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Solar storms: Two breakthroughs could lead to better warnings
The solar storms that cause blackouts and damage satelites have always been hard to predict, but two new methods of monitoring them could lead to much more accurate forecasts.
Intense solar storms can disrupt satellites, airline and electric-utility operations, and, in the case of astronauts on orbit, directly endanger lives.
Thursday, independent teams of researchers unveiled a pair of storm-tracking techniques that could significantly improve forecasts of "space weather" storms, the researchers say.
One team's approach tracks magnetic fields while they are still taking shape nearly 40,000 miles below the sun's surface, well before they form and corral groups of sunspots on the solar surface. These sunspot groups represent active regions that spawn coronal-mass ejections – outbursts that can send up to 1 billion tons of hot plasma hurtling through space at up to 1 million miles an hour.
The second team used a pair of sun-watching satellites to build detailed images of a coronal-mass ejection and its evolution as it traveled from the sun to Earth. Until now, researchers had been able to track these eruptions in detail for only about the first 20 percent of the trip, yet a cloud's structure and speed, among other traits, can change markedly across the missing 80 percent of the trip.
Between the two projects, the teams have developed tools to track some of the most severe types of space weather from gestation within the sun to delivery at Earth's doorstep.
For federal space-weather forecasters, these techniques could lead to substantial improvements in the accuracy of their forecasts.
The largest coronal-mass ejections most often come from active, sunspot-dotted regions of the solar surface. "It is pretty exciting to be able to look underneath the sun and try to predict when an active region will appear," says Alysha Reinard, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo.
With the new ability to track in detail a coronal-mass ejection along its complete trip, it should be possible to predict effects at Earth to within eight hours of its arrival, as opposed to today's 12- to 14-hour window, she says. Such an improvement could, for instance, allow airliners flying intercontinental routes to travel along the most fuel efficient routes longer before they have to change course to avoid air space subject to radio blackouts, which solar storms can bring.
The developments come as two scientists in Britain suggest that over the next several decades, solar storms could become a more significant problem than they are today. And it isn't just because of the spread of vulnerable technologies, such as power grids.
If the sun is entering a prolonged phase when the peak sunspot activity is relatively weak to nonexistent, solar storms would become fewer in number but more powerful when they do occur. Their conclusions appeared in the May 11 issues of the Journal of Geophysical Research and is based on Antarctic-ice-core reconstructions of past solar activity.
To spot the changes inside the sun that appear to herald a coming blossom of sunspots, a team led by Stanford University graduate student Stathis Ilonidis used data from the SOHO spacecraft, a collaboration between the European Space Agency and NASA. SOHO orbits the sun within a gravitational sweet spot that lies some 1.5 million miles from Earth, in the sun's direction. There, gravity from the sun and Earth in effect cancel each other, allowing the craft to stay put with few or no additional maneuvers needed.
Mr. Ilonidis and colleagues used an imager on SOHO that can detect changes in the intensity and direction of acoustic waves in the sun. These waves are generated by vigorous convection as the searing gases within the sun rise, cool, and sink again to be reheated by the star's nuclear furnace.
Scientists had long thought that the magnetic activity that generated sunspot regions originated deep within the sun. The results Ilonidis and colleagues are publishing in Friday's issue of the journal Science represent what he says are the first observations of this deep process.
The team looked at four different sunspot outbreaks and spotted the deep magnetic precursors for each. The strongest of their examples occurred Oct. 26, 2003. The next step is to look at a large number of sunspot outbreaks to see how consistently the precursor signals the team identified show up.
In addition to the Paul Revere-like "sunspots are coming" data SOHO provide, the team also says it's possible to estimate the intensity of a sunspot outbreak from the speed with which the magnetic fields responsible migrate up from deep in the sun.
Once an active region spawns a coronal-mass ejection, observations pioneered by Dr. DeForest's team could take over. The team used visible images from one of NASA's two STEREO spacecraft. The STEREO mission involves a pair of sun-watching orbiters traveling in opposite directions around the star but at the same distance as Earth.
Using new signal-processing techniques, the team was able to catch the full trip and evolution of a coronal-mass ejection by capturing the vanishingly faint sunlight that in effect glints off of the particles themselves.
Early in its travels, the massive cloud is dense and relatively compact, making it easy to see. But after it travels about 20 percent of the distance from the sun to Earth the cloud grows diffuse. By the time it reaches Earth three days later, it can arrive "as a 50-million-mile-tall wall of plasma," DeForest says.
As it travels, the plasma's interaction with the sun's extended magnetic field alters the cloud's shape and creates voids, filaments, and other features that make it increasingly difficult to detect.
DeForest's team used innovative image-processing techniques to tease out the light from the cloud. By the time the cloud reaches Earth, the light it reflects is about 10 billion times fainter than the light of a full moon, and some 10,000 times fainter than the stars within the spacecraft's field of view, but because of the way they processed the images they were able to see it.
The team, which described its research during a press briefing today, formally published its results recently in the Astrophysical Journal. | <urn:uuid:e8243480-6c81-458e-a2ca-70b97a73be1d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/0819/Solar-storms-Two-breakthroughs-could-lead-to-better-warnings/(page)/2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396106.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00134-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945941 | 1,308 | 3.296875 | 3 |
Posted by Smokey Stover on March 19, 2008 at 18:48:
In Reply to: Enough to make your hair curl posted by Carole on March 15, 2008 at 09:32:
: What is the origin of the phrase 'It's enough to make your hair curl'?
It's a fairly modern verbal image, first found by the OED in 1949:
"1949 'P. WENTWORTH' Spotlight xix. 119 And anything like the language--..I give you my word it was enough to curl your hair."
The meaning is to horrify, frighten or shock. In the example above it was strong language that would curl your hair, as is often the case with this phrase. I suppose the image comes from the fact that it takes a lot to turn straight hair curly. It's one of those invented images that caught on. Shock and horror don't actually make your hair curl.
Oddly, another image of how horrifying something may be is that it can cause your hairs to stand on end. This is actually biologically correct, as one effect of fear is to cause hairs to become erect (sometimes called horripilation). This phenomenon is also called goose-flesh or goose-bumps. | <urn:uuid:4563ebc5-290b-4829-8bb3-cd13b9ec84a5> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/57/messages/772.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399425.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00081-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978397 | 257 | 3.015625 | 3 |
These researchers are discovering the truth of former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's declaration, "You can't have good health without good oral health." They're studying the relationships between gum disease and such lifestyle factors as drinking and smoking; ferreting out the mechanism by which periodontal-disease bacteria may contribute to killers like heart attack and stroke; and finding new ways for dental practitioners to screen patients for problems beyond the mouth.
It's an exciting time for dental research, both at UB and nationwide, as scientists continue to discover how pervasive the influence of oral health really is. And through publications and seminar presentations, the university continues to be a hotbed of such research.
"Dental health in the United States is the best in the world because we're continually doing research on oral diseases," says Louis J. Goldberg, professor and dean of the School of Dental Medicine. "And our ability to diagnose and treat those diseases is directly related to research. We're able to provide an environment where students are aware of the importance of research. That we have faculty here doing this research is really to the benefit of society."
ne faculty member whose work has drawn widespread attention, among his scientific colleagues as well as in the popular media, is Robert J. Genco, SUNY Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Oral Biology. An affable man with a sense of humor about his work-his desk features a bumper sticker proclaiming, "FLOSS ... OR DIE!"- he's nevertheless dead serious about the health threats of oral diseases, periodontitis (gum disease) in particular. Among the half dozen types of bacteria that infect the oral tissue, Genco and his colleagues have concentrated on two particular strains in adults and one in children, studying how they act in the body and what implications they have for total-body health.
"One of the things we've found," Genco says, "is that these organisms cause disease by triggering the host to produce tissue destruction. These bacteria induce an immune response. In people who are neutropenic (deficient in the disease-fighting white blood cells called neutrophils), gum disease can be very serious. Diabetics, for example, are known to have very poor neutrophil function, and diabetes is a risk factor for periodontal disease."
In one study, Genco and his colleagues examined 1,500 adults in Erie County and asked, "What puts them at risk for gum disease?" The presence of gum infection, not surprisingly, was a strong factor. But they also found that cigarette smokers were five times as likely to develop gum disease, presumably because smoking reduces the protective action of the immune system. Stress, too, turned out to be a factor in gum disease. People who are under chronic financial stress-one kind of stress that's easy to measure-are at greater risk, Genco says.
Another study found that low calcium intake is strongly related to gum disease, both for people with inadequate calcium in their diets and for postmenopausal women, who have a tendency toward decreased bone density. "One-third of the population gets only half as much calcium as they should," Genco says. "I think it's important to let women know that they're at risk for losing teeth if they don't address the risk of bone loss from menopause."
The studies that have captured the attention of television and newspapers, however, are those that have linked periodontal disease to such killers as stroke and heart attack. Why there should be such a relationship is not yet fully understood, Genco says.
Previous studies had shown that other infections--Chlamydia pneumoniae and ulcers--were connected with heart disease, he says. But only in the past 10 years have researchers begun to connect periodontal bacteria to heart and other systemic problems. "It's emerging. It's controversial. We don't yet have full data, but the evidence is accumulating and becoming more convincing," Genco says.
In a study of the Pima Indians of Arizona, a population characterized by high levels of gum disease, Genco and his colleagues found that, among those with gum disease, the risk of heart attack was almost three times higher than for those with healthy gums. The Pima use very little tobacco, so the researchers could say with confidence that smoking was not a significant factor in their high rate of heart attacks.
A subsequent study carried out at UB with Maurizio Trevisan, chair of the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, found that although heart attack patients were heavily infected with all types of bacteria, the risk of infarction was significantly related to only three types of oral bacteria: Bacteroides forsythus, Porphyromonas gingivalis and Campylobacter rectus.
Joseph J. Zambon, professor of periodontology and associate dean for academic affairs in the School of Dental Medicine, has been conducting related research on atheromas, the fatty nodules that form on the inner walls of arteries. Atheromas can cause heart attack by closing off the blood vessels that supply blood to the heart muscle, and can cause stroke if they break off and clog an artery in the brain.
Traditional thinking, says Zambon, has it that atheromas are related to a variety of factors, such as high cholesterol levels, as well as diabetes. Now, he says, the idea is emerging that infections may have something to do with their formation. He posed the question, "Could oral pathogens be contributing to the formation of these deadly artery blockers?"
To find out, he and his colleague, Violet Haraszthy, studied atheromas removed from the carotid arteries of hospital patients. By analyzing the DNA of the nodules, they determined that in about half the samples, periodontal pathogens were indeed present.
That doesn't prove that the oral bacteria caused the blockage, Zambon notes. It could be that the nodule formed for other reasons, and oral bacteria accumulated in it as blood flowed past. But "you build up a body of evidence," he says. The next step will be a randomized clinical trial in which patients will take antibiotics to see whether that reduces the incidence of heart attack and stroke.
"This is an emerging story," Zambon says. "The idea is that oral infections have a bigger role in systemic problems than we previously thought." And, he says, it's one that people need to keep tabs on as more is learned about that relationship. "Men, especially, don't appreciate the consequences," he says. "If people have the idea that gum disease might cause them to lose their teeth, they may not pay much attention; however, if they know it may cause them to have a heart attack or stroke, that may have more of an effect" on their health habits.
Laurie C. Carter, associate professor of oral diagnostic sciences, has been working on a study similarly related to stroke. It's one that has immediate implications for what dentists do every day in the office.
A panoramic X ray, she points out, images not only the teeth and jaw, but also the soft tissue of the neck down to the carotid blood vessels. Dentists routinely examine the teeth on such radiographs, but it's now clear that there's another clue to good health in those pictures. "You don't see the vessels," Carter says, "unless there's calcified atherosclerotic plaque present"-- the kind of blockages that could indicate a significant risk for stroke.
"It's a totally silent disease," she says. "Stroke is the third-leading cause of death in the United States, so it's a public health problem of fairly wide scope. And very few people who suffer stroke have any advance indication that they're headed for trouble."
Unless, that is, their dentist tells them that their carotid blood vessels look worrisome and they should see their primary physician. With ultrasound diagnosis, some of these patients have found stenosis--a constriction of the vessels--anywhere from 30 to 40 percent, all the way up to 99 percent. These patients are in critical danger and are taken into surgery within a week or two.
Carter and her colleagues are now documenting this diagnostic tool. They are taking patients whose X rays show calcification for ultrasound diagnosis, and correlating the degree of stenosis found to the area of surface calcification on the X rays.
"We can't go out and do a mass screening like we do for blood pressure," Carter says. "But if there is calcification, you know there is disease."
Sara G. Grossi, clinical director of the Periodontal and Implant Research Center at UB, and her colleagues are studying lifestyle risk factors for gum disease, using data from the federal government's massive National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Analyzing data from nearly 6,500 survey subjects in that study, Grossi looked at alcohol consumption and antioxidant intake and discovered that both bear significant relationships to the development of gum disease. Her results replicated the findings from the school's own Erie County study that identified patterns of gum disease and dental decay.
ur studies indicated that the effects of smoking and alcohol on the body tissues are absolutely phenomenal," says Grossi. "It's important to have adequate intake of these antioxidants (such as vitamins A, C and E) in general, just to be able to neutralize free radicals and maintain a balance of health. We found that this effect was even more pronounced in individuals who were putting this to the greatest test, such as smokers."
The lesson, she says, is that "diet plays a bigger role in chronic diseases and infections than we previously recognized. We are probably being a little naive ... thinking that because we eat three times a day we have an adequate diet, meaning one that is sufficient in nutrients. What this study showed is that diet and specific nutrients in the diet (such as calcium) are very important to building bone and skeleton tissue and maintaining oral health.
"There is some intuitiveness to this, but the advantage we have in our current position is that these are the facts, and we are now empowered with this knowledge and can really utilize this information to our benefit. For example, in terms of children, we can make sure their intake of calcium is sufficient to support building a skeleton that is strong and will support them throughout their lives."
Grossi's conclusion: "I like to say that science has taught me one thing--my mother was right!"
Scott Thomas is copyediting coordinator of the Buffalo News. | <urn:uuid:3c7be155-5c69-4839-b621-93eabaac4b49> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.buffalo.edu/UBT/UBT-archives/13_ubtw00/features/feature2.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396100.16/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00049-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972894 | 2,191 | 2.84375 | 3 |
What exactly is “creation care?”
Creation care highlights our responsibility to serve and care for everything that God has created – people and place. Scripture tells us that God created the world, called it “good,” and then placed humans in charge of the earth as stewards (Gen. 1:28-30). Everything still belongs to God (Psalm 24:1-2), but we now have a responsibility. As Christians, it is our desire to honor God by employing good stewardship of the earth and by making wise decisions about how our environmental impact affects our neighbors, both locally and globally. At its core, creation care is a spiritual issue that directly relates to our views on consumption, materialism, stewardship, thankfulness, simplicity, and love for our neighbor. Taking care of creation is our response to the awesome God who created it.
How is creation care different from “environmentalism?”
Both creation care and environmentalism take seriously the dynamic relationship between humans and the environment, believing that our choices and actions have an important impact upon the natural world. However, while most environmentalists may be motivated by valid and commendable goals, they overlook the fundamental relationship between the natural world and it’s Creator.
Creation care emphasizes this relationship by viewing environmental responsibility as part of our worshipful response to God through the stewardship of everything entrusted to us. Creation care goes beyond mere stewardship, however, and concerns itself with the ways in which our lifestyle and environmental impact affect both our relationship with God and with those around us. Jesus said that the two greatest commandments were to love God and love your neighbor. Creation care means loving God by responsibly living in the world he has created, and loving our neighbor by refusing to negatively impact his or her natural environment, health, and quality of life.
Ultimately, the difference between creation care and environmentalism may be less in the goals we pursue, but more in the fundamental values that motivate us.
Does creation care mean worshipping nature?
Absolutely not. Creation care entails worshipping our Creator by respecting and being good stewards of that which he has created. Nature points to God (Romans 1:20), but it is not God.
Don’t we have plenty of other important issues to deal with, such as poverty, hunger, terrorism, and sanctity of life issues? Why should we focus so much effort on the environment?
All of these issues are extremely important. At the same time, pitting earth care against people care presents a false dichotomy. The Christian faith does not consist of a narrow set of issues, but rightly addresses all moral causes—particularly those related to justice and compassion. In reality, environmental sustainability and Christian care for others are inextricably linked together. For example:
- Our addiction to oil results in large amounts of money being sent to unstable governments in the Middle East that are known for human rights abuses and for sponsoring terrorism.
- The enormous demand for cheap energy results in coal plants that ruin the drinking water (not to mention the health) of rural Appalachia.
- Deforestation in the Amazon, due to increased demand for cheap meat, contributes to spreading desertification in poverty stricken West Africa.
- Changing climatic conditions results in increased droughts and flooding, as well as rising sea levels, for many of the poorest people in the world.
- Purchasing the cheapest possible goods at large mega-stores often sends money to sweatshops in East Asia where working conditions are intolerable. The list goes on and on.
Creation care is not a matter of prioritizing the environment over individuals. Rather, it entails recognizing that our interactions with the natural world result not only in environmental consequences, but in humanitarian costs as well.
Where does the Bible talk about caring for creation?
There are countless verses pointing toward our responsibility to care for the natural world, God’s concern for what he has created, and the worship that creation naturally ascribes to God by its very existence. For a larger listing of verses, visit Blessed Earth's list at http://www.blessedearth.org/resources/creation-care-scripture/. Here’s a partial listing of a few key verses:
- Genesis 1:28 – 30
- Genesis 9:8 – 17
- Deuteronomy 10:14
- Psalm 19:1 – 4
- Psalm 65: 9 – 13
- Psalm 104
- Nehemiah 9:6
- Micah 6:1 – 4, 7 – 8
- Romans 1:20
- Romans 8:19 – 23
- Philippians 2:4 – 8
- Colossians 1:16
A lot of people talk about “sustainability.” What does sustainability mean in relation to the environment?
Simply put, sustainability means living within our collective means. Environmental sustainability refers to meeting our natural resource needs (including water, food, minerals, energy, etc.) in such a way that we do not negatively impact the ability of others to meet their same needs. Sustainability places a particular emphasis on the needs of the poor, who are often disadvantaged by first-world consumption patterns, in addition to the long-term well being of future generations. From a biblical perspective, this concept is perhaps best illustrated by the parable of the good Samaritan who went out of his way to make personal sacrifices to care for both the immediate and long-term physical needs of a complete stranger.
What does “Fair Trade” mean? And why should it matter to me?
What many people do not realize is that the cheap coffee, tea, and chocolate we buy in the store (in addition to many other products) often comes at the expense of a decent livelihood for poverty-stricken farmers around the world. These farmers are frequently forced by large multinational corporations to sell their products at exorbitantly low prices and barely receive enough income to meet their basic needs. Fair Trade products seek to correct this inequity by guaranteeing a decent minimum wage to farmers. In addition, Fair Trade products are generally grown using more sustainable farming techniques, minimizing their environmental impact. What may cost a few cents more to you and I will result in a great difference in the life of many farmers all over the developing world.
What about global warming?
Regardless of one’s perspective on anthropogenic (human caused) global warming, the evidence of a changing climate is all too clear—the earth is warming, precipitation patterns are changing, sea levels are rising, and numerous species are going extinct. In an effort to make sense of these challenges, many people erroneously view global warming as a political issue, as if policy could help us interpret such changes. In fact, the examination of human influence on the global climate system is entirely a scientific issue with moral implications.
Despite uncertainty among the general public, the scientific debate over global warming is largely settled, with near unanimous agreement among climatologists that increased human emissions of greenhouse gases are contributing toward a changing climate. This conclusion is based on hundreds of well-documented, peer-reviewed scientific publications from the world's top climate experts. Perhaps most importantly, scientists tell us that such changes will significantly impact millions of people around the world. More and longer droughts, increased flooding, more severe weather events, mass species loss, spreading desertification, and abnormal growing patterns will all influence the ways in which we live.These changes present one of the greatest social justice challenges of our time. Not only will the consequences be global in scope, but they will also considerably impact our quality of life. More significantly, the poorest people (those who have emitted relatively few greenhouse gases, and are thus the least responsible) will be the most severely affected. The challenge for Christians will be in our ability to recognize the moral and ethical implications of this crisis, and to respond faithfully toward our local and global neighbors, as well as toward future generations. | <urn:uuid:20946a13-308b-463e-9799-132c09172d26> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.houghton.edu/creation-care/faqs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399425.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00035-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956249 | 1,632 | 2.671875 | 3 |
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Migration : Types and AdvantagesBY: David Prakash Kumar | Category: Politics | Post Date: 2009-06-22
Migration is the movement of people from one place to another. There are various reasons for people to migrate. Migration can be from one country to another. It can also be from one place in a country to another place within the same country. This kind of movement of people on a large scale has its own effects. These may be either good or detrimental.
This article considers the impact of migration on the individual who is migrating. Migration is common among all groups of people in all socio economic groups. The highest number of migrants, though, is in people of the lower socio - economic groups. The reason for this is not very difficult to understand. These people are migrating to seek a better socio economic status.
Types of migration and their advantages:
1. Economic Migration: The migrant may be able to earn more money in the place where they are migrating. This is the most common cause of migration. People migrate in search of better work prospects. This will help them earn more and support their family that may have migrated with them. In some situations, only the breadwinner of the family migrates, leaving all the others behind.
2. Political migration : If the individual is escaping from a war zone, then that is for saving themselves and to have a safe life. This has been seen in the recent wars around the world. Each war causes an increased migration from the conflict zone to other areas nearby that are peaceful.
3. Social Migration: Migrants can also be moving because some of the family has already migrated. These people may be migrating to join them. This happens on a smaller scale and is quite insignificant.
4. Migrants may also have a better health care facility in the place that they are migrating to. This will help them lead a healthier life.
5. To provide better education for children could also be a reason for migration. This is the kind of migration that occurs in people of higher socio economic status. All the other causes of migrations were mainly in the lower socio economic groups.
6. Environmental migration : This is the migration that occurs after natural disasters that may include floods, droughts, earthquakes. A recent example of this kind of migration was seen in the aftermath of the tsunami. Thousands of people living on the seacoast moved to places inland to save themselves from the unpredictability of nature.
These are the various types of migrations seen and their reasons. These factors pull people from a place they know to a new unfamiliar place. With modern transportation and communication facilities, more and more people are migrating.
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The cell phone was invented 40 years ago today. How has it changed our lives?
On this day, April 3, in 1973, a man named Martin Cooper crossed Sixth Avenue clutching a telephonic gadget that would change history beyond all imagining. The device was the world’s first handheld cellphone, and Cooper had invited reporters to watch him make its first public call. Even sophisticated New Yorkers stopped and gaped. This new phone was not only cordless, it was small and light—just 10 inches long and a mere 2 1/2 pounds.
Cooper was inspired to make a genuinely mobile cellphone after watching Captain Kirk’s gold flip-top “communicator” on Star Trek.
Today's Community Question on Tech Woot is whether cell phones have been good or bad for humanity, Not much discussion going on over there, but I would like to know how cell phones have changed the way you live, work and play.
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Mathematical equations aren't just useful — many are quite beautiful. And many scientists admit they are often fond of particular formulas not just for their function, but for their form, and the simple, poetic truths they contain.
While certain famous equations, such as Albert Einstein's E = mc^2, hog most of the public glory, many less familiar formulas have their champions among scientists. LiveScience asked physicists, astronomers and mathematicians for their favorite equations; here's what we found:
The equation above was formulated by Einstein as part of his groundbreaking general theory of relativity in 1915. The theory revolutionized how scientists understood gravity by describing the force as a warping of the fabric of space and time.
"It is still amazing to me that one such mathematical equation can describe what space-time is all about," said Space Telescope Science Institute astrophysicist Mario Livio, who nominated the equation as his favorite. "All of Einstein's true genius is embodied in this equation." [Einstein Quiz: Test Your Knowledge of the Genius]
"The right-hand side of this equation describes the energy contents of our universe (including the 'dark energy' that propels the current cosmic acceleration)," Livio explained. "The left-hand side describes the geometry of space-time. The equality reflects the fact that in Einstein's general relativity, mass and energy determine the geometry, and concomitantly the curvature, which is a manifestation of what we call gravity." [6 Weird Facts About Gravity]
"It's a very elegant equation," said Kyle Cranmer, a physicist at New York University, adding that the equation reveals the relationship between space-time and matter and energy. "This equation tells you how they are related — how the presence of the sun warps space-time so that the Earth moves around it in orbit, etc. It also tells you how the universe evolved since the Big Bang and predicts that there should be black holes."
Another of physics' reigning theories, the standard model describes the collection of fundamental particles currently thought to make up our universe.
The theory can be encapsulated in a main equation called the standard model Lagrangian (named after the 18th-century French mathematician and astronomer Joseph Louis Lagrange), which was chosen by theoretical physicist Lance Dixon of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California as his favorite formula.
"It has successfully described all elementary particles and forces that we've observed in the laboratory to date — except gravity," Dixon told LiveScience. "That includes, of course, the recently discovered Higgs(like) boson, phi in the formula. It is fully self-consistent with quantum mechanics and special relativity."
The standard model theory has not yet, however, been united with general relativity, which is why it cannot describe gravity. [Infographic: The Standard Model Explained]
While the first two equations describe particular aspects of our universe, another favorite equation can be applied to all manner of situations. The fundamental theorem of calculus forms the backbone of the mathematical method known as calculus, and links its two main ideas, the concept of the integral and the concept of the derivative.
"In simple words, [it] says that the net change of a smooth and continuous quantity, such as a distance travelled, over a given time interval (i.e. the difference in the values of the quantity at the end points of the time interval) is equal to the integral of the rate of change of that quantity, i.e. the integral of the velocity," said Melkana Brakalova-Trevithick, chair of the math department at Fordham University, who chose this equation as her favorite. "The fundamental theorem of calculus (FTC) allows us to determine the net change over an interval based on the rate of change over the entire interval."
The seeds of calculus began in ancient times, but much of it was put together in the 17th century by Isaac Newton, who used calculus to describe the motions of the planets around the sun.
An "oldie but goodie" equation is the famous Pythagorean theorem, which every beginning geometry student learns.
This formula describes how, for any right-angled triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse (the longest side of a right triangle) equals the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides.
"The very first mathematical fact that amazed me was Pythagorean theorem," said mathematician Daina Taimina of Cornell University. "I was a child then and it seemed to me so amazing that it works in geometry and it works with numbers!" [5 Seriously Mind-Boggling Math Facts]
This simple formula encapsulates something pure about the nature of spheres:
"It says that if you cut the surface of a sphere up into faces, edges and vertices, and let F be the number of faces, E the number of edges and V the number of vertices, you will always get V – E + F = 2," said Colin Adams, a mathematician at Williams College in Massachusetts.
"So, for example, take a tetrahedron, consisting of four triangles, six edges and four vertices," Adams explained. "If you blew hard into a tetrahedron with flexible faces, you could round it off into a sphere, so in that sense, a sphere can be cut into four faces, six edges and four vertices. And we see that V – E + F = 2. Same holds for a pyramid with five faces — four triangular, and one square — eight edges and five vertices," and any other combination of faces, edges and vertices.
"A very cool fact! The combinatorics of the vertices, edges and faces is capturing something very fundamental about the shape of a sphere," Adams said.
Einstein makes the list again with his formulas for special relativity, which describes how time and space aren't absolute concepts, but rather are relative depending on the speed of the observer. The equation above shows how time dilates, or slows down, the faster a person is moving in any direction.
"The point is it's really very simple," said Bill Murray, a particle physicist at the CERN laboratory in Geneva. "There is nothing there an A-level student cannot do, no complex derivatives and trace algebras. But what it embodies is a whole new way of looking at the world, a whole attitude to reality and our relationship to it. Suddenly, the rigid unchanging cosmos is swept away and replaced with a personal world, related to what you observe. You move from being outside the universe, looking down, to one of the components inside it. But the concepts and the maths can be grasped by anyone that wants to."
Murray said he preferred the special relativity equations to the more complicated formulas in Einstein's later theory. "I could never follow the maths of general relativity," he said.
1 = 0.999999999….
This simple equation, which states that the quantity 0.999, followed by an infinite string of nines, is equivalent to one, is the favorite of mathematician Steven Strogatz of Cornell University.
"I love how simple it is — everyone understands what it says — yet how provocative it is," Strogatz said. "Many people don't believe it could be true. It's also beautifully balanced. The left side represents the beginning of mathematics; the right side represents the mysteries of infinity."
Euler–Lagrange equations and Noether's theorem
"These are pretty abstract, but amazingly powerful," NYU's Cranmer said. "The cool thing is that this way of thinking about physics has survived some major revolutions in physics, like quantum mechanics, relativity, etc."
Here, L stands for the Lagrangian, which is a measure of energy in a physical system, such as springs, or levers or fundamental particles. "Solving this equation tells you how the system will evolve with time," Cranmer said.
A spinoff of the Lagrangian equation is called Noether's theorem, after the 20th-century German mathematician Emmy Noether. "This theorem is really fundamental to physics and the role of symmetry," Cranmer said. "Informally, the theorem is that if your system has a symmetry, then there is a corresponding conservation law. For example, the idea that the fundamental laws of physics are the same today as tomorrow (time symmetry) implies that energy is conserved. The idea that the laws of physics are the same here as they are in outer space implies that momentum is conserved. Symmetry is perhaps the driving concept in fundamental physics, primarily due to [Noether's] contribution."
"The Callan-Symanzik equation is a vital first-principles equation from 1970, essential for describing how naive expectations will fail in a quantum world," said theoretical physicist Matt Strassler of Rutgers University.
The equation has numerous applications, including allowing physicists to estimate the mass and size of the proton and neutron, which make up the nuclei of atoms.
Basic physics tells us that the gravitational force, and the electrical force, between two objects is proportional to the inverse of the distance between them squared. On a simple level, the same is true for the strong nuclear force that binds protons and neutrons together to form the nuclei of atoms, and that binds quarks together to form protons and neutrons. However, tiny quantum fluctuations can slightly alter a force's dependence on distance, which has dramatic consequences for the strong nuclear force.
"It prevents this force from decreasing at long distances, and causes it to trap quarks and to combine them to form the protons and neutrons of our world," Strassler said. "What the Callan-Symanzik equation does is relate this dramatic and difficult-to-calculate effect, important when [the distance] is roughly the size of a proton, to more subtle but easier-to-calculate effects that can be measured when [the distance] is much smaller than a proton."
The minimal surface equation
"The minimal surface equation somehow encodes the beautiful soap films that form on wire boundaries when you dip them in soapy water," said mathematician Frank Morgan of Williams College. "The fact that the equation is 'nonlinear,' involving powers and products of derivatives, is the coded mathematical hint for the surprising behavior of soap films. This is in contrast with more familiar linear partial differential equations, such as the heat equation, the wave equation, and the Schrödinger equation of quantum physics."
The Euler line
Glen Whitney, founder of the Museum of Math in New York, chose another geometrical theorem, this one having to do with the Euler line, named after 18th-century Swiss mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler.
"Start with any triangle," Whitney explained. "Draw the smallest circle that contains the triangle and find its center. Find the center of mass of the triangle — the point where the triangle, if cut out of a piece of paper, would balance on a pin. Draw the three altitudes of the triangle (the lines from each corner perpendicular to the opposite side), and find the point where they all meet. The theorem is that all three of the points you just found always lie on a single straight line, called the 'Euler line' of the triangle."
Whitney said the theorem encapsulates the beauty and power of mathematics, which often reveals surprising patterns in simple, familiar shapes. | <urn:uuid:f263ab25-4305-4283-b651-bc660801d7be> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.livescience.com/26681-most-beautiful-mathematical-equations.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392159.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00021-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950254 | 2,369 | 3.140625 | 3 |
“Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes” on view in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery March 15—June 22, 2014
Press Preview: Friday, March 14, 10 a.m. - noon
Enhanced pseudocolor image of the Archimedes Palimpsest (undertext orientation). Copyright the owner of the Archimedes Palimpsest, licensed for use under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Access Rights.*
Updated from Dec. 12, 2013
SAN MARINO, Calif.—The oldest surviving copy of treatises by the great classical mathematician Archimedes will be on view at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in an exhibition that documents how the text was discovered and how new technology was employed to make it legible. The exhibition, “Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes,” is presented in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery from March 15 to June 22, 2014.
Known as the Archimedes Palimpsest, the manuscript first went on view in 2011 in an exhibition created by the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, whose staff oversaw conservation and research on the text for 12 years before presenting it to the public. The text was purchased in 1998 at auction by an anonymous collector and subsequently loaned to the Walters for conservation, imaging, and transcription.
“Lost and Found” displays 20 leaves from the palimpsest, other manuscripts from the Walters Art Museum, and related objects from The Huntington’s history of science collection and from UCLA that help contextualize the palimpsest. Multimedia displays and other material round out the exhibition, showing the range of conservation and imaging techniques used during the 12-year-long process of discovery.
The Huntington is the only other venue to host the exhibition. “We are delighted to be able to show this rare object and to walk visitors through the meticulous process researchers went through to reveal some of Archimedes’ great works, two of which were hitherto unknown,” said David Zeidberg, the director of the library at The Huntington.
The Great Mathematical Genius of Antiquity
Archimedes lived in Syracuse, Sicily in the third century B.C. and died at the hands of a Roman soldier during the siege of the city in 212 B.C. He is legendary for the feats he is said to have performed in defending the city from the Romans, including using mirrors to direct the sun’s rays and burn the boats of the enemy. A mathematician, physicist, inventor, engineer, and astronomer, Archimedes is considered to be among the world’s greatest classical thinkers, in the company of other great scientists such as Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. Archimedes discovered the principle of Specific Gravity—that different types of things have different densities relative to water. He also discovered the Law of the Lever—that magnitudes are in equilibrium at distances reciprocally proportional to their weights; and he calculated to extraordinary accuracy the value of Pi—the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
Archimedes’ importance is evidenced in the treatises that he wrote, two of which survive only in the Archimedes Palimpsest. By studying these treatises over the last several years, it has been discovered that he calculated with Infinity and that he wrote the first treatise in an important branch of mathematics called Combinatorics, which is concerned with how many answers there are to any given problem.
The Journey of the Palimpsest
In 10th-century Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), an anonymous scribe copied Archimedes’ mathematical treatises in the original Greek onto parchment. Three hundred years later, a Greek Orthodox monk literally recycled the document to use the parchment for another purpose: he erased the Archimedes text, cut the pages along the center fold, rotated the leaves 90 degrees, and folded them in half. The pages were then bound with other erased manuscript leaves to create a prayer book. This recycled book is known as a palimpsest—referring to a piece of writing that has been erased or scraped off to make room for other writing; “palimpsesting” was commonplace hundreds of years ago when parchment and paper were hard to come by.
Over the hundreds of years that followed, successive owners held onto the prayer book, not knowing of the Archimedes underwriting until the late 1800s. It was at that time that Archimedes scholar Johan Ludvig Heiberg saw the book in Istanbul and recognized seven treatises by Archimedes underneath the prayers; he had discovered the oldest surviving source for Archimedes’ writings. He transcribed as much of the text as was possible, and he took photographs, which turned out to be crucial to the ultimate discovery of the significance of the book.
But little is known about what happened to the palimpsest during the 20th century; after Heiberg’s discoveries, it disappeared for decades. What is known is that over these “lost years” some of the pages went missing, mold set in, and illustrations of the Evangelists, forged to look medieval, had been painted on some of the pages. There is some suggestion that a book dealer may have added the illustrations to make the palimpsest more marketable. Eventually, the book, comprising 177 leaves, was put up for auction and sold in 1998.
A Painstaking Process
During the 12 years the Walters Art Museum worked on the text, some 80 scientists and scholars in the fields of conservation, imaging, and classical studies engaged in the painstaking process of discovery.
“It was in horrible condition, having suffered a thousand years of weather, travel, and abuse,” said Will Noel, Archimedes Project Director and then curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum, in a 2011 news release. The text was filthy; it had been singed by fire and dripped on with wax. In fact, before imaging could begin, the manuscript had to be stabilized. It took four years alone simply to disassemble and remove adhesive from the folds, given its fragility.
“I documented everything and saved all of the tiny pieces from the book, including paint chips, parchment fragments, and thread and put them into sleeves so we knew what pages they came from,” said Abigail Quandt, the Walters Art Museum’s senior conservator of manuscripts and rare books.
Once stabilized, the book went through a series of high-tech imaging processes to coax out the ancient text and diagrams. Teams of scientists combined different light sources—ultraviolet light, strobe, and tungsten—to get the job done. Additional imaging, using powerful synchrotron radiation at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, showed writing that had been hidden beneath religious paintings that had been added in the 20th century.
What Was Discovered in the Palimpsest
The palimpsest contains a copy of a previously unknown Archimedes work, his treatise called The Method of Mechanical Theorems. In it, Archimedes focused on the concept of infinity, showing how the use of infinitesimals could be employed to determine area or volume. His approach was remarkably similar to 17th-century works by Newton and Leibnitz, leading to the invention of calculus.
The manuscript also contains the only surviving copy in the original Greek text of his work On Floating Bodies, as well as the text of his works On The Measurement of the Circle, On the Sphere and the Cylinder, On Spiral Lines, and On the Equilibrium of Planes.
Also found only in the Palimpsest is Archimedes’ Stomachion—among the earliest known mathematical puzzles also known as tangrams. Scientists believe that in it Archimedes was trying to discover how many ways one could recombine 14 pieces of a geometric puzzle and still make a perfect square. The answer is high and counterintuitive—17,152 combinations. This area of study, known as combinatorics, is critical in modern computing.
This exhibition was organized by the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
Molina Healthcare is proud to support “Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes” at The Huntington. Additional support was provided by Scott Jordan, the MacTon Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation Exhibition and Education Endowment, the Gladys KriebleDelmas Foundation, and Janet and Alan Stanford.
RELATED TO THE EXHIBITION
Archimedes Palimpsest, Vol. I: Catalogue and Commentary
Archimedes Palimpsest, Vol. II: Images and Transcriptions
Reviel Netz (Editor), William Noel (Editor), Natalie Tchernetska (Editor), Nigel Wilson (Editor).
Hardcover: 700 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (2011)
Available at The Huntington’s Gift Shop, two volumes sold as a set: $250
The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist
Reviel Netz (Author), William Noel (Author)
Hardcover: 342 pages
Publisher: Da Capo Press; First Edition (2007)
Available at The Huntington’s Gift Shop, $27.50
April 17 (Thursday) 4:30–6 p.m.
Join David Zeidberg, Avery Director of the Library at The Huntington, for a private tour of the exhibition.
Class Fee: $15. Registration: brownpapertickets.com or 800-838-3006.
“Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes”
May 22 (Thursday) 7:30 p.m.
Botanical Center, Ahmanson Room
Authors of the book relating to the exhibition, William Noel and Reviel Netz, along with Walters Art Museum conservator Abigail Quandt, speak about the Archimedes project.
Free with admission. Registration: brownpapertickets.com or 800-838-3006.
May 23 (Friday) 8:30 a.m–4:30 p.m.
Botanical Center, Ahmanson Room
Symposium on the Archimedes Palimpsest and related Archimedes science.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: High-resolution digital images available on request for publicity use.]
Thea M. Page, 626-405-2260, [email protected]
Susan Turner-Lowe, 626-405-2147, [email protected]
About The Huntington
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens is a collections-based research and educational institution serving scholars and the general public. More information about The Huntington can be found online at huntington.org.
The Huntington is located at 1151 Oxford Rd., San Marino, Calif., 12 miles from downtown Los Angeles. It is open to the public Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday from noon to 4:30 p.m.; and Saturday, Sunday, and Monday holidays from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Summer hours (Memorial Day through Labor Day) are 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Closed Tuesdays and major holidays. Admission on weekdays: $20 adults, $15 seniors (65+), $12 students (ages 12–18 or with full-time student I.D.), $8 youth (ages 5–11), free for children under 5. Group rate, $11 per person for groups of 15 or more. Members are admitted free. Admission on weekends: $23 adults, $18 seniors, $13 students, $8 youth, free for children under 5. Group rate, $14 per person for groups of 15 or more. Members are admitted free. Admission is free to all visitors on the first Thursday of each month with advance tickets. Information: 626-405-2100 or huntington.org.
The Archimedes Palimpsest photographed in 1999. Copyright the owner of the Archimedes Palimpsest, licensed for use under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Access Rights.* John Dean Photographer.
Processed image of the Archimedes Palimpsest, showing the Archimedes text of “Floating Bodies,” as well as a diagram (detail). Copyright the owner of the Archimedes Palimpsest, licensed for use under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Access Rights.*
The Archimedes Palimpsest (prayer book orientation). Copyright the owner of the Archimedes Palimpsest, licensed for use under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Access Rights.*
Forgery of a medieval illustration of St. John in the Archimedes Palimpsest. Copyright the owner of the Archimedes Palimpsest, licensed for use under creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Access Rights.*
The Archimedes Palimpsest being disbound. Copyright the owner of the Archimedes Palimpsest, licensed for use under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Access Rights.* John Dean Photographer.
The Archimedes Palimpsest in 1998 before disbinding. Copyright the owner of the Archimedes Palimpsest, licensed for use under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Access Rights.* John Dean Photographer.
* The Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License allows users to alter and build upon the article and then distribute the resulting work, even commercially. As with all Creative Commons licenses, the work must be attributed to the original author and publisher. This license encourages maximum use and redistribution but gives the author the least control about how the work might appear. The full details of the license are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode. | <urn:uuid:4bb24a1b-bda2-4918-b79f-cb76123360e0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.huntington.org/WebAssets/Templates/content.aspx?id=15096 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402479.21/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00092-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931032 | 2,913 | 2.828125 | 3 |
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Image mosaicing is commonly used to increase the visual field of view by pasting together many images or video frames. Existing mosaicing methods are based on projecting all images onto a predetermined single manifold: A plane is commonly used for a camera translating sideways, a cylinder is used for a panning camera, and a sphere is used for a camera which is both panning and tilting. While different mosaicing methods should therefore be used for different types of camera motion, more general types of camera motion, such as forward motion, are practically impossible for traditional mosaicing. A new methodology to allow image mosaicing in more general cases of camera motion is presented. Mosaicing is performed by projecting thin strips from the images onto manifolds which are adapted to the camera motion. While the limitations of existing mosaicing techniques are a result of using predetermined manifolds, the use of more general manifolds overcomes these limitations. | <urn:uuid:2d46907d-3ae5-4e79-bccb-4c4912bf5c8e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&arnumber=879794&sortType%3Dasc_p_Sequence%26filter%3DAND(p_IS_Number%3A19035) | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393533.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00025-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941499 | 189 | 3.59375 | 4 |
Saturday, September 01, 2007
The first is a report on the increasing number of peer-reviewed scientific articles showing the misguided notions (or outright false claims) of the many alarmists. Among them:
- New peer-reviewed study finds global warming over last century linked to natural causes.
- Belgian weather institute’s (RMI) August 2007 study dismisses decisive role of CO2 in warming.
- Solar Cycle a better explanation for data on surface warming.
- Anthropogenic climate models fail test against real clouds, which would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent.
- Research into how the solar system regulates the earth’s climate...the variable output of the sun, the sun’s gravitational relationship between the earth (and the moon) and earth’s variable orbital relationship with the sun, regulate the earth’s climate.
- CO2’s impact on warming may be excessively exaggerated, so we're likely headed for a cooling.
- NASA temperature data error discovery has lead to 1934 -- not the previously hyped 1998 -- being declared the hottest in U.S. history since records began. (80% of man-made CO2 emissions occurred after 1940!)
- Further data corrections are needed to fix the urbanization of data.
- Greenland and the Arctic aren't behaving as global warming climate models predict!
- Former global warming scientists say the data has now made them global warming skeptics!
Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."Don't be fooled by the guff of those who want to set us on a backwards trajectory. Otherwise, you'll find out all too soon the answer to a bad joke: What's green on the outside, but red to the core? Well...these guys. And don't forget these guys.
The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the "primary" cause of warming, but it doesn't require any belief or support for "catastrophic" global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Forutunately, I've thought about this, too. What are the appropriate limits of the gospel? Whence its perspicuity? What about the exportation of women's liberation through missions? Should we cease the "circumcision" of women among African tribes that are evangelized?
As brutal and savage as one might consider that, the same thought was in the mind of most orchestrators of these 17-20th c. missionary efforts. We have not changed - we simply switch foci. Whereas missionary efforts of 150 years ago may have tried to encourage trim hair and lots of clothing (while saying nothing about the heavy-handed patriarchal family structure), today's missionaries would be content to let "natives" run around in loin cloths so long as they had adequate diversity training.
In each case, we make the fundamental mistake that the gospel is tied to our culture. When we politicize the gospel, evangelism becomes a ploy of party politics (no different from the spread of capitalism or communism "to lift people out of their misery"). The safer method - one which lets the Gospel penetrate and change a culture from within - is to lead people into a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ and then let the Holy Spirit come upon them to transform their culture in appropriate (if agonizingly slow) ways.
Those Cornelius moments happen and teach both missionaries and the missioned how wide God's community is.
Monday, August 27, 2007
In Exodus 28 God dictated the vestments to be worn by the priests of the Old Testament; and for most items, he gave their symbolic meaning. Under the radical liberty of the New Testament, however, there is no such prescription or symbolism imposed by the Divine. Almost no Christian Church tried to use the vestments of the Aaronic priesthood. Instead, the common street clothing of the Roman Empire was used - however, rubrics from the time mention that those worn by the leader of a service should be clean and were normally white. The early Christians saw their gatherings around the Eucharist as festive moments and sought to dress well, as if for a party (not out of any sense of sacerdotalism). As the Roman Empire declined in political sway, the dress of the general populace became shorter and tighter fitting, reflecting the fashions of the Germanic and Gallic tribes that had once been part of the Empire. The clergy, however, retained the older forms. Perhaps it was because at one time the tax systems of the Empire had paid their salary, or it may have been a near-universal conservative impulse among the clergy. Whatever the case, the clergy gave new symbolism to the clothing which they wore. We still have writings from the late Imperial and early medieval period where a new symbolism is gradually seen in what had once been ordinary clothes shared by everyone (see below under the description of each item for specific information).
As the centuries rolled on and the power and wealth of the Church increased, so too did its prestige. Out of an almost giddy sense of liturgical openness, following the expansion into lands far from Rome, a massive influx of music, poetry, narrative, and cultural distinctives changed the look and feel of the Church. Resources were directed toward the elaborate furnishings of the Church as worshipping communities sought to give their very best to the Church. It should be remembered that initially this was an outgrowth of the desire to honor God in their worship and to provide sensory stimuli that would aid in the retention of teaching and of tradition among the illiterate. However, by the late 14th century, less noble intentions became normative. Various religious movements, both lay and clergy-led, had called for radical vows of poverty and demanded that financial corruption and greed be purged from the Church. Reformed adherents to what the Puritans would later call “the Regulative Principle” did away with the historic liturgical vestments as having no Scriptural mandate. In their place, the early Reformers wore their street clothes. At a time when you could tell a person’s profession by what they wore, persons with academic credentials wore their gowns at almost all times. Thus, the learned ministry wore the marks of their scholastic achievements in the pulpit. This was later enshrined and became a new sort of conservative holdover long after these clothes ceased to be everyday dress.
As the Church came into America, there grew an impulse towards simplification – silk gowns are not practical in the wilderness. Furthermore, many ministers had no formal academic degree that would entitle them to the gown of previous generations. Therefore, most Protestant ministers lost the tradition of wearing anything other than the “Sunday best.” They also noticed that this was in many ways a return to the earliest Christian communities who had no regulated forms of dress. Such egalitarianism also fit well with the ethic of the emerging country. A push toward progress relegated many traditions to a position of dusty, “Old World” obsolescence.
In recent years, particularly due to the influence of the Christian ecumenical movement, there has been a trend toward rediscovering traditions laid down by previous generations. Liturgical renewal has created a new demand for symbolism that engages as many of the senses as possible. Thus resurgence in the wearing of vestments that connect us with our forbears across time and denominational tradition is being realized. Below you will find a commonly accepted symbolic meaning for each garment as well as the ancient vesting prayer traditionally employed while one dressed, where applicable. May the reader find them edifying, profitable, and of benefit for both the wearer and worshiper.
The Alb is a full, white, ankle length garment. It has become popular is recent years because of its cheerful white color and innovative styling. The most ancient of Christian vestments, its origins are traced to the Roman tunic, a common piece of clothing until the 5th century. After a catechumen was baptized, they often received a bright white alb as a symbol of their spiritual washing. Thus, the alb is truly the garment of the baptized; as such, it can be worn by any baptized Christian who is taking a part in leading worship. After the fall of Rome, it became a garment unique to the clergy as normal dress. The alb was still worn by anyone providing service in the liturgy until it was supplanted by the surplice and cotta. The alb is best presented in its simplest form – without lace or ornamentation – so that its beauty may flow in its drape. Likewise, its meaning is best preserved when it is kept bright white instead of the flaxen or cream colors that are coming to dominate its usage in some places. It reminds Christians of the multitude dressed in robes, who “have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” (Rev. 7:14). The image reminds each believer that they now stand clothed in the righteousness of Christ and proclaims the hope that someday we will stand with that white-robed multitude washed in the blood of the Lamb. This hope is expressed in the alb’s vesting prayer: “Clothe me, O Lord, and cleanse my heart, that cleansed in the blood of the Lamb I may always enjoy eternal happiness.”
The Amice is a rectangular white cloth, worn as a collar with the alb. Originally designed to protect the finer, silken vestments from natural body and hair oils and to ensure that the neck was unexposed (both for warmth and modesty). It is often omitted with contemporary albs because they close more tightly around the neck. Its historic use recalls the “helmet of salvation.” (Eph. 6:17) This vestment also served as the basis for the later academic hood. “O Lord, place on my head the garment of salvation to expose and reject the attack of the devil.”
Band or Tabs are worn on the style of academic black gown. The academic gown was originally used outside the church, but as a church garment was used first in England and later in Germany and among the Magisterial Reformers. Bands are the remnant of a wider ruff collar (such as was worn in the Elizabethan era). By the latter part of the 18th century they had become the provenance of all who had a university degree. Rarely seen in the US on anyone other than a minister, they remain in common use in the United Kingdom and Canada by barristers and academics. The shape, however, is somewhat different: barristers and graduates tend to wear bands that splay out at approximately an 30º angle and are approximately 6” long; ministers tend to wear bands that have a minimal, or even non-existent, angle so that the overall effect is of a set of bands that appear as a solid piece measuring 4” wide by 5” long. To some, the two tabs suggest the two tables of the Law (as in the Church of Scotland). Others think of “rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Ti 2:15), law and gospel, or Word and Sacrament, but neither of these fanciful notions spring from original use. In some Scandinavian branches of the Church, it remains a rather wide ruff collar.
The Cassock is a full-length black or scarlet (for Doctors of Divinity) garment worn with a clerical collar. Like a fitted shirt above the waist and a full ankle-length skirt below the waist, the cassock comes in two styles. The Roman cassock buttons down the middle (traditionally having 33 buttons, one for each year in Christ’s life). The Sarum (more often called Anglican) cassock buttons at the right shoulder and the waist, with a special button on the chest for the anchoring of an academic hood. This garment began as a simple overcoat that was used for warmth by all classes of peoples in the Middle Ages. Its length was increased and the garment died dark black for the modesty of the clergy. The cassock is the traditional street clothing of the clergy. As such, it is not a liturgical garment in the strictest sense. It became a symbol of the public ministry of the gospel and for that reason was common clothing for preachers. In the pulpit, it is most often worn with bands (see above) under an open preaching gown (see below). In the liturgical churches, it is commonly worn underneath the alb or surplice. Thus, the contrast of the white on black serves as a vivid reminder that any righteousness the minister has is only by the imputation of Christ.
The Chasuble developed from the poncho-like cloak the Paul refers to in 2 Timothy 4:13. Originally it was a warm raincoat worn by virtually everyone until the time of the Frankish kings (c. ad 800). In the church of the High Middle Ages, the chasuble became a highly ornamented garment, made from expensive silks and embroidered in gold and silver thread. For that reason it became know as “the vestment.” The chasuble is worn over the alb during the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Since it is exclusive to those ministers that are ordained to administer the sacrament, some associate it with the Roman Mass and sacerdotal privilege. More recently, liturgical churches of the Reformation have reclaimed this ancient, colorful and graceful vestment as more egalitarian than those vestments rooted in academic rank. Yoked around the neck and burdening the shoulders, the chasuble suggests Jesus’ words, “my yoke is easy and my burden light.” What a compelling invitation to Jesus’ supper when we recall that just before, he said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Mt. 11:28) The prayer used as the chasuble is put on reflects this, “Lord, you said, ‘My yoke is sweet and my burden is light,’ enable me always to rely on your grace and assistance.”
The Cincture is the name given to the robe or belt used around the waists of an alb or cassock. The use of such a belt in Scripture is associated with a call to serve or be ready for action. (Ex 12:11, Lk 12:35 and 1 Pe 1:13) Bible students who recall Agabus’ use of Paul’s belt (Ac 21:11) might well be reminded of the chains of persecution (Mt 5:10,11; 10:17ff) or how Jesus was bound. (Mt 27:2) The traditional cincture vesting prayer sadly suggests a confusion of law and gospel. “Bind me, O Lord, with the cincture of purity and extinguish within me unwanted passions so that I may experience the virtue of continence and chastity.”
The Geneva gown is a V-neck academic gown. Historically black, it has in recent times been used in a variety of colors, and with other adornments. It bears the name of the University of Geneva, from which Calvin adapted it for clerical use. Even to this day, its predominant use is outside the church, worn by graduates, magistrates and judges. It signifies an academically trained person and especially one performing a public function. The Geneva gown has historically been preferred in the non-liturgical protestant churches that use gowns. Historically, the gown was worn open, over a cassock and bands and, in the English-speaking churches, the hood of the preacher’s degree. The sleeves were open, wide and bell-shaped. However, as the cassock ceased to be worn under the gown, the bell sleeve had a cuff inserted to simulate the cassock sleeves underneath. It was traditionally worn with a wide scarf of silk (see Tippet below) that was later changed to velvet and sown directly onto the front of the gown. When someone has a doctoral degree, Americans show the academic rank by adding three doctoral chevrons to the sleeve. In other times and places, it has been considered most appropriate to wear the academic gown of the officiant – whether that be a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate. However, the Geneva gown (upon which the American doctoral gown is based) has a long pedigree within the Reformed tradition and emphasizes the learned preaching of the Word (the doctoral, or teaching, function of the minister). While all vestments cover up the person wearing them the Geneva gown seems to draw the worshipers attention to a void, while vestments with liturgical significance, when properly understood, focus attention on the good news which is the reason and content of our joint worship.
The Maniple is a small stole worn across the left wrist. It is worn only when the chasuble is worn during the Eucharist. Probably because it was an impractical nuisance, it fell out of usage except for Roman Catholics after the Reformation. Originally, like the linen napkin a waiter wears across his arm, the maniple was used by Roman officials as they served. It became a symbol worn by an official when serving on duty. The maniple declares: “This person is here to serve you.” While a symbol of the minister’s public calling to serve, the maniple reminds all believers that true freedom is found only in a life of serving the Lord, not sin and its appetite. “May I fittingly wear the maniple of freedom, O Lord, so that I may always take satisfaction in my calling.”
The Stole is a silk or cloth band of the color of the liturgical season, worn around the neck and hanging down at the front. Originally it was a neck scarf used to wipe the face and chase away insects. Its practical function gave way to its symbolic indication that the wearer is functioning in his called office. It became thin (normally 2-3” wide) and was worn crossed across the chest for those ordained to the presbyterate and for deacons, from the left shoulder to the right hip. The stole was always worn under the chasuble. A recent trend is for a broader stole (often called a preaching or overlay stole) that is approximately 5” wide – which has virtually brought an end to the practice of crossing the stole across the chest. It often has symbols embroidered or appliquéd onto the front at breast-level and is worn over top of the chasuble (or, in the chasuble’s absence, just the alb or surplice). The pastor’s calling is to counter the effects of sin by proclaiming the mysteries of Christ. The stole’s vesting prayer reflects this symbolism. “Give me again, O Lord, the stole of immortality which I lost in the transgression of my first parents, and though I am unworthy to come to Thy sacred mystery, grant that I may rejoice in the same everlastingly.”
The Surplice is a full long, flowing white garb with full sleeves worn over a cassock. A Scandinavian innovation, it allowed pastors serving in cold churches to wear extra-heavy, fur-lined cassocks, which wouldn’t fit under an alb. The surplice serves as an alb, and by the time of the Reformation it replaced the alb for non-communion services. Most consider its symbolism to be the same as that of an alb; however, many have taken note of an alternate symbolism. A white garment worn over a black cassock, it can be thought of as symbolic of Christ’s righteousness covering our sin, or Christ’s glory driving out darkness. The surplice is worn with a stole if ordained, an academic hood if entitled (though never together with a stole), but the surplice is never worn under a chasuble.
The Tippet, or Preaching Scarf, is worn over a preaching gown or surplice. This remnant of the academic and monastic hood developed into a garment that was used to denote a special office – normally that of chaplain to a member of the gentry. However, it also had associations with academic institutions and was always worn by those who had been granted the Doctor of Divinity degree. It is part of the official “choir dress” (what is worn at a non-sacramental service) of the churches in the Anglican Communion. The tippet is also commonly worn in very traditional Presbyterian Churches (“traditional” in a manner that is consistent with usage prior to the turn of the 20th century). At its best, it is a 36” wide scarf of silk which is cut to a length that falls approximately 4” above the hem of the academic gown. Some demand that silk be reserved for those who have a doctorate, however major clerical outfitters only seem to sell one sort so the point is often moot. The tippet is folded and gathered at the nape of the neck, often under a cord designed for the purpose (still seen on finer academic and preaching gowns today). There is little done to curb the fullness of the garment apart from that gathering, allowing it to fall in graceful folds down the front of the gown. Though it is often seen with embroidered crosses or the seal of the seminary from which one graduated, it was not originally appareled in any way. For ease of handling, many tippets now come with pleats sown in permanently for ease of donning. It should also be noted that the velvet panels down the front of the Geneva gown are derived from this vestment. It is first and foremost a sign of the learned exposition of the Word and the authority of the minister to exercise pastoral leadership – but it does not carry the connotation of sacramental authority which is so heavily invested in the stole.
Practices Within Reformed Churches
Are you surprised by the wealth of God’s Word illustrated by these garments? Suddenly they are more than strange, but beautiful clothes. They are vivid reminders of truth and potential stimulants to gospel meditation. Obviously they were created by hearts moved by the message of reconciliation in Christ. However, as they became an end to themselves instead of a means to an end, their usefulness as symbols of the extension of Christ’s continuing ministry within and to the Church were obscured. Against such abuses, the Reformers vehemently protested the use of any “sacerdotal” vestment. Yet, with the abeyance of the 16th century need to differentiate churches as either Protestant or Roman Catholic (as though those were the only viable categories) and with the increase of ecumenical activities, it seems right to re-evaluate the usefulness of ecclesiastical vesture within the modern setting. They were edifying and profitable to Christians in the past and can be to Christians in the present and in the future, so long as they convey a meaning that is not tied to mere ornament.
First, it should be noted that the magisterial Reformers set out to completely do away with any “Romish innovations” and adopted the street-clothes of their day. As noted above, at that time graduates of academic institutions dressed in a distinctive manner (which, incidentally, is largely based on monastic forms of dress). This eventually became a new form of traditional vesture that was preserved in the pulpit long after it had been abandoned in the streets.
The churches of Scotland, Ireland, Switzerland, and non-conformists (i.e., non-Anglicans) in England preserve this antiquated form of ecclesial-academic street dress most faithfully. There, the normal vesting of the minister is: full-length cassock (normally of the Sarum design), cincture (either a belt or wide strip of cloth that matches the cassock), bands and clerical collar, open gown (academic or Geneva), and (if appropriate) academic hood. The hood is worn on top of the bands. On top of the hood is often worn a scarf or tippet. If the preacher is particularly magisterial, he or she might wear a cap of some sort while not in pulpit (normally a John Knox cap or other piece of academic headgear).
One might wear the time-honored garb of the magisterial Reformation. The ubiquitous modern Geneva gown (and the “preaching gown” variations of it) is an updated version of those garments. One could certainly stretch back further in time and reclaim the cassock, gown, and bands that predominated the pulpit of Presbyterians from the 16th through the early 20th centuries. It provides for an element of sobriety and seriousness which can sometimes be inappropriately lacking in the pulpit. The caution is to recognize the legitimate human need for variety and color and provide alternative avenues for this need to be met when not done from the vesture of the minister.
Second, one might choose to wear the ancient vestments of the Church. In most Presbyterian Churches, this will not be something achieved in one week – or even one year. The strong antipathy of the Reformer’s anti-papal rhetoric still colors much of Presbyterian thought concerning church ornamentation. The renewed use of banners was largely responsible for the appearance of stoles worn over the Geneva gown. In Australia, Canada, and England – where Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians are largely governed by one ecclesiastical body (the United Church) – there has been a movement toward a uniform dress of alb and stole (with cincture optional). This has been done as a way of fostering ecumenical recognition of the clergy. The alb, being the garment of all of the baptized from ancient times, is a sign of solidarity with those who have been inducted into the common ministry of reconciliation in all times and in all places. The alb is also appropriate for any baptized church member who has a role in leading public worship (praying, assisting in the sacraments, presiding at ordinations and installations, etc.) and seems especially appropriate for officers of the Church. The stole, in like manner because of ancient use, is a sign of solidarity with all of those who have been set apart to labor in the ministry of Word and Sacrament to the Church in all times and in all places. Whether the chasuble and maniple are still too closely tied to a non-Reformed view of the sacraments is still unclear.
Thirdly, some churches that come from the magisterial reformation have chosen to abandon any type of vesture that may distinguish the pastor from any other person in the congregation. Rankled at the slightest hint of any clericalism, and affirming the verity of the priesthood of all believers, these Christians respond in a faithful manner that attempts to remove that which divides. However, we have seen that even in the adoption of street dress, certain decorum has always restricted flamboyance and immodesty.
Thus you will notice the most primitive vesture of the Christian liturgical year is in the white vestments of Easter.
cf. the overflowing generosity of the Israelites in Exodus 35:20-29 & 36:2-7.
e.g., Waldensians, Franciscans, and the heretical Cathari and Albigenses.
