give back to California by using the money she's earned to produce 200 more machines and send them to high schools across the state.
Although this was not her first time visiting Washington, Jessika grinned as she explained how "very excited" she was to be inside the White House.
The other California participant at the fair was 11-year-old Sylvia Todd from Auburn, who created a water color-painting robot.
Known to her You Tube followers as "Super Awesome Sylvia,'' she was excited when Obama stopped by her exhibit and told her it was "cool.''
"It's really exciting. It's mind blowing that I'm actually at the White House," Todd said.
Sylvia's project was situated in the State Dining Room where Thomas Jefferson and Meriwether Lewis prepared the Lewis and Clark expedition back in 1802.
Sylvia's watercolor painting robot, the WaterColorBot, incorporates art with technology to produce watercolor paintings drawn on IPads. The WaterColorBot is a "kid-friendly art robot that moves a paintbrush to paint your digital artwork onto paper using a set of watercolor paints," according to her website.
Sylvia's science project was originally created for the 2013 Robo games, in San Mateo. She collaborated with Evil Mad Scientists, a business that is dedicated to the sciences and do-it-yourself projects, to help her win a silver medal for her ArtBot Painting submission at this years competition.
The White House Science Fair was established in 2009 as part of President Obama's Educate to Innovate campaign and was developed to celebrate achievements students have made in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM.)
"We celebrate our great football players ... and we celebrate outstanding musicians,'' Obama said. "But we've got to make sure that we're also celebrating every single day in our schools, in our classrooms, and in our country the outstanding contributions that scientists and engineers are providing to use every single day.''
The California News Service is a journalism project of the University of California Washington Center. E-mail the California News Service at firstname.lastname@example.org
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Presentation on theme: "Black Widow Venom (α-Latrotoxin)"— Presentation transcript:
1 Black Widow Venom (α-Latrotoxin) Come a little closer the venom will hurt but you will Live, maybe…Njeri Henderson Kristin Wright Damon Morgan Phoenix TantumBiology of Toxins 445April 17th 2013
2 Outline Why should we care? Background of Black Widow Spider (B.W.S.) Characteristics of B.W.S.Introduction to α-Latrotoxin (α-LTX)Mechanism of ActionDeeper Investigations of α-LTXSymptomsTreatmentToxicity LevelsAntiveninMedical UsesInteresting FactsSummary
3 Why Should We Care?Before you can understand the Toxin, it is useful to explore the Animal which is responsible for it’s mechanismThere is an irrational fear of Black Widow Spiders and exploring their Toxicity will hopefully alleviate this assumptionIn humans α-latrotoxin RARELY result in deathα-latrotoxin has POTENTIAL MEDICAL USES
4 Arachnophobia: An irrational fear of spiders and is considered among the most common of all phobias Of the 30,000 types of spiders, the black widow is one of the best known and feared
5 genus: Latrodectus mactans: species BackgroundMost widespread venomous land animal, ranging from the Mediterranean, across the Americas, all of Africa and much of Australia and in Russia and Asia.genus: Latrodectus mactans: speciesmixture of Latin and Greeklatro - robber / macto - to slaytranslation: “deadly biting robber”
6 Characteristics of B.W.S. Juveniles have more potent venom(more neurotoxins)Their venom is 15x more potent than the Prairie RattlesnakeJuvenile Black WidowAdult Black Widow
7 Characteristics of B.W.S Cont. Females sometimes kill the male after mating, hence their name “Black Widow”Shiny, black, globular abdomen with a distinctive red hourglass on the undersideAdults reach a maximum size of half an inchTheir venom contains latrotoxin, a protein which attacks both the nervous system and the hormones which regulates how the body functionsThe vertebrate-specific neurotoxin is α-latrotoxin (α-LTX)
8 Introduction to α-Latrotoxin Selective for vertebrates - ineffective in insects and crustaceansHigh affinity for receptors that are specific for neuronal and endocrine cellsAlpha latrotoxin consists of four sub- units an α-LTX dimer and δ-LIT dimer that form a tetramer. IT IS ONLY TOXIC IN TETRAMERIC FORMIn order to for the tetramer to form there must be cations such as Ca2+ present.In its tetrameric form it interacts with receptors on the neuronal membrane which causes the insertion of α-LTX into the membrane, where the action of the venom takes place
9 Mechanism of ActionThis tetramer then binds to membrane receptors neurexin I, latrophilin 1, and receptor-like protein tyrosine phosphatase σ (PTP σ) found on neuronal membranes of motor cells and endocrine cells.Once the tetramer is inserted into the cell membrane two mechanisms of actions can occur:1. Pore Formation2. Receptor-mediated effects
10 M.O.A Cont. Pore Formation: Pores are permeable to Ca2+ Pores are also permeable to neurotransmitters, cations and waterInflux of Ca2+ into the cellStimulates exocytosisNerve terminal swellingThis stimulates a massive release of neurotransmitters resulting in clonic contractions of muscle tissue.
11 M.O.A Cont. Receptor-mediated effects: α-LTX stimulates a receptor (latrophilin 1-G protein receptor)Phospholipase C (PLC) is the downstream effector of Gαq/11Linked to Gαq/11When PLC is activated it increases cytosolic concentration of IP3Induces release of Ca2+ from intracellular storesLatrophilin with α-LTX can also induce the activation of Protein Kinase C (PKC).PKC is responsible for the phosphorylation of SNARE proteins.Thus latrophilin with α-LTX induces the effect of exocytosis of transport vesicles.This Mechanism is not yet known.Increased rate of spontaneous exocytosis
12 Deeper Investigation of α-LTX α-LTX’s ability to form pores in plasma membrane has been used to study mammalian nervous systems.Helped confirm the vesicular hypothesis of transmitter release.Establish the requirement of Ca2+ for endocytosis.Characterized the existence of individual neurotransmitter release sites within central nervous system.
13 Even Deeper Investigation of α-LTX Mutant form of α-LTX, α-LTXN4C , does not form pores in membrane.Stimulation of neuronal receptors by α-LTXN4C mediates release of intracellular Ca2+ stores.Excitatory stimulation caused by intracellular Ca2+ release without endocytosis of additional Ca2+ indicates two pools of synaptic vesicles: The readily releasable pool, and the depot pool.
