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Rolfing® is a system of soft tissue manipulation and movement education that organizes the whole body in gravity. Rolfing affects the body's posture and structure by manipulating the myofascial system (connective tissue). Research has demonstrated that Rolfing creates more efficient muscle use, allows the body to conserve energy, and creates more economical and refined patterns of movement.
Rolfing takes a holistic approach to improving your quality of life through your body. By realigning your body and re-educating your movement patterns, you can reduce or completely alleviate chronic pain issues, increase flexibility, and have more energy. Rolfing often allows clients to reduce or eliminate their dependence on expensive or time consuming maintenance programs they were on with chiropractors, massage, or just gritting their teeth through aches and pains.
Rolfing is named after its creator, Dr. Ida P. Rolf, who originally referred to the work as Structural Integration. Dr. Rolf received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Columbia University in 1920 and furthered her knowledge of the body through her scientific work in organic chemistry at the Rockefeller Institute. In a lifelong search for a solution to family health problems, Ida examined many systems that affected body structure including yoga, osteopathy and chiropractic. Eventually combining her knowledge of biochemistry with these systems, Ida developed the theory and practice of Rolfing. The original Rolf Institute was founded in Boulder, Colorado and now has offices in Germany and Brazil as well.
Who uses it?
Rolfing is useful for those experiencing chronic pain from muscle injuries, patterns of use, or physical and emotional traumas. It can also be useful for performance, athletics, dancing, practically any physical vocation as a way to help improve performance. Tapping into the mind/body connection, it is also used by some psychotherapists and counselors as a support to their work with clients. In all these cases greater physical support and flexibility can positively influence energy levels and emotional health. | <urn:uuid:26af6183-23e2-4c09-b1b8-7b62fcc3229c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://raleighrolfing.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393997.50/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00116-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95487 | 416 | 2.5625 | 3 |
By going public with her prophylactic double mastectomy, actress Angelina Jolie has again shone the spotlight on breast cancer and the genetic mutation known to increase the risk of getting it by 60 percent.
Although Jolie, 37, has the potential to save lives by raising awareness, facts about testing for the mutation and undergoing preventative care can be confusing. Here's what you need to know:
The test for the genetic mutation, called BRCA, is a simple blood test, but it's not for everyone. It's not always covered by insurance and can cost about $3,000, so you should know whether you're one of the 2 percent of women who have a family history that makes them more likely to have the BRCA mutation.
This is cancer.gov's list of family history to consider before undergoing BRCA testing:
- For women who are not of Ashkenazi Jewish descent:
- two first-degree relatives (mother, daughter or sister) diagnosed with breast cancer, one of whom was diagnosed at age 50 or younger;
- three or more first-degree or second-degree (grandmother or aunt) relatives diagnosed with breast cancer regardless of their age at diagnosis;
- a combination of first- and second-degree relatives diagnosed with breast cancer and ovarian cancer (one cancer type per person);
- a first-degree relative with cancer diagnosed in both breasts ( bilateral breast cancer);
- a combination of two or more first- or second-degree relatives diagnosed with ovarian cancer regardless of age at diagnosis;
- a first- or second-degree relative diagnosed with both breast and ovarian cancer regardless of age at diagnosis; and
- breast cancer diagnosed in a male relative.
- For women of Ashkenazi Jewish descent:
- any first-degree relative diagnosed with breast or ovarian cancer; and
- two second-degree relatives on the same side of the family diagnosed with breast or ovarian cancer.
In all, between 0.125 and 0.25 percent of women will test positive for the BRCA mutation, and it varies by ethnicity. These women have an increased risk of getting breast cancer and ovarian cancer.
If you do test positive for BRCA, you have options, and you don't necessarily have to go the Jolie route.
Some women choose not to have surgery. Instead, they increase cancer surveillance with imaging tests. These include regular mammograms to test for breast cancer, and regular pelvic sonograms and blood-tests to watch for ovarian cancer.
It is important to note that surveillance or screening does not reduce risk, but rather potentially improves early detection of cancer should it occur.
Other options include chemo-prevention, or taking certain medications to reduce cancer risk. For example, some women take a drug called tamoxifen to prevent breast cancer and others take birth-control pills to prevent ovarian cancer. These decisions are individual, highly personal and often times very difficult ones for a woman and her family to make.
Like Jolie, some women choose surgery when they learn they have the BRCA mutation. The decision to surgically remove the breasts and ovaries is an individual one and must take into account the woman's age, fertility and reproductive wishes, psychological factors and cost. Her general medical condition for undergoing elective surgery should be taken into consideration, too.
Often, the reconstructive process is done in stages for a few months and can cost as much as $50,000. Fortunately, since 1998, women without medical insurance have increased options and mandatory coverage for undergoing breast reconstruction after mastectomy.
Because these decisions are complex, patients can seek consultations with oncologists, general gynecologists, gynecologic oncologists, breast surgeons and reconstructive plastic surgeons.
While studies have shown a significant risk reduction and likely survival benefit in women with a BRCA mutation who undergo preventive surgery, their risk does not drop to zero. There is still a low chance of developing breast cancer in the chest wall, and ovarian cancer in the pelvic cavity.
Men carry the BRCA mutation, too, so if a woman with a mutation has a son, he has a 50 percent chance of being a carrier and having the mutation. Men with the mutation face increased risks of breast cancer, certain kinds of pancreatic cancer, testicular cancer and prostate cancer.
While the information presented here represents the medical tip of the iceberg, the hope is that it can begin the process of informing, educating and empowering both women and men about this kind of genetic mutation and cancer risk. | <urn:uuid:cb51f2e0-9741-4cc2-8f77-93568eee9f2f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2013/05/14/what-dr-ashton-wants-you-to-take-away-from-angelina-jolies-double-mastectomy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398869.97/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00142-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954601 | 934 | 2.578125 | 3 |
A Prayer for Owen Meany Theme of Memory and the Past
John Wheelwright narrates A Prayer for Owen Meany from kind of a detached perspective: most of the events of the novel take place between 1952 and 1968, but John tells us the story from the present, which in his case is 1987. As a result, most of the novel is actually a collection of John's memories – in a sense, everything that happens has already happened. Of course, memory also plays an important role within the story he tells. Only a day before he dies, Owen asks John to play the "remember game," and they go over the highlights of their childhood together. John also depends on other people's memories to try to piece together his mother's secret life.
Questions About Memory and the Past
- Why do you think Tabby comes up with such elaborate lies about the red dress, and why do you think she pretends not to remember the name of the store she bought it from?
- How do memories sustain John as an adult? How do they harm him?
- Why do you think Owen asks Johnny to play the "remember game" the day before he dies? Is it more for John's benefit or for Owen's benefit?
- What are some reasons why it might be significant that Harriet starts to lose her memory toward the end of her life?
Chew on This
Memory is a source of strength and affirmation in tough times.
In A Prayer for Owen Meany, memories are often painful and do more harm than good. | <urn:uuid:28fc0044-ab87-4607-aff3-fb62d4798581> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.shmoop.com/owen-meany/memory-the-past-theme.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783408840.13/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155008-00144-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967047 | 314 | 3.03125 | 3 |
Lao Tzu’s wise words ring true. They inspire us to look for something bigger than ourselves, something that society, education, and identity cannot provide: a sustainable connection to the living network.
The living network is not ruled by ones and zeros, or born of wires. It is the original network. It has always been, right here, right now — right before you. Learning how to stay connected to it is important.
Babies are constantly connected to it. Every sight and sound, motion and reaction informs them about who they are, and how they relate to their surroundings. We love to watch babies interact with their environments. We are amazed by their abilities to be in the moment. Their unhindered explorations give us a sense of awe.
Neuroscientists discovered that babies don’t really think. Their pre-frontal cortex is not yet developed, yet they fully experience themselves and their environments. Without a thought, they use their bodies to explore their worlds, absorbing every detail. Their explorations help to form their developing nervous systems.
As adults, our brains have already made sense of the world. We have associated thousands of causes with effects. We have learned which behaviors create certain outcomes. In essence, we have developed our identities, a necessary first step to becoming an adult.
However it is only a first step. Identity alone can create problems. Our identified thoughts and beliefs that once served a purpose become useless over time. Like a broken record taking up the airwaves, old thoughts keep us from hearing new information.
As adults we must take baby steps towards a more holistic understanding, and achieve interdependence.
Interdependence is the integration of our baby ability to be constantly connected to the moment, and our adult ability to make sense of previous experience. Like an expert jazz musician that knows music theory inside and out, yet lets go of thinking while playing, we too can learn how to let go and “let it rip,” using all of our understanding to spontaneously respond to the flow of the moment.
Rhythm has some special powers that can teach us how to develop these abilities. First it calls us, like our heartbeats, to the present moment — pulse after pulse. In order to sense rhythm we must sense ourselves — in the present moment.
Rhythm flows in the same time-space as thought. This means that it is impossible to be lost in an old thought while sensing rhythm. In the time it takes you to think a self-centered thought, you could instead be in rhythm — in rhythm with a drum, or in rhythm with your life as it plays out.
Once you are in rhythm, you are no longer held prisoner by old thoughts. You are free to creatively interact with your environment, while expanding your understanding of it. You gradually develop more spontaneous acting and thinking — and begin to integrate yourself with the living network.
You can recreate yourself. This is what Lao Tzu meant when he said, “I become what I might be.” 2,500 years later, Gerald Hüther, a neuroscientist from the University of Göttingen, writing about the effects of TaKeTiNa, wrote something similar:
“When one loses the ‘self’ and all
that is connected to it, one is
reunited with the authentic self.”
Come experience TaKeTiNa, and become what you might be. | <urn:uuid:d819a951-8354-48e1-86c2-103266215601> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.rhythminaction.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395548.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00159-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961115 | 711 | 2.625 | 3 |
The 20th century gave us three great networks: paved roads, the power grid and the information infrastructure. Thanks to the tools these have made possible, the middle-class North American household has become a little post-industrial factory in its own right, from mechanized agriculture (the riding lawn mower) to printing documents. Even our power drills and screwdrivers are not so different from those used on construction sites.
So where is the technological vanguard to go? The really radical alternative technology is living off the grid–declaring independence from central utilities. And the experts at this are Amish farmers and craftsmen, whose religious rules, values and economic needs have nourished a dynamic technological culture.
This should not be surprising. Medieval Christian theology gave labor a dignity it never achieved among Greek and Roman philosophers. The historian David F. Noble, in The Religion of Technology, points to the revolutionary step of the 9th century theologian Erigena, who confounded the sneers of classical writers against “useful arts” like architecture and medicine by equating their dignity with the seven “liberal arts.” Manual work was sanctified and inspired by God and was a means to salvation, and monasteries became centers of innovation. Even in the 19th century, ideals of simplicity and utility inspired American Shaker tools, including one design most of us still use: the flat broom.
According Donald B. Kraybill, a leading scholar of Amish technology, Amish communities unanimously rejected the rural electrification movement of the 1920s and 1930s as a threat to their principle of separation from the world. Some observers might have predicted that this ban and the rejection of tractors would threaten Amish crafts and farming in the competitive marketplace. But the opposite happened.
Amish ingenuity was focused on making horse-drawn agriculture more efficient. With the rise of large-scale mechanized farming in the U.S. after World War II, large equipment makers stopped developing machines for horse-drawn agriculture. Yet there is always room for innovation and improvement, even in “old” technology. Amish entrepreneurs saw this opportunity and are now exporters of devices that help make Third World draft-animal farming competitive with tractors as fuel prices have increased. Their best-known device is a plow that can be raised and lowered with hydraulic power.
Amish innovation goes beyond agriculture. As Amish farms have been divided among large families, crafts have helped preserve the Amish way of life. While Amish rules (called the Ordnung) differ among settlements–some of the strictest ban all motors–Amish leaders allow changes that make shops more competitive if they don’t threaten basic values. As an alternative to utility-supplied power, Amish shops may use combinations of generators and air compressors.
Dan Esh, an Amish woodburner and carver in Lancaster, Pa., (still the best-known of the settlements) observes that there is nothing wrong with electricity in itself; it is limited because of the evils it can lead to. His farm has no grid connection, but its diesel engine produces air power for essential equipment like milking machines and milk coolers that meet health regulations.
Esh is enthusiastic about compressed-air technology. “Air is a very efficient system,” he observes, and non-Amish people in Lancaster County have been adopting air-powered tools, using conventional electric motors to compress air in tanks. Amish machinists are also known for excellence in producing hydraulic parts in shops using compressed air for power tools. Some Amish establishments are now large enough to need elevators; theirs have been adapted from forklift trucks and can easily carry people, as well as goods, among floors.
Amish teachings also distinguish between ownership and use. Esh works with conventional electric tools in a shop with a non-Amish owner. Private automobiles are forbidden, but most Amish entrepreneurs and families may use taxi services. Amish businesses may also work with non-Amish marketers and Webmasters.
The future for Amish technology looks bright. Amish religion emphasizes conscientious work and self-sufficiency, so that paradoxically Amish rejection of the consumer society makes “Amish-made” a brand among consumers, even for un-Amish products. Custom home electronic entertainment systems built in Amish workshops are sold on the Web.
Some might see potential conflicts in participating in such worldly marketing, but Dan Esh is optimistic about his community’s flexibility in preserving its essential values. Faith demands careful work and rejection of outside aid. The older he gets, Esh says, the more he’s convinced of his leaders’ wisdom in making the right decisions. Seeing the continued success of Amish technology, it’s hard to disagree.
Edward Tenner is a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University. He is author of Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences and Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity. | <urn:uuid:20bd89de-fc89-4b1a-9c2c-ed6191696896> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.forbes.com/2008/10/31/amish-technology-grid-biz-power08-cx_et_1031tenner.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403508.34/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00052-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957349 | 1,037 | 3.109375 | 3 |
The molecule resveratrol, which occurs naturally in the skin of red grapes, has been shown to lower insulin levels in mice when injected directly into the brain, according to a UT Southwestern Medical Center study appearing in the December issue of the journal Endocrinology.
Scientists knew that resveratrol has anti-diabetic actions when fed to animals with type 2 diabetes, but it wasn’t clear which tissues were responsible for the effect.
This study suggests that “when acting directly on certain proteins in the brain, resveratrol may offer some protection against diabetes,” according to a new release.
But don’t start guzzling red wine in hopes it will ward off the disease.
“. . . Resveratrol does not cross the blood brain barrier efficiently. In order for the brain to accumulate the same dose of resveratrol delivered in our study, the amounts of red wine needed daily would surely cause deleterious effects, especially in the liver. Rather, our study suggests that resveratrol’s analogs that selectively target the brain may help in the fight against diet-induced diabetes,” said Dr. Roberto Coppari, assistant professor of internal medicine at UT Southwestern and senior author of the study, in the statement.
Learn more here. | <urn:uuid:f8efde19-2bfe-4f73-a1ef-e3b6d4dc7103> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://blog.mysanantonio.com/getfit/2009/10/study-shows-how-red-grapes-may-protect-against-diabetes/?gta=commentlistpos | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393093.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00089-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944355 | 274 | 2.984375 | 3 |
Mathews man dredged up ‘oldest formal artifact found in the Americas’
This is significant, he said, because "up until the discovery of this artifact we thought people weren’t here much before 12,000 years ago." The knife would indicate a much earlier occupation of this continent.
Stanford said Saturday he is sure that even older artifacts remain to be discovered, as the knife is made of rhyolite obtained from a site in South Mountain, Pa. "This is confirmed by X-ray fluorescence or … comparison of the elements" found in the blade and in a sample from South Mountain, he said.
While there is no information yet on who made and used the knife, Stanford said there are striking similarities between it and the tools used by the Solutrean people of Europe. "It was made exactly the same way (bifaced, or flaked on both sides) during the same time period." And that time period, he was, was during the last Ice Age, when most of Europe was glaciers and an ice bridge connected Europe with America. | <urn:uuid:4e33f773-b365-4897-bd72-a7c02f60c2b8> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.gazettejournal.net/index.php/news/news_article/mathews_man_dredged_up_oldest_formal_artifact_found_in_the_americas | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396459.32/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00139-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973165 | 224 | 3.09375 | 3 |
USS North Dakota: Eighth Grade Lesson -
The Floating Community - Fire and Engine Troubles
This is the only photograph of the
explosion and fire aboard the ship
on September 8, 1910. Note the
black smoke emerging from the
ventilator tower (with stripes).
The calm attitude of the men
suggests that this photo was taken
later in the day after the danger
was over, but while the fire still
smoldered. The handwritten note
on the back of this photograph
(below) indicates that the man
who kept this photo-postcard may
have been one of the heroes of
the day. 2002-P-15-Album2-P30b
At no time was the community feeling aboard the North Dakota tested more seriously than on the occasion of the fire. It was September 8, 1910, and the North Dakota had been fit for sea duty for only a few months. She was returning with her relatively young and inexperienced crew to Hampton Roads, Virginia after fleet exercises and was running on fuel oil. A fire broke out around 10:30 a.m. in the fuel oil stored in Room No. 3. Captain Gleaves ordered the ship to drop out of formation so as not to endanger the other ships of the division. Immediately he also gave two sets of orders: put out the fire, and retrieve the dead and injured from the engine room.