See Book of Confessions 6.103 and The Regulative Principle in Worship: A brief article.
by C. Matthew McMahon available at http://www.apuritansmind.com/PuritanWorship/McMahonRegulativePrinciple.htm
All Scriptural citations are from the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise specified.
Which could be quite substantial – in the medieval period, bathing was thought to expose one to disease. It was also seen an immodest. Perhaps this is why incense was so common in the churches! | <urn:uuid:31f3c984-adb7-469b-ad57-b48b8b679e8b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://grkndeacon.blogspot.com/2007_08_26_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396872.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00104-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966058 | 5,934 | 2.90625 | 3 |
I am wet-storing my boat for winter, but I am concerned that the batteries will freeze during the few weeks when the temperature gets in the low teens. Do you have any suggestions on how to keep the bilge pump supplied with power?
Tom Wood responds:
A few weeks in the lower teens? Not to worry. Here are the facts:
Acid will freeze, of course, as will water. The temperature at which the electrolyte in a fully charged battery freezes is about 75 degrees below zero Fahrenheit—which is why cars still start in the arctic in winter. On the other hand, the electrolyte in a mostly discharged battery is close to the specific gravity of water, and it freezes just below 30 degrees. So the first imperative is to get the battery fully charged and to keep it that way for the duration of the winter.
The main threat to the health of a battery comes from it standing idle. When batteries are used frequently, being discharged and fully recharged on a daily basis like they would be in the family automobile, even a cheap one will last a long time. This is because the chemical process "stirs" the electrolyte and cleanses the lead plates. When batteries sit for long periods of time between use, some of the sulfuric acid forms sulfate crystals that coats the lead plates. This coating gradually gets thicker, interfering with the chemical process between the lead and the acid. Some of this cooking can be "blown off" the plates by an equalization process—applying an unusually high voltage to the battery for six or eight hours. But the best way to take care of it is to prevent it by keeping the battery charged.
All batteries lose power over time and need to be recharged, even if they aren't used. The rate of this "self discharge" is about 1/100 of a volt per day for wet batteries, less for AGM or gel batteries. This is about 25 percent of battery capacity per month, so it's a good idea to recharge idle batteries every two weeks or so.
If your marina does not have electricity over the winter to operate your battery charger, I would recommend that you invest in a small solar panel to do this job. A charge rate of about two percent of the battery capacity is a good rule of thumb because this amount would be incapable of overcharging the battery and would not require the addition of a voltage regulator. This translates into roughly 25 watts of solar panel for every 100 amp-hours of battery capacity—a little more for northern boats in the winter because the sunlight is weak, there are many cloudy days, and daylight hours are short.
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Date of this Version
Some basic mathematical tools such as convex sets, polytopes and combinatorial topology are used quite heavily in applied fields such as geometric modeling, meshing, computer vision, medical imaging and robotics. This report may be viewed as a tutorial and a set of notes on convex sets, polytopes, polyhedra, combinatorial topology, Voronoi Diagrams and Delaunay Triangulations. It is intended for a broad audience of mathematically inclined readers.
One of my (selfish!) motivations in writing these notes was to understand the concept of shelling and how it is used to prove the famous Euler-Poincare formula(Poincare, 1899) and the more recent Upper Bound Theorem (McMullen, 1970) for polytopes. Another of my motivations was to give a "correct" account of Delaunay triangulations and Voronoi diagrams in terms of (direct and inverse) stereographic projections onto a sphere and prove rigorously that the projective map that sends the (projective) sphere to the (projective) paraboloid works correctly, that is, maps the Delaunay triangulation and Voronoi diagram w.r.t. the lifting onto the sphere to the Delaunay diagram and Voronoi diagrams w.r.t. the traditional lifting onto the paraboloid. Here, the problem is that this map is only well defined (total) in projective space and we are forced to define the notion of convex polyhedron in projective space.
It turns out that in order to achieve (even partially) the above goals, I found that it was necessary to include quite a bit of background material on convex sets, polytopes, polyhedra and projective spaces. I have included a rather thorough treatment of the equivalence of V-polytopes and H-polytopes and also of the equivalence of V-polyhedra and H-polyhedra, which is a bit harder. In particular, the Fourier-Motzkin elimination method (a version of Gaussian elimination for inequalities) is discussed in some detail. I also had to include some material on projective spaces, projective maps and polar duality w.r.t. a nondegenerate quadric in order to define a suitable notion of \projective polyhedron" based on cones. To the best of our knowledge, this notion of projective polyhedron is new. We also believe that some of our proofs establishing the equivalence of V-polyhedra and H-polyhedra are new.
Convex sets, polytopes, polyhedra, shellings, combinatorial topology, Voronoi diagrams, Delaunay triangulations.
Jean H. Gallier, "Notes on Convex Sets, Polytopes, Polyhedra, Combinatorial Topology, Voronoi Diagrams and Delaunay Triangulations", . November 2013.
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State Police acknowledge National AMBER Alert Awareness Day
Louisiana State Police joined the nation and acknowledged National AMBER Alert Awareness Day on Jan. 13, which the U.S. Department of Justice declared to increase awareness of the AMBER Alert program and encourage public engagement in the safe recovery of abducted children.
The AMBER Alert program was named after the late Amber Hagerman. On Jan. 13, 1996, the nine-year-old little girl was abducted from a Dallas, Texas, area neighborhood and murdered. Following Amber’s tragedy, a concerned citizen’s idea evolved into the first AMBER Alert plan, which served as a model nationwide for alerting the public about abducted children.
The Louisiana AMBER Alert plan became operational in 2002 and is managed by the Louisiana State Police as a statewide, cohesive effort between law enforcement and broadcasters. Their goal is to safely locate an abducted child within the critical two-to-three hour time period following an abduction.
The plan is not designed for custodial conflicts.
While AMBER Alert is a national effort, there is not one unified plan among all 50 states. Some states have statewide plans, while other states may have plans on a regional or metropolitan level and each plan operates independently of one another. In fact, there are over 100 plans in the country and many are not interoperable.
The Louisiana AMBER Alert plan is one statewide plan, which can act in conjunction with other plans if so requested.
Since the inception of the Louisiana AMBER Alert plan through the end of 2013, there have been 10 activations for Louisiana children and two for out-of-state activation requests. In all 12 cases, the children were safely located.
A total of 679 children have been successfully recovered in the United States because of the AMBER Alert system.
Activation of a Louisiana AMBER Alert involves utilizing a number of resources, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which provides notification to the public through wireless carriers, content providers and major retailers.
Recently, NCMEC announced the launch of an AMBER Alert Twitter account, as well. Using the handle @AMBERAlert, the new account will help abducted children alerts reach the approximately 49 million monthly Twitter users in the United States. Twitter users, who follow the @AMBERAlert handle, will automatically receive all AMBER Alerts in their Twitter feed.
Louisiana State Police Superintendent Colonel Mike Edmonson explained that each year, an average of 100-150 children are victims of abduction in this country and it’s critical that law enforcement, media, and the public work together in an urgent effort to effectively and efficiently locate an abducted child immediately following a verified abduction. “Saving that child’s life is the number one priority and to apprehend the abductor becomes our next priority,” Edmonson said.
If your child goes missing, parents/guardians are encouraged to immediately call a local law enforcement agency; be able to provide law enforcement with your child’s name, date of birth, height, weight and descriptions of any other unique identifiers such as eyeglasses and braces; and be able to tell police when you noticed your child was missing and what clothing he or she was wearing.
Also, be prepared to provide a recent photo of your child and any information that could help identify your child or abductor, such as vehicle and license plate information.
For more information on the Louisiana AMBER Alert program, including guidelines and criteria, visit http://www.lsp.org/amber.html.
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Most ophthalmologists spend four days a week in the office seeing patients and one day a week performing surgery, usually at a hospital. Office visits typically involve performing eye examinations and screening for diseases and infections such as glaucoma and conjunctivitis, or pink eye. Part of the job of ophthalmologists is to prevent vision problems before they start, so many of their patients may have near perfect vision but come in for prevention purposes.
Ophthalmologists treat patients of all ages, from infants to elderly adults. During an examination, they check a patient's vision and prescribe glasses and contact lenses to correct any problems. They also screen for diseases using tools such as an ophthalmoscope, which is an instrument used to look at the inside of the eye. When examining a patient's eyes, the ophthalmologist looks for signs of diseases that affect other parts of the body, such as diabetes and hypertension. When such a health problem is discovered, the ophthalmologist may work with another physician in diagnosing and managing treatment.
In a typical workweek, an ophthalmologist may see more than 100 patients and perform three or more major surgeries. The most common surgery performed is removing cataracts, which cloud the lens of the eye and cause partial or total blindness. Cataract surgery generally lasts just 30 minutes to an hour and usually helps patients regain all or most of their vision. Ophthalmologists also perform surgery to correct crossed eyes and glaucoma.
Ophthalmologists may specialize in one or more of the following areas: cornea and external disease, cataract and refractive surgery, glaucoma, uveitis and ocular immunology, vitreoretinal diseases, ophthalmic plastic surgery, pediatric ophthalmology, neuro-ophthalmology, and ophthalmic pathology.
Ophthalmologists may treat patients who have diseases that could cause them to lose some or all of their vision. That possibility can make patients feel fearful and anxious and can create stress for both the patients and the doctor. For this reason, ophthalmologists need to be able to show patients compassion and understanding in offering their medical expertise.
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Biological: Behavioural genetics · Evolutionary psychology · Neuroanatomy · Neurochemistry · Neuroendocrinology · Neuroscience · Psychoneuroimmunology · Physiological Psychology · Psychopharmacology (Index, Outline)
A generic drug (pl. generic drugs, short: generics) is a drug which is produced and distributed without a brand name. A generic must contain the same active ingredients as the original formulation. In most cases, it is considered bioequivalent to the brand name counterpart with respect to pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties. By extension, therefore, generics are assumed to be identical in dose, strength, route of administration, safety, efficacy, and intended use. In most cases, generic products are not available until the patent protections afforded the original developer have expired. When generic products become available, the market competition often leads to substantially lower prices for both the original brand name product and the generic forms.
The principal reason for the relatively low price of generic medicines is that these companies incur fewer costs in creating the generic drug, and are therefore able to maintain profitability while offereing the drug at a lower cost to consumers.
Generic manufacturers do not incur the cost of drug discovery, and instead are able to reverse-engineer known drug compounds to allow them to manufacture bioequivalent versions. Generic manufacturers also do not bear the burden of proving the safety and efficacy of the drugs through clinical trials, since these trials have already been conducted by the brand name company. In most countries, generic manufacturers must only prove that their preparation is bioequivalent to the existing drug in order to gain regulatory approval. It has been estimated that the average cost to brand-name drug companies of discovering and testing a single new drug may be as much as $800 million.
Generic drug companies may also receive the benefit of the previous marketing efforts of the brand-name drug company, including media advertising, presentations by drug representatives, and distribution of free samples. Many of the drugs introduced by generic manufacturers have already been on the market for a decade or more, and may already be well-known to patients and providers (although often under their branded name).
Prior to the expiration of a drug patent, a brand name company enjoys a period of "market exclusivity" or monopoly, in which they are able to set the price of the drug at the level which maximizes profitability. This price often greatly exceeds the production costs of the drug, but often allows the drug company to make a significant profit on their investment in research and development. The advantage of generic drugs to consumers comes in the introduction of competition, which prevents any single company from dicatating the overall market price of the drug. This results in a price that generally reflect the ongoing cost of producing the drug, which is usually much lower than the profit-maximizing monopoly price.
When can a generic drug be produced?Edit
When a pharmaceutical company first markets a drug, it is usually under a patent that allows only the pharmaceutical company that developed the drug to sell it. Generic drugs can be legally produced for drugs where: 1) the patent has expired, 2) the generic company certifies the brand company's patents are either invalid, unenforceable or will not be infringed, 3) for drugs which have never held patents, or 4) in countries where a patent(s) is/are not in force. The expiration of a patent removes the monopoly of the patent holder on drug sales licensing. Patent lifetime differs from country to country, and typically there is no way to renew a patent after it expires. A new version of the drug with significant changes to the compound could be patented, but this requires new clinical trials and does not prevent the generic versions of the original drug.
This allows the company to recoup the cost of developing that particular drug. After the patent on a drug expires, any pharmaceutical company can manufacture and sell that drug. Since the drug has already been tested and approved, the cost of simply manufacturing the drug will be a fraction of the original cost of testing and developing that particular drug.
Brand-name drug companies have used a number of strategies to extend the period of market exclusivity on their drugs, and prevent generic competition. This may involve aggressive litigation to preserve or extend patent protection on their medicines, a process referred to by critics as "evergreening." Patents are typically issued on novel pharmacologic componds quite early in the drug development process, at which time the 'clock' to patent expiration begins ticking. Later in the process, drug companies may seek new patents on the production of specific forms of these compounds, such as single enantiomers of drugs which can exist in both "left-handed" and "right-handed" forms, different inactive componants in a drug salt, or a specific hydrate form of the drug salt. If granted, these patents 'reset the clock' on patent expiration. These sorts of patents may later be targeted for invalidation by generic drug manufacturers.
Generic drug exclusivityEdit
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration offers a 180 day exclusivity period to generic drug manufacturers in specific cases. During this period only one (or sometimes a few) generic manufacturers can produce the generic version of a drug. This exclusivity period is only used when a generic manufacturer argues that a patent is invalid or is not violated in the generic production of a drug, and the period acts as a reward for the generic manufacturer who is willing to risk liability in court and the cost of patent court litigation. There is often contention around these 180 day exclusivity periods because a generic producer does not have to produce the drug during this period and can file an application first to prevent other generic producers from selling the drug.
Large pharmaceutical companies often spend thousands of dollars protecting their patents from generic competition. Apart from litigation, companies use other methods such as reformulation or licensing a subsidiary (or another company) to sell generics under the original patent. Generics sold under license from the patent holder are known as authorized generics; they are not affected by the 180 day exclusivity period as they fall under the patent holder's original drug application.
A prime example of how this works is simvastatin (Zocor), a popular drug created and manufactured by U.S. based pharmaceutical Merck & Co., which lost its US patent protection on June 23, 2006. India-based Ranbaxy Laboratories (at the 80-mg strength) and Israel-based Teva Pharmaceutical Industries (at all other strengths) received 180 day exclusivity periods for simvastatin; due to Zocor's popularity, both companies began marketing their products immediately after the patent expired. However, Dr. Reddy's Laboratories also markets an authorized generic version of simvastatin under license from Zocor's manufacturer, Merck & Co.; some packages of Dr. Reddy's simvastatin even show Merck as the actual manufacturer and have Merck's logo on the bottom.
Approval and regulationEdit
Most nations require generic drug manufacturers to prove that their formulation exhibits bioequivalence to the innovator product. Over the past several years there have been studies that have shown the effectiveness and safety of some generic drugs. Generic drugs are always less expensive and can save patients and insurance companies thousands of dollars supposedly without compromising the quality of care. The FDA must approve generic drugs just as innovator drugs must be approved. Bioequivalence, however, does not mean that generic drugs are exactly the same as their innovator product counterparts, as chemical differences do exist. Some doctors and patients emphatically believe that certain generic drugs are not as effective as the products they are meant to replace (ie. Prozac, Oxycontin), and consumers would undoubtedly benefit from more clinical studies done on drug by drug basis. Generic drugs start out at first being fairly expensive, however the price of the generic product decreases as the rate of production increases.
As an interesting case study in the use of generic equivalents of name-brand agents, warfarin has been only available under the trade name Coumadin in North America until recently. Warfarin (either under the trade name or the generic equivalent) has a narrow therapeutic window and requires frequent blood tests to make sure patients do not have a subtherapeutic or a toxic level. A study performed in the Canadian province of Ontario showed that replacing Coumadin with generic warfarin was considered safe. In spite of the study, many physicians are not comfortable in allowing their patients to take the branded generic equivalent agents.
U.S. generics approval processEdit
Enacted in 1984, the U.S. Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act, informally known as the "Hatch-Waxman Act", standardized U.S. procedures for recognition of generic drugs. An applicant files an Abbreviated New Drug Application (or "ANDA") with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and seeks to demonstrate therapeutic equivalence to a specified, previously approved "reference listed drug." When an ANDA is approved, the FDA adds the drug to its Approved Drug Products list, also known as the "Orange Book", and annotates the list to show equivalence between the reference listed drug and the approved generic. The FDA also recognizes drugs using the same ingredients with different bioavailability and divides them into therapeutic equivalence groups. For example, as of 2006 diltiazem hydrochloride had four equivalence groups all using the same active ingredient but considered equivalent only within a group.
See also Edit
- Approval process for generic drugs
- Clinical monitoring
- Clinical protocol
- Clinical research
- Clinical trial management
- Research exemption (in patent law)
- ↑ "The price of innovation: new estimates of drug development cost" (pdf) DiMasi J.A. et al.: , Journal of Health Economics 22(2003), 151-185. Accessed 31st of May 2007
- ↑ U.S. Patent 4,721,723: Dextro-rotatory enantiomer of methyl alpha-5 (4,5,6,7-tetrahydro (3,2-c) thieno pyridyl) (2-chlorophenyl)-acetate
- ↑ U.S. Patent 4,879,303: Amlodipine besylate
- ↑ U.S. Patent 4,721,723: Paroxetine hydrochloride hemihydrate
- ↑ Brisol-Myers Squibb press release on successful defense of Plavix patent
- ↑ Apotex press release on successful challenge of Norvasc patent
- ↑ Apotex press release on successful challenge of Paxil patent
- ↑ Pereira JA, Holbrook AM, Dolovich L, Goldsmith C, Thabane L, Douketis JD, Crowther MA, Bates SM, Ginsberg JS. (2005). Are brand-name and generic warfarin interchangeable? Multiple n-of-1 randomized, crossover trials.. Ann Pharmacother 39 (7-8): 1188-93. PMID 15914517.
- ↑ Pereira JA, Holbrook AM, Dolovich L, Goldsmith C, Thabane L, Douketis JD, Crowther M, Bates SM, Ginsberg JS. (2005). Are brand-name and generic warfarin interchangeable? A survey of Ontario patients and physicians.. Can J Clin Pharmacol 12 (3): e229-39. PMID 16278495.
- ↑ Approved Drug Products with Therapeutic Equivalence Evaluations, Preface. - an explanation of FDA terms and procedures
- USFDA, Office of Generic Drugs
- UK Department of Health, generic drugs
- USAN stem name list
- Generic Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Resource Center
- The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics
- Generic Drug or What Are Generics
- Fighting generic competition: strategies for research-based companies - Urch Publishing
- Generic medications pharmacy with most full description for each product
|This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors).| | <urn:uuid:670ba3f2-7a89-40cd-a9d7-34515688ff4c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Generic_drug | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397797.77/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00046-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.918348 | 2,520 | 3.359375 | 3 |
Cities need to watch the weather closely in the future to make sure that city services are always in good working order, according to a new report being studied by the City of Toronto.
That’s because the changing climate–including severe weather and warmer temperatures–may affect cities’ infrastructure. In this case, “infrastructure” refers to services that support the city, such as roads, public transit and energy plants.
The report, requested by the Toronto Environment Office, summed up the past 10 years of serious weather events in and around Toronto.
In the last decade, several records were broken due to the weather. For instance, there was one day in which there was an unusually high demand for power during a very hot summer. This kind of high demand can put a strain on the city’s ability to provide power.
An all-time record 409 mm (millimetres) of rainfall was set at Trent University during this time. Four hundred and nine millimetres is equivalent to 14 billion litres of water in five hours.
Also, in the past 10 years, Toronto had its earliest ever official heat wave.
These kinds of weather events will likely continue and could affect the infrastructure of Toronto and other cities.
Without continuing repairs and maintenance, services will have to work harder. Sewers could back up, power sources could be affected, and heat waves could damage the surfaces of roads.
To avoid this, these services will have to be repaired more often and maintained more carefully, according to the study.
By Kathleen Tilly
Climate change affects more than the weather and a city’s infrastructure. What else is impacted by climate change? How is it affected?
Reading Prompt: Analysing Texts
Journalists work hard to write in a style that is easy to understand. One strategy they use is to connect the first sentence to the last.
How did the journalist of this article tie the concluding sentence to the opening statement? How does this help you to better understand the article?
Analyse texts and explain how various elements in them contribute to meaning (OME, Reading: 1.7).
Analyse a variety of texts, both simple and complex, and explain how the different elements in them contribute to meaning and influence the reader’s reaction (OME, Reading: 1.7).
Grammar Feature: Prefix
A prefix is a group of letters added before a word to change its meaning.
A word used several times in this article is “infrastructure.” The prefix infra means below. The prefix is added to the word ‘structure’ to change the meaning.
Can you add a prefix to the following words to change their meanings? | <urn:uuid:cca902f3-9abe-4717-9bbd-3fb077e09cbd> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://teachingkidsnews.com/2013/02/12/5-changes-to-infrastructure-because-of-climate-change/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398216.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00106-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956484 | 561 | 3.21875 | 3 |
Author and Page information
- This page: http://www.globalissues.org/article/69/militarization-and-weaponization-of-outer-space.
- To print all information e.g. expanded side notes, shows alternative links, use the print version:
The exploration and use of outer space … shall be for peaceful purposes and shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interest of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development. … [The] prevention of an arms race in outer space would avert a grave danger for international peace and security
— Prevention of an arms race in outer space, United Nations General Assembly Resolution, A/RES/55/32, January 2001. (PDF Document)
It’s politically sensitive, but it’s going to happen. Some people don’t want to hear this, and it sure isn’t in vogue, but—absolutely—we’re going to fight in space. We’re going to fight from space and we’re going to fight into space. That’s why the US has development programs in directed energy and hit-to-kill mechanisms. We will engage terrestrial targets someday—ships, airplanes, land targets—from space.
— Commander-in-Chief of US Space Command, Joseph W. Ashy, Aviation Week and Space Technology, August 9, 1996, quoted from Master of Space by Karl Grossman, Progressive Magazine, January 2000
This web page has the following sub-sections:
World Agrees: Space for peaceful purposes
Interntionally, for many years, it has been agreed that space should be used for peaceful purposes, and for the benefit of all humankind. Examples of uses and benefits include weather monitoring, help in search and rescue, help in potential natural disaster detection, coordinating efforts on detecting and dealing with issues of space debris and minimizing harmful impacts on Earth, research in sciences, health, etc.
The United Nations (U.N.) Outer Space Treaty provides the basic framework on international space law, saying that space should be reserved for peaceful uses. It came into effect in October 1967. As summarized by the U.N. Office for Outer Space Affairs web site, the treaty includes the following principles:
- the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind;
- outer space shall be free for exploration and use by all States;
- outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means;
- States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner;
- the Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes;
- astronauts shall be regarded as the envoys of mankind;
- States shall be responsible for national space activities whether carried out by governmental or non-governmental activities;
- States shall be liable for damage caused by their space objects; and
- States shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies.
Towards the end of 2000, the United Nations General Assembly had a vote on a resolution called the “Prevention of Outer Space Arms Race.” It was adopted by a recorded vote of 163 in favor to none against, with 3 abstentions. The three that abstained were the Federated States of Micronesia, Israel and the United States of America. (You can see the details from a U.N. press release, together with a list of countries that voted, were absent and so on.)
US Seeks Militarization of Space
While various militaries around the world have used Space for years, it has largely been for surveillance satellites etc.
However, the Bush Administration in the United States has long made it clear that the US wishes to expand its military capabilities and have weapons in space and therfore also be dominant in this fourth military arena (the other three being sea, land and air). This new “ultimate high ground” would provide further superior military capabilities.
While it would provide additional important defense mechanisms, many worry about the other benefit it would bring—capabilities for offensive purposes to push America’s “national interests” even if they are not in the interests of the international community.
Furthermore, together with its pursuit of missile defense, (which goes against the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty, an important part of global arms control mechanisms), the USA risks starting a wasteful expenditure of an arms race in space.
Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, and the resulting “War on Terror” military-based policies and spending has increased. So too have the policies looking into space-based weapons. The Washington D.C.-based Center for Defence Information (CDI) provides a detailed report suggesting that this should not be a rushed decision:
Unlike in Star Trek, the “final frontier” has yet to become a battlefield. But if the current trends continue, that will change—not in the distance future of science fiction, but within the next several decades. Emerging Bush administration plans and policies are clearly aimed at making the United States the first nation to deploy space-based weapons. There are several drivers behind this goal, including the very real concern about the vulnerability of space assets that are increasingly important to how the US military operates, and the administration’s decision to pursue missile defense.
Unfortunately, the administration has done little thinking—at least publicly—about the potential for far-reaching military, political and economic ramifications of a US move to break the taboo against weaponizing space. There is reason for concern that doing so could actually undermine, rather than enhance, the national security of the United States, as well as global stability. Thus it behooves the administration, as well as Congress, to undertake an in-depth and public policy review of the pros and cons of weaponizing space. Such a review would look seriously at the threat, both short-term and long-term, as well as measures to prevent, deter or counter any future threat using all the tools in the US policy toolbox: diplomatic, including arms control treaties; economic; and military, including defensive measures short of offensive weapons. There is nothing to be gained, and potentially much to be lost, by rushing such a momentous change in US space policy.
— Theresa Hitchens, Weapons in Space: Silver Bullet or Russian Roulette?, The Policy Implications of US Pursuit of Space-Based Weapons, Center for Defence Information, April 18, 2002
But because space-based weapons have been on the agenda long before September 11, and the War on Terror, the fight against terrorism is not the sole justification, though it may now add to the reasons. However, long before September 11, the concerns of the US’ motives for pursuing such policies have been questioned. The fear is that by seeking to create a dominant position in space, the US will become more powerful and others may be compelled to join an arms race in space.
The above-mentioned CDI report also points out that “The Bush administration’s views were directly reflected in the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), released Oct. 1, 2001. ‘A key objective … is not only to ensure US ability to exploit space for military purposes, but also as required to deny an adversary’s ability to do so,’ states the QDR.” In this context then, space is no longer seen as the resource available for all of humanity, but another ground from which to fight geopolitical and economic battles.
Militarization of Space for Economic Superiority
With regard to space dominance, we have it, we like it, and we’re going to keep it. Space is in the nation’s economic interest.
— Keith Hall, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space, Speech to the National Space Club in 1997. (Emphasis Added)
Most wars (hot wars, trade wars, cold wars etc) throughout history have had trade and resources at their core. (See the Military Expansion part of this web site for more on that perspective.) The military superiority of past and present nations has been to defend or expand such “national interests.” The militarization of space by the USA, even when there has been an international agreement to use space for peaceful purposes, as mentioned above, begs the question “why?”
On 16 January 1984, Reagan announced that “Nineteen eighty-four is the year of opportunities for peace.” War is Peace, as Orwell wrote in his satirical book [called 1984]. Peace through strength, peace through domination. It is clear to most of the world that the Son of Star Wars, the Nuclear Missile Defense option, is also not about defense, but it is another way for the US to exert its global hegemony. The NMD, as this history of the SDI shows us, is a political weapon to further US ends rather than enhance global security.
— Vijay Prashad, Shooting Stars, June 15, 2001
While the answer from US authorities is usually along the lines of defensive purposes (as with the related issues of missile defense and star wars, as also discussed on this web site, in this section), many see the domination of space as the ability to maintain, expand and enforce those policies that will serve that national interest.
The US military explicitly says it wants to “control” space to protect its economic interests and establish superiority over the world.
Several documents reveal the plans. Take Vision for 2020, a 1996 report of the US Space Command, which “coordinates the use of Army, Navy, and Air Force space forces” and was set up in 1985 to “help institutionalize the use of space.”
The multicolored cover of Vision for 2020 shows a weapon shooting a laser beam from space and zapping a target below. The report opens with the following: “US Space Command—dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment. Integrating Space Forces into warfighting capabilities across the full spectrum of conflict.” A century ago, “Nations built navies to protect and enhance their commercial interests” by ruling the seas, the report notes. Now it is time to rule space.
— Karl Grossman, Master of Space, Progressive Magazine, January 2000
An Arms Race?
How will the rest of the world take to being dominated from above? One doesn’t have to be particularly unfriendly to the US to feel uncomfortable. More naturally hostile or suspicious countries could well feel they have been given no choice but to develop their own antisatellite weapons in an attempt to blind US satellites, even though, since the US will far outspend them, the effort would become an ever receding goal. … It will not only make enemies where none exist, it will drive its Nato allies, already nervous and alarmed about the consequences of the ballistic missile shield plan, into a state of antipathy towards America.
— Jonathan Power, Space—After Tito’s fun it might be Rumsfeld’s nightmare, Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, May 9, 2001
Additionally, the development of weapons in space risks leading to an arms race, as mentioned in the Star Wars section on this site, in discussing the development of missile defenses.
Currently, as CDI points out, the threat to US space-based interests is not as much as it is made out to be:
Vulnerabilities do not necessarily result in threats. In order to threaten US space assets, military or commercial, a potential adversary must have both technological capabilities and intent to use them in a hostile manner. There is little hard evidence that any other country or hostile non-state actor possesses either the technology or the intention to seriously threaten US military or commercial operations in space—nor is there much evidence of serious pursuit of space-based weapons by potentially hostile actors.
Currently, the simplest ways to attack satellites and satellite-based systems involve ground-based operations against ground facilities, and disruption of computerized downlinks. … It is obvious that the United States must ensure the integrity of its increasingly important space networks, and find ways to defense against threats to space assets. Still, there is little reason to believe that it is necessary for the US to put weapons in space to do so. Space warfare proponents are making a suspect leap in logic in arguing that space-based weapons are, or will soon be, required to protect the ability of the United States to operate freely in space. One could argue much more rationally that what is needed most urgently is to find ways to prevent computer network intrusion; to ensure redundant capabilities both at the system and subsystem level, including the ability to rapidly replace satellites on orbit; to improve security of ground facilities (perhaps moving to underground facilities); and to harden electronic components on particularly important satellites.
Furthermore, the evidence of actual space weapons programs by potential adversaries is thin.
— Theresa Hitchens, Weapons in Space: Silver Bullet or Russian Roulette? The Policy Implications of US Pursuit of Space-Based Weapons, Center for Defence Information, April 18, 2002
However, fearful of the additional advantage, dominance and power the US will have, it is possible other nations may choose to develop their own systems to try and keep up or minimize the perceived threat. This will in turn make the US want to increase its expenditure even more, and so on, leading to an arms race, which risks leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy to justify continued expenditures.
Once testing [of space weapons] begins, the “need” for destructive capabilities in orbit induces a mindset opposed to rational restraint. The mindset becomes unassailable if testing is completed, for then the system “must” be deployed since, if we have developed the capability, others will want to follow suit and rapidly will do so.
— Chief of Research, Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.), Space Wars, Center for Defense Information, February 2001.
While the US may possibly be able to afford this, for other nations to get involved into such expenditures will be costly indeed, especially most have other pressing priorities. (It is also somewhat questionable that even the US can afford this in the long term, but the influential US military industrial complex supports this and so tax payers money will help large military contractors, as also discussed in more detail on the Star Wars page on this site.)
(The star wars part of this section on this web site, also linked to from above, discusses more about the possibilities of an arms race and an impact on international relations.)
For more information, as well as the links above, you could start at the following:
- United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). From here you can also see the official treaty documents and more.
- Articles by Karl Grossman. Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, wrote The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet (Common Courage, 1997). He is a prominent researcher and writer on these issues.
- Lasers from Heaven by Matthew Rothschild, Progressive Magazine, May 10, 2001.
- The Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space works to make a “global call to resist the nuclearization and weaponization of space.”
- From the Washington, D.C. based Center for Defense Information (CDI):
- Space Wars, by Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.) February 2001.
- Space: Battleground or Frontier of the 21st Century, by Jeffrey Mason, November to December 1999.
- CDI’s section on missile defense has many other articles on space and missile defense.
- The Next Space Race from CDI’s America’s Defense Monitor programs, August 27, 2000.
- Space Policy Project from the Federation of American Scientists provides a large collection of articles.
- The Institute for Cooperation in Space (ICIS) works to prevent the militarization of space, and have space used for peaceful purposes. | <urn:uuid:a18c0ebb-8d28-4845-822a-e3f4ad1d2a28> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.globalissues.org/article/69/militarization-and-weaponization-of-outer-space | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394937.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00133-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941458 | 3,364 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Links and documents
Listed on the Canadian Register:
Statement of Significance
Description of Historic Place
The Laidlaw Antelope Trap archaeological site is situated on roughly 64 hectares of land near the town of Bow Island, Alberta. It is located in shortgrass prairie on a terrace 2.5 kilometres long and one kilometre wide which is located on the slope of the South Saskatchewan River valley. The main feature of the site consists of a rectangular-shaped pit with a surrounding stone wall. Linear stone alignments interpreted as "drive lanes" extend in a "V-shape" from two adjacent corners of the rectangle. Associated features include two stone circles ("tipi rings") and a 2.5 metre circular pile of stones that may have served as another wall. Within two kilometres of the site, numerous additional stone circle, cairn and stone alignment sites have also been identified. Artifacts excavated from the Laidlaw Antelope Trap site are housed in the collections of the Royal Alberta Museum.
The heritage value of the Laidlaw Antelope Trap lies in the fact that it is a well preserved example of a site type rarely identified in the Plains of North America.
The Laidlaw Antelope Trap site has been interpreted as an example of the methods used for communal pronghorn antelope hunting by Alberta's prehistoric Aboriginal people. Though the use of enclosures with drive lanes was commonly used to trap and kill bison during the Middle and Late Prehistoric period in the Plains, capture of pronghorn antelope using such methods is unique. To date, this site is only one of two known examples of prehistoric communal pronghorn antelope hunting in Alberta, and is one of only a few such sites in North America.
Based on archaeological excavations conducted in 1983, researchers have recovered bone fragments, including specimens identified as pronghorn antelope, from beneath and between stones in the enclosure, drive lanes and circular stone pile. Researchers surmise that the pronghorn would have been herded into and down the drive lanes, funnelling them into the enclosure at the narrow apex of the drive lanes. Once contained within the enclosure, the captured animals would be quickly killed. In addition to antelope bone, artifacts recovered from the site include four chipped stone artifacts representing waste flakes from stone tool manufacturing and a flake briefly retouched for use as a tool. Radiocarbon dating of the bone fragments indicates that the site was used by prehistoric hunters during the Late Middle Prehistoric Period, roughly 3,000 to 3,500 years ago.
Source: Alberta Culture and Community Spirit, Historica Resources Management Branch (File: Des. 1383). Brumley, John H. 1984. "The Laidlaw Site: An Aboriginal Antelope Trap from Southeastern Alberta" in Archaeology in Alberta 1983 (Archaeological Survey of Alberta Occasional Paper No. 23), compiled by David Burley pp 96-126. Brumley, John H. 1986. "A Radiocarbon Date from the Laidlaw Site, DlOu-9" in Research Notes, Archaeology in Alberta 1985 (Archaeological Survey of Alberta Occasional Paper No. 29), compiled by John W. Ives pg 205.
The character-defining elements of the Laidlaw Antelope Trap site include:
- its location in native short grass prairie on a upper terrace of the South Saskatchewan River;
- the unique stone configuration used to create the trap, including a roughly square excavated pit up to 80 centimetres deep, with slightly sloping walls, that has been enclosed by a wall built to at least 80 to 100 centimetres above the ground; the two drive lanes, which are 29 and 35 metres long, extending from adjacent corners of the square enclosure and forming a "V-shape" funnel whose apex terminates at the enclosure; and the associated stone pile formed of a collapsed circular structure 2.5 metres in diameter that may have been a wall as tall as 20 to 50 centimetres in height, constructed of rocks as heavy as 50 kilograms;
- the potential relationship of the trap to other surface stone features in the surrounding landscape, including the stone circles immediately adjacent to the feature and the other stone circle, cairn and stone alignment sites within 2 kilometres of the site;
- the potential for the site to provide information about a prehistoric hunting method that is only rarely represented in the North American Plains archaeological record.
Province of Alberta
Historical Resources Act
Provincial Historic Resource
Theme - Category and Type
- Peopling the Land
- Canada's Earliest Inhabitants
- Peopling the Land
- People and the Environment
- Developing Economies
- Hunting and Gathering
Function - Category and Type
- Food Supply
- Hunting or Resource Harvesting Site
Architect / Designer
Location of Supporting Documentation
Alberta Culture and Community Spirit, Historic Resources Management Branch, Old St. Stephen's College, 8820 - 112 Street, Edmonton, AB T6G 2P8 (File: Des. 1383)
Cross-Reference to Collection | <urn:uuid:4a96a00c-bd37-436d-8651-65d556d84d8f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu.aspx?id=10861 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394605.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00081-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.907005 | 1,056 | 3.03125 | 3 |
Advantages Of Social Networking
Adequately utilizing the advantages of social networking, you must understand social networking. The definition of social networking depends on the platform used. Some variations are:
- A social network – is a platform, site or other online service focusing on building and creating networks. Some sites offer personal social relationship building, catering to individuals sharing mutual interests. Joining various networks offers many advantages of social networking.
- A social network is – a social structure comprised of people (or organizations) called “nodes”. The group will be connected by one or more common bond such as friendship, common interests, mutual friends, family members, business, dislikes to name a few.
- Social Network is the people with whom one is connected. Pertaining to some of the best social networking sites, these digital terms are often refer to your friends (facebook), followers (twitter), readers (Blog) or subscribers (YouTube).
Advantages Of Social Networking – Social Networking Tools
Effective communication is a crucial part of social networking, either online or off line. The basic social networking tools required for online social networking are:
- Computer access -a computer is needed to communicate effectively online. If you don’t have a personal computer, public libraries offer free access.
- Internet connection – several community locations offer wi-fi, free of charge. Some of the nationally known locations are McDonald’s, Starbucks, Barnes & Noble.
- Email address – Google and yahoo offer free email accounts.
The online social network is comprised of several large well known Top Social Networks such as:
These social networking websites create an online community of Internet users, each offering different advantages of social networking to it’s many members. Following the social network theory, members join various social networking websites, therefore, many of these online members will share a common interest. These online communities provide socialization with other like-minded individuals. Before beginning your online networking, be sure you are well equipped with the essential social networking tools. Communicating and developing these new relationships will require some time and commitment. Depending upon whether you are creating a business or a private network will be a contributing factor to your time commitment. Once you’ve joined this online community, you will begin to build your own network of friends and associates. And you will further begin to utilize and realize the many advantages of social networking; both professionally and personally.
Social Networking Tools – Dangers Of Social Networking
There are many benefits of social networking, however, always protect yourself from the possible dangers of social networking. Always be mindful, everyone doesn’t play by the same rules as you. The online community consists of predators and dishonest people just as offline communities. Although your social networking is online, always be aware and mindful of what personal information you share while socializing and networking online. Equip yourself with the necessary social networking tools and enjoy the many advantages of social networking.
Join the Online Profit Team to learn from top earners how to create multiple streams of income from the comforts of your home. Simply click the image below to get started now. | <urn:uuid:18521f89-2840-4a2f-948d-99890e7201cb> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://juliekbeachum.com/advantages-of-social-networking/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397797.77/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00094-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921128 | 644 | 2.828125 | 3 |
April 22nd is Earth Day, an international celebration of Planet Earth. While important legislative and social changes came about as a result of the Earth Day movement, it is also a time to celebrate the simple, physical beauty of this planet.
Some of of the most breathtaking places on Earth have been designated as sacred spots, often referred to as the 7 Wonders of the Natural World. According to CNN, the 7 Natural Wonders are the Grand Canyon, the Great Barrier Reef, the Harbor of Rio De Janeiro, Mount Everest, Aurora, Parícutin Volcano, and Victoria Falls. Each of these places are recognized for their natural beauty and majesty.
Unfortunately, a number of the world's most beautiful places are slowly being ruined by human interruption. In 2009, the Australian Government released a report outlining the threats facing the Great Barrier Reef. After becoming bleached by pollution, tourism, and other effects of climate change, the reef is in dire need of protection in order to survive. The Aral Sea, once the fourth largest lake in the world, is only a fraction of it's 1960 size after a government irrigation plan destroyed it, according to the NASA website. And due to illegal logging, CNN cited the Tahuamanu Rainforest, Madagascar forests, and the Congo River Basin as natural habitats in grave danger of disappearing forever.
But there are ways to protect these resources. With 80% of water pollution coming from land activity, cutting down on waste would save both our forests and our oceans.
Do you have your own natural wonder? Whether it is a landscape, special location or just a perfect tree, we want to see it! Submit your own nature photo, and enjoy the images below.
UPDATE: Submissions are now closed. Thanks to everyone who submitted their favorite nature photos! | <urn:uuid:ef39352b-d2fc-47ae-8d6d-8f06af8bf135> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/16/earth-day-photos_n_1421874.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393146.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00186-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940767 | 361 | 3.203125 | 3 |
Amity Shlaes wrote “The Forgotten Man,” a book about the Great Depression. While largely about government policy of the 1930’s, it also focuses on average individuals affected by 11 years of a bad economy.
It begins like a novel with the tragic suicide of a 13-year-old child living in Brooklyn, with no memories of anything but hard times. The family of eight is in a bad way. The father’s work injury and long-term unemployment, the inability of some older siblings to find work, and the shut off of the gas for the apartment 7 months earlier had taken its toll.
One November day he hung himself from the transom of his bedroom door. After his death an older brother told reporters his brother had become sensitive and felt embarrassed about asking for his share of food at dinner. Tragically, the death of William Troeller was not fiction. It occurred in 1937, 8 years after the stock market crash of 1929, and 4 1⁄2 years after Franklin Roosevelt became president.
The general premise of her book is that bad government policy can prolong a bad economy, too much government intervention and regulation can prevent a recovery, and refusing to admit policy failure can make a bad problem worse. There was a battle between industrialists, entrepreneurs and capitalists who knew business and growth, and the academics and socialists (I say this only because in the 1920’s many had traveled to and lived in Lenin’s Russia and hailed its economic model as the future) of the Roosevelt administration.
The era was characterized by huge government spending to revive the economy, high tax rates that were increased as taxes to the treasury declined, and millions of Americans on public assistance. But on a personal note, Americans no longer believed their lives or their children’s would be any better.
There are too many uncomfortable parallels between then and now. Industrialists against the academics, entrepreneurs against the socialists, higher tax rates looming on Jan. 1, 2013, for those who actually pay income taxes, and 106 million Americans, about 1 in 3, receiving assistance from one of the 82 federal welfare programs. Polling shows the highest level in modern times of people who now believe their children will be worse off than they were.
The president is asking us to give him four more years to keep doing the same things and just trust him that the economy will improve. Big government solutions, shunning the advice of business leaders, reliance on theorists and a stubborn unwillingness to change are hallmarks of this president.
What will be different in his approach or outcome? Fool me once, but not twice. It’s time for new ideas and policies, and a different philosophy of government in Washington. | <urn:uuid:35e3bb88-e69d-4f8c-a072-b7ce2959a7e2> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.nj.com/south-jersey-voices/index.ssf/2012/10/letter_how_would_four_more_yea.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397749.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00057-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977799 | 555 | 2.765625 | 3 |
Read to Investigate Support 15 assessed Science benchmarks per set with hands-on investigations and independent reading. Extend core Science program concepts and vocabulary Develop Science process skills and critical thinking Strengthen Science literacy Reinforce key Science strands: Earth and Space Energy Force and Motion Living Things and Their Environment The Nature of Matter Processes of Life Processes That Shape the Earth
Ecosystem graphic organizer inside our 8th Grade Science Interactive Notebook.
Buy Earth Processes Poster Series - Set of 8 Posters. Rocks & Minerals; Faults & Folds; Earth's Structure; Erosion...
Shopping Check Price | <urn:uuid:23e93191-986d-450f-b4b1-f3a569915ddf> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://indulgy.com/post/wnlp2kbWQ1/weathering-erosion-deposition-graphic-organizer | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395679.92/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00064-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.746924 | 124 | 3.328125 | 3 |
"As the Greeks wrote their myths in the constellations, Orion, the mighty hunter, wheeled across the winter sky in eternal, futile pursuit of Taurus, the great bull, and Leo, the couchant lion. But long before the Greeks looked skyward and evolved their myths, primitive men discerned in the flickering pattern of the stars cosmic enactments of their fearsome struggles with their own devil-god - the shark."
Like the Greek gods, sharks also have within their repertoire a constellation myth, as told by the Warrau Indians of South America. For this tribe, Orion's Belt has a far more sinister backstory - it is a severed human leg. According to the legend, the leg once belonged to Nohi-Abassi, who schemed to kill his mother-in-law by enticing a hungry shark to eat her. Unluckily for him, however, his sister-in-law, "playing the role of a shark," cut off his leg. Nohi-Abassi died, and while his leg now rests in the sky as Orion's Belt, the rest of him wound up in an altogether less celestial place.
Also like the Greeks, whose gods were constantly cavorting with human women and begetting demi-gods, many Hawaiian myths tell of similar erotic behavior among their shark gods. Legend tells that Kamo-hoa-lii, king of the sharks, fell in love with Kalei, a human, and transformed himself into a man to marry her and bear a child with her. "The child, Nanaue, looked like any other child - except that on his back he bore the mark of his shark-father, the mouth of a shark." The story does not end well for the child, who devoured many islanders after the taboo of never being fed animal flesh was broken, presumably birthing an insatiable desire for human flesh. He was eventually caught - in his shark form - and taken to a hill in Kain-alu that still bears his name.
A staple of ancient Roman culture also bears a grisly similarity to the history of cultural practices involving sharks. While the Roman gladiator practice of pitting man against land beasts like lions or tigers is fairly well-known to most people (thanks in large part to Hollywood), gladiator games involving sharks are perhaps somewhat less well-known. But, like Sparatcus, Hawaiian warriors were also matched against fearsome killers for imperial entertainment. Shark pens constructed of large lava stones encircling a 4-acre area at the edge of a bay served as the den for the sharks. Fish and human bait were used to lure sharks into the pens, and Hawaiian warriors battled for their lives using a shark-tooth dagger, which was simply a single shark-tooth affixed to the end of a long stick. The warriors had a single opportunity to prevail: they must allow the sharks to charge them, attempting to dive beneath the shark at the last moment and use the shark-tooth dagger to slit the underside of the shark open.
Sharks also find themselves on the list of species with mistaken identities. Just as manatees and similar creatures have been mistaken for mermaids throughout history, so, too, has the shark been given this misnomer. In the town of Bregenz, Austria, a severely contorted, mummified shark has hung from an archway as a reputed "mermaid" guarding the town since, allegedly, the thirteenth century. Legend tells that a fisherman brought the "mermaid" in with his catch early one morning, but before he could return it, the "Spirit of the Lake" told him to hang her from the Arch of the Martinster as she was "beget of a land woman and...of no use [in the water]." Dr. Denys W. Tucker of the British Museum "tentatively identified the mermaid, from a photograph, as a mummified Porbeagle shark."
The chapter has many more stories to tell. One myth explains how various species of sharks were created as a result of an especially cruel young woman beating, squishing and lashing various sharks. Another relates how two particularly lazy sharks laid still for so long that they became islands. Some cultures tell a Jonah and the Whale type story which would be more aptly named "Jonah and the Shark." Moving past myth to historical fact, our book of the week describes "shark charmers" and holy men who kiss sharks in order to overpower and subdue them. Throughout history, holy wars have been fought among tribes, resulting from one tribe inadvertently or otherwise catching and/or defiling the sacred shark species of another tribe. Sharks have even played a central role in the resolution of documented crimes throughout history!
It truly is worth the time to read through this chapter of our book of the week, as it recounts the rich history of the shark as it has evolved through cultural experience. Maybe it will inspire you to see something other than a belt in the night sky :-) | <urn:uuid:75fd59a2-d971-498e-b093-3245a1ad450d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2011/08/book-of-week-shark-week-part-2.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393463.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00057-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972457 | 1,034 | 2.625 | 3 |
ADOPT A GRIZZLY BEAR
In 1975, The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed
the brown (grizzly) bear as a threatened species
in the Lower 48 states, under the Endangered
Species Act, meaning it is considered likely to
become endangered. In Alaska, where there are
estimated to be over 30,000 brown bears, they are
classified as a game animal with regionally
The brown bear (known as the grizzly in the Lower
48 states) is a large predator distinguished from
black bears by a distinctive hump on the shoulders,
a dished profile to the face, and long claws about
the length of a human finger. Coloration is usually
darkish brown but can vary from very light cream to
black. The long guard hairs on their back and
shoulders often have white tips and give the bears
a "grizzled" appearance, hence the name "grizzly."
Brown bears vary greatly in size. Adult males can
weigh from 300 to 850 pounds while females weigh in between 200 and 450 pounds. The largest brown bears are found along the coast of Alaska and British Columbia, and islands such as Kodiak and Admiralty Islands. Here, because of a consistent diet of high protein salmon, males average over 700 pounds and females average about 450 pounds. European brown bears and brown bears from the interior of North America average about two-thirds the size of these large coastal brown bears. Despite this large size, brown bears are extremely agile and fast, reaching speeds of 35 to 40 mph.
Brown bears are found in a variety of habitats, from dense forests, to subalpine meadows and arctic tundra. The brown bear is thought to have adapted to the life of a plains or steppe animal and was once common on the Great Plains of North America. Human encroachment has forced the remaining brown bear populations to select rugged mountains and remote forests that are undisturbed by humans.
Brown bears are found in North America, eastern and western Europe, northern Asia and in Japan. In North America, brown bears are found in western Canada, Alaska, and in the states of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington. Brown bears have the widest distribution of any bear species and occupy a wide range of habitats. Historically, they could be found from Alaksa to Mexico, California to Ohio.
In the lower 48 states there are 800 - 1,020 brown bears surviving. Of these, about 350 live in northwestern Montana, 350-400 live in or around Yellowstone National Park, about 30 in the Selkirk Mountains in northern Idaho/northeast Washington, about 30 live in the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem in northern Idaho/western Montana, and perhaps 20 live in the North Cascades of upper Washington state. In Alaska, there are about 30,000.
Females reach sexual maturity at 4 to 7 years old and breed in early May through mid-July. Bears experience "delayed implantation" so that the fertilized egg does not begin to develop until November, enabling the young to be born in January or February while the mothers are hibernating in a den. Cubs are about 1 - 1½ pounds when born and litter sizes range from 1 - 3, but two is most common. Cubs will remain with their mothers for at least 2 - 4 years, and females won’t breed again while in the company of their young. Thus, the breeding interval is three or more years between successive litters.
Brown bears are omnivores and will eat both vegetation and animals. Grasses, sedges, roots, berries, insects, fish, carrion and small and large mammals are all part of a bear's diet. In some areas they have become significant predators of large hoofed mammals such as moose, caribou and elk. In other areas a large, consistent supply of food like salmon have led to behavioral changes that allow large congregations of brown bears to share an abundant resource. The diet of brown bears varies depending on what foods are available in that particular season or habitat.
Bears live solitary lives except during breeding, cub rearing, and in those areas with a super-abundant food supply such as salmon streams. Brown bears hibernate during the winter for 5-8 months, depending on the location, and usually dig their dens on north-facing slopes to ensure good snow cover. Brown bears need to eat a lot in the summer and fall in order to build up sufficient fat reserves for surviving the denning period. This is particularly true for pregnant females who give birth to one-pound cubs and then nurse them to about 20 pounds before emerging from the den in April -May. All the time without eating or drinking a thing! These bears will defend their territories, and mothers are known for their ferocity in defending their cubs.
Brown bears can live up to 30 years in the wild, though 20 - 25 is normal.
Most of the threats to the survival of brown bears are associated with degradation of habitat due to development, logging, road-building and energy and mineral exploration. Habitat destruction in valley bottoms and riparian areas is particularly harmful to grizzlies because they use these as "corridors" to travel from one area to another. Another major threat to the brown bear is human-caused mortality. Some brown bears are accidentally killed by hunters who mistake them for black bears, a legal game species. Other bears become habituated to humans because of what biologists call "attractants," which include garbage, pet foods, livestock carcasses, and improper camping practices. This can eventually lead to conflicts between people and bears - not only in populated areas of the grizzly's range but also in back-country recreation sites and removal of the bear. And lastly, illegal killing (poaching) of bears remains another factor leading to their decline.
The Endangered Species Act and Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an international treaty with more than 144 member countries. Appendix I listed species cannot be traded commercially. Appendix II listed species can be traded commercially only if it does not harm their survival. | <urn:uuid:f8113fc9-a3c3-419a-aa86-efd2d6d15565> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://worldanimalfoundation.homestead.com/AdoptAGrizzlyBear.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395346.6/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00093-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95057 | 1,290 | 3.890625 | 4 |
To the editor:
Knowing about your family’s health history goes a long way toward preventing serious diseases like diabetes.
Many people who develop type 2 diabetes have one or more family members with the disease, so it’s important to know your family’s diabetes health history.
The good news is that people with a family history of diabetes can take steps now to prevent or delay the onset of the disease.
The Northwest Colorado Visiting Nurse Association is partnering with the National Diabetes Education Program to share this message during National Diabetes Awareness Month this November.
You can prevent or delay type 2 diabetes by losing a small amount of weight – 5 to 7 percent (10 to 14 pounds for a 200-pound person) – and becoming more active. Keys to success, which will benefit the entire family, are:
• Get at least 30 minutes of physical activity a day, at least 5 days a week.
• Eat a variety of foods that are low in fat and reduce the number of calories you eat each day.
• To help achieve health goals, write down everything you eat and drink, and the number of minutes you are active each day. Review these notes daily.
Nearly 24 million Americans have diabetes. In 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that nearly 5.9 percent of adults in Colorado had diagnosed diabetes, up from 3.8 percent in 1994. On October 22, the CDC announced that the number of Americans with diabetes is projected to double or triple by 2050.
It is estimated that another 57 million adults in the U.S. have pre-diabetes, placing them at increased risk for developing type 2 diabetes. In addition, it is estimated that one-third of the people with diabetes don’t know that they have the disease.
People with undiagnosed diabetes can experience damage to the heart, eyes, kidneys, and limbs, without having any symptoms.
In recognition of November’s National Diabetes Awareness Month, the VNA will offer free cardiovascular screenings, which include blood glucose measures to screen for diabetes.
Call Eveline at 871-7658 to make an appointment in Craig at 745 Russell St. To learn if you are at risk of diabetes, take the diabetes risk test at www.yourdiabetesinfo.org.
Community health educator, Northwest Colorado Visiting Nurse Association | <urn:uuid:19cc1620-a235-41b7-925e-bfa0e0341665> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.craigdailypress.com/news/2010/nov/05/atusa-baghery-help-prevent-diabetes/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396459.32/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00163-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937355 | 483 | 2.765625 | 3 |
Today’s the day the Comet PanSTARRS makes its closest approach to Earth but we can’t see it from North America just yet.
So far the comet has only been visible to the southern hemisphere, but that will change by Thursday, when it may be visible near the sun during sunset.
Astronomers measure the brightness of objects in the sky by using a magnitude scale, and they now believe this comet could reach an apparent magnitude of +1 — which is not brilliant, but not too bad, either. This puts the comet about on par with Antares, a star that is visible in the nighttime sky.
In any case it should be visible with binoculars.
Here’s where to look for PanSTARRS in the nighttime sky later this month:
Of course PANSTARRS is just an appetizer for what could be a still more spectacular comet later this year, ISON, which could reach a brightness nearly that of the moon in late November or December as it makes its closest approach to the Sun.
But comets are notoriously fickle, so we’ll just wait an see what kind of a show ISON puts on. For now, let’s enjoy PANSTARRS. | <urn:uuid:feb04a9c-0565-4ab2-ba57-b558ba44637e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://blog.sfgate.com/science/2013/03/05/comet-panstarrs-to-be-visible-in-nighttime-sky-later-this-month/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397795.31/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00127-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95037 | 254 | 3.078125 | 3 |
Carbon Footprint of New Conference Center: One Million Tons
It's an inconvenient truth. The proposed Conference Center has a huge carbon footprint compared to the existing Faculty Center. Note that California AB32 is concerned with promoting statewide policies to reduce greenhouse gases: the proposed Conference Center/Hotel is in conflict. The Regents also call for a carbon neutral UC Campus with programmed reduction in air travel. The EPA is also regulating greenhouse gases as hazardous emissions.
See our new link to the Science article concerning virtual meetings: an increasing trend as we move away from the heavy carbon footprint of the hundreds of plane flights each conference causes.
If we want to make any effort toward containing the CO2 problem, we must go on a kind of diet. Think of the Conference Center as that piece of chocolate cake that you push away. You don't need to eat it, and it's not worth the calories. We hope you'll agree that the Conference Center isn't worth the carbon. Even if the building's carbon footprint can be mitigated through energy savings and perhaps rooftop Solar power, it is the supply chain and activities of the Conference Center that are responsible for most of the carbon footprint. So the LEEDS silver certification would have little impact on the total carbon footprint. What is sustainability? It is making prudent, sometimes difficult choices, to live within our means both from an environmental and fiscal perspective. One must ask whether the Conference Center is a prudent, sustainable, choice. In the end, if scientists are going to attempt to convince the broader community of the dangers of climate change, we must convince our own Universities to take steps- sometimes painful- to mitigate climate change. That means not pursuing major development.
The Berkeley Cool Climate network calculator http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/ estimates:
300,000 s.f. hotel + supply chain (Los Angeles, CA) corresponds to 3376 M tons of CO2, annually.
This is for a hotel only, not a conference center + hotel.
Number of airline flights:
70% occupancy X 282 rooms X 365 = 72,051 nights. Assume 3 days per meeting or visit, so divide flights by
3 on average. So that's 24,000 flights per year. According to the same site:
1 round-trip medium 400-1200 mile flight = 0.8 metric Ton of CO2.
Carbon from flights: 19,000 T
Car travel: 1 T per 2000 miles, using 20 miles/gallon
(100 trips of 20 miles). While difficult to say, it is fair to guess that activities will generate 200 trips per week,
or roughly 100-200 T per year.
Total CO2 production: 3376 (hotel) + 19,000 (flights) + 200 (cars)
= 22,576 metric tons per year.
Note that even if we are wrong, and the CO2 from the flights is 20% less than our estimate, we are still
looking at roughly 19,000 metric tons of carbon per year - and the total 1 M metric tons is still correct.
If carbon offsets are around $10.00 per metric Ton - costs about $225,000/yr in carbon offsets.
Over a 50 year lifetime, the Conference Center and its associated conference/hotel activities would be responsible for about one million metric tons of CO2 production. | <urn:uuid:3d04dc8b-a39b-4174-9d90-ae76e200f126> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://sites.google.com/site/savefca/carbon-footprint-of-conference-center | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396100.16/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00185-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928679 | 693 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Over the past two decades, the global impact of transnational crime has risen to unprecedented levels as criminal groups use new technologies and diversify their activities.
Over the past two decades, the global impact of transnational crime has risen to unprecedented levels as criminal groups use new technologies and diversify their activities.
"Today, organized crime is killing more people, and more children, than all the dictatorial regimes combined in the world..." - Felipe Calderon, President of Mexico
Hand-colored engraving of a portrait of Peter the Great, Czar of Russia in 1717, by Jean-Marc Nattier (North Wind Picture Archives/AP Images).
In 1676, a ban on smoking in Russia was lifted by the czar, Peter the Great, as a part of his move to modernize and make the country more like Western Europe. The original ban had been instituted in 1634 by Czar Mikhail Fyodorovich. But tobacco smuggling continued despite the ban, and those caught smoking faced severe penalties, including the cutting of smokers’ noses, deportation to Siberia, and potentially the death penalty for repeated offenses. After the ban was lifted, Russia attempted to prosper economically from legal cultivation and trade of tobacco and cigarettes. This included not only Russia’s leadership collecting taxes on tobacco imports, particularly from Great Britain, but also nurturing a domestic Russian tobacco cultivation industry.
Portolan Map of Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Indian Subcontinent. Done in 1544 by the Italian cartographer Battista Agnese (Photo by Buyenlarge/Getty Images).
The Pirate Round was a geographical route used by Anglo-American pirates from 1693 to 1700. It extended east from the Caribbean, around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, north to Madagascar, and finally to the Arabian Peninsula and, in some cases, as far as India. Both pirates and privateers—or pirates with a letter of marquee from a government essentially authorizing the grantee to carry out piracy—raided ships along the route to steal spices, gold, silver, and other commodities. As a result of the Pirate Round, the island of Madagascar quickly became an organized pirate haven, complete with an outpost to facilitate the trade and smuggling of illicit goods and slaves. The overall profitability of the Pirate Round trade route, however, began to erode when merchants began to use armed escorts.
A handcut engraving from the 1880s of a Chinese merchant weighing opium (North Wind Picture Archives/AP Images).
In 1729, Chinese emperor Yung Cheng enacted a ban on the sale of opium—except for medicinal purposes. Addiction rates had surged after the Dutch and British empires began exporting vast amounts of opium to China in the early eighteenth century in response to a high trade deficit. (Europe and its colonies imported many Chinese luxury goods but European traders were unable to establish a market for European goods in China.)
Despite the ban, Britain continued to encourage opium smuggling into China indirectly through the British East India Company. Opium imports increased substantially, motivating the new emperor, Kia King, to ban opium altogether in 1799. After a Chinese maritime commissioner attempted to seize opium cargo in 1839, Great Britain launched a military expedition, later designated as the first Opium War. In 1842, China conceded and was forced to pay Britain a large indemnity, cede the territory of Hong Kong to the British, and grant certain European powers economic “spheres of influence” to operate freely in Chinese ports.
Woodcut from the 1850s of the steamship named "Arabia" of the Cunard Line (North Wind Pictures/AP Images).
In January 1803, the Charlotte Dundas, widely regarded as the first functional steamboat, was launched on a canal in Scotland. In the decades that followed, steamboats were heavily used in global commerce, travel, and consequently, illicit transnational smuggling. In East Asia, for example, steamships enabled the British Empire to expand its operations in China in smuggling vast amounts of opium into the country despite a ban instated by Emperor Kia King in 1799. Steamboats were well suited to long-distance voyages because they had significant cargo space and could hold a large crew. By 1890, the increasing specialization and technological development of steamships, combined with the use of improved navigation charts and the development of the Suez Canal, led to an end of the era of sailing ships in commerce.
Chinese rioters burning British warehouses during the Second Opium War in the 1850s. Hand-colored woodcut of a 19th-century illustration (North Wind Pictures/AP Images).