14 Symptoms of α-LTXThe Bite (IS THE ONLY WAY FOR THE TOXIN TO BE ABSORBED VIA THE BLOOD) is similar to a pin prick, which takes its effect in 30 to 60 minutes which results in:Pain in bite are may become generalizedMuscle cramps (especially shoulder and back)Abdominal pain – may mimic conditions of appendicitis or gallbladder problemsChest pain – may be mistaken for a heart attackBlood Pressure and Heart Rate ElevatedNausea, vomiting, fainting, dizziness and respiratory problems may followPeople RARELY die from a black widow's bite. Life-threatening reactions are generally seen only in small children and the elderly.
15 Treatment of α-LTXThe victim usually recovers in 2 to 5 days. Only 1% of all black widow attacks are fatal.Despite the low mortality rates it is still recommended that one immediately see a Doctor after an bite.Calcium gluconate (anti-venom) can also be administered by an physicianThe wound should also be cleansed and Ice Packs can be used for the pain
16 Comparison of Toxicity Levels The LD50 of α-LTX measured in μg/kg:Guinea Pig: 0.1Pigeon: 0.4Mouse: 0.9Chicken: 2.1Human LD50 ranges from 4.3 to 20 to 95 μg/kg
17 Milking w/o nipples Antivenin Production Find spider Milk spider Purify venomInject pure venom into horse or sheepAnimal makes antibodies against venomWithdraw blood and separate antibodiesConcentrate antibodies into a solutionInject into blood of recently bitten victimMilking w/onipples
18 Medical Uses of α-LTXIndigenous South Americans have traditionally used the venom as an AphrodisiacChilean scientists are working on a peptide derived from the venom to produce a Male Contraceptive Agent (Romero et. al., 2011)The venom Counters The Effects Of innvervation of muscles paralyzed by Botulinum Toxin (Gomez et. al., 1981)A particular peptide with a building block of proteins could help Treat Alzheimer's’
19 Interesting Facts The antivenin was not produced until 1956 Could be First Documented Death from α-LTXNo deaths have been reported in the past 10 years in the U.S.The antivenin was not produced until 1956
20 Most recent case of α-LTX in humans And Then There’s More…Daniela Holmqvist, a rookie from Sweden on the Ladies European Tour was bitten by a spider during a round in Canberra, Australia.Most recent case of α-LTX in humansFebruary 14, 2013
21 SummaryBlack Widow spiders, Latrodectus mactans, are ubiquitous in nearly all regions.Black Widow venom is a tetramer polypeptide that is injected into the spiders prey.Once in the bloodstream α-LTX binds to neuronal and endocrine cell membranes, inducing pore formation and Ca2+ uptake, which in turn causes vesicular neurotransmitter exocytosis. This produces clinical symptoms such as muscle pain, tachycardia, diaphoresis, and in extreme cases death.Most Black Widow envenomation's do not result in long term health problems, and death is rare .α-LTX has been used to research neuronal cell function, and uses for Black Widow venom as a therapeutic agent for several conditions are being investigated.
22 CitationsDavletov, Bazbek A. Frederic A. Meunier. Anothony C. Ashton. Hiroaki Matsushita. Warren D. Hirst. Vera G. Lelianova. Graham P. Wilkin. J. Oliver Dolly. And Yuri A. Ushkaryov. Vesicle Exocytosis Stimulated by Alpha-Latrotoxin is Mediated by Latrophilin and Requires Both External and AStored Ca2+. From: The EMBO Journal. Vol. 17 No.14. ppGarb, Jessica E., and Cheryl Y. Hayashi. Molecular Evolution of Alpha-Latrotoxin, the Exceptionally Potent Vertebrate Neurotoxin in Black Widow Spider Venom. Obtained on: March 23, 2013Holts, George G. and Joel F. Habener. Black Widow Spider Alpha-Latrotoxin: A Presynaptic Neurotoxin that Shares Structural Homology with the Glucagon-like Peptide-1 Family of Insulin Secretagogic Hormones. From: Comp Biochem Physiol B Biochem Mol Biol October; 121(2):Ichtchenko, Konstantin. Mikhail Khvotchev. Nikita Kiyatkin. Lance Simpson. Shuzo Sugita. And Thomas C. Südhof. Alpha-Latrotoxin Action Probed with Recombinant Toxin: Receptors Recruit Alpha-Latrotoxin but do not Transduce an Exocytotic Signal. From: The EMBO Journal. Vol. 17 No.21 ppKhvotchev, Mikhail. And Thomas C. Südhof. Alpha-Latrotoxin Triggers Transmitter Release via Direct Insertion into the Presynaptic Plasma Membrane. From: The EMBO Journal. Vol. 19 No.13. ppSilva, Amelia M., June Liu-Gentry, Adam S. Dickey, David W. Barnett, and Stanley Misler. Alpha-Latrotoxin increases spontaneous and Depolarization-Evoked Exocytosis from Pancreatic Islet Beta-Cells. From: Journal of Physiology. Vol. 565, Issue 3. PpSilva, John-Paul, Jason Suckling, and Yuri Ushkaryov. Penelope’s Web: Using Alpha-Latrotoxin to Untangle Mysteries of Exocytosis. From: Journal of Nuerochemistry October; 111(2): Doi: /j x.Trudeau, Louis-Eric. Vladmir Parpura. And Philip G. Haydon. Activation of Nuerotransmitter Release in Hippocampal Nerve Terminals During Recovery From Intracellular Acidification. From: Journal of Neurophysiology. 81:Tzeng, Mu-Chin. Rochelle S. Cohen. And Philip Siekevitz. Release of Neurotransmitters and Depletion of Synaptic Vesicles in Cerebral Cortex Slices by Alpha-Latrotoxin From Black Widow Spider Venom. From: Neurobiology. Vol. 75 No.8. pp August 1978.Ushkaryov, Yuri A., Alexis Rohou. And Shuzo Sugita. Alpha-Latrotoxin and its Receptors. From: Handbook Experimental Phamacology. 2008; (184): Doi: /978-3— _7Utah Poison Control Center. Black Widow Spider Envenomation. From: Utox pdate. Vol. 4, IssueB. Ceccarelli, W.P. Hurlbut, Ca2+-dependent recycling of synaptic vesicles at the frog neuromuscular junction,J. Cell Biol., 87 (1980), pp. 297–303C. Auger, A. Marty, Heterogeneity of functional synaptic parameters among single release sites, Neuron, 19 (1997), pp. 139–150A.C. Ashton, K.E. Volynski, V.G. Lelianova, E.V. Orlova, C. Van Renterghem, M. Canepari, M. Seagar, Y.A. Ushkaryov, α-latrotoxin, acting via two Ca2+-dependent pathways, triggers exocytosis of two pools of synaptic vesicles, J. Biol. Chem., 276 (2001), pp –44703
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About This Chapter
Ecology Lesson Plans - Chapter Summary
This chapter can act as both a resource for you to use when approaching the instruction of ecology as well as a means for you to review the content you'll be instructing. Through the course of the chapter, you'll go over both lesson plans and informational lessons on natural resources and climate change. These lessons will detail the following to help you develop related lesson plans:
- Natural resources and invasive species
- Climate change on the global scale
- Fossil fuels and their impact on global warming
How It Helps
- Prepares instructional design: Using these resources, you can go into teaching topics of ecology with a more thorough lesson plan designed to help you teach the subjects most effectively.