While dense black smoke poured out of the ventilators and hatchways (doors to the lower levels of the ship), the fire was dampened by flooding the engine room and the oil storage area with sea water. The hold of the ship filled with nine feet of water, but the fire continued to burn above that level.
Without the engines, the pumps could not be operated to put out the rest of the fire. The Commander in Chief of the Fleet, Admiral Schroeder, ordered a tugboat and the USS New Hampshire to stand by the North Dakota to give all aid possible. The tugboat pumped water onto the fires burning above the flooded engine room. For about one hour, the North Dakota was in grave danger of exploding because the powder magazine (gun powder storeroom) was located just above the fire. Fortunately, the flames did not reach the gun powder.
Later in the day, the North Dakota was able to put four boilers back into service. With the little power they provided, the ship was able to raise the anchors and steam slowly into port.
In spite of the quick efforts to put out the flames, three men, Joseph Schmidt, Robert Gilmore, and Joseph Strait, died in the fire. All were enlisted men who held the job of coal passer. Ten men, including one officer, were injured and were moved to a hospital ship, the USS Solace, for treatment before being transferred to a hospital in Virginia.
At the board of inquiry, Lieutenant Commander Orin G. Murfin, who sustained burns in the fire, testified that he was in the engine room and ordered the room abandoned when he saw a flash of flame run along the oil lines. But the fire quickly grew and filled the room with gasses and flames preventing three of the men from escaping the fire room.
Ten men were honored for heroic actions in the fire. Thomas Davis, John Quinlan, George Ellis, and Arnold J. Smith received warm commendations. Six men were awarded the Medal of Honor for “extraordinary heroism.” They were Thomas Stanton, Karl Westa, Patrick Reid, August Holz, Charles Roberts, and Harry Lipscomb. They also received a one-hundred dollar bonus. Davis, Quinlan, Ellis, and Smith closed off the engine fires in a fire room where the heat was so intense they had to be sprayed with fire hoses to avoid dying of the heat. Stanton, Westa, Reid, Holz, Roberts, and Lipscomb were honored for entering the burning engine room to put out the fire. They also removed the dead through waist-deep water in intense heat and dense smoke. Charles Roberts, a machinist’s mate, was overcome by smoke.
The board of inquiry found that a leak in the oil pipes had led to the fire. The crew repaired the damage, and the ship rejoined the fleet by September 29. The Navy declared that the fire was not due to a flawed design – many ships around the world sailed with similar designs. The fire did raise the question of the safety of fuel oil, but the Navy declared that it would not abandon that form of fuel. Instead, the Navy made efforts to protect the powder magazines from the heat and possible fires in the engine rooms.
This fire – not the last that the North Dakota would experience – tested the men and prepared them to deal with future emergencies. It also called upon the officers to apply everything they knew about the ship to the effort to save her. The newspapers reported that “realizing this danger – they worked coolly and with great courage. Capt. Gleaves and every officer aboard fought flames shoulder to shoulder with the men, and when the danger had passed they were as grimy as [coal] stokers.”
Historical records give us very little information about the men who died in the fire. We know little more than that Joseph Schmidt was from Brooklyn, New York; Robert Gilmore was from Connecticut, and Joseph Strait enlisted in Michigan.
Before World War II (1941 – 1945) it was possible to earn the Medal of Honor for bravery in non-combat situations which was the case for these six men. Charles Roberts was born in 1882 and died in 1957. Harry Lipscomb was born in Washington, D.C., in 1878 and died in 1926. He married, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. August Holz was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1871. He died in Long Island, New York in 1935. Thomas Stanton was born in Ireland in 1869, but entered the Navy from Rhode Island. He lived until 1950. Karl Westa was born in Norway in 1875 and lived until 1949. He, too, is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. There is no information available about Patrick Reid.
Unfortunately, the North Dakota had another fire and one more death. After repairs to the damages from the September 8 fire, the ship sailed with the fleet to England and France. On December 14, 1910, an explosion in the coal bunkers burned a sailor identified only as Evans. Evans died of the burns shortly after, but little more was mentioned in the newspapers about the event.
The North Dakota continued to have trouble with the Curtis turbine engines. In February 1915, the engines were damaged while returning from Cuba. In June 1915, the North Dakota was ordered into a shipyard where the engines were to be repaired or replaced in a major overhaul to the satisfaction of the engineer officers who found these turbines to be unreliable.
Engine trouble turned out to be the North Dakota’s greatest failing. When she was running well, she could operate efficiently and at great speed. But when troubles came, they tested the strength, courage, and devotion to duty of all members of this ship’s community.
Source: New York Times, September 9, 1910 | <urn:uuid:6affb6de-d014-4354-8ada-b2592ee5ffa7> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.ndstudies.org/resources/8th_ussnd/ussnd_fire.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396027.60/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00002-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979775 | 1,483 | 3.40625 | 3 |
Items by Ray Wheeler
The battle over wilderness preservation in Utah is fought on many fronts before it comes to a vote in Congress.
A checklist highlights the difference between the area preserved by the Utah Public Lands Act of 1995 and the Redrock Wilderness Act.
Utah's wilderness hearings stir controversy and draw vigorous support for more wilderness designation.
Until the early 1980s, southern Utah was a battleground against extractive industry. But many here are also opposed to industrial tourism. Is there a middle way that can support the region's small communities?
Ray Wheeler wanders across southeastern Utah, attempting to discover why the area is so bound to extraction, even against its own economic interest, and whether change is possible.
An effort to create wilderness in the La Sal Mountains near Moab, Utah, highlights infighting between the state's conservation groups. | <urn:uuid:705bb22c-2b6f-4479-b879-5490321df8e8> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.hcn.org/author_search?getAuthor=Ray%20Wheeler&sort_on=PublicationDate&sort_order=descending | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403508.34/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00085-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948736 | 169 | 2.640625 | 3 |
During this time, there were few people in Philadelphia who could rival the wealth of Peter A.B. Widener. Born on November 13, 1834 to a bricklayer, Widener worked as a butcher and saved enough money to start one of the first meat store chains in the country. He also began buying stocks in street railways. Together with his friend William L. Elkins, Widener eventually controlled the streetcar system in Philadelphia. His wealth grew even more as he became involved in public transportation systems in Chicago and other cities. He later expanded his power by purchasing large blocks of stock in the United States Steel Corporation, Standard Oil, and Pennsylvania Railroad.
In 1887, Widener had a large mansion built at the intersection of Broad Street and Girard Avenue. Designed by architect Willis G. Hale, the residence was four and a half stories high and included an arched entrance with a double staircase, a banquet room, and original murals and frescoes by artist George Herzog. In 1900, Widener transferred ownership of this mansion to the Free Library of Philadelphia. The building was designated as the Josephine Widener Memorial Branch of the Free Library in honor of Widener’s wife who had died in 1896. The mansion served as a branch of the Free Library until it was sold in 1946. With the proceeds from the sale, a former bank at 2531 West Lehigh Avenue was purchased and remodeled as the new location for the library branch. In 2005, the Widener Branch of the Free Library moved to its current location at 2808 West Lehigh Avenue. The Widener Mansion was destroyed by fire in 1980.
In addition to his support for the Free Library of Philadelphia, Widener contributed to other charitable organizations in Philadelphia. He founded the Widener Memorial Home for Crippled Children in memory of his late wife. After his son and grandson died on the Titanic in 1912, Widener provided funds for an additional building at the Home in honor of his son.
After donating his mansion to the Free Library, Widener took up residence at Lynnewood Hall, his newly constructed 110-room mansion located in Elkins Park. Designed by Horace Trumbauer, the mansion was based on a palace in Bath, England and featured numerous outbuildings and gardens. Widener also used Lynnewood Hall as a gallery for his valuable art collection which included works by Raphael, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and El Greco. After Widener’s death on November 6, 1915, his son Joseph continued to add to the art collection. In 1939, Joseph agreed to donate the collection to the newly formed National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
- “From the Tour: Founding Benefactors of the National Gallery of Art – Object 5 of 9.” The Collection National Gallery of Art. National Gallery of Art. http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/ggfound/ggfound-1239.html
- “Peter A.B. Widener House.” Historic American Buildings Survey. HABS No. PA-1742. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/hh:@field(DOCID+@lit(PA1358))
- “Residential Designs by the Horace Trumbauer Architectural Firm.” Free Library of Philadelphia. http://libwww.library.phila.gov/75th/residential.htm
- The New York Times. “P.A.B. Widener, Capitalist, Dies.” November 7, 1915. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9F04E0DF113CE733A25754C0A9679D946496D6CF
- The New York Times. “P.A.B. Widener’s Gift.” May 9, 1900.The New York Times. “Widener Plans Memorial.” April 28, 1912. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9B05E5DD103AE633A2575BC2A9629C946396D6CF
- “Widener Branch.” Free Library of Philadelphia. http://libwww.freelibrary.org/branches/branch.cfm?loc=WID | <urn:uuid:26560f40-7b38-484d-964e-aa03a7e55965> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.phillyhistory.org/blog/index.php/2009/03/the-widener-mansion/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394414.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00082-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964327 | 922 | 2.96875 | 3 |
Mathematics Content Standards.
By the end of grade one, students understand and use the concept of ones and tens in the place value number system. Students add and subtract small numbers with ease. They measure with simple units and locate objects in space. They describe data and analyze and solve simple problems.
1.0 Students understand and use numbers up to 100:
1.1 Count, read, and write whole numbers to 100.
1.2 Compare and order whole numbers to 100 by using the symbols for less than, equal to, or greater than (<, =, >).
1.3 Represent equivalent forms of the same number through the use of physical models, diagrams, and number expressions (to 20) (e.g., 8 may be represented as 4 + 4, 5 + 3, 2 + 2 + 2 + 2, 10 -2, 11 -3).
1.4 Count and group object in ones and tens (e.g., three groups of 10 and 4 equals 34, or 30 + 4).
1.5 Identify and know the value of coins and show different combinations of coins that equal the same value.
2.0 Students demonstrate the meaning of addition and subtraction and use these operations to solve problems:
2.1 Know the addition facts (sums to 20) and the corresponding subtraction facts and commit them to memory.
2.2 Use the inverse relationship between addition and subtraction to solve problems.
2.3 Identify one more than, one less than, 10 more than, and 10 less than a given number.
2.4 Count by 2s, 5s, and 10s to 100.
2.5 Show the meaning of addition (putting together, increasing) and subtraction (taking away, comparing, finding the difference).
2.6 Solve addition and subtraction problems with one-and two-digit numbers (e.g., 5 + 58 = __).
2.7 Find the sum of three one-digit numbers.
3.0 Students use estimation strategies in computation and problem solving that involve numbers that use the ones, tens, and hundreds places:
3.1 Make reasonable estimates when comparing larger or smaller numbers.
Algebra and Functions
1.0 Students use number sentences with operational symbols and expressions to solve problems:
1.1 Write and solve number sentences from problem situations that express relationships involving addition and subtraction.
1.2 Understand the meaning of the symbols +, -, =.
1.3 Create problem situations that might lead to given number sentences involving addition and subtraction.
Measurement and Geometry
1.0 Students use direct comparison and nonstandard units to describe the measurements of objects:
1.1 Compare the length, weight, and volume of two or more objects by using direct comparison or a nonstandard unit.
1.2 Tell time to the nearest half hour and relate time to events (e.g., before/after, shorter/longer).
2.0 Students identify common geometric figures, classify them by common attributes, and describe their relative position or their location in space:
2.1 Identify, describe, and compare triangles, rectangles, squares, and circles, including the faces of three-dimensional objects.
2.2 Classify familiar plane and solid objects by common attributes, such as color, position, shape, size, roundness, or number of corners, and explain which attributes are being used for classification.
2.3 Give and follow directions about location.
2.4 Arrange and describe objects in space by proximity, position, and direction (e.g., near, far, below, above, up, down, behind, in front of, next to, left or right of).
Statistics, Data Analysis, and Probability
1.0 Students organize, represent, and compare data by category on simple graphs and charts:
1.1 Sort objects and data by common attributes and describe the categories.
1.2 Represent and compare data (e.g., largest, smallest, most often, least often) by using pictures, bar graphs, tally charts, and picture graphs.
2.0 Students sort objects and create and describe patterns by numbers, shapes, sizes, rhythms, or colors:
2.1 Describe, extend, and explain ways to get to a next element in simple repeating patterns (e.g., rhythmic, numeric, color, and shape).
1.0 Students make decisions about how to set up a problem:
1.1 Determine the approach, materials, and strategies to be used.
1.2 Use tools, such as manipulatives or sketches, to model problems.
2.0 Students solve problems and justify their reasoning:
2.1 Explain the reasoning used and justify the procedures selected.
2.2 Make precise calculations and check the validity of the results from the context of the problem.
3.0 Students note connections between one problem and another. | <urn:uuid:5d46c6ba-c5b5-428b-bce0-2d40c65f75ab> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://allmathbooks.blogspot.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398869.97/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00038-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.898731 | 1,033 | 4.15625 | 4 |
Use Technology to Build Up Others, Students Told
Contributed By By Kaisey Skipper, Church News contributor
- Use emails and text messages to build up and thank others.
- Use phones “as a tool for learning and teaching” and as a “new way to learn and teach.”
“Do all you can to build up another soul,” Brother Russell T. Osguthorpe, Sunday School general president, told students and faculty during a Brigham Young University–Idaho campus devotional on March 18.
Brother Osguthorpe began his address by defining the word “edify.”
“To edify literally means to build up, to lift one another,” he said.
Drawing from BYU–Idaho’s fifth learning-model principle, Brother Osguthorpe said, “Learners and teachers at BYU–Idaho love, serve, and teach one another.”
“If you make a concerted effort as students and faculty to follow it and to live it, I promise you that the Lord will bless you in unimaginably positive ways,” he said. “The reason you have this model is so that you can strengthen each other as learners and teachers. The model is a method to help us build up each other’s souls.”
Brother Osguthorpe talked about Peter’s struggles and about how the Savior came to help in order to build Peter up. He said that Christ was trying to build up Peter’s soul to prepare him for what was ahead.
“We came to this earth to prove ourselves,” he said. “But we can’t go through this test alone. We’re in this complex, mixed-up world together. … A loving Heavenly Father told us that His Only Begotten Son would save us from any calamity that might befall us.”
He said that neither mortality nor salvation is a solo journey. Mortality, like salvation, is “something we work on together” and is the reason we have families: to “gain the strength we need to reach out and help others.”
Brother Osguthorpe said that one of the most basic needs of humans is the need to feel loved. He said that everyone has someone who could use a message of thanks.
He asked the students to take out their electronic devices and look at them.
“Try to think of this not just as a communication tool or a music player but as a tool to build up another’s soul,” said Brother Osguthorpe. “So I ask you, can you pick up your phone—without checking one single message—and think of someone you might thank for something?”
Brother Osguthorpe said he recently read that about 300 billion emails are sent per day, which is about 3 million emails per second. He also mentioned how Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 send about 88 text messages per day. He asked students to think how many of their messages edify others.
“We can all send more messages of thanks and praise,” he said. “But these phones can also be powerful tools to learn and teach. They are tools for you to follow the principles in your learning model here at BYU–Idaho. We can learn new things every day on our phones.”
He challenged students to use their phones “as a tool for learning and teaching” and to use them in a “new way to learn and teach.”
He said that everyone has a divine duty and obligation to share what they are learning with others because “learning is a sacred privilege [and] an act of wonder.”
Brother Osguthorpe used Moses 7:18 to demonstrate when people lifted one another up:
“And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them.”
The reason they became people of Zion is because that’s what they wanted to become, Brother Osguthorpe said. The greater will and desire they had to become Zion caused them to draw closer together, and they built each other’s souls up.
He told students to seek opportunities to thank, praise, learn, and teach in order to help build each other up.
“Keep looking at your phone as a tool to lift someone else,” Brother Osguthorpe said. “We can all send a message that will strengthen and build up another person’s soul, a message that will make them feel more competent, more loved, [and] more able to meet the demands of life.”
Students and faculty meet in the BYU–Idaho Center to listen to Brother Russell T. Osguthorpe, the Sunday School general president, speak during a campus devotional on March 18. Photo by Michael Lewis, Brigham Young University–Idaho. | <urn:uuid:66ee7f89-302f-4ec6-b3a7-c3b73602e21e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://www.lds.org/church/news/use-technology-to-build-up-others-students-told?lang=eng | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396147.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00197-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97019 | 1,051 | 2.609375 | 3 |
How to Create a Work Breakdown Structure
Creating a work breakdown structure (WBS) helps you be both comprehensive and specific when managing a project: Thinking in detail is critical when planning your project, but you also need to consider the big picture. If you fail to identify a major part of your project’s work, you won’t have the chance to detail it. A work breakdown structure is key.
The diagram here shows that the entire project, represented as a Level 1 component, can be subdivided into Level 2 components, and some or all Level 2 components can be subdivided into Level 3 components.