The Second Opium War began after a series of clashes between Chinese and British maritime authorities after Chinese customs officials boarded a British vessel, the Arrow, in early October 1856. Searching for opium, the Chinese claimed they had the right to search the ship because it was not registered properly under the British flag. British forces considered the incident an unprovoked and illegal search, and attacked the Chinese port of Canton. Ultimately, the British military—joined by French forces—entered Peking. China’s leadership was then forced to accept the Convention of Peking, which granted European authorities even more economic rights to operation in the country, allowed for the freedom of religion in China, and legalized the opium trade.
Chinese police parade forty-two convicted criminals who belong to the same underground Triad society during public sentencing at a stadium in Guangzhou, southern China, May 31, 2004 (China Photos/Courtesy Reuters).
Chinese gangs or secret societies, usually referred to as triads, emerged in the early twentieth century when Shaolin monks formed a group with the goal of ending the Qing Dynasty rule. Following the dynasty’s fall in 1911 and subsequent communist takeover, the triads underwent a major transition from revolutionary operations to more illicit criminal activity.
Today, they are active in drug and human trafficking, pirating of intellectual property, facilitation of prostitution, as well as money laundering and fraud, among other criminal enterprises. Tending to be ethnically homogenous, hierarchal in organization, and well connected with prominent police and political figures in Asia, some of the most powerful triads are based in Hong Kong. Triads, however, can also be found in Australia, Europe, Macau, North America, and South Africa. It is estimated that Chinese triads smuggle around one hundred thousand illegal Chinese aliens into the United States each year.
Workers destroy twelve million dollars worth of opium in Shanghai in January 1918 (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images).
On January 23, 1912, representatives from China, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan, the Netherlands, Persia (now Iran), Portugal, Russia, Siam (now Thailand), the United Kingdom, and the United Kingdom’s maritime territories signed the Hague International Opium Convention. Broadly, the convention—which was the first international drug control treaty—called on parties to control “manufacturing, importing, selling, distributing, and exporting morphine, cocaine, and their respective salts.” Although its provisions were relatively vague and did not enter into force for a decade, the treaty became a powerful tool for those calling for expanded narcotics regulation and played a large role in influencing national-level drug control legislation at the time. It also laid the foundation for decades of drug control efforts that focused on the transport and production of drugs, rather than health-based strategies to reduce drug use.
Full-length portrait of Albert, Prince of Monaco, circa 1885 (Photo by Unidentified Author/Alinari via Getty Images).
Prince Albert of Monaco, frustrated by the inability to legally pursue a former lover who had robbed him and fled outside Monaco’s borders, in 1914 hosted the first International Criminal Police Conference to discuss enhancing international cooperation on crossborder crime. The meeting gathered police officers and other legal officials from twenty-three countries across North America, South America, Europe, and the Middle East. Delegates discussed the need for a more centralized body to facilitate police cooperation and pursuing criminals across national borders. In 1923, the group established the International Criminal Police Commission. Reconvening after World War II, the commission restarted its work and in 1956 was formally renamed Interpol (officially, the International Criminal Police Organization). Today, Interpol has 190 member states and is considered one of the preeminent global institutions in the fight against transnational crime.
A common Chinese jar that disguised 110 tales of raw opium, found by authorities in Hong Kong (AP Photo).
The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 sought to bring the United States into compliance with international agreements regulating the distribution of opiates. Supporters of the bill argued that baseline regulation of opium was necessary, given its role in various social ills. The law did ban the use of opiates, but also mandated that certain licensed professionals could legally prescribe them. A controversial clause in the legislation blocked the distribution of opiates to addicts because addiction was not considered a disease to be treated. Many opium addicts therefore resorted to black market sales, smuggling, and other criminal activity to obtain the drug. Later, a government-sponsored commission concluded that the Harrison Act in fact increased the black market for narcotics and that the smuggling of opiates had increased around the Mexican and Canadian borders. Despite the controversy, the act was considered a pioneering piece of U.S. drug legislation in the twentieth century.
Chicago crime boss Al Capone, center, in the custody of U.S. marshals, leaves the courtroom of Federal Judge James H. Wilkerson in Chicago on October 24, 1931. He was tried for tax evasion (AP Photo).
The term organized crime is believed to have been first used in 1919 by the Chicago Crime Commission, an independent group of local business representatives. At the time, the expression did not refer [PDF] to formal criminal organizations, but to a more decentralized criminal class of individuals profiting from inefficiency and corruption of public institutions. Later, and largely as a result of the prohibition of alcohol in the United States, the term evolved [PDF] to refer to more formal organizations such as gangs or syndicates engaged in criminal activity on a cooperative, hierarchal basis. In the 1950s, the U.S. Senate Kefauver Committee explicitly linked organized crime to the rise of the Italian mafia and ethnically homogenous groups. More recently, the term has undergone yet another transition and refers also to complex transnational crime networks such as the Russian mafia, Chinese triads, and Latin American cartels. Experts continue to debate [PDF] the term’s definition.
Spectators gathered by the side of captured rum runner, Silver Spray, watch prohibition agents pour “white lightning” from the five-gallon bottles on the deck into the Elizabeth River, in Norfolk, Virginia in 1922 (Charles S. Borjes/AP Photo/Virginian-Pilot).
In the wake of the Revolution of 1917, which ended a centuries-old czarist government, Russia's new Soviet regime implemented a harsh policy of arresting and sending suspected criminal and political opponents to labor camps. In the camps, many of these individuals, particularly professional pickpockets, formed elaborate, hierarchical criminal secret societies. The most elite criminals were called vory v zakonei (vory), or thieves in law. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, vory members attempted to adapt to Russia's new economic and political system, but faced fresh challenges from other criminal groups—particularly those with formal educational backgrounds. Nevertheless, the vory remain popular in Russian culture today, and are still believed to be in operation within and across Russia's borders.
Spectators gathered by the side of captured rum runner, Silver Spray, watch prohibition agents pour “white lightning” from the five-gallon bottles on the deck into the Elizabeth River, in Norfolk, Virginia in 1922
In January 1920, the U.S. Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, restricting the import, export, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol. Despite the ban, intricate illicit networks commonly smuggled alcohol from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and other places. Secret bars, called speakeasies, sprouted up across the United States. At the same time, powerful criminal syndicates specializing in the illegal distribution of alcohol emerged. Alphonse Gabriel “Al” Capone made tens of millions of dollars from illegal alcohol sales and wielded substantial political and economic leverage, particularly in Chicago. The rise of criminal activity related to alcohol sales also led to intergang violence as organized criminal organizations sought to stake out territory for their operations. In 1933, after widespread abuse of the law across the country, even by President Harding, who allegedly kept a liquor stash in the White House, the Twenty-First Amendment repealed Prohibition.
A Chinese coolie cuts white poppy, which furnishes China with opium, near Shanghai on September 21, 1936 (AP Photo).
In May of 1921, the League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee began monitoring laws, regulations, and statistics related to narcotics. Early on, the committee focused on collecting data that would allow it to report measures taken by “governments to carry out the obligations of the (Hague International Opium) Convention, and upon the production, distribution and consumption of the substance with which the Convention deals.”
In 1930, the advisory committee revised its rules, specifically requesting that states report how much opium they had confiscated from illegal traffickers. Their work revealed trends such as a surge of opium cultivation in China, a rising amount of opium exported from the Middle East, and the increasing export of opium from India for nonmedicinal uses. After studying Chinese opium production, the committee referred the problem to the League of Nations’ Council for further consideration, a major step in international anti–drug trafficking monitoring.
U.S. Border Patrol inspectors locate fresh footprints in the desert along the border to Mexico, twelve miles west of Calexico, California on August 11, 1950. With Mt. Signal as a distinct directional point in the background, this area was frequently used by illegal immigrants to enter the United States (AP Photo).
In 1924 and 1926, the United States concluded separate smuggling-related agreements with Mexico and Canada. Both accords symbolized an important evolution in the regulation of transnational commerce. The convention with Canada authorized both countries to inspect cargo crossing the U.S.-Canadian border for suspected illicit goods, supported the sharing of information to prevent smuggling, and called for the return of stolen goods.
The convention with Mexico was comparatively more comprehensive, and included measures to address the smuggling of narcotics, liquor, other commercial merchandise, and material related to fisheries, as well as the problem of illegal laborers crossing into the United States from Mexico. In 1924, the U.S. Border Patrol was also established, initially focusing on preventing illegal immigrants from crossing into the United States from Mexico.
Smoking opium valued at $25,000 was seized in a coal bunker on a ship in Brooklyn, New York by members of the Surveyors’ Searching Squad of New York on March 9, 1925. Photo shows members of the Searching Squad who made the haul (AP Photo).
The International Opium Convention of 1925 updated the Hague International Opium Convention of 1912. Specifically, the 1925 convention sought to focus more on international controls for narcotics as well as cannabis. In particular, the accord established import-export controls for the legitimate international trade of such substances, and established the League of Nations’ Permanent Central Opium Board (later absorbed by the United Nations) to gather country-specific statistics related to the narcotics trade. The International Opium Convention also supplemented the First Geneva Convention on Opium, agreed to the same year, which mandated that opium be produced only through state-run monopolies, and that the entire opium trade end within fifteen years.
Sap oozes from poppies after they are scratched, a process to get opium from poppies, in a village about 310 miles north of Kabul on May 6, 2006. Heroin and morphine are derived from opium, which comes from poppies (Ahmad Masood/Courtesy Reuters).
Drafted in July 1931, the Narcotics Convention—officially the Convention for Limiting the Manufacture and Regulating the Distribution of Narcotic Drugs—entered into force in July 1933 with forty state parties. It sought to improve on country-specific data collection for narcotics to establish worldwide trade and manufacturing controls, recognized the need to manufacture some narcotics for “medical and scientific purposes,” and called on parties to submit manufacturing estimates and import needs for a variety of narcotics to the League of Nations Permanent Central Opium Board. The board, in turn, was empowered to establish suggested limits for each country’s narcotics output, import, and production. It was also responsible for making projections for countries that failed to submit proper statistical data. Countries that did not control illicit drug traffic could be identified and publicly shamed through convention reports. The convention also stipulated that state parties could enact drug bans on noncompliant countries.
The vagrancy charges against Meyer Lansky was dismissed on February 26, 1958, after a short trial (AP Photo).
Meyer Lansky, a powerful U.S. gambling baron, is widely credited for establishing the practice of money laundering—that is, transferring funds acquired from criminal activity through a variety of seemingly legitimate bank accounts and nonexistent companies—beginning in 1932. Popularly referred to as the "mob’s accountant," Lansky shifted millions of dollars through fake shell and holding companies to anonymous offshore bank accounts in Switzerland. Although Lansky flew to Israel in the 1970s to avoid tax evasion charges, he was eventually deported back to the United States. The case against him failed, however, and he was never charged. He died in 1983, allegedly with tens of millions of dollars still stashed away in hidden bank accounts outside the United States. Currently, the United Nations estimates that money laundering accounts for between $800 billion to $2 trillion (2 percent to 5 percent) of global domestic product.
Ships are anchored outside the Singapore harbor as a storm approaches on March 6, 2001, in Singapore. Singapore hosted an anti-piracy meeting on March 16, 2001, between high ranking International Maritime Organization officials and regional maritime authorities to come up with ways to combat the growing problem of piracy (Ed Wray/AP Photo).
In 1948, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), then called the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization, was established to govern international maritime commerce. Other than a focus on creating baseline standards for maritime security, the IMO is also responsible for establishing universal regulations related to pollution, search and rescue, and legal adjudication of maritime disputes.
In December 2002, the IMO enacted amendments to the 1974 International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, which created the International Ship and Port Facility Code—an attempt to prevent smuggling, terrorism, and other forms of maritime transnational crime. In 2009, the IMO also convened a meeting in Djibouti to address the problem of piracy, armed robbery, and maritime security, especially in the Gulf of Aden. To date, the IMO has 170 members.
A prime mover drives past stacks of containers at a container terminal in Singapore on December 22, 2007. Singapore is spending S$2 billion ($1.38 billion) to boost annual capacity at its container port by about 40 per cent to cope with the higher volumes expected from global trade, a newspaper said on Saturday (Tim Chong/Courtesy Reuters).
After years of observing dock workers unload and load goods from trucks to ships, Malcolm McLean, owner of a small trucking company, gambled on an invention intended to speed up the process: container shipping. On April 26, 1956, the first container ship set sail. His invention led to the creation of an entirely new transport system that transformed global trade and economies by making the movement of goods easier, cheaper, and more efficient. Although container shipping opened up critical markets around the world, it also created a new means of transporting illicit goods. Today, nearly 90 percent [PDF] of global manufactured goods are transported via container.
The first of the long range Boeing 707 intercontinental jet transport plane is shown during tests over Washington State in 1959 (AP Photo).
On October 26, 1958, the Boeing 707 took off on its first commercial flight from Paris to New York. After its maiden flight, similar jetliners were introduced around the world in rapid succession. The Boeing 707 revolutionized the transportation industry by cutting transatlantic travel from six days by ship to less than a single day, connecting countries, peoples, and markets like never before. Like the container revolution, the advent of the jet age opened new avenues for transnational criminal activity.
On March 17, 1947 officials seized 459 ounces of pure heroin valued at over one million dollars in the black market aboard the French freighter Saint Tropez after its arrival in New York City. Cesar Negro, Marseilles seaman,second from left, was arrested on charges of smuggling narcotics and Rene Bruchard (second from right), ship’s linen keeper, is being held for questioning (AP Photo).
On March 25, 1961, to consolidate and synthesize the nine existing agreements on drug control, the United Nations adopted the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which entered into force in December 1964. The convention aimed to combat drug abuse through coordinated international action against trafficking. It created a list of prohibited substances and placed limits on the possession, distribution, and production of such drugs, as well as established the International Narcotics Control Board, a precursor to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. The Commission on Narcotic Drugs and the World Health Organization were subsequently granted the power to add or remove drugs from the list of banned substances.
Hidden behind stacks of plastic chairs are 3,084 pounds of marijuana seized by U.S. Customs Service on November 19, 1999, at the Port of Charleston. It was found in a cargo container brought in from Jamaica (U.S. Customs Service/AP Photo).
Strategically located between drug producers in Latin America and consumers in the United States, Jamaica became a major transit point for drug trafficking in the early 1970s, supplying the 10 percent of marijuana imported to the United States that didn’t originate in Mexico. In response, U.S. and Jamaican authorities stepped up crop eradication, interdiction efforts, and security along the border. By 1980, marijuana trafficking through Jamaica had slowed to a crawl but U.S. demand for marijuana was quickly filled by Columbian criminal groups. Jamaican posses (gangs), however, simply resorted to selling cocaine instead of marijuana during the mid-1980s. After the crackdown on marijuana production and transit ended, gangs returned to the marijuana trade and in 2010, the nation remained the Caribbean’s largest producer and exporter [PDF] of marijuana.
A Los Angeles police officer searches members of the 18th Street gang during a 1987 sweep in the downtown on August 11, 1987 in Los Angeles (AP Photo).
Gang membership and activity sharply increased throughout the United States in the 1970s, as did associated gang-related violence. Many of the gangs are involved in the illicit drug trade, importing illegal drugs from around the world.
In Los Angeles, the number of youth gangs doubled in one decade from four hundred to eight hundred. Although gangs are predominantly associated with major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, rural areas, such as Mississippi, also witnessed a rise in gang activity as drug distribution widened. Today, gangs account for an estimated 80 percent of crimes across the country. Furthermore, many gangs that originated in the United States—particularly Mara Salvatruchas (MS-13) and 18th Street Gang (M-18)—are increasingly recruiting members in Mexico and Central America, adding a transnational dimension to the gang problem in the United States.
Commissioner of Narcotics Henry L. Giordano begins his testimony before a House Commerce Subcommittee, on February 27, 1968, backing administration proposals that would make LSD possession a misdemeanor punishable by one year in prison and would strengthen penalties against the manufacture, sales, and distribution of the hallucinogenic drug (Henry Griffin/AP Photo).
Throughout the 1960s, the use of recreational drugs proliferated in the United States and other developed countries. In response, the United Nations passed the Convention on Psychotropic Substances on February 21, 1971. The convention established an international control system for psychotropic substances—namely methamphetamines, hallucinogens, and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)—although it did not criminalize them as harshly as other so-called “organic” illicit drugs.
U.S. President Richard M. Nixon addresses a joint session of Congress in the House of Representatives in Washington, DC, in September 1971. Seated behind the president are U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew, left, and Speaker of the House Carl Albert (AP Photo).
In the aftermath of a report produced by U.S. congressmen Robert Steele and Morgan Murphy that described high rates of heroin abuse among servicemen in Vietnam, the Nixon administration refocused government attention and resources to address the growing drug problem in the United States. At a press conference on June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon named drug abuse “public enemy number one,” setting into motion what is known today as the war on drugs. In 1973, Nixon established the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to enforce federal drug laws and coordinate government efforts. In contrast with subsequent administrations, the majority of funding to combat drugs during the Nixon administration was allocated for treatment, rather than enforcement.
A Kenya Wildlife Service officer pours gasoline onto a heap of more than ten tons of elephant ivory and rhino horns which was burned to help stem illegal ivory trade on February 9, 2011. The ivory has a street value of over $1 million dollars (Corinne Dufka/Courtesy Reuters).
On July 1, 1975, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) entered into force to prevent overexploitation or extinction. Originally, CITES protected only a select number of plants and animals through international trade bans or restrictions. Today, CITES protects more than thirty thousand species and is the largest existing environmental agreement, with more than 170 state parties. In addition to plants and animals, CITES also limits trade in items made from its restricted species, such as food, medicine, and clothing. The convention remains a critical tool to stopping international environmental crime, which earns tens of billions [PDF] of dollars every year.
Portraits of Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, and books of his sayings, were featured in most of the demonstrations held by Red Guards. This demonstration on September 14, 1966 in Beijing, was typical of those in other locations (AP Photo).
The Big Circle Boys, known in Chinese as Tai Huen Jai, were originally members of the Red Guards, youth militants who terrorized academics, teachers, and capitalists according to the party line of the Chinese Cultural Revolution from 1965 to 1968. After Chairman Mao Zedong died in 1976, the Red Guards were disbanded and forced to attend reeducation camps, where they were reportedly starved and tortured. The Big Circle Boys initially engaged in petty and violent crime in China, acquiring a reputation for ruthlessness. Over time, the gang expanded beyond Chinese borders to the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States, where members became increasingly involved in drug, arms, and human trafficking.
Directors general of Customs from several South and Central American countries watch as U.S. Customs agents unload a ship container filled with about 3,200 lbs. of cocaine found hidden with cases of toilets from Colombia at the Port of Miami on March 3, 1997. Agents found the cocaine worth an estimated $24 million.
Following the major crackdown on drug production and trafficking in Mexico in the 1970s, Colombian cartels developed rapidly to meet the demand for new sources of marijuana and cocaine. In 1978 and 1979, major Colombian drug cartel leaders from Medellín, Colombia, embarked on a campaign to control wholesale distribution in the United States. As demand and profits increased exponentially, drug trafficking became increasingly sophisticated; cartels evolved to become transnational criminal organizations that transported large quantities of drugs by ship, airplane, and even submarine. Today, Colombia is the world's leading producer and exporter of cocaine. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, more than 95 percent of cocaine seized in the United States originates in Colombia.
President Jimmy Carter reaches to shake hands with Representative William Harsha (R-Ohio) at the White House in Washington, DC on October 24, 1978, before Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978.
When the Penn Central Railroad went bankrupt in 1970, the U.S. government was forced to evaluate its strict route and fare controls of transportation. Facing increasing pressure to relax the rigid regulation of the airline industry to prevent it too from collapsing, President Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act on October 24, 1978. The act removed government control over and regulation of flight routes, schedules, and fares, and opened the commercial market to new airline companies. Over the next twenty years, air travel doubled and fares dropped by 40 percent. Europe would deregulate its airlines in 1992, which would lead prices in that region also to drop. The deregulation of airfare, which made travel more affordable and accessible, is cited as one of the major contributors to globalization. Although globalization has fostered international licit trade, illegal markets have simultaneously benefited.
The ECOWAS/CEDEAO (Economic Community of West African States/Communaute economique des Etats de l’Afrique de l’Ouest ) insignia pictured in 1992 (Photo by Erick-Christian AHOUNOU/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images).
On May 29, 1979, the Economic Community of West African States established the Protocol on Free Movement of Persons, Residence, and Establishment, which called on member states to ensure the free movement of people, services, and capital throughout the region. Aimed at strengthening economic and cultural integration among the member states in the hopes of enhancing regional stability and security, the treaty had a significant impact on West Africa as borders opened and large sectors of the population moved. In countries such as Nigeria, however, the immigrant surge created a new, cheap labor source, which jeopardized job security for Nigerians. Ultimately, many individuals turned to criminal activities to earn a living. In addition, the decreased controls across the region increased the difficulty of monitoring border shipments and identifying criminal operations transporting illicit goods among the nations in the region.
Men smoke at the Yakuza headquarters in Osaka, Japan in 1985 (Abbas/Magnum Photos).
Japanese gangs, known collectively as the yakuza, are a decentralized and widespread criminal organization. Gangs have historically deep ties to the construction industry, which they capitalized on as labor brokers and subcontractors during the Japanese construction boom of the 1980s. By 1990, the yakuza had ties to nearly nine hundred construction companies throughout Japan. In 1992, the Japanese government took action against the yakuza by passing an antigang law; since then, membership has declined by 14 percent, although the gangs still operate with relatively impunity and have expanded beyond Japan’s borders.
Today, the yakuza are the largest organized criminal group in the world. The three largest and most powerful syndicates are the Yamaguchi-gumi, Sumiyoshi-kai, and Inagawa-kai, each further divided into hundreds of clans. In February 2012, the Obama administration froze the U.S.-based assets of yakuza leaders in response to their increased involvement in drug and human trafficking.
A razor blade is used to divide the contents of a five-dollar vile of crack, a smokable, purified form of cocaine, at a crack house in the South Bronx section of New York City in 1989 (Mark Lennihan/AP Photo).
By the early 1980s, the increased availability of cocaine on the black market caused prices to plummet by as much as 80 percent. In response, cocaine dealers developed a new product known as crack cocaine, which is a smokeable version of the powder. Compared with its pure powder form, crack cocaine was relatively inexpensive, which opened up markets to less affluent communities. As use of the powerful, highly addictive drug spread throughout the major U.S. cities in the 1980s and 1990s, public panic ensued. In an effort to address the problem, on November 18, 1988, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which increased criminal penalties for drug trafficking and possession and strengthened drug control regulations. Although the market demand has declined [PDF] by nearly 50 percent since consumption peaked the 1980s, the United States remains the largest consumer of cocaine worldwide, fueling criminal violence around the world—and especially in Latin America.
Chemical precursors, used to manufacture synthetic drugs, are seen in the Guatemalan police’s warehouse in Guatemala City on January 18, 2012. According to local media, 2062 of such containers have been seized in 2012 so far, as compared to a total of 6671 seized by the Guatemalan police in 2011 (Jorge Lopez/AP Photo/).
In response to escalating drug use and trafficking worldwide in the 1970s and 1980s, on December 19, 1988, the United Nations adopted the Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Vienna Convention), which built upon the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances. The convention strengthened legal and enforcement mechanisms to combat drug trafficking with stipulations like the illegalization of diversion of precursor chemicals, and increased international cooperation for extradition and transfer of proceedings. For the first time, the convention also criminalized the laundering of drug trafficking profits, which was later expanded to apply to all money laundering by the UN General Assembly in 1998.
Members of a Contra force planning to march into Nicaragua Monday in defiance of a Central America peace plan cheer during a parade ground formation in Honduras on August 29, 1989. United Nations secretary-general Javier Perez de Cuellar said he would soon contact the U.S. backed Nicaraguan rebels to obtain their cooperation in the plan, which calls for their disarmament (Matias Recart/AP Photo).
In the aftermath of the controversy surrounding the Iran-Contra affair, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) investigated allegations of Nicaraguan contra involvement in drug trafficking in the United States, particularly of crack cocaine. The Reagan administration had supported the Nicaraguan contras, which were vying for power against the communist Sandanista regime. On April 13, 1989, the SFRC released its findings, known as the Kerry Committee report, which concluded that the U.S. Department of State had indirectly funded drug traffickers: “It is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers.”
Thai customs officials show seized ivory in Bangkok on September 30, 2004. The ivory was seized from a Thai Airways International flight from Singapore bound for Bangkok. Elephant is on the "Ten Most Wanted Species" - most at risk from unregulated international trade and their fate was discussed at the thirteenth CITES conference a week later in Bangkok (Sukree Sukplang/Courtesy Reuters).
Although elephants have been hunted for centuries, the 1970s witnessed hunting of an unprecedented scale as a result of rising demand for ivory. Following the slaughter of an estimated seven hundred thousand elephants in ten years, the Fifteenth Conference of Parties (COP) to the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora imposed an international ban on elephant poaching and the ivory trade. Held from October 9 through October 20, 1989, the COP also established a specialized program, Monitoring Illegal Killing of Elephants, to track cases and monitor the ban’s implementation. In 2011, however, reports emerged of a spike in elephant poaching and seizures, raising concerns that elephants could again be on the brink of extinction.
Hong Kong Chief Secretary Donald Tsang (2nd R) speaks at a meeting in Hong Kong held by the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF) on January 30, 2002. Over 300 delegates from over 55 jurisdictions take part in the three-day meeting to review how much governments and banks have done to stop terrorist funds since the September 11 attacks (Bobby Yip/Courtesy Reuters).
In 1989, the Group of Seven Summit founded the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to draft policies and best practices to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. In its first report, released in April 1990, FATF outlined forty recommendations to combat money laundering. The recommendations included updating legal systems, instituting protective measures at financial institutions and non-financial businesses, and enhancing international cooperation. In October 2001, FATF added [PDF] recommendations on terrorism financing in response to increasing global terror threats.
FATF has been effective in encouraging states to adopt anti-money laundering policies by listing noncooperative nations and jurisdictions publicly, which have in turn engendered international pressure and also prompted UN Security Council resolution requiring UN member states to implement the recommendations on both terrorism and anti-money laundering.
Bosnian Serb soldiers follow armoured vehicles during a battle with Muslim forces, some thirty kilometers from the northeastern Bosnian Muslim-controlled town of Tuzla, in an area called Teocak on February 10, 1993 (Stringer/Courtesy Reuters).
On June 25, 1991, the republics of Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, which led to a series of armed conflicts throughout the Balkan region from 1991 to 1995. As the region stabilized, nations were left with large, surplus weapons stockpiles, which corrupt military officers sold to local criminals and international arms traffickers. In addition, poor governance in the region persists, allowing crime to both hinder regional development and facilitate transnational illicit trade. For example, nearly 80 percent of the European heroin trade crosses through the Balkans, and more than 50 percent of the human trafficking victims in Europe originate in the Balkans.
A Russian soldier directs an APC to roll over a line of guns prepared for destruction in outskirts of the villge of Vedeno on August 27, 1995. Russian forces destroyed hundreds of weapons surrendered by Chechen rebels in what both sides said was the biggest disarmement act in the breakaway province (Dima Korotayev/Courtesy Reuters).
In 1987, republics in the Baltic region of the Soviet Union began demanding autonomy. When Mikhail Gorbachev eventually resigned on December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union officially collapsed. In post-Soviet Russia, rampant corruption, massive stockpiles of unused weapons, and established black market trading routes contributed to the growth in illicit arms trafficking out of Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. Furthermore, post-Soviet republics benefit considerably from the trade, and arms buildups in those nations continue to add to the supply of poorly monitored weapons stockpiles.
European Community president Jacques Delors tells a news conference on December 8, 1993 that the first phase of the European monetary union was a failure (Charles Platiau/Courtesy Reuters).
On February 7, 1992, members of the European Community signed the Maastricht Treaty, or Treaty on the European Union (EU). The treaty, which established the euro as the single form of currency, also drastically reduced the restrictions and regulations on trade of goods and services among member nations. As a result, trade among the members surged, but illicit trade in the area rose in parallel. Three years later, in 1995, the Schengen Agreement took effect, abolishing border checks among its signatories. Twenty-five nations (including four non-EU members) now participate in the area. Some analysts believe that the elimination of internal border controls has allowed pan-European crime to grow and, in particular, has contributed to an increase in trafficking of women from eastern Europe to western Europe.
Members of the Colombian Navy stand guard on top of a seized submarine built by drug smugglers in a makeshift shipyard in Timbiqui, department of Cauca, on February 14, 2011. Colombian authorities said the submersible craft was to be used to transport eight tons of cocaine illegally into Mexico (Jaime Saldarriaga/Courtesy Reuters).
In 1993, Colombian authorities first discovered that drug trafficking organizations were using semi-submersible watercraft to transport multiple tons of cocaine to the United States. The Colombian Navy seized a narco-submarine in the Caribbean Sea on May 22, 1993, and has since taken part in a joint venture with the U.S Coast Guard to monitor waterways for semi-submersible crafts. The submarines are difficult to spot because they are almost undetectable by radar and create little wake. Since the first semi-submersible craft was used, Colombian drug smugglers have altered the craft’s design, building fully submersible torpedoes that can be dragged behind fishing vessels undetected and submarines that are capable of submersing up to sixty-five feet below the surface. In the two decades since the cartels began using the vessels, security forces have seized between fifty and sixty-three narco-submarines.
Colombian vice president Humberto de la Calle Lombana with Colombian officials at the 1994 Naples Conference on international organised crime (Stringer/Courtesy Reuters).
In response to drastic increases in organized crime on both national and international levels, the World Ministerial Conference on Organized Transnational Crime met from November 21 through 23, 1994. The aims of the conference, which was held in Naples, Italy, were to examine the global problems associated with transnational crime and to discuss international policy options, including national and international legislation to combat the threat. In the Naples Political Declaration and Global Action Plan against Organized Transnational Crime, participating nations agreed that societies should protect themselves from transnational crime by enacting adequate legislation and jointly emphasized the need for increased, and more efficient, international cooperation to combat organized transnational crime. The UN General Assembly adopted the declaration the following month, in December 1994.
An employee of Pacific Internet, one of Singapore’s three Internet service providers amid some of the company’s networking machinery on March 19, 1996 (Jonathan Drake/Courtesy Reuters).
The National Science Foundation ended its support of the NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network), a precursor to the modern Internet platform, on April 30, 1995. With this decommissioning, the final restrictions on Internet usage were removed, paving the way for private Internet service providers (ISPs) and therefore commercial traffic on the Internet. After being made available for public use, the Internet soon evolved into a platform for people, news organizations, and private enterprises to communicate, share information, and conduct business. However, the current form of the Internet is generally unmonitored. Criminal organizations also use it to communicate, violate intellectual property laws, and hack into personal and financial information.
A worker at the New Delhi Navin Florine Industries prepares tanks of CFC gas on March 19, 1996. The U.S. Customs Service says that contraband chlorofluorocarbon-12, the air-conditioning gas commonly called Freon, smuggled from India has suddenly become its number two problem, behind illegal drugs. CFC gas from India, where it is still legal , seeped into the United States by the ton, allowing American motorists to stay cool for less but prolonging the threat to the Earth’s ozone shield (John Moore/AP Photo).
The 1987 Montreal Protocol required developed countries to ban production and manufacturing of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) by 1996 because of their strong contribution to ozone layer depletion. Developed in the 1930s, CFCs are compounds of carbon, fluoride, and chlorine used as coolants and propellants found in everyday products such as refrigerators and aerosol cans. Because of the high demand for CFCs, illegal smuggling rose significantly—especially because developing nations were required to phase out the product beginning only in 2000. As with many aspects of smuggling, high profit margins were compelling. A canister of CFCs that cost $42 in Mexico in 1997 could earn $550 in the United States. Smugglers used falsely labeled containers and falsified shipping documents to hide their activities. In the mid-1990s, as much as 15 percent of the chemicals produced worldwide were estimated to be smuggled into industrialized countries where they were illegal.
Swedish Queen Silvia makes the final speech at the world congress against the commercial sexual exploitation of children in Stockholm, August 31, 1996 (Stringer/Courtesy Reuters).
The First World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children was held in Stockholm, Sweden, from August 27 to 31, 1996, the first meeting of its kind and aimed to design strategies and policies to help fight the sexual exploitation of children. The meeting focused on three main challenges: child prostitution (including international trafficking), child pornography, and the sale of children for sexual exploitation. The outcome document called for stronger national and international cooperation, better enforcement and review of laws currently in place to protect children, and criminalization of the sexual exploitation of children. The event marked an important step in the international effort to harmonize criminal policies to fight transnational crime, as well as fight crossborder exploitation of children.
An outside view of the UNODC headquarters headquarters, the Vienna International Centre (H. Heihsenberger/UNIS Vienna).
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) was established on November 1, 1997 when the United Nations (UN) combined the existing Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention and the Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Division in Vienna. Since its creation, the UNODC has focused its resources on combating crime, drugs, and terrorism. UNODC conducts research about current global and regional drug production and usage, manages capacity-building programs to help countries combat crime, and runs alternative livelihood programs for impoverished individuals involved in illicit trade. UNODC also helps implement the Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and advises the UN on anticrime policies. In addition, UNODC conducts programs to counter human trafficking, the sale and transportation of illicit firearms, and corruption.
Heads of State of the eight major industrialised democracies are seated at the table for the plenary session of their annual summit May 17, 1998 (Stringer/Courtesy Reuters).
The Group of Eight (G8) summit, held in the United Kingdom from May 15 to 18, 1998, determined that the growing trend of globalization had increased the amount of transnational criminal activity. The outcome document identified transnational crime as one of the world’s major challenges. In the document, G8 leaders also agreed that current criminal activity poses a threat to national and international security, as well as to global financial institutions by way of money laundering and corruption. Finally, G8 nations pledged to work together to explore new ways of fighting corruption, address the issue of human trafficking, promote joint law enforcement operations against perpetrators of transnational crime, and support the policy recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force.
Colombian Army General Mario Montoya (L) takes a cocaine pack confiscated by troops in Putumayo province, in this file photo taken on February 12, 2001.Plan Colombia began in December and has sent U.S.-contracted spray planes flying over dangerous jungle territory prowled by leftist guerrillas and outlawed paramilitaries (Eliana Aponte/Courtesy Reuters).
In 1999, Colombian president Andres Pastrana proposed Plan Colombia to promote the domestic peace process, tackle the nation’s narcotics trade, aid the economy, and strengthen the democratic system. In its support for the plan, the United States emphasized counter-smuggling operations and training and assistance for the Colombian military, but also supported development and institution-building programs.
Congress authorized [PDF] the initiative in 2000, and Colombia continues [PDF] to receive funding. By January 2012, the United States had provided over $8 billion in aid.
Plan Colombia has been credited with reducing coca cultivation by 65 percent in Colombia, though much of this was offset by a 40 percent increase in Peru, and a doubling in Bolivia. The plan was also faulted for focusing too much on military aid. In its first eight years, the program provided almost $5 billion to the Colombian military and national police, with only $1 billion allocated for “social, economic, and justice sector programs,” and alternative development programs were flawed. Critics also condemn controversial policies like aerial spraying of over one million hectares of crops between 2000 and 2008. The UN reports that roughly one million [PDF] people have been forced to flee and remain displaced as a direct result of counter-narcotic efforts.
Fighters of Liberian president Charles Taylor in Monrovia on July 22, 2003. Liberia said on Tuesday more than six hundred civilians had been killed and called for an arms embargo to be lifted so government troops could rebuff the attacks. Arms trafficker Leonid Minin was found to shipping arms to the country despite the embargo, contributing to escalating violence (Courtesy Reuters/Luc Gnago).
On August 4, 2000, Italian authorities arrested Leonid Minin, a Ukrainian businessman and notorious arms trafficker, after eight years of surveillance by customs and intelligence agencies. Police uncovered fifteen hundred pages of documents that included falsified end-user certificates for weapons sales, money transfer receipts, faxes, and letters. The files exposed extensive illegal arms trafficking, including to Liberia despite a United Nations arms embargo. The case also exposed the holes and flaws in international criminal law and other global frameworks. In addition, Minin’s success and the ease with which he conducted his operations were attributed to dysfunctional political systems or weak governance in many former Soviet republics supplying the weapons as well as the lack of a coordinated response from international institutions.
UN secretary-general Kofi Annan (L) and Italian Pino Arlacchi (C), the UN executive director for drug enforcement and crime prevention, stand as Austrian president Thomas Klestil signs the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime in Palermo on December 12, 2000 (Tony Gentile/Courtesy Reuters).
On November 15, 2000, the UN General Assembly adopted the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC), or the Palermo Convention, which entered into force in 2003, and today has 124 state parties. It sought to break down silos between types of illicit crime—previously governed by sector-specific international anticrime initiatives. It defines an organized criminal group as three or more people working together to commit a serious crime for financial gain, and stipulates that a serious crime is any offense punishable by “maximum deprivation of liberty of at least four years or a more serious penalty.” It requires member states to enact domestic laws and policies to combat TOC. It has three voluntary protocols, against human trafficking, smuggling of migrants, and illegal manufacture and trafficking of firearms and ammunition. The treaty, however, has no monitoring mechanism and has failed to keep up with criminal groups. A recent review has led to discussion about updates and improvements.
Vladimiro Montesinos arrives at a courtroom on February 2003 to be tried for influence peddling, money laundering, drug trafficking, and human rights violations (Pilar Olivares/Courtesy Reuters).
In 2001, the United States and Peru investigated [PDF] Vladimiro Montesinos, the former head of Peru’s intelligence service, for extortion, bribery, drug and weapon trafficking, and money laundering. Allegations of his illegal activities with drug traffickers had begun to surface during the trial of a drug dealer, Demetrio Chavez Penaherrera, in 1996. Penaherrera testified that Montesinos took bribes in exchange for protection and allowed drug traffickers to operate freely without fear of persecution. The discovery of Montesinos’s involvement in illegal arms sales to the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces , and videotapes of his bribing political and officials eventually led to his arrest in Venezuela and extradition to Peru on June 24, 2001. His trial in 2003 highlighted the link between corruption by public officials and transnational crime.
Hijacked United Airlines Flight 175 flies toward the World Trade Center twin towers shortly before slamming into the south tower as the north tower burns following an earlier attack by a hijacked airliner in New York City September 11, 2001 (Stringer/Courtesy Reuters).
On September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked four planes: two flew into the World Trade Center in New York City, one hit the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the fourth crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, before reaching its target. The terrorist organization al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attacks. Since the attacks, evidence has emerged about sporadic and increasing cooperation between criminal networks and terrorist groups, and investigations have also revealed that groups share tactics online or by email. For example, the Dubai-based Indian criminal, Aftab Ansari, is believed to have used ransom money he earned from kidnappings to help fund the September 11 attacks. In addition, terrorist groups increasingly rely on organized crime networks to provide them with weapons.
Interpol employees work in the control room of the Infra-Red operation in Lyon,France on Monday, July 5, 2010. Interpol has been leading an international operation,called Infra-Red, since May aimed at tracking down 450 particularly dangerous fugitives, and has arrested 39 people as a result (Laurent Cipriani/AP Photo).
Before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Interpol agents were available only Monday through Friday, red notices (requests for the arrest of wanted persons) were issued with alarming slowness, and only thirty countries shared information about suspected terrorists. After 9/11, however, nations determined to strengthen Interpol. As a result, the organization launched a web-based information exchange system, I-24/7, in 2002. The new structure provided methods for safe communication, sharing information, and enhanced cooperation among law enforcement officers in all member countries. A nation’s law enforcement can access the database, search for suspected or wanted criminals, and find links between criminals. Through this program, Interpol also grants access to its databases, specifically those on what is termed nominal data, which include more than 150,000 records on international criminals (as well as deceased and missing persons). Today, over one hundred countries share information, contributing to the identification of more than ten thousand suspected terrorists.
Naik Bakhat (R), a thirty-five-year-old woman, smokes opium as her daughter watches in Eshkashem district of Badakhshan province, northeast of Kabul April 23, 2008. Traditionally, people in rural Afghanistan have had a casual attitude towards opium, using it as a panacea for all ailments due to the lack of medicines. Afghanistan is the world’s largest opium producer and exporter as well as a huge narcotics consumer. Heroin, opium, and other drugs are a scourge on the streets of Kabul (Ahmad Masood/Courtesy Reuters).
In 2003, fifty-five countries signed the Paris Pact Initiative, pledging to coordinate a response to the societal harm of addiction to opium and its derivatives by reducing production and transportation of opium originating in Afghanistan. The Group of Eight and the UN Security Council endorsed the pact the same year. More than seventy countries and international organizations now participate in the Paris Pact Initiative, which seeks to provide expert advice to policymakers in the region, improve data collection and analysis capabilities of authorities in Afghanistan and its neighbors, and help countries along the Afghan opium trafficking route “coordinate counter narcotics technical assistance.”
A.Q. Khan pictured in Islamabad on December 24, 2003. He has admitted transferring nuclear technology to Iran and Libya (Mian Kursheed/Courtesy Reuters).
Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan confessed [PDF] on February 4, 2004 to facilitating the smuggling of illegal nuclear intelligence and machinery, such as centrifuges, after one of his shipments was intercepted en route to Libya. Khan is also suspected of selling nuclear centrifuge technology to North Korea and Iran. In a 2004 International Atomic Energy Agency symposium, experts concluded that, despite Khan’s apprehension and confession, little had been achieved in ending the “threat posed by transnational, privatized nuclear proliferation [PDF].”
Khan’s success in smuggling parts and intelligence to countries seeking nuclear weapons revealed the flaws in international efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation and thwart a terrorist group from attaining the necessary parts to assemble an improvised nuclear weapon.
A Chinese man looks through former United States President Bill Clinton’s autobiography at a bookstore in Shanghai on July 15, 2004. Clinton’s original English edition autobiography " My Life" is on sale in China’s business capital for 270 yuan (US$33) (Claro Cortes IV/Courtesy Reuters).
Fake copies of President Bill Clinton’s autobiography began appearing in China in July 2004. In addition to violating intellectual property laws, the counterfeit copies included many edits and inaccurate assertions about the president’s life, such as childhood conversations praising China. The incident highlighted a large problem for Western publishers, which lose tens of millions of dollars every year as Chinese forgeries sell bootlegged versions of their texts. Not long before the book appeared, the American Chamber of Commerce had criticized China’s failure to enforce intellectual property rights.
Edvard Munch’s masterpieces "The Scream" and "Madonna" are displayed at Munch Museum in Oslo September 26, 2006. The art pieces were recovered by the police two years after they were stolen by two masked gunmen (Cornelius Poppe/Courtesy Reuters/Scanpix).
On August 23, 2004, masked gunmen entered the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, and stole two Edvard Munch paintings, The Scream and Madonna. Several apprehensions were made in connection to the theft, and in May 2006 three men were ultimately imprisoned. Two of the perpetrators were forced to pay more than $100 million in compensation to the City of Oslo. Two years after the theft, Norwegian police recovered the stolen paintings. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates that proceeds from illegal art trafficking amount to $6 billion per year.
South Korean lawmaker Kim Moon-soo shows a genuine U.S. $100 note (top) and a counterfeit $100 note which he obtained through human rights activists in the Chinese city of Dandong bordering North Korea on February 23, 2006. Kim said he had obtained counterfeit U.S. $100 notes through North Korean trading company officials who he said were certain to be intelligence agents (Kim Kyung-Hoon/Courtesy Reuters).
On October 2, 2004, agents of the U.S. Secret Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation uncovered on a Chinese container ship a stash of counterfeit $100 bills. The discovery was the first shipment of the counterfeit bills, dubbed "supernotes" because of the sophistication and extreme likeness to U.S. currency. Similar shipments soon began showing up by the hundreds of thousands in ports on both U.S. seaboards. Counterfeit bills had made their way into circulation through North Korean diplomats, Russian mafia, and republican organizations in Northern Ireland. Through joint operations such as Operation Smoking Dragon and Royal Charm, the United States has indicted ten suspects, made eighty-seven arrests, and seized more than $4.5 million in counterfeit bills. In 2004, the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions against the North Korean Banco Delta Asia, designated it as a “primary money-laundering concern,” and froze overseas assets of members of the North Korea ruling party.
Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former prime minister of Norway, holds the 2004 "High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change" (Henny Ray Abrams/Courtesy Reuters).
In December 2004, a United Nations secretary-general high-level panel on threats, challenges, and change released a report that declared transnational organized crime (TOC) as a “menace to states and societies.” The report argued that TOC weakens human security and hampers the ability of states to “provide for law and order.” The document indicated that internal conflict resolution was critical to curbing the international effects of TOC. The report also urged nations to improve international regulatory frameworks. Overall, the report raised the profile of TOC by identifying it as an amplifier of all other major global threats by creating easy, illegal access to weapons, drugs, and money.
Secretary-general of the Council of Europe Terry Davis (C) speaks at a news conference after the 2005 Council of Europe summit on May 17, 2005. Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski (R) and Rene van der Linden, the president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe listen (Peter Andrews/Courtesy Reuters).
On May 16, 2005, the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings was opened for signature in Warsaw, Poland. After earning the requisite signatures, it entered into force on February 1, 2008. The convention defined trafficking in human beings as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons” through threats, “forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability.” The three main purposes are to prevent and fight against human trafficking, protect the human rights of the victims, and encourage international support for actions against human trafficking. The convention applies equally to men, women, and children.
A hospital patient in Panama City holds a bottle of the cough medicine tainted with the poison diethylene glycol on October 12, 2006 (Courtesy Reuters/Alberto Lowe).
In September 2006, forty-six barrels of glycerin, which is typically used in drugs, food, and toothpaste, arrived in Panama. The chemicals, however, which had originated in China, were counterfeit and contained diethylene glycol—a component of industrial solvents and antifreeze. Panamanian drug makers incorporated the counterfeit glycerin into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine that first began sickening patients almost immediately. More than three hundred people died after being given the tainted cold syrup to treat coughs.
Later in 2006, in response to the Panamanian incident and many unfortunate precedents in Haiti, Bangladesh, Argentina, Nigeria and India, the World Health Organization launched the International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Task Force to combat counterfeit drugs. Despite these actions, production and distribution of counterfeit drugs remain a major global health problem.
Suspected Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout arrives at a Bangkok criminal court on October 5, 2010. The forty-three-year-old former Soviet air force officer known as the "Merchant of Death" faces U.S. accusations of trafficking arms since the 1990s to dictators and conflict zones in Africa, South America, and the Middle East (Sukree Sukplang/Courtesy Reuters).
On March 6, 2008, the Royal Thai Police arrested the Russian arms smuggler Viktor Bout for negotiating a weapons deal with undercover U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents posing as members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Bout was deported and then sentenced to twenty-five years in prison by a U.S. federal judge in April 2012, despite Russian protests that the trial was politically motivated.
Bout’s apprehension, extradition, and trial required unprecedented international cooperation. However, Bout was arrested and tried for selling weapons to a designated terrorist group (FARC). Therefore critics lamented that poor international legal frameworks prevented Bout from being tried specifically for illegal arms trafficking.
After leaving the Soviet military in the early 1990s, Bout had begun his own air transport company using Soviet military aircraft. He subsequently trafficked weapons to several African warlords and paramilitary groups including in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and most notably worked with Charles Taylor of Liberia and the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone. The United States also made use of his services during the early stages of the war in Afghanistan after 9/11.
The MV Faina, a hijacked Ukrainian ship carrying thirty-three tanks, is seen from a U.S. Navy ship in the Gulf of Aden, in this handout picture from September 29, 2008 (U.S. Navy mass communication specialist second class Jason Zalasky/Courtesy Reuters).
On September 25, 2008, the Ukrainian ship the Faina and its twenty-one-member crew were hijacked by Somali pirates and later discovered to be carrying cargo destined for Kenya, including Soviet tanks, ammunition, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers from a state-owned Ukrainian company. Officials from both the Ukrainian and Kenyan governments declared that the shipment was legal. In 2009, however, leaked cables from a meeting between U.S. and senior Ukrainian officials revealed that the United States had investigated the case, discovered contracts that listed South Sudan as the recipient, and concluded that the cargo onboard was destined for South Sudan. The cables also revealed that the United States had satellite imagery of tanks being offloaded in Kenya and transported by railroad to South Sudan. At the time, arms transfers to the region without approval from the UN Security Council Sudan sanctions committee were considered a violation of an arms embargo.
Packs of cocaine are burned by officials and members of United Nation Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) in Monrovia, Liberia on February 2, 2008. A French navy warship intercepted a Liberian-flagged fishing vessel carrying 2.5 tonnes of cocaine in waters off the West African coast, a United Nations anti-narcotics official said (Emmanuel Tobey/Courtesy Reuters).
According to a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), released in October 2008, West Africa has become a new transit hub for cocaine. The report indicates that weak governance structures and poor border controls across West Africa are enabling traffickers to easily transport drugs from Latin America to Europe, where they generate some $2 billion in profits. Former UNODC executive director Antonio Maria Costa pronounced that the new drug “threat” is “turning West Africa’s Gold Coast into the Coke Coast.” Four years on, West Africa continues to be a major route for drug traffickers.
A Palestinian boy holds a picture depicting Lebanon’s Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, as Islamic Jihad militants stand on an Israeli flag, during a rally marking the sixteenth anniversary of the killing of Fathi al-Shiqaqi, the militant movement’s founder, in the northern Gaza Strip on April 11, 2011 (Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Courtesy Reuters).
On July 6, 2010, Jameel Nasr was arrested by Mexican authorities and accused of trying to establish “a base in South America and the United States to carry out operations against Israeli and Western targets.” A 2010 Arizona police department internal memo also expressed concern that the organization Hezbollah had been working with drug cartels in Mexico. It noted not only that the partnership threatened to empower the terrorist organization in the Western Hemisphere, but also that Latin American criminal groups appeared to be adopting strategies from Islamic militants. Hezbollah operatives were found to have received money, weapons, and protection from local cartels—and to be capable of bombings in South America. In exchange, the cartels received access to Middle East heroin and benefited from Hezbollah’s experience in money laundering, explosives, tunnel building, and training. Some analysts, however, have cautioned [PDF] that terrorist groups and transnational organized crime groups have very different goals and are unlikely to strike full-blown alliances.
Members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy (L-R) Richard Branson, former Swiss president Ruth Dreifuss, former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former Colombian president Cesar Gaviria, former Norwegian minister of foreign affairs Thorvald Stoltenberg and German state secretary of health Marion Caspers-Merk hold a news conference in New York on June 2, 2011 (Brendan McDermid/Courtesy Reuters).
On June 2, 2011, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which included former leaders of Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Poland, Greece, and Switzerland as well as former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and various other former government officials, released a monumental report titled War on Drugs. The commission sought to evaluate current anti-narcotrafficking efforts, the results of individual nations’ drug legislation, and propose policy recommendations. The commissioners proposed an historic shift in global drug policy: condemning the global war on drugs as a failure, calling for an end to criminalization of drug users who do not harm or endanger others, encouraging governments to decriminalize the use of certain drugs, and emphasizing that treatment options must be prioritized. The U.S. and Mexican administrations “swiftly dismissed” the findings. A spokesman for the Obama administration explained its viewpoint that “making drugs more available—as this report suggests—will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe.”
Customers and employees are seen from the exterior of a fake Apple store in Kunming, Yunnan province, China on July 22, 2011. The fake Apple store in China, made famous by a blog that said even the staff working there didn’t realise it was a bogus outlet, is probably the most audacious example to date of the risks Western companies face in the booming Chinese market (Aly Song/Courtesy Reuters).
Illegal storefronts designed to resemble legitimate Apple retailers were discovered in Kunming, China, after an American living in China posted an entry on her blog on July 20, 2011. The story was soon broadcast on more than a thousand media outlets. Chinese officials investigated five of the stores, and the local industry and commerce administration ordered two of them closed for operating without a business license. According to Reuters, however, the merchandise being sold were all genuine Apple products obtained from authorized Apple resellers, but the businesses were not permitted to portray themselves as official Apple stores. According to the Apple website, the company has only five legitimate retail locations in China, three in Shanghai and two in Beijing. The fake stores highlight China’s failure to protect intellectual property rights, which experts say violates the Law of the People’s Republic of China Against Competition by Inappropriate Means.
An analyst looks at code in the malware lab of a cyber security defense lab at the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, Idaho on September 29, 2011(Jim Urquhart/Courtesy Reuters)
On November 9, 2011, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested six Estonian nationals and charged them with operating an Internet crime ring that put malicious software on half a million computers in the United States that redirected users to advertisements. The virus also infected computers with malware, rendering them vulnerable to other Internet viruses. Operation Ghost Click, which led to the arrests, was a joint effort that included teams from the FBI, Estonian law enforcement, and the Dutch National Police Agency, among others. Most notably, the operation received help from the private sector on a domestic and international level. The incident highlighted a new front line of transnational crime—cyberspace.
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom stands next to his wife Mona as he talks to members of the media after leaving the High Court in Auckland (Simon Watts/Courtesy Reuters).
On January 19, 2012, the hacker group Anonymous Analytics claimed responsibility for shutting down the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) website only hours after the DOJ and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation shut down the file-sharing site Megaupload.com and indicted its founder Kim Dotcom and six associates. Anonymous also took credit for shutting down several other sites, including the Motion Picture Association of America, Recording Industry Association of America, and Universal Music. The DOJ indictment accused Megaupload.com of “operating a worldwide criminal organization” that allowed its users to participate in money laundering and copyright infringement.
Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos is projected live on a screen as he speaks during the inauguration of the Americas Summit in Cartagena on April 14, 2012 (Jose Miguel Gomez/Courtesy Reuters).
At the Sixth Summit of the Americas, leaders from more than thirty countries in North, South, and Central America debated alternative approaches to counter the growing levels of violent crime in the region. Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos called for a more open-minded debate about policies between imprisoning drug users and legalizing drugs, proposing that the group consider, for example, “decriminalizing consumption but putting all the efforts into interdiction.”
In the run up to the summit, Latin American officials increasingly called for a new strategy. On March 29, 2012, a Colombian lawmaker named Hugo Velasquez proposed legislation that would decriminalize the cultivation of the coca leaf and marijuana, which garnered support from leaders across the hemisphere. At the summit, however, U.S. president Barack Obama maintained that drug legalization “isn’t a valid option in the United States.”
Former Liberian president Taylor awaits the start of the prosecution’s closing arguments during his trial at the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone in Leidschendam, The Hague, on August 8, 2011 (Jerry Lampen/Courtesy Reuters).
On April 26, 2012, the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) convicted former Liberian president Charles Taylor of war crimes for aiding the Revolutionary United Front, a rebel army operating in Sierra Leone. During his presidency, Taylor used profits from selling “logs of war” [PDF]—illegally cut timber—to purchase weapons for his regime. It was later discovered that Taylor sold timber to Leonid Minin, who was arrested in 2000 for arms dealing, in exchange for weapons. A Global Witness report from 2001 alleges that Taylor also restricted access to Liberia’s forests, but granted contracts to at least seven businesses associated with arms trafficking and sponsoring militia movements. The United Nations subsequently enacted sanctions on timber exports from Liberia, which were lifted on June 20, 2006.
The carcasses of elephants slaughtered by poachers (Handout/Courtesy Reuters).
Two New York jewelers pleaded guilty on July 12, 2012 after the seizure of more than $2 million worth of illicit ivory. Despite the international ban on commercial ivory trading since 1989, more than twenty-four tons of ivory was seized around the world in 2011. According to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and flora, "poachers are responsible for eight of ten elephant deaths in Africa." Such trends also have grave implications for Central African security. Poaching has long been linked to transnational organized crime, and militias, insurgents, and terrorist groups use the profits from wildlife crime to purchase arms and fund operations that further destabilize the region.
HSBC Bank USA President and Chief Executive Officer Dorner and HSBC Holdings Chief Legal Officer Stuart Levey testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in Washington (Gary Cameron/Courtesy Reuters).
A July 2012 report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations accused global banking giant HSBC of exposing the U.S. financial system to illegal funds from terrorists, drug cartels, and rogue regimes due to lax anti-money laundering (AML) controls. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) had previously cited HSBC for multiple AML deficiencies, yet the OCC had failed to take any action against the bank. HSBC said it "will apologize, acknowledge these mistakes, answer for actions and give absolute commitment to fixing what went wrong." The bank has set aside $2 billion to cover potential fines or settlement costs.
General Ntaganda sits on trial at The Hague in the Netherlands (Peter Dejong/Courtesy Reuters).
General Bosco Ntaganda, who fought for a number of rebel groups and the army in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), turned himself in to the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, Rwanda. He was then sent to The Hague, where he appeared before the International Criminal Court facing seven counts of war crimes and three counts of crimes against humanity that took place in the Ituri region of the DRC between 2002 and 2003 while fighting for the Union of Congolese Patriots led by Thomas Lubanga. Thomas Lubanga, incidentally, has been the only individual convicted by the ICC of war crimes to date. General Ntaganda has also previously been indicted by the ICC for recruiting child soldiers in 2006.
Police destroy sacks of marijuana in Banda Aceh, Indonesia (Junaidi Hanafiah/Courtesy Reuters).
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime completed its first comprehensive study on transnational organized crime threats in East Asia and the Pacific in April 2013. The report, which studies twelve selected contraband markets including trafficking in humans, narcotics, stolen goods, and environmental products, found that these markets are worth $90 billion each year. A third of this value stems from drug trafficking with sixty-five metric tons of heroin worth $16.3 billion flowing through the region in 2011. The report also highlights the growing threat posed by fraudulent medicines and environmental crime related to extractive industries.
Secretary of State John Kerry first proposed information sharing and cooperation between the United States and China on April 13, 2013, during his first visit to Beijing (Paul J. Richards/Courtesy Reuters).
Talks between China and the United States concerning their efforts to combat cyber threats began in early March amid accusations from both sides that the other was involved in aggressive hacking campaigns against both public and private servers in their respective countries. By late April, the United States and China held their highest-level military talks in two years as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin E. Dempsey, met with General Fang Fenghui following Secretary of State Kerry’s visit to China. At these talks both China and the United States agreed to create a cooperative "mechanism" to work together on issues related to cybersecurity though progress is likely to remain slow.
Hacking back, or "white-hat hacking" has proven to be a controversial tactic with few rules or codes of conduct to govern the behavior and determine the liabilities of individual companies and law enforcement agencies (Kacper Pempel/Courtesy Reuters).
In its effort to disrupt cybercrime, Microsoft took part in "Operation Citadel" to disrupt more than a thousand botnets. The botnets in question are allegedly responsible for $500 million in losses to financial institutions, banks, and consumers and are composed of over five million personal computers. Operation Citadel was supported by the FBI and other government agencies.
Over the past two decades, as the world economy has globalized, so has its illicit counterpart. The global impact of transnational crime has risen to unprecedented levels. Criminal groups have appropriated new technologies, adapted horizontal network structures that are difficult to trace and stop, and diversified their activities. The result has been an unparalleled scale of international crime.
As many as fifty-two activities fall under the umbrella of transnational crime, from arms smuggling to human trafficking to environmental crime. These crimes undermine states’ abilities to provide citizens with basic services, fuel violent conflicts, and subject people to intolerable suffering. The cost of transnational organized crime is estimated to be roughly 3.6 percent [PDF] of the global economy. Money laundering alone costs at least 2 percent of global gross domestic product every year according to UN reports. Drug traffickers have destabilized entire areas of the Western Hemisphere, leading to the deaths of at least fifty thousand people in Mexico alone in the past six years. Counterfeit medicines further sicken ill patients and contribute to the emergence of drug-resistant strains of viruses. Environmental crime—including illegal logging, waste dumping, and harvesting of endangered species—both destroy fragile ecosystems and endanger innocent civilians. Between twelve and twenty-seven million people toil in forced labor—more than at the peak of the African slave trade.
For many reasons, global transnational crime presents nations with a unique and particularly challenging task. To begin with, by definition, transnational crime crosses borders. But the law enforcement institutions that have developed over centuries were constructed to maintain order primarily within national boundaries. In addition, transnational crime affects nations in diverse ways. In many states, political institutions have strong links to transnational crime, and citizens in numerous communities across the world rely on international criminal groups to provide basic services or livelihoods. Finally, the international community requires solid data to gauge the challenge and effectiveness of responses, but data on transnational organized crime is notoriously difficult to gather and is often politicized.
Overall assessment: Archaic system needs reframing
International efforts to address transnational organized crime (TOC) are too weak to address the threat. Strategies focus too little on combating corruption and addressing the increasing interplay of TOC and political power. On balance, multilateral initiatives to fight crime are sector specific and attempt to prosecute TOC without effectively addressing the market that underpins transnational crime globally.
The central legal instrument for fighting transnational organized crime is the UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC). Finalized in 2000 in Palermo, Italy, the convention is the first to address transnational crime as an activity that cannot be adequately curtailed by treaties tailored to one commercial sector. It defines a TOC group as a structured organization with three or more members and establishes legislative standards for nations to implement domestically.
However, the convention’s ability to inform [PDF] and influence operational practices is limited. UNTOC does not adequately account for the increasingly activity-based, horizontal structure of criminal syndicates or the growing nexus between organized crime and terrorism, corruption, conflict, public health, global finance, and modern technology. The struggle to implement the convention reflects a certain dearth of global political will to do so. In a number of major world powers, the state itself is captured—or partly captured—by organized crime. The governments of Russia and other Eurasian countries are known to benefit from ties between TOC and energy exports as well as from cybercrime; the Chinese economy earns high profits from counterfeits sold internationally; and many Latin American and West African politicians either are coerced by narcotrafficking groups, or maintain close ties with them.
Most important, the treaty lacks an implementation mechanism that would allow assistance to countries not capable of adhering to the convention’s guidelines. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is charged with helping implement UNTOC on the ground, but its former executive director, Antonio Maria Costa, has rebuked UN member states for neglecting their responsibilities. At a 2010 conference of parties, countries acknowledged the need to revise the convention to be more effective and stressed the importance of implementation. A working group is currently reviewing implementation, which might ultimately lead to a monitoring or capacity-building provision.
UNODC also provides technical assistance and training in constructing legal frameworks and enhancing national enforcement capacity. It serves as a hub for disseminating best practices and data collection on criminal activities. All estimates of the magnitude of TOC, however, are necessarily approximations; criminals obviously do not report their annual earnings or scope of activities, and published estimates are often politicized or rely on shaky data [PDF].