- Solidifies understanding: You'll review the definition and types of natural resources as well as the effects of climate change, allowing you to go into their instruction with the topics fresh in your mind.
- Fosters student learning: You'll learn about planning lessons on natural resources and climate change bearing in mind the students' reception.
By the end of this chapter, you'll have bolstered your knowledge of:
- Natural resources
- Climate change and mitigation strategies
- Planning lessons focused on natural resources and climate change
1. Biomass Lesson Plan
This lesson will help you teach the concept of biomass. Students will learn to identify the parts of an ecosystem that add to its biomass and place them in a biomass pyramid. This lesson includes a role-playing activity to engage your kinesthetic learners.
2. What Is Biomass? - Definition & Explanation
In this lesson, you'll learn what ecologists use to quantify the amount of matter in an ecological community. This often relates to the amount of energy being produced by various parts of that community.
3. Indicator Species Lesson Plan
Teach your students about indicator species with this lesson plan. A text lesson defines the term, then explains the concept using concrete examples students can easily understand. Hands-on learning, discussion question, and a quiz mean your students remember concepts long-term.
4. Indicator Species: Definition & Examples
An indicator species can tell scientists a lot about a habitat. This lesson will define the term 'indicator species' and then outline some examples of creatures that can indicate healthy water, air, and forest.
5. Ecological Succession Lesson Plan
Use this lesson plan to teach students about ecological succession. Students learn the process of ecological succession, including types and stages, before applying concepts to a hands-on activity.
6. What Is Ecological Succession? - Definition, Types & Stages
How does an ecological community develop? Ecological succession describes this process of development, identifying how the community began as well as how and when it stabilizes.
7. Ecology Lesson Plan for High School
In this lesson, you will introduce students to the study of ecology. Reinforce concepts learned with class discussion, group work, and a culminating activity.
8. What Is Ecology? - Definition & Explanation
From the largest animals to bacteria invisible to the human eye, the survival of any organism depends on its interaction with the environment. In this lesson you will learn the basics about ecology, the scientific study of these interactions.
9. Mutualism Lesson Plan
Understanding symbiotic relationships is essential to any biology, ecology or environmental science curriculum. This lesson uses a short video, group-work and pair-work to focus on mutualistic relationships.
10. Mutualism: Examples & Definition
There are many types of relationships in nature. This lesson explores mutualism, a type of symbiotic relationship between two organisms. These fascinating relationships are like survival partnerships between species.
11. Interactions in Ecosystems Lesson Plan
While teaching your students about various animals and organisms, this lesson plan will help your class understand how these living things interact within an ecosystem. Students will use scientific language to describe these relationships.
12. Interactions in Ecosystems: Types & Examples
In this lesson we'll be learning about different types of interactions in ecosystems. We'll look at different types of symbiosis as well as predator prey relationships and examples of each.
13. Feedback in Biological Systems Lesson Plan
Feedback systems regulate every system in our bodies. Your students will learn about feedback systems as they watch a video, illustrate examples of feedback systems and complete a worksheet.
14. Radial Symmetry Lesson Plan
Through this lesson plan, students will view a video about bilateral and radial symmetry and will analyze photos of marine animals to categorize them by symmetrical type.
15. Radial Symmetry in Biology: Definition & Examples
One way that animals are broadly categorized is based on their body symmetry. Radial symmetry is one type, and here, we will explore what it is and what organisms exhibit it. Once you get to the end of the lesson, you can test your knowledge with a brief quiz.
16. Ecosystem Activities
Ecosystems contain organisms in a food chain as well and soil, sand, water, and air. With a little ingenuity, students are able to learn about ecosystems even if your school lacks access to nature.
17. Ecology Lesson Plan for Elementary School
Ecology is part of every student's life, but do they know what it means? This lesson plan uses a text lesson to teach students what ecology is and how scientists study ecosystems using fun, hands-on learning experiences to support traditional learning.
18. Ecology Lesson For Kids: Definition & Facts
Ecology is the study of how living things relate to each other and the non-living things in the environment. This lesson will teach you about ecology and why scientists use it to help us understand our planet.
19. Nature Lesson Plan for Elementary School
What is nature and how do we experience it? This lesson plan uses a text lesson to explain key facts about nature and the ways in which we connect with it. An activity asks students to classify living and non-living things found in nature.
20. Abiotic vs. Biotic Factors Activities
Looking to spice up your lessons pertaining to abiotic and biotic factors? This lesson contains several ideas that will make learning about these factors engaging and meaningful.
21. Biotic & Abiotic Factors Lesson Plan
This lesson plan will aid you in introducing biotic and abiotic factors to your students. Your students will read and discuss a text lesson and video, have a discussion, and create a key for an ecosystem.
22. Biomass Activities & Games
If your class is studying ecology, providing students with a thorough understanding of biomass is important. Use these activities and games to help students understand biomass and its importance to the health and sustainability of an ecosystem.
23. Ecological Succession Activities & Games
Studying succession is a fun way to learn about ecology, plants, animals and how the environment changes over time. This series of games and activities allows students to explore ecological succession in active, fun ways that ensure the topic will stick in their brains.
24. Symbiosis Activities & Games
Teaching your students about the different types of relationships between living things? Use this lesson as a helpful source of activities and games that keep your students engaged in learning about symbiosis.
25. Symbiosis Lesson Plan
This lesson plan introduces high school students to the topic of symbiotic relationships. Using a video lesson, class discussion and a partner activity, students learn to recognize and describe mutualism, commensalism, parasitism and competition.
26. Secondary Succession Lesson Plan
This lesson plan provides high school students with a deeper look at secondary succession. Using a short video, first-hand observations, and an in-class model, students explore and discuss this type of ecological succession.