You can continue to subdivide all the components in the same manner until you reach a point at which you think the components you defined are sufficiently detailed for planning and management purposes. At this point, you now have Level n components, where n is the number of the lowest-level component in a particular WBS branch. Level n components are called work packages.
Suppose you’re responsible for creating and presenting a new training program for your organization. To get started, you’d develop a WBS for this project as follows:
Determine the major deliverables or products to be produced.
Ask yourself, What major intermediate or final products or deliverables must be produced to achieve the project’s objectives?
You may identify the following items:
Training program needs statement
Training program design
Training program presentation
Divide each of these major deliverables into its component deliverables in the same manner.
Choose any one of these deliverables to begin with. Suppose you choose Training program needs statement.
Ask, What intermediate deliverables must I have so I can create the needs statement?
You may determine that you require the following:
Interviews of potential participants
A review of materials discussing the needs for the program
A report summarizing the needs this program will address
Divide each of these work pieces into its component parts.
Suppose you choose to start with Interviews of potential participants.
Ask, What deliverables must I have to complete these interviews?
You may decide that you have to produce the following deliverables:
Report of interview findings | <urn:uuid:5f1bd3c9-30bf-4e55-ba85-dca2c68f2116> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-create-a-work-breakdown-structure.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403825.35/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00025-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.911554 | 453 | 2.8125 | 3 |
The Results of Evaluation
When The Case of Plastics ended, we all had opinions about what worked and what didn’t. But these were anecdotal impressions from people deeply invested in the project. For a more unbiased look at the pilot we turned to the report of our outside evaluator.
This report helped us determine what students thought of the project and identify successes and areas for improvement. Here are just three of the ideas:
1. The survey responses were generally positive. Though problems exist, the positive tone of student responses made clear that they saw value in this program, which is always reassuring. And if this project has value, why not other, similar projects? Other games? Other conflicts?
2. Now the challenges: Some students reported that they needed more time to complete the project, particularly the introductory section. Knowing the limitations on teachers, we had worked to keep the game within a reasonable time frame. But the introduction doesn’t require much class time, and students can prepare out of class while studying other topics in class. The new version of the game emphasizes this possibility and encourages teachers to give students as much preparation time as possible. And perhaps some extra debate time, if possible.
3. Students also reported confusion about game rules and expectations. We had relied on teachers to explain much of the game to students, but given the student confusion, we decided to do more. We added explanatory material for students and outlined a more active role for teachers. Teachers are encouraged to explain expectations in detail at the beginning of the project and to clarify, fact check, and redirect students as necessary throughout the game.
With the help of these and other suggestions from the evaluation report, The Case of Plastics nears its final form and release to a wider audience. | <urn:uuid:e9e7fddc-adcf-47ed-bfb8-1a683e733e95> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/online-resources/conflicts-in-chemistry/the-case-of-plastics/blog/the-results-of-evaluation.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397428.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00193-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967054 | 360 | 3.390625 | 3 |
An artist's conception shows NASA's Curiosity rover, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, which is about the size of a Mini Cooper automobile.
Scientists have decided to point NASA's next Mars rover toward a mountain of layered minerals inside Gale Crater, after a process they compared to picking a favorite flavor of ice cream out of 30 choices. One big reason Gale won out is because it's like Neapolitan ice cream, offering a yummy combination of flavors.
Like the strawberry-vanilla-chocolate ice cream, the 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mound inside Gale Crater offers multiple possibilities — intriguing geological sites at different elevations that could document a billion years of Mars' climate history, and perhaps its habitability as well.
"Gale Crater is interesting to explore because it crosses what we think is a major time boundary on Mars that’s recorded in its mineral history," Brown University's John Mustard, a planetary scientist who helped with the early stages of the selection process, said in an emailed comment. "That boundary marks a change from an early wet, hospitable environment that would have been suitable for life to a middle period where conditions may have become more hostile. We believe that at Gale Crater, we have located that boundary where life may have sprung up and where it may have been extinguished."
In a statement, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the Curiosity rover could shed light on Mars' future as well as its past. "Curiosity not only will return a wealth of important science data, but it will serve as a precursor mission for human exploration to the Red Planet," he said.
This artist's conception shows the Curiosity rover being lowered toward the Martian surface on tethers from a "sky crane" system.
$2.5 billion mission to Mars
The Curiosity rover, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, is a mobile robot as big as a Mini Cooper automobile, bristling with scientific instruments and a camera capable of taking high-definition, full-color video at a rate of more than five frames per second.
The $2.5 billion mission is due for launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on an Atlas 5 rocket, as early as the day after Thanksgiving, with landing on Mars set for August 2012. The rover is designed to be lowered to the Martian surface by a rocket-powered "sky crane" system that's never been used before for interplanetary probes.
NASA expects Curiosity to operate for a "warranty period" of one full Martian year, the equivalent of two Earth years, and to rove for 13 miles (20 kilometers or more). John Grotzinger, Curiosity's mission scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, estimates that it would take about two years for the radioactivity-powered rover to work its way up to the summit of Gale Crater's mountain — and he's already hoping for as much of a decade's worth of extra exploration.
After all, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars were designed to operate for 90 days — but seven and a half years after they landed, Spirit only recently gave up the ghost, and Opportunity is still going strong. "If history is a predictor of the future, we expect to have future life to go," Grotzinger said today at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, where the site selection was announced.
The 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer-wide) Gale Crater should provide a spectacular backdrop for Curiosity's cinematography. Scientists compared the terrain to the Grand Canyon and Utah's Monument Valley. The mountain inside the crater rises higher than any peak in the 48 contiguous U.S. states, but it has channels that should give Curiosity a chance to make a slow ascent to the top.
"This might be the tallest mountain anywhere in the solar system that we can climb with a rover," Grotzinger said.
How the choice was made
The selection process leading to today's announcement started five years ago, when more than 100 scientists sifted through about 30 potential landing sites. Four top candidates were selected in 2008, and earlier this year, that "Final Four" was whittled down to two: Gale Crater as well as Eberswalde Crater, which scientists believe contains the remains of an ancient river delta. (Eberswalde was the favorite of Cosmic Log readers in an unscientific poll we offered last week. Sorry, folks.)
The final recommendation was made by the Curiosity mission's science team and approved by senior NASA officials. Grotzinger said choosing from among the Final Four sites was a matter of taste, like choosing between vanilla and chocolate ice cream. "When you come down to four landing sites, that's basically what it comes down to. ... In the end, we picked the one that felt best," he said.
Orbital imagery shows Gale Crater, with the projected landing zone for Curiosity indicated by a yellow ellipse measuring 20 by 25 kilometers (12.4 by 15.5 miles). A 5-kilometer-high (3-mile-high) mountain can be seen just above the landing zone in this oblique, computer-generated view.
NASA's strategy for past Mars probes has been to "follow the water," on the assumption that areas where liquid water once flowed would be prime places to look for evidence of past habitability. In NASA's announcement, Grotzinger said that was one of the factors that made Gale Crater so attractive.
"It’s a huge crater sitting in a very low-elevation position on Mars, and we all know that water runs downhill," he said. "In terms of the total vertical profile exposed and the low elevation, Gale offers attractions similar to Mars’ famous Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system."
'Great novel' focuses on Martian past
The other keys to Gale's appeal are the minerals layered throughout the 3-mile-high mountain inside the crater.
Curiosity will be targeted to land on an alluvial fan that was apparently formed from sediments carried down the mountainside by water. Then the rover will make its way up to higher levels, where orbital observations have spotted the types of clay minerals and sulfates that are typically formed by the interaction of rock and water.
Different types of geological formations are accessible at different elevations, reflecting different epochs in Mars' history. Grotzinger said Curiosity could survey samples from a vertical range extending for hundreds of meters (yards), far more than the roughly 20 meters of vertical range sampled by the Opportunity rover. He compared the vertical variation to chapters in a book, and said Gale Crater promised to be a "great novel."
Planetary scientist John Grotzinger takes you on a guided tour of Gale Crater.
Curiosity's instruments are capable of detecting organic carbon in ground-up rock samples, and Grotzinger said the rover has "a shot at potentially discovering organic compounds." He emphasized that the instruments cannot definitively pick up the presence of life. However, confirming the presence of organic compounds on Mars would represent a significant advance in the decades-long search for evidence of life on the Red Planet.
Dawn Sumner, a geologist at the University of California at Davis, said she and her colleagues were looking forward to the adventure. "Geologists like climbing up cliffs," she said at the National Air and Space Museum, "and we get to go to those places with this rover for the first time on Mars."
For the next couple of decades, robots will be the only earthly things climbing up those cliffs, but that may not always be the case. NASA's current vision for space exploration calls for sending astronauts to Mars in the mid-2030s, and some believe the job could be done earlier. When, if ever, will humans follow in Curiosity's wheel tracks? What might they find? Feel free to add your comments below.
More about Mars:
- Slideshow: Mars rover preps for duty
- How a long mission to Mars could kill you
- Cosmic Log archive for posts about Mars
- Mars resource page at msnbc.com
Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. | <urn:uuid:0e41b846-5bbc-4047-a5bb-7fb9a9509795> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2011/07/22/7141717-and-the-next-mars-rover-goes-to | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396222.11/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00188-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95595 | 1,740 | 2.9375 | 3 |
Goat Internal Parasites
Many goats pick up large numbers of internal parasites on pastures if the pastures are not managed properly.
Goats that become infected may become ill or even die. They may become lethargic, have diarrhea, lose weight or just maintain their weight. Sometimes these signs may go undetected. Internal parasites infect the gastrointestinal tract, liver, lungs, blood system, lymphatic system, and skin.
Every herd in the United States has some parasites. There are several main parasites that invade goats.
When are my pastures most likely to infect my goats with parasites? Do the larvae over-winter? These are just a few questions that you may be asking.
The best way to determine what parasites are infecting your goats is to have your veterinarian check a manure sample. He can then tell what parasites are infecting your goats as well as at what level and what product to use to treat your goats.
Many producers have always used dewormers. Some of the larvae may have become immune to the treatment. So what can you do?
There are few products approved for use in goats. Therefore, you may need to establish a relationship with your veterinarian who can prescribe treatments not listed on a label. | <urn:uuid:4117ece6-4591-4a8e-bfab-75a8f32c5ae3> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://extension.psu.edu/courses/meat-goat/health/goat-internal-parasites | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403826.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00181-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967227 | 252 | 2.65625 | 3 |
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More Great Links
- Stamberg, Susan. "Still dreaming of a 'White Christmas.'" National Public Radio. Nov. 21, 2002. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=850892
- "Will we have a white Christmas?" National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Dec. 12, 2006. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/extremes/christmas.html#intro
- "About 'White Christmas': the song." Irving Berlin's 'White Christmas: The Musical.' http://www.whitechristmasthemusical.com/intro.htm | <urn:uuid:8e59a595-4ddf-4a04-9114-f2ae99b8f577> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://people.howstuffworks.com/culture-traditions/holidays-christmas/white-christmas1.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403826.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00178-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.754199 | 249 | 3.09375 | 3 |
The American chemical engineer and the American petroleum industry developed side by side over the past century. The petroleum industry began when Edwin L. Drake drilled a successful oil well at Titusville Pennsylvania in 1859. Others quickly followed his lead, and before long oil wells covered the countryside. Just ten years after California's Gold Rush, Pennsylvania had developed its own brand of "gold fever". Some, like John D. Rockefeller, accumulated vast fortunes from this "black gold", while others like Mr. Drake died broke. The difference between success and failure was often a fine line.
"Enough already...go to the end."
Small amounts of petroleum have been used throughout history. The Egyptians coated mummies and sealed their mighty Pyramids with pitch. The Babylonians, Assyrians, and Persians used it to pave their streets and hold their walls and buildings together. Boats along the Euphrates were constructed with woven reeds and sealed with pitch. The Chinese also came across it while digging holes for brine (salt water) and used the petroleum for heating. The Bible even claims that Noah used it to make his Ark seaworthy.
American Indians used petroleum for paint, fuel, and medicine. Desert nomads used it to treat camels for mange, and the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, used petroleum it to treat his gout. Ancient Persians and Sumatrans also believed petroleum had medicinal value. This seemed a popular idea, and up through the 19th Century jars of petroleum were sold as miracle tonic able to cure whatever ailed you. People who drank this "snake oil" discovered that petroleum doesn't taste very good!
Yet despite its usefulness, for thousands of years petroleum was very scarce. People collected it when it bubbled to the surface or seeped into wells. For those digging wells to get drinking water the petroleum was seen as a nuisance. However, some thought the oil might have large scale economic value. George Bissell, a lawyer, thought that petroleum might be converted into kerosene for use in lamps. An analysis by Benjamin Silliman, Jr., a Yale chemistry and geology professor, confirmed his hunch.
In 1854 Bissell and a friend formed the unsuccessful Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company. Not one to be easily dismayed, in 1858 Bissell and a group of business men formed the Seneca Oil Company. They hired an ex-railroad conductor named Edwin Drake to drill for oil along a secluded creek in Titusville Pennsylvania. They soon dubbed him "Colonel" Drake to impress the locals. But the "Colonel" needed help so he hired Uncle Billy Smith and his two sons who had experience with drilling salt wells. In 1859 this motley crew found oil at a depth of 69 ½ feet.
Drake's well produced only thirty-five barrels a day, however he could sell it for $20 a barrel. News of the well quickly spread and brought droves of fortune seekers. Soon the hills were covered with prospectors trying to decide where to dig their wells. Some used Y-shaped devining rods to guide them. Others followed Drake's lead and drilled close to water, a technique that was dubbed "creekology". Many found oil, but usually at 4 or 5 hundred feet below the surface. Drake had just been lucky to find oil so high up!
To dig the wells six-inch wide cast iron pipes were sunk down to the bedrock. A screw like drill was then used to scoop out dirt and rock from the middle. Many discovered to their dismay that once they hit oil they had no way to contain all of it. Until caps were added to the wells vast quantities of oil flowed into the appropriately named Oil Creek.
Transporting the oil was also a problem. In 1865 Samuel Van Syckel, an oil buyer, began construction on a two-inch wide pipeline designed to span the distance to the railroad depot five miles away. The teamsters, who had previously transported the oil, didn't take to kindly to Syckel's plan, and they used pickaxes to break apart the line. Eventually Van Syckel brought in armed guards, finished the pipeline, and made a ton-o-money. By 1865 wooden derricks were bled 3.5 million barrels a year out of the ground. (Giddens) Such large scale production caused the price of crude oil to plummet to ten cents a barrel.
Andrew Carnegie was a large stockholder in the Columbia Oil Company. Carnegie believed that the oil fields would quickly run dry because of all the drilling. He persuaded Columbia Oil to dig a huge hole to store 100,000 barrels of oil so that they could make a killing when the country's wells went dry. Luckily there was more oil than they thought! But don't feel too sorry for Carnegie, he didn't let the setback slow him down very much, and went on to make his millions in the steel industry.
In contrast, "Colonel" Drake was committed to the oil business. He scoured the country looking for customers willing to buy his crude oil. However, the bad smell, muddy black color, and highly volatile component, called naphtha, caused few sales. It became obvious that one would have to refine the oil to find a market.
By 1860 there were 15 refineries in operation. Known as "tea kettle" stills, they consisted of a large iron drum and a long tube which acted as a condenser. Capacity of these stills ranged from 1 to 100 barrels a day. A coal fire heated the drum, and three fractions were obtained during the distillation process. The first component to boil off was the highly volatile naphtha. Next came the kerosene, or "lamp oil", and lastly came the heavy oils and tar which were simply left in the bottom of the drum. These early refineries produced about 75% kerosene, which could be sold for high profits. (Giddens, p.14)
Kerosene was so valuable because of a whale shortage that had began in 1845 due to heavy hunting. Sperm oil had been the main product of the whaling industry and was used in lamps. Candles were made with another whale product called "spermaceti". This shortage of natural sources meant that kerosene was in great demand. Almost all the families across the country started using kerosene to light their homes. However, the naphtha and tar fractions were seen as valueless and were simply dumped into Oil Creek. (I would like to point out that these first refineries were not operated by chemical engineers!)
Later these waste streams were converted into valuable products. In 1869 Robert Chesebrough discovered how to make petroleum jelly and called his new product Vaseline. The heavy components began being used as lubricants, or as waxes in candles and chewing gum. Tar was used as a roofing material. But the more volatile components were still without much value. Limited success came in using gasoline as a local anesthetic and liquid petroleum gas (LPG) in a compression cycle to make ice. The success in refined petroleum products greatly spread the technique. By 1865 there were 194 refineries in operation.
In 1862 John D. Rockefeller financed his first refinery as a side investment. He soon discovered that he liked the petroleum industry, and devoted himself to it full time. As a young bookkeeper Rockefeller had come to love the order of a well organized ledger. However, he was appalled by the disorder and instability of the oil industry. Anyone could drill a well, and overproduction plagued the early industry. At times this overproduction meant that the crude oil was cheaper than water. Rockefeller saw early on, that refining and transportation, as opposed to production, were the keys to taking control of the industry. And control the industry he did!