Furthermore, UNODC is 91 percent funded by voluntary contributions and suffers from chronic funding shortages and understaffing. These resource constraints continue to limit the agency’s effectiveness.
Beyond UNODC, a succession of UN Security Council (UNSC) open debates, and presidential statements, have slowly and steadily expanded that body’s repertoire on TOC. For example, UNSC presidential statement 2009/32 urged the institution to prioritize the TOC threat to benefit peace and security in Africa. In 2010, the UNSC agreed to a presidential statement 2010/4 committing member states and the UN to fight transnational crime.
Although the UN General Assembly has also issued many resolutions to fight TOC, most have been vague and irrelevant. The broader UN system has also tackled the issue of transnational crime through specialized agencies, programs, commissions, working groups, campaigns, and even a research institute. The UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ), for example, reviews UN standards and norms to combat TOC as well as their implementation by member states. The UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) funds the CCPCJ and guides its work. ECOSOC has also issued a number of important resolutions on the subject, which still guide UNODC’s work on crime prevention. For example, a 1995 resolution [PDF] outlined strategies like strengthening community resilience.
Overall, however, the UN’s work on TOC remains piecemeal. Units address the issue only within the context of their agency, departmental, or program mandate and bureaucracy, which impedes policy coherence and effective action. To rectify this, in early 2011, the UN secretary-general established a task force on transnational organized crime and drug trafficking with the aim of creating a system-wide strategy to fight international crime and enhance coordination. The taskforce clearly demonstrates that the UN is aware of the lack of internal cohesion and is increasingly viewing transnational crime as a political and strategic issue.
National policing and border control is also critical to stopping organized crime. In an era of globalization, Interpol is the world’s intermediary for police cooperation. Founded in 1923, Interpol has 190 members, each with a national central bureau staffed by local officials. The agency’s priority is to secure communication among law enforcement agencies, to manage international criminal databases, to provide operational support during crises, and to train police forces. However, with a budget of roughly $75 million in 2010, the agency is grossly underfunded. It also holds no authority to conduct investigations independently or to arrest suspects, and is therefore only as strong as the host country’s police force.
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are also engaged in the fight against TOC, namely, in conducting assessments of anti–money laundering provisions in countries. To date, the institutions have conducted some seventy assessments, but a recent report [PDF] suggests that they are largely uneven because they did not focus on areas that present greater risk. The World Bank also carries out anticorruption efforts, and in 2011 pledged $1.5 billion to fight TOC over the next few years, recognizing its corrosive impact on development.
Regional cooperation, particularly at borders, is generally weak despite initiatives, such as Europol’s annual organized crime threat assessment, the European Union’s prioritization of anti-TOC efforts in Bulgaria and Romania, and comparable efforts under the Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an initiative of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), has adopted a successful policy of “naming and shaming” noncooperating jurisdictions, and has enlisted countries to craft legislative frameworks to combat money laundering. Eight regional initiatives modeled on FATF have since been established to replicate its work, and have been widely hailed [PDF] as successful. However, more broadly, regional efforts have been weak. For instance, the initiative of the Economic Community of West African States to adopt a moratorium on the import and export of light weapons has had little impact.
Various major donor countries fund projects in partner nations to enhance security. The United States, for instance, supports four regional International Law Enforcement Academies designed to provide countries with technical support. In general, however, bilateral donor initiatives on TOC are modest. While programs like Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative have significant funds, the aid is overwhelmingly military, and funding for more comprehensive solutions has consistently decreased [PDF] year after year.
Imposing economic sanctions against criminal groups is a new strategy being tested by the United States. In July 2011, the Obama administration issued sanctions against four TOC groups in Mexico, Japan, Italy, and eastern Europe. The order froze their assets and criminalized aid to the groups. Such provisions have often been used, with measured success, to target other nonstate actors—namely, terrorists.
Overall, the TOC regime faces three sweeping challenges. First, political will is too often lacking at national, regional, and global levels. More than a few states are crippled by corruption, and when political leaders or elites benefit from organized crime, implementation of international frameworks is not feasible. Second, the current regime suffers from critical normative gaps, and sensible strategies where norms exist. The international community has yet to agree to an operational definition of TOC. As a result, monitoring and enforcement of counter-TOC agreements is weak, many countries have not signed onto important treaties, and national legislation is unevenly implemented. Finally, the dearth of data—and impracticality of properly measuring international criminal activity—hinders every attempt to devise adequate strategies to combat TOC.
Building norms: Progressing but still stovepiped and vaguely defined
To construct effective strategies to fight transnational organized crime (TOC), the international community has attempted to build normative consensus. The UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) provided the definition of a TOC group, but it will take years before the convention is fully integrated into national judicial systems. Although some international norms are already strong—such as those for drug trafficking and money laundering—the world is struggling to design instruments that respond effectively to the groups that engage in many forms of crime. At the same time, current norms do not consider the range of political motivations and alliances between powerful political or business leaders and criminals.
Still, one important normative shift is already occurring. Traditionally, global and national standards have aimed primarily to detect and diminish the supply, transport, and sale of illicit commodities. But nations and international institutions are increasingly recognizing the need for a more comprehensive strategy. They are slowly integrating public health, development, and community-based practices to decrease not only the supply but also the demand for illicit commodities. In parallel, development institutions, such as the World Bank, are recognizing [PDF] that anti-TOC funding and programs are imperative for economic growth, democracy, and governance.
Globalization has facilitated an explosive growth in transnational organized crime since the early 1990s. The international community has sought to respond with stronger and more comprehensive measures. In 1994, at the World Ministerial Conference on Organized Transnational Crime in Naples, Italy, countries took an important step and called for a multi-sector treaty that addressed the whole spectrum of TOC. Previously, international treaties had targeted one type of illicit activity—with drug trafficking treaties being the most potent—but failed to address the diverse activities of TOC groups. The result was UNTOC, also known as the Palermo Convention, which was finalized in 2000 and came into force in 2003. Today, UNTOC stands as the core treaty addressing transnational crime as an overarching problem—and the only comprehensive tool the world has.
However, the world still lacks an operational definition for transnational crime, and norms for law enforcement and judicial cooperation remain weak, vague, or nonexistent. UNTOC defined groups that engage in TOC but “excluded single, ad hoc operations,” which are responsible for much of TOC today. Furthermore, to effectively track and prosecute international crime, nations must agree to robust policing cooperation and to assist developing countries. Prosecutions for international crime may require evidence from authorities of multiple nations. Pursuing suspects requires intelligence sharing, extradition, and cross-border police cooperation. Identifying perpetrators also requires capable domestic institutions. However, transnational law enforcement cooperation can be exceedingly controversial. Joint investigations are often undermined when foreign investigations must rely on support from corrupt countries that do not wish to fight crime or whose systems are crippled by corruption. Nations jealously guard judicial and policing authorities as sovereign authorities. Accordingly, these topics have barely been mentioned in international conventions. Countries are also generally reluctant to release domestic intelligence to other nations or to a collective intergovernmental or supranational authority.
Finally, many experts have long called for the world to reorient the fight against crime away from law enforcement and instead address transnational crime as a market activity. As long as incentives for participating in international crime remain so high, they argue, success against one group, or in one area, will merely create a scramble by other groups to usurp the former group’s profit. For example, norms to combat narcotrafficking are very strong, but some argue that they are misguided, because “successes” in one area may only displace the problem elsewhere. The high-profile, well-resourced, and internationally exported U.S.-led war on drugs has long prioritized law enforcement over market-based policies. This approach is so entrenched that retooling international norms to incorporate market-based strategies is an uphill battle. The United States has recently been more candid [PDF] about demand in the developed world fueling international crime, as well as about the need for prevention and treatment, but international action remains strongly focused on supply-side measures. Some critics believe that the global regime needs to shift entirely toward a public health model designed to reduce demand rather than stamp out supply.
When it comes to other criminal sectors, anti–money laundering (AML) norms are among the strongest. In the 1980s, the developed world began to forge international AML instruments, which resulted in the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) forty recommendations for domestic AML regimes. The FATF also identified certain “noncooperating jurisdictions” that could be subject to international naming and shaming. September 11 inspired additional recommendations to combat terrorist financing, and FATF norms have since become the global yardstick for counter–terrorist financing efforts. The need to “follow the money” to root out nonstate actors has become firmly embedded in international normative frameworks.
Global norms against human trafficking and illicit weapons smuggling have also developed significantly in the past decade as nations accede to the relevant protocols to UNTOC: the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children; the Protocol Against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea, and Air, and the Protocol Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, their Parts and Components and Ammunition. Much remains to be done, however. Labor trafficking and the dangers of migrant smuggling receive far too little attention in comparison with sexual trafficking. In terms of weapons smuggling, recognition of its contribution to armed conflict, particularly in Africa and Latin America, is growing, but the world still lacks a strong, enforceable treaty that governs illicit trafficking in small arms and light weapons.
Given the weakness of global normative frameworks, certain regions have endeavored to address transnational crime on their own. This approach has some merit, inasmuch as regions often face drastically different realities, and more focused local multilateral institutions may be better suited to combat the threat. On the other hand, some worry that separate regional approaches might undermine common global standards—or help push criminal activities to more vulnerable regions.
To date, regional norms remain weakly developed except in Europe, where the integration of the European Union (EU) has allowed more law enforcement and judicial cooperation. Still, even EU states have been unable to agree to an operational definition of TOC. As organized crime surged in West Africa over the past decade, the Economic Community of West African States did attempt to build regional mechanisms to stem the tide, but fighting organized crime remains a fairly low priority across most of the continent. The Organization of American States’ Hemispheric Action Plan, meanwhile, has endorsed UNTOC and stressed the need for states to implement it—but it has not dented the growth of transnational crime in Latin America. In Asia, the Pacific Islands Forum has made important strides through a capacity-building framework with Australia, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has agreed to some important transnational crime norms, but the region remains plagued by TOC.
Overall, as criminal organizations grow stronger, the world lags in its efforts to devise adequate mechanisms to fight them. In part this reflects a structural problem—the ease with which illicit networks can hopscotch across sovereign borders, leaving national governments behind. In sum, “even as crime is transnationalized, crime control remains largely corralled behind national borders.”
Corruption: Normative and institutional progress, spotty implementation
Corruption fosters the ideal environment for transnational organized crime (TOC). Corruption supports a wide range of illicit markets, from drugs and arms trafficking to environmental crime and counterfeit markets. The same motives that attract TOC to corrupt states also prevent the state from establishing rule of law and a functional judicial system, as corrupt officials benefit from the lack of transparent and accountable systems. Corruption is also notoriously difficult to eradicate in countries where it is deeply embedded in political culture. Many high-level politicians profit from organized crime, hindering anti-TOC efforts. Indeed, in many Eurasian, Latin American, and West African states, criminal syndicates have deeply penetrated executive bodies, legislatures, the police, and courts. Where states consider organized crime an ally in domestic governance, they inevitably will be reluctant to support the development of more robust international governance capacities. Despite some efforts, the international community has been unable to mobilize an effective method to combat corruption.
Over the past decade, anticorruption efforts have picked up steam, but progress is halting. After two protracted years of negotiations, the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) entered into force in December 2005 and established an overarching international framework. As the first legally binding international anticorruption agreement, UNCAC provides a comprehensive set of measures to be implemented by state parties to prevent, combat, and prosecute corruption. Significantly, UNCAC does not define corruption, but does require states to criminalize a wide range of corrupt acts, including bribery, kickbacks, money laundering, embezzlement, and obstructing justice. In an important breakthrough after long-standing disagreement among states, asset recovery is also listed as a fundamental provision of the convention. Emphasizing the need for international cooperation, UNCAC requires state parties to return ill-gotten gains to the country of origin. It also calls for enhanced transparency and accountability, based on the argument that more knowledge raises the costs of illicit activity and therefore reduces corruption.
The convention initially received broad support and has nearly global coverage with 159 state parties. However, countries known for endemic corruption—such as Afghanistan, Honduras, and Russia—are parties to the convention, undermining its legitimacy and exposing its weaknesses. Although UNCAC successfully builds anticorruption norms, it does not provide for monitoring, implementation, or enforcement. The first session of the Conference of State Parties to UNCAC, held in 2006, attempted to address this criticism by committing to establish a mechanism to monitor corruption. But subsequent sessions have failed to reach an agreement.
Regional organizations have also made significant normative progress by developing comprehensive anticorruption instruments, although implementation and effectiveness have been patchy. The first regional convention to address corruption was the Inter-American Convention against Corruption, which was adopted by state parties to the Organization of American States and entered into force in March 1997. The Council of Europe passed the Criminal Law Convention on Corruption in January 2002, with an additional protocol authorizing the creation of a monitoring mechanism, the Group of States Against Corruption. In July 2003, the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption was enacted in an attempt to address widespread corruption on the African continent.
One of the most successful—albeit controversial—regional initiatives is the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). At the request of the Guatemalan government, the UN created CICIG in 2007 to reinforce the rule of law by strengthening institutions, investigating corruption, and training officials. By 2010, CICIG helped to oust thousands of corrupt policemen, ten prosecutors, three supreme court justices, and an attorney general. The commission has also supported the trials and convictions [PDF] of more than 130 criminals, including a former president and foreign minister. Some critics have questioned CICIG’s sustainability, arguing that it is not fulfilling its mandate to transfer technical capacities to Guatemalan counterparts and interfering in cases beyond its remit. At the same time, CICIG must request to join criminal cases as a complementary prosecutor and the Guatemalan justice system can deny it jurisdiction to participate—decreasing the commission’s independence and potential impact. Nevertheless, the commission is an important model for anticorruption efforts.
Together, UNCAC and regional conventions provide a solid foundation of international norms, standards, and measures to combat corruption. However, they fall short of the integration and coordination required of a global anticorruption strategy and have not significantly affected change on the ground in most countries.
To fill the void, other international and civil society organizations that focus primarily on economic and sustainable development have taken up the mantle of anticorruption work. The World Bank, Interpol, the Group of Twenty (G20), the International Monetary Fund, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have attempted to raise awareness of the issue by addressing the consequences of corruption.
The World Bank has spearheaded efforts to combat corruption through a partnership with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), called the Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative (StAR). Established in 2007, StAR provides assistance and training to developing countries to prevent money laundering and recover stolen assets. The initiative has worked with over five hundred officials in forty countries around the world and is expanding its country partnerships, although no assets have been recovered thus far. StAR is further hindered by the fact that it cannot legally investigate or prosecute cases of stolen assets. As part of the StAR initiative, the World Bank cooperates with numerous global bodies, such as INTERPOL and the international center for asset recovery, to help seize and return stolen funds. In addition, the G20 formed the Anti-Corruption Working Group in June 2010 to develop and recommend anticorruption business practices.
Nongovernmental organizations and academic institutions play a critical role in pioneering innovative solutions to increase transparency in corrupt governments. The Program on Liberation Technology, for example, at Stanford University is researching the use of mobile phones to text individuals facts on government spending (per public record), so as to empower local communities with the knowledge of what they should receive and what they do receive.
These efforts are complicated by the fact that there is no existing method of measuring corruption. This is partly because it is largely conducted in secret, and partly because corruption can sometimes appear legitimate. Transparency International, a civil society organization, publishes the annual Corruption Perceptions Index, which ranks countries according to perceptions of public-sector corruption. Although it is not a perfect science, it does provide a comprehensive assessment of individual countries and regions. In 2011, Somalia, North Korea, Myanmar, and Afghanistan led the list as the most corrupt countries in the world. A recent survey [PDF] conducted by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated that Afghan officials paid $2.5 billion in bribes and related payments in 2009.
When undertaken, national anticorruption strategies to end impunity and promote capacity building have also produced some success. In 2008, the Mexican government launched Operación Limpieza (Operation Clean), with the goal of purging the law enforcement of corruption. Thus far, the interim commissioner of the federal police, head of the counternarcotics division, and thirty other officials have been arrested.
Following the money: Increasingly legislated, uneven implementation
Money laundering is the life blood of transnational organized crime. Since the late 1980s, the world has been straining to manage illicit flows of cash among the massive sums that flow across borders every day. A meta-analysis [PDF] conducted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in 2011 concluded that globally, criminal proceeds amount to around 3.6 percent (or between 2.3 and 5.5 percent) of the world’s gross domestic products combined—roughly $2.1 trillion annually—and costs between 2 and 5 percent of global gross domestic product ever year according to the UN. Nations have prioritized “following the money” to identify criminals and deter citizens from turning to crime, but the world is floundering [PDF] in its efforts. “Ultimately, anti–money laundering tools, which were designed to combat organized crime, have been ineffective,” according to a ten-year review of the Palermo Convention [PDF]. The UNODC reports that less than 1 percent [PDF] of illicit financial flows around the world are seized and frozen. This saps nations of needed resources and allows criminals to profit illegally and remain at large.
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), founded in 1989 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is celebrated as one of the greatest anti–money laundering (AML) successes. FATF’s forty recommended measures, published in 1990, and nine counterterrorist financing measures, lay out steps national governments can take to improve AML capabilities. In 2012, FATF also revised its recommendations based on feedback from the financial sector, businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals, and combined the terrorism and money laundering recommendations. All member countries both carry out a self assessment and submit to peer review of their implementation of recommendations. In 2000 FATF also published an associated list of noncooperative countries and territories [PDF] (NCCT). Fearful of losing investment or international standing, all twenty-three of the countries first included on the FATF list subsequently enacted AML legislative frameworks and many more passed similar laws in order to avoid landing on the list. Twelve binding UN Security Council resolutions between 2001 and 2010 also mandated UN member states to improve financial monitoring systems, and the FATF recommendations became the yardstick for compliance. Experts therefore credit the FATF NCCT list with coercing “between a quarter and a third of the world’s sovereign states… to adopt the standard AML policy” by 2006. However, despite putting laws on the books, the majority of these countries are incapable or unwilling to strictly enforce them.
To date, eight regional groups modeled on FATF have emerged across the world, that is, FATF-style regional bodies (FSRBs). With a deeper understanding of the local context, the FSRBs evaluate state systems in the region, and recommend ways to improve AML regimes. FSRBs also provide training for law enforcement officials and help countries develop financial intelligence units (FIUs) in coordination with UNODC, which track suspicious financial activity. FIUs are essential because they can participate in an international information sharing initiative that builds a network of FIUs, known as the Egmont Group. As internationally monitored initiatives, FSRBs add meat to various other regional efforts, ranging from the Organization of American States AML standards to an action group against money laundering of the Economic Community of West African States.
More broadly, countries have incrementally forged important AML norms. Originally, the 1988 United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances first criminalized laundering the profits of drug trafficking. This was later expanded to apply to all money laundering in 1998 by a UN General Assembly political declaration. Then, the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC or Palermo Convention) and the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), which entered into force in 2003 and 2005 respectively, further entrenched necessary AML standards. Interpol supports these efforts by processing investigative requests between nations, but because Interpol lacks its own jurisdiction, it primarily urges nations to implement these norms rather than enforces them itself.
The Palermo Convention clarifies several AML steps for signatories to take. State parties must criminalize money laundering and any conscious facilitation of it, as well as “institute a comprehensive domestic regulatory and supervisory regime… in order to deter and detect all forms of money laundering.” These include stipulations regarding customer identification, record keeping and the reporting of suspicious transactions, as well as shoring up law enforcement, regulatory, and administrative regimes with the necessary resources to cooperate with national and international AML investigations. However, these obligations have been unevenly implemented by states.
Equally important, UNCAC mandates that states “take such civil and administrative measures” to prevent government corruption from the highest levels to lower-level border officials, policeman, and bankers. Since their complicity is necessary for transnational crimes ranging from weapons smuggling to money laundering, these measures are crucial. But implementation has lagged across many member states.
To help states meet these standards, the UN Global Program Against Money Laundering, Proceeds of Crime and the Financing of Terrorism (GPML) provides technical assistance in various forms such as legislative advice or training justice officials to investigate and prosecute financial crime. GPML also supports countries that wish to update [PDF] their domestic AML frameworks, and its mentor program “is one of the most successful known activities in AML/CTF technical and training assistance.” In a 2011 review by an independent panel of experts, GPML was deemed “successful” and “highly relevant.”
In 2000, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) also responded to the growing challenge of money laundering, emphasizing that it not only facilitates crime, but also threatens members’ economies by undermining the stability of financial institutions, increasing the volatility of capital flows, and having a “dampening effect on foreign direct investment.” In response, the IMF now conducts assessments, provides technical assistance, and drafts policy recommendations for the global AML effort. As an international body focused on global finance with universal membership, the IMF was able to expand the scope of AML efforts beyond the global North. Still, the IMF is not ideally suited to root out criminal profits because AML efforts require law enforcement and judicial prosecution.
Despite these initiatives, corruption, corporate and bank secrecy, and informal money transfer systems like hawala continue to complicate AML efforts. Financial havens such as Nauru or the Cayman Islands provide opportunities for illicit monetary transfers no matter how robust domestic or regional frameworks are. Many banks also provide offshore operations for clients seeking broader secrecy. Swiss banks, for example, have transferred many operations to Liechtenstein, the Cayman Islands, or Isle of Jersey. In some cases, banks collude with criminal organizations—even in developed nations as evidenced by one U.S. bank’s cooperation with Mexican cartels.
Therefore, strong regulatory policies are crucial and need to be closely monitored. A growing trend, for instance, requires private banks or firms to take responsibility for AML. In response, banks increasingly publish their own AML policies [PDF], pledge to enact “know your customer” rules, cooperate with law enforcement, and even recruit former financial investigator police officers. In one instance, for example, U.S. banks detected certain money laundering tactics like mirror accounts of drug cartels. Still, numerous studies have concluded that banks generally believe that AML regulations are not cost effective and impose an enormous burden on them. The 2008 financial crisis inspired calls for broader regulations and the U.S. government has recently begun to revisit AML regulation under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, but implementation of the countless stipulations is far off, if not impossible.
Another new strategy with great potential is the use of national sanctions to combat transnational crime. Between July 2011 and February 2012, the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on five criminal syndicates in Mexico, Italy, eastern Europe, and Japan. The department stated that the effort aimed to prevent the groups from using billions in annual profits. Experts noted that sanctions have been effective against nonstate actors like al-Qaeda, and thus might aid in combating criminal groups. Though promising, the move’s impact has yet to be demonstrated, and it does not portend to replace multilateral AML cooperation.
Narcotrafficking: Stuck in criminalization paradigm
Narcotrafficking is arguably the most legislated and enforced sector of transnational crime, but the effectiveness of the regime is increasingly questioned. Pressing international issues often suffer from underfunding and lack of high-profile attention, but narcotrafficking is an exception. Heavily backed by U.S. resources and enormous U.S. political attention, countries have sought to enforce an array of treaties that regulate production, distribution, and transport of nonmedical drugs. But trafficking groups easily change location, adapt network-style structures, and diversify their activities to evade law enforcement efforts. As a result, experts stress the need to understand narcotrafficking as a market. In 2011, the UN Global Commission on Drug Policy recommended a paradigm shift to public health rather than criminalization, noting that despite $2.5 trillion spent since the 1970s, the U.S.-led global war on drugs has failed, primarily because of its focus on law enforcement. Slowly, some countries and international institutions are attempting to incorporate public health and economic programs into the fight against narcotrafficking, but much remains to be done.
The Commission on Narcotic Drugs is the main international body that oversees the implementation of global anti-narcotrafficking efforts by deciding which drugs belong to which schedules (or risk levels) of the drug control treaties and advising other bodies. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is the primary agency to help countries implement UN treaties and initiatives on the ground. Highly respected, UNODC operates around the world, conducting evaluations of the illegal drug market, helping states implement awareness programs, and providing treatment support. In addition, the UNODC Justice Section [PDF] helps states establish or improve judicial frameworks and works to empower law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute drug traffickers. For example, a joint program [PDF] with the World Customs Organization that operates in eleven countries helps those nations regulate the contents of shipping containers in which drugs often cross borders. UNODC also conducts a wide array of other operations related to international crime that are critical to anti-narcotrafficking efforts, including anticorruption and alternative livelihood development, among others. Its resources, however, are limited.
The core narcotrafficking accords that still serve as the basis for the international anti-narcotrafficking regime emerged between 1960 and 1990. In 1961, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (Single Convention) synthesized the mandates of nine drug-related treaties dating back to the 1912 International Opium Convention. The Single Convention also established a list of prohibited substances and limits on the possession, distribution, manufacture and production of prohibited drugs—as well as set up the International Narcotics Control Board, a precursor to UNODC. A decade later, the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances incorporated manufactured drugs such as methamphetamines and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)—though it did not criminalize them as harshly as organic illegal drugs. In 1988, the Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances built on the previous two treaties, obliging states to criminalize possession, purchase, and cultivation of illegal drugs. It also set down rules for extradition cooperation, created provisions of mutual legal assistance to investigate and prosecute suspects, and criminalized money laundering of narcotrafficking profits. Still in force, these three conventions represent the backbone of the international war on drugs.
Notably, during negotiations for the 1961 Single Convention, nations coalesced into various blocs in a manner that affected the drug regime for the next decades. Powerful nations that were primary importers of illegal organic drugs, such as the United States and West Germany, successfully lobbied for a strict control regime on the supply side, rather than requiring states with high addiction rates to attempt to mitigate demand through health-based policies at home. As a result, today’s anti-narcotrafficking instruments continue to identify the illegal drug trade primarily as a criminal activity, and therefore charge nations to control the problem through law enforcement.
More recently, the 2000 UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime did incorporate more comprehensive strategies to fight drug-related offenses. Article 30 of that treaty requires “other measures” to fight crime “through economic development” and Article 31, stipulates that states “shall endeavor to develop” appropriate preventive strategies. Although an important normative development, the directives remain vague and underemphasized.
Regional organizations have joined the fight against narcotrafficking, with mixed results. The Organization of American States has launched some innovative programs that aim to decrease demand for illegal drugs, but the region still faces an enormous challenge. Latin American leaders are using the forum to pressure the world—and especially the United States—to reevaluate existing prohibition regimes, but any progress will take years. The European Union is endowed with broader powers than other regional initiatives, and therefore has been able to impose more consistent legislation across the union and support capacity-building initiatives in eastern Europe, but European drug use and rates of human trafficking continue to climb. The Economic Community of West African States has taken initial steps to fight drug trafficking, but governance gaps in the region continue to leave it vulnerable. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has conferred high-level political attention on narcotrafficking, committing to a “Drug-Free ASEAN”, but the realities of governance gaps and economic development challenges have impeded [PDF] these efforts.
A number of bilateral capacity-building endeavors have also had a major impact on narcotrafficking norms around the world. Plan Colombia, (now called the Andean Counterdrug Initiative) for example, is an $8.5 billion program initiated in 1999 in which the United States provides expertise and financial resources to the Colombian military and administrative and judicial sectors to help Colombia fight narcotraffickers. Though the policy has managed to curb the Colombian drug problem to some extent (though not without controversy), in 2010, the UNODC reported that the lion’s share of drug cultivation had merely been displaced to neighboring Peru. The United States has also devoted $1.5 billion since 2008 to the Mérida Initiative to help Mexico suppress cartels there, but as Mexico tames the drug trade in one area it reappears elsewhere and violence is increasing. Mexico’s drug trade has also contributed to surging violence in Central America. Experts stress that these outcomes demonstrate the need to prioritize comprehensive strategies rather than rely too heavily on law enforcement.
New methods are slowly being pioneered to fight demand at the national level, but they remain the exception rather than the rule. A domestic program within the United States has pioneered drug courts, which supervise drug addicts during treatment rather than imprisoning them. In the first twenty years, drug courts were reported to be 75 percent more successful at preventing recidivism than incarceration and to reduce crime by as much as 35 percent. Similarly, Brazil has devised a strategy of placing permanent “pacifying police units” in the violent favelas, rather than attack narcotrafficking gangs with military police—an approach that has led to a “drastic change,” in the words of a Brazilian police captain. Furthermore, some U.S. districts are experimenting with drug market intervention [PDF]—where known drug dealers are invited to meet with community leaders who convince them of the harm they are inflicting on friends and family, rather than arrested and imprisoned—with remarkable success. Although such initiatives are small, they provide a promising model.
The war on illicit weapons: Rising awareness, limited scope
Smuggling weapons or their integral components fuels conflict among and within states as well as empowers pernicious nonstate actors such as gangs, pirates, and terrorists. Weapons smuggling can include the illicit transfer or diversion of materials, technology, and components related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as well as the trafficking and theft of conventional weapons. Awareness has spread about the overall threat from this form of transnational crime, but institutions to counteract the illicit transfer of weapons remain limited in scope.
The threat from illicit WMD transfers is primarily that a terrorist group would create a radiological dirty bomb or assemble a nuclear device. Although the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which was agreed to in 1968, attempted to prevent the unchecked proliferation of nuclear weapons, many find the treaty and its enforcement body, the International Atomic Energy Agency, ill equipped to counter threats posed by so-called rogue states and dangerous nonstate actors. The possibility of al-Qaeda or another group independently building a nuclear bomb is relatively small, but the consequences would be devastating. As evidenced by the discovery of the Abdul Qadeer Khan network in Pakistan, modern smuggling can involve intricate transnational channels supporting the transfer of sensitive technology. Stockpiles of nuclear warheads and material are also at risk for theft or illicit transfers, especially within the territory of the former Soviet Union.
In 2004, the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1540 (UNSCR) marked a watershed moment for efforts to stem the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Binding on all UN member states, UNSCR 1540 called on countries to implement domestic legislation to prevent proliferation, as well as established the 1540 Committee to monitor implementation of the resolution. Regardless, as of 2011, more than fifty [PDF] UN members had not formally reported their efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation to the 1540 Committee. Other challenges related to the implementation of UNSCR 1540 include difficulties in coordinating global nonproliferation capacity-building efforts and addressing the concerns of some developing states that claim to lack the necessary technical expertise and resources to implement the resolution’s provisions. In addition, many developing countries simply do not prioritize the threat of nuclear weapons as highly as other issues.
The relatively recent emergence of multilateral arrangements like the Proliferation Security Initiative, Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, and the UN Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism have been critical tools for norm-building and sustaining global attention on the threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Nevertheless, potential candidates for illicit transfers—whether state or nonstate—can simply opt not to cooperate or participate in these accords. Similarly, although the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, attended by nearly fifty heads of state or government, pledged to secure vulnerable fissile nuclear material by 2014, the pledge was not legally binding, nor did it cover threats posed by the proliferation of specific nuclear weapons related components. A binding Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty also has yet to be drafted.
Conventional weapons, whether small arms and light weapons (SALW) or more advanced weapons systems, are substantially more likely to be smuggled or involved in illicit transfers. The UN’s Register for Conventional Arms was created for states to report all exports and imports related to seven categories of armaments considered to be the most dangerous, including small arms. However, compliance by countries is voluntary and reporting has declined in recent years.
The illegal trafficking of SALW, an estimated $1 billion annual industry, has received significant global attention. The UN’s Program of Action to Prevent, Combat, and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in SALW in all its Aspects (PoA) is its most comprehensive effort in this area. Adopted by all UN member states in 2001, the PoA requires countries to develop national bodies that review legislation and cooperate internationally to stem illicit trade of SALW. Despite setting important normative foundations on licensing, tracing, and international cooperation, the PoA is a voluntary agreement and does not address [PDF] important issues including ammunitions, state-to-state transfer, and transfer to nonstate actors. A review conference scheduled for 2012 will examine the implementation of its recommendations by member states, but analysts have already reported significant gaps in implementation for a variety of reasons. To begin with, some states do not clearly understand their obligations [PDF], even when the PoA is unambiguous, and for many nations SALW trafficking is not a high priority. In addition, the PoA lacks [PDF] clear benchmarks and a mechanism for sharing best practices to support implementation.
The only legally binding treaty on SALW is the Firearms Protocol, a complementary instrument to the UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime, that requires states to bolster control measures against illicit firearms and their ammunition. However, this agreement also does not regulate state-to-state transfers and has had only some success in helping countries keep a tab on illicit weapons, despite licensing, marking, and tracing provisions. For example, in 2007, in violation of international sanctions, a Ukrainian ship transported thirty-three T-72 tanks, rocket-propelled grenades, and anti-aircraft guns to South Sudan via Kenya.
The International Tracing Instrument (ITI), an offshoot of the PoA, was created to fill this vacuum. The ITI aims to identify and trace weapons’ paths from source to destination. However, an April 2011 report on small arms by the UN secretary-general notes that, in many cases, ground-level officials do not understand tracking related markings on weapons, or do not have the records needed to link weapons with arms manufacturers. Often, serial numbers are simply ground off weapons.
The United Nations has resumed talks to negotiate a potentially comprehensive and legally binding arms trade treaty. Prospects for a breakthrough are dim, however. Contentious topics will require tough compromises from states such as China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—top arms exporters. U.S. constitutional protections to possess personal firearms significantly complicate negotiations. The agenda includes establishing a monitoring provision for SALW ammunition exports, determining responsibility for illegal state-to-state SALW sales, and enforcing such an accord.
Still, the number of civil society groups dedicated to promoting stronger and more inclusive cross-border regulations of small arms and light weapons has exploded. Established in 1998, the International Action Network on Small Arms, for instance, combines the work of numerous international groups seeking to stop all trafficking of SALW. Persistent lobbying from international nongovernmental organizations may have also played a central role accelerating UN and other regional negotiations to prevent the smuggling of conventional weapons.
Regionally, robust accords to prevent the trafficking of arms are the exception rather than the rule. One of the most far reaching is the binding Economic Community of Western African States Convention on Small Arms and Light Weapons, which entered into force in 2009. Some posit that the convention, which was drafted with support from leading SALW civil society groups and banned arms transfers to nonstate actors, could be a model for other regions and even work toward a global arms trade treaty. The moratorium, however, has been “routinely flouted” [PDF] and has little impact.
Illicit markets: Lacks comprehensive framework, international agreement
Other illicit markets include counterfeit products, counterfeit drugs, resource trafficking and environmental crime, and organ trafficking. These operate extralegally and thrive at the expense of legal trade and economic systems.
Global efforts to curtail these markets tend to be sector-specific responses, despite the fact that many criminal groups have diversified their activities into multiple markets. Collectively, global conventions, multilateral initiatives, and international institutions provide normative standards of protection, target the movement of illegal goods, and criminalize illicit activities—with varying degrees of effectiveness. Where norms exist, enforcement tends to be uneven. Nongovernmental organizations and private-sector entities have called for a global monitoring mechanism to track violations and seizures to expand knowledge of trends and developments.
Statistics point to oceans as a major channel for illicit markets, given that nearly 90 percent [PDF] of global manufactured goods are transported by container. Several International Maritime Organization (IMO) conventions address the safety of container shipping, including the International Convention on Safe Containers, which establishes uniform regulations for shipping containers. The conventions, however, do not address comprehensive security solutions, and illegal goods are secretly stashed in containers en route to their destinations. In 1992, the IMO enacted the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation, which created a legal framework to interdict, detain, and prosecute terrorists, pirates, and other criminals.
The U.S. government attempts to address this vulnerability in part through the Container Security Initiative (CSI), which aims to prescreen the majority of containers destined for the United States by isolating those that contain illegal goods before transit. The initiative, which operates in fifty-eight foreign ports, covers more than 80 percent of container cargo en route to the United States. Several international partners and organizations, including the European Union, Group of Eight, and WCO, have expressed interest in modeling security measures for containerized cargo based on the CSI model, though such expansion is years away. Despite these efforts, experts estimate that only 2 percent of containers destined for U.S. ports are actually inspected.
Trade in Counterfeit Products
The World Trade Organization (WTO), the main international institution dealing with trade issues, has led international efforts to combat illicit markets, specifically trade in counterfeit goods. The landmark Agreement of Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), passed in 1995, applies to all 153 WTO members and establishes minimum standards for intellectual property rights, including trademarks, copyrights, and patents, to be enforced by member states. Covering a broad range of sectors and goods—such as electronics, knock-off designer apparel, and art—TRIPS is the most comprehensive multilateral agreement addressing counterfeit goods to date. The UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization helps the WTO implement TRIPS by managing an international registry of patents, providing translations and notifications of national regulations, and supporting international technical cooperation. Specifically, the Madrid Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Marks along with its protocol allows countries to register trademarks in multiple countries through a single application that broadens coverage, but also lacks an enforcement mechanism. At the same time, TRIPS relies on UN member states to enforce intellectual property laws, which has led to serious gaps due to lack of political will or capability.
Recent efforts to strengthen enforcement mechanisms have met stiff resistance. Signed by thirty-one state parties—including Australia, Canada, Japan, the United States, and the European Union—the 2011 Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) attempts to establish an international legal framework to address violations of intellectual property rights. However, ACTA has been criticized for violating freedom of expression and privacy, as well as excluding civil society organizations and developing countries from negotiations. In response to a petition signed by more than two million Europeans, the European Commission referred ACTA to the European Court of Justice to determine whether the agreement violates individual rights.
Private-sector groups affected by illicit markets have also formed industry-specific trade associations, which have pushed for anti-counterfeiting legislation. Among the most active and influential of these organizations are the Motion Picture Association of America, Business Software Alliance, Recording Industry Association of America, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and the Council of Fashion Designers of America. They lobby for anti-counterfeiting legislation and enforcement, publish data and reports, run public advocacy and education campaigns, and help their members investigate and prosecute violations. However, rights groups have criticized such organizations for wielding undue influence and pushing legislation that disproportionately benefits businesses at the expense of consumers.
TRIPS coverage also extends to pharmaceutical patents. Although TRIPS requires all countries to adopt minimum standards, it does allow for some flexibility for developing countries through compulsory licensing agreements, a provision recently applied for the first time in India to produce a generic cancer drug. In 2001, the WTO Ministerial Conference adopted the Doha Declaration, affirming that TRIPS “does not and should not prevent members from taking measures to protect public health” by promoting access to affordable drugs.
Despite these advances, the definition of counterfeit medicine remains unclear. Disagreement is widespread over the working definition of counterfeit drugs provided by the World Health Organization (WHO). Developing countries maintain that generic versions of brand-name drugs should not be considered counterfeit as they are essential to affordable health care. Many nations do not yet have legislation targeting counterfeit drugs, although there are signs of progress. In 2011, China and Nigeria agreed to a new bilateral initiative allowing regulators to jointly combat counterfeit drugs.
Multilateral and regional organizations have taken steps to enforce anti–counterfeit medicine agreements. In 2006, the WHO launched the International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce, the goal of which is to develop international and regional networks to facilitate information sharing on the counterfeit drug market, although it has yet to make a global impact due to resistance from several important developing countries. Interpol has also implemented several regional initiatives to combat counterfeit drugs and arrest traffickers: Operation Storm in southeast Asia, Operation Mamba in eastern Africa, and Operation Cobra in western Africa. Between January 2010 and October 2011, Interpol and local partners seized millions of pills and made hundreds of arrests, underscoring the need for continued multilateral intervention. Finally, in December 2010, the Council of Europe adopted the Convention on the Counterfeiting of Medical Products and Similar Crimes Involving Threats to Public Health, which criminalized the manufacturing and trade of counterfeit drugs. Experts have criticized the convention, however, for its vague definition of generic medicine—and have instead advocated for a legally binding treaty led by the WHO. Without an international treaty criminalizing counterfeit drugs, progress will be limited, because each region or country continues to operate on various definitions of what constitutes counterfeit medicine. The WHO executive board adopted a voluntary resolution on counterfeit medicine in February 2012, but a comprehensive and adequate treaty is still far off.
To fight environmental crime, the principal international treaty is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). CITES is the strongest existing measure to protect the environment from exploitation; it proscribes trade in more than nine hundred animal and plant species in danger of extinction, and restricts trade in more than twenty-nine thousand additional species. Although it has created an important framework for efforts against environmental crime, CITES covers such a wide range of plant and animal species that it is virtually impossible to focus attention and enforce trade restrictions on all of them at once. The UN Environment Program (UNEP), the primary UN body for global environmental issues, supports CITES and related programmatic initiatives, but has a limited budget for these efforts. CITES is also supplemented by more than five hundred global and regional multilateral environmental treaties that deal with specific issue areas, including biodiversity, wildlife, pollution, use of chemicals, and waste disposal. The UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, supported by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), also serves as a legal framework for combating illicit resource trafficking, although it is primarily limited to crimes committed by organized groups and does not specifically mention the environment.
Laws to regulate illegal resource harvesting have not kept pace with environmental crime. A number of tree species are protected under CITES, but there is no existing comprehensive international agreement that regulates illegal logging. Experts argue [PDF] that CITES could be broadened to more adequately address illegal logging. The Forest Law Enforcement and Governance regional initiative, which convened producer and consumer countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe, attempted to raise awareness of illegal logging, but little progress has been made. Despite two other UN agreements to combat illegal fishing—the Conservation and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks (Fish Stocks Agreement) and the Agreement on Port State Measures to Prevent, Deter and Eliminate Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing—serious gaps in enforcement remain (see Global Governance Monitor: Oceans for an in-depth discussion).
International efforts to combat pollution and toxic waste dumping, on the other hand, have achieved marked success. The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants together provide an international framework to regulate the movements and dumping of waste, as well as the use of specific chemicals. Maritime pollution is regulated by the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL). States are responsible for implementing and enforcing MARPOL to curb the most destructive forms of maritime pollution, including oil spills, particulate matter such as sulfur oxide and nitrous oxide, and greenhouse gas emissions.
In response to the proliferation of environmental crime and limited enforcement, five international groups—CITES, Interpol, UNODC, the World Customs Organization, and the World Bank—formed the International Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime (ICCW), which became operational in March 2011. ICCW hopes to mount a coordinated global effort against environmental crime by supporting national law enforcement and facilitating information sharing, but it is too early to judge progress.
Organ trafficking has also become a serious problem. And while the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons (TIP protocol) identifies "the removal of organs" as a crime, many national governments have legal loopholes and outliers that allow for the activity to continue unchecked. In Iran, for example, kidney sales are legal and regulated; in India, the law outlaws all organ sales except for kidneys; and in China, it is illegal to buy or sell organs, although the government is allowed to harvest the organs of executed prisoners. A joint UN-Council of Europe study in 2009 called for [PDF] a new international treaty that would specifically address organ trafficking, including human trafficking for the removal of organs, which is a subset of a broader and more pervasive issue.
Combating cyber crime: Advancing from anarchy, but constant challenges
Cyber crime, which is estimated to cost the global economy between $114 billion and $1 trillion annually, comprises myriad illegal activities, including cyberattacks on governments or businesses, identity theft, and illegal hacking. As societies increasingly rely on the Internet, the need for robust measures to address cyber crime is clear. However, some experts believe that establishing a comprehensive, binding cyber crime convention may be impossible given fundamental differences in opinions between countries about the Internet. Other challenges include defining cyber crime and assigning responsibility for attacks orchestrated from within a country’s territory. Even in existing initiatives, the definition of cyber crime and stipulations to fight it are not consistent, and too often cyber crime is conflated with cyberterrorism, cyber espionage, or cyber warfare.
The most robust international accord that addresses cyber crime is the Council of Europe Convention on Cyber Crime. With thirty-two parties and fifteen signatories, it is the only international legally binding accord that governs the issue. Importantly, it defines cyber crime offenses such as data interference, child pornography, and illegal interception. The accord also includes a yearly consultation process for parties carried out through the Convention Committee on Cyber Crime. Testifying to the need for strong international cyber crime governance, the United States and a number of other countries outside the region have ratified the treaty; more nations are considering doing so.
The convention is also the basis for other international standards on cyber crime. The United Nations (UN) [PDF], Interpol [PDF], and various regional organizations have encouraged countries to model national legislation on the articles of the Council of Europe Convention on Cyber Crime and have supported acceding to it. Numerous countries, including hotbeds of cyber crime such as Nigeria, have updated [PDF] national legislation to conform to the treaty. However, many underdeveloped states do not have the institutional capacity to fulfill requirements, complicating efforts to harmonize domestic legislation. The convention on cyber crime also includes an additional protocol, which attempts to counter the use of the Internet as a medium to spread xenophobia and racism.
Although the United Nations examined cyber crime and related issues in 2010, member states were unable to reach a consensus on whether to expand the Council of Europe Convention on Cyber Crime or to create a new global treaty. In many instances, calls for firmer global institutions and agreements to fight cyber crime are met with skepticism from online users and policymakers, who worry that cyber crime laws might limit freedom of speech and private-sector Internet use. Both the UN General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)—responsible for development issues—have introduced several resolutions on cyber crime, but the issue is low on their agenda. In this regard, the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice has been important in bringing cyber crime to the attention of member states. Created in 1992 at the request of ECOSOC, the commission has increasingly raised the issue of cyber crime with other parts of the UN system. In 2011 it spearheaded a draft resolution urging countries to provide capacity-building assistance to fight cyber crime.
One specialized agency in the UN, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), has led [PDF] international information and communication technologies policy since 1865 (the body became a specialized UN agency in 1947). The ITU addresses the gamut of cyber crime problems, but its work on cyber crime has focused on data collection, research, and recommendations on building and harmonizing effective national legislation. The ITU also suffers from some important procedural weaknesses. Only UN plenary assemblies and world conferences can form ITU study groups to discuss relevant problems, but they meet only once every four years. Despite its flaws, the agency has launched some ambitious projects. One of its flagship projects, Child Online Protection, aims to protect children from malicious attacks in cyberspace. More recently, ITU joined forces with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime to assess specific countries’ institutional capacities, review legislation, provide technical assistance, and offer training opportunities. Although it is still too early to determine its success, the collaboration paves the way for more partnerships within the UN, where work on cyber crime is often fragmented and lacks prioritization.
Informal organizations and multilateral arrangements have established frameworks to facilitate the sharing of best practices and intelligence related to cyber crime. Interpol, along with its 190 member countries, relies on its I-24/7 worldwide communication system as well as its National Central Reference Points [PDF] network—a specialized group of investigators—to combat cyber crime. But even with these initiatives, many countries do not have adequate funding, enough cyber crime laws, or the institutional capacity to prevent, investigate, or prosecute cyber criminals. Furthermore, working in different jurisdictions to obtain evidence tends to be inefficient and slow. Numerous regional initiatives as well as nongovernmental organizations have also been established with the specific mission of preventing the exploitation of children through the Internet. Enforcement, though, remains limited by the inherent difficulties in tracing perpetrators of cyber crime, especially when occurring across borders and contrasting legal jurisdictions.
One major multilateral initiative, the Lyon Group, was created by the Group of Eight (G8) in 1996. The Lyon Group gathers senior experts to discuss international crime issues and has a dedicated subgroup that addresses high-tech crime with the aim of helping law enforcement agencies enhance their strategies to prevent, investigate, and prosecute cyber crime. The G8 has also adopted forty operative recommendations to combat transnational organized crime, and all members are required to set up a 24/7 network of point of contacts to address computer crimes and requests. Still, current technologies do not have the capacity to fully track cyber crime, which hinders the subgroup’s effectiveness.
At the regional level, organizations and ad hoc groups have attempted to tackle cyber crime. For instance, the Organization of American States (OAS) established a working group on cyber crime, which spearheaded a compilation of existing cyber crime legislation in OAS member states. The working group, backed by a recommendation from all OAS attorney generals and ministers of justice, has also requested that OAS member states consider applying the principles of the Council of Europe’s Convention on Cyber Crime. Similarly, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation group has taken on the issue, with an action plan [PDF] to combat cyber crime that includes personal information protections, cybersecurity capacity building, and raising awareness against cyber crime. Nevertheless, cyber crime rates continue to climb in every region around the world.
Combating human trafficking and migrant smuggling: Record progress, but inadequate enforcement
Human trafficking is the only illicit activity classified as a crime against humanity. Although it manifests itself in many forms, forced labor and sexual exploitation are the primary types. Migrant smuggling is considered distinct from human trafficking, both legally and conceptually. In practice, however, it is difficult to differentiate between the acts of migrant smuggling and trafficking. Both target the poor and deceive or violently abuse victims. Some migrants become victims of trafficking, and smugglers may also serve as traffickers.
Global governance efforts and tools to combat human trafficking and migrant smuggling are generally uncoordinated, underresourced, and lacking in the political will to exert meaningful change. To date, no permanent mechanism for collecting and evaluating comprehensive data on human trafficking or migrant smuggling has been established, which presents a significant hurdle for international organizations and national governments to devise effective policies and strategies.
Until recently, no international agreement defined human trafficking or laid out a strategy to address it. Heightened international attention in the 1990s, however, paved the way in the United Nations (UN) for the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons (TIP protocol) to the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC), which entered into force in December 2003. To date, 142 countries have ratified the TIP protocol and 128 countries have passed laws prohibiting human trafficking.
The TIP protocol broadly defined human trafficking under international law as the “recruitment, transportation, harboring, or receipt of persons, by means of… forms of coercion… for the purpose of exploitation.” Its ultimate goal was to harmonize domestic legislation to criminalize the phenomenon.
Similarly, “migrant smuggling” was also undefined until the Protocol Against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea, and Air (Smuggling of Migrants protocol) to the UNTOC entered into force in January 2004. It identifies the crime as the “procurement, in order to obtain… financial or other material benefit, of the illegal entry of a person into a state.” Ratified by 129 member states, the protocol does not aim to curb illegal immigration, but instead to undermine organized smugglers. Some experts have argued [PDF], however, that the protocol does not go far enough to protect the rights of migrants.
The protocols are the strongest measures to date on human trafficking and migrant smuggling. In particular, passage of the TIP protocol prompted the proliferation of regional conventions decrying human trafficking. The European Union ratified the Brussels Declaration on Preventing and Combating Trafficking in Human Beings in 2002; the Association of Southeast Nations (ASEAN) passed the Declaration Against Trafficking in Persons, Particularly Women and Children in 2004; and the African Union followed suit in 2006 and enacted the Ouagadougou Action Plan to Combat Trafficking in Human Beings, Especially Women and Children; among others. Many of these regional conventions, however, are not legally binding on member states, and have thus proved unable to effect significant change on the ground.
Regional action on migrant smuggling has been mostly limited to extending general protections to migrants. For example, the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Program for the Promotion and Protection of the Human Rights of Migrants, Including Migrant Workers and their Families and the ASEAN Declaration on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Migrant Workers focus on the basic rights of migrant workers, with sporadic references to the issue of migrant smuggling.
Despite halting normative progress among regional organizations, enforcement has floundered at the national level. Many countries only recently passed laws codifying human trafficking as a crime, and in some countries such legislation is wholly absent. Definitions of the crime vary widely; many national laws are confined to trafficking of women, or only recognize sexual exploitation of trafficking victims and do not address other forms such as labor trafficking. Even if states have enacted requisite legislation, 40 percent [PDF] of these countries did not produce a single conviction between 2003 and 2008.
Many states have recently criminalized [PDF] migrant smuggling activities, but struggle to enforce the statutes. Of the few governments that try to combat migrant smuggling, resources are often directed to border controls rather than long-term measures. Many states do not see smuggled migrants as victims, but rather as illegal immigrants.
The United States plays a major role in global efforts to combat human trafficking. The U.S. Congress passed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (TVPA) in October 2000, which provided resources to monitor and reduce human trafficking. However, the TVPA expired at the end of 2011 and is yet to be reauthorized due to partisan deadlock over budget allocations. The U.S. State Department also produces [PDF] an annual trafficking report ranking 184 governments—including itself—on its actions against trafficking. Although somewhat politicized, the reports are a useful means of tracking implementation of international norms. Other organizations, such as the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and International Organization for Migration are also working to compile accurate data. In one high-profile initiative, the UN Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) partnered with other UN agencies to aggregate data. Though moderately successful, the project ended in 2009 and the information will soon be outdated.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is charged with monitoring and implementing the UNTOC protocols, which it does by assisting countries with drafting legislation and creating national antitrafficking strategies. Its work is supplemented by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ (OHCHR) special rapporteur on trafficking in persons, special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, and the special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, who undertake country visits, monitor activities, and produce annual reports on their issue areas. In October 2011, the UNODC and the OHCHR joined forces to enhance cooperation, showing progress in efforts to streamline interagency work.
Countless international, regional, and local NGOs are dedicated to raising awareness of human trafficking. Amnesty International, Mercy Corps, and Human Rights Watch often publish country reports on trafficking, and the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women has a broad membership of more than one hundred affiliated NGOs. Many of the NGOs focus attention on women and sexual slavery, often at the expense of labor trafficking issues.
Child trafficking, of course, remains sensitive and controversial. Although covered in the TIP protocol, some experts have argued that child trafficking deserves a separate accord. International instruments addressing the issue of child labor include the Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention, which defines “worst forms” as the sale and trafficking of children, forced labor, and recruitment for use in armed conflict. In addition, the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict specifically addresses the recruitment and exploitation of child soldiers. Despite these landmark measures, efforts to coordinate child labor and trafficking efforts more broadly remain inadequate.
Should the international community shift its focus to a broader, health-based approach to cut demand for illegal drugs?
Yes: Proponents [PDF] of a dramatic reset to fight narcotrafficking worldwide argue that attacking producers, suppliers, and transporters of illegal drugs unfairly burdens developing countries, increases the profitability of selling illicit drugs, and also severely raises the levels of violence associated with the trade. In 2011, the United Nations Global Commission on Drug Policy concluded that the U.S.-led war on drugs had failed, despite $2.5 trillion spent over forty years, precisely because the strategy focuses too heavily on criminalizing illegal drugs. It recommends a shift away from strict prohibition regimes in favor of public health policies to decrease demand, prevent drug abuse, and treat addiction.
Ultimately, attempting to eradicate production of drug crops like coca leaf or opium poppy only displaces the threat and leaves impoverished farmers with poorly implemented alternative livelihood strategies. Furthermore, methamphetamine use has skyrocketed in the past five years, which may account for much of the reduction in use of opiates and cocaine. Given resource constraints, law enforcement agencies must also target drug traffickers consecutively, which creates a feeding frenzy as groups fight to replace the arrested group and leads to exponential violence without decreasing the threat to the community. Finally, by illegalizing supply without devoting equal resources to cutting demand, the current strategy provides an extraordinary incentive to traffickers and producers to provide the drugs to users who are willing to pay high prices because the drugs are hard to come by.
No: Opponents of legalization argue that the greatest costs of drug use are not caused by prohibition regimes, but rather by the drugs themselves. Reducing demand is not possible without limiting drug availability. “When illegal drugs are readily available, the likelihood increases that they will be abused,” explains the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy. When China was not able to regulate the supply of opium in 1900, for example, fully 25 percent of China’s population was addicted to opium. Aggregated estimates demonstrate [PDF] that the current strategy of strictly punishing the production or transport of opiates, cocaine, and amphetamine-type stimulants has decreased instances of their abuse by 40 percent over the past century—implying that prohibition regimes have markedly decreased drug use around the world.
Furthermore, opponents say that relaxing controls on supply and use of drugs will not reduce violence because criminality stems from the need to earn quick, large profits outside the law rather than the nature of the illicit product being sold. Drug traffickers “would simply find another commodity to export.” In addition, any relaxation of drug controls would still leave the drugs more heavily taxed or illegal—and therefore not disincentivize illicit trade in them, but only make them more readily available. Finally, theories that the government would benefit from taxing less dangerous drugs like marijuana, and shifting to prevention strategies instead, overlook the concerns that governments might be motivated to disregard the damage of addiction since higher levels of addiction would earn them more money.
Should the United States sign the Firearms Protocol?
Yes: The UN Protocol Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Their Parts and Components and Ammunition (Firearms Protocol) to the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime requires countries to adopt responsible legislation to prevent criminals from obtaining guns and implement controls to be able to trace firearms after they are manufactured. The United States helped draft the Firearms Protocol, but has not yet become a party to it. Doing so would not threaten the legal sale and purchase of guns in the United States, nor threaten Second Amendment constitutional rights to bear arms because it seeks only to decrease illicit trade in firearms through marking weapons, maintaining records on gun purchases, and improving licensing systems to prevent known criminals from purchasing weapons. Licit trade would thus not be curtailed. It would, however, significantly decrease the illegal sale of weapons bought in the United States and then sold to cartels that are wreaking havoc in Mexico and Central America—as well as decrease the illicit flows from Central Europe that fuel African civil wars.
No: Opponents to the Firearms Protocol believe that the language is vague, and could be progressively interpreted to curtail individual rights to own guns in the United States. In addition, the protocol does not regulate state-to-state transfers of weapons, which significantly contribute to weapon flows fuelling intrastate conflicts. Opponents of the protocol therefore perceive that the ultimate goal of the protocol is to restrict civilian ownership of firearms. Some have even argued that the right to protect oneself by purchasing a personal firearm is a human right, and should therefore not be limited, no matter how well-intentioned the Firearms Protocol may be.
Should the United States increase the use of unilateral sanctions on transnational organized crime groups?
Yes: The use of economic sanctions against transnational organized crime (TOC) groups are an important recognition of the need to employ innovative strategies to target nonstate actors. Although terrorist groups and TOC groups do not possess similar goals, the structural similarities of these fluid networks imply that analogous mechanisms will be useful to fight both. The executive order freezes the assets in the United States of any individuals that are listed on the order’s annex, as well as freezes the assets of U.S. persons (citizen, resident, or person physically located in the United States) who conduct financial transactions with a designated group. The sanctions will impose a much-needed limit on the financial gains of TOC groups, argue supporters of the move.
The sanctions also bear weight because violators can be fined up to $1 million or sentenced to twenty years in prison, or both. Furthermore, under the executive order, the U.S. secretary of the treasury is granted the power to impose sanctions on other groups, facilitating an adaptive process of punishing groups that emerge.
No: Though economic sanctions appear to be a sharp tool against organized crime groups, in reality, the groups earn billions from trafficking in weapons and people, and other crimes. As a result, sanctions will not significantly cripple their operations or deter people from engaging in criminal behavior. Furthermore, foreign governments may lack the capacity or will to cooperate with U.S. efforts. For example, Japan reacted to the recent U.S. sanctions on Japanese yakuza with “shock and shame,” which will decrease the impact of U.S. economic sanctions on the group. It will also hinder the United States’ ability to identify further criminals on whom to impose sanctions because they rely on Japanese government intelligence.
In addition, the targeted groups are “large and amorphous,” and will further burden U.S. and international businesses with cumbersome due diligence responsibilities. Moreover, the strategy aims to root out illicit networks with law enforcement, rather than cut demand for their illicit services or use more comprehensive strategies to fight them. Any success in debilitating one criminal group, will only lead another to take its place.
Should the United States pursue a binding international convention related to cyber crime?
Yes: Proponents of a worldwide binding cyber crime convention claim that country-specific mandates will not address the threat because it is a quintessential transnational threat that requires global cooperation . The Internet is an open network and crimes can be perpetrated from within any country. More so than other crimes, the perpetrators of cyber crime directly and instantaneously attack people in foreign jurisdictions, and often target people in multiple countries at once. Cyber criminals can also act with extraordinary speed, increasing the need for swift judicial cooperation among multiple countries to identify criminals and shut down operations in a timely matter.
Extensive and integrated global cooperation is imperative to combat the threat. Bilateral arrangements between law enforcement or judicial agencies cannot keep up with cyber criminals, who operate without the impediment of national borders. A global convention would provide regulatory guidelines, a clearer definition of what constitutes cyber crime, and provide mechanisms for much-needed capacity building to help poor nations confront cyber crime. In addition, supporters believe a binding global treaty is feasible. The Council of Europe Convention on Cyber Crime, has been ratified and signed by countries outside of the European continent, for example.
No: Opponents of a binding international cyber crime convention argue that the inherent difficulty of investigating cyber crime would render enforcement of a potential convention nearly impossible. Many cyber crime attacks are never detected [PDF], and cyber criminals are able to mask their identity with relative ease. Moreover, monitoring nations’ compliance with a global cyber crime convention is unrealistic as the technology used to conduct cyber crime—such as computer viruses, worms, denial of service attacks, scripts—changes [PDF] so rapidly.
In addition, efforts to control cyber crime threaten freedom of speech and open the door to invasions of private citizens’ privacy, as well as impose limits on the sharing of information via the internet. Enforcement of anti–cyber crime regulations would almost certainly impose [PDF] heavy burdens on the private sector, and opponents of a global accord argue that independent businesses and citizens are better placed to regulate cyber crime themselves. For example, banks have the motivation and funds to invest in protecting their systems and international regulations would do little to improve on their efforts.
Should the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) model be expanded for broader anticorruption efforts?
Yes: Supporters of CICIG argue that it is one of the most successful anticorruption initiatives, and should be replicated outside Guatemala or expanded into a regional model. CICIG was first initiated [PDF] by the Guatemalan human rights ombudsman and subsequently earned support from the Guatemalan “government, civil society, institutions for the defense of human rights, UN agencies in Guatemala, and the churches” [PDF]. Because of this local support, CICIG has been better integrated [PDF] into the domestic judicial system. UN support for CICIG, and its hybrid structure that includes international investigators and prosecutors, are also innovative mechanisms that increased its effectiveness and legitimacy.
By 2010, CICIG cooperation with Guatemalan prosecutors and investigators had led to the arrest of a former president for embezzlement, two former national police chiefs for drug connections, former defense officials for fraud, as well as ousted thousands of policemen, ten prosecutors, three supreme court justices, and an attorney general. Advocates of CICIG have lauded the program for its aggressive anticorruption efforts and for raising public awareness of organized crime. In 2010, Honduras and El Salvador consulted with the United States to tentatively establish country-specific models based on CICIG. Although the proposal has yet to come to fruition, supporters argue that it is the most effective method for combating corruption to date, and should be expanded to the region.
No: Critics argue that the CICIG model is fundamentally flawed and unsustainable for several reasons. First, CICIG was formed at the request of the Guatemalan government; it is unlikely that other countries known for similarly high levels of corruption would voluntarily invite the UN to encroach on their national sovereignty. Second, the model is predicated on strong cooperation between the UN and the national government, but CICIG faced significant domestic resistance in Guatemala. The former head of CICIG resigned in 2010, arguing that the Guatemalan government had not fulfilled promises to reform the justice system, particularly its failure to adopt stronger anticrime and anticorruption legislation. The Commission suffered from poor oversight, and has conducted investigations in cases where “it has no business.” The program has also been accused of interfering with Guatemala’s justice agenda rather than helping bolster it and has not managed to get anticorruption legislation through the Guatemalan legislature. In addition, some contend that the body has disproportionately focused on high-profile arrests and prosecutions, skirting its mandate to transfer technical capacities to Guatemalan officials, which is critical to long-term sustainability and future progress. As a result of these serious flaws, CICIG was less popular than the corrupt Guatemalan attorney-general’s office in October 2011 polls.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) launched a global campaign to educate consumers about the highly lucrative trade of counterfeit goods. The campaign, titled “Don’t Buy Into Organized Crime,” aims to raise awareness about the economic, social, and environmental impact of the illicit counterfeit goods trade and the transnational organized crime that such goods may fund. UNODC estimates that the counterfeit business amounts to $250 billion each year. A report [PDF] released by the campaign highlights the connections between counterfeit goods, corruption, and organized criminal groups, such as the Triads and Yakuza in Asia.