27. Natural Environment Lesson Plan
What role does the natural environment play in your life? Check out this lesson plan for engaging ways to teach your students about the different views cultures have on nature.
28. Patterns in Nature Lesson Plan
Is nature random or are there specific patterns that emerge? This lesson plan uses a text lesson to explain the patterns of nature. An activity gives students practice in identify the patterns in nature.
29. Shapes in Nature Lesson Plan
With this lesson, your students will learn about basic 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional shapes, as well as practice identifying those shapes in nature.
30. Nature Spy Lesson Plan
In this lesson plan, based on the book 'Nature Spy' by Shelley Rotner, students will take a nature walk to observe the impact of humans, plants, and animals on the environment. They will record their observations using drawings and text.
31. Ecological Niche Lesson Plan
What is an ecological niche? Use this lesson plan along with a video lesson to help your students learn the answer to this question. A puzzle activity explores the concept further.
32. Community Ecology Lesson Plan
Communities interact in many ways. Your students will learn about community ecology as they watch a video, create demo posters, and complete a worksheet about community ecology.
33. Population Ecology Lesson Plan
Populations change all the time and certain scientists study these changes. Your students will enjoy learning about population ecology as they watch a video and create population ecologist flipbooks.
34. Limiting Factors Lesson Plan
This lesson plan introduces high school students to the concept of limiting factors in chemistry. Students will read and discuss a short text lesson, observe a demonstration, and complete two hands-on activities.
35. Primary Succession Lesson Plan
This lesson plan is a tool for helping students learn about primary succession. Students will be able to use domain-specific language to summarize the formation of new habitats following a major event.
36. Forest Succession Lesson Plan
Forest succession is a process that occurs over hundreds of years. Your students will learn about forest succession as they read a text, create a forest succession display and complete a worksheet.
37. Forest Succession: Definition & Stages
This article will look at the development of forests through a cyclical process known as forest succession. Forest succession occurs in several stages outlined below.
38. Keystone Species Lesson Plan
With this lesson plan, your students are going to learn about keystone species and their impact on an ecosystem. They will chart this using an ecosystem arch and will present some of their understanding though creative writing.
39. Ecological Systems Theory of Developments Lesson Plan
Urie Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory of development examines the influence of environmental factors on human development. This lesson plan explores this theory using a video lesson. An activity reinforces critical content.
40. Living Systems Requirement for Free Energy & Matter Lesson Plan
It is important for your students to know that living systems require free energy and matter in order to continue to exist. Your students will learn by watching a video, identifying energy sources, and completing a worksheet.
41. Complete and Incomplete Metamorphosis Activities
Upper elementary or middle school students can benefit from practicing their knowledge of complete and incomplete metamorphosis. Use these activities to guide students through engaging exercises that require concept comprehension and application.
42. Reduce Reuse Recycle Activities
'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle' is a slogan that most students know, but do they understand what it is all about? Teaching students the meaning behind the slogan and the impact it can have is important for all learners.
43. Global Warming Activities for Middle School
Global warming is an important topic, but can be hard for some students to understand. These activities can help your students approach this topic in different ways to better appreciate the causes and implications of climate change.
44. Farm-to-Table Activities
Farm-to-table is a 21st-century food and environmental sustainability movement. In this resource, you will find three different activities that allow students to engage with this topic in practical ways.
45. Water Conservation Project Ideas
Water conservation projects are an entertaining and educational way for your students to display what they have learned about water conservation in the class. The following projects will help students to demonstrate their learning.
46. Ecology Activities for Middle School
Teaching ecology to middle school students is an important endeavor. Use these activities to help your students work together to understand the interactions within the natural world.
47. Ecology Activities for High School Biology
You are looking for some practical ways to teach and help your students to understand ecology and how an ecosystem works. The activities below will help you do just that with your students.
48. Ecological Pyramid Activities for High School
It is time for your high school students to learn about ecological pyramids and you want activities that they can complete that will compliment what you are teaching them. The activities below accomplish that task.
49. Ecological Relationships POGIL Activities for High School Biology
POGIL activities encourage team problem solving, reflection, and critical thinking skills to be applied in a carefully structured manner. Explore ecological relationships with your high school Biology students using these engaging POGIL activities.
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Other chapters within the Plants & Ecology Lesson Plans course
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The sole importance of grounding substation is for protection of equipment from lightning strikes and surges and to protect the individuals operating in the substation. Grounding substation system is essential for connecting the neutral points of generators and transformers to the ground and also the metal parts which do not carry current such as overhead shielding wires, frames, structures, tanks and many more.
Grounding substation of surge arresters is done via earthing systems. The role of substation earthing system is provision of ground mat beneath the surface of the earth and around substation which have a uniform zero potential as per lower earth resistance and the ground to ensure that; the operating staffs are safe through limitation of the voltage gradient at the ground level in substation. Besides, it provides a discharge path for lightning which comes through surge arresters, rod-gaps and shielding wires. More so, it provides reduced resistance path to earthing switch terminals to enable them discharge trapped charges to earth before repairs and maintenance.
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NuSTAR's Improved View
This image taken by the ultraviolet-light monitoring camera on the European Space Agency's (ESA's) XMM-Newton telescope shows the beautiful spiral arms of the galaxy NGC1365. Copious high-energy X-ray emission is emitted by the host galaxy, and by many background sources. The large regions observed by previous satellites contain so much of this background emission that the radiation from the central black hole is mixed and diluted into it. NuSTAR, NASA's newest X-ray observatory, is able to isolate the emission from the black hole, allowing a far more precise analysis of its properties.
Image credit: ESA
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Late 1936, the Government of Catalonia created the first abortion law in the Iberian peninsula and one of the first in the world.
With the abolition of the Republic, due to the coup d'etat of General Franco and the fascist victory at the Spanish Civil War, the Catalan law was abolished.
It was not until 1985, with Act 9/1985 , abortion was allowed in Spain, but only in three cases: serious physical or mental health problem of the mother, rape or malformations of the fetus.
In 2010 they created the new Act 2 /2010, which expanded the possibilities for abortion.
Now, in 2013, the Spanish government wants to create a new law that will restrict abortion even more than it was in 1985.
Catalonia was one of the most advanced countries in the world in this regard. Spain forced us, against our wish to remain in the nineteenth century for most of the twentieth century.