In 1870 he established Standard Oil, which then controlled 10% of the refining capacity in the country. Transportation often encompassed 20% of the total production cost and Rockefeller made under-the-table deals with railroads to give him secret shipping rebates. This cheap transportation allowed Standard to undercut its competitors and Rockefeller expanded aggressively, buying out competitors left and right. Soon standard built a network of "iron arteries" which delivered oil across the Eastern U.S. This pipeline system relieved Standard's dependence upon the railroads and reduced its transportation costs even more. By 1880 Standard controlled 90% of the country's refining capacity. Because of its massive size, it brought security and stability to the oil business, guaranteeing continuous profits. With Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller became the richest person in the World.
But what came out of all this activity? In short the early petroleum industry:
Brought a revolution in lighting with kerosene.
Helped keep machines in good conditions with lubricants. (it was the "Machine Age" after all)
Provided a new source of national wealth (in 1865 it was the countries 6th largest export).
Aided the Union in the Civil War by strengthening the economy (also petroleum was used to treat wounded soldiers at the battle of Gettysburg).
The petroleum industry, like other chemical industries, has a plethora of terms designed to scare off anyone who wants to understand exactly what is going on. Mastering this nomenclature is one of the main tasks facing chemistry and chemical engineering students. Here are a few commonly used terms, but be forewarned; because of the complexity of compounds in the petroleum industry some of these terms are very vague.
Hydrocarbons are chemical compounds made mainly of carbon and hydrogen. Both petroleum and coal contain many different hydrocarbons. Methane, ethanol, and benzene are examples of hydrocarbons, though there are many many others.
Bitumen is a another term for hydrocarbons. Both petroleum and coal are sometimes referred to as Bituminous.
Organic compounds are chemicals made of carbon (although the classification is not totally consistent and some carbon compounds, like carbon dioxide, are not considered organic). Hydrocarbons are commonly referred to as organic compounds, and it is fair to think of the two as equivalent. Carbohydrates, proteins, and urea (found in urine) are examples or organic compounds. It was once thought that organic compounds could only be produced from organic sources. Because of their usefulness, a huge chemical industry developed around organic chemicals during the 19th Century. Dyes and pharmaceuticals where products of this industry. As chemists increased their skills they found that organic compounds could be synthesized from inorganic sources. However, by this time the classification had been firmly rooted in industry and universities and so it remains today.
Inorganic compounds include everything that is not considered organic (every compound in the world is ether organic or inorganic).
Aromatic compounds are organic compounds which always have a benzene ring in them. Because of this they can be quite reactive and have some interesting properties. The dye and pharmaceutical industries depend heavily on aromatic compounds.
Aliphatic compounds are organic compounds which are not aromatic. They include single bonded (ethane, propane, butane), double bonded (ethene or called ethylene, propene, butene), and triple bonded (ethyne or called acetylene, propyne, butyne) straight chain hydrocarbons as well as cyclic non-benzene structures (cyclopentane, cyclobutane) (every organic compound in the world is either aromatic or aliphatic).
A Barrel (bbl.) of crude contains 42 gallons or 158.8 liters. No one actually ships petroleum in barrels anymore because they are too small, but the term is still used to describe a defined volume.
Petroleum literally means "rock oil". It is a very broad word referring to all liquid hydrocarbons which can be collected from the ground. Even natural gas and solid hydrocarbons are sometimes referred to as petroleum. When petroleum first comes from the ground it is called crude oil. Later it is usually just referred to as oil. It can flow like water or be as viscous as peanut butter. It can be yellow, red, green, brown, or black.
Fractions are complex mixtures of chemical compounds that all have a similar boiling point. Light and heavy fractions refer to a compound's boiling point and not their actual density (these are two entirely different things). Light fractions can be very heavy (dense), and heavy fractions can be very light (go figure)!
Isomers are chemicals which have the same number and type of atoms but have them arranged in a different way. Methane (CH4), ethane (C2H6), and propane (C3H8) have no isomers because their is only one way the carbons can hook together. Butane (C4H10) has two isomers (n-butane and isobutane). Decane (C10H22) has seventy five isomers, and a molecule with 20 carbon atoms (C20H42) has over 100,000 isomers. Crude oil contains molecules having 1 to 100+ carbon atoms. Naming these compounds based upon normal chemical rhetoric would be hell on earth! The huge number of possible molecular arrangements is why people talk of fractions instead of using proper chemical nomenclature.
Natural Gas is a mixture of very low boiling hydrocarbons. Natural gas can only be liquefied under extremely high pressures and very low temperatures. It is called "dry" when methane (CH4) is the primary component, and "wet" if it contains higher boiling hydrocarbons. If it smells bad, because of sulfur compounds, it is called "sour". Otherwise, it is called "sweet".
Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) is a very light fraction of petroleum. It is also a fairly simple fraction containing mainly propane and butane. First, it should be noted that under normal pressures LPG is actually a gas, unlike gasoline (often just called "gas") which is really a liquid (ugh). However, under modestly high pressures these compounds can be converted to a liquid (hence their name). Being able to store them as a liquid reduces the container size by a factor of a hundred. This is no doubt why propane stoves are so popular. As cracking methods have evolved more and more LPG has been produced by refineries.
Gasoline is a light fraction of petroleum which is quite volatile and burns rapidly. Straight run gasoline refers to gasoline produced by distillation instead of cracking, although it really doesn't make a difference. Gasoline is often just called "gas", however it is a liquid at typical pressures. This confusing state of affairs developed because the first internal combustion engines ran on town gas (a mixture of carbon monoxide, CO, and hydrogen, H2, both actual gases). These engines were therefore called "gas engines". When gasoline replaced town gas people still called the motors "gas engines" and also started calling gasoline "gas". Today, the average American uses 450 gallons of gasoline a year.
Octane Number rates a fuel's ability to avoid premature ignition called knock. Premature ignition reduces an engine's power and quickly wares it out. The octane scale arbitrarily defines n-heptane a value of 0, and isooctane (2,2,4-trimethyl pentane) an octane number of 100. Isooctane is then added to heptane until the mixture has the same knock characteristics as the fuel being tested, and the percent isooctane is taken as the unknown fuels octane number. Tetraethyl lead used to be a common anti-knock additive which would raise a fuels octane number. High octane fuel can be used in engines with high compression ratios which in turn produce much more power. However, the additive is no longer used because of concerns over lead pollution.
Naphtha is a light fraction of petroleum used to make gasoline. Naphtha also produces solvents and feedstocks for the petrochemical industry.
Kerosene was the first important petroleum fraction, replacing whale oils in lamps over a hundred years ago. Some unscrupulous refiners failed to distill off all the naphtha from the kerosene fraction thereby increasing the volume of their final product. This lead to many lamp explosions and fires.
Diesel fuels find use in the fleet of trucks which transport the nations goods. Diesel engines power these larger engines, and use higher compression ratios (and temperatures) than their gasoline cousins. They are therefore more efficient. It is also interesting to note that diesel engines have no spark plugs, instead the fuel-air mixture is ignited by the rising temperatures and pressures during the compression stroke.
Gas Oil (or fuel oils) are used for domestic heating. In the winter refineries produce more gas oil, whereas during the summer driving months they produce more gasoline.
Heavy Fuel Oil is often blended with gas oils for easier use in industry. Ships burn heavy fuel oils but they call it bunker oil.
Atmospheric Residual is everything that cannot be vaporized under normal pressures. Atmospheric residual is fed into another distillation column, operating at lower pressures, which can separate out some of the lighter compounds. Lubricants and waxes reside in this fraction.
Vacuum Residual is the bottom of the barrel. It includes asphalt and some coke.
Pitch is a thick, black, sticky material. It is left behind when the lighter components of coal tar or petroleum are distilled off. Pitch is a "natural" form of asphalt.
Asphalt is a high boiling component of crude oil. It is therefore found at the "bottom of the barrel" when petroleum is distilled.
Tars are byproducts formed when coke is made from coal or charcoal is made from wood. It is a thick, complex, oily black mixture of heavy organic compounds very similar to pitch or asphalt, though from a different source.
"The end already...go back to the top."
We always welcome COMMENTS, SUGGESTIONS, OR REACTIONS. | <urn:uuid:9f6e12c8-5848-44d9-8202-15ead547fc08> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.pafko.com/history/h_petro.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397842.93/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00160-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971764 | 3,717 | 3.453125 | 3 |
Lumbar supports – also called braces or corsets – are not very effective at preventing low back pain or reducing disability in those who suffer from an arthritic back, according to a review in a recent issue of The Cochrane Library, a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates medical research.
Researchers at Amsterdam School for Health Professionals in the Netherlands looked at seven prevention and eight treatment studies, which together included 15,798 people. They found little or no difference between people with low-back pain who used back supports and those who received no treatment or education on lifting techniques in back pain prevention or reduction of sick leave.
In four studies, there was little or no difference between patients with acute or chronic back pain who used back supports and those who received no treatment in short-term pain reduction or overall improvement. In three studies there was little or no difference in short-term pain reduction, overall improvement and return-to-work between those who used back supports and those who received manipulation, physiotherapy, or electrical stimulation.
In one study, back supports along with patient education about recovering from back pain were helpful in reducing the number of days of sick leave but not in preventing back pain. In another, back supports plus usual medical care reduced the number of days of low-back pain and improved function, but did not reduce sick leave.
The researchers say conclusions from this review should be viewed with caution due to the low quality of many of the studies. In the future, researchers should report side effects from wearing back supports and measure how many hours per day the supports are actually worn. | <urn:uuid:88937182-a9f6-4529-8168-b1ba7520d2b2> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://arthritistoday.org/news/lumbar-supports-low-back-pain.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395621.98/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00127-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970185 | 330 | 2.765625 | 3 |
Abraham Lincoln (18091865). Political Debates Between Lincoln and Douglas 1897.
Douglas took his ground that negroes were not included in the Declaration of Independence:
I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal,equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.
They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all,constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.
There again are the sentiments I have expressed in regard to the Declaration of Independence upon a former occasion,sentiments which have been put in print and read wherever anybody cared to know what so humble an individual as myself chose to say in regard to it.
At Galesburgh, the other day, I said in answer to Judge Douglas, that three years ago there never had been a man, so far as I knew or believed, in the whole world, who had said that the Declaration of Independence did not include negroes in the term all men. I reassert it to-day. I assert that Judge Douglas and all his friends may search the whole records of the country, and it will be a matter of great astonishment to me if they shall be able to find that one human being three years ago had ever uttered the astounding sentiment that the term all men in the Declaration did not include the negro. Do not let me be misunderstood. I know that more than three years ago there were men who, finding this assertion constantly in the way of their schemes to bring about the ascendency and perpetuation of slavery, denied the truth of it. I know that Mr. Calhoun and all the politicians of his school denied the truth of the Declaration. I know that it ran along in the mouth of some | <urn:uuid:6ff18fde-6497-4f7c-a3ab-e6a048d58105> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.bartleby.com/251/pages/page415.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396872.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00093-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98433 | 538 | 3.453125 | 3 |
San Franciscans are viciously proud of their little gingerbread village of a city. Rightfully so. But soon, the demands of population growth will force San Francisco to expand its infrastructure, and all that quaint character could suffer. Imagine the wrath of the NIMBY crowds if a new wind farm came along and blocked their precious views of the Golden Gate. IwamotoScott Architecture’s solution: Hide the ugly below ground.
IwamotoScott, a young, theory-driven San Francisco firm, designed a futuristic master plan for the city in 2108, when the population is expected to double. Hydro-Net, as they call it, could’ve tumbled straight out of the mind of Syd Mead. The architects envision a subterranean world in which the city harvests its own green energy, and residents zip around in hydrogen-fueled hover cars (hover cars!!), freeing roads above ground from high-speed traffic. A street-level infrastructural web spread along the waterfront and at "nodal points" in various neighborhoods would connect to the below-ground networks (so people can actually get from their cars to their apartments). Somewhere in there, Hydro-Net would also be able to harvest fog as a water source, and "automated drilling robots" would build tunnel walls out of carbon nanotube technology that could store and distribute hydrogen fuel.
In short, both above- and below-ground worlds would work in tandem to collect and share water, power, fuel, and other goods, and cart residents and tourists around the city—presumably without blocking too many views of the Golden Gate.
Hydro-Net is one of eight designs included in Architecture of Consequence: San Francisco, an exhibit about how architecture can facilitate social change. It’s on view at AIA San Francisco | Center for Architecture + Design Gallery through Oct. 21. Stay tuned on Co.Design for more coverage of the show.
[Image courtesy of AIA San Francisco] | <urn:uuid:204b8190-4131-435b-b7b8-b00c9b2c922c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665015/san-francisco-in-2100-a-subterranean-world-full-of-robots-and-hover-cars | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397696.49/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00049-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946993 | 411 | 2.625 | 3 |
Click Image to Enlarge
Surging or output variations have always been one of the major processing issues in single-screw extrusion. Melt pumps compensate by removing the output variation, but the surge behind the melt pump is still there. The changing speed of the screw reacting to the pressure behind the melt pump causes a continuous variation in screw speed. This in turn results in a continuous change in melt temperature and causes variations in die flow.
Sometimes changes in melt temperature can be corrected by a static mixer. But a surge is still an undesirable processing issue. Understanding the causes of surging can help troubleshoot and correct it.
Screw surging has four main causes, assuming the screw and temperature controls are working properly. They are feed-entry variations, polymer sticking to the screw, plugging of the melting section and an inadequately filled metering section. Let’s consider the feed-entry variation for the purposes of this column.
Feed-related variations can be caused by anything that interrupts or momentarily restricts the flow of polymer into the screw. This can be any mechanical device prior to the screw—such as a feeder—or the geometry of the flow passage the polymer follows to get to the screw. Also, the polymer bulk-flow characteristics can cause bridging or tunneling that result in erratic flow to the screw.
How do you recognize a feed-related surge versus the other types? Feed-related surges can be somewhat rhythmic or totally erratic, with a cycle varying from a few seconds to as much as several minutes, depending on what is causing them. However, a feed surge is always a momentary decrease in output—never an increase in output. The periodic decrease in polymer entering the screw tends to pass through the screw as a unit or “slug” without much redistribution, and exits as a momentary reduction in output.
Even when the amount of polymer in the screw changes for a very short time, the motor load is similarly affected. For example, if you have a 10% surge as measured by a 10% drop in head pressure, there will be a similar change in motor load for a similar time interval. Of course there will be a time delay between the observed change in motor load and the change in output or surge. The motor load decreases as the reduction in polymer in the screw flights passes through the screw, but it is not observed in the head pressure until it exits the screw.
In the “old days” this was easily observed by watching the drop in motor load and the drop in head pressure on the analog instruments, and noting they had very similar percentage changes as well as a similar cycle. If you still have analog meters and no melt pump, you have all the information you need to observe a feed surge.
With the broad use of melt pumps and digital instruments, it is hard, if not impossible, to determine such a pattern unless you are continuously plotting these functions. As a result most processors will need a data logger with several channels to troubleshoot the cause of surging. The plot of a feed-section surge without a melt pump would look somewhat like the accompanying illustration.
If you have a melt pump, you must produce this plot either under manual control of the pump speed or allow the extruder to drive the melt pump by turning the pump motor off and allowing the extruder to continue. Otherwise the drop in suction pressure behind the melt pump will cause the screw speed to change resulting in a motor-load change masking the whole thing. Surging is easily recognized with a melt pump, as you can see and hear the screw speed changing continuously, but you can’t tell what is causing it without some analysis.
Once you determine it is a feed surge, look in the area up to the feed section of the screw for the cause. If the surge does not follow the pattern shown then it is a result of one of the other causes of surging, which will be covered in another column. | <urn:uuid:1ab06604-0ce7-40d2-b318-8f643b7cf5eb> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.ptonline.com/columns/solving-feed-related-surging | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397567.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00140-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949464 | 809 | 2.9375 | 3 |
You probably know that you can change a font's color. Just select the text in question and choose a color from the Font Color dropdown in the Font group (on the Home tab). In Word 2007, this option's on the Formatting toolbar.
When using this dropdown in Word 2010, you might have noticed the gradient option, but not known how to apply it. (This option isn't available in Word 2007 or Word 2003.) A gradient fill lets you blend two or more colors instead of just one. To be frank, you might never have a need for this option, but it's good to know it's available, for that odd project that needs a bit of flamboyant pizazz.
The first step is to select the text you're enhancing, as you normally would before applying a format. Then, do the following to apply a gradient fill effect to the selected text:
- Click the Home tab.
- Click the Font Options dropdown in the Font group.
- Choose Gradient.
- Select More Gradients from the resulting submenu.
- Select Text File (the default) in the left pane (if necessary) and click Gradient Fill. Doing so will display several new options.
- Click the Preset dropdown and choose an option-knowing which one is difficult at first. For this example, click Rainbow. Live Preview will provide just a glimpse of the effect.
- The angle setting should be 45 degrees; adjust if necessary. For a very different effect, change the angle setting from 45 to 90.
- Click Close.
As you can see, just by changing the angle, you can drastically change the effect. All of the options give you a lot of control, but this is definitely one of those features where less is more!
Here are a few guidelines for using these settings:
- The Type option lets you define the direction to use when generating the fill. Choosing this option determines the Direction options.