In a show of its commitment to international efforts to combat the illegal trade of ivory, China held a public ceremony to destroy six tons of ivory seized by Chinese authorities. The event came on the heels of a similar event in the United States, where U.S. officials crushed six tons of ivory in November 2013. Although the ivory trade was banned by the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in 1989, the illicit trade of ivory persists: according to a 2013 United Nations report [PDF], elephant poaching and ivory trafficking have increased in recent years. Some experts have criticized the destruction of ivory stockpiles, noting that these symbolic acts do little to combat the ivory trade and may in fact have the unintended consequence of increasing demand.
On January 1, 2014, a Colorado state law legalizing the recreational use of marijuana went into effect. The first of its kind in the United States, the law permits state-licensed marijuana retailers to sell up to one ounce of marijuana to residents of Colorado who are 21 or older. Although cannabis remains illegal under U.S. federal law, the Obama administration has indicated that states will be given the freedom to determine their own laws on recreational and marijuana. Similar developments are taking place in Washington state, where retailers will be authorized to sell marijuana for recreational use later in 2014. Some experts contend that the legalization of marijuana in the United States will undercut Mexican drug cartels’ profits, while others doubt that Colorado’s statute will have any significant impact on transnational drug trafficking.
In its effort to disrupt cybercrime, Microsoft took part in "Operation Citadel" to disrupt more than a thousand botnets.“Botnet” is a term that refers to a network of computers that have been targeted by malicious software (malware) that allows criminals to commit crimes—e.g., spread viruses, attack other computers, commit fraud—over the internet without the users’ awareness. The botnets in question are allegedly responsible for $500 million in losses to financial institutions, banks, and consumers and are composed of over five million personal computers. Operation Citadel was supported by the FBI and other government agencies.
A United Nations conference in Vienna suggested that wildlife crime and illegal forestry has become the fourth-largest transnational crime in the world behind illicit trade in drugs, arms, and human beings, respectively. While the World Wildlife Fund estimates that the global trade is worth $17 billion annually, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime suggests that the illegal trade in wildlife and wood-based products in the Asia-Pacific region alone is worth $19.5 billion.
According to a United Nations report, army forces under the command of former Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo used ammunition rounds produced in the Sudan during the four-month long civil war in the country. The United Nations Operation in Cote d’Ivoire (UNOCI) contends that these rounds were likely trafficked into the country following French and UN intervention on the side of newly installed president Outtara. If proven, the trafficking of the weapons would represent a breach of the arms embargo first imposed in 2004 on the Ivory Coast.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime completed its first comprehensive study on transnational organized crime threats in East Asia and the Pacific in April 2013. The report, which studies twelve selected contraband markets including trafficking in humans, narcotics, stolen goods, and environmental products, found that these markets are worth $90 billion each year. A third of this value stems from drug trafficking with sixty-five metric tons of heroin worth $16.3 billion flowing through the region in 2011. The report also highlights the growing threat posed by fraudulent medicines and environmental crime related to extractive industries.
U.S. and international action are needed to manage the threat of transnational organized crime. These recommendations reflect the views of Stewart M. Patrick, director of the International Institutions and Global Governance program, and James Cockayne, codirector of the Center on Global Counterterrorism Cooperation.
In the near term, the United States and its partners should pursue the following initiatives to bolster global anticrime efforts.
Improve data with a trust fund for independent research
The United States and its partners require more reliable data on transnational crime to appropriately allocate resources where they will achieve maximum impact—and reduce spending on ineffective programs. To accomplish this, the United States should work with likeminded governments to establish a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) trust fund to improve data collection on a range of transnational criminal issues. UNODC currently compiles global statistics on drugs, human trafficking, and corruption, but the mechanisms are flawed due to limited in-country resources, manipulation of data, and low levels of participation from local institutions. The trust fund can be used to build the technical expertise of local staff that collect and analyze the data, and create a mechanism for ongoing training as noted in a report [PDF] by the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs. An effective example for data analysis that could serve as a model is the “crime observatories [PDF]” program, managed by the International Center for the Prevention of Crime, which aim to improve the analysis on criminal data.
Draw on lessons from counterterrorism efforts
The U.S. experience fighting global terrorist networks since 9/11 can provide important lessons on how to weaken transnational organized crime groups. The United States should press to apply to transnational crime successful initiatives from the counterterrorism regime, such as the systems of joint threat analysis and international and public-private relationships, that the United States built to tackle the threat of terrorism. The U.S. government has already recognized how some counterterror strategies can apply to anticrime efforts, like the use of sanctions against criminal networks that resembled sanctions on al-Qaeda. It should push for broader international cooperation to reinforce their impact.
In addition, the Financial Action Task Force recently combined its standards for money laundering and terrorist financing, which will effectively require states to improve general anti–money laundering regulations in order to comply with UN Security Council resolutions on counterterrorist financing. The United States should both revise domestic frameworks to comply with the updated standards, and insist that other nations follow suit. Finally, the United States should elevate the importance of combating international criminal networks in diplomatic relationships with existing allies in the “global war on terror,” noting that the two are increasingly interconnected, as both sets of illicit actors increasingly form tactical alliances and appropriate one another’s methodologies.
Bolster anti–money laundering regulations
The International Monetary Fund and World Bank estimate that between $2 and $3 trillion is laundered each year. But worldwide, only $170 million is detected and stopped annually. There are a number of areas where the U.S. government could work more closely with the financial sector to crack down on money laundering and address its intertwining with politics. Positive steps would include closer scrutiny of banking practices of public officials globally, as well as partnerships to develop more effective supervision of informal remittance networks and money transfer systems.
Furthermore, current anti–money laundering standards in the United States require banks to know their customers. But evidence of significant illicit transactions suggests that these regulations need to be implemented more faithfully. The United States should also work more assiduously with international partners to clamp down on the use of offshore tax havens by U.S. corporations or individuals, since such havens are often used to launder the proceeds of illicit trade.
In the longer term, the United States and its international partners should consider the following steps:
Streamline U.S. government anticrime capacity building
The United States should streamline existing capacity-building efforts, which are currently scattered across numerous domestic and international agencies. Currently, the U.S. Department of State bureaus of international narcotics and law and counterterrorism, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Institute for Justice, and Department of Defense—in addition to an array of international programs—all conduct operations to bolster the ability of developing countries to fight transnational crime. Building on the 2011 Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime, the U.S. government should compile a database mapping its efforts to counter transnational crime across regions and issue areas, and use the results to improve coordination and reduce duplication of efforts.
Support evidence-based drug policy
The United States should support an evidence-based approach to tackling illicit drugs—and end its inflexible commitment to prohibition regimes that prioritize supply reduction over analysis of pricing incentives, strategies for cutting demand, and harm reduction programs. For example, heroin substitution programs have “led [PDF] to an overall reduction in the number of people addicted…[and] reduced levels of other criminal activity associated with the market.” Generally speaking, global prohibition regimes perversely inflate the price of illegal drugs, creating tremendous market incentives for people to produce and transport these forbidden commodities. Studies [PDF] of alternative anti-drug policies have often proved not only successful in tempering incentives to sell illicit drugs, but have also not resulted in increased drug use. At times, these policies have actually decreased violence more than law enforcement interventions. These were the conclusions of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, whose nineteen members included a former U.S. secretary of state and former U.S. chairman of the Federal Reserve, and four former heads of state. The U.S. government must engage in a more open debate about policies to manage drug abuse.
Combat criminal impunity
In countries with fractured judicial systems, weak rule of law, or widespread corruption, violent criminal organizations can operate with impunity. The United States and its international partners should explore the possibility of setting up a complementary, international judicial framework that could prosecute criminals if local judicial systems are deemed incapable of holding a fair trial. The United Nations should revisit relevant early debates about the International Criminal Court (ICC), which some originally proposed should also try drug traffickers. Even as human trafficking has been labeled a crime against humanity, and as the number of people murdered by criminal organizations surges in parts of the world, many criminal groups operate with impunity [PDF]. In these instances, the United States should consider an international alternative to local courts. This might include prosecuting egregious violent crime under the mandate of the ICC, establishing a distinct body to try such cases, or setting up hybrid international-national courts.
For more information, including membership; mandate; gaps and weaknesses; implementation, compliance and enforcement; and U.S. policy stance, download the full report.
Protects all industrial property rights, such as patents, marks, industrial design, utility models, trade names, geographical indications, and repression of unfair competition. Requires state parties to provide the same rights and right of property to citizens of other member countries that it does to its own.
Established Madrid System for the International Registration of Marks, allowing one trademark application to be automatically guaranteed in multiple countries if approved. 1981 protocol removed barriers including limited flexibility in registration requirements and time frames, and mandate to submit applications in French.
Prohibited manufacture, distribution, selling, and trade of opium and other drugs for any use other than medical. First official declaration on dangers of opium smoking and other drugs, and their nonmedical trade. 1925 revisions introduced statistical control system overseen by Permanent Central Opium Board, recognized today as International Narcotics Control Board.
Consolidates relevant international agreements struck between 1904 and 1951. States must punish anyone who entices another for prostitution or who exploits prostitution of another, even with consent. First international agreement that prostitution and human trafficking are “incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person.” Prohibits brothels, prostitution, and expulsion of offenders.
Includes measures to prevent nuclear weapons from falling into criminal hands. Prohibits five recognized nuclear weapon states (NWS) from supplying nonnuclear weapon states (NNWS) with nuclear weapons-related material or technology. NWS pledge to disarm completely. NNWS guaranteed access to civilian nuclear technology, and accept safeguards. Treaty extended indefinitely during 1995 review conference.
Replaced and consolidated existing drug control agreements into one framework.
Protects wild animals and plants from overexploitation through international trade. Considered strongest existing measure to combat environmental crime. Protects roughly 5,000 species of animals and 29,000 species of plants. Appendices list species threatened with extinction, prohibits trade in such circumstances. Controls trade in species on brink of entering threatened list.
Requires state parties to criminalize certain drug-related activities, including diversion of precursor chemicals, and to cooperate internationally to interdict illegal drug shipments. Requires countries to seize monetary proceeds from drug offenses, and to pass legislation allowing asset freezes and seizure.
Created legal framework to interdict, detain, and prosecute terrorists, pirates, and other criminals. Ensures that all appropriate action is taken against unlawful acts committed against ships. Includes seizure of ships by force, any violence against passengers aboard ships, as well as harmful tampering with ships.
Requires states to establish “protected areas” and regulate resources necessary for global biological diversity. State parties must ensure that activities under national jurisdiction or control do not harm “environment of other states or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction.”
Governs (PDF) uses of the sea, such as illegal fishing, or illegal waste dumping at sea. Sets out international framework for suppression of piracy (PDF), requiring states to cooperate. Prohibits transporting of slaves. Decrees that any slave on board a ship is automatically free.
Established minimum standards for intellectual property rights, to be enforced by state parties. Covers broad range of goods, including pharmaceutical patents. Doha Declaration later clarified that TRIPS “does not and should not prevent members from taking measures to protect public health” by using generic drugs.
Calls on states to recognize how arms transfers contribute to international crime and commit to eradicating illicit arms trafficking. Declares state responsibility to “exercise restraint” over arms, production, transfer, and procurement; to consider noneconomic factors when selling weapons (i.e. international security), and to recognize need for transparency in arms transfer.
Created global system for monitoring conventional arms and dual-use goods and technologies.
Defines and develops concept of alternative development as key to combating illicit drug production. Calls on states to promote sustainable alternative livelihoods. Legitimizes eradication when organized crime groups involved in illicit crop cultivation, and when alternative sources of income exist.
Requires parties to enact legislation criminalizing bribery of foreign public officials, as well as any complicity in acts of bribery, “including incitement, aiding and abetting, or authorization of a bribery act.” Signing required for OECD membership.
Defines “worst forms” of labor as sale and trafficking of children, forced labor, and recruitment for use in armed conflict.
Identifies tax havens or jurisdictions with tax practices that do not adequately combat money laundering. Model Agreement on Exchange of Information on Tax Matters developed standards for effective multilateral information exchange.
First legally binding and multisector international instrument on transnational organized crime (TOC). Defines organized crime group. Requires member states to enact domestic legislation criminalizing membership in organized crime groups, money laundering, corruption and obstruction of justice. Promotes cooperation for international legal assistance, law enforcement cooperation, and extradition.
Requires state parties to criminalize illicit manufacture and trafficking of firearms. Promotes international cooperation on combating small arms trade. Requires member states to implement national systems for licensing and marking firearms and to “maintain inventories of weapons” stockpiles. Contains licensing, marking, and tracing provisions.
Broadly defines human trafficking as “recruitment, transportation, harboring, or receipt of persons, by… coercion… for... exploitation,” and established ultimate goal of harmonizing domestic legislation to criminalize it. Applies to trafficking committed across borders and within a state, and with or without participation of organized criminal groups.
Does not address (PDF) important issues including ammunitions, state-to state transfer, and transfer to nonstate actors. Lacks (PDF) clear benchmarks and a mechanism for sharing best practices to support implementation. Lacks oversight.
Calls on states to prevent, suppress, and criminalize the financing of terrorism.
Defines cyber crime offenses such as data interference, child pornography, and illegal interception. Provides a model for many other nations and regions of cybercrime international standards to apply. Additional protocol attempts to decrease xenophobia and racism on Internet.
Criminalizes “procurement... to obtain… financial or other material benefit, of the illegal entry of a person into a state.” Protects rights of migrants. State parties may request assistance of other state parties if it suspects a ship to be smuggling migrants.
Names transnational organized crime (TOC) as one of six major threats to international security. Mentions drug trafficking as a security and global health threat. Recommends bolstering state capacity and improving coordination between agencies and countries. Calls on all UN members to accede to and implement conventions on TOC and corruption, and for monitoring mechanisms for such treaties.
Calls on countries to implement domestic legislation to prevent nuclear proliferation. Established 1540 Committee to monitor implementation. Governs nuclear sales to nonstate actors.
Requires state parties to criminalize transfer of proceeds from a crime, and other aspects of money laundering. Calls for states to establish financial intelligence units. Does not define corruption. Criminalizes wide range of corrupt acts. Requires state parties to return ill-gotten gains to country of origin.
Urges member states to implement Financial Action Task Force Forty Recommendations on Anti–Money Laundering. Expands on counterterrorist financing measures. Reinforced by UN General Assembly in 2006 (Resolution 60/288).
Would ban production of fissile material for nuclear weapons purposes like highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium, which are essential for building nuclear weapons and powering nuclear reactors. Effective control and elimination of fissile materials essential to nuclear disarmament.
Proposed to reduce irresponsible trade of conventional arms and ammunitions as well as control and regulate the illicit transfer, spread, production, and dispersion of small arms and ammunition. Calls for comprehensive (PDF) and legally binding international framework.
Attempts to establish an international legal framework against the violation of intellectual property rights (IPR) and to promote cross border protection of IPR.
Clarifies terms of international cooperation and mutual assistance in investigating, locating, seizing, and confiscating illicit profits from transnational crime. Lays out obligations related to confiscating illicit profit, including carrying out provisional actions (e.g. freezing or seizing of assets), and assisting in identifying and tracking suspicious cross-border financial activity.
Attempts to expand regional cooperation related to the prevention and criminalization of drug trafficking and drug abuse. Clarifies interregional cooperation measures related to mutual legal assistance, prosecution, and the exchange of scientific and technical data related to eradication of plants “containing narcotic or psychotropic substances.”
Clarifies channels for regional cooperation related to certain cases of criminal investigations, prosecutions, and proceedings. Addresses cross-border collaboration related to notification of judicial action, gathering testimony, locating witnesses, freezing of assets, searches and seizures, transmittal of official documents, and the transfer of detained individuals, among other issues.
Dedicated to expanding parties’ capacity to “detect, punish, and eradicate corruption,” as well as increasing regional cooperation in anticorruption efforts. Applies to cases of corruption of public officials, transnational bribery, and illicit enrichment. First international anticorruption convention. Establishes legal framework related to cross-border investigations and adjudication.
Declaration by parties not to import, export, or manufacture light weapons for the duration of three years.
Requires states to adopt necessary legislation or national measures to criminalize both “active and passive bribery.” Applies to bribery of domestic and foreign public officials as well as assemblies. Also applies to private sector, international courts, and international parliamentary assemblies. Clarifies mechanisms for facilitating adjudication of bribery cases including extradition, information-sharing, and confiscation of illicit profit.
Addresses right of those individuals affected by corruption to receive fair compensation and act as whistleblowers without fear of retaliation. Defines corruption as “requesting, offering, giving or accepting directly or indirectly, a bribe or any undue advantage or prospect thereof, which distorts the proper performance or behavior required of the recipient of the bribe, the undue advantage of or the prospect thereof.”
Enumerates potential pathways for cooperation among ASEAN member states to prevent and punish trafficking of women and children. Includes information sharing, increasing cross-border cooperation in document verification, distinguishing victims from perpetrators, and building a regional counter-trafficking network.
Calls for variety of national level reforms to prevent and punish corruption, and is chiefly targeted toward addressing the corruption of public officials. Attempts to harmonize anticorruption legislation across region.
Established Inter-American Program for the Promotion and Protection of the Human Rights of Migrants, Including Migrant Workers and Their Families. Enumerates thirty-three activities for protection of human rights of migrants in different areas of general secretariat of OAS. Identifies smuggling of migrants and trafficking of persons as integral.
Addresses a variety of corruption practices, including laundering, bribing of public officials, illicit enrichment, funding of political parties, public-private-sector relationships, and confiscation of proceeds from corruption, among other issues. Covers preventing, adjudicating, and criminalizing corruption. Links participation of civil society and media to combating corruption.
Addresses illicit trafficking, manufacture, and possession of small arms and light weapons (SALW) within Great Lakes Region and Horn of Africa. Calls for national-level reforms on a variety of SALW issues including trafficking, broker regulations, tracking and markings, disposal, import-export controls, voluntary surrender, and implementation of community awareness programs.
Calls on “sending and receiving member states” (in terms of migrant workers) to protect fundamental rights and dignity of migrant workers. Addresses issues including employment rights, repatriation, undocumented workers, and need to implement anti-trafficking and smuggling efforts.
Updates and revises 1990 convention primarily in response to challenges posed by transnational terrorism. First binding international accord to address money laundering and terrorism financing. Details processes for freezing, seizing, and confiscating illicit proceeds.
Institutes arms transfer ban among member states with possibility of exemption for certain defense and security needs; law enforcement, and participation in peace support operations. Prohibits arms transfer to nonstate actors without approval of importing country.
Proposed treaty would be first to address counterfeit medicines. Defines counterfeit, medical product, and victim. Criminalizes manufacture and trafficking of counterfeit medicines; falsification of documents related to counterfeit medicine; and unauthorized production, supply, and marketing of medicines or medical devices not meeting basic requirements.
Requests development of national action plans to combat illicit weapons and harmonize legislation across region. Calls for implementation of relevant international and regional small arms and light weapons instruments.
For more information, including membership; mandate; gaps and weaknesses; implementation, compliance and enforcement; and U.S. policy stance, download the full report.
For more information, including membership; mandate; gaps and weaknesses; implementation, compliance and enforcement; and U.S. policy stance, download the full report.
Supports national police forces worldwide by providing resources and services such as training, investigative support, and access to secure databases and lines of communication.
Promotes economic and sustainable development worldwide by combating corruption and advocating for increased transparency and accountability. Partners with international organizations on anticorruption and asset recovery initiatives, such as the StAR Initiative. Works with International Monetary Fund to produce anti-money-laundering assessments.
Provides policy advice and technical assistance to improve accountability, increase transparency, and combat corruption and money laundering. Conducts financial assessments and monitors compliance with international anti–money-laundering standards. Partners with other international institutions to advance initiatives such as the G20 Anti-Corruption Working Group and StAR initiative.
Promotes and coordinates international cooperation on Internet and radio communication standards. Issue-specific study groups collect data, provide research and analysis, and publish recommendations. Study Group Seventeen addresses cybersecurity and cyber crime standards for domestic legislation.
Intergovernmental organization dedicated to customs issues. Develops global standards, coordinates national policies, and facilitates international trade. Spearheaded anti–money-laundering, counterfeiting, and piracy initiatives.
Part of UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). Restructures, trains, and assists domestic law enforcement agencies to prevent and combat organized crime in transitional and post-conflict states. Works closely with Interpol and other UN organizations on anticrime capacity-building initiatives.
Focused on economic development and achieving Millennium Development Goals. Partners with UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in anticorruption campaigns. Helps member states implement UN Convention Against Corruption. Houses anticorruption portal that provides news and research for member states.
UN agency dedicated to use of intellectual property, such as patents, copyright, trademarks, and designs.
Assists intergovernmental, governmental, and nongovernmental organizations draft and implement policies to prevent crime and promote criminal justice. Collects and analyzes data on international policies and criminal justice systems. Facilitates international law enforcement cooperation and judicial assistance between and among states.
Monitors implementation of UN drug conventions and treaties. Works with national governments to identify violations and address weaknesses in countries’ narcotics control systems. Ensures that member states have adequate supplies of licit drugs. Assesses precursor chemicals to determine whether they should be subject to controls.
Promotes international environmental standards. Coordinates member states’ environmental policies. Provides technical assistance. Works closely with Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora secretariat to monitor implementation. Maintains databases on environmental trade and species. Supports Green Customs Initiative to prevent and detect illegal trade in plants.
Policymaking body charged with developing and promoting international standards to combat money laundering and terrorism financing. Issues recommendations for anti–money laundering legislation and enforcement. Established financial intelligence units (FIUs) in several countries to protect financial institutions from criminal abuse.
Central UN agency on transnational organized crime. Assists member states to combat illegal drugs, arms, resources, and human trafficking; migrant smuggling; terrorism; piracy; and corruption. Charged with monitoring compliance, implementation, and enforcement of international treaties and conventions by member states. Provides capacity-building assistance and technical expertise, such as drafting legislation and creating national anticrime strategies.
Promotes peace, security, stability, and cooperation among member states. Has sought to address transnational crime, human trafficking, and narcotrafficking, and corruption through various treaties and conventions.
Promotes economic growth, security, and stability among member states. Has passed numerous treaties and conventions against transnational organized crime, corruption, and trafficking.
Works to accelerate economic development, interstate trade, and coordinate foreign policy objectives among member states. Sponsors agency programs to fight transnational crime and reduce flow of illicit arms into the region. Crime Prevention Action Plan aims to address social development roots of crime.
Promotes economic cooperation among member states. Adopted Abuja Declaration in 2008 and Regional Action Plan on Transnational Organized Crime in 2010, which particularly aimed to combat illicit drug trafficking and abuse. Adopted moratorium on import and export of small arms to control their illicit flows.
Regional partnership promoting economic and political interdependency and cooperation. Promotes collective law enforcement and judicial cooperation to prevent illicit trade and trafficking.
Regional organization promoting peace, security, stability, good governance, and human rights. Has adopted numerous conventions and treaties against drug, human, and arms trafficking, as well as corruption.
Receives reports and consolidates data on official international weapons transfers.
Principal UN policymaking body for criminal justice issues. Drafts international instruments regarding crime prevention and criminal justice, and monitors the implementation of existing relevant treaties. Mandates and priorities include action against transnational crime, such as organized crime and money laundering. Reviews related standards and norms, and implementation in member states.
Seeks to support international agencies and communities with criminal prevention and criminal justice issues.
Informal network designed to improve, expand, and systematize exchange of information between FIUs regarding money laundering and terrorism financing. Forum for FIUs to report on best practices. Promotes establishment of FIUs and coordinates training programs. Each member must adhere to Egmont principles.
Facilitates international cooperation with U.S. law enforcement and promotes collective action among global law enforcement to fight transnational crime and terrorism through the sharing of knowledge and training.
Group of experts gathered by G8 to find ways to fight transnational organized crime (TOC). Merged in 2001 with Roma Group to fight international terrorism, its primary focus today.
Provided recommendations to G8 on how to fight TOC. Subgroups later created to address specific TOC activities (e.g. judicial cooperation in investigations, high-tech crime, immigration fraud, human trafficking).
Assists UN member states accede to and implement international frameworks to combat money laundering. Assists member states detect, seize, and confiscate illicit proceeds. Supplies technical assistance and expertise to help countries develop law enforcement and criminal justice capacity to fight financial crime. Supports improvement of financial intelligence units. Develops model civil and criminal legislation to promote national compliance with international standards.
Aims to identify and inspect all shipments to United States that pose risk for terrorism before they leave foreign ports.
Establishes interdiction principles of suspected illegal shipments of WMD and related items.
Aims to identify and trace weapons’ path from source to destination. Complies with nations’ implementation efforts of Firearms protocol.
Establishes seventeen standards for safe, transparent trade and for combating fraudulent activities, such as cargo inspections or customs-to-customs informational exchange. Provides technical and capacity-building assistance. Encourages cooperation between customs administrations.
Launched by World Health Organization (WHO), aims to develop international and regional networks to facilitate information sharing on counterfeit drug market.
Promotes awareness, technical support and services to states and nonstate actors to combat human trafficking worldwide.
Works with wildlife law enforcement to improve coordinated response against serious wildlife crimes.
Aims to bring an informed, science-based discussion about humane and effective ways to reduce harm caused by drugs to people and societies to international level. Published [PDF] 2011 report encouraging experiments with decriminalization and legal regulation in certain states. Critics countered that lessening the fight to reduce availability would lead to more drug use.
Forum for members in Western Hemisphere to build capacity to combat drug abuse through action programs, research, and evaluation standards.
Seeks to address problems of judicial cooperation. Addresses mutual assistance in criminal matters, extradition, penitentiary policies, cyber crime, and forensic sciences.
Evaluates members based on compliance with Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recommendations and other international standards in relation to money laundering and terrorism funding.
Seeks to strengthen regional coordination and enforcement on matters relating to transnational crime.
Aims to design policies to improve anti–money-laundering and terrorism financing efforts. Trains law enforcement to combat money laundering and terrorism financing.
Works to bolster cyber crime prevention, investigation, and prosecutions. Facilitates information sharing and provides recommendations for how to improve cyber crime cooperation in Western Hemisphere and between OAS and other international organizations.
United States supported initiative to bolster fight against narcotrafficking and associated violence in primarily Mexico. Provides some aid to Central America through Caribbean Basin Security Initiative. Aims to disrupt organized criminal groups, bolster institutions, construct “a twenty-first century border” between the United States and Mexico, and build “strong and resilient communities.”
Created at request of Guatemalan government. Hybrid judicial model where international prosecutors and investigators work alongside Guatemalan officials to help investigate corruption and bolster domestic capacity to fight corruption.
In the past four decades, the United States has allocated an estimated $2.5 trillion in educational programs, foreign military assistance, and policing efforts in its war on drugs. But a number of critics—from law enforcement officials to educational professionals—believe that the policy has failed, citing increasing drug use, racial inequalities caused by the war on drugs, and international violence resulting from it.
The U.S. government has been the driving force in a global effort to reduce supply, transport, and sale of illicit drugs since the early twentieth century, when it spearheaded the first international treaty to reduce the availability of narcotics and cocaine. In 1973, the modern concept of the war on drugs was born when then U.S. president Richard Nixon announced a “global war on the drug menace.” Because of the war on drug’s global nature, in June 2011, a former UN secretary-general, three former Latin American presidents, a former U.S. federal reserve chairman, and an acting Greek prime minister joined together to study the policy, and ultimately concluded that it required rethinking.
Since 2006, drug related violence is estimated to have killed more than fifty thousand people in Mexico. Criminal violence perpetrated by drug gangs and cartels has manifested through aggravated theft, kidnappings, targeted assassinations of public officials, and even publicized beheadings among the country’s many rival gangs. Mexico remains a major transit point for drug smuggling and illicit weapons smuggling from the United States to Central America. Mexican-based gangs also operate throughout Central America, contributing to “breathtaking levels” of violent crime in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The increase in violence correlates to Mexican president Felipe Calderón’s decision to deploy thousands of troops within the country to assist weak and underfunded local institutions “starved to dysfunction” by budgetary procedures.
Afghanistan is estimated to be responsible for up to 90 percent of global opium production. In 2011, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated (PDF) that the net economic value of opium constituted15 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product. Policies to reduce production have also proved challenging because many of Afghanistan’s farmers rely on opium production and would otherwise face extreme poverty, or because alternative opportunities have been destroyed by the ongoing conflict in the country. In addition, a UN study found that rates of addiction to opium, heroin, and other opiates are soaring within Afghanistan; heroin use alone increased by 140 percent over the past five years. To counter Afghanistan’s opium-dominated economy, the UNODC has launched a multiyear capacity-building project with the Afghan Ministry of Counter Narcotics.
Overall, the 2011 UNODC World Drug Report (PDF) estimates that there are 16.7 million opiate users worldwide. The production and export of opium in Afghanistan has fueled instability not only in that country, but also across its borders. In particular, opium plays a significant role in providing both funds for Afghanistan’s ongoing insurgency and resources for powerful transnational drug cartels.
The small separatist region of Transnistria, located between Ukraine and Moldova, has become a leading international transit center for smuggling and the sale of illicit goods. Although Transnistria declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, it lacks international recognition as an independent country and technically remains part of Moldova. Nevertheless, Oazu Nantoi, program director at the Institute for Public Policy in Moldova, calls Transnistria “a zone uncontrolled by any state.”
In particular, Transnistria’s ambiguous international status has effectively made it a haven for the smuggling of small arms and light weapons, fraudulent identification and financial documents, cigarettes, CDs, drugs, alcohol, and even human beings. The smuggling of weapons especially has garnered international attention as the country has an estimated forty-thousand-ton stockpile of weapons left from the Cold War as well as a functioning small arms production facility. Weapons linked to Transnistria have appeared in Chechnya, the Balkans, and other locales in Africa.
In response to an increasing demand for high-quality rosewood in Vietnam and China, illegal logging has spiked in Cambodia, often with the semiofficial backing from high-level Cambodian military and political officials. According to one nongovernmental organization, illegal logging operations are controlled by a “small kleptocratic mafia” in the country. Although Cambodia’s government has attempted to do more to address illegal logging, the practice nonetheless remains enticing for some of the poorest sectors of Cambodia’s population, who can profit substantially from smuggling rosewood. Over the years, Cambodia’s virgin forest cover has plummeted to 3.1 percent from a high of 70 percent in 1970.
According to the World Bank, illegal logging accounts (PDF) for $10 billion globally. Sadly, the protection of forests is a low priority on the global governance agenda, and to date efforts to create a global treaty that would protect forests from illicit activities remains unrealized. A study by the United Nations Environment Program further indicates that the cost of illegal logging is in the millions, costing governments much needed tax income from legitimate commercial logging activities.
Following the collapse of Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime in 2011, the international community faced a new danger from the Qaddafi regime’s immense stockpiles of conventional and nonconventional weapons. The leftover weapons included large quantities of man-portable-air-defense-systems, rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns, automatic rifles, and even chemical weapons.
The United States has provided millions of dollars of monetary aid to Libya’s new government to help secure loose weapons, but many experts fear the stockpiles could become targets for theft.
A December 2011 United Nations report claimed that some of the stockpiled weapons have already been trafficked across Libya’s borders, increasing the potential risk of instability and terrorism in the Sahel region of Africa. Many, in particular, fear Libya’s weapons could fall into the hands of Boko Haram, a powerful terrorist group operating in Nigeria.
Nigeria has become increasingly known as the provenance of cyber crime, largely because of the so-called 419 advance-fee fraud. This involves individuals from countries like the United States receiving an official-looking email asking for a small fee in exchange for a (hoax) large payout. This type of cyber crime has scammed unsuspecting businesses and individuals out of billions of dollars worldwide.
Perpetrators of cyber crime in Nigeria have proven extremely adaptable as awareness has increased about 419 scams. New avenues for fraud include social networking websites, actual telephone conversations, shipping scams, and even dating websites. This type of cyber crime has also led to kidnappings, that dupe victims into traveling to Nigeria, where they are then taken and held for ransom. Nigeria has attempted to stop this practice through new national cyber crime laws, but some experts believe (PDF) they are far from adequate and poorly enforced.
Widespread corruption in Russia facilitates transnational crime and high rates of illicit activity. In 2011, Transparency International, which ranks countries along a scale of corruption, placed the nation at 143rd—far behind other emerging powers. Russia also earned last place in the 2011 Bribe Payers Index. Corruption drains the Russian economy of an estimated $2 billion or more a year, it also prevents the nation from tackling domestic drug addiction that has reached an “apocalyptic scale,” funds narcotraffickers in foreign countries, and sustains trade in illicit arms. Furthermore, reports of corrupt military and government officials facilitating illicit trade in nuclear materials remains a major concern
Corruption is the exploitation of public power and resources for private gain. According to Transparency International’s Global Corruption Perception Index, close to 75 percent of countries score less than 5 out of 10 on corruption—underlying the global magnitude of the problem. Corruption erodes the standard of living and the legitimacy of the ruling governments. Alarmingly, it also increases the risk of civil war by 30-40 percent according to the World Bank.
China produces a large proportion of the world’s counterfeit goods, including products ranging from brand-name fashion items and pirated DVDs to cell phones and cigarettes. For example, in 2010, 78 percent of all software sold in China was illegal—almost twice the global average of 42 percent. Although China announced new measures to combat the flourishing industry in market goods, experts doubt that it will make substantial progress on the issue.
Illicit trade deducts millions of dollars from companies’ profits, and therefore also increases the cost of research and development, and decreases the taxes that governments can earn and use to provide citizens with necessary services. Furthermore, the channels by which counterfeit goods are transported can also be exploited for other more dangerous illicit trade, such as counterfeit medicine or weapons.
India is a major producer of counterfeit medication, and the sector is growing. To combat the production of counterfeit medication, India has instituted a barcode identification program, whereby people can use text messages and unique identifier numbers to ascertain whether a drug is from a legitimate source. Still, producers of counterfeit medication have shifted to using advanced packing techniques for illicit medications, making it difficult for consumers to determine the authenticity of a given medicine.
Considered a $200 billion per year industry, a counterfeit medication is “a medicine, which is deliberately and fraudulently mislabeled with respect to identity and/or source,” and, in many cases, can contain inactive or even toxic ingredients that leads to deaths of patients treated with them. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, more than seven hundred thousand people die each year from counterfeit medications, many of which originate in India.
Ukraine has long been identified as one of the major hubs of human trafficking, and victims are sold for prostitution, bonded labor, or forced labor. The International Organization for Migration estimates that more than 110,000 Ukrainian men, women, and children have fallen into trafficking in the past two decades. Though Ukraine has ratified an international instrument on human trafficking, the Ukrainian government has been criticized for not complying with minimum standards to combat human trafficking.
Human trafficking claims [PDF] over two million victims each year. In 2006, over 65 percent of victims detected by state authorities were women and close to 80 percent were victims of sexual exploitation. Like other illicit criminal activities, however, a truly accurate global figure remains difficult to estimate due to the covert nature of the crime. | <urn:uuid:5ce3096e-f549-4702-8b2a-8f1280a65b82> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.cfr.org/global-governance/global-governance-monitor/p18985?_escaped_fragment_=/crime | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396455.95/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00141-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941034 | 42,565 | 2.921875 | 3 |
This week, the environmental group Oceana is collecting images from a high-definition video camera in the ocean off the Oregon Coast. As I reported for EarthFix, it’s a research expedition with a cause: The group wants to use the footage to close more seafloor habitat to bottom trawl fishing.
The underwater footage will be collected using a remote-operated vehicle over the course of seven days. You can follow the expedition’s blog posts on Oceana’s website.
Bottom trawl boats drag weighted nets across the sea floor to catch groundfish – species including Petrale sole and sablefish, which is often sold as black cod. Some areas off the West Coast are already closed to this kind of fishing to prevent damage to fragile fish habitat such as coral reefs.
Regional fishery managers are in the process of reviewing whether more restrictions are needed, and Oceana has proposed closing additional areas in more than a dozen places off the Oregon and Washington coasts.
Ben Enticknap of Oceana says he’s hoping the videos they collect this week will help make the case.
“What we’re trying to do is identify the most sensitive habitats and keep the bottom trawls out of there,” he said.
Brad Pettinger of the Oregon Trawl Commission says the fishing industry has already taken measures to protect the marine environment and will likely oppose additional restrictions.
The Pacific Fishery Management Council will consider proposals for new fishing area closures in November. | <urn:uuid:b51b973f-5989-4ccc-81c9-bb706aec5d1a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.opb.org/news/blog/ecotrope/underwater-camera-films-fish-habitat-off-oregons-coast/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391766.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00201-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930902 | 315 | 2.546875 | 3 |
The wild lowbush blueberry plant, Vaccinium Augustifolium, is for the most part confined to northeastern North America. The principle commercial Wild Blueberry producing areas are Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, and Maine. Maine is the largest producer representing up to 55 percent of production. Newfoundland is the smallest producer, representing between 1 and 2 percent of North American production.
The large scale commercial development of the Wild Blueberry crops today had its beginnings in the late 1940's and early 1950's. Since then, the industry has steadily expanded.
How the Plant Grows | <urn:uuid:a0f0b9b0-d1b8-4c0e-ab3e-1172b0cb32be> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.wildblueberries.net/bluegrow.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396949.33/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00154-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919127 | 126 | 3.25 | 3 |
South Africa: Keeping Mom Alive Is the Best AIDS Tactic
July 26, 2005
According to the National HIV and Syphilis Sero-Prevalence Survey in South Africa 200 -- conducted by the Department of Health and released in September 2004 -- 27.9 percent of pregnant women in the country had HIV/AIDS in 2003. Nearly one-third of South African newborns stand to lose their mothers to AIDS-related causes.
Dr. Tshidi Sebitloane of the University of Kwa Zulu-Natal said infant mortality of two-year-old HIV-negative children whose mothers are chronically ill or have died appears to be as high as mortality among HIV-positive children the same age. Yet, attention so far has focused more on preventing mother-to-child transmission than on the future health of HIV-positive mothers.
Sebitloane said that might partly reflect the fact that free antiretroviral (ARV) treatment has only begun to be available in South Africa in the past 18 months, and regulations to improve HIV-positive mothers' access to the drugs are not yet in place. Sebitloane said the Department of Health should make voluntary counseling and HIV and CD4-count testing available at all antenatal clinics.
A program to improve care for HIV-positive mothers, the Mother-to-Child Transmission Plus initiative, launched by Columbia University of New York City, has been implemented at 13 sites in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and has given 7,000 mothers so far access to ARVs. Three sites are in South Africa.
Feeding babies a mix of breast milk and formula risks facilitating HIV transmission, possibly because this may irritate their bowels, making them more vulnerable to infections, research has shown. But only one-third of mothers responding to a recent survey had been properly advised to use one method exclusively, wean babies at three to four months, and choose formula feeding if they have access to the clean water needed to prepare it.
Inter Press Service
06.12.05; Kristin Palitza
Generic Drug Company Aspen Pharmacare Increasing Antiretroviral Production to Fulfill South African, PEPFAR Orders
This article was provided by CDC National Prevention Information Network. It is a part of the publication CDC HIV/Hepatitis/STD/TB Prevention News Update. | <urn:uuid:a34f2a63-0625-481b-921e-00cb03ada442> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.thebody.com/content/art25230.html?nxtprv | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391634.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00004-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941292 | 486 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Wayanad, One of the fourteen districts in Kerala (India) is situated in an elevated picturesque mountainous plateau in Western Ghats. It lies between north latitude 11degree 26?28?? and 11degree 48?22?? and east longitude 75 degree 46?38?? and 76 degree 26?11??.
There is a land not far from Calicut, the city of Zamorins, yet a world apart from Kerala's agricultural and industrial epicentres. It is a quiet place where scenic beauty wild life and traditional matter, simplicity is a virtue and beauty still blossoms from the mountainous horizon and from the green glaze of alluring vegetation. This is Wayanad - the green paradise - the border world of greener part of Kerala. Clean and pristine, enchanting and hypnotising this land has a history and mystery, culture and social epistemology yet to be discovered. Located at a distance about 76 km. from the sea shores of Calicut in the Western Ghats, this station is full of plantations, forests and wildlife. Wayanad hills are contiguous to Mudumala in Tamil Nadu and Bandhipur in Karnataka, thus forming a vast land mass for the wild life to move about in its most natural abode.
The name Wayanad has been derived from the expression 'Vayal nadu' - the village of paddy fields.
In the ancient times this land was ruled by the Rajas of the Veda tribe. In later times, Wayanad came under the rule of Pazhassi Rajahs of Kottayam royal dynasty. When Hyder Ali became the ruler of Mysore, he invaded Wayanad and brought it under his way. In the days of Tipu, Wayanad was restored to the Kottayam royal dynasty. But Tipu handled entire Malabar to the British after the Sreerandapattam truce that he made with them. This was followed by fierce encounters between the British and Kerala Varma Pazhassi Rajah of Kottayam. Even when the Rajah was driven to the wilderness of Wayanad he waged several battles with his Nair and Kurichia-Kuruma tribal soliders against the British troops and defeated the latter several times through guerilla type encounters. The British could get only the dead body of the Rajah who killed himself somewhere in the interior forest. Thus Wayanad fell into the hands of British, and with it began a new turn in the history of this area. The Britishers opened up the Plateau for cultivation of tea and other cash crops. Roads were laid across the dangerous slopes of Wayanad from Calicut and Telicherry. These roads were extended to the city of Mysore and to Ooty through Gudalur. Roads facilities provided opportunities for the people of outside Wayanad to flow and settle to these jungle regions.
When the state of Kerala was formed in 1956, Wayanad was part of Kannur district. Later South Wayanad was added to Kozhikode district and then on November 1, 1980 North and South Wayanad joined together to form the present Wayanad district.
This mountain district is in many ways the most picturesque in the state, with its rolling hills covered with tropical rainforest. Wayanad also contributes richly to its fortunes, thanks to the flourishing cultivation of many spices, as well as Tea, Coffee and Cocoa. Wayanad is situated at a height of 700 to 2100m above sea level and is home to many species of animal and plant life. Temperatures range from 12 to 25 degrees centigrade. This district also has the added advantage of linking Kerala with the golden triangle of South India : Bangalore, Mysore and Ooty.
This high altitude district is characterised by the cultivation of perennial plantation crops and spices. The major plantation crops include coffee, tea, pepper, cardamom and rubber. Coffee based farming system is a notable feature of Wayanad. Coffee is grown both as pure crop and as mixed crop along with pepper. Pepper is grown largely along with coffee in the north eastern parts of the district, especially in Pulpally and Mullankolly areas. Coffee in Wayanad (66,999 ha.) shares 33.65 per cent of the total cropped area in the district and 78 per cent of the coffee area in the state. Other major crops are rubber(63,015 ha.), coconut(59,452 ha.), cardamom (38,348 ha.), tea (31,792 ha.) cassava and ginger. A recent increase in the area under coconut cultivation is noticed in the lower elevations. Paddy is cultivated in 22,772 hectares of land. The rice fields of Wayanad are in the valleys formed by hillocks and in majority of paddy lands, only a single crop is harvested. Ginger cultivation in Wayanad has also substantially increased in recent times and the ginger produced is mainly marketed in the form of green ginger. Homestead farming assumes importance in this district. The average size of holdings are 0.68 ha. A variety of crops including annuals and perennials are grown in these small holdings. The crops include coconut, arecanut, pepper, vegetables, tuber crops, drumstick, papaya, etc. and fruit trees like mango and jack. The crop patterns/crop combinations prevelant in this district are not based on any scientific norms. Therefore scientific cropping patterns suitable for the agro-ecological situation is to be recommended.
THE POPULATION OF THE DISTRICT: Accoring to 1991 census, is 6,72,128 of which male population is 3,41,958 and female 3,30,170. The density of population is 316.2 per sq. kilometres. The population of scheduled tribes is 1,14,969 and that of scheduled caste is 27,835. Strictly speaking, there is no urban population in Wayanad. However, life in Sulthan Bathery, Mananthavady and Kalpetta is in the process of gaining urban status. The decadal growth rate in the population of Wayanad was 59.17 per cent in 1941-51, 62.60 per cent in 1951-61, 50.35 per cent in 1961-71 and 33.71 per cent in 1971-81. In the first three decades of this century, the growth of population in Wayanad was less than ten per cent. This shows that there was an influx of settlers to Wayanad after the Second World War. The economic slump, difficulties and miseries creeping as a result of war into the life of common people, compelled them to seek 'pastures anew' on the virgin soil of Wayanad from all parts of Kerala and Karnataka. In the first year of settlement, thousands succumbed to malaria and the attack of wild animals. Those who survived these and the cold conditions, cleared the forests and transfomed Wayanad into a paradise of prosperity. Total number of workers in the district is 2,27,453. Out of them 53,773 are females. There are 40,729 cultivators of which the male numbers 36,063 and females 4,666. Total number of labourers are 74,813 of which 26,907 are females.
Marketing of Agriculture Produce
The marketing of coffee was fully regulated by the Coffee Board till 1992 and the entire coffee grown in the district had to be pooled to the Board.But in the Coffee Policy of 1995 - 96 , the Government exempted small scale growers possessing land less than 10 hectares from the obligation of pooling.Those growers with more than 10 hectares of coffee plantation were obliged to provide 60 percent of their produces to the Coffee Board.But Government of India recently announced the abolition of the pooling system for coffee altogether from 14th September 1996 and coffee growers are now free to market either in the domestic market or export.
Pepper is marketed mainly as dired berries. The different agencies engaged in the marketing of the produce are hill produce merchants , marketing socities, commission agents and exporters.Being an export oriented commodity, pepper prices show frequent fluctuations depending on the international prices prevailing for the commodity from timt to time.Ginger is mainly marketed as green ginger.Cardamom is sold at auction centres.The traders are licensed by the Spices Board and they participate in the different marketing centers for auction.Rubber is a controled commodityand is mainly marketed in the form of smoked rubber sheets.A large number of private dealers as well as the primary rubber marketing societies under the Rubber Marketing Federation , operate at the village level for the purchase and sale of commodity. | <urn:uuid:16857822-38de-421c-bb62-6a1fa80d918a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://kerals.com/keralatourism/kerala.php?t=15 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397428.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00013-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954507 | 1,787 | 3.125 | 3 |
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(Or VIGIL; Latin Vigilia; Greek pannychis).
In the first ages, during the night before every feast, a vigil was kept. In the evening the faithful assembled in the place or church where the feast was to be celebrated and prepared themselves by prayers, readings from Holy Writ (now the Offices of Vespers and Matins), and sometimes also by hearing a sermon. On such occasions, as on fast days in general, Mass also was celebrated in the evening, before the Vespers of the following day. Towards morning the people dispersed to the streets and houses near the church, to wait for the solemn services of the forenoon. This vigil was a regular institution of Christian life and was defended and highly recommended by St. Augustine and St. Jerome (see Pleithner, "Aeltere Geschichte des Breviergebetes", pp. 223 sq.). The morning intermission gave rise to grave abuses; the people caroused and danced in the streets and halls around the church (Durandus, "Rat. Div. off.", VI, 7). St. Jerome speaks of these improprieties (Epist. ad Ripuarium).
As the feasts multiplied, the number of vigils was greatly reduced. But the abuses could be stopped only by abolishing the vigils. And where they could not be abrogated at once and entirely they were to begin in the afternoon. A synod held at Rouen in 1231 prohibited all vigils except those before the patronal feast of a church (Hefele, "Conciliengeschichte", V, 1007). In place of nocturnal observances, the bishops introduced for the laity a fast on the day before the feast, which fast Durandus (loc. cit.) calls "jejunium dispensationis". Honorius of Auxerre, in 1152 (Gemma Animae, III, 6), and others explain in this way the origin of this fast. It existed, however, long before the abolition of the nocturnal meetings. The fast on Christmas Eve is mentioned by Theophilus of Alexandria (d. 412), that before the Epiphany by St. John Chrysostom (d. 407), that before Pentecost by the Sacramentary of St. Leo I. Pope Nicholas I (d. 867), in his answer to the Bulgarians, speaks of the fast on the eves of Christmas and of the Assumption. The Synod of Erfurt (932) connects a fast with every vigil. The very fact that the people were not permitted to eat or drink before the services of the vigil (Vespers and Matins) were ended, after midnight, explains the excesses of which the councils and writers speak.
The Synod of Seligenstadt (1022) mentions vigils on the eves of Christmas, Epiphany, the feast of the Apostles, the Assumption of Mary, St. Laurence, and All Saints, besides the fast of two weeks before the Nativity of St. John. After the eleventh century the fast, Office, and Mass of the nocturnal vigil were transferred to the day before the feast; and even now the liturgy of the Holy Saturday (vigil of Easter) shows, in all its parts, that originally it was not kept on the morning of Saturday, but during Easter Night. The day before the feast was henceforth called vigil. A similar celebration before the high feast exists also in the Orthodox (Greek) Church, and is called pannychis or hagrypnia. In the Occident only the older feasts have vigils; even the feasts of the first class introduced after the thirteenth century (Corpus Christi, the Sacred Heart) have no vigils, except the Immaculate Conception, which Pope Leo XIII (30 Nov., 1879) singled out for this distinction. The number of vigils in the Roman Calendar besides Holy Saturday is seventeen, viz., the eves of Christmas, the Epiphany, the Ascension, Pentecost, the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption, the eight feasts of the Apostles, St. John the Baptist, St. Laurence, and All Saints. Some dioceses and religious orders have particular vigils, e.g. the Servites, on the Saturday next before the feast of the Seven Dolours of Our Lady; the Carmelites, on the eve of the feast of Mount Carmel. In the United States only four of theses vigils are fast days: the vigils of Christmas, Pentecost, the Assumption, and All Saints.
The vigils of Christmas, the Epiphany, and Pentecost are called vigiliae majores; they have a proper Office (semi-double), and the vigil of Christmas, from Lauds on, is kept as a double feast. The rest are vigiliae minorea, or communes, and have the ferial office. On the occasion of the reform of the Breviary, in 1568, a homily on the Gospel of the vigil was added, an innovation not accepted by the Cistercians. If a vigil falls on a Sunday, according to the present rubrics, it is kept on the preceding Saturday; during the Middle Ages in many churches it was joined to the Sunday Office. If it occurs on a double or a semi-double feats, it is limited to a commemoration in the Lauds and Mass (a feast of the first class excludes this commemoration), the ninth lesson in the Breviary, and the last Gospel in Mass. If it occurs on a day within an ordinary octave, the Mass is said of the vigil, the Office of the octave; if it occurs on a feria major, the vigil is omitted in the Breviary and commemorated only in the Mass, if the feria has a proper mass; if not (e.g. in Advent), the mass is said of the vigil, the feria is commemorated. In the Ambrosian Liturgy of Milan only the vigils of Christmas and Pentecost are kept, at least by a special Mass; the other vigils exist only in the Calendar, but are not kept in the liturgy. In the Mozarabic Rite only Christmas has a vigil; three days before Epiphany and four days before Pentecost a fast is observed; the other vigils are unknown.
BINTERIM, Die Denkwurdigkeiten der christ-katholischen Kirche (Mainz, 1829); SCHOED in Kirchenlexicon, s.v. VIGIL; Rubricae generales Breviarii Romani, tit. 6; Rubricae generales Missalis Rom., tit. 3; PLEITHNER, Aelteste Geschichte des Breviergebets (Kempten, 1887), #284, 360.
APA citation. (1909). Eve of a Feast. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05647a.htm
MLA citation. "Eve of a Feast." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 5. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909. <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05647a.htm>.
Transcription. This article was transcribed for New Advent by Barbara Jane Barrett.
Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. May 1, 1909. Remy Lafort, Censor. Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York.
Contact information. The editor of New Advent is Kevin Knight. My email address is webmaster at newadvent.org. Regrettably, I can't reply to every letter, but I greatly appreciate your feedback — especially notifications about typographical errors and inappropriate ads. | <urn:uuid:bcf76b02-49c8-4763-b619-d0ea6071a14f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05647a.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393463.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00159-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927337 | 1,702 | 3.375 | 3 |
On Friday, December 27, a Snowy Owl was reported on the airfield at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, near Runway 4-22. A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Wildlife Services Wildlife Technician stationed at BWI Marshall set a trap for the large bird, which was captured during the night. The Snowy Owl was banded and relocated the next day, well away from BWI Marshall.
In recent months, Snowy Owls have been seen in increasing numbers in Maryland and throughout the eastern United States. The large birds pose a threat to aviation. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) data ranks Snowy Owls among the bird species most likely to cause damage when struck by aircraft. The owls’ size, mass, density, and low-flying habits are hazard factors.
“Airlines and airports work hard to help prevent the hazards related to bird strikes,” said Paul J. Wiedefeld, Chief Executive Officer of BWI Marshall. “At BWI Marshall, we take a number of proactive measures to make aviation safer while protecting wildlife.”
BWI Marshall has a comprehensive, integrated program in place to help minimize conflict between birds and aircraft. Two USDA Wildlife Services employees are stationed at BWI Marshall to assist the Airport with this important work.
At BWI Marshall, the emphasis is on proactive measures to deter birds from the Airport. For example, storm-water management facilities are specifically designed to not appeal to birds. The goal is to minimize standing water that could attract waterfowl or other birds. Specific vegetation and landscaping across the Airport property is designed to not attract birds. Other prevention methods can be as simple as utilizing covered trash cans in outdoor areas around the Airport terminal and the public parking facilities.
Beyond the active environmental and planning efforts, numerous prevention methods are used to harass birds away from aircraft operating areas. For example, the Airport uses twelve propane cannons positioned at strategic locations around the airfield. These cannons can be fired remotely to produce a loud noise to frighten birds away from aircraft operating areas. Similarly, USDA Wildlife Services personnel at BWI Marshall use a number of hand-held devices which produce loud noises or bright flashes to deter birds. | <urn:uuid:dcd2ef47-ca61-4d41-9d3f-813e8fb1edee> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://bwiairport.com/en/about-bwi/press-releases/1116 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403502.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00195-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942688 | 460 | 3.1875 | 3 |
FRIDAY, Jan. 18, 2013 — Researchers have found an unlikely way to block development of type 1 diabetes in females — exposing them to bacteria from the gastrointestinal tracts of males. But turning that finding into an effective treatment is uncertain and a long way off since the females and males in question were mice, not men or women.
The findings, published Thursday in Science, suggest that exposure to normal GI tract bacteria early in life may also protect against other autoimmune diseases, such multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease, lupus, and even allergies and asthma. Overall, they add to a growing body of research that suggests humans may benefit from bacteria, the so-called "hygiene hypothesis."
"Our findings suggest potential strategies for using normal gut bacteria to block progression of insulin-dependent diabetes in kids who have high genetic risk," said lead researcher Jayne Danska, PhD, in a release from the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres in Germany.
The researchers, from The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto — in collaboration with co-authors from the University of Colorado Denver, the Helmholtz Centre in Leipzig, Germany, and the University of Bern in Switzerland — also discovered sex plays a role in the equation.
"It was completely unexpected to find that the sex of an animal determines aspects of their gut microbe composition, that these microbes affect sex hormone levels, and that the hormones in turn regulate an immune-mediated disease," Dr. Danska also said.
The study adds support to the “hygiene hypothesis." If you've never heard of the “hygiene hypothesis," it goes like this: Children who encounter animals or children outside their families early in life benefit from the exposure to a variety of microbes — it builds up their immune systems. As society modernized, however, so did efforts to disinfect it. The "hygiene hypothesis" suggests that poorly built-up immune systems might be more prone to overreacting and producing allergic reactions to foreign substances, like pollen.
Multiple studies have been conducted on the topic. One published in 2012 found children growing up Amish in Switzerland, who lived on farms, had less asthma and allergies than Swiss children who didn't grow up on a farm.
But not all experts buy into the theory — at least, not as the sole cause of the rise in allergies noted in recent decades, for example.
In a 2012 report from the International Scientific Forum on Home Hygiene (IFH) in the U.K., scientists said the cause is more complicated than that. Microbial exposure does play a role in regulating the immune system, they wrote, but disinfected counter tops alone do not make us more vulnerable to hay fever and allergies. Believing they do can have unsafe consequences.
Whether or not you believe the “hygiene hypothesis," the findings of this most recent study leave room for optimism. The researchers hope similar approaches may one day be applied to prevent and treat autoimmune diseases in humans.
"We don't know yet how transfer of male gut microbes into females increases their testosterone, or how this process protects against autoimmunity," Danska said. “This study opens up a new research arena to explore the clinical potential of altering the gut microbe community to prevent or treat immune-mediated diseases."
PHOTO CREDIT: CMSP/Getty Images
Last Updated: 1/18/2013 | <urn:uuid:a4bacb34-a32d-4397-bf25-d5d3f61daf37> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.everydayhealth.com/digestive-health/gut-bacteria-may-prevent-type-1-diabetes-2306.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397696.49/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00083-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9461 | 701 | 3.296875 | 3 |
A medical procedure involving repeated cycles of compression of the chest and artificial respiration, performed to maintain blood circulation and oxygenation in a person who has suffered cardiac arrest.
- If necessary, a doctor or emergency medical team may perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
- Also included will be patients who develop severe complications during cardiac catheterisation who require cardiopulmonary resuscitation until emergency surgery is performed.
- Treatment of VF involves defibrillation, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and IV medication therapy.
For editors and proofreaders
Line breaks: car¦dio|pul¦mon¦ary re|sus¦ci|ta¦tion
Definition of cardiopulmonary resuscitation in:
What do you find interesting about this word or phrase?
Comments that don't adhere to our Community Guidelines may be moderated or removed. | <urn:uuid:b4eaba8e-1ac6-4b55-b5a0-e93377bafb2b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/english/cardiopulmonary-resuscitation | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396106.71/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00011-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.869296 | 183 | 3.21875 | 3 |
|Values are valid only on day of printing.|
Updated: June 2013
Published: July 2011
Cancers involving the bile ducts (biliary tract malignancy) are frequently difficult to diagnose. The tumors that most frequently involve the biliary tract are pancreatic cancer and cholangiocarcinoma, a tumor that arises from the epithelial lining of the bile duct. Mayo Clinic offers a test to assess for biliary tract malignancy through the combination of cytology and molecular testing by fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH). This test is particularly useful when evaluating patients with primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) who are at high risk for developing cholangiocarcinoma.
The FISH test was developed within the Mayo Clinic Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology and is widely used by physicians in our Hepatology Clinic, Pancreas Clinic, Transplant Service, and by our Advanced Therapeutic Endoscopists as a routine part of patient care. The test has significantly greater sensitivity for detecting biliary tract tumors than cytology alone. The pairing of molecular testing with cytology often enables tumor detection and delivery of care at an earlier disease stage, thereby offering the potential to reduce patient mortality and reduce overall health care costs.
Based on clinical correlations from the Mayo Clinic patient population, Mayo Medical Laboratories has developed a prediction model that utilizes the patient’s age, cytology result, FISH result, and PSC status to determine the likelihood that a patient has a malignancy involving the biliary tract and this information is provided in the interpretation of the patient’s report.(1)
The test does not require a surgical pathology consult. Clients may send samples to Mayo Medical Laboratories for both cytology and FISH testing or FISH testing alone. | <urn:uuid:3ff33cf0-fb7d-455c-a07e-4b55d8facbb6> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.mayomedicallaboratories.com/articles/features/biliary-fish/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395621.98/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00025-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.902716 | 377 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Do ONE thing for Diversity and Inclusion
21 May is the World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development. The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) in partnership with UNESCO and a wide coalition of partners from corporations to civil society is launching the world campaign “Do One Thing for Diversity and Inclusion”, aimed at engaging people around the world to Do One Thing to support Cultural Diversity and Inclusion.
Following the adoption in 2001 of the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity the UN General Assembly declared May 21 as the World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development.
Why does diversity matters?
Three-quarters of the world’s major conflicts have a cultural dimension.
Bridging the gap between cultures is urgent and necessary for peace, stability and development.
The 2012 campaign, by encouraging people and organizations from around the world to take concrete action to support diversity, aims:
- To raise awareness worldwide about the importance of intercultural dialogue, diversity and inclusion.
- To build a world community of individuals committed to support diversity with real and every day-life gestures.
- To combat polarization and stereotypes to improve understanding and cooperation among people from different cultures.
Join the worldwide campaign, “Do One Thing for Diversity and Inclusion”, like the Facebook page and encourage your neighbors, your family, your friends and your coworkers to Do One Thing to support Diversity and Inclusion on the World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development on May 21, 2012.
Every one of us can do ONE thing for diversity and inclusion; even one very little thing can become a global action if we all take part in it.
Ten simple things YOU can do to celebrate the World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development on May 21, 2012.
1. Visit an art exhibit or a museum dedicated to other cultures.
2. Invite a family or people in the neighborhood from another culture or religion to share a meal with you and exchange views on life.
3. Rent a movie or read a book from another country or religion than your own.
4. Invite people from a different culture to share your customs
5. Read about the great thinkers of other cultures than yours (e.g. Confucius, Socrates, Avicenna, Ibn Khaldun, Aristotle, Ganesh, Rumi)
6. Go next week-end to visit a place of worship different than yours and participate in the celebration.
7. Play the “stereotypes game.” Stick a post-it on your forehead with the name of a country. Ask people to tell you stereotypes associated with people from that country. You win if you find out where you are from.
8. Learn about traditional celebrations from other cultures; learn more about Hanukkah or Ramadan or about amazing celebrations of New Year’s Eve in Spain or Qingming festival in China.
9. Spread your own culture around the world through our Facebook page and learn about other cultures
10. Explore music of a different culture
There are thousands of things that you can do, are you taking part in it?
<- Back to: UNESCO Office in Venice | <urn:uuid:b362b5c3-9c75-4018-8bf0-f6c3b07372eb> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.unesco.org/new/en/venice/about-this-office/single-view/news/do_one_thing_for_diversity_and_inclusion-2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399117.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00155-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.907093 | 653 | 2.875 | 3 |
OF SAMPLES FOR SIEVE ANALYSIS
This IM sets forth approved sampling methods and the minimum amount of dry materials necessary for the determination of particle size distribution.