This is another example that it is too difficult to improve too many things as long as we stay under Spanish rule. We Catalans cannot decide almost anything. There is clearly a cultural difference between Catalan and Castilian mentality. This difference makes us want to decide by ourselves how we want to organise ourselves, and Spain will not allow it. They do this with our education system, with our cultural activities, and also by revoking any law they don't like, such as the Catalan prohibition of bull fights.
We Catalans want to decide by ourselves instead of being subordinated to the mentality of the neighbour country (Spain), that do not (want to) understand us and think in a different way than us. This difference has nothing to do with being better or worse. We are just different.
This difference is reflected in the difference between the Catalan and the Spanish political spectrum.
Therefore, my conclusion remains : we need a state of our own in order to normalise what we already did in 1936.
More information (Catalan):
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The Vedic Period
• Due to scant archaeological remains, literary sources are used to derive information about Vedic period. Vedic literature comprises the four Vedas: Rig, Sama, Yajur and Atharva.
• Brahmanas were elaborate commentaries on Vedic hymns and socio-religious meaning of rituals. Aranyakas were philosophical and mystical works for hermits and students living in jungles.
• Upanishads describe Aryan religious and spiritual thoughts. Ramayana and Mahabharata are two great Aryan epics.
• Iron, discovered and used around 1200 BC, led to great changes in agriculture, technological developments and warfare. Vedic people knew four kinds of pottery.
• Early Vedic Society, based on Varna or Caste System, was divided into four Varnas: Brahmanas, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras.
• Patriarchal Family was the norm, wherein succession passed from father to eldest son (kulpa). Sons were desired to fight in wars.
• Vedic Education was imparted orally. Teachers recited mantras, students repeated them. There were some gifted women scholars as well.
• Women were held in great respect. As wives however, their life and property was at husbands’ mercy. Right to marry was their personal choice. They also had certain religious and political freedom.
• Marriage was done with consent of the parents. But marriage with Dasyus was limited.
• In Later Vedic Society, social condition was same as that of earlier period. Caste System, now rigid, became birth based. Untouchables were treated as outcastes.
• Under Ashrama System, individual life was divided into Brahmacharya (education), Grihastha (householder), Vanaprastha (forest hermit) and Sannyasin (renunciation).
• Education was limited to three upper castes. Boys sent to gurukula for education learnt various subjects.
• Position of Women declined. They were denied access to sacrifices and Sabhas. Education was prohibited for them. Widow Remarriage was forbidden.
• Polygamy was practiced by upper classes. Eight types of Marriages were recognised, of which four were approved.
• Early economy was based on agriculture and cattle rearing, former being main occupation of the people. In Trade and Industry, Barter system was practiced, as were various crafts.
• Later economy was characterised by use of iron, which revolutionised agriculture. Pastoral life or Rigvedic people was overshadowed by agriculture, which developed more. Hymns emphasised on cattle wealth, hence cows were seen as sacred.
• Trade and Commerce increased during this period, both maritime and inland. Corporations and guilds emerged. Art and Craft specialisation expanded.
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The marriage ritual, which involved neither dowry, nor bride price, was called -Marks:1
There were eight kinds of marriages in Vedic period. Of these, Prajapatya ritual involved neither dowry, nor bride-price.
Mahabharta was composed byMarks:1
Explanation:Both Mahabharta and Puranas are supposed to be compiled by Ved Vyasa. Ved Vyasa was a great seer, guru, author, poet and philosopher in the Hindu religion.
The two greatest Sanskrit epics are theMarks:1
Mahabharta and Ramayana
Explanation:The Mahabharata is about a war fought between the Kauravas and Pandavas, who were cousins.The Ramayana is about Rama, a prince of Kosala, who was sent into exile. His wife Sita was abducted by the king of Lanka, named Ravana, and Rama had to fight a battle to get her back.
The language in which puranas were written wasMarks:1
Explanation:The Puranas were written in simple Sanskrit verse and were meant to be heard by everybody, including women and shudras, who were not allowed to study the Vedas.
grand, long compositions, about heroic men and women, and include stories about gods
Epics are grand, long compositions, about heroic men and women, and include stories about gods.
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Did you know 34 percent of children entering kindergarten lack the basic language skills needed to learn how to read?
Join the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library (JMRL) in the quest to build early literacy skills by participating in the 1000 Books Before Kindergarten challenge!
How does the challenge work? It’s simple…read!
First, pick up the ‘reading log’ worksheet at any JMRL location or download it online at www.jmrl.org, then color a square on the log for every book you read.
After reading 50 books, bring the worksheet into the library to receive a folder to hold your program materials. After 100 books, participants will receive a tote bag and a sticker for the worksheet.
When you finally reach 1000 books, take home a free book and a certificate of achievement!
If participants get an extra sticker for doing the early literacy activity on each worksheet, they will also receive an extra prize after finishing the program.
For more information, visit the JMRL website at http://www.jmrl.org.
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Most of the rugs have been made of the same materials for centuries, wool, cotton, silk, to which silver and gold thread can be added, although those with silver and gold were made especially for shahs and emperors. Because of its availability wool is the most common material used for making rugs in the Orient.
The two knots used in making oriental rugs are Turkish knot and Persian knot. The Turkish knot is symmetrical, or Ghiordes, knot, it was most widely used in Turkey. The second is the asymmetrical knot or Senneh, knot, and for the most part was used in Persia.
Regardless of the names, both knots are used everywhere in the world, there is no clear-cut geographical distribution of the two knots. But the rugs can be classified on the basis of their origin and according to what colors and designs we find in these rugs. Most of the rugs that are named after the regions in which they were created.
For example, the Persian Tabriz rug, is called the Tabriz as it originated in the city of Tabriz, Iran. Similarly, we can find the different types of rugs based on their origin of design such as Turkish rugs, Indian Rugs, Persian Rugs, Chinese rugs, Caucasian rugs, rugs from Afghanistan and Pakistan and so on. Click here to see some of the rugs from different parts of the world.
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A common misconception about the history of mental illness is that, before Freud and psychoanalysis, there was no such thing as talk therapies or what is commonly known today as psychotherapy.
A common misconception about the history of mental illness is that before Freud and psychoanalysis, there was no such thing as talk therapies or what is commonly known today as psychotherapy. Confinement (eg, cages, chains, and straitjackets), sedation (eg, opium and bromides), and somatic interventions (eg, bindings, purging, and electric stimulation) dominate the imagined landscape of premodern treatments for mental disorders. This picture is not altogether inaccurate-but it is incomplete. In large measure, this prevailing image is why so many today continue to associate the term “madness” with coercion and violence.