- The Direction option determines the progression of colors and shades.
- The Angle option specifies the angle the fill rotates (in other words, the sharpness of the gradient angle). This option is available only with the Linear Type.
- Stops determine the position, color, and transparency of each section. You'll need one stop for each color. You can change their positions by sliding them. You can also add and delete stops. You can have up to 10.
That's probably clear as mud, but the best way to master this feature is to just experiment with it. As a side note, you can do something similar with the document's background, as follows:
- Click the Page Layout tab.
- In the Page Background group, click the Page Color dropdown, and select Fill Effects.
- On the Gradient tab, choose Rainbow from the Preset Colors dropdown.
- Click OK.
These examples are just a means to share the feature. I chose Rainbow because it displays so much contrast from one setting to another-not because I recommend that you use it for your projects. (Nor am I saying not to use it.)
Susan Sales Harkins is an IT consultant, specializing in desktop solutions. Previously, she was editor in chief for The Cobb Group, the world's largest publisher of technical journals. | <urn:uuid:fbbdf37a-9d30-4eed-ad8d-43d4dc26e990> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/microsoft-office/highlight-text-with-the-gradient-fill-effect-in-word/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398628.62/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00009-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.885324 | 683 | 3.109375 | 3 |
Whether you’re a professional video editor or an amateur that occasionally uses iMovie or Windows Movie Maker for home movies, you’ve probably noticed the bit rate setting during the process of exporting your video. What does bit rate mean in video? How do we know what the right setting is for a particular video?
What is Bit Rate?
A digital video (in its original state) is really a string of still images that is tied together in a single video file. In a lossless video format, these files can be extremely big, taking up gigabytes of space for just a few minutes of video. Because of this, lossy codecs have been developed that turn these giant files into much smaller, manageable ones. They do this by taking out data that remains constant from each frame, and only storing data that actually changes. This allows videos with still backgrounds to be much smaller than they would be if the background had to be present in every single frame.
The side effect of video compression is in a drop in quality. What is kept still in a picture might not look exactly the same way once compressed, especially if each frame shares a portion of the overall bit rate. Setting the bit rate too low means that each frame has a restricted amount of space to work with. The result is a more pixelated and distorted image. A bit rate that has been set too high will take up a lot of space on your hard drive, and make uploading the video to YouTube a much longer process.
In short, the bit rate is the amount of bits that can be used in one second of video. If your video has 30 frames per second, it will require a higher bit rate than one shot at 24.
What Should the Bit Rate Be?
Determining the right bit rate to set your edited video at can be tricky. You need to balance space requirements with quality, and I have yet to meet a team of video editors that agrees on what this magical number should be. There are some variables to take into account when deciding on a proper setting:
- Source Bit Rate: What bit rate is the source file recorded at? Exceeding this number doesn’t help the quality, and will only increase the size of the file. While some codecs may differ, the general rule of thumb is to keep the bit rate at or below the source.
- Size of the Video: Are you exporting a video at 720p or 320p? The larger a video is, the greater the bit rate needs to be in order to maintain picture quality involving more pixels.
- Codec Used: Some video codecs offer better quality at lower compressions. Depending on the codec, you might be able to get away with reducing the bit rate without experiencing a great amount of perceived quality loss over another codec. Because there are so many variations on even the most popular of encoding systems and codecs, determining the best bit rate for your video can be a matter of trial and error.
- Where You’re Uploading: YouTube takes video that you upload and converts it into several different size and bit rate formats that it supports. Because of this, you want to be mindful of the bit rate YouTube uses when deciding what to encode your video to. For example, YouTube uses a variable bit rate averaging at 2 Mbps for its 720p video stream. Because its compression systems are so fine tuned, its 2 Mbps 720p video may look better than the one you come out with. It’s a good idea here to encode your video above YouTube’s for this very reason. For videos on LockerGnome, many of them are presently encoded at 5 Mbps or above.
- Amount of Movement: The more movement present in a video, the more bits are required to maintain image quality. A single speaker talking to a camera mounted on tripod while standing against a still background makes compressing a file down much easier than an action sequence that takes place in a park filled with trees on a breezy day. Everything that moves in your video requires extra bits to handle. Setting your bit rate too low may result in terrible pixelation and even the appearance of objects that appear to split themselves as they move across the screen.
Over all, finding the right bit rate is a matter of trial and error for most video editors. There is no golden rule or magical number to set, and anyone that tells you otherwise is doing so on the assumption that all compression software and codecs work the same. Sadly, they really don’t. | <urn:uuid:08a8d9bf-f0ea-4b00-ab17-fe213d789a69> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.lockergnome.com/media/2011/08/16/what-does-bit-rate-mean-in-video/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397111.67/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00131-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942683 | 925 | 3.171875 | 3 |
What is interactive learning?
Interactive learning is a method of engaging learners with the help of multimedia materials and teaching techniques that elicit active participation in learning (as opposed to passive reception of information).
Critique of the Interactive Learning Method
- This page was last modified on 12 August 2009, at 00:13.
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It's part of an effort to better understand sleep's impact on our health
Sleep is crucial for rejuvenating our brains and bodies, and thanks to smartphones and fitness trackers we’re able to get deeper insights into our nightly dozing.
SleepHealth, a new iPhone app powered by IBM’s Watson intelligence system, is the latest app aimed at helping us understand how we sleep.
SleepHealth uses the sensors in your iPhone or Apple Watch to measure users’ movements throughout the night. It also uses the Apple Watch’s heart rate monitor to detect when the wearer has fallen asleep. The app then offers suggestions for living healthier and sleeping better.
SleepHealth includes a nap tracker and a personal sleep concierge, which were “designed specifically with the Apple Watch in mind,” according to IBM. When Apple’s next iPhone update launches, SleepHealth will reduce light exposure before sleep through Apple’s new Night Shift feature.
Many health-related apps can offer feedback on sleeping patterns, such as SleepCycle and Sleep Time+. What makes SleepHealth different is that it aims to gain a better understanding of sleep in general by using Apple’s ResearchKit framework. Made with the American Sleep Apnea Association, SleepHealth allows users 18 and older to complete surveys and tasks as part of a larger study aimed at helping doctors and researchers explore the impact of sleep on daytime activities.
To do this, the app also tests users’ alertness during the day and can track their physical activity. Data from these surveys is stored and analyzed in Watson’s Health Cloud, where researchers can examine it to parse together patterns. | <urn:uuid:84bdd67b-1b41-497e-b39c-cb8b2080059b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://time.com/4244474/iphone-ibm-sleep-app/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396949.33/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00185-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931229 | 340 | 2.578125 | 3 |
November 1, 2012
New Federal Register Interactive Electoral College Maps Allow Users to Predict 2012 Election
New Video Short Explains Electoral College Process
Washington, DC…The National Archives’ Office of the Federal Register has launched new interactive Electoral College maps on its official Electoral College website. The public can actively participate in the electoral process by predicting electoral votes for the upcoming Presidential election and sharing their prediction results through social media. The new maps are online [www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/map/predict.html].
In addition, the Federal Register has posted a new video on how the Electoral College works [www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/about.html].
With the new interactive maps, users can predict which candidate will win which states, and the Electoral College website will keep a running tally. The user can then tweet or email predictions or create posts on Facebook to share. The site is simple to navigate, and the user can create a personalized map from a template. Results can also be loaded from the previous two elections.
After the election, the user can view the actual Certificates of Ascertainment and Vote from each state once the Federal Register has received and uploaded them to the website.
The new site allows users access to election information from previous Presidential elections. The Federal Register has data as far back as the 1964 election uploaded to the site and will gradually add data from the 1960 election and earlier. Users can see who the candidates were and who won each state and pull up information about the popular vote totals. For example, did you know that a third-party candidate received one electoral vote in 1972? [www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/historical.html].
The Office of the Federal Register has administered the Electoral College since the 1950s. It launched its first website in 1996 and started posting the Certificates of Ascertainment and Vote in 2000. This election year’s Certificates will be posted online once the states send them to the Federal Register.
# # #
For press information about the Electoral College process, contact the Legal Affairs and Policy Division at the Office of the Federal Register at [email protected] or 202-741-6030. | <urn:uuid:61bd5191-4823-45bc-a8d9-e43e345890c4> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2013/nr13-07.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393997.50/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00161-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92403 | 476 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Ambient energy scavenging, also called energy harvesting or power harvesting, is the process of obtaining usable energy from natural and human-made sources that surround us in the everyday environment.
In most locations on earth, there is abundant ambient electromagnetic (EM) energy from cellular, television and radio transmitters, as well as satellite and other wireless communication systems. Other sources include physical motion, visible light, heat from the sun and the earth's interior, wind, ocean waves, ocean tidal currents, river currents and sound waves.
Human activities inevitably produce waste energy that can go to productive use if harnessed and stored. For example, when you walk down the street, you move your arms and legs, generating kinetic energy to propel yourself, and also thermal energy as friction with your clothes, the surrounding air, and the pavement beneath your feet. An ambient energy scavenging device can convert most or all of this wasted energy into electrical energy that you can use (for example) to charge your cell phone battery.
The concept of ambient energy scavenging has existed for decades. In recent years, mounting interest in alternative energy has accelerated the pace of research. Here are a few examples of current research:
- The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing an integrated energy scavenging and storage system for use with portable electronics, weaponry and vehicles, among other things. The integration of renewable energy with storage could enable batteries that would constantly remain charged.
- Technology from a company called Voltree harvests the metabolic energy of trees and converts it to electricity that power wireless sensor networks used to detect and control forest fires.
- Piezoelectric (PE) generators, created with crystals that give off a charge under pressure, are being used or tested under roadways, walkways and in sports stadiums to obtain usable energy from traffic and activity above them. For example, an Israeli company called Innowattech placed PE generators beneath 33 feet of highway. The company estimates that such devices under a half-mile of a busy highway could generate enough electricity to power 250 homes.
Continue reading about ambient energy scavenging:
Faruk Yildiz outlines several ambient energy scavenging methods.
Engineers at Georgia Tech have developed a method of harvesting ambient electromagnetic energy.
See more about DARPA's energy scavenging and storage system project.
Piezoelectric materials may provide an alternative for scavenging energy from physical vibrations such as sound waves. | <urn:uuid:53ca8dde-5315-448c-b12c-5342661d7a58> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/ambient-energy-scavenging | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403825.35/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00087-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927641 | 501 | 3.859375 | 4 |
The first commercial energy station powered by ocean waves started up yesterday three miles off the Portuguese coast. The machine, which resembles a giant red sea snake, generates electricity that’s transmitted via an underwater cable to the nation’s power grid. Two more machines are expected to be added in the coming weeks, allowing the “wave farm” to generate a total of 2.25 megawatts, enough to supply 1,500 households with electricity [Reuters]. If successful, a second phase will see energy generation rise to 21 megawatts from a further 25 machines providing electricity for 15,000 Portuguese homes [CNN].
Environmentalists love the idea of generating power from the natural motion of waves and tides, as the ocean’s energy is bountiful, reliable, and creates no greenhouse gases. But the technology has been slow to mature. Last year, a wave-power machine sank off the Oregon coast. Blades have broken off experimental tidal turbines in New York’s turbulent East River [The New York Times]. A problem with offshore moorings also delayed the Portuguese project for about a year. But wave power proponents say that some problems are inevitable with a new technology, and that most of the kinks have now been ironed out.
The machines being installed in Portuguese waters were made by a Scottish company called Pelamis Wave Power; pelamis is an ancient word for sea snake. And it is true that the machines look like giant metal snakes floating in the water. Each one has four long sections with three “power modules” hinged between them. There are large hydraulic rams sticking into the modules. As the long sections twist and turn in the waves they pull the rams in and out of the modules like pistons. The huge force of the rams is harnessed to run generators in the power modules [BBC News].
Wave and tidal power stations face more stress than other renewable energy devices, says energy expert Ian Fells: “It’s extraordinarily difficult to design a machine that will cope with the extreme violence of waves. Some wave machines are under the surface all the time — but they are not as well developed as yet. Pelamis lies in the surface and it remains to be seen how successful it will be…. We’ll just have to see how it operates over time and how it copes with serious weather conditions” [CNN]. But other companies and countries appear eager to take up the challenge as well. Pelamis plans to install machines off the coasts of Scotland and Cornwall, in southwestern England, in the next two years, and the British company Ocean Power Technologies has just deployed its first “PowerBuoy” off the coast of Spain. | <urn:uuid:8dd76e21-ab9e-47c5-b07d-32f5ffe85a98> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2008/09/24/first-wave-farm-sends-energy-to-portugals-power-grid/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783408828.55/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155008-00183-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935081 | 554 | 3.125 | 3 |
Once certain information is learned and processed in the brain, the information is more likely to be retained if a short daytime nap is taken.
A recent study tested 33 healthy individuals for memory, and its connection to sleep. There were 11 males and 22 females, averaging an age of 23.3 years. All participants were given information and tasks to memorize that fall under the category “declarative memory.” Declarative memory includes book and visual study, such as textbook learning and diagram memorization. This is opposed to “procedural memory,” which accounts for things like muscle memory and certain physical skill sets. The study did not address the connection between midday naps and procedural memory.
After learning the declarative memory tasks, which included memorizing words, a diagram and a maze, 16 of the participants took 45-minute non-REM naps, while the other 17 remained awake. When tested later, the trend was that those who took naps remembered their declarative memory tasks better than those who stayed awake.
One important condition stressed in the study was that the tasks had to be learned thoroughly before sleep in order for the nap to have any measurable effect. “These results suggest that there is a threshold acquisition level that has to be obtained for sleep to optimally process the memory,” says study author Dr. Matthew Tucker. In other words, a nap will not allow one to acquire, or retain, unlearnt or poorly learned knowledge that had been recently studied. “The importance of this finding is that sleep may not indiscriminately process all information we acquire during wakefulness, only the information we learn well.”
The conclusion, that a short midday nap may help one retain learnt knowledge, should have a significant impact on those individuals devoted towards gaining and retaining knowledge, such as students. Finding 45 minutes to sleep during the day could potentially save hours of relearning material.
Source: Defeat Diabetes Foundation: Tucker, Matthew. Fishbein, William. Sleep. “Enhancement of Declarative Memory Performance Following a Daytime Nap Is Contingent on Strength of Initial Task Acquisition.” February 1st 2008 | <urn:uuid:419e94b5-0033-4576-8fd5-bae76bb43fc6> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://defeatdiabetes.org/short-daytime-nap-helps-retain-learned-knowledge/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391519.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00167-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970617 | 446 | 3.4375 | 3 |
Advances Canadian culture, celebrates heritage and embraces Canadian identity.
Canada Council for the Arts
Independent, arm's length organization created by the Parliament of Canada in 1957 to foster and promote the arts. Provides a wide range of grants and services to professional Canadian artists.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Public broadcasting service, providing radio and television programming nation-wide in both official languages.
Canadian Museum of Nature
Features information about exhibitions, programmes, activities, research and collections.
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)
Independent agency responsible for regulating Canada's broadcasting and telecommunications systems.
Library and Archives Canada
Federal cultural agency responsible for collecting and preserving Canada's published heritage so that it's available for present and future generations of Canadians.
National Arts Centre
Develops the performing arts in the National Capital Region and assists the Canada Council in the development of the performing arts elsewhere in Canada.
National Battlefield Commission
Conserves, administers and develops the National Battlefields Park in Quebec City, better known as the Plains of Abraham.
National Film Board of Canada
Public agency that produces and distributes films and other audiovisual works to Canadians and the rest of the world. Includes information about films in progress, new releases and classics, as well as a special page for kids.
National Gallery of Canada
Exhibitions, collections and a wide range of resources, including a virtual tour of the Canadian Collection.
Information about Canada's national historic sites, parks and other heritage related information.
Federal cultural agency devoted to the development and promotion of audiovisual documents produced by the Canadian private sector.
Other languages 1
Last update:April 29, 2015 at 11:14:50 UTC | <urn:uuid:24bdbdf7-7d7d-4a30-bed8-0d934f72b02c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/Canada/Government/Departments_and_Agencies/Canadian_Heritage/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391519.2/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00013-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.890261 | 348 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Alfred Moore Scales (1827-1889)
Alfred Moore Scales was born on November 26, 1827 in Rockingham County on his family’s plantation, Ingleside. Caldwell first studied at the Caldwell Institute in Greensboro before transferring to the University of North Carolina in 1845. Scales ...
Alfred Moore Waddell (1834-1912)
A reluctant secessionist and Confederate, Alfred Moore Waddell staunchly supported the Democratic Party during the late 1800s. Although he served as a Congressman throughout the 1870s and edited and owned influential newspapers, he is most known ...
Alleghany County (1859)
Alleghany County, one of North Carolina's most northern counties, is located in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Although it is the fifth smallest county in the state, Alleghany County has a rich heritage that is connected to the geography of the region. ...
Alton A. Lennon (1906 – 1986)
Alton A. Lennon was a Democratic U.S. Senator from North Carolina between 1953 and 1954. Prior to that from 1957 to 1973, he was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Alton was known as one of North Carolina’s most conservative ...