LOCATION FOR SAMPLING
Safety must be foremost when determining sample locations. The Contractor/Producer shall make adequate provisions, satisfactory to the Engineer, for the safety of personnel responsible to obtain representative samples of the aggregate.
Provisions shall include guards for moving belts, pulleys, and wheels near the sampling point, and a stable platform with adequate safety rails when sampling is to be done from an elevated location.
Stopped belt sampling locations must be equipped with an on-off switch near, and in plain view of the sampling location. This switch, when in the off position, must have full control of the belt.
1. Conveyor Belt/Template Method
A minimum of three locations is required when obtaining a sample using this method. Normally, the belt should be recharged for each location to help assure a representative sample. (Review section titled ‘Sampling Stockpiles For Gradation Confirmation’).
The ends of the template should be spaced to yield approximately one third of the total minimum required sample weight. More increments may be needed to achieve the required minimum weight.
Stop the belt and insert the template as illustrated. Remove all material from the belt contained within the template. A brush or whisk broom will be useful in capturing the finer particles.
The increments are combined together to make one field sample.
2. Stream Flow Method
When obtaining a sample by interception of the aggregate stream flow, care must be exercised, so the sampling device (See picture below.) passes quickly through the entire stream flow and does not overflow. At least three separate passes shall be made with the sampling device when obtaining a sample. Each pass is an increment of the sample. This is normally considered to be the best method to obtain a representative sample of coarse aggregate.
3. Stockpile Method (for fine aggregate only, or as directed by the District Materials Engineer)
Stockpile sampling of fine aggregate may be accomplished by either using a shovel or a sand probe. When obtaining a field sample by the stockpile method, a minimum of three increments shall be taken at different locations around the stockpile. Avoid sampling in areas prone to segregation, such as along the bottom of cone stockpiles.
NOTE: Stockpile sampling of coarse or combined aggregate should be avoided. If it becomes absolutely necessary to obtain a sample from a production stockpile, consult the District Materials Engineer to help devise an adequate and proper sampling plan.
SAMPLING STOCKPILES FOR GRADATION CONFIRMATION
Stockpile sampling of coarse or mixed coarse and fine aggregate is difficult due to segregation. When sampling to determine gradation compliance of these materials, the Contractor, Producer or Supplier will supply equipment such as a sampling bin or flow-boy to provide a streamflow or stopped conveyor belt sampling location.
An end-loader will open the pile to be sampled in at least three locations. One end-loader bucket from each opened area is then placed into the sampling bin and sampled in a manner to assure representation of the entire quantity.
Alternately, material from each of the opened areas may be combined in a small stockpile, carefully blended to minimize degradation of the aggregate, and placed into the sampling bin.
Avoid obtaining sample increments at the beginning or end of bin discharge due to the natural tendency of segregation through the bin.
Transport aggregate samples in bags or other containers constructed to preclude loss or contamination of the sample, or damage to the contents from mishandling during shipment.
Shipping containers for aggregate samples shall each have suitable identification attached and enclosed so that field reporting, laboratory logging and testing may be facilitated.
Minimum sample sizes for sieve analysis of aggregates are based on the smallest sieve through which at least 95% of the sample will pass. The following table lists the required minimum field sample and test sample sizes:
SIEVE SIZE FIELD SAMPLE (lbs/kg) TEST SAMPLE (gms/kg)
1½ in. 50/23.0 5,000/5.0 ‹1›
1 in. 30/13.5 3,500/3.5
¾ in. 20/9.0 2,000/2.0
½ in. 20/9.0 1,500/1.5
⅜ in. 10/4.5 1,000/1.0 ‹2›
No. 4 sieve 10/4.5 500/0.5
No. 8 sieve 10/4.5 200/0.2
(Products with maximum sizes over 1½ in. (37.5 mm) are normally visually inspected. Contact the appropriate District Materials Engineer.)
(1) When testing 1½” aggregate for Special Backfill, Granular Subbase, or Modified Subbase the minimum test sample is 2500 grams.
(2) When testing fine aggregate with no more than 10% retained on the No. 4 sieve the minimum test sample is 500 grams. | <urn:uuid:d0cabe43-b10f-482a-ad8c-805256ff7ed7> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.iowadot.gov/erl/archiveoct2013/IM/content/301.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397842.93/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00097-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.912147 | 1,060 | 2.671875 | 3 |
Linux backlight control
Backlight control is one of those things that you'd think would be simple, but ha ha this is computing so of course it's an utter disaster and everything is a huge mess. There's three main classes of backlight control in the x86 world, all of which have drawbacks:
- ACPI specifies a mechanism for backlight control, and the majority of modern machines implement it. It has the advantage that the brightness query interface is generally aware of anything else in the system which may have changed the brightness, so it's unlikely to get out of sync with reality if the platform tries to do something odd like change the backlight itself in response to an ambient light sensor or some other event. The main drawback is that there's typically a fairly small number of available backlight values, usually somewhere between 8 and 20.
- A platform-specific mechanism. This used to be more popular before the ACPI backlight interface took off, but some machines still require it. The idea here is that there's some sort of platform-specific way of requesting a backlight change, ranging from a vendor-specific ACPI method through to triggering system management calls by magic register writes. These methods usually (but not always) keep in sync with other firmware changes, but rarely provide any more brightness steps than the standard ACPI interface.
- Many mobile GPUs have backlight control registers built in. These usually give you a range of several thousand possible values, but using them will almost certainly leave you out of sync with reality if the firmware touches them at all. To make things worse, the firmware control of the backlight may occur after the gpu - so you could end up with two different controls that both need to be full in order to get maximum brightness. The worst case scenario is that the firmware gets confused by the values not being what it programmed and you end up with a hung machine.
Right now, if there's an ACPI backlight interface then that's usually the only thing we'll show you. We can do that because we can identify if there's an ACPI backlight interface when we parse the ACPI tables at the start of booting, and that information can be registered before we start setting up any other backlights. The problem comes when we have no ACPI backlight interface. We don't have any idea whether there's a platform mechanism until a platform driver loads, which could be at any time. As a result, we've been reluctant to expose GPU-level backlight control because doing so would often give you two separate backlight controls and no indication as to which should be used. Userspace doesn't really have a way to make that decision either, so everyone ends up unhappy.
This is especially problematic with some machines which provide no ACPI or known platform control (or, in the case of some Samsungs, only provide platform control if you have a special Linux BIOS that Samsung won't give you) but can control the backlight via the gpu. Right now you get nothing, because giving you something would potentially break other systems and the needs of the many etc. Sorry! But this is obviously problematic in the long term, especially because multi-GPU machines tend to have multiple ACPI backlight interfaces, so I've been working on a better approach.
When a backlight device is registered, it appears under /sys/class/backlight. If it's an ACPI device it has a symlink pointing to some random ACPI device. If it's a platform device it's pointing at something like "dell-laptop" which is approximately unhelpful when it comes to figuring out what it controls. If it's a GPU-level device then it probably points at the PCI device, which is helpful except in the case where you have multiple backlight controls on a single GPU. So, by and large, you have no good way to identify which backlight control is preferable unless you keep a huge list of all possible backlights along with some scoring.
The first thing I've added to improve this is a "type" attribute. This tells you whether a given backlight is firmware-level (like ACPI), platform-level (like the various laptop drivers) or performs raw register writes (like a GPU driver). That lets userspace decide which interface is preferable. It'll typically be the ACPI interface, because that's the most likely to keep synchronisation and so avoid bizarre brightness bugs. The next thing has been to start fixing up the parent links. There's nothing we can do for the platform level devices, but the ACPI drivers could at least point at PCI devices rather than into ACPI space. That means that multi-GPU systems can now identify which interface to use based on the currently active GPU. Finally, I've started pointing the GPU-level backlight controls at the specific output rather than merely at the PCI device. This probably makes little difference for laptops as such, but once we start exposing backlight control for monitors that support ddcci it'll make things much easier as we'll know which backlight control corresponds to which monitor.
I've then written a small library that accepts information about the output and picks the "best" backlight for the device. It's obviously based on a pile of heuristics and there's a couple of bits of API that I suspect need to be nailed down yet, but it means that this code only needs to be written once. It's then simple to glue this into X drivers, which means that they can expose a "Backlight" xrandr property on each relevant display. That means that backlight control is then handled at the session level with the X server acting as the privileged agent, which simplifies a bunch of things and means we can finally let hal die entirely. Long-term this means we'll have unified backlight control for all of your displays, which is a wonderful thing.
Summary: We kind of suck right now, but there's a reasonably clear path to getting better.
Syndicated 2010-09-09 21:43:34 from Matthew Garrett | <urn:uuid:743c9634-3e40-4c89-815c-2e1412723ce0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.advogato.org/person/mjg59/diary.html?start=266 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393332.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00131-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955294 | 1,230 | 3.109375 | 3 |
It is claimed that mathematics is universal and this book is powerful evidence of that claim. If you replace the names of the authors of the primary textbooks and the occasional culturally contextual term, this book could have been written by Americans about American mathematical education. Generally restricted to what Americans would call K–12 mathematics education, the topics of what to cover, how long to spend, when topics should be covered, and the sequence of presentation completely mimics the debates in the United States.
For example, there is a chapter with the title “On Algebra Education in Russian Schools” with a subsection called “Methodological Issues in Teaching Algebra” that covers the grades 5–9 (ages 10–15). Sample problems for various topics are given and these problems could be lifted out and pasted into every basic algebra text used in the United States with no alteration other than the occasional replacement of the metric measure with the English one.
The only point of significant difference occurs when the author recounts the history of the Russian (Soviet) nation. The revolution of 1917 completely changed the social and political structure of the nation. More recently the consequences of the introduction of perestroika and the subsequent fall of the communist system are discussed.
With all of the negative commentary about the problems of the American educational system, it was refreshing to read about some of the similar problems and issues in Russia, traditionally a powerhouse in mathematics education.
Charles Ashbacher splits his time between consulting with industry in projects involving math and computers, teaching college classes and co-editing The Journal of Recreational Mathematics. In his spare time, he reads about these things and helps his daughter in her lawn care business. | <urn:uuid:a6a9f61f-b386-417c-98ed-150cce2b69bc> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://mathdl.maa.org/publications/maa-reviews/russian-mathematics-education-programs-and-practices?device=mobile | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398075.47/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00017-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958895 | 342 | 3.21875 | 3 |
Water in Yavapai County - Part I
Prescott, AZ – Water is a scarce commodity in the desert southwest. All over there are battles over water and who should have it. In Yavapai County it's no different.
State officials have told the tri cities area they must come up with a new water resource to sustain their growing communities. They have permission to tap into the Big Chino aquifer several miles away. Federal studies have shown that aquifer supplies at least 80 percent of the flow for the upper Verde River, the only Arizona river to flow freely year-round. Abe Springer is a geology professor at Northern Arizona University and coordinator of the Northern Arizona Water Institute.
ABE SPRINGER: Those studies have shown that varying a few percentage points a good percentage of the flow of the upper headwaters of the Verde River comes from the Big Chino basin. It's tough to describe in words what it looks like but the best description is the big chino basin looks like a bathtub.
And Springer says where the tub overflows is where we see springs and the Verde River headwaters.
SFX: opening and closing of the gate, hiking
On a recent sunny morning the Nature Conservancy's Dan Campbell hikes to the headwaters. He takes long strides past several old cottonwood trees and other lush vegetation that thrives along the river's edge.
CAMPBELL: It's important to see how little water there really is at the top of this river we estimate 23 cubic feet per second. If you imagine say a basketball is roughly a cubic foot 23 of those passing by in a second it's not much water. It does make this entire habitat very vulnerable to upstream pumping.
Campbell worries that if the water level in the river drops because of groundwater pumping, wildlife like bald eagles and beaver may be without a home. Last year the group American Rivers named the Verde among the top 10 most endangered rivers in the US.
CAMPBELL: Oh there goes a great blue heron which indicates the number of fish in here.
In addition to the wildlife, people downstream are also concerned about their quality of life. In Clarkdale, a small town about 25 miles away, Mayor Doug Von Gausig sits on his back deck that's perched several feet above the Verde.
VON GAUSIG: I would say the river being here is why we're all here one way or another. Cottonwood and Clarkdale were both founded here because of the Verde, Camp Verde certainly was For me it's spiritual sustenance and I think that's what it is for most people in the Verde Valley.
For Brenda Hauser the river provides more than spiritual sustenance. It provides actual sustenance - mostly corn, hay and pumpkins.
SFX: water flowing back into the Verde from the irrigation pond
On the Hauser's farm in Camp Verde they've dug ditches from the river to irrigate the fields. She and her family have relied on the Verde to farm for three decades.
HAUSER: It's a scary thing you dry up farms to use the water to plant houses.
SFX: bring back up and fade out irrigation water
If we travel farther downstream all the way to Phoenix we hit the Salt River Project - or SRP - which provides water and hydropower to the Phoenix metro area. Most of its surface water supply comes from the Salt River. But 30 percent comes from the Verde. SRP's Greg Kornrumph says he worries about the pipelines' impact on their allotment.
KORNRUMPH: This is water that's been flowing in that river forever. To the extent that there are impacts that reduce that flow it's an impact to water rights and water supplies that SRP and its shareholders have relied upon for over a 100 years.
Kornrumph and others are concerned that Prescott and Prescott Valley haven't yet come up with a contingency plan in case the groundwater pumping drops the river level. The Center for Biological Diversity has even threatened to sue.
Prescott and Prescott Valley water managers say there's no reason to mitigate. The two communities commissioned a study from a private firm that found a clay intrusion between the aquifer and the river. The study concluded their pumping 18 miles from the headwaters won't affect the river at all. Still they plan to build monitoring wells along with the pipeline to ensure they're not depleting the river. John Munderloh, the water resource manager for Prescott Valley, believes that should be enough.
MUNDERLOH: I think it's important that we not over commit our public dollars to a plan we may not need.
In 1980 state legislators enacted the Arizona Groundwater Management Code as a result of serious declines of groundwater in central and southern Arizona aquifers. The Prescott area became one of five so-called Active Management Areas along with Phoenix and Tucson areas. But John Munderloh points out that the others had federal help from the Central Arizona Project.
MUNDERLOH: We were left without options when we were straddled with the same water management plan that the Phoenix area, the Tucson area were hit with. It was never their intent or their vision to provide us with a source of water when they created those rules until that was rectified in 1992 when the legislators said ok you can import water from the Big Chino.
In the late 1990s the Arizona Department of Water Resources found Prescott to be taking more water out of the Little Chino aquifer than what they were putting in. So state officials gave them until 2025 to obtain enough water to support their community without depleting the resource. That meant tapping into the Big Chino.
Chino Valley has taken a different approach with its own pipeline project. Mayor Karen Fann says they'll recharge the Verde with treated effluent to replace what they pump out of the Big Chino.
FANN: We have put on another very strict caveat to that water that any developer that purchases this new water for a new subdivision he cannot use it for outside watering Any outside watering has got to be done with other resources. We are talking rain harvesting.
Critics have pointed out that Chino Valley doesn't get much rain and it's going to be challenging to convince people to get on board with the conservation plan.
To complicate matters many people in Yavapai County have their own domestic wells - wells they could pump all day without restrictions if they wish.
Fann says it's important to work with the well-users and the other communities to educate them on their responsibility to the environment.
FANN: If we don't work together as a group and if we all fight each for some reason if the transmission line never gets built the reality is more and more people will move to the Prescott AMA, more and more people will split their lots there will be more wells and quite honestly we will just keep depleting the water resource instead of being good stewards of our area.
Both Fann and Prescott/Prescott Valley leaders say they've tried to work together but neither party is willing to build one pipeline instead of two even though it would save taxpayers millions of dollars.
Both pipelines should be complete in the next couple years unless they're held up by a lawsuit. But all three communities agree the pipelines only provide a short term solution.
FANN: The reality is that that's going to solve our problem for maybe the next 20-25 years. It's a good interim stop gap but Arizona truly needs to wake up and smell the roses on this issue.
In the coming years water experts say there will be a need for more drastic measures like desalination plants and water reclamation systems that turn waste water into drinking water.
For Arizona Public Radio I'm Laurel Morales. | <urn:uuid:ea738b6f-56a5-466a-a774-d7dfb4f37b6f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://knau.org/post/water-yavapai-county-part-i | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394987.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00094-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960987 | 1,610 | 2.78125 | 3 |
It has come to this. A year after rescuing Greece from default, Europe is staring into the abyss. The bailout has proved insufficient. Greece needs more money, and it can’t borrow from private markets, where it faces interest rates as high as 25 percent. But Europe’s governments are reluctant to advance more funds unless other lenders — banks, bondholders — absorb some losses by writing down their debts. This, however, would constitute a default, risking a broader banking crisis that might torpedo Europe’s fragile recovery in France, Germany and elsewhere. There is no easy escape.Read the rest here.
What’s called a “debt crisis” is increasingly a political and social crisis. Looming over the financial complexities is the broader question of the ability — or willingness — of weak debtor nations to endure growing hardship to service their massive government debts. Already, unemployment is 14.1 percent in Greece, 14.7 percent in Ireland, 11.1 percent in Portugal and 20.7 percent in Spain. What are the limits of austerity? Steep spending cuts and tax increases do curb budget deficits, but they also create deep recessions, lowering tax revenue and offsetting some of the deficit improvement.
Just how long this grinding process can continue is unclear. In Spain, the incumbent socialist party lost big in recent elections. Popular unrest persists in Greece amid signs — reports The Post’s Anthony Faiola — of a “resurgence of an anarchist movement” there and elsewhere.
Some causes of Europe’s plight are well-known: the harsh recession following the 2008-09 financial crisis; aging populations coupled with costly welfare states. But there’s also another, less recognized culprit: the euro, the single currency now used by 17 countries. | <urn:uuid:36a49da2-845e-4ad7-98f2-7f717dbd2cb6> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://ad-orientem.blogspot.com/2011/05/greeces-crisis-could-torpedo-europes.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396027.60/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00030-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928397 | 367 | 2.796875 | 3 |
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|man pages section 1: User Commands Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 Information Library|
- display a count of lines, words and characters in a file
wc [-c | -m | -C] [-lw] [file]...
The wc utility reads one or more input files and, by default, writes the number of newline characters, words and bytes contained in each input file to the standard output.
The utility also writes a total count for all named files, if more than one input file is specified.
The following options are supported:
Same as -m.
Counts words delimited by white space characters or new line characters. Delimiting characters are Extended Unix Code (EUC) characters from any code set defined by iswspace().
If no option is specified, the default is -lwc (counts lines, words, and bytes.)
The following operand is supported:
A path name of an input file. If no file operands are specified, the standard input will be used.
See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of wc when encountering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte ( 231 bytes).
See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of wc: LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, and NLSPATH.
The following exit values are returned:
An error occurred.
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: | <urn:uuid:b0d103ad-1375-472e-bce3-ad84ca42bd49> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26505_01/html/816-5165/wc-1.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395548.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00175-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.801544 | 334 | 2.765625 | 3 |
Industry & Economy
Caltech's extraordinary scientists and engineers focus on the most difficult scientific and societal problems, forging breakthroughs, improving lives, and launching new fields, technologies, and industries.
Innovation: Past, Present, and Future
Groundbreaking discoveries by Caltech researchers throughout the Institute's history have led directly to social and economic improvements. Here are just a few examples:
- Clair Patterson's research on lead pollution prompted pollution controls in the auto industry.
- Nobel laureate Linus Pauling's theories of how atoms bond to one another to make molecules became the basis of modern pharmaceutical research and development.
- Carver Mead (BS '56, MS '57, PhD '60) discovered scaling laws for very-large-scale-integration technology and developed methods that have made possible many of the innovative integrated-circuit designs used in today's consumer electronics.
- Lee Hood (BS '60, PhD '68) developed several instruments, including the DNA sequencer, which enabled the mapping of the human genome.
Current research being done on campus is laying the groundwork for the inventions and the innovations of the future. Caltech scientists and engineers are
- Developing novel approaches to attacking cancer cells, preventing HIV, and treating or neutralizing numerous other diseases.
- Improving the generation of affordable, efficient, and abundant forms of sustainable energy, such as solar and wind energy, and energy from biofuels.
- Creating neural prosthetics that one day may help paralyzed people walk and handle objects, and allow blind people to see.
- Building low-cost medical diagnostic devices for use in developing countries.
Leading in Discovery
Caltech's Office of Technology Transfer and Corporate Partnerships (OTTCP) helps faculty members collaborate with major corporations in aerospace, energy, information-technology, medical, pharmaceutical, and other industries to advance both basic research and cutting-edge technology in those fields. Among those partnerships are
- Caltech's Corporate Partnerships program, which helps bring science and technology breakthroughs directly to the industries and people that can apply them.
- A Bioengineering Research Program established at the Institute in 2009, through which Caltech and the international health-care company Sanofi now collaborate on developing human-health therapeutic and diagnostic solutions.
- The Caltech Entrepreneurs Forum, which encourages technology-based entrepreneurship ventures by offering advice, support, education, and networking opportunities.
- Collaborative projects between Caltech and City of Hope, UCLA, UCSF, USC, and other institutions, all of which have a common goal of propelling Caltech's biomedical breakthroughs from the lab to the clinic.
An Entrepreneurial Engine
- Advanced materials
- Computer and network technology
Caltech alumni, too, have founded numerous influential companies. Some of these include
- Applied Semantics (acquired by Google in 2003) — Gilad Elbaz, BS '91
- Beckman Instruments — Arnold Beckman, PhD '28
- DirecTV — Eddy Hartenstein, MS '74
- Factual — Gilad Elbaz, BS '91
- Idealab — William Gross, BS '81
- Intel — Gordon Moore, PhD '54
- Quora — Adam D'Angelo, BS '06
- Trimble Navigation — Charles Trimble, BS '63, MS '64
- TRW — Simon Ramo, PhD '36
- Varitronix — York Liao, BS '67
Stimulating the Economy
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, managed by Caltech for NASA, is a close partner in innovation; together, Caltech and JPL are also major contributors to the local economy, and Pasadena's largest employer. In FY 2011, JPL subcontracted $593 million in projects to companies and organizations in 48 states and Washington, D.C.
In addition, JPL played a key role in the development of such widespread technologies and products as
- The "camera on a chip"
- Robot-assisted microsurgery
- Electric vehicles
- Carbon-composite materials | <urn:uuid:61e6b028-33cc-43c2-8408-c9509c377568> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.caltech.edu/content/industry-economy | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397636.15/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00120-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.886501 | 840 | 2.90625 | 3 |
|Tool: Intercepted arc - Math Open Reference||
|Go to:||http://www.mathopenref.com/arcintercepted.html (opens a new window)|
An interactive applet and associated web page that demonstrate the concept of the intercepted arc - "That part of a circle that lies between two lines that intersect it". The applet shows a circle with part of it's circumference highlighted and the central angle shown. As the user drags either end of the arc it is redrawn and the intercepted arc changes.
Applet can be enlarged to full screen size for use with a classroom projector. After use in the classroom, student can access it again from any web browser at home or in the library with no login required.
This resource is a component of the Math Open Reference Interactive Geometry textbook project at http://www.mathopenref.com.
|Technology Type:||Java Applet|
|Cost:||Does not require payment for use|
|Average Rating:||||Login to rate this resource|
|My MathTools:||Login to Subscribe / Save This|
|Reviews:||be the first to review this resource|
|Discussions:||start a discussion of this resource| | <urn:uuid:7e70a3fb-7e5a-43ec-af95-33e1e9ea371f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://mathforum.org/mathtools/tool/32604/g,10.11.4,ALL,ALL/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393518.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00077-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.765723 | 256 | 3.6875 | 4 |
Tendonitis (also tenonitis or tendinitis) is an inflammation of a tendon. For example, patellar tendonitis (jumper's knee) is an inflammation of the patellar tendon, which connects the tibia to the patella.
Achilles tendinitis is tendinitis of the Achilles tendon, generally precipitated by overuse of the affected limb and is more common among athletes ...
Tendonitis as related to Achilles tendinitis
- Achilles tendon rupture - Wikipedia, the free …
Achilles tendon rupture is when the achilles tendon breaks. The achilles is the most commonly injured tendon. Rupture can occur while performing actions requiring ...
- Achilles Tendon Injury Recovery Blog
AchillesBlog exists to bring together people who are recovering from Achilles Tendon injuries. You can share your injury and recovery experiences with others who are ...
- Everything About Achilles Tendons
Everything about Achilles tendons. The Achilles tendon encyclopedia for people who have, want to recover from, or prevent an Achilles Tendon injury.
- Achilles Tendonitis Information and Effective …
Achilles Tendonitis is a very common injury that can persist for years unless treatment is properly addressed. Achilles Tendonitis is a common name used for an acute ...
- Tendonitis - How To Diagnose, Treat & Cure Tendonitis
Tendonitis Information - Diagnose & Treat Tendonitis. iTendonitis.com was established to help people suffering from tendonitis, tennis elbow and joint injuries.
- Achilles Tendonitis - Symptoms & Treatment of Heel Pain
Achilles tendonitis is a common problem that causes heel pain. Treatment of Achilles tendonitis is focused on non-surgical options for most patients.
- Achilles Tendon Injuries - Medscape Reference
Achilles tendon pathologies include rupture and tendonitis. Many experts now believe, however, that tendonitis is a misleading term that should no …
- Achilles Tendonitis | Achilles Tendon Pain | Foot Pain ...
Achilles tendonitis and Achilles tendon pain are common injuries, especially in runners. Learn natural treatments and prevention for Achilles tendon pain and foot pain!
- Tendon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A tendon (or sinew) is a tough band of fibrous connective tissue that usually connects muscle to bone and is capable of withstanding tension. Tendons are similar to ... | <urn:uuid:233e3ac9-56f6-4dcb-87e9-c7667e83e502> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.goldbamboo.com/relate-tl1780-tr9230.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397842.93/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00094-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.833439 | 502 | 3.125 | 3 |
Renewable Energy Systems
The goal of the Research Program on Renewable Energy Systems is to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, hence minimise greenhouse gas emissions, by increasing the share of renewables in our energy mix.
The Program, led by Professor Behdad Moghtaderi, in particular focuses on the development of novel systems / processes for more efficient and viable utilisation of renewable energy sources such as biomass, wind and geothermal.
The research underpinning the Program covers fundamental and applied aspects of renewable energy systems, these include, but are not limited to; biomass combustion, gasification and pyrolysis, design of novel wind turbines as well as, geothermal power cycles and hot dry rock technology for geothermal power generation.
The main laboratory of this program - the Renewable Energy Systems (RES) Laboratory has been dedicated to two large programs of study aimed at the development of more efficient technologies for utilisation of biomass and geothermal resources, respectively. Several projects are currently under way as part of these two programs of study.
- Development of a Novel Geothermal Power Cycle
- Development of a Novel Regenerator for Adapting Supercritical Cycles to Geothermal
- Power Applications
- Development of a Novel Desalination Process for Geothermal Resources
- Combustion Characteristics of Biomass Chars in Pressurised Circulating Fluidised Bed Reactors
- Gasification Characteristics of Australian Biomass Fuels in Fluidised Bed Reactors
- Burnout and Ash issues related to Co-Firing of Coal and Biomass in PF Boilers
- Methodologies to interpret Trials of Coal / Biomass Co-Firing
The Laboratory utilises a variety of equipment, including:
- bench-scale set ups for assessing the performance of various geothermal power cycles
- a bench-scale HDH based desalination unit
- a bench-scale biomass gasifier
- a pressurised biomass gasifier and
- various pulverisers and fuel crushers. | <urn:uuid:d3c15bbf-2297-48cc-8e80-cdec8e64f960> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.newcastle.edu.au/research-and-innovation/centre/energy/research/renewable-energy-systems | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391766.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00005-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.886785 | 414 | 2.96875 | 3 |
Visions of a Cashless Society: Echoes
Many technological innovations surfaced first in science fiction and then became a reality.
Think of Jules Verne imagining a flight to the moon and long-range submarines decades before such things existed; H. G. Wells warning of aerial bombardments prior to World War I; or Arthur C. Clarke writing on geosynchronous communications satellites in 1945.
But literature foresaw only limited advances in the way we exchange money. Capitalism was the default social organization of American science fiction, and few authors put much energy into imagining its future. By the 1940s, many had adopted the term "credit" as the universal name for future currencies, including Isaac Asimov in his two main strands of work (the far-future "Foundation" saga and the near-future "Robot" stories). Usually, however, "credit" functioned as a simple linguistic substitution for "dollar," and one reads of credits being slapped onto counters, flung to parking attendants, drawn from pockets and the like.
Such examples tell how readers and writers of science fiction were more interested in the future of rockets, physics and social dynamics than they were in banking, economics or organizational innovation. Disregarding the functioning of the economy even led to notable inconsistencies, as in the Star Trek universe, where the Federation is supposed to have evolved beyond money, but dialog and plot elements continue to reference trading, gambling and the exchange of credits.
The concept of a "cashless society" -- now getting increased attention as countries such as Sweden try to move away from bills and coins -- actually originated first in the world of business and only later moved into the realm of fiction.
Few bankers and consultants in the 1950s foresaw how their recently adopted computers and telecommunications equipment would revolutionize the way consumers exchanged money. Their first target was those costly and cumbersome paper checks, the volume of which was growing at an alarming rate. But two men, in particular, promoted the concept of the cashless-checkless society as the appropriate solution to this problem.
The first was John Diebold, who had earlier popularized the term “automation.” His consulting company, the Diebold Group, constructed several networked computer systems for commercial banks in the early 1960s. Diebold wrote in business journals of an impending "transaction overload," cautioning that "the 'cashless society' is no longer an option but a necessity." He acknowledged that there was "considerable vagueness" surrounding the details of how such a society might be achieved, but argued that "some system must and will develop in which money (and credit) moves quickly and safely" around the world.
This vision won influential support from George Mitchell, a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, who began warning bankers in 1966 of the increasing costs of processing paper checks and urging the banking industry to consider how "the computer can drastically change money and its use."
Soon, others in banking and journalism embraced this vision of the future. As they extended their gaze, more concrete predictions emerged, such as a nationwide electronic-funds-transfer system, or an EFT, activated by some kind of economic identification card. Once banks digitized their accounts, and the nation's merchants were connected to them by telecommunication links, it would be relatively easy to usher in a new kind of cashless-checkless society.
Or so they thought. As the bankers of the 1960s and '70s soon discovered, the technical aspects of such a system were the relatively easy part; selling the idea of electronic payments to consumers, merchants and regulators was far more difficult.
The banks themselves also disagreed strongly about just how an EFT system should work. All of them wanted to get rid of costly checks and cash, but they had different opinions on how an electronic system should be structured, owned and operated. Large commercial banks in the U.S. wanted to develop their own proprietary systems and sell access to their competitors. Smaller banks favored cooperative associations or an electronic version of the Federal Reserve's existing check-clearing system.
The recently formed national credit-card associations -- Interbank (which would later become MasterCard) and National BankAmericard Inc. (which would later become Visa Inc.) -- naturally saw their own credit-card networks as the perfect vehicle for a fully cashless society. But their member banks often disagreed, as they saw credit cards as something distinct from "real banking."
Although much of the technology necessary for a national EFT system existed by the late 1970s, lack of consumer interest and disagreements among the banks stymied its development. Not until the 1990s were debit cards -- first issued in the mid-1970s -- widely issued by banks and adopted by consumers.
The cashless society envisioned in the 1950s is now closer, but still far from becoming reality.
Over the past year, Visa has produced a series of videos describing its vision for the next generation of electronic payments, in which consumers all over the world will be able to pay for all kinds of goods and services using only a mobile phone. In a similar vein, the International Finance Corporation recently published a report suggesting a framework for countries looking to establish a mobile money business.
Both portray a compelling new world where cumbersome and risky bank notes are replaced with safe and sterile electronic transactions initiated at the touch of a mobile handset. In these visions, your mobile becomes your "digital wallet," bringing us all one step closer to the banker's dream of a cashless society.
Such a society might be desirable. But if history can teach us anything, the road will not be as smooth and straight as enthusiasts might suppose.
(Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is a professor of business history and bank management at Bangor University in Wales and the editor of "Technological Innovation in Retail Finance: International Historical Perspectives." Thomas Haigh is an associate professor of information studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and chair of the Special Interest Group on Computers, Information and Society of the Society for the History of Technology. David Stearns is a historian of money and technology and the author of "Electronic Value Exchange: Origins of the VISA Electronic Payment System." The opinions expressed are their own.)
To contact the authors of this post: [email protected].
To contact the editor responsible for this post: Timothy Lavin at [email protected]. | <urn:uuid:c8d06821-5bbd-460c-8961-8070a7b109f7> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2012-03-29/visions-of-a-cashless-society-echoes.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399428.8/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00027-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96217 | 1,326 | 2.6875 | 3 |
From stranger safety tips to teaching how to recognize danger without freaking them out, discover advice from safety experts on how to teach kids to react when approached by a predator.
"Kids are almost always taught to help someone in need. It's important to clarify that a child should never help an adult that they don't know," warns Michael St. John of Action Karate. "Adults should always ask other adults for help. Children need to be told that it's OK to say no if a stranger asks them for help."
Regardless of how prepared your child may be, there may be times when he still needs to get away. So, instead of going quietly, teach your child to draw as much attention to himself as possible. "No matter the age, act like a two-year-old," heeds Robert D. Sollars, of Sollars Security Shield. "In other words scream, yell, stomp on the attacker's feet, punch, gouge or do whatever to attract attention. This is especially true at night and if they are by themselves."
"One of our biggest tips for children is about creating a 'safe list,'" shares Tracy Vega, co-founder of Simple Self Defense For Women. "This is a list of people who can interact and pick-up your children. This is extremely helpful when parents are divorced or separated and one parent is not allowed access to the child. Instead of being afraid of everyone, they simply know who they can trust."
Regardless of age, keep kids safe by agreeing on a secret password. "Develop a secret code word between the two of you. The word or short phrase should be something that they can remember but not commonly known to others," suggests Tonya Genison Prince, child sexual abuse prevention expert. "All adults and children who claim that they were sent by Mom and Dad should know the word — including family members and acquaintances."
"We also strongly suggest that parents refrain from writing their child's name on everything at any age," urges Vega. "You don't ever want to give a potential bad person an opening to start a conversation — and most any child will respond to an adult or authority figure that calls them by name."
Even when armed with these safety tips, the most effective way to teach your kids about stranger danger is to be repetitive. "Working with children for the past ten years... I've learned that any kind of stranger danger education needs to be reinforced at home on a regular basis," informs St. John. "It needs to be a conversation that is had as a family just as often as a parent asks 'How was your day?' It may seem repetitive, but if it's not on the top of a child's mind, he will forget." And keeping kids safe is every parent's most important priority.
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SheKnows is making some changes! | <urn:uuid:6f416681-2964-480f-9254-713692b16d3f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.sheknows.com/parenting/articles/1006243/teach-your-kids-about-stranger-danger | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397748.48/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00030-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975864 | 596 | 2.515625 | 3 |
You may have never heard of Hope, Minnesota. But at one time tiny Hope was a hub of activity, back when dairy farmers brought cans of milk to creameries by horse and carriage. It was so time-consuming to transport the milk that creameries sprang up about every three miles.
At one time you could find 30 creameries dotting the Steele County landscape, among them, the Hope Creamery.
The creamery still churns out butter in a 1920s red brick building. The old butter-making techniques are supervised by Gene Kruckeberg, a tall, slim man dressed all in white. He started making butter in Steele County 48 years ago.
"Yeah, that's right. January 1, 1958," Kruckeberg said.
Kruckeberg has not seen much change on the job. Sure, the milk used in Hope Butter today comes by truck, not horse and buggy. The milk comes from a farm in Hastings, not from neighboring dairy farms.
But the milk is still pasteurized for a full day. The cream is then skimmed off the top and pumped into an old 900-gallon motorized batch churn. The ingredients remain simple: well water, cream and perhaps a bit of salt. Then the churn is turned on. Initially the churn turns quickly, but it slows as the small curds of butter begin to separate and become heavier. The process takes about 45 minutes.
Gene Kruckeberg and his crew generally make butter only once a week. During the churning process, Kruckeberg watches and listens to cues that will him by sound whether the water content is right.
"As soon as the water's worked in you gotta quit rotating it, otherwise the butter gets sticky. You gotta keep an eye on it. I mean, you can't just walk away from it, let it churn and come back," Kruckeberg said.
Hope Creamery makes about 5,000 pounds of butter a week. That's a fraction of the volume manufactured by large producers like Minnesota-based Land-o-Lakes.
"Nowadays, all the large plants have continuous churns, where the cream comes in one end of it and it comes out a ribbon of butter on the other end. It's a real fast process, or real fast churning," Kruckeberg said.
Once the butter has finished churning, Gene Kruckeberg and his crew dip their arms and hands into a trough full of water and sanitizer. Then they scoop the butter out of the churn by hand, and throw handfuls of the pale, yellow butter into an old-fashioned butter-wrapping machine.
The butter looks different from the typical sticks sold in grocery stores. The color is paler and there are no chemicals or dyes enhancing its yellow hue.
Many Twin Cities chefs report the butter tastes different too. Chefs at restaurants like Lucia's and The Cue at the Guthrie are using Hope Butter in their cooking.
"We don't have as much milk solids in our butter the way the continuous churn butter does. So when they melt it, it's more clear butter, not as many milk solid specks in it. That's one reason they like it. Plus the taste," Kruckeberg said.
Kruckeberg boasts that his product competes with butter produced in Europe. Critics often cite European butter as having superior taste and texture. It also has a higher fat content than typical American butter.
In fact, Hope Butter produces an extra high-fat content version of butter that chefs use in making pastries. More fat means there's less moisture in the butter, and that results in flakier pastry and a fuller flavor.
Victor Mrotz, the owner of Hope Creamery, grew up near the creamery and ate the butter as a child. Mrotz and his wife bought the creamery in 2001. Mrotz says he's happy with his product, and with the fact that he's preserving jobs in this rural farm town. Some of his workers are calling Mrotz a hero for saving the creamery.
"Hero is a strong word I guess. Heroes are people who run into burning buildings," he says. "I ran into a falling-down building. Maybe that's what it was."
Twin Cities grocery stores Lund's, Byerly's and Kowalski's sell Hope Creamery Butter. Mrotz says he's hoping to expand his company and distribute the butter throughout the region. | <urn:uuid:6501cc8c-9aac-49ba-9849-623b51a4e315> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.mprnews.org/story/2006/08/15/butter | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783408828.55/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155008-00102-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970947 | 937 | 2.578125 | 3 |
|Grasp (Grasp) (?), v. t.
[imp. & p. p. Grasper (?); p. pr. & vb. n. Qraspine.]
[OE. graspen; prob. akin to LG. grupsen, or to E. grope. Cf. Grab, Grope.]
1. To seize and hold by clasping or embracing with the fingers or arms; to catch to take possession of. "Thy hand is made to grasp a palmer's staff." Shak.
2. To lay hold of with the mind; to become thoroughly acquainted or conversant with; to comprehend.
Grasp (Grasp), v. i.
To effect a grasp; to make the motion of grasping; to clutch; to struggle; to strive. "As one that grasped And tugged for life and was by strength subdued." Shak.
-- To grasp at, to catch at; to try to seize; as, Alexander grasped at universal empire,
Grasp (Grasp), n.
1. A gripe or seizure of the hand; a seizure by embrace, or infolding in the arms. "The grasps of love." Shak.
2. Reach of the arms; hence, the power of seizing and holding; as, it was beyond his grasp.
3. Forcible possession; hold. "The whole space that's in the tyrant's grasp." Shak.
4. Wide-reaching power of intellect to comprehend subjects and hold them under survey. "The foremost minds of the next . . . era were not, in power of grasp, equal to their predecessors." Z. Taylor.
5. The handle of a sword or of an oar.
Authors Encyclopedia | Encyclopedia of the Self
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Emotional Literacy Education | The Old Man of the Holy Mountain | Classical Authors Forums
Visitor Agreement | Copyright c 1999 - 2001 Mark Zimmerman. All Rights Reserved. | <urn:uuid:ed2d0917-67a3-43d2-a46d-7c21d3d4be77> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://selfknowledge.com/41365.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392069.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00045-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.857519 | 420 | 2.875 | 3 |
The interactive worksheet below will provide an introduction to MS Excel including some setup and using icons, toolbars, and shortcuts. Participants will learn to use Excel functions with an emphasis on those needed for data analysis.
Section 1: Paste, Fill, Insert, Replace
Section 2: Sort, Descriptive Statistics (Average, Median, Mode, Standard Deviation, etc...)
The interactive worksheet below will build on the introduction to Excel worksheet, or your own previous experience with Excel. Topics include customizing Excel, shortcuts, macros and the solver.
Check out these websites for additional Excel help!
Excel 2013 Tutorials - Includes links to videos of getting started with Excel 2013
Excel 2010 Tutorials - Includes links to videos of getting started with Excel 2010
Excel 2007: Use for Analysis of Economics Data A collection of handouts assuming no knowledge of Excel and relatively little knowledge of statistics
Excel Easy for 2010 or 2007: An illustrated tutorial that starts from the beginning for those with no knowledge of Excel.
DON'T FORGET- You can always stop by the Quantitative Skills Center to get some in-person help and resources. | <urn:uuid:6e88d9ae-d58e-4d8e-8dde-e3959ef59bb2> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.uwb.edu/qsc/resources/tutorials/excel | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397636.15/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00180-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.81067 | 237 | 3.15625 | 3 |
GREENHOUSE WARMING MAY DRY OUT AMERICA'S BREAD BASKET,
SAY NOAA SCIENTISTS
November 17, 1999 Parts of the central United States will likely experience more frequent drought conditions because of increasing greenhouse gases, according to a computer model run by NOAA.
"The central U.S., which includes agricultural states such as Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois, along with central Asia, and areas surrounding the Mediterranean Sea will likely experience substantial percentage reductions in soil moisture during the summer season by the middle of the next century. This means that these regions will be particularly vulnerable to more frequent drought conditions and associated reduction in crop yield," said Richard Wetherald, a meteorologist at GFDL and one of the study's authors. The other author is Syukuro Manabe, former GFDL scientist now affiliated with the Institute for Global Change Research in Tokyo, Japan.
In the study, the NOAA scientists used their computer model of the Earth's climate. Such models, which simulate the interactions among the atmosphere, oceans, land surface, and sea ice, are the primary tools used in the study of climate change and make use of the latest generation of supercomputers.
The scientists used their model to simulate change over the period 1765-2065 by incorporating the effect of increasing greenhouse gases and sulfate particles. "This is a robust result; most other models also show the same impacts on the central U.S.," said Wetherald.
However, while model-projected
increases of global-mean temperature are consistent with observations,
Wetherald said that "corresponding increases in drought
frequency are unlikely to be statistically confirmed in the near
future. Our study suggests that because of the large natural
variability inherent in hydrologic processes, such as precipitation,
soil moisture, and runoff, confirmation of the projected decrease
in soil moisture will be difficult to detect, at least during
the first few decades of the twenty-first century." | <urn:uuid:2f005701-54d9-469e-a361-0274d6d7bacc> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories/s322.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391634.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00111-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931784 | 412 | 2.96875 | 3 |
Documentation > Greenhouse effect > Greenhouse gases : what are they ? > Are we really sure that it's man that modified the atmosphere?
It is well know that a number of greenhouse gases have long been in the atmosphere. CO2, for example, has been in the air for a couple billion years ! Methane has been emitted by swamps since anaerobic bacteria live in them, and that has probably lasted for a couple hundred million years. What, then, allows to conclude that humanity bears whatsoever responsibility in the recent - and undisputed - atmospheric increase of these gases ? In this case, scientists will work like a (good) magistrate : they back their conclusions on a body of facts and indications, and progressively sort out any cause that cannot explain what is observed.
Since the end of the 50's, 1957 to be precise, systematic measurements of the atmospheric CO2 concentration have taken place in various places around the world, the most famous of them being Manau Loa, in Hawai. Why Hawaï, if not to surf all day ? Because to have relevant measurements one needs to avoid being close to a large source of CO2 such as a main city, a heavily industrialized region, etc. The observatories that came after Manau Loa are all located on remote islands, or on boats.
Since then, it has been observed that the CO2 concentration in the air increased each year, and recently other measurements have shown that the oxygen concentration is evolving in a remarkably symetric way, decreasing a little every year also (don't worry, it does not make the air unbreathable !), and for one molecule of CO2 appearing in the atmosphere, a molecule of oxygen disappears, which strongly backs the idea that the CO2 increase is due to combustion.
The upper black curve represents the proportion of the atmospheric CO2 measured in ppm (parts per million or ppm ; 1 ppm = = 0,0001%) at Mauna Loa, Hawaï. The upper dark blue curve (that seems "embedded" in the black curve, and "oscillates" the same way, only with a smaller amplitude) represents the same, measured at Baring Head, New Zealand. The lower amplitude of the measure performed at Baring Head comes from the fact that most of the biomass lives in the Northern Hemisphere, where it generates a seasonal change in the atmospheric CO2.
In rough terms, during the spring and summer, when the vegetation is growing, the dominant flux is CO2 being absorbed by the vegetation (and hence a diminution of the atmospheric CO2), when in autumn and winter, the dominant flux is coming from the decay of dead organic matter (including leaves that fell in autumn) and the respiration of plants and micro-organisms. The mixing of the air between the two hemispheres requires a year or more, so that the variation taking place in the northern hemisphere is not instantly seen in the Southern hemisphere.
When it comes to the annual average, the difference between the two hemispheres becomes marginal, and the trend is exactely the same : a fast increase, up to 380 parts par million of CO2 in 2006.
Cyan and pink curves at the bottom represent the variation of the oxygen content of the atmosphere, also in ppm (the reference value is a mixing ratio with nitrogen). The pink curve comes from samplings done at Alert, Canada (82°N) and the cyan from samplings taken at Cape Grim, Australia (41°S). The correlation with the CO2 curve is striking.
Source : IPCC, 4th assessment report, 2007
And not only did it increase, but it did so a little more each year (graph below). There is, therefore, an acceleration in the increase which is clearly perceptible over a time scale - several decades - which is ridiculous compared to the time constants of most of the natural cycles.
Grey bars show the annual atmospheric increase of CO2 - in ppm - in the measurements of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The increase is clearly greater each year (on average), going from 0,5 part per million of CO2 circa 1960 to 2 ppm per year (4 times more) at present times. The black and grey bottom curves give the 5-year average of the Scripps value (black) and NOAA values (red).
The upper black curve represents (in parts per million) the atmospheric increase that would happen if all the CO2 resulting from fossil fuel use remained airborne. The difference with the actual increase corresponds to the uptake by sinks.
Fraction of the CO2 emitted each year that remains airborne (0 = 0%, 1 = 100%).
This fraction remains quite stable near 50%, with an anomaly in the early 1990's, when the CO2 emissions increased fourfold between 1960 and 2005. This is a result of the increase of the uptake by sinks, but one might wonder if it will last.
Over the recent past, the case is settled : the atmospheric CO2 is increasing, is even increasing faster and faster, at the same pace than oil, gas and coal combustion, while the atmospheric oxygen is decreasing in corresponding quantities. This is quite a good hint already that we have a role in this situation, but in order to know with certainty whether our industrial civilization is definitely involved or not, we must know what was the situation before 1750.
But before 1750 (and even some time after that year) there was no instrument allowing to measure directly the proportion of CO2 in the air, or the proportion of methane, or the proportion of anything else. As none of our ancestors had the good idea to store a sample of the atmosphere somewhere for us, how did we do ?
We have been lucky in this case : where there are large ice caps, mother nature has provided in the same time a natural mechanism for recording past atmospheric compositions. On these caps, it always freezes, so that the snow that falls does not melt but slowly transforms into ice under the pressure of the snow fallen after. During that transformation of snow into ice, the air that surrounds the snow flakes gets progressively imprisonned into the ice under the form of small bubbles.
Those bubbles are therefore a testimony of the period at which the snow fell (actually there is a little lag, but it can be determined so that it is possible to find a way out).
As a result of this process, an ice cap (in Antarctica, or in Greenland, or even a mountain glacier) is composed of ice that gets older when one bores deeper, and, with every layer of ice there are little air bubbles, as old as the ice, that can yield precious information about the composition of the atmosphere at the time they were formed.
With modern techniques, it is possible :
to bore into the ice and extract in a clean way (without contaminating it with ambiant air) what is called an ice core, that is a long cylinder, about 10 to 20 cm in diameter, and that can be several km long (from the surface to the underlying rock ; of course this core is extracted by little bits),
to attribute an age to every part of this ice core,
to analyse the composition of the air trapped in the ice all along the core, in order to reconstitute the proportion of greenhouse gases for ancient times.
Boring holes into ice caps and analyzing them later in order to determine what past climates looked like is the job of paleoclimatologists.
As the deepest layers of the Antarctic ice cap are several hundred thousands year old (the record is presently held by an ice core coming from the Vostok base, and goes back to 400.000 years), one now understands that it is possible to have some hints - the closer we are to present times, the more accurate the results are, of course - on what happened since then.
The first conclusion that can be drawned from these analysis is that for all the "natural" greenhouse gases, the atmospheric concentration has increased exponentially since 1750 (graph below).
Since 1958 the values derive from direct measurements in the air ; for previous years they derive from analysis performed on the ice cores. For the CO2 graph the various symbols (plain circles, empty circles, triangles, etc) refer to measurements made in various ice cores.
NB : ppm means "part per million", 1 ppm = 0,0001% ; ppb = part per billion, that is 0,0000001% : a thousand times less ! it can be seen that greenhouse gases do not need to be present in huge quantities to have a determining effect.
Another major conclusion is that the CO2 concentration in the air has stayed the same for the 10.000 years that preceed 1750, and have never gotten over the 1750 value (280 ppmv, and today we are at 350) fort the 400.000 years that preceed 1750.
Actually, for these 400.000 years that preceed 1750, the atmospheric CO2 concentration has oscillated between 200 and 280 ppmv (graph below).
The vertical axis gives the concentration (in ppmv) and the lower horizontal axis the number of years before present. The upper horizontal axis gives the depth of the ice below the surface. The recent years (that is after 1750) are not shown. It is easy to see that the CO2 has never represented more than 280 ppmv of the lower atmosphere in the recent geological times.
If this evidence is not enough to consider us as the culprits, at least it allows us to be counted among the suspects. What will allow to close the case is the isotopic analysis of the carbon included into the atmospheric CO2.
The carbon atom has three isotopes (that means it can be found in the nature under three different forms) :
the carbon 12, by far the most abundant, has 6 protons (the number of protons is what characterizes an element, no matter whether it is iron, helium or oxygen, and governs its chemical properties) and 6 neutrons (the number of neutrons influences the physical properties, but not the chemical properties).
the carbon 13, which has 6 protons and 7 neutrons, and is therefore a little heavier than the carbon 12, is a stable isotope (it is not radioactive) and amounts to roughly 1% of the terrestrial carbon, with a slight but noticeable difference between the oceanic and the terrestrial environments : this isotope is a little less abundant among the continents (and therefore in the terrestrial biomass) than it is in the ocean,
the carbon 14, which has 6 protons and 8 neutrons, is instable (that is radioactive, with a half life of roughly 5.500 years : after 5.500 years half an initial stock of carbon 14 will have disappeared). This carbon is created in the upper atmosphere by the neutrons of the cosmic rays, when they collide wich an atom of neutrogen :
This carbon, once formed, is oxydized in CO2 and then integrated in the carbon cycle. It can therefore be found a little bit everywhere, but as it will have almost totally disintegrated after several tenths of thousands years, it can't be found in the fossil fuels, that were formed several million years ago at least.
A consequence of all that is that, depending on where it comes from, the atmospheric CO2 will vary in isotopic composition :
It is now observed that the atmospheric CO2 is getting poorer in carbon 14 and in carbon 13. The decrease of the proportion of carbon 13 indicates that the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere can't come from the ocean (otherwise the atmospheric CO2 would get richer in carbon 13), and the decrease of the proportion of carbon 14 implies - as it is the only possibility - that emissions deriving from the use of fossil fuels contribute to the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The never before atmospheric concentrations now reached for the major greenhouse gases, the never before rate of increase now observed, and the confirmation of the contribution of the various sources by isotopic analysis, all this allows us to affirm that mankind - and particularly its "modern" activities - is indeed the primary cause of the increase of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
So we finally hold the culprit : that's us !
Our responsibility is even more obvious for "industrial" gases that did not exist naturally in the atmosphere prior to the industrial age (the halocarbons). and for which the concentrations are also rapidly rising (graph below).
If we go back in time further on, there have been previous periods with very high CO2 concentrations, and therefore higher average temperatures, but that probably never went over the present ones by more than 5 to 10 degrees Celsius (let's recall that the change that we have put in motion could bring a temperature rise of more that 10 °C over a couple of centuries), because the solar activity (that is the amount of energy radiated by the Sun) was a little lower at the time. Anyway we were not born then !
CO2 concentrations since the beginning of the primary era. RCO2 is the ratio between the present concentration actuelle (300 ppm, that is 0,03% of the whole atmosphere) and the past concentrations. For example, R = 5 means that the CO2 concentration was 5*300 = 1500 ppm, or that CO2 occupied 0,15% of the atmosphere.
It can be seen that the major tendancy during the quaternary era (that started 4 millions years ago) and even of the tertiary era (that started 70 million years ago, and during which mammals developped) was basically a constant lowering of this concentration. | <urn:uuid:14754f43-d379-4d7c-acba-ce49e25c4e33> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/greenhouse/anthropic.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397748.48/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00004-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948862 | 2,799 | 3.71875 | 4 |
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A hydrocele is a collection of fluid inside the area of the scrotum, surrounding the testicle. Hydroceles are common in newborn infants and normally resolve after a few months after birth. The main symptom is a painless, swollen testicle, on one or both sides, which feels like a water-filled balloon. Hydroceles are usually not dangerous, and they are usually only treated when they cause discomfort or embarrassment, or they get so large that they threaten the blood supply of the testicle.
- Last reviewed on 10/9/2012
- Linda J. Vorvick, MD, Medical Director and Director of Didactic Curriculum, MEDEX Northwest Division of Physician Assistant Studies, Department of Family Medicine, UW Medicine, School of Medicine, University of Washington. Louis S. Liou, MD, PhD, Chief of Urology, Cambridge Health Alliance, Visiting Assistant Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School. Also reviewed by David Zieve, MD, MHA, Medical Director, A.D.A.M. Health Solutions, Ebix, Inc.
The information provided herein should not be used during any medical emergency or for the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition. A licensed medical professional should be consulted for diagnosis and treatment of any and all medical conditions. Call 911 for all medical emergencies. Links to other sites are provided for information only -- they do not constitute endorsements of those other sites. © 1997- 2013 A.D.A.M., Inc. Any duplication or distribution of the information contained herein is strictly prohibited. | <urn:uuid:62562747-82e1-4c0a-b9e5-d7266e9df083> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://umm.edu/health/medical/ency/images/hydrocele | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393442.26/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00064-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.913091 | 326 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Volume 3, Number
1995 Indiana University - The Center for Adolescent
The first contact a
student teacher has with her/his students often makes a lasting impression
and sets the tone for the entire experience. Here are some ideas on how to
make that first impression a positive one.
- Be sure to smile.
- Write your name on the board. This helps the students remember your
name and gives them a chance to write it down.
- Pronounce your name
slowly and clearly. If your name is unusual or difficult to pronounce, you
may want to talk about the origin of your name.
- Talk about your
teaching experience or your motivation for becoming a teacher. Be
- Communicate your expectations. You are there to teach,
but you also are there to learn.
- Let your students know what you
expect of them. This can help motivate them to do good work.
a deep breath and go for it! You are about to embark on a wonderful
Here is one example of how to introduce
Hello, my name is Chris O'Conner. I am a student teacher. This
means that I have finished all of my college classes and I am almost ready
to become a full-time teacher. I am here so that I can practice what I've
learned in my classes. I also want to learn from you about what works and
as a student teacher:
I am a senior at the university and I've been a counselor at camp
Whattablast for the past three summers. Last year, I was a peer tutor in
French and I occasionally give swimming lessons.
Because I will be trying some new approaches, I will rely on your
feedback to let me how they are working. I want you to feel comfortable
letting me know that "today's class was really fun," or " that group
project was a waste of time." Preferably, you would let me know these
things by writing a note or talking to me before or after class. Your
comments can help guide our classroom activities.
Finally, I know that I will be spending a lot of time creating
lesson plans, grading papers, and generally preparing for each day. I
promise to put forth my best effort so that we can all get something out
of this. In return, I expect that you will all show me an honest effort
and that you will each try to do your best work. Also, I want to thank Ms.
Rivera for allowing me to teach in her classroom. Does anyone have a
This document was last updated 5/29/97 by
Copyright1996 Indiana University -
Center for Adolescent Studies, all rights reserved.
Kris Bosworth - Director | <urn:uuid:7c5e0e9d-a76f-4b82-907c-94a827b326af> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.protectiveschools.org/drugstats/tt/v3i1/intro.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391519.2/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00009-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959293 | 576 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Thomas Alva Edison
By: Melissa Ritter
A. The Early Life
Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847 to Nancy and Samuel Edison. His family was part Dutch and part British. In 1854 Edison's family settled in Port Huran, Michigan, where Edison attended school for three months. This was his only public education, although his mother continued his education. She taught him reading, writing, and arithmetic. Thomas's mother read to him from well-known English writers, like Edward Gibbon, William Shakespeare, and Charles Dickens.
When Thomas was twelve he earned a job selling newspapers and apples on the Detroit and Port Huron branch of the Grand Trunk Railroad.
Somewhere around this time, Edison's hearing started to decline. Some think that it was due to a childhood attack of scarlet fever. Edison was once said that he sometimes considered his partial deafness almost an asset, particularly when he wanted to concentrate on an experiment. But in one of his entries in his diary some years later, he wrote, I haven't heard a bird sing since I was twelve years old.”
When Edison was fifteen years old, while still working on the railroad he bought a small secondhand printing press and 300 lbs. of type. He installed the press in a baggage car and soon began producing his own newspaper called the Weekly Herald, which he printed, edited, and sold on the Grand Trunk Railroad.
B. The Family life
Thomas Edison married his first wife, Mary Stilwell, in the year of 1871. She was only 16 years old and was working in one of his companies. They married on Christmas Day of the year. They had a daughter, Marion, and two sons, Thomas Jr. and William. Mary died in 1884.
After his first wife's death in 1884, Thomas fell in love with Mina Miller, the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer. They married and had a daughter, Madeleine and two sons, Charles and Theodore.
Edison spent little if no time with his family. He focused much on his work and people reportedly seen him wearing dirty shirts and shabby working clothes. Many of his workers spoke of Thomas's true qualities like his good sense of humor, honesty, and genuine affection for his family.
C. Edison's Attitude towards work
Edison reportedly worked on his experiments with high intensity. He lived in his laboratory, sometimes getting only 4 hours of sleep per day and eating meals brought to him by his wife. His assistants knew not to disturb him and that his work was very important to him.
Before starting an experiment, Edison read and looked up all the literature on the topic to avoid repeating experiments that others had already conducted. The best illustration of Edison's working methods is his own famous statement: “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”
During Edison's lifetime, he received numerous awards and honors from all parts of the world. In 1881 he was honored with the French Legion of Honor for developing electric power distribution systems. Italy made him a Grand Officer of the Crown and he received honors from the governments of Chile, Britain, Japan, Russia, and many others. One of his most famous admirers was American businessman Henry Ford who spent several million dollars to construct a museum of industry in Dearborn, Michigan. The museum was largely a collection of Thomas's inventions. In 1929 the museum held a celebration, called Light's Golden Jubilee, to mark the 50 th anniversary of the invention of the electric light.
E. Edison's death
Thomas Alva Edison died in his home in Glenmont, on October 18, 1931. He was 84, and to this day he is buried behind his home, but was originally buried in Rosedale Cemetery in West Orange. In honor and tribute to him the United States government was considering turning off all electric current in the country for minute or two. It became apparent the operation of the great electrical distribution systems couldn't be interrupted even for a moment without taking a chance of a horrible effect. Thomas Edison was one of America's greatest inventors of all time.
Edison is known to have invented almost 1000 inventions over his lifetime. The period from 1879 to 1900, when Edison produced and perfected most of his devices, has got the name called the “Age of Edison.”
The early inventions brought Edison no financial returns. The first invention to bring him money was an improvement on the stock ticker. Edison received $40,000, which today would be worth $530,000. For the next five years Thomas spent up to 18 hours a day in his shop in Newark, New Jersey, inventing and creating different electrical devices. One important object he designed during this time was called the quadruplex, which was a highly efficient telegraph that could send four messages at a time over a telegraph wire, instead of one.
Around 1876, Edison made a laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey (the first laboratory dedicate4d to industrial research in the world). Within ten years millions of people throughout the world knew Edison as the “Wizard of Menlo Park.”
Edison's first major invention was Menlo Park was an improvement on the telephone. The telephone was created by Alexander Graham Bell, but could not operate over distances of more than 2 to 3 miles. Thomas improved the telephone after 1000's of experiments. He improved it as much that is could carry speech clearly over almost unlimited distances. This was such a major invention that it connected New York City to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a distance of about 107 miles.
Edison's most original invention would be the phonograph. He had discovered a small, thin membrane in the mouthpiece of the phone's diaphragm, which vibrated in tune with the voice. He thought that if these vibrations could somehow be recorded, so that the diaphragm could be made to vibrate in exactly the same manner at any future time, then speech, music, and other sounds could be preserved and reproduced. In a later experiment, he applied one end of the needle to the diaphragm and other end to a strip of wax paper. He then pulled the paper along underneath the needle while repeatedly shouted, “Hello!” The needle then created grooves in the paper. When the paper was again pulled along underneath the needle, the needle followed the grooves it had formed earlier and pushed against the diaphragm, making the diaphragm reproduce Edison's sounds. This first experiment marked the beginning of the phonograph.
Thomas Edison also set out to develop an incandescent lamp, which would produce light by heating a wire until it glowed brightly.
Edison developed detail plans for an entire distribution system for electric power. He realized that widespread use of electric light bulbs would require an efficient system of delivering electricity to businesses and homes.