Yet the history of madness is replete with examples of noninvasive, noncoercive forms of treatment.1 Music, for instance, was recommended as a treatment for relieving symptoms since ancient times.2 During the 18th and early 19th centuries, Philippe Pinel (1745-1826), William Tuke (1732-1822), Francis Willis (1718-1807), and many others developed and refined the so-called moral treatment, intended as a way of healing lunacy by appealing to a patient’s intellectual and emotional faculties.3,4 And throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, hypnotism and suggestion were widely used by neurologists, psychiatrists, and healers of different kinds for treating a wide variety of ailments.5
One of the least acknowledged, yet most enduring, forms of psychological treatment was psychagogy. Dating back to ancient Greece and Palestine, psychagogy remained a mainstream therapeutic method and profession until the term largely fell into disuse during the 1970s and 1980s. It remains unclear (to me at least) whether the “disappearance” of the field of psychagogy was a function of its having lost out to competing therapies or whether its methods and ideas were simply appropriated by and folded into other fields. Whatever the case is, however, today the term is likely unfamiliar to all except for those versed in Christian theology.
So what was psychagogy? The term comes from ancient Greek philosophy, in which Plato used it to refer to “the manner of leading the soul through words.”6 He contrasted psychagogy, or “guidance of the soul” toward self-knowledge, with deceptive uses of the art of persuasion (rhetoric). Centuries later, the idea was taken up by Paul of Tarsus and early Christian thinkers, who relied on psychagogic techniques in writing the New Testament.7 And as historian Paul Dilley has recently shown, ancient Christian monks developed a form of ascetic psychagogy, by which disciples were trained in self-improvement through various “stages of advice, discipline, and emotional support.”8
Psychagogy mostly retained its association with techniques aimed at moral self-improvement until the turn of the 20th century. Then, in the 1920s, French and German specialists began to incorporate psychagogic methods in their work with character psychology, psychoanalysis, hypnosis, and general psychotherapeutic practice. In 1924, an International Institute for Psychagogy and Psychotherapy was founded by the Swiss psychoanalyst Charles Baudouin.
A mix of purposes, methods, and clients would come to distinguish psychagogy throughout the rest of the century. Taking on influences from depth psychology, pedagogy, developmental psychology, social psychology, and casework, practitioners utilized a variety of individual and group methods in helping adults and children improve quality of life and better adjust to their social circumstances. Work therapy, directive and nondirective conversation, organized group activities, occupational therapy, conflict resolution, and therapeutic community were used in different measure by psychagogues.9 During the 1950s and 1960s, a professional identity was maintained through conferences and training programs in West Germany. There, psychagogy increasingly drew on the fields of special education, social work, and psychoanalysis to carve out a role working with emotionally disturbed adolescents in both inpatient and outpatient settings.10
Today, the influence of psychagogy is still discernible in pastoral counseling. For the most part, however, it is a term that largely prompts quizzical looks on the faces of those to whom it is mentioned. Too bad, really. Given its remarkable resilience, modern psychagogy warrants the same kind of attention from historians of psychiatry as its ancient counterpart has received from philosophy and religious studies scholars.
Care of the Psyche: A History of Psychological Healing.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 1999.
MacKinnon D. Music, madness and the body: symptom and cure.
2006;17(65, pt 1):9-21.
Charland LC. Benevolent theory: moral treatment at the York Retreat.
Weiner DB. Alienists, treatises, and the psychologic approach in the era of Pinel. In: Wallace ER IV, Gach J, eds.
History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology.
New York: Springer Science + Business Media; 2008:281-303.
A History of Hypnotism.
New York: Cambridge University Press; 1992.
Paul and Philodemus: Adaptability in Epicurean and Early Christian Psychagogy. Supplements to Novum Testamentum.
Leiden, the Netherlands: EJ Brill; 1995:17.
Sterling G. Hellenistic moral philosophy and the New Testament. In: Porter SE, ed.
Dictionary of Biblical Criticism and Interpretation.
New York: Routledge; 2007:153.
Care of the Other in Ancient Monasticism: A Cultural History of Ascetic Guidance
[dissertation]. New Haven, CT: Yale University; 2008.
Schraml W. Die psychagogischen Methoden.
Z Klin Psychol Psychother.
Knöll H. Psychagogik-Gedanken zur Begriffsbestimmung.
Prax Kinderpsychol Kinderpsychiatr.
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Tigers are on the brink of extinction because only about 3,200 tigers are left in the world today, a report has said.
The still existing ones included six sub-species: Sumatran, Bengalese, Amurese, Indo-Chinese, South Chinese, and Malayan tigers, said the report released by the Indonesian Forestry Ministry yesterday, a day before delegates of 13 countries met for talks to save tigers here today.
The main threats facing the tigers around the world included damage of natural habitats, drastic decrease of natural predators, hunting and illegal trading, as well as conflicts between tigers and people living in the tigers’ habitat, the report said.
The Bali meeting, that would officially be opened by Minister of Forestry Zulkifli Hasan, was held before the World Tiger Summit in St Petersburg, Russia, from September 15 to 18, 2010.
In their a joint press statement, Chairman of the HarimauKita (Our Tiger) Forum Hariyo T Wibisono and Director of Bio-Diversity Conservation Harry Santoso said there are now only about 400 Sumatran tigers left.
These Sumatran tigers account for about 12 per cent of the world’s tiger population, making Indonesia a key country for tiger conservation in the world, they said.
“Ironically, the habitats of these Sumatran tigers have declined up to almost 50 per cent over the past 25 years.
About 70 per cent of their remaining habitats exist outside the conservation areas.”
Wibisono said the remaining habitats were located in 20 separated forests. This condition was vulnerable to the remaining tigers because they were not in good protection.
“To save these endangered Sumatran tigers, the entire stakeholders in Indonesia need to work together in taking concrete and effective conservation measures,” he said.
If not, the Sumatran tigers would follow the fates of Javanese and Balinese tigers, Wibisono said.
In paving the way for the Sumatran tiger conservation efforts, Executive Director of WWF-Indonesia Dr Efransjah said the remaining natural habitats should be saved.
The critical forest areas need also be restored and sustainable development-strategies should be put in place so that the tigers have enough habitats, he said.