NC Signers of the Declaration of Independence
North Carolina played an important role in the beginning of the United States. ...
North Carolina Constitution Is an Important Governing Document
I often have wondered how many North Carolinians have taken the time to study or at least generally refer to the North Carolina Constitution. ...
- African American
- Benevolent Work
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- Civil War
- Colleges and Universities
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- Early America
- Fusion Politics
- Modern Era
- New Deal/ Great Depression
- Political Documents
- Political History
- Primary Documents
- Progressive Era
- Ratification Debates
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- Sports and Entertainment | <urn:uuid:6e959c67-4eab-466e-8904-6211a41f8473> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396224.52/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00119-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940437 | 414 | 2.890625 | 3 |
The announcement marks an important symbolic and operational milestone in rebuilding the nation's nuclear weapons complex, which began a long retrenchment in the late 1980s as the Cold War ended and the toll of environmental damage from bomb production became known.
"Since 1989 until today, we were the only nuclear power in the world that could not make a pit," said Linton Brooks, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Energy Department agency that runs the weapons production complex.
A pit is a hollow sphere made of plutonium, surrounded by conventional explosives that detonate and start fission as the sphere implodes.
Under a Bush administration plan, the Energy Department is beginning limited production of plutonium parts for the stockpile of nuclear weapons and will begin laying plans for a new factory that could produce components for hundreds of weapons each year.
The last time the United States made a plutonium pit was at the Energy Department's Rocky Flats site in Colorado, which was shut down after serious environmental laws were broken and the FBI raided the plant.
Weapons scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico said Tuesday that they had built a plutonium pit for a W-88 warhead for a Trident nuclear missile.
The production took eight years and ultimately will cost $1.5 billion when the pit is fully certified by the Energy Department in 2007, Los Alamos officials said.
"It is a sign that after a long period of decline, the weapons complex is back and growing," said Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Energy Department weapons expert. "To the average U.S. citizen, it would be accurate to say we have restarted the production of nuclear weapons."
Energy Department officials vehemently denied that they are actually producing nuclear weapons and said they need the capability of producing plutonium parts to ensure the reliability of the stockpile of U.S. weapons, which is aging and may need new components.
Although the United States built its first nuclear bomb in a matter of a few years during World War II, the effort to restart component production is going to take about two decades.
The Energy Department expects the future pit factory to begin production in 2018, after lengthy design and environmental reviews.
But critics question whether the Bush administration is going overboard in its investments in the nuclear weapons complex. Thomas Cochran, a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the government is now spending about $6 billion annually on the nuclear weapons complex, 50% more than it did during the Cold War. | <urn:uuid:2a6f8211-56f3-4ff0-ba9a-22ea1c3b969e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.lossless-audio.com/usa/504847833.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398628.62/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00094-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962185 | 511 | 3.203125 | 3 |
Last name: Callaway
This interesting and unusual medieval English surname is of Norman French origin, and is locational from a place called "Caillovet-Orgeville" in Eure, France, and is derived from the Old Norman French "cail(ou)" for a pebble. Kelway is a dialectal variant of this placename, which was probably introduced into England after the Norman Conquest of 1066, and the variants in the modern idiom include Callaway, Calloway Calway, Kellaway, and Kelleway. Tytherton - Kellaways (or Kelways) in Wiltshire gets its name from the above place also. Two notable namebearers listed in the National Biography are brothers Joseph Kelway (deceased 1782) and Thomas Kelway (deceased 1749) were both organists of renown. The name development includes Elyas de Kaylewe in 1255. The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of Philip de Chailewai, which was dated 1165, in the "Pipe Rolls of Gloucester", during the reign of King Henry 11, known as "The Builder of Churches", 1154 - 1189. Surnames became necessary when governments introduced personal taxation. In England this was known as Poll Tax. Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to "develop" often leading to astonishing variants of the original spelling.
© Copyright: Name Origin Research www.surnamedb.com 1980 - 2016
Want to dig deeper into your family history? Take a look at our page on building a Family Tree
. Or get scientific and enter the exciting world of Ancestral DNA | <urn:uuid:77077f62-1799-4811-9e05-c9e8efa97b85> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Callaway | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394937.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00045-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960789 | 350 | 2.6875 | 3 |
On the Fahrenheit scale, do 0 and 100 have any special significance? INACTIVE
Everybody knows 0 degrees on the Celsius scale is the freezing point of water and 100 degrees is the boiling point. On the Fahrenheit scale, however, freezing is 32 degrees and boiling 212. How on earth were these numbers arrived at? Do 0 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit mean anything?
Researchers have gone to their graves trying to figure out what old man Fahrenheit was up to, Leslie. Here's the story as well as I can piece it together:
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686-1736) was a German instrument maker who invented the first practical mercury thermometer. Casting about for a suitable scale for his device, he visited the Danish astronomer Ole Romer, who had devised a system of his own. As it turned out, it was a case of the blind leading the blind.
Romer had decided that the boiling point of water should be 60 degrees, which at least had the strength of numerological tradition behind it (60 minutes in an hour, right?). But zero was arbitrary, the main consideration apparently being that it should be colder than it ever got in Denmark. (Romer didn't like using negative numbers in his weather logbook.) In addition to the boiling point of water, the other landmarks on Romer's scale were the freezing point of water, 7.5 degrees, and body temperature, 22.5 degrees.
D.G., simple soul that he was, thought this cockeyed system was the soul of elegance. He made one useful change--to get rid of the fractions, he multiplied Romer's degrees by 4, giving him 30 for the freezing point and 90 for body temperature. Then, for reasons nobody has ever been able to fathom, he multiplied all the numbers by 16/15, making 32 freezing and 96 body temperature. Boiling point for the time being he ignored altogether.
By and by Fahrenheit got ready to present his scale to London's Royal Society, the scientific big leagues of the day. It dawned on him that it was going to look a little strange having the zero on his scale just hanging off the end, so to speak. So he cooked up the explanation that zero was the temperature of a mix of ice, water, and ammonium chloride.
Later Fahrenheit established that the boiling point of water came in at 212 degrees. Over time this replaced body temperature as the upper landmark on his scale. Meanwhile, as more precise measurements were made, body temperature had to be adjusted to 98.6 degrees.
In short, 100 means nothing on the Fahrenheit scale, 96 used to mean something but doesn't anymore, and 0 is colder than it ever gets in Denmark. Brilliant. Lest we get too down on Fahrenheit, though, consider Anders Celsius, who devised the centigrade scale (0 to 100). Everybody agrees Celsius's scale makes more sense than Fahrenheit's. Trouble is, the original Celsius scale had 100 for freezing, 0 for boiling. In other words, it was upside down. (The numbers were reversed after Celsius's death.) You have to wonder whether these guys breathed one lungful of mercury fumes too many.
Now for a little bonus info. At what temperature do the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales read the same? Why, minus 40, of course. Cecil was stumped by that one once during a radio interview, and you can bet it won't happen twice. | <urn:uuid:99740669-c92d-412f-82d5-f1e561a27c8e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1266/on-the-fahrenheit-scale-do-0-and-100-have-any-special-significance | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403826.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00019-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962896 | 696 | 3.453125 | 3 |
In the Actor Model, concurrency is the default. Sequencing must by arranged explicitly. An important case of sequencing occurs when there is a data dependency between different parts of a system. One part produces a value that another part needs to perform its function.One mechanism for sequencing data-dependent operations is to create a Future. This is sometimes known as a single-assignment data-flow variable (e.g.: in Mozart/Oz) . It is basically a storage cell that can be written to only once, but read from multiple times. If a read occurs before the write, the read-reply is delayed until the write provides a value. This effectively suspends readers until the write occurs. Note, however, that there is no blocking in an actor system. The asynchronous reply to a read request is simply deferred until a value is available.
When an actor representing a Future is created, its value is unknown. In this state, it expects either a
#read or a
LET future_beh = \msg.[ CASE msg OF (cust, #write, value) : [ BECOME value_beh(value) SEND SELF TO cust ] (cust, #read) : [ BECOME wait_beh(cust) ] END ]
When an actor with future_beh receives a
#write request, it becomes bound to the value and sends its
SELF to the customer cust. This serves as a synchronization signal, indicating that the value has been set.
#readrequest, it becomes waiting for the customer cust. Notice that there is no reply to the customer at this time.
When a Future has been bound to a value, it expects only
#read requests. Any other messages (including
#write requests) are silently ignored.
LET value_beh(value) = \msg.[ CASE msg OF (cust, #read) : [ SEND value TO cust ] END ]
When an actor with value_beh receives a
#read request, it simply sends its value to the customer cust.
When a Future receives
#read requests before a value is provided by a
#write request, the deferred readers are buffered in the waiting actor.
LET wait_beh(waiting) = \msg.[ CASE msg OF (cust, #write, value) : [ BECOME value_beh(value) SEND SELF TO cust SEND waiting TO NEW broadcast_beh(value) ] (cust, #read) : [ BECOME wait_beh(cust, waiting) ] END ]
When an actor with wait_beh receives a
#write request, it becomes bound to the value and sends its
SELF to the customer cust. Now that a value is available, it creates a broadcast actor to send replies to all the waiting readers.
#readrequest, it adds the customer cust to the list of deferred readers.
A Broadcast actor is created specifically to send a value to a list of customers. A Future uses a Broadcast actor to deliver replies to deferred readers.
LET broadcast_beh(value) = \waiting.[ CASE waiting OF (first, rest) : [ SEND value TO first SEND rest TO SELF ] last : [ SEND value TO last ] END ]
An actor with broadcast_beh is created with a value. When it receives a waiting list, it uses pattern matching to determine if the list is compound, or just a single value. If the list is compound (a pair), it sends the value to the first customer, and sends the rest of the waiting list back to itself. If the list is just a single value, it simply sends the value to the last customer.Once the value has been delivered to all the waiting customers, there will be no further references to the Broadcast actor, so it can be reclaimed by the garbage-collector.
The following example demonstrates the operation of a Future receiving concurrent
#write requests. We create two customers, foo and bar, which simply label any message they receive and send it to the console (via println). These customers are used in two concurrent
#read requests for the Future var. A concurrent
#write request sets the value of the Future to
42. The customer for the
#write request is sink (which ignores all messages) because, in this case, we don’t care about when the value is set.
CREATE var WITH future_beh CREATE foo WITH \msg.[ SEND (#foo, msg) TO println ] CREATE bar WITH \msg.[ SEND (#bar, msg) TO println ] SEND (foo, #read) TO var SEND (bar, #read) TO var SEND (sink, #write, 42) TO var
#write requests are issued concurrently, the Future var will receive them in a non-deterministic order. The
#write request could arrive first, in which case the
#read requests will be satisfied immediately. The
#read requests could both arrive before the
#write, in which case the read-replies will be deferred until the value is set by
#write. Or, the
#write request could arrive between the two
#read requests, as shown in Figure 1.
Access to a Future, as described above, implies the capability to
#write its value. In many cases we would like to separate those capabilities. We may want to give read-only access to several potential consumers, while reserving write access for the producer. One powerful feature of pure-actor systems is that Actors act as security capabilities. In order to attenuate the capability of a client, we simply create a proxy actor that enforces our desired security policy.
LET read_only_beh(future) = \msg.[ CASE msg OF (cust, #read) : [ SEND msg TO future ] END ] CREATE ro_var WITH read_only_beh(var)
An actor with read_only_beh is created with a reference to a future. When a
#read request is received, the message is forwarded to the future. All other messages are silently ignored.
#writerequest by sending its
SELFback to the customer. Our proxy must intercept this response and substitute its own identity to maintain encapsulation of the future.
LET write_sync_beh(cust, msg) = \_.[ SEND msg TO cust ] LET write_only_beh(future) = \msg.[ CASE msg OF (cust, #write, value) : [ SEND (k_write, #write, value) TO future CREATE k_write WITH write_sync_beh(cust, SELF) ] END ] CREATE wo_var WITH write_only_beh(var)
When an actor with write_only_beh receives a
#write request, it sends a
#write request to the future, providing a customer k_write with write_sync_beh. When the future responds, k_write sends the identity of the proxy to the original customer cust.
Sometimes it is useful to arrange a race among multiple producers. You may have multiple algorithms competing to provide a result. Different algorithms may win under different circumstances. The first one to determine a result will
#write to the Future. Subsequent results are ignored. In this case, the write synchronization signal is unimportant, so we change the protocol to expect a
#result message with no customer. This behavior acts like an adapter between the racers (sending
#result messages, expecting no reply) and the future (expecting
#write requests and sending a synchronization reply).
LET result_race_beh(future) = \msg.[ CASE msg OF (#result, value) : [ SEND (SELF, #write, value) TO future BECOME \_. ] END ]
When an actor with result_race_beh receives a
#result message, it sends a
#write request to the future with the result value and its
SELF as the customer. Then it becomes a behavior that ignores all subsequent messages. Note that this serves two purposes; to ignore any other race results, and to throw away the write synchronization signal.
Futures are a fundamental synchronization mechanism in concurrent systems. We have shown how futures work through an actor-based description, illustrating the events that transition a Future through its life-cycle. Building on that foundation, we have demonstrated how, following the Object Capability Model, we can exercise fine-grained control over access to the Future. This is extended to the case of arranging a race among concurrent speculative computations.
- P. Van Roy, S. Haridi. Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming. MIT Press, 2004.
- J. Dennis, E. Van Horn. Programming Semantics for Multiprogrammed Computations. ACM Conference on Programming Languages and Pragmatics, San Dimas, CA, August, 1965. | <urn:uuid:4861c747-d220-4021-8013-4ede127bb716> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.dalnefre.com/wp/2012/03/futures-and-capabilities/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399106.96/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00107-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.898269 | 1,868 | 2.75 | 3 |
History of guiding
If you do not
have flash, or for a more in-depth overview of guiding's history
please see the text below.
The Story Bank is another great way to learn about the history
of Girlguiding by reading actual accounts from members over the
last 100 years. Visit the Story Bank for
History of guiding timeline
Robert Baden-Powell held a camp for boys at Brownsea Island in
Dorset to test his Scouting ideas. Scouting was born.
Scouting for Boys by Baden-Powell was published. Small
groups of girls, undaunted by the title, started 'Scout' activities
Girls 'gatecrashed' the first Boy Scout Rally at Crystal Palace,
attracting the attention of Baden-Powell. They asked him to offer
'something for girls too'.
The Girl Guides Association was formed - a separate
organisation for girls - led by Agnes Baden-Powell, Robert
New badges such as the Air mechanic badge were introduced in
addition to Cyclist, Photographer, Electrician, Sailor,
Telegraphist and Tailor.
A junior section for girls under 11 was formed, called
'Rosebuds' (renamed 'Brownies' in 1915).
Guides acted as messengers of confidential information for
Marconi Wireless Telegraph (1914-1918).
Senior Guide groups were formed for girls aged 14 to 25.
Olave Baden-Powell (Robert Baden-Powell's wife) was appointed
22 February (Olave and Robert Baden-Powell's joint birthday)
became World Thinking Day - a day when members of Guide
organisations belonging to the World Association of Girl Guides and
Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) think about each other.
HRH Princess Elizabeth and HRH Princess Margaret enrolled as a
Guide and Brownie respectively.
Guide Gift Week: members raised over £50,000 to help the war
effort, by giving up half a day's salary, forfeiting pocket money,
or by fundraising.
The Guide International Service (G.I.S) Committee was set up to
select and train Leaders for relief work after the war.
The Queen's Guide Award was introduced as the highest guiding
HRH Princess Margaret became President of the Guide
Six Guides broke the girls' relay record for swimming the
Innovate - a discussion group for members aged 16-26 -
began, giving girls a voice in the direction of guiding.
Rainbows - a section for five- to seven-year-olds - was
A new set of uniforms, designed by Jeff Banks, was
The first ever BIG GIG - a pop concert exclusively for
Guides - was staged at Wembley Arena.
The Guide Association was renamed Girlguiding.
Brownies were the first to receive new clothing designed by Ally
HRH Sophie, Countess of Wessex, became President of
The '4ward, 4 self, 4 others' peer education
programme was launched. Girls take part in sessions run by their
peers on subjects including media awareness, eating disorders, the
environment and sexual health.
The Lottery-funded scheme SWITCH began, aimed at growing guiding
within hard-to-reach communities.
Liz Burnley became Chief Guide (Chair of Girlguiding) until
The Girls shout out! research report series was
launched giving girls and young women the opportunity to have their
voices heard on the issues that matter to them such as self-esteem,
mental health and active citizenship.
Girlguiding launched a community action project, Changing
the World, with 19 partner charities.
Girlguiding launched its Centenary celebrations.
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to this page.
Subscribe | View Subscriptions | <urn:uuid:ce016221-bf85-495f-9fe5-88f88836dd54> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.girlguiding.org.uk/about_us/key_information/history.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395992.75/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00150-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932322 | 804 | 2.921875 | 3 |
TESTING: IT’S ALL ABOUT HOW YOU HANDLE IT
by Corey Ford
When I went down to Charlotte I was skeptical. I had heard that standardized
testing drove the turnaround of its public school system – and I wasn't buying
it: Weren't teachers dumbing down the curriculum? Weren't they “teaching to
the test?” And what's the point of so much testing anyway?