In 1893 Thomas built the first motion picture studio. It had a hinged roof that could be raised to admit sunlight. The whole building was mounted on a pivot and could swing around to follow the sun. He could produce many one- minute films.
Did Edison use Morse code to propose to his second wife?
In fact, yes he did. He taught Mina Miller Morse code so they could have secret conversations when their family was around. It was more of a type of sign language, tapping it on each others hand.
Did Edison have a Tattoo?
Yes, Edison had a tattoo, but nothing to what today's tattoos look like. Thomas had 5 dots tattooed on his left forearm, like 5 dots on the face of a dice.
What was Edison worth when he died?
When Thomas died in 1931, his estate was worth about $12 million, but most of that wasn't cash. Most of it was buildings and equipment in his laboratories and factories.
Did they save Edison's last breathe in a bottle when he died?
No, not really. There were a couple of empty bottles lying near the bed of Edison when he died. He son Charles had them sealed and gave them to close friends like Henry Ford and Edison's doctor. They can be seen on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
Was Edison a genius?
Well, Life Magazine claimed he was. In 1997 they named Edison the Man of the Millennium. He was named over important people such as Columbus, Galileo, and DaVinci.
Did the clock in Edison's office stop the moment he died?
Most likely not. It is more of a myth. There was a song written long before Edison died called, “The Grandfather Clock” that could be the source to this myth. | <urn:uuid:1159a653-f47e-435a-b211-b742603908d6> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.stegen.k12.mo.us/tchrpges/sghs/aengelmann/EdisonThomasAlva2.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403823.74/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00200-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985136 | 1,792 | 3.171875 | 3 |
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Find the latest in professional publications, learn new techniques and strategies, and find out how you can connect with other literacy professionals.
Teacher Resources by Grade
|1st - 2nd||3rd - 4th|
|5th - 6th||7th - 8th|
|9th - 10th||11th - 12th|
Using QARs to Develop Comprehension and Reflective Reading Habits
|Grades||6 – 8|
|Lesson Plan Type||Recurring Lesson|
|Estimated Time||Three 40-minute sessions|
Lawrenceville, New Jersey
MATERIALS AND TECHNOLOGY
- Individual copies of Richard Peck's "A One-Woman Crime Wave" from A Long Way From Chicago (Dial Books for Young Readers, 1998)
- Markers and construction paper
- Multiple computers with Internet access and Adobe Acrobat Reader
- Question-Answer Relationships handout
- QAR rubric
- Sample questions for Daniel's Ride
- Reading Stop Points handout
|1.||For an introduction to the QAR strategy, use the lesson, "Guided Comprehension: Self-Questioning Using Question-Answer Relationships."
|2.||Ensure computer access to the Internet and Adobe Acrobat Reader, which can be downloaded for free if necessary. Each student should sit at a computer, but if this is not feasible, group several students around one computer.
|3.||Review the story Daniel's Ride by Michael Perry at the International Children's Digital Library. Type in the book title and click "search" to access this text. The International Children's Digital Library features full-page scans of hundreds of children's books, so other texts can easily be substituted for Daniel's Ride. The text appears quite small at first, so click the zoom button (magnifying glass icon) to get a better view.
|4.||Photocopy enough copies of the Question-Answer Relationships and Reading Stop Points handouts for the entire class.
|5.||Develop models for each of the four QAR question types that correspond to the text you will be using. Sample questions for Daniel's Ride are provided.
|6.||Gather large construction paper and markers, and make individual copies of "A One-Woman Crime Wave" by Richard Peck.| | <urn:uuid:d01c5a50-87dd-4673-bd27-c2dd6bb5c073> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/using-qars-develop-comprehension-232.html?tab=3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397562.76/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00070-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.832217 | 540 | 3.296875 | 3 |
Known by their emblem, a sea-green ribbon, the Levellers anticipated the philosophical ideas of the American Revolution in many respects. Their philosophy, expressed in a pamphlet by Lilburne, The Foundations of Freedom, or an Agreement of the People, was presented to Parliament in 1649. The philosophy had three principal tenets: the existence of certain inalterable rights of man beyond the jurisdiction of any government; the idea that governmental authority derived from the people; and the doctrine of separation of powers, directed especially against the contention that the Law makers should be Law executors. The Levellers advocated a representative assembly to meet biannually, based on a redistribution of seats according to density of population, and with the franchise extending to all Englishmen 21 years of age or over and wealthy enough to be "housekeepers". They also urged abolition of capital punishment for all crimes except murder. The Levellers are sometimes confused with the Diggers, a strongly religious and pacifist group that advocated the abolition of private ownership of land.
"Levellers," Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1994 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation.
There are several links on the internet which can provide more information.
In April 1649 a band of about 40 Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard, began to dig uncultivated common land on Saint George's Hill in Cobham, Surrey. They worked for a week and erected tents for dwellings; as they prepared to cultivate a second hill, they were dispersed by government troops. Everard and Winstanley were arrested, tried, and sentenced to pay large fines. Despite government opposition to the experiment, the Cobham colony lasted until 1651. The Diggers founded other colonies, none of which endured.
Winstanley wrote several pamphlets explaining the principles of the Diggers. Although he was devoutly Christian, he was against organized religion and the clergy, claiming that they supported the class structure of society. His last work, The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652),explains his theory of a social system founded on communistic principles. The Digger movement was one of the influences leading to the development of 19th-century radical thought in Great Britain and of modern socialism.
"Diggers," Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1994 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation. | <urn:uuid:820fd392-0f4a-441e-aecc-2e03aef2adc4> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://minkeynet.net/~pfleming/lvlrs/lvlrs.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398869.97/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00124-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96146 | 506 | 3.375 | 3 |
nevirapine (generic name)
It is used with other medicines to treat HIV
(ne VYE ra peen)
Table of Contents
Top Learning Centers(Recursos en Español)
What is this medicine?NEVIRAPINE (ne VYE ra peen) is an antiretroviral medicine. It is used with other medicines to treat HIV. This medicine is not a cure for HIV. It will not stop the spread of HIV to others.
What should I tell my health care provider before I take this medicine?They need to know if you have any of these conditions:
How should I use this medicine?Take this medicine by mouth with a glass of water. Follow the directions on the prescription label. You may take this medicine with or without food. Shake gently before using. It is best to use an oral dosing syringe to measure and give this medicine. This is very important for doses of 5 ml or less. If a dosing cup is used, take the medicine, then rinse the cup with water and drink the rinse to make sure you get the whole dose. Do not use a household spoon to measure the dose. Household spoons are not accurate. Take your medicine at regular intervals. Do not take your medicine more often than directed. For your anti-HIV therapy to work as well as possible, take each dose exactly as prescribed. Do not skip doses or stop your medicine even if you feel better. Skipping doses may make the HIV virus resistant to this medicine and other medicines. Do not stop taking except on your doctor's advice.
A special MedGuide will be given to you by the pharmacist with each prescription and refill. Be sure to read this information carefully each time.
Talk to your pediatrician regarding the use of this medicine in children. While this drug may be prescribed for children as young as 15 days old for selected conditions, precautions do apply.
What if I miss a dose?If you miss a dose, take it as soon as you can. If it is almost time for your next dose, take only that dose. Do not take double or extra doses.
What may interact with this medicine?Do not take this medicine with any of the following medications:
This medicine may also interact with the following medications: | <urn:uuid:8a420300-8f63-48ae-aaf9-dac59aaf3a6b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://www.aarpmedicareplans.com/goldcontent/nevirapine-1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783408840.13/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155008-00006-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921831 | 473 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Electric Power >> Energized vs. Deenergized Work
Energized vs. Deenergized Work
Many electrical lines, circuits, and systems are worked on while energized. This is often because the system loading or its configuration, or both, makes it impossible to deenergize the system, or because continuity of customer service must be maintained. However, some work can only be done with the system deenergized, such as splicing underground cable or work inside a boiler. Most electric work can be done safely while energized using special techniques and equipment that have been developed over the years.
Merely opening a switch or closing a valve does not satisfy the requirements for treating a system as deenergized. A system is not properly deenergized until all of the hazardous energy control requirements in 1910.269(d) for generation installations or 1910.269(m) for transmission and distribution lines and equipment have been met and the system is properly grounded per 1910.269(n). Any system not meeting these requirements must be worked on as if it were energized.
Minimum Approach Distances (MAD)
Hazardous Energy Control
Disabling of Reclosers and Remotely Operated Devices
Live Line/Bare Hand Work
Grounding for Employee Protection
Insulating Gloves and Sleeves
Insulating Protective Equipment | <urn:uuid:a9a5041a-1a0f-4192-b209-e702c1d5143c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://osha.gov/SLTC/etools/electric_power/energized_deenergized.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783408840.13/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155008-00134-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936622 | 282 | 3.109375 | 3 |
Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition
The New Helen (Author: Oscar Wilde)
- 1] Where hast thou been since round the walls of Troy
2] The sons of God fought in that great emprise?
3] Why dost thou walk our common earth again?
4] Hast thou forgotten that impassioned boy,
5] His purple galley, and his Tyrian men,
6] And treacherous Aphrodite's mocking eyes?
7] For surely it was thou, who, like a star
8] Hung in the silver silence of the night,
9] Didst lure the Old World's chivalry and might
10] Into the clamorous crimson waves of war!
- 11] Or didst thou rule the fire-laden moon?
12] In amorous Sidon was thy temple built
13] Over the light and laughter of the sea?
14] Where, behind lattice scarlet-wrought and gilt,
15] Some brown-limbed girl did weave thee tapestry
16] All through the waste and wearied hours of noon;
17] Till her wan cheek with flame of passion burned,
18] And she rose up the sea-washed lips to kiss
19] Of some glad Cyprian sailor, safe returned
20] From Calpé and the cliffs of Herakles!
- 21] No! thou art Helen, and none other one!
22] It was for thee that young Sarpedôn died,
23] And Memnôn's manhood was untimely spent;
24] It was for thee gold-crested Hector tried
25] With Thetis' child that evil race to run,
26] In the last year of thy beleaguerment;
27] Ay! even now the glory of thy fame
28] Burns in those fields of trampled asphodel,
29] Where the high lords whom Ilion knew so well
30] Clash ghostly shields, and call upon thy name.
- 31] Where hast thou been? in that enchanted land
32] Whose slumbering vales forlorn Calypso knew,
33] Where never mower rose to greet the day
34] But all unswathed the trammelling grasses grew,
35] And the sad shepherd saw the tall corn stand
36] Till summer's red had changed to withered grey?
37] Didst thou lie there by some Lethæan stream
38] Deep brooding on thine ancient memory,
39] The crash of broken spears, the fiery gleam
40] From shivered helm, the Grecian battle-cry?
- 41] Nay, thou wert hidden in that hollow hill
42] With one who is forgotten utterly,
43] That discrowned Queen men call the Erycine;
44] Hidden away that never mightst thou see
45] The face of Her, before whose mouldering shrine
46] To-day at Rome the silent nations kneel;
47] Who gat from Love no joyous gladdening,
48] But only Love's intolerable pain,
49] Only a sword to pierce her heart in twain,
50] Only the bitterness of child-bearing.
- 51] The lotus-leaves which heal the wounds of Death
52] Lie in thy hand; O, be thou kind to me,
53] While yet I know the summer of my days;
54] For hardly can my tremulous lips draw breath
55] To fill the silver trumpet with thy praise,
56] So bowed am I before thy mystery;
57] So bowed and broken on Love's terrible wheel,
58] That I have lost all hope and heart to sing,
59] Yet care I not what ruin time may bring
60] If in thy temple thou wilt let me kneel.
- 61] Alas, alas, thou wilt not tarry here,
62] But, like that bird, the servant of the sun,
63] Who flies before the northwind and the night,
64] So wilt thou fly our evil land and drear,
65] Back to the tower of thine old delight,
66] And the red lips of young Euphorion;
67] Nor shall I ever see thy face again,
68] But in this poisonous garden must I stay,
69] Crowning my brows with the thorn-crown of pain,
70] Till all my loveless life shall pass away.
- 71] O Helen! Helen! Helen! yet a while,
72] Yet for a little while, O, tarry here,
73] Till the dawn cometh and the shadows flee!
74] For in the gladsome sunlight of thy smile
75] Of heaven or hell I have no thought or fear,
76] Seeing I know no other god but thee:
77] No other god save him, before whose feet
78] In nets of gold the tired planets move,
79] The incarnate spirit of spiritual love
80] Who in thy body holds his joyous seat.
- 81] Thou wert not born as common women are!
82] But, girt with silver splendour of the foam,
83] Didst from the depths of sapphire seas arise!
84] And at thy coming some immortal star,
85] Bearded with flame, blazed in the Eastern skies,
86] And waked the shepherds on thine island-home.
87] Thou shalt not die: no asps of Egypt creep
88] Close at thy heels to taint the delicate air;
89] No sullen-blooming poppies stain thy hair,
90] Those scarlet heralds of eternal sleep.
- 91] Lily of love, pure and inviolate!
92] Tower of ivory! red rose of fire!
93] Thou hast come down our darkness to illume:
94] For we, close-caught in the wide nets of Fate,
95] Wearied with waiting for the World's Desire,
96] Aimlessly wandered in the house of gloom,
97] Aimlessly sought some slumberous anodyne
98] For wasted lives, for lingering wretchedness,
99] Till we beheld thy re-arisen shrine,
100] And the white glory of thy loveliness. | <urn:uuid:120eee3c-8e01-4cb9-ba18-befb0e6aee33> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://celt.ucc.ie/published/E850003-049/text001.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394414.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00169-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.871291 | 1,384 | 2.734375 | 3 |
"The History of Science has suffered greatly from the use by teachers of second-hand material, and the consequent obliteration of the circumstances and the intellectual atmosphere in which the great discoveries of the past were made. A first-hand study is always instructive, and often . . . full of surprises."Ronald A. Fisher, 1955
Since R. A. Fisher (1890-1962) the sciences that have put statistical significance at their centers have misused it. They have lost interest in estimating and testing for the actual effects of drugs or fertilizers or economic policies. The big problem began when Fisher ignored the size-matters/how-much question central to a statistical test invented by William Sealy Gosset (1876-1937), so-called "Student's t." Fisher substituted for it a qualitative question concerning the "existence" of an effect, by which Fisher meant "low sampling error by an arbitrary standard of variance." Forgetting after Fisher what is known in statistics as a "minimax strategy," or other "loss function," many sciences have fallen into a sizeless stare. They seek sampling precision only. And they end by asserting that sampling precision just is oomph, magnitude, practical significance. The minke and sperm whales of Antarctica and the users and makers of Vioxx are some of the recent victims of this bizarre ritual.
Crossing frantically a busy street to save your child from certain death is a good gamble. Crossing frantically to get another mustard packet for your hot dog is not. The size of the potential loss if you don't hurry to save your child is larger, most will agree, than the potential loss if you don't get the mustard. But a majority of scientists in economics, medicine, and other statistical fields appear not to grasp the difference. If they have been trained in exclusively Fisherian methods (and nearly all of them have) they look only for a probability of success in the crossing—the existence of a probability of success better than .99 or .95 or .90, and this within the restricted frame of sampling—ignoring in any spiritual or financial currency the value of the prize and the expected cost of pursuing it. In the life and human sciences a majority of scientists look at the world with what we have dubbed "the sizeless stare of statistical significance."
The sizeless scientists act as if they believe the size of an effect does not matter. In their hearts they do care about size, magnitude, oomph. But strangely they don't measure it. They substitute "significance" measured in Fisher's way. Then they take the substitution a step further by limiting their concern for error to errors in sampling only. And then they take it a step further still, reducing all errors in sampling to one kind of error—that of excessive skepticism, "Type I error." Their main line of defense for this surprising and unscientific procedure is that, after all, "statistical significance," which they have calculated, is "objective." But so too are the digits in the New York City telephone directory, objective, or the spins of a roulette wheel. These are no more relevant to the task of finding out the sizes and properties of viruses or star clusters or investment rates of return than is statistical significance. In short, statistical scientists after Fisher neither test nor estimate, really, truly. They "testimate."
The most popular test was invented, we've noted, by Gosset, better known by his penname of "Student," a chemist and brewer at Guinness in Dublin. Gosset didn't think his test was very important to his main goal, which was of course brewing a good beer at a good price. The test, Gosset warned right from the beginning, does not deal with substantive importance. It does not begin to measure what Gosset called "real error" and "pecuniary advantage," two terms worth reviving in current statistical practice. But Karl Pearson and especially the amazing Ronald Fisher didn't listen. In two great books written and revised during the 1920s and 1930s, Fisher imposed a Rule of Two: if a result departs from an assumed hypothesis by two or more standard deviations of its own sampling variation, regardless of the size of the prize and the expected cost of going for it, then it is to be called a "significant" scientific finding. If not, not. Fisher told the subjectivity-phobic sciences that if they wanted to raise their studies "to the rank of sciences" they must employ his Rule. He later urged them to ignore the size-matters/how-much approaches of Gosset, Neyman, Egon Pearson, Wald, Jeffreys, Deming, Shewhart, and Savage. Most statistical scientists listened to Fisher.
We ourselves in our home field of economics were long enchanted by Fisherian significance and the Rule of Two. But at length we came to wonder why the correlation of prices at home with prices abroad must be "within two standard deviations of 1.0 in the sample" before one could speak about the integration of world markets. And we came to think it strange that the U. S. Department of Labor refused to discuss black teenage unemployment rates of 30 or 40% because they were, by Fisher's circumscribed definition, "insignificant." After being told repeatedly, if implausibly, that such mistakes in the use of Gosset's test were not common in economics, we developed in the 1990s a questionnaire to test for economic as against statistical significance. We applied it to the behavior of our tribe during the 1980s.
We did not study the scientific writings of amateurs. On the contrary, we studied the American Economic Review, a leading journal of economics. With questionnaire in hand we read every full-length article it published that used a test of statistical significance, January 1980 to December 1989. As we expected, in the 1980s more than 70% of the articles made the significant mistake of R. A. Fisher.
We published our paper in 1996. Some of our colleagues replied, "In the old days [of the 1980s] people made that mistake; but [in the 1990s] we modern sophisticates do not." So in 2004 we published a follow-up study, reading all the articles in the AER in the next decade, the 1990s. Sadly, our colleagues were again mistaken. Since the 1980s the practice in important respects got worse, not better. About 80% of the articles made the mistaken Fisherian substitution, failing to examine the magnitudes of their results. And less than 10% showed full concern for oomph. In a leading journal of economics, in other words, nine out of ten articles in the 1990s acted as if size doesn't matter for deciding whether a number is big or small, whether an effect is big or small enough to matter. The significance asterisk, the flickering star of *, has become a totem of economic belief.
Does globalization hurt the poor, does the minimum wage increase unemployment, does world money cause inflation, does public welfare undermine self-reliance? Such scientific questions are always matters of economic significance. How much hurt, increase, cause, undermining? Size matters. Oomph is what we seek. But that is not what is found by the statistical methods of modern economics.
Sizeless economic research has produced mistaken findings about purchasing power parity, unemployment programs, monetary policy, rational addiction, and the minimum wage. In truth, it has vitiated most econometric finding since the 1920s and virtually all of them since the significance error was institutionalized in the 1940s. The conclusions of Fisherian studies might occasionally be correct. But only by accident.
New assistant professors are not to blame. Look rather at the report card on their teachers and editors and referees— notwithstanding cries of anguish from the Savages, Zellners, Grangers, and Leamers of the economics profession. Economists received a quiet warning by F. Y. Edgeworth in 1885—too quiet, it seems—that sampling precision is not the same as oomph. They ignored it and have ignored other warnings, too.
Did other fields, such as psychology, do the same? Yes. In 1919 Edwin Boring warned his fellow psychologists about confusing so-called statistical with actual significance. Boring was a famous experimentalist at Harvard. But during his lectures on scientific inference his colleagues appear to have dozed off. Fisher's 5% philosophy was eventually codified by the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, dictating an erroneous method worldwide to thousands of academic journals in psychology, education, and related sciences, including forensics.
"Power" is a neglected statistical offset to the "first kind of error" of null-hypothesis significance testing. Power assigns a likelihood to the "second kind of error," that of undue gullibility. The leading journals of psychometrics have had their power examined by insiders to the field. The power of most psychological science in the Age of Fisher turns out to have been embarrassingly low or, in more than a few cases, spuriously "high"—as was found in a 70,000-observation examination of the matter. Like economists the psychologists developed a fetish for testimation, and wandered away from powerful measures of oomph.
Psychologists and economists have always said that people are "Bayesian learners" or "Neyman-Pearson signal detectors." We learn by doing and by staying alert to the signals. But when psychologists and others propose to test those very hypotheses they use Fisher's Rule of Two. That is, they erase their own learning and power to detect the signal. They seek a foundation in a Popperian falsificationism long known to be philosophically dubious. What in logic is called the "fallacy of the transposed conditional" has grossly misled psychology and other sizeless sciences. An example is the over-diagnosis of schizophrenia.
We found that medicine and epidemiology, too, are doing damage with Student's t —more in human terms perhaps than are economics and psychology. The scale along which one would measure oomph is very clear in medicine: life or death. Cardiovascular epidemiology, to take one example, combines with gusto the fallacy of the transposed conditional and the sizeless stare of statistical significance. Your mother, with her weak heart, needs to know the oomph of a treatment. Medical testimators aren't saying.
Some medical editors have battled against the 5% philosophy. But even the New England Journal of Medicine could not lead medical research back to William Sealy Gosset and the promised land of real science. Neither could the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, though covering worldwide hundreds of journals. Kenneth Rothman, the founder of Epidemiology, forced change in his one journal. But only his journal. Decades ago a sensible few in education, ecology, and sociology initiated a "significance test controversy." But grantors, journal referees, and tenure committees in the statistical sciences had faith that probability spaces can judge—the "judgment" merely that p < .05 is "better" for variable X than p < .11 for variable Y. It's not. It depends on the oomph of X and Y.
The upshot is that because of Fisher's Standard Error you are being given dangerous medicines, and are being denied the best medicines. The Centers for Disease Control is infected with p-values, in a grant for example to study drug use in Atlanta. Public health has been infected, too. An outbreak of salmonella in South Carolina was studied using significance tests. In consequence a good deal of the outbreak was ignored. In 1995 a Cancer Trialists' Collaborative Group came to a rare consensus on effect size: ten different studies agreed that a certain drug for treating prostate cancer can increase patient survival by 12%. An eleventh study published in the New England Journal dismissed the drug. The dismissal was based not on effect size bounded by confidence intervals based on what Gosset called "real" error but on a single p-value only, indicating, the Fisherian authors believed, "no clinically meaningful improvement" in survival.
The history of this persistent but mistaken practice is a social study of science. In 1885 an eccentric and brilliant Oxford don, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, coined the very term "significance." Edgeworth was prolific in science and philosophy, but was especially interested in watching bees and wasps. In measuring their behavioral differences, though, he focused on the sizes and meanings of the differences. He never depended on statistical significance.
By contrast, Edgeworth's younger colleague in London, the great and powerful Karl Pearson, used "significance" very heavily indeed. As such things were defined in 1900 Pearson was an advanced thinker—for example, he was an imperialist and a racist, and one of the founding fathers of neo-positivism and of eugenics. Seeking to resolve a tension between passion and science, ethics and rationality, Pearson mistook "significance" for "revelations about the objective world." In 1901 he believed 1.5 to 3 standard deviations were "definitely significant." By 1906, he tried to codify the sizeless stare with a Rule of Three, and tried to teach it to Gosset.
Pearson's journal, Biometrika (1901- ), was for decades a major nest for the significance mistake. An article on the brooding habits of the cuckoo bird, published in the inaugural volume, shows the sizeless stare at its beginnings.
Gosset revolutionized statistics in 1908 with two papers published in this same Pearson's journal, "The Probable Error of a Mean" and "The Probable Error of a Correlation Coefficient." Gosset also independently invented Monte Carlo analysis and the economic design of experiments. He conceived in 1926 the ideas if not the words of "power" and "loss," which he gave to Egon Pearson and Jerzy Neyman to complete. Yet most statistical workers know nothing about Gosset. He was exceptionally humble, kindly to other scientists, a good father and husband, altogether a paragon. As suits an amiable worker bee, he planted edible berries, blew a penny whistle, carved entire, functioning fishing boats with a penknife, and—though a great scientist—was for 38 years a business man brewing Guinness. Gosset always wanted to answer the How Much question. Guinness needed to know. Karl Pearson couldn't understand.
The tragedy in the fable arose from Gosset the bee losing out to R. A. Fisher, the wasp. All agree that Fisher was a genius. Richard Dawkins calls him "the greatest of Darwin's successors." But Fisher was a genius at a certain kind of academic rhetoric and politics as much as at mathematical statistics and genetics. His ascent came at a cost to science—and to Gosset
Fisher asked Gosset to calculate Gosset's tables of t for him, gratis. He then took Gosset's tables, copyrighted them for himself, and in the journal Metron and in his Statistical Methods for Research Workers, later to be published in thirteen editions and more than a half-dozen languages, he promoted his own circumscribed version of Gosset's test. The new assignment of authorship and the faux machinery for science were spread by disciples and by Fisher himself to America and beyond. For decades Harold Hotelling, an important statistician and economist, enthusiastically carried the Fisherian flag. P. C. Mahalanobis, the great Indian scientist, was spellbound.
R. A. Fisher was a necessary condition for the standard error of regressions. No Fisher, no lasting error. But for null hypothesis significance testing to persist in the face of its logical and practical difficulties, something else must be operating. Perhaps it is what Thorstein Veblen called "trained incapacity," to which might be added what Robert Merton called the "bureaucratization of knowledge" and what Friedrich Hayek called the "scientistic prejudice." We suggest that the sizeless sciences need to reform their scientistic bureaucracies.
What, then? Get back to size in science, and to "real error" seriously considered. It is more difficult than Fisherian procedures, and cannot be reduced to mechanical procedures. How big is big is a necessary question in any science, and has no answer independent of the conversation of scientists. But it has the merit at least of being relevant to science, business, and life. The Fisherian procedures are not.
The implied reader of the book is a significance tester, the keeper of numerical things. We want to persuade you of one claim: that William Sealy Gosset (1876-1937)—aka "Student" of the Student's t-test—was right, and that his difficult friend, Ronald A. Fisher, though a genius, was wrong. Fit is not the same thing as importance. Statistical significance is not the same thing as scientific importance. R2, t-statistic, F-test, and all the more sophisticated versions of them in time series and the most advanced statistics are misleading, at best.
No working scientist today knows much about Gosset, a brewer of Guinness stout and the inventor of a good deal of modern statistics. The scruffy little Gosset, with his tall leather boots and a rucksack on his back, is the heroic underdog in our story. Gosset, we claim, was a great scientist. He took an economic approach to the logic of uncertainty. For over two decades he quietly tried to educate Fisher. But Fisher, our flawed villain, erased from Gosset's inventions the consciously economic element. We want to bring it back.
We lament what could have been in statistical sciences if only Fisher had cared to understand the full import of Gosset's insights. Or if only Egon Pearson had had the forceful personality of his father, Karl. Or if only Gosset had been a professor and not a business man, and had been positioned to offset the intellectual capital of Fisher.
But we don't consider the great if mistaken Fisher and his intellectual descendents our enemies. We have learned a great deal from Fisher and his followers, and still do, as many have. We hope you, oh significance tester, will read the book optimistically—with a sense of how "real" significance can transform your science. Biometricians who study AIDS and economists who study growth policy in poor countries are causing damage with a broken statistical instrument. But wait: consider the progress we can make if we fix the instrument.
Can so many scientists have been wrong over the eighty years since 1925? Unhappily, yes. The mainstream in science, as any scientist will tell you, is often wrong. Otherwise, come to think of it, science would be complete. Few scientists would make that claim. Statistical significance is surely not the only error in modern science, though it has been we will show an exceptionally damaging one. Scientists are often tardy in fixing basic flaws in their sciences, despite the presence of better alternatives. Think of the half century it took American geologists to recognize the truth of drifting continents, a theory proposed in 1915 by—of all eminently ignorable people—a German meteorologist. Scientists, after all, are human. What Nietzsche called the "twilight of the idols," the fear of losing a powerful symbol or god or technology, haunts us all.
In the statistical fields such as economics, psychology, sociology, medicine the idol is the test of significance. The alternative, Gossetian way is a uniformly more powerful test, but has been largely ignored. Unlike the Fisherian idol, Gosset's approach is a rational guide for decision-making, and easy to understand. But it has been resisted now for eighty years.
Our book also addresses implied readers outside the statistical fields themselves, such as intellectual historians and philosophers of science. The history and philosophy of applied statistics took a wrong turn in the 1920s. In an admittedly sketchy way—Ziliak himself is working on a book centered on Gosset—we explore the philosophy and tell the history here. We found that the recent historians of statistics, whom we honor in other matters, have not gotten around to Gosset. The historiography of "significance" is still being importantly shaped by R. A. Fisher himself, four decades beyond the grave. It is known among sophisticates that Fisher took pains to historicize his prejudices about statistical methods. Yet his history gave little credit to other people, and none to those who in the 1930s developed a decision-theoretic alternative to the Fisherian routine. Since the 1940s most statistical theorists, particularly at the advanced level, do not mention Gosset. With the notable exception of Donald MacKenzie, a sociologist and historian of science, scholars have not much examined Gosset's published works. And it appears that no one besides the ever-careful Egon S. Pearson (1895-1980) has looked very far into the Gosset archives—and that was in 1937-1939, for the purpose of an obituary.
The evidence on the Gosset-Fisher relationship that Ziliak found in the archives is startling. In brief, Gosset got scooped. Fisher's victory over Gosset has been so successful and yet so invisible that a 2006 publication of anti-Fisherian statistics makes the usual mistake, effectively equating Fisher's approach with that of Gosset's (Howson and Urbach 2006, p. 133). In truth it was Gosset, in 1905, not Neyman, in 1938, who gave "the first emphasis of the behavioralistic outlook in statistics" (Savage 1954, p. 159).
Only slowly did we realize how widespread the standard error had become in sciences other than our home field of economics. Some time passed before we systematically looked into them. Thus the broader intervention here. We couldn't get into every science or subfield. And additional work remains of course to be done on significance and other problems of testing and estimation. Some readers, for example, have asked us to wade in on the dual problems of specification error and causality. We reply that we agree—these are important issues—but we couldn't do justice to them here.
But we think the methodological overlaps in education and psychology, economics and sociology, agriculture and biology, economics and epidemiology are sufficiently large, and the inheritance in them of Fisherian methods sufficiently deep, that our book can shed light on all the t-testing sciences. We were alarmed and dismayed to discover, for example, that supreme courts in the U. S., state and Federal, have started to decide cases on the basis of Fisher's arbitrary test. The law is becoming infected with Fisher. Time to speak up.
We invite also a general and non-technical reader to the discussion, too. If he starts at the beginning and reads through Chapter 3 he will get the main point—that oomph, the difference a treatment makes, dominates precision. The extended but simple "diet pill example" in Chapter 3 will equip him with the essential logic, and with the replies he'll need to stay in the conversation. Chapter 17 through to the end of the book provides our brief history of the problem, and a sketch of a solution.
Readers may find it strange that two historical economists such as we have intruded on the theory, history, philosophy, sociology, and practice of hypothesis testing in the sciences. We are not professional statisticians, and are only amateur historians and philosophers of science. Yet economists have played a role in the logic, philosophy, and dissemination of testing, estimation, and error analysis in all of the sciences, from Mill through Friedman to Heckman. Gosset himself, we've noted, was a business man, and the inventor of an economic approach to uncertainty. Keynes wrote A Treatise on Probability (1921), an important if somewhat neglected book on the history and foundations of probability theory.
Advanced empirical economics, which we've endured, taught, and written about for years, has become an exercise in hypothesis testing, and is broken. We're saying here that the brokenness extends to many other quantitative sciences—though notably—we could say significantly—not to physics and chemistry and geology. We don't claim to understand fully the sciences we survey. But we do understand their unhappy statistical rhetoric. It needs to change. | <urn:uuid:877387ed-34a2-4803-bdcc-c32821624ec0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/articles/stats/preface_ziliak.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393997.50/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00174-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959829 | 5,065 | 2.5625 | 3 |
THE MINERAL MUSCOVITE
- Chemistry: KAl2(AlSi3O10)(F, OH)2, Potassium aluminum silicate hydroxide fluoride.
- Class: Silicates
- Subclass: Phyllosilicates
- Group: Micas
- Uses: heat and electrical insulator for industrial purposes.
Muscovite is a common rock forming mineral and is found in igneous, metamorphic and detrital sedimentary rocks.
Muscovite has a layered structure of aluminum silicate sheets weakly bonded together by layers of potassium ions.
These potassium ion layers produce the perfect cleavage of muscovite.
Although it has such easy cleavage, the cleavage sheets are quite durable and are often found in sands that have undergone much erosion and transport that would have destroyed most other minerals.
The sheets of muscovite also have high heat and electrical insulating properties and are used to make many electical components.
Muscovite sheets were used for kitchen oven windows before synthetic materials replaced them.
Muscovite is not often valuable as a mineral specimen but is often associated with other minerals of extrodinary beauty and value.
Some very nice muscovite crystals accompany such valuable minerals as tourmaline, topaz, beryl, almandine and others.
A rare twin variety from Brazil forms yellow five pointed stars and is called "Star Muscovite".
A deep green variety is called fuchsite and is colored by chromium inpurities.
- Color is white, silver, yellow, green and brown.
- Luster is vitreous to pearly.
- Transparency crystals are transparent to translucent.
- Crystal System is monoclinic; 2/m
- Crystal Habits include tabular crystals with a prominant pinacoid termination.
Muscovites four prism faces form diamond shaped "books" and if modified by another pinacoid they form pseudo-hexagonal crystal "books".
The sides of the crystal often tend to tapper.
Also as lamellar rock forming masses and small flakes in detrital matterial.
Twinned crystals can form flat five pointed stars.
- Cleavage is perfect in one direction producing thin sheets or flakes.
- Fracture is not readily observed due to cleavage but is uneven.
- Hardness is 2 - 2.5.
- Specific Gravity is approximately 2.8 (average)
- Streak is white.
- Associated Minerals are quartz, feldspars, beryl and tourmalines.
- Other Characteristics: cleavage sheets are flexible and elastic, meaning they can be bent and will flex back to original shape.
- Notable Occurrences include India, Pakistan, Brazil and many USA locallities.
- Best Field Indicators are crystal habit, cleavage, elastic sheets, color and associations. | <urn:uuid:93794fe1-f8cd-4a98-8a26-5e6e6ef78bda> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.galleries.com/Muscovite | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399117.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00089-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914697 | 612 | 3.734375 | 4 |
O’Sullivan, M. & Benham-Hutchins, M. (October 2011). TRUTHFUL: A Method to Assist Patients with Evaluating Health Information on the Internet. Online Journal of Nursing Informatics (OJNI), 15, (3). Available at http://ojni.org/issues/?p=893
The World Wide Web has fast become a primary repository for health information for the medically naïve yet technically savvy healthcare consumer. Nurses can and should acknowledge the genuine value of the Web as a teaching tool by providing responsible guidance through the overwhelming maze of information it presents. This article embraces the theme of delivering quality health information on the internet by using the truthful website evaluation method and demonstrates the use of this acronym to evaluate a popular health information website from the American Association of Sleep Apnea. In the role of health care advocate, nurses can responsibly inspire the consumer to seek personal answers and empowerment as well as capitalize on the opportunities for interpersonal conversations that questions from these queries may generate.
The image of ‘patient education’ as a one on one, question and answer conversation between provider and patient is fast becoming a thing of the past. Knowledge of health and wellness within the lay population has become more of an independent study. Regardless of the setting, a living room sofa, an office examination table or a hospital bed, when or if a nurse is lucky enough to secure thirty minutes to interact with a client or his/her family, the encounter becomes more of a fact finding mission than an educational enterprise. It comes as no surprise to any health care provider that the computer literacy of our clientele is transforming as well. The ‘right here, right now’ culture of today no longer expects more than just education; it demands empowerment. One solution is to maximizing every health care educational opportunity is to incorporate instantaneous educational opportunities of the World Wide Web.
In a matter of seconds, any Web query produces easily thousands of websites which may or may not encompass the intent of the original search. The nurse’s challenge is twofold: first, to be able to responsibly review and recommend specialty websites to the client and second, to engage the hi-tech yet commonly health illiterate consumer to safely explore the Web for their personal health issues at their own pace. To this end, this article embraces the theme of delivering education via an acronym. This evaluation method is easy for the nurse to deliver and easy for the client to engage because it is succinct and direct. The acronym chosen is truthful.
T – Technical characteristics of the webpage (Fox, 2009)
R – Rated and reviewed website?
(http://www.medlineplus.gov) produced by the National Library of Medicine, or Healthfinder ® (http://www.healthfinder.gov) from the US Department of Health and Human Services. (Medical Library Association, 2009)
U – What is your understanding of page’s purpose? (Agency For Health Care Policy And Research, 1999)
T – Treatments recommended
H – Have you seen this information before? (Medical Library Association)
F – Funding origins
U – All about YOU (National Library of Medicine & National Institutes of Health)
L – Legitimacy of the sources (Fox, 2009)
As an example, the website www.sleepapnea.org has been chosen to review using the “TRUTHFUL” medical information website evaluation method. This website originates from the American Association of Sleep Apnea (AASA), founded in 1990, “a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public about sleep apnea and to serving people with this common disorder.” (American Association of Sleep Apnea, 2008, About the ASAA, para.1). The website is intended for multiple audiences: patients, parents, practitioners and the media. This intention of this exercise is to represent the website as being evaluated from a patient’s perspective.
T – Technical: The webpage is organized, easy to read and use. All links work from the blogs to chat rooms to the YouTube videos to research. Most of the basic obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) information is dated 1999-2007; however, all of the research, blogs, chat rooms, surgical options, and video/book resources are extremely current. The general information presented has no posting date on it.
R – Reviewed: This site has been reviewed by the Health on the Network (HON), Medical Matrix and Healthfinder® networks. The site is not HON certified and has received a one out of five stars rating from the Medical Matrix website.
U – Purpose: The following statement was identified within the “about the ASAA” tab: “The ASAA promotes education and awareness… voluntary mutual support groups, research, and continuous improvement in care.” (American Association of Sleep Apnea, 2008, About the ASAA, para. 2).
T – Treatments: Multiple non-invasive and surgical options are presented; all with clear disclaimers to the effect of seek medical direction before proceeding.
H – Authentication: Much of the basic literature presented on this website is identical to the American Sleep Association (ASA – HON accredited) and National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute’s (NHLBI – government run) sites the primary sources used within the text presented on the ASAA website are not specifically referenced. This domain’s name is .org which means formed by an organization versus a government or educational institution.
F– Funding: Sponsorship ranges from corporations to individuals to sleep medicine clinics. The site provides links to supporting shopping websites, the Combined Federal Campaign and vehicle donation opportunities. It also solicits for membership and individual donations. Unless the clearly marked product links are engaged, one does not see advertisements littered throughout the site.
L– legitimacy: Sixteen people make up the association’s board of directors, six of which are physicians, one is a PhD. It is unclear if these are the authors of the information posted. No board member can be contacted directly but a site email system, the association’s physical address (with map service) and phone number are readily apparent. The medical advice provided on this site is varied – from personal recommendations within the chat rooms to peer reviewed research links. There are multiple disclaimers all over the site that the ASAA does not endorse or support any specific of therapeutic intervention.
In general, it is prudent to refer and/or recommend this website for clients to review for a variety of reasons. First, the site is user friendly. Navigation is simple and it does not assault the eyes with advertisements. Second, the medical information is written in straightforward English within the parent, patient and media tabs. While not a source for cutting edge research studies, it does provide established information that does not require an advanced degree in physiology to interpret. Third, the site is conservative with frequent reminders to seek the professional advice before engaging any suggested treatments. Fourth, the blogs and chat rooms are very active which speaks volumes as to the very real, but perhaps unintended, role of this website in filling a needed gap in managing this disorder. Experiential sharing between those with OSA is important to the mission of the ASA. This forum allows for detailed discussion, for example, what kind of masks work best, common frustrations in accessing care, and what life can be like with a normal sleep pattern. Advocacy, however, is about advising as well as acclaiming a website. Though the site is beneficial, this is an ‘. Org’ website (an organization versus a governmental (.gov) or educational (.edu) institution) and not well recommended by medical reviewing websites such as Health on the Network (HON) or Medical Matrix. Therefore, readers should be cautioned to examine alternative resources, those with a ‘.gov or.edu’ ending or their personal health care providers, to corroborate the medical accuracy of any health care conclusions they draw from this site. Final points of note, the primary sponsors are medical supplying companies and less than half of the site’s Board of Directors has advanced degrees in a healthcare related field.
The “TRUTHFUL” medical information website evaluation method is intended to guide anyone from the nursing professional to the medically naïve healthcare consumer through the seemingly limitless knowledge bank that is the World Wide Web. It is meant to be flexible, convenient and easily applied to any website conveying health care information. The ASAA website reviewed here is intended to educate the general public about obstructive sleep apnea. Upon applying the “TRUTHFUL” evaluation method, the reader can promptly determine that it has genuine merit as a generally information/socializing outlet but perhaps is not the most rigorous evidence based medical authority on the subject of sleep apnea.
Nurses can and should acknowledge the value of the Web as a source of information, education and support. Granted, one website cannot possibly be all things to all people and education is not always just about the facts. Just getting someone to seek answers to personal care needs and generating interpersonal discussions with their health care providers has its own intrinsic value.
(Agency For Health Care Policy And Research 1999 Assessing the Quality of Internet Health Information)Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. (1999). Assessing the Quality of Internet Health Information. Retrieved from http://www.ahrq.gov/data/infoqual.htm
(American Association Of Sleep Apnea 2008 Home Page)American Association of Sleep Apnea. (2008). Home Page. Retrieved on October 25, 2009, from http://www.sleepapnea.org/info/index.html
(American Sleep Association 2007 Home page)American Sleep Association. (2007). Home page. Retrieved October 25, 2009, from http://www.sleepassociation.org/
(Fox L M 2009 Evaluating Medical Information on the World Wide Web)Fox, L. M. (2009). Evaluating Medical Information on the World Wide Web. Retrieved October 15, 2009, from http://hsclibrary.uchsc.edu/education/evaluating.php
(Medical Library Association 09820 User’s Guide to Finding and Evaluating Health Information on the Web)Medical Library Association. (09, August 20). A User’s Guide to Finding and Evaluating Health Information on the Web. Retrieved from http://www.mlanet.org/resources/userguide/html
(National Heart Lung And Blood Institute 2009 Sleep Apnea)National Heart Lung and Blood Institute. (2009). Sleep Apnea. Retrieved October 25, 2009, from http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/dci/Diseases/SleepApnea/
(National Library Of Medicine National Institutes Of Health 0922)National Library of Medicine, & National Institutes of Health. (09, February 2). Retrieved from http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/webeval/webeval_start.html
Nursing school – University of WA, Seattle 1987. Master’s degree – University of New England, Biddeford, ME – MSNA (nurse anesthesia) 1992. Doctoral degree – Northeastern University, Boston. 2010. Presently employed at the Audie L. Murphy Veterans Administration Hospital, San Antonio, TX as a staff nurse anesthetist. Previous nursing experiences include medical-surgical, medical/surgical/cardiac intensive care, anesthesia, adjunct/assistant professor of nursing and nurse anesthesia, hospital education and utilization management.
Marge is an Assistant Professor at Texas Woman’s University, College of Nursing, Denton in Denton, Texas. | <urn:uuid:9f862d7e-331b-4557-855c-29794ca8e1b5> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://ojni.org/issues/?p=893 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395560.69/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00015-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917041 | 2,404 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Features of Constitution1
|Is there a constitution?||Yes|
|Does the constitution provide for freedom of religion?||Yes|
|Last Amended||not amended|
|Source||Centre for Human Rights (University of Pretoria)|
|Translation||Unofficial translation by ARDA staff from French source|
|Current as of||May 11, 2011|
Constitution Excerpts (clauses that reference religion)2
The Republic of Congo is a sovereign, indivisible, secular, and social democratic state.
All citizens are equal before the law. Any discrimination based the following is prohibited: origin, social or material status, racial, ethnic, or regional membership, sex, education, language, religion, philosophy, or place of residence. Women have the same rights as men.
Freedom of belief and freedom of conscience are inviolable. The use of religion for political purposes is prohibited.
Political parties have a national character and do not identify themselves in form, in action, or in any other way with an ethnic group, region, religion, or cult.
Political parties are recognized under the Constitution and the law. To be recognized, they are required to adhere to these fundamental principles:
…the secular character of the state;
The initiative to amend the Constitution belongs, concurrently, to the President of the Republic and to members of Parliament. No procedure of revision can be initiated or continued when it jeopardizes the integrity of the territory. The republican form, the secularity of the state, the number of mandates of the Republic and the rights set forth in Sections I and II cannot be the object of amendments.
1. Data under the "Features of Constitution" heading are drawn from coding of the U.S. State Department's 2008 International Religious Freedom Reports conducted by researchers at the Association of Religion Data Archives. The article by Brian Grim and Roger Finke describes the coding of the International Religious Freedom reports. A dataset with these and the other international measures highlighted on the country pages can be downloaded from this website. Used with permission.
2. The constitutional excerpts shown above are reproduced from the websites given in the "Source" field; the links to these websites were active as of May 2011. Where the constitutional text shown on these websites was provided in a language other than English, this text was translated to English by ARDA staff with assistance from web-based translation utilities such as Google Translate and Yahoo! Babel Fish. Constitutional text was converted to American English where applicable. Constitutional clauses were judged to contain religious content based largely on the standards used in the construction of the Religion and State Constitutions Dataset collected by Jonathan Fox. Emphases were added to the text by ARDA staff to highlight religious content in articles that also contain content that does not pertain to matters of religion. The data on this page were correct to the best of the knowledge of the ARDA as of the date listed in the "Current as of" field shown above. Please contact us at [email protected] if you are aware of any incorrect information provided on this page. | <urn:uuid:e92173fc-e933-41bd-ad61-973193d98056> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.thearda.com/internationalData/countries/Country_58_6.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403825.35/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00168-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921997 | 634 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Transcendentali smEmerson, Ralph Waldo Henry David Thoreau & An Introduction to Transcendentalism
Ralph Waldo• Emerson Born May 25, 1803 in Boston• Educated at Harvard• Was a pastor until wife’s death in 1831;resigned in 1832 with questions about the Church• Travels to Europe, England, meets Romantic poets including Wordsworth and Coleridge• Publishes Nature in 1836…thought of as the beginning of the Transcendentalist movement—the first real American literary movement• 1841: “Self-Reliance”• Loses son to scarlet fever in 1842; work becomes increasingly jaded• Lives until 1882
Henry David• July 12, 1817 Thoreau Born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Mass• 1821 The family (including siblings Helen, John, Jr., and Sophia) moves to Boston• 1837 Graduates from Harvard Accepts a job as a school teacher in Concord (Is fired after 2 weeks for refusing to beat a child) (Divine,• 1838-1841 327) Heads a private school in Concord with his elder brother, John
Henry David Thoreau• 1841-1843 Lives with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family in Concord• 1842 John dies suddenly of lockjaw (Contracted by cutting his ring finger with a razor)• 1845-1847 Lives in small house he builds for himself on Walden Pond• 1846 Mexican War begins (Thoreau spends a night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax)
Henry David• 1848 Thoreau Begins career as a professional lecturer• 1849 Publishes “Civil Disobedience”• 1854 Publishes Walden; or, Life in the Woods• 1862 Dies in Concord, Mass
In His Own Words• Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.• Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life youve imagined.• Men have become the tools of their tools.• Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is in prison.• What is the use of a house if you havent got a tolerable planet to put it on?
In His Own Words• I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.• What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.• All good things are wild, and free.• I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.• I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.• Most people dread finding out when they come to die that they have never really lived.
Transcendentalism• Basic Assumption: The intuitive faculty, instead of the rational or sense- based, became the means for a conscious union of the individual psyche with the world psyche also known as the Oversoul, Life-Force, Prime Mover, or God. In other words: The basic truths of the universe lie beyond what we can obtain from our senses • Senses get us facts and laws, we can reason to book knowledge and technology, but there is more to the world • Transcendentalism is not a religion, a philosophy, or a literary theory…but it has components of each
Transcendentalism• Major Tenets: 1. An individual is the spiritual center of the universe Emerson: Intuition is “the highest power of the Soul” 1. The structure of the universe literally duplicates the structure of the individual self, therefore all knowledge begins with self-knowledge 3. Nature is a living mystery, full of signs; Nature is Symbolic (God, humanity, and nature are all connected) 4. Individual Virtue & Happiness Depend Upon Self- Realization • Requires the reconciliation of 2 things: The Expansive or Self-Transcending Tendency The Contracting or Self-Asserting Tendency
Two Tendencies• The Expansive or Self-Transcending Tendency The Desire to Embrace the World – To Know and Become One with the World• The Contracting or Self-Asserting Tendency The Desire to Withdraw, to remain Unique & Separate – The Egotistical Existence
Anti-• Transcendentalists Connected with high class, good taste, distinguished achievement, Boston/Harvard• Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville appreciated power of transcendental ideals, but argued critically against them Saw much in nature that was not good and godlike…saw gap between desire and possibility, the blending of good and evil in even the highest human motives found in humanity a strange mixture of will and desire, an “uneven balance” opposed to transcendentalist optimism Melville: Seeks “the intense feeling of usable truth”: “By usable truth, we mean the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not”
Civil Disobedience“Civil Disobedience” Focuses on the Relationship between Two Bodies: • The Government • The Individual
The Government• “Government is best which governs least” (1)• Men as machines (2-3)• The Individual’s Duty (6-11) To Break the Law: “If a law requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say break the law” (8) To Withdraw from Society (8-11) • Majority of one (8) • Rich Men vs. Poor Men (money v. virtue) (10) “Cast your whole vote” (9) | <urn:uuid:cca030ca-2f53-4ed8-9cf8-be847a463561> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.slideshare.net/luanew/transendecialism | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395620.9/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00193-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.908938 | 1,196 | 3.09375 | 3 |
Editor: I would like to propose the formation of a new organization, more fit to the current world, and to the goals of modern democratic nations. This organization would be called The United Democratic Nations, and would not be subject to the vagaries of tiny countries, nor to the votes of authoritarian regimes.
For example, one good way to make sure that the world is never again held hostage by France's political and economic interests is to dissolve the United Nations and to create this new organization (the United Democratic Nations), which will include only democracies, and which would distribute power based on population.
Decisions within this organization would be taken by majority vote, and would have binding power for all members. In other words, the principle behind the European parliament. (If the European Union does not accept countries that are not democratic, why should the United Nations? If France has no veto power on the European continent, why should it have veto power on the rest of planet Earth?)
If such an organization existed today, the vote of India would be about 20 times more important than the vote of France. Has any major newspaper in the world reported the opinion of the democratically-elected Indian government in the same way they report (daily) Chirac's opinion? Why not? Why does the opinion of 1 billion Indian people matter zero, and the opinion of 60 million French weigh so heavily?
Has any major newspaper in the world reported the opinion of the governments of Latin America? Why not? Why does the opinion of an entire continent matter zero, and the opinion of France matter so much?
Read more Views on the War in Iraq online
© 2016. All Rights Reserved. Contact Us | <urn:uuid:22bb3d1a-b6e4-498c-8215-dc9ca46038fc> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://staugustine.com/stories/040703/opi_letter1.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398209.20/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00120-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960109 | 340 | 2.609375 | 3 |
I am pleased to see that several companies are starting to recognize that building zero carbon data centers is a more sustainable direction rather than focusing on energy efficiency (i.e. PUE).
As China, India and the rest of the developing world starts to deploy data centers, GHG emissions will continue to increase in portion to the number of data centers regardless of the PUE. But building zero carbon data centers powered only by renewable energy means that as the world deploys many more hundreds of data centers, GHG emissions will remain virtually unaltered and close to zero.
The other attraction of these types of solutions is that they are much more adaptable and survivable in an era of severe weather due to climate change, when the existing coal powered electrical grid is likely to be seriously compromised. According to a recent report in Reuters it is predicted that coal and nuclear power generating capacity between 2031 and 2060 will decrease by between 4 and 16 percent in the United States and a 6 to 19 percent decline in Europe due to lack of cooling water as a result of warmer temperatures from climate change. Already in previous summer heat waves several power plants in Europe and USA have had to shut down because of lack of cool water.
This is the type of thinking we need in all sectors of society if we are going to meaningfully address climate change. Hewlett Packard is also involved in GreenCloud project in NY state — which is a distributed follow the wind/follow the sun zero carbon data center project similar to the Greenstar program.
By Bill St. Arnaud , Green IT Networking Consultant
|Data Center||Policy & Regulation|
|DNS Security||Regional Registries|
|Domain Names||Registry Services|
|Intellectual Property||Top-Level Domains|
|Internet of Things||Web|
|Internet Protocol||White Space|
Afilias - Mobile & Web Services | <urn:uuid:f73b3e71-6edd-4692-b717-3a5858e42550> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.circleid.com/posts/20120604_hewlett_packard_other_companies_deploying_zero_carbon_data_centers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393997.50/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00098-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.880418 | 389 | 2.578125 | 3 |
BIRDLIFE Australia has thanked local people for helping the vulnerable hooded plover have a successful breeding season so far this year in the south-west.
Birdlife Australia’s hooded plover project officer Grainne Maguire said more than 30 volunteers had maintained protection around the birds’ nest sites on south-west beaches to give chicks the chance to live beyond infancy.
Ms Maguire said the good breeding season for the birds in western Victoria was sustaining the Victorian population because breeding outcomes in eastern Victoria this season had been “terrible”.
Human intrusion into nesting sites in eastern Victoria, including beaches along the Mornington Peninsula, had devastated the survival rate of chicks born in those areas, she said.
However, good numbers of hooded plover nesting pairs had been found on beaches in the Warrnambool, Levy’s Point, Killarney and Yambuk areas.
The big volunteer effort, coordinated by Tower Hill ranger Toni Ryan, helped chicks get through the high-risk stage to where they are able to fly from their nesting area.
Ms Maguire said volunteers had roped off some nest sites in high-risk areas and erected signs asking people to stay away because of birds’ vulnerable status.
They maintained the protective measures for more than 60 days, from the time the first camouflaged eggs were spotted at a nest — usually a humble scoop in the sand — until the chicks could fly.
The success stories have included a nest site in an off-leash area for dogs on the Lady Bay shoreline at the mouth of the Hopkins River. Ms Maguire said Warrnambool people had respected the roped-off areas and one of the three chicks hatched in the area survived to be able to fly away last month.
She said a one-third survival rate for hooded plover chicks was about normal for the species.
She said there was another nesting site on the shoreline near the Logans Beach whale viewing platform where two chicks are yet to reach the flying stage.
This season was the first time hooded plovers had nested so close to the popular viewing platform, said Ms Maguire, who was delighted the public had respected the nesting site and not disturbed the birds.
Birdlife Australia has been running a campaign to protect the hooded plover for about the past seven years because of its vulnerable status. | <urn:uuid:3cf9d867-0a55-4311-8597-bff4b561889c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.standard.net.au/story/2203796/volunteers-help-our-plovers-recover/?src=rss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398869.97/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00037-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972776 | 495 | 2.546875 | 3 |
The Indonesian national motto of "Unity in Diversity" points to one of the greatest attractions of Indonesia.
There are around 300 ethnic groups, a result of Indonesia's unique geographical make-up consisting of more than 17,000 islands, and history.
Many Indonesians see themselves first by their ethnic, religion and cultural group, and secondly as Indonesians.
The glue that binds the people together is the usage of the Indonesian language and adoption of Pancasila as national philosophy which stressed the doctrine of Religious pluralism, Humanism, Unity, Democracy and Social Justice.
Considering the above mentioned facts, I felt that Indonesia could only exist as a country if its people keep on believing on what have been pledged by our founding fathers on 28 October 1928, as follow :
- We are one Nation : Indonesia
- We have one Language : Indonesia
- We have one Country : Indonesia | <urn:uuid:531d911b-44cc-4a2d-9d42-c2a7f5c9ba9c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://multibrand.blogspot.com/2011/10/united-well-stand-separated-well-fall.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396459.32/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00001-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950588 | 179 | 2.734375 | 3 |
Mr. BRIDENSTINE. Mr. Speaker, global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago. Global temperature changes, when they exist, correlate with Sun output and ocean cycles.
During the Medieval Warm Period from 800 to 1300 A.D.--long before cars, power plants, or the Industrial Revolution--temperatures were warmer than today. During the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1900 A.D., temperatures were cooler. Neither of these periods were caused by any human activity.
Even climate change alarmists admit that the number of hurricanes hitting the U.S. and the number of tornado touchdowns have been on a slow decline for over 100 years.
But here's what we absolutely know. We know that Oklahoma will have tornadoes when the cold jet stream meets the warm gulf air. And we also know that this President spends 30 times as much money on global warming research as he does on weather forecasting and warning.
For this gross misallocation, the people of Oklahoma are ready to accept the President's apology, and I intend to submit legislation to fix this. | <urn:uuid:d744afef-9811-48a8-9486-49988bbe3184> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://votesmart.org/public-statement/791004/global-warming | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397562.76/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00054-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94281 | 218 | 2.578125 | 3 |
PARIS: Careless use of a broad-spectrum antibiotic in the 1950s created a “hyper-virulent” strain of germ that worsened risks for newborn babies, according to detective work by French-led gene scientists.
Today’s strain of Streptococcus agalactiae results from massive over-use of tetracycline in the post-Seocnd World War antibiotics boom, they reported in the journal Nature Communications yesterday.
Strains of the microbe that were sensitive to tetracycline were wiped out, leaving behind a dominant, resistant superstrain that is dangerous for newborn babies without careful preventive care.
S. agalactiae is a common bacterium that colonises the intestines or urinary-genital tract. Between 15 and 30 percent of people carry the germ but the vast majority of them do not fall ill from it.
But the bacterium can be dangerous to newborns if they are exposed to it through infected fluids during delivery, be it vaginal or caesarean.
Called Group B Strep (GBS), infection can lead to potentially fatal pneumonia, meningitis and blood infection.
The new study unravelled the genetic code of 229 samples of S. agalactiae dating from 1950 to the present day, enabling the scientists to draw up a family tree of the bug and its evolution.
The probe revealed a “hypervirulent” strain called CC17 that began to emerge in the early 1960s, also coinciding with a worrying surge in GBS cases in America and Europe, affecting roughly one in three births.
“The use of tetracycline from 1948 onwards led in humans to the complete replacement of a diverse GBS population by only (a) few tetracycline-resistant clones, particularly well adapted to their host,” the paper said.
Ninety percent of S. galacticae found in human samples are of this resistant strain, it found.
In a press release, the Pasteur Institute said the investigation highlighted the peril of mindless use of antibiotics. | <urn:uuid:c58513be-babd-4eb3-bd1b-a9dc1e0201fe> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://thepeninsulaqatar.com/life-style/culture/294324/careless-drug-use-bred-baby-threatening-germ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394987.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00193-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932152 | 434 | 3.09375 | 3 |
Chemical weapons were first used in World War I. They were primarily used to
demoralize, ...... "Facts About Phosgene". CDC. ... "Facts About Sulfur Mustard".
Jan 2, 2015 ... On January 2, 1915—one hundred years ago today—German forces in World
War I made the first chlorine gas attack, ushering in the modern ...
These chemicals are in liquid, gas or solid form and blister, choke and affect the
nerves or blood. Chemical warfare agents are generally classified according to ...
Chemical weapons, such as nerve gas and tear gas, have been formulated to
inflict harm or death to humans. They can be widely dispersed in gas, liquid and ...
The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) has now been in force for more than
17 years. The international community is using this instrument to eliminate the ...
Physicians for Human Rights: For a doctor who encounters effects of chemical
warfare agents (CWAs) in a patient population for the first time, quick access to
Chemical and biological warfare has been used long before World War One. As
early as the Stone ... Fascinating facts and interesting stories. Facts · Fast Facts ...
Aug 14, 2013 ... The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) has been in force for over 15 years.
And it's impact is still relevant to day: the international ...
May 17, 2014 ... I'll be accompanying some of the students from my school on a history trip to
Ypres and a few other World War 1 battlefields in a few weeks' ...
Apr 26, 2013 ... Bashar Assad almost certainly crossed a 'red line' by using sarin or some other
chemical weapon against his own people, President Obama ... | <urn:uuid:3d9c9910-c8d2-45d3-b3fe-2cfd6e469021> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.ask.com/web?qsrc=60&o=41647999&oo=41647999&l=dir&gc=1&q=Chemical+Warfare+Facts | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402746.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00100-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.893987 | 364 | 3.484375 | 3 |
Tuesday, December 3, 2002
Tue December 3, 2002 01:44 PM ET
By Charnicia E. Huggins
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Contrary to many experts' predictions, infants born to mothers who used cocaine heavily during pregnancy do not seem to have developmental delays in early life, new study findings show.
During the cocaine epidemic in the US, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many expected that children exposed in the womb to their mother's cocaine use, or "crack babies," would suffer lasting developmental impairment.
However, the idea that these children are "doomed at birth" is not consistent with the present study findings, which looked at children up to the age of 2 years, or with previous research, lead study author Dr. Deborah A. Frank of Boston University's School of Medicine in Massachusetts, told Reuters Health.
"This stereotype does as much harm, if not more, to children as the actual physiological impact of prenatal exposure," Frank added. "The negative expectations of these children are in itself very harmful."
Frank and her colleagues studied 203 mother-infant pairs, including mothers who were heavy cocaine users, meaning they had used cocaine on more than 62 days during their pregnancy; light users; non-users and their full-term infants. The infants' psychomotor and mental development was tested at 6, 12 and 24 months of age. Psychomotor function involves physical activity that is linked to mental processes, for example learning to grasp an object or to crawl or walk.
Overall, infants who were exposed to high levels of cocaine did not have a higher risk of mental or psychomotor developmental problems, the investigators report in the December issue of Pediatrics. But they did have slightly lower scores if they were also lower birth weight infants, the report indicates.
In general, lower birth weight infants--regardless of their cocaine exposure--did not perform as well on tests of their mental abilities as their normal-weight peers, but those who were also exposed to high levels of cocaine scored lower on mental and psychomotor tests.
The reason for this may be due to social factors, including the infants' home environment, study findings suggest.