“How to minimize potential conflicts between tigers and people should also be a common agenda for related parties,” he said.
Saving forests and Sumatran tiger habitats are relevant to the Indonesian government’s commitment to reduce carbon emission from deforestations and forest degradation, Efransjah said.
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Essay Topic 1
Explain the significance of the novel's title. What did the author mean by calling the book The Master of Go? Cite an example to support your answer.
Essay Topic 2
Politics play a significant role in the book. Kawabata refers to the politics of the Japanese society of The Master of Go compared to that of China. Discuss the use of politics in the novel. How does politics influence the actions of the main characters of the Master, Otake, and others? Also, examine the use of politics in relationships.
Essay Topic 3
One of the main themes in the book is ethical and social responsibility. List at least four examples where Kawabata employs this specific theme. Is the battle between making ethical choices obvious or subtle? What characters are involved in this kind of battle? Do you think the right person or group won? Does good always triumph...
This section contains 1,015 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page)
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Water: Total Maximum Daily Loads (303d)
Memorandum on Listing Waters Impaired
by Atmospheric Mercury Under
Clean Water Act Section 303(d):
Voluntary Subcategory 5m
March 8, 2007
We are using Clean Water Act tools to encourage comprehensive state and regional mercury control programs, particularly for watersheds impaired by mercury from the air. Specifically, EPA is issuing a memorandum describing a voluntary approach for listing waters impaired by mercury mainly from atmospheric sources under Clean Water Act Section 303(d). The memorandum provides information to states, territories, and authorized tribes, and supplements EPA’s clarification memo on 2008 state Integrated Reports. The voluntary approach acknowledges the challenges involved in addressing waters impaired due to atmospheric mercury deposition; uses the Clean Water Act Section 303(d) listing process to encourage and recognize states that are taking early action to address their mercury sources; and is designed to achieve environmental results sooner. Under this approach, we are encouraging states to put a priority on multi-pronged mercury control strategies.
EPA, the states, and other stakeholders have been working to determine how best to address waters impaired by mercury, particularly where the primary source of the mercury is atmospheric deposition. To date, over 8,500 water bodies in 43 states and Puerto Rico are listed under Section 303(d) of the Clean Water Act as impaired due to mercury. State water programs have tools for addressing mercury discharges from water sources under the Clean Water Act, but they need to work closely with their air, waste, and toxics programs to address other sources of mercury. U.S. mercury deposition results from domestic man-made sources and global sources, including natural, re-emitted, and man-made. EPA has estimated that, on average, over three-quarters (83 percent) of the mercury deposited in the U.S. originates from international sources, with the remaining 17 percent coming from U.S. and Canadian sources. The mix of long-distance and local sources makes it difficult in some waterbodies to achieve water quality standards for mercury. A number of states have developed or are in the process of developing Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs), and there are currently approved mercury TMDLs for over 300 waterbodies in 20 states and the District of Columbia. In addition, a number of states are moving ahead to address mercury sources within their control through comprehensive mercury reduction programs.
Highlights of Subcategory 5m Approach
- Using the voluntary approach, where a state has in place a comprehensive mercury reduction program, the state may separate their waters impaired by mercury primarily from atmospheric sources in a specific subcategory (“5m”) of their impaired waters lists. States using this approach may also defer development of TMDLs for these waters beyond the currently recommended schedules for TMDLs.
- The memorandum identifies the recommended components of the voluntary approach, such as: having a comprehensive mercury reduction program in place; demonstrating initially that a state has begun to make progress in reducing the mercury loadings over which it has control; identifying those water bodies in the state impaired by atmospheric mercury deposition and the potential emission sources contributing to that deposition; implementing appropriate regulatory and non-regulatory controls; and describing reduction goals and targets, implementation schedules, monitoring, and public reporting.
- Multi-state efforts are encouraged where possible to identify regional goals and targets.
- A state would include a description of the elements of its comprehensive mercury program and regularly reporting of progress in conjunction with the existing biennial section 303(d) listing process. Reporting through the 303(d) listing will provide public visibility and accountability regarding a state’s mercury reduction efforts.
- Nothing in the approach is meant to imply that EPA believes it is inappropriate for states to put mercury TMDLs in their schedules sooner rather than later. Nor would use of the "5m" approach remove the obligation to develop TMDLs for mercury-impaired waters if such mercury reduction programs do not result in attainment of water quality standards.
- There are a number of potential advantages to pursuing a “5m” approach, including the potential to focus more resources earlier on implementation of pollutant controls.
- EPA will continue to assist all states in their efforts to attain water quality standards and will work with states to provide additional information on approaches to developing mercury TMDLs in the coming months.
For further information, or a copy of the memorandum, please contact Ruth Chemerys at (202) 566-1216 or John Goodin at (202) 566-1373.
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Antigone depicts the human stubbornness towards accepting what is supposed to be good for him and hence in the later part shows the pain and suffering man goes through by disobeying his Almighty which is the result of man refusing to accept destiny and circumstances. The counter side of human behavior shown in this dramatic poetry is that man, instead following his creator, listens to an inside character that is part of his conscious and gives in to his inner needs, desires and compulsions which leads to the ultimate and mysterious justification of man's actions, behavior and eventually his life.
Comparison and Contrast of the Two Antigones
Sophocles is known to create his work in a sense where the protagonist is often than not struggling through an important but moral war within, which always concludes itself to be tragic due to a very particular yet extreme quality. In his greatest work known to date "Antigone," he has executed the task of a poetic drama in a beautiful tragedy. In this drama the typical Sopholean theme is evident throughout, which has always been about the fate of man when he defies from the rules and destiny already put in places by God, it depicts the human stubbornness towards accepting what is supposed to be good for him and hence in the later part shows the pain and suffering man goes through by disobeying his Almighty which is the result of man refusing to accept destiny and circumstances. The counter side of human behavior shown in this dramatic poetry is that man, instead following his creator, listens to an inside character that is part of his conscious and gives in to his inner needs, desires and compulsions which leads to the ultimate and mysterious justification of man's actions, behavior and eventually his life. In Antigone, by Sophocles, Creon is used to describe the role of a hero who is met with tragedy in every path of his life and this tragic hero has a tragic flaw, hence we can see that the fat of Gods are responsible for his downfall and possess a Hubris (Harkin. 2008).