But what I learned in Charlotte is that testing improves teaching. The key
is the data: how you collect it and how you use it.
Every nine weeks, bubble sheets and No. 2 pencils are handed out to all of
Charlotte's students. Teachers unlock their drawers and pull out stacks of pink
packets about 10 pages thick. They are the quarterly exams – documents that will
collect the data that drives everything that happens in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg
school district from that day forward.
But that data is only as good as the content that's covered and the questions
that are asked. The purpose is to find out if students have learned the skills
they need to know. The test is pointless without a clear definition of those
In North Carolina, the state determines the curriculum. It publishes a book
called the Standard Course of Study that lays out what skills North Carolina's
public school children need to master in each grade. It then tests them on
those skills in the annual End of Grade Test.
To prepare for that test, Charlotte's district office takes this unwieldy
book and translates it into specific, clearly defined skills called curriculum
objectives. A curriculum objective in math may be multiplying fractions, while
in reading it may be identifying the main idea in a story. All of these objectives,
when put together, add up to the skills a student needs to master by year's end.
The district office then takes each curriculum objective and gathers the best
teaching minds around it. These experts use the best research available to develop
a lesson plan to teach that objective.
The lesson plan has very specific steps and instructions, sometimes scripted
down to what the teacher says, word for word. An inexperienced or substitute
teacher may follow the script, while a veteran may embellish the lesson. Either
way, the most effective lesson plan is in place for each curriculum objective.
Finally, the lesson plans are laid out in sequence and aligned with the school
calendar in a pacing guide that insures teachers stay on track to cover all of
the curriculum objectives before the End of Grade Test.
At the end of every nine weeks, a quarter of that year's objectives have been
covered. It's then time to test how well the students have mastered them and
how effectively the teachers have taught them.
But a test is only as good as its questions, which must challenge students
to demonstrate mastery. “These are not rote memorization type questions,” says
Susan Agruso, who oversees Charlotte's testing system. “They are thinking questions – students
have to understand information and put pieces of information together to come
up with the correct answer to a question.”
“For example, when a student reads a passage, he or she will be asked questions
about the meaning of the passage, the author's purpose, the main idea,” explains
Agruso. “A student has to read the whole passage, understand it and look at this
whole piece of literature and say, ‘Oh… That's what the author wants me to understand.
That's the tone he's using with it.' You have to understand the whole piece,
comprehend it, put all those pieces together.”
But even with a challenging question, it's not good enough to ask it only once. “You
can't determine mastery with one question, so we will ask a main idea question
in several different ways for several different passages,” explains Agruso.
Over a range of questions, the student will demonstrate whether he or she has
mastered, partially mastered, or failed to master the objective – useful data
to a teacher. So when the clock stops at the end of the quarterly test, students
will have been challenged multiple times on each objective that needed to be
covered by that time of the year.
Immediately after the quarterly tests, students' bubble sheets are taken to
district headquarters where assistant principals race to feed them through scoring
machines. Within hours, all tests have been processed, creating four valuable
reports – an individual student report, a class report, a school report and a
It's what Charlotte does with these reports that makes all the difference.
Teachers wait anxiously to find out how their students performed, how well
they taught the material, and how they need to teach differently tomorrow. Each
teacher receives an Item Analysis Report that lists every student in her class
and their answers to each question, so she knows exactly which items each student
Even more critical is the Group Mastery Report, which lists every child in
the class and describes all students' level of mastery on each objective. In
a glance, the teacher sees the weak spots in her class.
“She gets a view of her classroom,” says Agruso. “Do I have a group of students
who are struggling with fractions? I need to work with this group. Do I have
a child who doesn't understand fractions? I have to figure out some ways to give
him some extra help. Or is my whole class missing this concept? I have to build
in some tutorial work for them so that they can do better on fractions.”
Weak spots in scores reveal the weak spots in teaching. “It allows me to see
whether or not what I'm doing is working,” says Nicole Barrow, a fourth grade
teacher at Highland Renaissance Academy. Her colleague Shonja Alexander agrees, “The
test results have been an excellent resource to just go back and say, ‘Okay,
maybe that little instruction I did didn't work for this group. Maybe I need
to go back and…find something else that's going to reach them.'” Teachers compare
scores among their team and figure out which techniques worked best.
The team uses the report to group students by their level of mastery. Students
are shuffled out of their normal class arrangements into groups based on ability
on a particular skill. Students who need intense intervention receive one-on-one
attention from the teacher who teaches the concept best. Children who have mastered
the skill explore higher-level work. A separate time period is dedicated to this
re-teaching, allowing the regular class to stay on pace.
The principal receives a similar report, broken down by classroom rather than
student, giving her an instant read-out on how her teachers are teaching. She
uses this data to identify the best way to target the school's limited resources.
The principal can focus teaching coaches, intensive training, and tutoring where
they are needed most needed. The data enables the principal to be a better instructional
At the district level, all the data is brought together and crunched in many
ways to help Charlotte's children succeed. At central headquarters, Susan Agruso
can sit at her computer and compare one school versus another, or with the district
as a whole. She can “drill down” to minute detail. She's just a few clicks away
from telling you how a Hispanic eighth grader in Ms. Smith's class at Bishop
Spaugh Academy is doing on factoring quadratic equations.
Real-time data means that district resources are constantly in play. Regional
superintendents and instructional specialists gather around reports that list
how each school is doing. They see which schools need help, devise a plan and
send in rapid response teams the next day.
The experts designing lesson plans look at the data, too. It's a great measure
of which lessons are working. They look at which curriculum objectives are giving
teachers and students the most trouble and they re-tackle the problem.
“We always struggle with the same things year after year after year,” says
Agruso. “The challenge is to break the pattern… so we can figure out how to teach
it so they all learn.”
It's a system of constant improvement tailored to the immediate needs of student,
teacher and school. None of them can hide from objective data. A child can't
hide his weaknesses from the teacher, a teacher can't hide her weaknesses from
the principal and a principal can't hide a school's weaknesses from the superintendent.
But it's not about blame. It's about targeting the weak spots in each child,
teacher and school and combating them with best practices and resources.
When I first heard that Charlotte did a lot of standardized testing, my gut
reaction was extremely negative. I thought Charlotte teachers must be dumbing
down the curriculum by “teaching to the test.” But I was wrong.
“I think it's important to understand the difference between ‘teaching a test'
and ‘teaching to the test.' And I would say the latter is a perfectly acceptable
and desirable outcome,” says Agruso. “Teaching the test questions is inappropriate.
And for the teacher to spend the bulk of the year just reviewing test questions
is inappropriate. That's not teaching content.”
When the testing system was first established in Charlotte, some teachers
tried to sequentially teach the test questions, but the data rooted them out.
“The sense of urgency at the schoolhouse led to some pretty bad practices.
Teachers and principals with a lot of workbooks… a test prep kind of approach,
which they learned very quickly had a negative impact on students and achievement,” explains
Eric Smith, the superintendent who brought all this testing to Charlotte-Mecklenburg
Schools. “In order to get the kind of outcomes we needed, you had to have a substantive
understanding of the content by children.”
Smith found that the assessments actually raised the quality of instruction. “Teachers
had to see the kind of questions, the complexity that would be demanded of children
so that when they taught they would be teaching at a high enough level for kids
to be able to be successful. So [frequent assessments] helped to drive us – not
only what needed to be taught, but at what level it needed to be taught.”
“Our assessments are used to measure if the students have learned what it is
you're supposed to be teaching,” explains Agruso. “When you teach the curriculum
you are preparing children to be successful on the end of year test, which is
a way of saying ‘teaching to the test.'”
Testing works in Charlotte because it is an integral part of a well-designed
system that is dead serious about its educational goals. They determined the
skills children need to learn, made a clear plan of how to teach those skills,
designed a way to test mastery of those skills and created a system that immediately
reacted to problems, identified solutions and created a virtuous cycle of constant
We need more testing like that. | <urn:uuid:10010107-4389-4db7-b8ef-f03abbff1d2e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.pbs.org/makingschoolswork/dwr/nc/testing.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397797.77/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00101-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959373 | 2,402 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Definitions for ibn al-haytham
This page provides all possible meanings and translations of the word ibn al-haytham
Alhazen, Alhacen, al-Haytham, Ibn al-Haytham, Al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham(noun)
an Egyptian polymath (born in Iraq) whose research in geometry and optics was influential into the 17th century; established experiments as the norm of proof in physics (died in 1040)
The numerical value of ibn al-haytham in Chaldean Numerology is: 6
The numerical value of ibn al-haytham in Pythagorean Numerology is: 6
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"ibn al-haytham." Definitions.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2016. Web. 25 Jun 2016. <http://www.definitions.net/definition/ibn al-haytham>. | <urn:uuid:9f795b78-43ae-4bce-9ab6-d0080542511f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.definitions.net/definition/ibn%20al-haytham | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392159.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00140-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.8184 | 290 | 2.75 | 3 |
Knowledge about Ignorance: New Directions in the Study of Political Information
- Author(s): Ilya Somin
- Date Posted: 2006
- Law & Economics #: 06-30
For decades, scholars have recognized that most citizens have little or no political knowledge, and that it is in fact rational for the average voter to make little effort to acquire political information. This article shows that rational ignorance is fully compatible with the so-called "paradox of voting" because it will often be rational for citizens to vote, but irrational for them to become well-informed. Furthermore, rational ignorance leads not only to inadequate acquisition of political information but also to ineffective use of such information as citizens do possess. The combination of these two problems has fundamental implications for a variety of issues in public policy and international affairs, including the desirable size and scope of government, the need for judicial review, the division of power within a federal system, and the conduct of the War on Terror. | <urn:uuid:5550a1f0-cb0f-4915-925e-8078e1853b17> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.law.gmu.edu/pubs/papers/06-30 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391519.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00035-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950633 | 200 | 2.625 | 3 |
New research about how spinach may help you stay strong
When you think of muscle-building foods like protein-rich meat or eggs ala the film Rocky may come to mind, but research shows that veggies also play an important role. A new Swedish study concluded that natural compounds found in vegetables like spinach and beets helped mice build stronger muscles.
Natural nitrates (not the synthetic kind used to cure meat like hot dogs) from veggies appear to stimulate muscle proteins at doses that can be obtained by eating a normal diet. In the study the amount fed to the rodents was equivalent to two or three beets or one bunch of spinach, roughly eight ounces.
In another recent post I shared new research about how natural substances in apples have been shown to help build muscle and fight fat. Other studies have also demonstrated the power of produce to help maintain muscle mass. Researchers at the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University looked at the link between muscle and potassium-rich fruits and vegetables. After studying nearly 400 men and women for three years they found a pretty powerful effect. Those who ate the most potassium maintained an average of 3.6 additional pounds of muscle compared to those who consumed half as much, a benefit that could offset the 4.4 pound loss of lean tissue typically seen per decade in healthy men and women. Some of the best sources include sweet potatoes, spinach, beans, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, beets, bananas, oranges, cantaloupe, and kiwi.
Unfortunately if you added up all of the fruit and veggie servings the average American should have consumed over a lifetime that they did not eat you’d fill an entire football field. If you’re in the majority, and tend to fall short of the recommended two daily fruit and three daily veggie servings, set a goal of fitting in at least one more each day. It may just be one of the best ways to stay lean and strong!
Cynthia Sass is a registered dietitian with master's degrees in both nutrition science and public health. Frequently seen on national TV, she's a SHAPE contributing editor and nutrition consultant to the New York Rangers and Tampa Bay Rays. Her latest New York Times best seller is S.A.S.S! Yourself Slim: Conquer Cravings, Drop Pounds and Lose Inches. | <urn:uuid:12723c58-f147-4ae9-9614-97cdcd347bba> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.shape.com/blogs/weight-loss-coach/popeye-was-right-how-spinach-helps-build-muscle | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395160.19/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00198-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94418 | 477 | 2.875 | 3 |
ON A 95-DEGREE MID-SEPTEMBER DAY IN THE FLORIDA PANHANDLE, a Raytheon Hawker Horizon business jet taxied up to a hangar at Eglin Air Force Base, a joint-use facility whose civilian side is the Okaloosa Regional Airport. The “Hawk,” as it is called at Raytheon, is a glossy new eight-passenger bizjet to which the Federal Aviation Administration granted a provisional type certificate in December 2004. However, a bit of additional testing was necessary to gain final FAA approval, so the aircraft was towed inside the hangar, where technicians hooked up its two Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines to a pair of exhaust ducts, ran instrumentation cables to a sound-protected, temperature- and humidity-controlled observation booth, and chained the aircraft to a set of anchors embedded in the concrete floor.
From This Story
The next morning it was –40 degrees inside the hangar, which had been sealed against the outside. The Raytheon test crew entered the aircraft, started the Hawk’s engines, and, after a short countdown, slammed them to full power. The engines boomed for about an hour at various power settings as the hot exhaust streamed through ductwork and out the rear of the hangar; nevertheless, the indoor temperature remained a steady and crisp –40. By rights, two jet engines running at high speed inside a closed space should have created a vacuum that would have collapsed the hangar and drawn the debris through the engine intakes. The reason that didn’t happen is just one of the technological marvels of the McKinley Climatic Laboratory, the world’s largest torture chamber for aircraft in search of FAA or military certification.
The McKinley lab can create just about every weather condition imaginable, and some that are unimaginable. “We can make it rain up to 25 inches per hour,” says lab director Kirk Velasco. Using the type of snow machines found on ski slopes, lab workers can produce whiteout blizzards in the chamber. They can create fog, wind, and icing, generating a layer of “unlimited ice thickness” over your entire aircraft (along with icicles that hang from the ceiling, some weighing 200 pounds), then follow such a display with a scorching burst of simulated solar radiation. They can vary the relative humidity between 10 percent and 100 percent. Moreover, they can do this for aircraft of any size, including a Boeing B-29, a Northrop B-2, a Lockheed C-5A, a Lockheed Martin F-22, a Boeing 747, general aviation airplanes, and helicopters, all of which have been run at full power (and the helicopters at full collective) through McKinley’s weather gantlet. The only airplane too big to pass between the lab’s dual 15-inch-thick, stainless steel, 200-ton hangar doors is the forthcoming Airbus A380 airliner, whose wingspan is about 10 feet too long. “They’ll have to chase the weather,” says Velasco of the Airbus testers. “We’re not the only game in town: Mother Nature also provides. You can chase icing clouds to find icing conditions. It just takes a lot more time, and you do a lot of flying around.”
Over its nearly 60 years, the McKinley lab has tested every military aircraft in the current U.S. inventory, plus many civilian craft, not to mention a gaggle of missiles, bombs, Humvees, tanks, trucks, howitzers, ground-support equipment, hard- and soft-walled shelters, and even cars and snow tires, among other things. For smaller items and more specialized climatic cruelties, the McKinley lab has five test cells in addition to the cavernous Main Chamber. The Salt Fog Chamber can produce an oven-like 149 degrees and a jungle-like 100 percent humidity, together with a corrosive fog solution consisting of five percent sodium chloride in water. The Sun, Wind, Rain, and Dust Chamber can blast various commercially available grades of sand at a test item for hours at a time.
Recently, Velasco and his group subjected a 25-mm Gatling gun from a Lockheed AC-130U “Spooky” gunship to conditions perhaps encountered regularly in the Gobi desert. “We did a major sand test,” he says. “I mean we beat the crap out of it with sand—40-mile-an-hour windblown sand—for six hours.” Afterward, when lab workers aimed the Gatling gun at an in-house bullet catcher and fired, the weapon still worked.
Concern about the effect of cold weather on aircraft led the U.S. Army Air Corps to establish the Cold Weather Detachment at Ladd Field, Alaska, in 1940, and place it under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Ashley C. McKinley, a former dirigible pilot who had photographed American explorer Richard Byrd’s expedition to the Antarctic in 1928 and ’29. After a short stint at Ladd, however, McKinley realized that instead of flying each prototype aircraft to Alaska and back, it would make more sense, and cost the military much less, to create weather on demand, mechanically, at a geographic point that was easy to get to. McKinley also thought it reasonable that all U.S. combat aircraft be required to operate at –65 degrees.
In 1943, the U.S. Army Air Forces directed that an immense climate-controlled hangar be built at Eglin Field in Florida. Four years later, in May 1947, the Eglin Climatic Hangar was in operation, and within 50 years it had run its heavy weather conditions across more than 300 aircraft and 2,000 pieces of equipment. Between 1994 and 1997, the facility underwent a ground-up renovation, which created the lab that is in place today.
Although the principles of refrigeration are comparatively simple and relatively ancient (the first U.S. patent for mechanical refrigeration was granted in 1851), the scale and complexity of the cooling system at McKinley boggle the mind. The Main Chamber has two basic refrigeration modes (plus a heating mode), the first for cold-soaking the aircraft when its engines aren’t running. The setup here is a closed-loop system, the same in principle as that found in a home refrigerator or window air conditioner: Cool a refrigerant, send it through a set of coils, and then blow air over the coils. Doing this on the vast proportions of McKinley’s three-million-plus cubic feet of airspace is a simple matter of scaling up all the components: gigantic, screaming compressor pumps, huge squirrel-cage fans, monster cooling coils, and massive jolts of power. (McKinley has its own electrical substation so that when the system starts running, lights don’t dim in the surrounding community. As it is, the lab’s electric bill averages between $100,000 and $200,000 a month.)