Infants who were heavily exposed to cocaine were more likely to have been taken out of their mother's custody and placed with unrelated foster parents, the authors note. Those who were cared for by another family member, however, had more developmental problems at later ages than did infants who were left in the care of their biological mother.
Related caregivers are not always properly evaluated and monitored--as are foster parents and biological mothers with a history of drug use--and may not have the necessary support and resources necessary to provide the best care for the infant, Frank explained.
In other findings, all of the infants scored lower on their developmental tests as they got older. "That's the sad news," Frank said. "Poverty corrodes child development.
"But for everybody, early intervention helped to decrease the magnitude of that decline," she added.
Early speech, physical therapy and other intervention services seemed to protect heavily cocaine-exposed infants against problems in their mental and psychomotor development, study findings indicate.
In fact, the heavily exposed infants who received early intervention performed better in tests of their mental development than less-exposed or non-exposed infants. This may be because infants exposed to high levels of cocaine were more likely to get such help earlier--before their first birthday--than their peers, the researchers speculate.
In general, the development of cocaine-exposed infants "very much depends on what happens to them after they are born," Frank said, citing the importance of appropriate caregivers and intervention.
Further, cocaine-exposed infants can benefit from the same types of intervention programs that every impoverished child at risk for developmental problems needs, Frank said. "People need not be scared to enroll these children in the same programs." The cocaine-exposed children "didn't need anything extraordinary," she added.
Finally, to ensure that cocaine-exposed infants placed in the care of a relative receive the same quality of care as their peers, pediatricians should "advocate for measures to decrease caregiver burden, increase resources, and enhance supervision for caregivers providing kinship care to the level of that provided for unrelated foster parents," the researchers write.
"You have to support the children, and you have to support the caregiver, whoever it is," Frank said.
Grants from the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the National Center for Research Resources funded the study.
SOURCE: Pediatrics 2002;110:1143-1152. | <urn:uuid:ec4b47e6-2ea7-43f3-85fb-4566c0961c41> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.hscareers.com/news/articles.asp?id=296 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399425.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00023-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974719 | 949 | 2.90625 | 3 |
Flickr: Natalie Woo
Billboard from 2009 along California's Interstate 5 freeway.
More on race and perception, though this time, the issue is not what people see– it’s what they know about President Obama’s ancestry. In “For Birthers, Obama’s Not Black Enough“, Melissa Harris-Perry wonders if the President’s lack of connection to “the historical variation of blackness that is uniquely and indisputably American” is part of what makes him suspect to those who doubt his citizenship:
The American slave system disrupted the ability of enslaved Africans to retain or pass along their ethnic identities. Igbo, Ashanti, Akan, Yoruba and Hausa became interchangeable units for sale. While slaves nurtured fragments of cultural, religious and familial traditions, much of the specificity of their African experience was surrendered to an imagined and indistinct notion of “Africa.” Moreover, the law did not initially recognize slaves or their US-born children as American. So enslaved Africans were women and men literally without a country, defined solely in terms of their labor value. Their descendants eventually achieved citizenship, but to be an American black, a Negro, is to be a rejected child who nonetheless clings to her abusive father because she knows no other parent. To be a black American descended from slaves is to lack, if not a birth certificate, then at least a known genealogy—to have only a vague sense of where one comes from, of who one’s ancestors were and of where one belongs.
In this sense, Obama is not very black. He is not a Negro. As a black man, President Obama’s confident and clear knowledge of his lineage is precisely the thing that makes his American identity dubious. Unlike most black people, he has easy access to both his American and his African selves.
Flickr: United States Government Work
No wonder Irving Street was blocked off this morning! The President visited Bell Multicultural High School in Columbia Heights, for a town hall meeting on education that will air tonight on Univision. The Chancellor for D.C. schools, Kaya Henderson was also there, along with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Juan Sepulveda, head of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics.
According to pool reports, the President was greeted by enthusiastic cheers from students and parents as he took the stage. The President answered questions from the audience and via pre-taped video about the role of parents in education, the DREAM act, technology and more. However, the first question, from the event’s moderator, Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, was about Libya. The President briefly answered that U.S. involvement there would be limited before adding that he would address the issue later tonight (tune in to WAMU 88.5 at 7 p.m., for NPR’s full coverage of the event).
After watching a video question from a female student who was holding up a deportation letter, the President said that he strongly supports the DREAM Act: “We’ve got to keep the pressure up on Congress”. Obama stated that it was not appropriate to give undocumented workers “temporary protected status” and he clarified that it was not possible to suspend deportations by executive order.
The White House
Long tables are more Presidential!
It sounds like Mayor-elect Gray’s lunch with President Obama went well (via The Hill):
Speaking alone to reporters outside the White House, Gray described his lunch with the president as “delightful” and said that it was “Even better than I could have hoped for.”
“One of the most important things to me was that the president really wants to work closely with our city,” he said. “We’re going to — in the days and weeks ahead after I’m sworn in — are going to work very closely together.”
I had a feeling D.C. schools would come up, after that infamous interview the President did with Matt Lauer for TODAY, which referenced his daughters attending private school…
Gray said that the president and he spoke about improving public education and early childhood instruction in Washington, as well as funding for infrastructure around the proposed new Department of Homeland Security headquarters in impoverished Southeast Washington. They also discussed solutions to the city’s high unemployment rate.
Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy
Courage the Turkey was the lucky recipient of the 2009 Pardon.
After the President partakes in the Thanksgiving tradition of pardoning two turkeys at the White House, he has some nice plans for the rest of the day:
Later Wednesday, Obama and his family were delivering two turkeys less fortunate than Apple and Cider to Martha’s Table, a local charity that feeds the hungry and provides other community services. A Pennsylvania turkey farm donated the birds.
The Obamas visited the charity last year, also on Thanksgiving eve, and helped hand out frozen turkeys, stuffing and other fixings to people standing in line.
President Obama being interviewed on TODAY.
Earlier this morning, on NBC’s TODAY show, Matt Lauer sat down with President Barack Obama to discuss education. The President took a question posed by a woman from Florida who asked if his daughters would get the same “high-quality, rigorous education” at one of our city’s public schools as they currently receive at “their very elite private academy“.
The President said:
Well thanks for the question. I’ll be blunt with you, the answer is No right now. The DC public school systems are struggling. Now, they have made some important strides over the last several years to move in the direction of reform. There are some terrific individual schools in the DC system. And that’s true by the way in every city across the country….some great public schools on par with any private school in the country. But…a lot of times you’ve got to test in or it’s a lottery pick for you to be able to get into those schools, so those options are not available for enough children.
I’ll be very honest with you. Given my position, if I wanted to find a great public school for Malia and Sasha to be in, we could probably maneuver to do it. But the broader problem is for a mom or a dad who are working hard but don’t have a bunch of connections, don’t have a lot of choice in terms of where they live, they should be getting the same quality education for their kids as anybody else. And we don’t have that yet. | <urn:uuid:0649b3db-4966-4509-a1e2-1e5cb56a1506> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://dcentric.wamu.org/tag/obama/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395621.98/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00106-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976526 | 1,390 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Oregon's Crater Lake National Park, By the Numbers
Recreational visits to Crater National Park in 2008.
Total acreage of the park. That’s a little more than 286 square miles, including the 20.42 square miles accounted for by six mile-wide Crater Lake.
Estimated maximum elevation (feet above sea level) of Mounta Mazama, the stratovolcano that collapsed about 7,700 years ago to form the caldera that Crater Lake sits in. The highest elevation on the caldera rim (Hillman Peak) is now 8,151 feet, so roughly 4,000 feet of ancient Mount Mazama has gone missing.
Elevation (feet above sea level) of Mount Scott, the highest peak in the park. If you’d like to climb it, there’s a five-mile (roundtrip) trail that leads to the top
Maximum depth of the lake, in feet, as recorded by a multibeam survey in July 2000. Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and the seventh-deepest lake in the world.
Inches of snowfall in a typical winter. That’s over 44 feet, and it makes Crater Lake one of the snowiest places in the world where snowfall is carefully measured. Deep snow curtails access to most park attractions from October through May.
Approximate number of years it took for Crater Lake to fill to its present level after the caldera was formed. The lake has no inlets or outlets. Precipitation and snowmelt supply water to the lake, and evaporation and seepage keep it from getting any deeper. The lake level has varied just 16 feet (less than one percent) during the last century.
Miles of trails in the park.
Transparency of the lake water, in feet, as measured with a secchi disk (a black-and-white disk lowered into the water on a cable). In 1969, and again in 1997, a secchi disk lowered into the lake could still be seen at a depth of 144 feet below the surface. Light penetrates even further than that, making it possible for algae to grow as much as 725 feet below the surface. Crater Lake’s world-record clarity and striking blue color are attributable to its isolation from streams.
Miles of visibility from the highest vantage points in the park. Needless to say, air pollution is not the problem here that it is in many other parks.
Year round temperature (degrees Fahrenheit) of water more than 260 feet below the surface. Temperatures at the surface may be as high as 65 degrees at the summer peak.
Length of Rim Drive (miles). The more than 50 turnouts along this road offer views that are hard to beat for sheer scenic splendor.
Number of national parks created before Crater Lake National Park was established in 1902. People who insist that Crater Lake was the fifth national park don’t count Mackinac National Park (later Mackinac Island National Park), which was established in 1875 and abolished in 1895.
Cubic miles of water in the lake. Each year, about 34 billion gallons of water are added to the lake by precipitation/snowmelt and a like amount is subtracted by evaporation and seepage.
Number of people who have ever been to the bottom of Crater Lake and lived to tell about it. Several decades ago, oceanographer Mark Buktenica rode the submersible Deep Rover to the deepest part of the lake to make scientific observations. No one has been back since.
Number of native species of fish. However, there are several species of stocked fish, and fishermen can keep everything they catch.
Black bears are occasionally seen in the park, but pending the results of research currently underway, nobody knows how many there are. | <urn:uuid:bb5653ef-1dc9-4559-8908-ab4e8cacd03a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2009/10/numbers-crater-lake-national-park4708 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397873.63/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00095-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954962 | 808 | 3.4375 | 3 |
|The American Presidency Project|
|• Ronald Reagan|
|Proclamation 5443 - National Black (Afro-American) History Month, 1986|
|February 24, 1986|
By the President of the United States of America
Black history is a book rich with the American experience but with many pages yet unexplored. A chapter once beautiful and tragic was brilliantly illuminated this very year with the first celebration of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as a national holiday. This new holiday symbolizes the trail he blazed for others and the struggle of many Americans for full and unfettered recognition of the constitutional rights of all Americans, regardless of race or color.
Black history in the United States has been a proving ground for America's ideals. A great test of these ideals came with the Civil War and the elimination of slavery. Another test came a century later, in the struggle for practical recognition of the rights already won in principle—the abolition of legalized segregation and second-class citizenship.
The foremost purpose of Black History Month is to make all Americans aware of this struggle for freedom and equal opportunity. It is also a time to celebrate the many achievements of blacks in every field, from science and the arts to politics and religion. It not only offers black Americans an occasion to explore their heritage, but it also offers all Americans an occasion and opportunity to gain a fuller perspective of the contributions of black Americans to our Nation. The American experience and character can never be fully grasped until the knowledge of black history assumes its rightful place in our schools and our scholarship.
The Congress, by Senate Joint Resolution 74, has designated the month of February 1986 as "National Black (Afro-American) History Month" and has authorized and requested the President to issue a proclamation in observance of this month.
Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim February 1986 as National Black (Afro-American) History Month. I invite the Governors of the several States, and our schools, colleges, universities, and libraries, the stewards of our national consciousness, and all Americans to observe this month with appropriate activities to heighten awareness of black history and to stimulate continuing inquiry into this rich vein of the American experience.
In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-fourth day of February, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-six, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and tenth.
[Filed with the Office of the Federal Register, 10:57 a. m., February 25, 1986]
|Citation: Ronald Reagan: "Proclamation 5443 - National Black (Afro-American) History Month, 1986", February 24, 1986. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=36910.|
© 1999-2011 - Gerhard Peters - The American Presidency Project | <urn:uuid:e3b8cadd-dc93-4289-a7b4-99d4de5e6222> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/print.php?pid=36910 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393442.26/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00140-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926452 | 619 | 3.828125 | 4 |
by Robert Wilkinson
Tonight we go back to the original tune that introduced rock and roll to the world and blew the doors wide open for all that has happened since then! Tonight we dance to the song that ignited the fire that set countless millions of teens to dancing!
Tomorrow would have been the 89th birthday of one of the originators of rock and roll, the legendary Bill Haley. Bill Haley (July 6, 1925 – February 9, 1981), along with Elvis, Buddy, Chuck, and Little Richard, was one of the original 5 who created the genre. Bill, known as “the Father of Rock and Roll,” is unique in that he and his Comets introduced the world to rock and roll at the very beginning.
Haley and his band were important in launching the music known as "Rock and Roll" to a wider, mostly white audience after a period of it being considered an underground genre. When "Rock Around the Clock" appeared behind the opening credits of the 1955 film “Blackboard Jungle” ...it soared to the top of the American Billboard chart for eight weeks. The single is commonly used as a convenient line of demarcation between the "rock era" and the music industry that preceded it; Billboard separated its statistical tabulations into 1890-1954 and 1955–present. After the record rose to number one, Haley was quickly given the title "Father of Rock and Roll," by the media, and by teenagers that had come to embrace the new style of music. With the song's success, the age of rock music began overnight and instantly ended the dominance of the jazz and pop standards performed by Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford, Perry Como, Bing Crosby, and others.
Success came at somewhat of a price as the new music confused and horrified most people over the age of 30, leading to Cold War-fueled suspicion that rock-and-roll was part of a communist plot to corrupt the minds of American teenagers. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover attempted to dig up incriminating material on Bill Haley, who took to carrying a gun with him on tours for his own safety.
”Rock Around the Clock" was the first record ever to sell over one million copies in both Britain and Germany and, in 1957, Haley became the first major American rock singer to tour Europe. Haley continued to score hits throughout the 1950s ...and he starred in the first rock and roll musical movies “Rock Around the Clock” and “Don’t Knock the Rock,” both in 1956. Haley was already 30 years old and so he was soon eclipsed in the United States by the younger, sexier Elvis, but continued to enjoy great popularity in Latin America, Europe, and Australia through the 1960s.
While it got everyone's attention in 1955 as the opening song for "Blackboard Jungle," a classic noir juvenile delinquent flick, when it was the name of Alan Freed's first 1956 jukebox movie "Rock Around the Clock," that was the birth of rock and roll in the movies. Alan Freed made and starred in teen movies built around great music and dancing, and besides Bill Haley and the Comets, also introduced Little Richard, Chuck Berry, the Platters, Frankie Lymon and a bunch of other great groups to the mass media. And yes, Amerika freaked out in 1956. Rock and roll AND civil rights at the same time blew some minds. Too much dancing, I suppose. Which reminds me....
On with the dance! We now go back to the very beginning of rock and roll to a tune that had “foxtrot with vocal” stamped on the original 45. This comes from an era when people actually did dance, and dance with all they had! For your dancing enjoyment, originally released in April 1954, the soundtrack tune from the movie “Blackboard Jungle” that introduced rock and roll as it blazed into the mass consciousness!
From the "Washington Square" television show hosted by Ray Bolger, a rare find from early tv! Here's Bill Haley and the Comets in a very live 1956 performance of our Saturday Night Attitude dance tune, "Rock Around the Clock."
From a 1954 short movie, here’s a great clip of Bill Haley and the Comets performing their first hit from 1953, “Crazy Man Crazy” plus “Straight Jacket” and the 1955 hit, “Shake Rattle and Roll”
We now move to the first Alan Freed jukebox movie “Rock Around the Clock,” a film designed to expose teens to rock and roll! Here's the original clip from the film of our Saturday Night Attitude tune that blew the doors down! “Rock Around the Clock”
From the same movie, a “live” performance of their 1956 hit “See You Later Alligator” followed by Bill’s 1952 hit, “Rock A-Beatin’ Boogie.” We’ll close Bill’s contributions to the movie with “Razzle Dazzle”
Thanks to the second Alan Freed jukebox movie “Don’t Knock the Rock,” we have a great clip of their “live” performance of the 1956 hit “Rip It Up”
Live and rocking in the 1980 documentary “Blue Suede Shoes” (not long before he died), here are Bill and the Comets performing their 1952 hit, “Rock the Joint”
From 1951, Bill’s first hit when the Comets were still known as the Saddlemen, the studio version of one of the first prototypical rock and roll tunes, the legendary “Rocket 88”
From Birmingham, England, a great live concert from 1979! Bill Haley Live in Concert 1979
(Set list: “Shake Rattle and Roll,” “Razzle Dazzle,” “Rudy Rock,” “When The Saints Play Rock and Roll,” “See You Later Alligator,” “Rock Around the Clock,” “Rock This Joint,” “Me and Bobby Magee,” “Rock A-Beatin’ Boogie,” “Rip It Up,” Chuck Berry’s “The Promised Land,” and back to “When the Saints Come Marchin’ In”
As usual, we'll finish this birthday tribute to Bill Haley with a live performance on American Bandstand in 1960 of our Saturday Night Attitude dance tune, “Rock Around the Clock”
Eternal gratitude to you, Mister Bill Haley. You and your Comets were the first to open the doors to rock and roll, capturing the public imagination and changing the world forever, which is no small thing. And in an interesting personal connection, we both shared fond memories of Grandmom and Pop Jones, since we both hung around their drugstore back when I was very young and you were founding rock and roll! Shake, Rattle, and Roll, Rock the Joint, Rip It Up, and I'll See You Later, Alligator....
© Copyright 2014 Robert Wilkinson | <urn:uuid:7b999ebd-eaf1-4cb6-8713-1b2e8d0f51f1> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.aquariuspapers.com/astrology/2014/07/its-our-saturday-night-attitude-dance-courtesy-of-birthday-boy-bill-haley.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403502.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00195-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952637 | 1,501 | 2.671875 | 3 |
A species of yeast that University of California scientists have found in cherries and raspberries infested by the spotted wing drosophila could play a role in developing better lures to detect the pest.
The spotted wing drosophila, a pest that originated in Asia, first invaded California in 2008. If uncontrolled, it has the potential to cause $860 million in crop losses for cherry and caneberry growers in California, Oregon, and Washington, according to a press release from the university.
UC-Davis scientists, working with a visiting professor from Spain, found the yeast Hanseniaspora uvarum in almost every cherry, raspberry, and spotted wing drosophila larva that they collected in Davis, Winters, and Watsonville.
Dr. Kyria Boundy-Mills, curator of the Phaff Yeast Culture Collection, who is working on the project, said they are conducting tests to see if the yeast would be a good lure to detect the fly in the field. In commercial orchards, the spotted wing drosophila is typically being trapped with lures of apple cider vinegar or baker’s yeast and sugar water, but those lures also attract other fruit flies and nontarget insects.
Also working on the project are Dr. Frank Zalom, entomologist and IPM specialist at UC Davis, graduate student Kelly Hamby, and Professor Alejandro Hernandez of the University of Extramadura, Spain. | <urn:uuid:28ae472e-a37e-4712-b212-da374f57034c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.goodfruit.com/yeast-tested-as-lure/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393093.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00040-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931591 | 299 | 3.21875 | 3 |
Hurricane season has arrived, sparking renewed debate regarding possible links between global warming and the frequency and severity of hurricanes, heat waves and other extreme weather events.
Meanwhile, a related discussion has ensued among international-security experts who believe climate-change-related damage to global ecosystems and the resulting competition for natural resources may increasingly serve as triggers for wars and other conflicts in the future.
Jrgen Scheffran, a research scientist in the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security and the Center for Advanced BioEnergy Research at the University of Illinois, is among those raising concerns. In a survey of recent research published earlier this summer in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Scheffran concluded that "the impact of climate change on human and global security could extend far beyond the limited scope the world has seen thus far."
Scheffran's review included a critical analysis of four trends identified in a report by the German Advisory Council on Global Change as among those most possibly destabilizing populations and governments: degradation of freshwater resources, food insecurity, natural disasters and environmental migration.
He also cited last year's report by a working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicating that climate change would affect species and ecosystems worldwide, from rainforests to coral reefs.
In his analysis, Scheffran noted that the number of world regions vulnerable to drought was expected to rise.
Water supplies stored in glaciers and snow cover in major mountain ranges such as the Andes and Himalayas also are expected to decrease, he said.
"Most critical for human survival are water and food, which are sensitive to changing climatic conditions," Scheffran said.
The degradation of these critical resources, combined with threats to populations caused by natural disasters, disease and crumbling economic and ecosystems, he said, could ultimately have "cascading effects."
"Environmental changes caused by global warming will not only affect human living conditions but may also generate larger societal effects, by threatening the infrastructures of society or by inducing social responses that aggravate the problem," he wrote. "The associated socio-economic and political stress can undermine the functioning of communities, the effectiveness of institutions, and the stability of societal structures. These degraded conditions could contribute to civil strife, and, worse, armed conflict."
In fact, Scheffran said, there's evidence that such dramas are already playing out on the world stage whether already affected by climate change or not.
"Large areas of Africa are suffering from scarcity of food and fresh water resources, making them more vulnerable to conflict. An example is Sudan's Darfur province where an ongoing conflict was aggravated since droughts forced Arab herders to move into areas of African farmers."
Other regions of the world including the Middle East, Central Asia and South America also are being affected, he said.
With so much at stake, Scheffran recommends multiple strategies for forestalling otherwise insurmountable consequences. Among the most critical, he said, is for governments to incorporate measures for addressing climate change within national policy. Beyond that, he advocates a cooperative, international approach to addressing concerns.
"Although climate change bears a significant conflict potential, it can also transform the international system toward more cooperation if it is seen as a common threat that requires joint action," he said.
One of the more hopeful, recent signs on that front, he said, was the 2007 Bali climate summit that brought together more than 10,000 representatives from throughout the world to draft a climate plan.
"The Bali Roadmap has many good ideas, but was criticized as being too vague to induce a major policy shift," Scheffran said. "Nevertheless, the seeming conflict between environment and the economy will be best overcome with the recognition that protecting the climate in the best interest of the economy."
In addition to global cooperation, Scheffran believes that those occupying Earth now can learn a lot about the future by studying the past.
"History has shown how dependent our culture is on a narrow window of climatic conditions for average temperature and precipitation," he said. "The great human civilizations began to flourish after the last ice age, and some disappeared due to droughts and other adverse shifts in the climate. The so-called 'Little Ice Age' in the northern hemisphere a few hundred years ago was caused by an average drop in temperature of less than a degree Celsius.
"The consequences were quite severe in parts of Europe, associated with loss of harvest and population decline," Scheffran said. "Riots and military conflicts became more likely, as a recent empirical study has suggested."
However, as history has demonstrated, humans are quite capable of adapting to changing climate conditions as long as those changes are moderate.
"The challenge is to slow down the dynamics and stabilize the climate system at levels which are not dangerous," Scheffran said.
He remains optimistic that this is still possible in large part, because public awareness and educational efforts taking place today are making concerns about climate change a priority.
"Global warming receives now more public and political attention than a few years ago," Scheffran said.
"Grass-roots movements are emerging in the United States for protecting the climate and developing energy alternatives, involving not only many local communities and companies but also influential states such as California, led by Gov. (Arnold) Schwarzenegger."
Further evidence that the issue is being taken seriously at last, Scheffran said, is coming from the campaign trail.
"Congressional and presidential candidates now acknowledge that something has to be done to play a leading role on energy and climate change to not fall behind the rest of the world," he said.
|Contact: Melissa Mitchell|
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | <urn:uuid:39d6a863-c0ec-457b-98b7-df7840c1bc7c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.bio-medicine.org/biology-news-1/Climate-change-could-be-impetus-for-wars--other-conflicts--expert-says-4572-1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403826.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00049-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961477 | 1,169 | 3 | 3 |
Why do we age? Science didn’t really start investigating that question until the 1960′s, when a scientist named Hayflick discovered that normal human cells only divide 80 or 90 times.
After that, the aging cell might live for years, but it doesn’t function properly anymore, and can even damage other cells around it. This concept, called the “Hayflick Limit,” isn’t restricted to humans, either, most organisms seem to have a maximum genetic lifespan. How do cells know how old they are, or when to stop dividing?
Think of chromosomes, strings of genetic information inside our cells, as two shoestrings, wrapped around each other. Shoestrings have a plastic end cap at each end. Chromosomes have these end caps, too, at the tip of each chromosome is an ending sequence called a telomere (TEE-lo-meer). When the cell divides, the chromosome is pulled apart and each half is copied, but it’s never a perfect copy, because the chromosome isn’t copied all the way to the tip. That’s where telomeres come in handy. As the end caps for our DNA, they protect the genes, so we don’t lose important genetic information every time our cell divides, we just lose a little piece of the end cap, the telomere.
The trouble with telomeres is that they don’t last forever. We lose bits of them with every cell division, and normal body cells can’t rebuild them again. Scientists think this might explain the “Hayflick limit.” After a certain number of cell divisions, our telomeres are whittled away. After that, the cell can’t copy its DNA correctly anymore, so it stops dividing. While telomeres protect our genes, they may also act as the ultimate biological clock! | <urn:uuid:4551326c-b159-41a2-ba84-0d8fc2280717> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/the-problem-with-telomeres/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392099.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00110-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.904114 | 398 | 4 | 4 |
House Plants Need Repotting
Just mulching won’t give them what they need to overwinter
The editor of Bay Weekly recently asked if she could simply add potting soil to raise the level of rooting medium in her houseplants or if she had to repot. I advised her to repot.
The rooting medium in house plants shrinks with time. As the organic matter in the potting medium decomposes due to high soil temperatures and frequent irrigations, the volume of rooting medium shrinks. If there are drainage holes in the container, most likely some of the finer particles in the rooting medium have been washed away. As the root ball of the plant grows smaller, it dries out more rapidly so the plant needs to be irrigated more frequently. Eventually the plant becomes root-bound and stops growing.
Simply raising the volume of rooting medium by mulching the plant with new potting soil does not provide the roots with any relief. The roots do not have access to that surface layer of potting soil because the roots of plants grow sideways and down. The top of the plants grows up. A classic science project is to try to grow plants upside down. The top of the plant will always turn towards the sky, while the roots will turn and grow downward.
When repotting, always shake away as much old potting soil from around the roots as possible. If the roots are crowded and circling the inside wall of the container, pull them outward or cut the roots to promote branching and formation of new roots.
Take the soil that you have removed and blend it with equal parts new potting soil and add at least one-third to one-half by volume of compost. Place sufficient soil in the bottom of the pot to raise the planting depth of the surface roots to within one inch of the top edge of the pot. Work your improved potting soil down around the roots.
Bounce the bottom of the pot on a hard surface several times as you press the soil down along the stem and between the roots.
After the soil is adequately worked around the stem and roots, allow at least one-half to three-quarters inch of space for watering.
Water thoroughly so that excess water can be seen dripping from the bottom of the pot.
Houseplants Need Lots of Sun and Little Fertilizer over Winter
I just read a column from Behnke’s that plants indoors for the winter should get as much light as possible but no fertilizer.
I have always fertilized indoor plants. I generally use a weak mixture of MiracleGro once a month in winter, twice in summer. They seem happy.
I just picked up some Osmocote that says it lasts for four months. Should I use it?
–Lynn Whitall; via email
Houseplants need all of the light they can absorb during winter months, so put them in front of windows.
Most of the Osmocote fertilizers release nutrients for three months or more, and Osmocote 18-6-12 releases for eight months. Keep doing what you are doing in winter and save your Osmocote until next spring. At that point, drill the Osmocote into the potting soil by poking a hole with your finger about an inch deep. In the hole, add one teaspoon per six inches in diameter.
Ask Dr. Gouin your questions at [email protected]. All questions will appear in Bay Weekly. Please include your name and address. | <urn:uuid:85151ca7-b33d-4e82-b548-1161b0f53d65> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.bayweekly.com/articles/bay-gardener-dr-francis-gouin/article/house-plants-need-repotting?page=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398628.62/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00018-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949363 | 724 | 2.921875 | 3 |
The Rural Assistance Center (RAC) and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis recently released a Rural Oral Health Toolkit to help rural communities improve access to oral health care. Developed by NORC on behalf of the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy (ORHP), the toolkit contains resources to help communities develop oral health programs by building on best practices of successful oral health program models.
The toolkit is made up of several modules. Each concentrates on different aspects of oral health programs.
- Module 1: Oral Health in Rural Communities;
- Module 2: Rural Oral Health Program Models;
- Module 3: Implementation of Rural Oral Health Programs;
- Module 4: Planning for Sustainability;
- Module 5: Evaluating Rural Oral Health Programs;
- Module 6: Dissemination of Rural Oral Health Resources and Promising Practices; and
- Module 7: Program Clearinghouse. | <urn:uuid:b6feafe4-fba6-4e80-9096-da0c27d4aa00> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.adea.org/Blog.aspx?id=21352&blogid=20132 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403826.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00046-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.850775 | 194 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Flag of Malta
This page is about the meaning, origin and characteristic of the symbol, emblem, seal, sign, logo or flag: Flag of Malta.
The Flag of Malta (Maltese: Bandiera ta' Malta) is a basic bi-color, with white in the hoist and red in the fly. A representation of the George Cross, awarded to Malta by George VI in 1942 is carried, edged with red, in the canton of the white stripe
Tradition states that the colors of the flag were given to Malta by Roger I of Sicily in 1090. Roger's fleet landed in Malta on the completion of the Norman conquest of Sicily. It is said that local Christians offered to fight by Roger's side against the Arab defenders. In order to recognize the locals fighting on his side from the defenders, Roger reportedly tore off part of his chequered red-and-white flag. This story has, however, been debunked as a 19th-century myth, possibly even earlier due to the Mdina, Malta's old capital, associating its colors with Rogers in the late Middle Ages.
The flag of the Knights of Malta, a white cross on a red field, was a more likely source of the Maltese colors, inspiring the red and white shield used during the British colonial period.
The George Cross
The George Cross originally appeared on the flag placed on a blue canton (see List of flags of Malta). The flag was changed on 21 September 1964 with Malta's independence when the blue canton was replaced by a red fimbriation the intention being that the Cross appear less prominent. The flag has remained unchanged since.
The Maltese national flag bears a decoration from another country, in this case the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This has been the cause of occasional controversy since Malta's independence.
The civil ensign is entirely different: it shows a red field, bordered white and charged with a white Maltese cross.
Asymmetric, Closed shape, Colorful, Contains both straight and curved lines, Has crossing lines.
More symbols in World Flags:
Flags from countries around the world, including their origins, design and history. read more »
More symbols in Flags:
A flag is usually a piece of fabric with a distinctive design that is usually rectangular and used as a symbol, as a signaling device, or decoration. The term flag is also used to refer to the graphi… read more »
More symbols in Awareness Ribbons:
Many groups have adopted ribbons as symbols of support or awareness, and as a result, many causes often share each color. Some causes may also be represented by more than one color. read more » | <urn:uuid:8fdc4b02-3906-4520-99aa-683193b6f813> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.symbols.com/symbol/1783 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397864.87/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00103-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952412 | 555 | 3.125 | 3 |
A combination of modern technology and hands-on interpretation is helping a group of students from the Kansas State School for the Blind on an expedition of discovery this month. They're visiting several NPS sites while retracing the routes of the Oregon and California National Historic Trails.
The group of eighteen students from the Kansas State School for the Blind and their leaders is travelling in a minivan-caravan, visiting important NPS trail sites and using “talking” GPS devices to help them walk in wagon ruts at stops along the way.
Fort Laramie National Historic Site and other NPS units along the travel routes are engaging the students in accessible living-history programming as they learn about the emigration experience. At Fort Laramie the trekkers, along with 20 support staff and teacher interns, learned how to load and fire a mountain howitzer and tasted the hard life of an Army laundress by washing clothing on an old-fashioned washboard.
Later they celebrated an early Fourth of July at Independence Rock and used their GPS units to explore Oregon Trail ruts at South Pass in west-central Wyoming. Other stops along the trail this summer include City of Rocks National Reserve at Almo, Idaho, and Fort Vancouver National Historic Site in Vancouver, Washington.
The trekkers will return to Kansas City following the Nez Perce and Lewis and Clark National Historic Trails, with stops at the Nez Perce reservation and two NPS areas in North Dakota: Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site and Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site.
Their route includes some fine NPS sites that many of us miss in our own journeys—and their trip reminds us there's more than one way to "see the U.S.A." | <urn:uuid:31e0d4d4-3f67-4288-ba08-86680f791cde> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2010/06/visually-impaired-students-retracing-oregon-and-california-national-historic-trails6060 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783404405.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155004-00142-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940503 | 355 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Specific questions on water quantities
Specific questions on water use and the amounts of available water on earth
Approximately 1385 million cubic kilometres of water are available on earth. 97,5% of the water is salt water that can be found mainly in oceans. Only 2,5% is freshwater that can be used by plants, animals and humans. However, nearly 90% of this freshwater is not readily available, because it is centred in icecaps of the Antarctic. Only 0.26% of the water on this world is available for humans and other organisms, this is about 93.000 cubic kilometres. Only 0.014% of this water can be used for drinking water production, as most of it is stored in clouds or in the ground.
Increases in world population means increased water use and less availability on a per capita basis. In 1989 there was some 9,000 cubic metres of freshwater per person available for human use. By 2000, this had dropped to 7,800 cubic metres and it is expected to plummet to 5,100 cubic metres per person by 2025, when the global population is projected to reach 8 billion.
People already use over half the world's accessible freshwater now, and may use nearly three-quarters by 2025. Over the twentieth century, the world annual water use has grown from about 300 km3 to about 2,100 km3 (see chart).
In this chart the annual water consumption is shown, as withdrawal and use. These two concepts are separated, because much of the withdrawn water is later returned to the water cycle, after application. An example is cooling water; it is used for power generation and is immediately released for further use downstream.
Global consumption of water is doubling every 20 years, more that twice the rate of human population growth. According to the various water research agencies, the world water use is expected to triple in the next 50 years.
Water scarcity is caused by dry climates, drought, desiccation, or water stress. Water scarcity caused by drought has killed over 24,000 people a year since the 1970's. Over 40% of the world's population now experiences water shortages that threaten their agriculture and industry and also their personal health. Today over a billion people do not have access to clean drinking water and by 2025 at least 3 billion people in 90 different countries are expected to face severe water stress. The main problem that causes this is not a shortage of water, but the wasteful and unsustainable use of available water supplies.
The costs of a cubic meter of water are known to differ between countries. In this chart, the costs of one cubic meter of water are shown, for 14 different countries.
When water is desalinated through the Reverse Osmosis (RO) treatment, the costs are as follows:
The costs should decline within the next 10-50 years, as membranes become cheaper and more efficient. However, the costs are mostly energy related, so the energy use should be taken into account.
Global population now exceeds 6.2 billion, more that double what it was in 1950, and is currently projected to rise to between 7.9 billion and 10.9 billion by 2050. Even when the population does not increase, water use will still grow. A population increase will only make the global water use rise faster.
For more answers to your questions on water quantities, move to our Water Quantity FAQ
For the answers to your questions on drinking water, move to our Drinking Water FAQ | <urn:uuid:8acc9898-4641-469c-9699-12f0bee613c0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.lenntech.com/specific-questions-water-quantities.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783404826.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155004-00106-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958772 | 702 | 3.609375 | 4 |
This is the VOA Special English DEVELOPMENT REPORT.
From time to time we examine different organizations involved in development and relief work around the world. This week we tell about Oxfam. Oxfam is an independent British organization. The group works in poor communities with local organizations. It says it tries to find permanent answers to poverty and suffering. It says every human being has the right to self-respect and a chance to succeed.
Oxfam was formed in nineteen-forty-two. The organization was part of an effort in Britain to get food and medical supplies to starving people in Greece. At that time, Nazi Germans occupied the country. Allied forces had ordered a naval blockade in the Mediterranean. Groups formed in Britain to urge the government to let humanitarian aid get through. One of the groups was called the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief.
After World War Two, Oxfam decided to continue on and extend its aid to more than just war victims. It saw a need for humanitarian relief in all parts of the world.
Today, Oxfam has programs in more than seventy developing countries. It says that in each case, it employs local people who know the issues affecting their communities. Oxfam also carries out education campaigns and policy work. It says it wants to make sure governments and international organizations understand the problems that face the world's poor.
Oxfam depends on money from supporters to operate. A committee governs the organization with the help of a lower-level group. The members of the two committees are not paid. A chief executive supervises the daily operations of Oxfam.
Over the past fifty years, Oxfam has carried out numerous projects. It has helped communities to set up schools. The organization will pay for building classrooms and for equipment and teacher-training programs. Oxfam has helped communities improve their health services and water supplies. And it trains local people to teach others in their villages about cleanliness and healthy foods.
Oxfam says poverty is not a fact of life but instead an injustice that must be overcome. For more than half a century, it has been working alongside other international aid organizations to help make this happen.
This VOA Special English DEVELOPMENT REPORT was written by Jill Moss. | <urn:uuid:ca285f3c-e186-4a97-9446-f9af2340d608> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.manythings.org/voa/0/11021.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397567.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00071-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968722 | 456 | 3.203125 | 3 |
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No Child Left Behind and Science Education: Opportunities, Challenges, and Risks
Ronald W. Marx and Christopher J. Harris
The Elementary School Journal
Vol. 106, No. 5 (May 2006), pp. 467-478
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/505441
Page Count: 12
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Abstract This article examines the opportunities, challenges, and risks that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) poses for science education in elementary and middle schools. Four areas of science education—standards, instruction, teachers, and curriculum—are discussed in the present context of NCLB accountability. Attention is given to how the current policy agenda affects science education and how this agenda may influence the teaching and learning of science for years to come.
© 2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:15bb342a-ba24-4efb-82a1-b873d4567970> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/505441 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396875.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00095-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.869781 | 308 | 3.09375 | 3 |
Below is information about the student activity/lesson plan from your search.
Energy Choices and Society, Geothermal, Solar, Water, Wind Energy
Students will compare and contrast renewable and nonrenewable resources to explore energy options. The following activities will be completed:
- Field Trip to a Local Energy Source (optional)
- Virtual Field Trip to an Energy Source (optional)
- Chocolate Chip Cookie Mining Lab
Language Arts, Science, Technology
Handouts and other materials needed detailed within curriculum guide.
Next Generation Science Standards:
- 3-LS4-4: Make a claim about the merit of a solution to a problem caused when the environment changes and the types of plants and animals that live there may change.
- 4-PS3-2: Make observations to provide evidence that energy can be transferred from place to place by sound, light, heat, and electric currents.
- 4-PS3-4: Apply scientific ideas to design, test, and refine a device that converts energy from one form to another.
- 4-ESS3-1: Obtain and combine information to describe that energy and fuels are derived from natural resources and their uses affect the environment.
- 5-ESS3-1: Obtain and combine information about ways individual communities use science ideas to protect the Earth's resources and environment.
America's Home Energy Education Challenge | <urn:uuid:c2682de3-9131-4a2a-837f-8e8eeeb34a8b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://energy.gov/eere/education/downloads/energy-production | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397565.80/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00079-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.84611 | 284 | 4.1875 | 4 |
Plate Tectonics as Expressed in Geological Landforms and Events
This activity was selected for the On the Cutting Edge Exemplary Teaching Collection
Resources in this top level collection a) must have scored Exemplary or Very Good in all five review categories, and must also rate as “Exemplary” in at least three of the five categories. The five categories included in the peer review process are
- Scientific Accuracy
- Alignment of Learning Goals, Activities, and Assessments
- Pedagogic Effectiveness
- Robustness (usability and dependability of all components)
- Completeness of the ActivitySheet web page
For more information about the peer review process itself, please see http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/review.html.
This activity has gone through an observational review process.
This resources was tested in a classroom and feedback was provided using this protocol. The activity was modified in response to the feedback.
This page first made public: Oct 30, 2009
Context for Use
This activity can be assigned as homework, or it can be conducted in part as a classroom demonstration, followed by a homework assignment. Student access to Internet-capable computers, onto which Google Earth and GeoMapApp software can be downloaded, is essential for its use. How an instructor approaches the this activity will depend on the degree of facility students have with accessing Internet-based data resources - it may be that some how-to training for the use of such resources is necessary. Fortunately, both Google Earth and GeoMapApp are relatively intuitive software.
The activity may be used, with some modification, in either introductory geology courses, or in Junior/Senior level courses on tectonics or petrology. Lecture and reading materials on the basics of plate tectonics, plate boundaries, and plate boundary interactions should precede its assignment.
Description and Teaching Materials
Provided is an example handout sheet for the activity, along with Google Earth kmz overlay files for the Central America/Gulf of California MARGINS focus areas. The images are "nested," so that switching from one to the next focuses onto a smaller and smaller region. Depending on how the images are viewed, one may wish to re-create them with different point sizes in GeoMapApp, which is relatively simple to do.
The more recent versions of GeoMapApp permit customized color-coding and sizing of symbols, which might be a desirable way of preparing these files. Also, it may be necessary now to download the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Network kmz file for the positions of active volcanoes on the Earth, as newer versions of Google Earth may not include it as an upload. The Smithsonian file is updated periodically.
Data and overlay files for the Izu-Bonin/Japan focus areas discussed in the handout (or overlays for any other region of the Earth) can be generated in GeoMapApp, and transferred to Google Earth in the form of .kmz files, produced as a "save as" option in GeoMapApp.
- Updated Assignment sheet 09 (Microsoft Word 53kB May28 09)
- KMZ file for earthquake epicenters in the eastern Pacific ( 1.5MB Feb19 07)
- KMZ file for the Costa Rica/Cocos area ( 1.6MB Feb19 07)
- KMZ file for the Nicoya Peninsula close-up area ( 1.4MB Feb19 07)
- KMZ file for regional plate boundaries from Bird (2003) ( 909kB Feb19 07) (for instructor's use)
Teaching Notes and Tips
Critical to the effective use of this activity is that the instructor become facile in manipulating both Google Earth and GeoMapApp. Fortunately, this is rather easy to do. As with much of science instruction in the Information Age, what students need is to learn how to access and interpret information, so anticipate "mechanical" questions related to the use of the applications, so as to address them quickly and move on to examining the data.
It may be necessary to ensure that students grasp the necessary functionality in GeoMapApp, and even in Google Earth. Students aren't as familar with these resources as investigative tools as an instructor might expect. It's also a good idea to discuss the similarities and differences in the datasets represented by GeoMapApp (especially the Virtual Globe presentation) and Google Earth.
My approach to assessment in this activity is to develop rubrics for evaluating student responses to the two sets of questions. How the rubrics are cast will depend on how the activity is used (i.e., straight homework, an in-class computer lab, or as a lecture/homework combination) and the level of the student audience. The questions are intended to ultimately get students past the simple identification of plate boundaries, though making these identifications from the combined earthquake and volcanic datasets is obviously a big part of the activity.
Rubric for Mini-Lesson, by Sandra Swenson, CUNY-John Jay College (Microsoft Word 27kB May29 09)
References and Resources
Google Earth: http://earth.google.com
Smithsonian Global Volcanism Network: http://www.volcano.si.edu/ | <urn:uuid:a97e8e61-6eb6-4ebe-9d94-35cc993b249c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://serc.carleton.edu/margins/minilessons/PTLandforms.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397695.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00150-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.908267 | 1,090 | 3.640625 | 4 |
None so deaf as those who will not hear
Possible interpretation: Nobody is deafer than the person who decides he does not want to listen. Often used in reference to prejudice and intolerance.Note: none (pronoun) = no person; no one | deaf (adj.) = unable to hear; not having the power of hearing | will (verb) = intend; desire [this is "will" used as a main verb, not as a modal auxiliary verb] | Also found as: "There are none so deaf as those who will not hear." There is a similar proverb: "None so blind as those who will not see."
"None so deaf as those who will not hear" is a saying that refers to
This entry is in the following categories:
Contributor: Josef Essberger | <urn:uuid:fbb6efdf-7101-48ea-9269-7afba29e665f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://www.englishclub.com/ref/esl/Sayings/N/None_so_deaf_as_those_who_will_not_hear_583.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394987.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00068-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956074 | 167 | 3.15625 | 3 |
The Thirty Years' War began as a conflict between the Catholic and Lutheran (Protestant) princes of Germany over succession of the title of Holy Roman Emperor. It waged in various forms for three decades, largely destroying Germany in the process. By the end of the conflict, international power politics had largely replaced religious divisions as the basis for alliances, with Catholic France and Lutheran Sweden allied against the Catholic Hapsburgs of Spain and their German allies. The war ended in a series of treaties known collectively as the Peace of Westphalia, which effectively ended the political power of the Holy Roman Emperor, hastened Spain's decline as a world power, and extended religious tolerance in Germany to include Calvinists as well as Lutherans and Catholics.
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In history there are many key concepts and terms that are crucial for students to know and understand. Often it can be hard to determine what the most important history concepts and terms are, and even once you’ve identified them you still need to understand what they mean. To help you learn and understand key history terms and concepts, we’ve identified some of the most important ones and provided detailed definitions for them, written and compiled by Chegg experts. | <urn:uuid:2f4e9736-5c4f-4542-beba-89e0cabd22f4> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.chegg.com/homework-help/definitions/thirty-years-war-45 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396887.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00134-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964077 | 279 | 4.1875 | 4 |
Family: †††††††††††††††††† Cynocephalidae.
Size:††††††††††††††††††††††† Length 13 to 17 in., Tail 7 to 11 in., Weight 2 to 4 lbs.
Characteristics:††††††† Solitary, nocturnal.
∑ The flying lemur is also known as a colugo, cobego or kagwag.
∑ The longest glide for a flying lemur was recorded at 136 metres (450 ft.).
∑ Almost 90% of the Philippine Eagleís diet consists of flying lemur.
∑ Although its teeth resemble those of carnivores, the flying lemur's diet consists of fruit and leaves.
The flying lemur doesnít fly and it isnít a lemur, but received its name because of its nocturnal habit and the shape of its fox-like head, both of which are reminiscent of lemurs. Like flying squirrels, lemurs actually glide rather than fly. They have flaps of skin that surround almost the entire body and extend from the fingers and toes to the tail. When the flying lemur wants to glide from one tree to another, it holds its arms and legs out, creating a parachute or wing-glider type of effect, soaring 50 to 100 metres in one effortless motion. Flying lemurs never purposely descend to the ground, where they move slowly and awkwardly due to the large flaps of skins that hang from their bodies, rendering them nearly helpless when they attempt to walk upright. They spend their entire lives up in trees, sleeping in tree hollows or hanging upside down from branches during the heat of the day. The flying lemur eats a diet consisting entirely of leaves, buds, fruit and flowers, but only from certain species of plants. The destruction of its habitat has therefore been fatal for this animal, and because itís difficult to find the right food for them when in captivity, captive flying lemurs often meet early deaths. It eats by grabbing a branch, pulling it towards its mouth and biting off a piece of leaf. Water is obtained by licking drops from wet leaves. Flying lemurs are solitary animals and although up to 12 may be found per hectare, if two males find themselves in the same tree, they become aggressive toward each other until one leaves.
The Philippine flying lemur (C. volans) is found only on islands belonging to the Philippines, while the Malayan flying lemur (C. variegates) is found in the rainforests of Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sumatra and Borneo. Malayan flying lemurs are larger and lighter coloured than Philippine flying lemurs, and have more white spots on their backs.
Because theyíre not often successfully kept in captivity, knowledge about the flying lemurís reproduction is limited. The female usually has one baby after a two-month pregnancy. The newborn is extremely helpless and attaches itself to its motherís belly, where itís carried in a pouch the mother fashions from her skin flaps. The oldest flying lemur in captivity was kept for 17.5 years before it escaped. | <urn:uuid:3f13a812-c6f0-43a2-80aa-604e4233805c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.robstewartphotography.com/facts/Flylemur.asp?i_id=477/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395346.6/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00122-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948221 | 685 | 3.359375 | 3 |
J. Kenworthy and J. Whittaker
Disability and Society, vol. 15, 2000, p. 219-231
Argues in favour of the education of all disabled children in mainstream rather than special schools. Suggests that compulsory segregation of children with special needs will continue until the law underwrites their right to an equal choice of education. Highlights the case of David McKibben and his family who have taken on the East Belfast Education Board to fight for David's right to attend his local mainstream high school. David experienced further rejection by independent special needs tribunals. Paper asserts that these tribunals and current UK education legislation are fundamentally at odds with the human rights of disabled and non-disabled children.
Guardian, 14th Apr. 2000, p. 21
Argues that extremely disruptive children need to be excluded from schools for the sake of the majority. Investment needs to be made in special units supported by re-education welfare and educational psychology staff in which difficult children can undergo intensive treatment and rehabilitation.
Independent, May 12th 2000, p. 7
Reports on how new government guidelines on the education of under fives will help children reach national standards in speaking, listening, working in a group, concentrating and persisting in a task by the age of six.
S. Lawlor (editor)
London: Politeia, 2000
Report shows that children in England and Wales lag behind pupils in other similar countries in basic literacy and numeracy. Proposals to improve standards include provision of better textbooks, more use of whole-class teaching, introduction of subject specialist teachers in primary schools and measures to make classes more homogeneous in terms of pupils' ability.
Foster Care, no. 101, 2000, p. 8-9
Looks at draft guidance recently produced by the DfEE on the education of children looked-after by local authorities. The guidance emphasises carers' education responsibilities, recommends Personal Education Plans (PEPs) for all looked-after children, and proposes a designated teacher with responsibility for looked-after children in each school.
Education and Lifelong Learning Working Group
London: Local Government Association, 2000
Highlights problems of isolation, recruitment difficulties and poor accommodation experienced by rural schools. Urges such schools to work more closely together to share facilities and to consider broader use by the community.
International Journal of Inclusive Education, vol. 4, 2000, p. 133-151
Education policy in the UK for children with special educational needs has been based on the assumption that the means to ensuring equality of educational opportunity is the mainstream school. Paper argues that this is false and demonstrates that as long as the present organisation of schooling, the curriculum and assessment and testing procedures remain unchallenged, equal educational opportunity will remain a myth. Shows that current reforms in education seem to be directed towards preserving the status quo and making schools more efficient, thus reinforcing inequality and discrimination. Finally attempts to set a new agenda for the 21st century in which education would be based on problem-solving, collaboration, team-working and the celebration of diversity.
Independent, May 9th 2000, p. 9
Firfield Community School, the first comprehensive to enter the Fresh Start programme will be closed by Newcastle City Council if parents agree. It has a budget crisis and empty places.
(See also Guardian, May 9th 2000, p. 5; Daily Telegraph, May 9th 2000, p. 10)
Independent, Apr. 25th 2000, p. 8
From 2002 A-levels will become modular and most students will take four subjects instead of the present three. After one year's study they can take a new AS examination, (half an A-level) before deciding whether to proceed to the full A-level. Because the AS examination will count for half the marks and will be easier than existing A-levels, the exam at the end of the second year will have more challenging questions than any of those in the present A-levels.
Guardian, May 18th 2000, p. 12
All 36 comprehensive school heads in County Durham have written an open letter to Tony Blair saying that a backlog of £82m worth of basic repairs to school buildings was threatening local children's education.
(See also Independent, May 18th 2000, p. 6)
Independent, Apr. 13th 2000, p. 12
The number of infants in classes of more than 30 halved in 1999. Average class sizes for juniors have also fallen from 28.4 to 28.3 while average secondary school class sizes have risen marginally from 21.9 to 22.
(See also Guardian, Apr. 13th 2000, p. 7)
Public Finance, Apr. 21st - 27th 2000, p. 25
Calls on the Treasury and Westminster Council to stop trying to force the Private Finance Initiative on Pimlico School.
Times, Apr. 13th 2000, p. 8
The school tests for seven-year-olds may be changed if it is found to be causing children undue stress.
(See also Daily Telegraph, Apr. 13th 2000, p. 6; Guardian, Apr. 13th 2000, p. 7)
Independent, Apr. 13th 2000, p. 2
An independent analysis has shown that education spending in the first three years of the new Labour government grew by 1.25% per year, compared to 2.25% per year under the Major government.
Financial Times, Apr. 25th 2000, p. 5
Martin Johnson, present of NASUWT, has accused the government of dismantling the comprehensive school system and replacing it with selection by stealth. He attached specialist schools which benefit from extra funding and can select 10% of their pupils by aptitude. He also criticised the system of parental choice which allows affluent parents to move into the catchment areas of successful schools.
(See also Guardian, Apr. 25th 2000, p. 1; Independent, Apr. 25th 2000, p. 8)
Times, Apr. 27th 2000, p. 1
Reports that the government is to invest in on-site learning support units' within mainstream schools to which unruly and disruptive pupils can be sent.
(See also Daily Telegraph, Apr. 27th 2000, p. 13; Independent, Apr. 27th 2000, p. 10; Guardian, Apr. 27th 2000, p. 11)
Guardian, Apr. 20th 2000, p. 7
Teachers are planning to sue their Local Education Authorities for allegedly failing to protect staff from the dangers of returning disruptive pupils to the classrooms. Violent pupils are no longer expelled from schools because of the government's social inclusion policy. Teachers claim that children with learning difficulties and behavioural problems are often better served in special schools where places have been cut on grounds of cost.
(See also Independent, Apr. 20th 2000, p. 10)
Independent, Apr. 26th 2000, p. 8
The National Union of Teachers has voted in favour of balloting members on a one-day strike against performance related pay. However, the Union's general secretary has said he will not implement the decision.
(See also Times, Apr. 26th 2000, p.6; Daily Telegraph, Apr. 26th 2000, p. 1 + 2; Financial Times, Apr. 26th 2000, p. 6; Guardian Apr. 26th 2000, p. 2)
Guardian, Apr. 19th 2000, p. 7
Association of Teachers and lecturers warns that the government drive to raise standards is placing pupils under stress, leading to anxiety, irritability and short tempers.
(See also Times, Apr. 19th 2000, p. 15; Daily Telegraph, Apr. 19th 2000, p. 6; Independent, Apr. 19th 2000, p. 11)
Times, Apr. 26th 2000, p. 20
Attacks the Labour governments policy of imposing rigid central control on schools through the national curriculum, a harsh testing and inspection regime, and performance-related pay for teachers.
Financial Times, May 16th 2000, p. 10
Government is encouraging private companies to compete with local authorities for contracts to provide schools with services such as building maintenance, cleaning and IT. Private operators may also take over the role of inspecting and advising schools in matters ranging from the appointment of head teachers to fundraising.
Guardian, Apr. 17th 2000, p. 15
The academic success of church-run schools has made them extremely popular. The Anglican church is planning to increase the number of secondary schools it runs, and may consider taking over failing local authority-run schools.
Housing, Apr. 2000, p. 38-39
Living conditions can have a profound effect on a child's education. Article calls for better co-ordination between local authority housing and education departments. | <urn:uuid:782adc53-e72b-43d9-8bd7-68ecb20d9ba2> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.bl.uk/welfarereform/issue13/ed-schoo.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393093.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00022-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930761 | 1,820 | 2.78125 | 3 |
If you are being asked to write a dissertation you'll know that this is not a simple essay. Or another way of looking at it is to say that this is a really complex and detailed essay. Rather than have simple fact paragraphs it will have chapters. It will have far more words than your basic essay. You will tackle the topic in much greater detail.
Even with the shortest and simplest of essays, the principle that the choice of topic largely determines the success of your work applies also to a dissertation. The more you know about the dissertation topic and more enthusiasm you have to discover more, the easier it will be to write your dissertation and arguably, the better will be your finished product. Talk over your choice of topic with your teacher or professor and ensure that it is the best possible topic for your interests and talents.
The thesis statement you create is the basis of your dissertation. It must be crystal clear, as short as possible and as simple as possible. That is not to say that the thesis statement won't contain some serious philosophy. But it is the way you phrase it which is so important.
And the thesis statement will then be discussed and supported throughout your dissertation. The key question though involves you being able to measure the claims you make. Yes you must be able to substantiate your claims but likewise you must be able to measure said claims. The success of your dissertation will in part be determined by your ability to prove and measure the claims emanating from your thesis statement.
Always remember that the quality of your research reflects directly on the quality of your writing. It is no point reading a vast amount of material if some or much of it is irrelevant. It is better that you read fewer books or articles and material which is relevant to your dissertation than ploughing through a mountain of books gathering material which is useless or irrelevant. Sensible and targeted research reading will give you superior information to support your thesis statement.
As the old adage goes, ‘if you fail to prepare you prepare to fail’. Look upon writing your dissertation as a marathon as opposed to a sprint. You need an expert timetable and outline and you need to plan your preparation. The more detailed and more planned your preparation is, the easier it will be for you to write your actual dissertation. And of course having finished the first draft, you then begin the all-important proofreading and editing phase.
Even the most basic of essays requires follow-up work. Correcting spelling and grammar mistakes goes without saying. But there is much to do as far as clarity of writing is concerned. Have you repeated yourself? Have you said something using too many words? Every beginner needs to learn the art of editing and polishing their dissertation. Get feedback from a variety of sources. You can do so much to make something good better and something better brilliant.
Copyright © JewishCouncil.info. All Rights Reserved. | <urn:uuid:28aa8545-4c90-4e02-a1d8-dd9edd72105d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.jewishcouncil.info/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393146.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00186-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954223 | 586 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Honda Motor Co. held demonstrations this week of experimental safety technology designed to prevent its vehicles from colliding with other vehicles, pedestrians and motorcycles.
Embedded computer chips on vehicles, in motorcycles and in a pedestrian's cell phone can communicate their respective whereabouts and detect if they are on a collision course. If so, warnings will show up on the vehicle's screen or the phone. If that doesn't work, the vehicle is programmed to make an emergency stop.
Honda researchers de-monstrated a range of projects in prototype stage at their research and development center in Raymond, Ohio.
-- from wire reports | <urn:uuid:522302fb-dcc5-4fee-b0a9-d2959f858621> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.goerie.com/article/20130830/BUSINESS05/308309976/Honda-has-plans-to-put-the-brakes-on-accidents | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783408828.55/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155008-00182-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944016 | 125 | 2.984375 | 3 |
Sizes and Scales: The Sun bear stands approximately four feet (1.2 m) in length, making it the smallest member in the bear family. It is often called the Dog bear because of its small stature. It has a two-inch (3 cm) tail and on average weighs less than 145 pounds (65 kg). Males tend to be slightly larger than females.
Fur: short and sleek... Unlike other bears, the Sun bear's fur is short and sleek. This adaptation is probably due to the lowland climates it inhabits.
Make Your Markings: Dark black or brown-black fur covers its body, except on the chest where there is a pale orange-yellow marking in the shape of a horseshoe. Similar colored fur can be found around the muzzle and the eyes. This distinct marking gives the Sun bear its name.
Claws for Climbing: The Sun bear possesses sickle-shaped claws that are relatively light in weight. It has large paws with naked soles, probably to assist in climbing. Its inward-turned feet make the bear's walk pigeon-toed, but It is an excellent climber.
It has small, round ears and a short muzzle.
Tree Lover: As primarily nocturnal creatures, the Sun bear tends to rest during the day on lower limbs not far above the ground. Because it spends so much time in trees, the Sun bear can sometimes cause a good amount of damage to private property.
Coocoo for Coconuts:
It has been known to destroy coconut palms and cocoa trees on plantations. Hunting of nuisance bears is a major cause for the recent decline in the Sun bear population, as well
as poaching for its fur and for use in Chinese medicine.
Diet: The diet of the Sun bear varies widely and includes small vertebrates such as lizards, birds, and other mammals, in addition to fruits, eggs, termites, the young tips of palm trees, nests of bees, berries, sprouts, insects, roots, cocoa and coconuts. Its powerful jaws can crack open nuts. Much of the Sun bear's food must be detected using its keen sense of smell as its sight is poor.
The Birds and the Bees: The Sun bear does not hibernate and as a result it can reproduce year-round. It is not uncommon for it to give birth to two cubs at a time weighing approximately 10-12 ounces (280 to 340 g) each. The gestation period is about 96 days, but suckling can continue for about 18 months. The offspring reach sexual maturity after 3-4 years, and live up to 28 years in captivity.
There is one subspecies of Sun bear (Helarctos malayanus euryspilus) other than the nominate, found only on the island of Borneo.
The Malayan name for the Sun bear is basindo nan tenggil, which is translated as 'he who likes to sit high'.
The Indonesian name for the Sun bear is beruang Madu, which means Honey bear.
All text is available under the terms
of the GNU Free Documentation License | <urn:uuid:45211e98-82a4-47f4-9cce-df199aebc7d4> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/content/animals/animals/mammals/sunbear.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397428.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00090-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95118 | 649 | 3.375 | 3 |
Byzantine icon found in Jerusalem
By Matti Friedman, AP
November 1, 2011, 12:46 am TWN
JERUSALEM--A tiny, exquisitely made box found on an excavated street in Jerusalem is a token of Christian faith from 1,400 years ago, Israeli archaeologists said Sunday.
The box, carved from the bone of a cow, horse or camel, decorated with a cross on the lid and measuring only 0.8 inch by 0.6 inche (2 centimeters by 1.5 centimeters), was likely carried by a Christian believer around the end of the 6th century A.D, according to Yana Tchekhanovets of the Israel Antiquities Authority, one of the directors of the dig where the box was found.
When the lid is removed, the remains of two portraits are still visible in paint and gold leaf. The figures, a man and a woman, are probably Christian saints and possibly Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
The box was found in an excavation outside the walls of Jerusalem's Old City in the remains of a Byzantine-era thoroughfare, she said. Uncovered two years ago, it was treated by preservation experts and extensively researched before it was unveiled at an archaeological conference last week.
The box is important in part because it offers the first archaeological evidence that the use of icons in the Byzantine period was not limited to church ceremonies, she said.
Part of a similar box was found three decades ago in Jordan, but this is the only well-preserved example to be found so far, she said. Similar icons are still carried today by some Christian believers, especially from the eastern Orthodox churches.
The relic was found in the City of David excavation, a Jerusalem dig named for the biblical monarch believed to have ruled a Jewish kingdom from the site.
The politically sensitive dig is located in what is today the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, just outside the Old City walls in east Jerusalem, the section of the holy city captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war and claimed by the Palestinians as their capital. | <urn:uuid:e827835d-510b-4551-8b99-3f102e6717b5> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.chinapost.com.tw/life/automotive/2011/11/01/321581/Byzantine-icon.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395992.75/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00151-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96481 | 427 | 2.625 | 3 |
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