There have been several adaptations of this play; the most prominent is by Jean Anouilh's and his version of Antigone. The play was adapted in 1942; this was the time when the Nazi forces had occupied most of France, hence taking the original theme of the play Anouilh has written the play in relation to the human sentiments and state at that time. Making Antigone an idealist, a conflict is shown between her and her strict and unbending uncle Creon, on the pending issue of providing her dead brother Polynices a proper burial, this provides for the main conflict in the play. However there are also other interpretations revealed in the play, for instance the struggle of the French Resistance Movement going against the Vichy government during the success of the Nazi government. Antigone is just one of the many plays adapted by Anouilh which are based on Greek mythology. This play was the outcome of the utter disappointment and surprise on the World War II and is one among a series of plays adapted during this by the dramatist. Other among adaptations there are Eurydice (1942) and Medee (first performed in 1937; published 1946).
In this paper we will compare and analyze both the versions of the play and explore the common themes. The main focus will be on how and what the themes represented in accordance to the time line they were written in. Also various difficult choices were made in both the plays regarding the pertaining situation, we will analyze the decisions that were made and whether they were the right decisions to be made (Glissant. 1981). We will also provide a stark analysis of all the characters in each of the plays and a comparison of both as well. Since Anouilh's version is an adaption we will also compare that what would Sophocles would have thought of the adaption. In this analysis we will also include the implications of the play in today's world and whether it has any significance. Lastly, we will decide which plays stands out more and why.
Comparison of Various Themes
Given that this play was written in two different time lines, with different strategies and motivations behind them, it still provides the same message of difficult decisions and a fate full of tragedies (Glissant. 1981). However, considering the situations in both the plays are different the themes present will provide a different approach; below we will analyze the different approaches taken towards the theme of the play.
Metaphysical vs. Social/Political
Antigone by Sophocles is a deep comparison and contrast between the two types of laws and justices that man follows; that being the divine religious laws and the one which is at hand which happens to be the law made by man, ruling states, cities and countries. The central figure in the play being that of fate, hence the law of God is shown to be the rule in all the characters fate, which include religious authority, customs and traditions which are increased to the status of the law. The curiosity and questions regarding the rules, law and justice play the main and central figure in the Antigone, it is best depicted when the average standards of the divine justice play the role of inner clash with Creon's will as he plays the role of the head of justice.
The conflicts listed above are extremely close in relation, however this basic set assists in understanding and untangling of various important issues throughout the play. In the Antigone version which was adapted by Anouilh during the Second World War, the character Antigine is as having her values lined up in priorities in each set of laws and rules mentioned above, and Creon is shown in conflict with the second set (Donellan. 1999). This adaption continues to be a dissident and extremely influential play and provides an inspiration for rebels in future generations. In this adaption which also became the most powerful literature on resistance during the Second World War, the main conflict between a person and the power which the state holds has been shown as an important and urgent matter for the people. Antigone is shown to be a massive threat to the then current status quo; she uses the supreme law as a shield for her actions, but is always couched in her position when it comes to faith and in the unrelenting power of her own personal conscience. She is shown to offer her life for sacrifice to please the principles which stand higher than average human laws (Donellan. 1999). On the other hand Creon is shown to sentence her, which proves to condemnation of his ruling.
Youth vs. Maturity
There is no denying the fact that the conflict between youth and maturity is shown by excess or no pride which is most common in Sophcles works is depicted as a trait which is heavily despised by the Gods and is worthy of being punished without any mercy. In Antigone Sophcles mentions the type of pride and arrogance that forces man to substitute divine laws with manmade laws which are limited in their thinking. In the context of the play Creon creates laws thinking that it will substitute the laws laid down by the Gods and calls it the Divine law hence showcasing pride which is worthy of punishment for no human is capable of creating laws that can substitute divine laws and claim it to be right and above any law (Saxonhouse. 1992). As a result of this when the Prophet Tiresias comes to warn Creon that he will suffer a horrible fate, he realizes what he has done but still refuses to admit that fact that he has made a horrible mistake and only bends before the Prophet because he wants his life to be spared, however he does not realize that he has pushed too far this time and as a result he must see the loss of his family in front of his
In the Anouilh version of Antigone, the Nazi occupation is compared to the king Creon as he is shown to be corrupt and blinded by ambitions just like the regime. The clearest example is arrogance, unperceptive power and downright cruelty for the people around them (Saxonhouse. 1992).
Hero vs. Ordinary Human
In both the Antigones the difference between hero and an ordinary human has always been evident and this is showcased by the will of determination to change one's current routine, rules and the policies the common people have to follow and the upper strata is left to do as they will in such times a hero is needed to show what is right and wrong. Hence in one way or the other determination is present in each and every character of the play. Even though fate plays an even more important role in the…
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We're still trying to figure out how to properly harness the power of hydrogen as a clean energy source — and now we might be able to pick up some unexpected pointers from some bizarre symbiotic bacteria found at the ocean depths.
Many mussels found around hydrothermal vents live in a symbiotic relationship with bacteria, which handle key biological functions for their host. In one instance, the bacteria serve as the powerhouse for the mussels, processing materials around them into usable energy. Intriguingly, these bacteria are actually taking in hydrogen as their power source, making them the natural equivalent of the hydrogen fuel cells we're currently working to build.
Hydrothermal vents shoot out a steady stream of inorganic chemicals such as hydrogen sulfide, ammonium, methane, iron and, crucially, hydrogen. Since the bottom of the ocean is about as far away from sunlight as it's possible to get, the energy producers that live around these vents cannot make use of photosynthesis like their counterparts on land. Instead, they have to harvest the inorganic chemicals to produce energy, in a process known as chemosynthesis.
Until now, researchers were only aware of two broad types of chemosynthetic microbes - ones that processed hydrogen sulfide for their host, and ones that processed methane. But now researchers at the Max Planck Institute have discovered a third, and it's the hydrogen-harvest bacteria of the Logatchev hydrothermal vent field deep beneath the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
It makes sense that the bacteria at this particular vent would look to hydrogen as an energy source. Logatchev has the highest known hydrogen concentrations in its plumes of any vent, and the researchers calculate that microbes could harvest seven times as much energy using hydrogen as they could with methane, and eighteen times what they could hope to get from hydrogen sulfide.
It appears that these mussels and their symbiotic partners are far from the only organisms to make use of hydrogen as an energy source, but this is the first time that we've actually observed this particular process. Now the only real question is whether there's any chance we can throw some hydrogen and some deep-sea mussels into a car engine, and just sort of see what happens next...
Via the Max Planck Institute. Image by MARUM.
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