During closed-loop operation, fans withdraw ambient air from inside the chamber, blow it over the cooling coils, and send the cold air up into ceiling ducts that distribute it through large circular diffusers. The same air is recycled through the system again and again, reducing the chamber’s temperature incrementally with each pass. (For high-temp tests, steam is run through the coils.)
The situation changes, however, when an aircraft’s jet engine is running, something that cannot happen in a closed system due to the process of combustion, which sucks in copious amounts of hangar air and forces it out through the engine exhaust system. All that air must be replaced at the precise rate at which it is being consumed. Plus, with the engines and exhaust ductwork radiating heat into the hangar, the incoming air must be cold enough to maintain the target temperature. Keeping up with all that heating and venting requires a whole new dimension in cooling and airflow management, which at McKinley is a masterpiece of engineering called the air makeup system.
“The air makeup system will take that outside air at 95 degrees, cool it down to –40 degrees, and dump it into the chamber at the exact same rate that the engines are using it,” says Velasco. The system has two primary components, the first of which is the air makeup building proper, which is a separate, free-standing, two-story structure housing an air-intake duct, one steam coil and two successive ranks of air conditioning coils, and an exhaust duct that pours a continuous volume of fresh-frozen air into the Main Chamber through a large square hole in the ceiling.
However, there is no way that even McKinley’s powerful compressors can produce the mass of cold air needed to balance a 747’s four engines running at cruise power for a solid hour. The solution: Chill a whole lot of coolant in advance and store it at low temperature until it’s needed. Accordingly, for two days prior to the Raytheon Hawker Horizon test, McKinley’s air makeup team has been cooling down the facility’s most potent refrigerant, R30, a.k.a. methylene chloride, to a temperature of –100 degrees, then shunting it into a 750,000-gallon cylindrical tank adjacent to the air makeup building. Big as a house, that tank of liquid frigidity is really the crux of the entire enterprise.
“This system can take outside air as hot as 105 degrees Fahrenheit and cool it down to minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit, at a rate of 1,000 pounds mass of air per second,” says Velasco. “So as long as your engines aren’t using more than a thousand pounds mass per second of air, we can maintain the conditions in there while those engines are operating.”
Lab personnel are kept informed of equipment functioning by the Facility Monitoring and Control System, a room that runs 24/7 to keep tabs on the facility’s hundreds of valves, miles of piping and electrical circuitry, and compressor pumps, steam boilers, heat exchangers, evaporators, condensers, nozzles, ducts, fans, backflow dampers, plenum doors, cooling towers, surge tanks, storage tanks, coil banks, pressure vessels, and large-scale fluid flows. A day’s use of the Main Chamber can cost between $10,000 to $25,000. If all you’re doing is a simple snow-load test of a tent, figure the lower end. “If you have something really complex,” says Velasco, “like a military Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35, the short-takeoff-and-landing version—it’s got a big lifting fan in the middle, it’s got variable exhaust in the back, a very complicated exhaust setup that we have to specially design and build—that gets up to $25,000 a day.”
Velasco, a thin, balding aeronautical engineer in his late 40s, came to Eglin in 1984 after spending three years doing climatic testing at Edwards Air Force Base in California’s Mojave Desert. One of the tests involved bringing a Lockheed F-16 to McKinley for the full treatment. The place impressed him so much that he transferred to Eglin and never left.
In the years since, Velasco has seen it all, but the tradition at McKinley is to maintain a strict code of omerta about test results. After all, any aircraft, military or civilian, is manufactured by a company whose board members would rather that the outside world not know that during one of the lab’s –40-degree tests, its precious airplane’s landing gear wouldn’t retract or, worse, extend.
“I hate to talk about stuff like that,” Velasco admits. Nevertheless: “I remember vividly—and I won’t mention the name of the aircraft—but we had a large aircraft in here and we did a rain test on it, and we filled it up with water. I mean, water was draining out of that aircraft for two days after we shut down. We could open panels and there were wing cavities filled with it. It was like a swimming pool, you could jump in and swim in it. It was leaking in because of the way they built the access panels—they were not sealed properly.
“Believe it or not, rain is a tough test to pass,” Velasco adds. “We create a windblown rain, we don’t just rain overhead and sprinkle on the thing. We have big wind machines blowing 50-mph winds, and you can blow it up under the wings and from all angles. You blow water everywhere.”
Then, because it’s ancient history, he talks about a B-52 test of a much-touted hydraulic fluid that wasn’t supposed to catch on fire the way conventional fluids did when the bomber’s hydraulic lines got hit by ground fire in Vietnam. “This B-52 had a rotating launcher inside of it that carried cruise missiles,” says Velasco. “The thing’s got to rotate and drop a bomb, rotate and drop a bomb, at minus 65 degrees. We were trying a newfangled type of hydraulic system—that was the whole test. The fluid was less flammable, but at the same time it was much more viscous. It was like molasses at minus 65 versus the old stuff, which would flow relatively freely at minus 65.” So much for the new hydraulic fluid, which the Air Force summarily discarded.
The alternative response to the discovery of a defect is to modify the system at fault. “You’ll have landing gear that won’t come up because they made the hydraulic lines too small, so they have to go back and mod the lines, make a bigger hydraulic line,” says Velasco. “They might have an eighth-inch line down to the gear and it’s just too small, not enough fluid getting there fast enough, so they have to put in a quarter-inch line or a three-eighth-inch line.”
At the other end of the temperature spectrum, heat poses a problem for avionics systems, especially those based on cathode-ray-tube displays, which generate lots of heat, compared to conventional gauges, which don’t. An avionics meltdown, when it happens, prompts the company in question to beef up its “environmental control systems” (air conditioning).
After five days in the deep freeze, the Raytheon Hawker Horizon was covered by a light layer of frost. This was not another sign of lab-induced weather trauma but rather the result of technicians (most of them clad in parkas) repeatedly entering and exiting the hangar, letting in minute amounts of Florida humidity.
During a previous cold test at McKinley, the Hawk had been raised up on jacks so that its gear could be cycled, something that was done without difficulty. On this occasion, with an FAA representative in attendance to verify the results, the flight crew performed a series of low-temperature starts of the auxiliary power unit’s battery, tested oxygen mask operation and the crew alerting system, monitored normal and emergency exit door forces, and so on. All challenges were met successfully. You might say that the whole thing was anticlimactic.
“There’s lots of experience to draw upon,” says Velasco, “and so the newer stuff is a lot better than it used to be in the old, old days.”
When the Hawker Horizon is finally certified and takes to the skies, passengers, crew, and the general public can take comfort in the fact that it passed without a hitch through Kirk Velasco’s little shop of weather horrors. | <urn:uuid:cb6ee5d2-7b38-4e58-b3ab-1fa124e10f1c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/torture-chamber-11999852/?all | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395039.24/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00031-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950885 | 3,361 | 2.84375 | 3 |
Che Guevara biography
Che Guevara Biography
Young Ernesto Guevara
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna is born June 14, 1928 in Rosario, one of the most important cities in Argentina, in a well off family. A family with aristocratic roots but socialistic ideas.
In 1937, Ernesto is 9 years old and goes to the third grade of primary school; he follows up engagingly the Spanish Civil war. On a map he indicates the military evolution.
In 1947, Ernesto Guevara meets the young Berta Gilda Infante, also known as Tita. She is a member of the Argentine Communistic Youth. They build up a profound friendship. Together they read Marxist texts and discuss the actualities.
In 1948, Ernesto, who is 20 years old at that time, undergoes an examination at the faculty of medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. In March he passes for the examinations of the first year, in June for those of the second year and in December for those from the third year.
January 1 1950, Ernesto Guevara attempts his first voyage. He traverses the northern provinces of Argentina on a bicycle on which he adjusted a small motor. He arrives at San Francisco del Chahar, near Córdoba, where his friend Alberto Granado runs the dispensary of the leper-centre. With the patients he has long conversations about their disease.
He continues his university studies and is above all interested in the scientific research for allergies, asthma, leprosy and nutritive theory.
While he is studying, he works as a male nurse on trading and petroleum ships of the Argentine national shipping-company. Like that he travels from the south of Argentina to Brazil, Venezuela and Trinidad.
A journey through Latin America
In October he decides to make his first trip through Latin-America. Together with Alberto Granado he leaves in January 1952 on an old ‘Norton’ 500-cc motorbike.
In Valparaiso Chile he writes in his diary: “We are looking for the bottom part of the town. We talk to many beggars. Our noses inhale attentively the misery.”
About Chile he writes: “The most important effort that needs to be done is to get rid of the uncomfortable ‘Yankee-friend’. It is especially at this moment an immense task, because of the great amount of dollars they have invested here and the convenience of using economical pressure whenever they believe their interests are being threatened.”
On March 24 they arrive at the Peruvian Tacna. After a discussion about the poverty in the region, he refers in his notes to the words of José Marti: “I want to link my destiny to that of the poor of this world.”
On May 1 they arrive in Lima. Che meets doctor Hugo Pesce, a Peruvian scientist, and director of the national leprosy program and an important Marxist. They discuss several nights until the morning comes. Year’s later Che puts that these conversations were very important for the change in his attitude towards life and the society.
On May 17 he leaves for the leper-centre of San Pablo in the Peruvian Amazon forest. He arrives on June 7. During his visit to this place, he complaints about the miserable way that the people of that region and the sick have to live. There were no clothes, almost no food and no medication. After working there for a few weeks, he leaves for Leticia, Colombia via the Amazon River.
July 17 he arrives in Caracas. There he decides to go back to Buenos Aires to finish his studies in medical science. He travels with a cargo-plane via Miami, where the technical problems with the aeroplane give him a delay of one month. To survive, he works as a waiter and he washes dishes in a bar. On regular base he is apprehended and questioned by the police. They ask him if he, his mother or father are communist. He is back in Buenos Aires on August 31.
On his way to the revolution
Che Guevara finished his studies early 1953. He gets summoned for military duty but he was rejected. On July 7 he goes by slow train to La Paz, Bolivia, 6000km further. Che arrives at Panama late October. He is indignant about the submissive attitude of the Panamese leaders towards the U.S. In Costa Rica he learns about the domination of United Fruit and the exploitation and of the misery that is the result of it. In a letter to his aunt Beatriz he writes: “In El Paso I traversed the vast domains of United Fruit. Once more I was able to convince myself how criminal the capitalistic octopuses are. On a picture of our old and bewailed comrade Stalin, I swore not to rest before these capitalistic octopuses are destroyed. In Guatemala I want to get perfect in becoming an authentic revolutionary.”
Via Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador, Che arrives late December at Guatemala where Jacobo Arbenz leads a revolutionary process. In a letter to his mother he writes: “I’ve finally reached my aim . . . If everything goes well, I think I will stay here for about 2 years.”
June 14-16. Che sees how North American Aeroplanes fly over Guatemala and bomb down the military installations and the poor popular quarters. He writes: “This incident has united all Guatemalese with their government and with all who, just like me, were attracted by Guatemala.” The U.S. chooses Castillo Armas as ‘leader’ of the coup.
June 18, 1954. He lives to see de coup d’état against the Arbenz government, planned and executed by the U.S. He transports weapons and tries to assemble some youths to fight; he helps to bring political leaders in safety. On June 20 Che writes to his mother: “These attacks, together with the lies of the international press, have woken the indifferent. A combative climate rules. I have applied as a voluntary for the medical help services and I have registered in the youth-brigade to get a military education and to go there where necessary.”
On June 26 the national radio declares the resignation of president Arbenz and the exile of almost all-political leaders and their families. This causes a great commotion with the revolutionary people. Che puts it like this: “In Guatemala it was necessary to fight but almost no one fought. Resistance had to be put up and almost no one wanted to do it.”
Repression breaks loose. Latin-American embassies are getting filled with political refugees. Che is indicated as a dangerous Argentine communist and may not remain in Guatemala.
Early 1955 Che Guevara finds work as a doctor in the “Hospital Central” of Mexico-City.
In June he meets Raul Castro. They become friends. On July 8 Fidel Castro arrives in the Mexican capital. About their first meeting Che said: “I’ve met him during one of the cool nights in Mexico and I remember that our first conversation was about international politics.”
That same night – towards morning – I was one of the future participants of the expedition with the Granma.” Fidel Castro about that meeting: “He knew much about the Marxism-Leninism, self-thought, very eager to learn, he was a convinced. When we met Che he was already an educated revolutionary.”
On June 24, the Mexican police have arrested Che together with Cuban comrades.
On July 3 the press agency UPI notifies: “The Argentine doctor Guevara will be deported to his land of origin, because of his presumed participation of the failed conspiracy against the Cuban government of Fulgencio Batista.” The Mexican ex-president Lázaro Cárdenas interferes to defend the Cuban revolutionaries. Late July the last, among them Che Guevara, are released. They continue their revolutionary activities in clandestinely.
With Fidel Castro to Cuba
November 25: the yacht Granma leaves in a stormy night with on board 82 man from the mouth of the river Tuxpán in Mexico.
On December 2 they landed in Los Cayelos, at the East Coast. The next day the Cuban and Latin-American newspapers announced about the expedition: ” . . . Fidel Castro, Ernesto Guevara, Raul Castro and all other members of the expedition have perished . . .” Their arrival is noticed and they get hunted. The group splits. On December 5 in Alegría del Pino, Che gets ambushed. Later on he writes about this: “I’ve got wounded in my neck. I stayed alive thanks to my luck of a cat. A box of bullets I was carrying close to my chest stopped a bullet of a machine gun and it ricochets up to my neck.”
With the help of other he could escape in the sugarcane fields. In these circumstances Che had to make the, so often told about, choice between his duty as a doctor and his duty as a revolutionary soldier. To escape he had to choose between a backpack filled with medications and a crate of bullets. It was impossible to take them both. Che takes the crate with bullets and hurries into the sugarcane. Later they leave a great deal of their cargo with a farmer. On December 21 Che’s group arrives at a coffee plantation where Fidel is already waiting for a couple of days.
On January they attack the barracks of La Plata. Che: “La Plata was our first victory. It was clear to everybody that a rebel-army existed and was ready for battle. To us it was the confirmation of the chances to the final victory.” The ambushes and fights increased. The army bombarded. In April he organises, in order of Fidel extended contacts with the farmers, to create points of support in the area. Year’s later Che writes: “The guerrilla and the farmers gradually became one, without anyone could tell when this unity really had performed. I only know that these contacts with the farmers in the mountains made the spontaneous decision turn quickly into a devoted and serious relation. The suffering and sincere inhabitants of the Sierra Maestra have never known how important their part was in the creation of our revolutionary ideology.”
In July Che begins to alphabetise Joel, Israel and other guerrilla’s. The others also are organised in circles of study about the history of Cuba, the characteristics of the army of tyranny and the importance of the armoured battle. On July 21 Fidel nominated Che commander. About this Che writes: “In a very informal way I was nominated commander of the second colonne of the guerrilla-army (. . .) The dose vanity that anyone has inside of him, made me the proudest man on the world that day.”
On September 17, five army-trucks fall into an ambush of the rebels.
On January 6 Che writes to Fidel: “I already said that these merits would always be counted for: showing that in America the armoured battle with the support of the people is possible.”
In February Che gets interviewed in front of the microphones of “Radio El Mundo” from Buenos Aires: “I’m simply here because I think that the only way to liberate America of the dictators is to defeat them. I’ll give all the help I can to make them go down, the sooner the better.”
“Aren’t you afraid that your intervention will be regarded as a foreign interference?”
“First of all I don’t regard only Argentina as my native country but whole of America. For this I would like to call up to examples such as Marti, and it is exactly on his land of birth that I would make his doctrine come true. Besides you can’t call it interference if I want to give myself personally and totally – up to my blood – to a case that seems right to me and that is completely that of the people. A people that wants to get liberated of a tyranny that on itself cheers the armoured interference of a foreign power with aeroplanes, weapons and military advisors. Up to now not even one country accused the North-American interference in Cuban affairs, not one newspaper accuses the Yankees of helping Batista slaughtering his people.”
On May 24 and 25 dictatorial troops attacked two mines in Sierra Maestra. It is the beginning of a big offensive. Hostile troops made a forced entry in several points in the Sierra Maestra and threaten to advance. In addition they occupy the supply and communication-lines. The next few days Che participates in a counter-attack that debouch into a defeat for the enemy, a force of over 10,000 men.
On August 21 Fidel writes: “The mission to conduct a brigade from the Sierra Maestra to the province ‘Las Villas’ and to operate there according to the strategic plan of the Rebel-army, is assigned to Commander Ernesto Che Guevara. (. . .) He is also appointed as head of all units of the ‘M-26 de julio’ that are operating in this province, in the cities as well as in the countryside. (. . .) The eight brigade has for a strategic object to attack the enemy continuously in the centre of Cuba and to intercept the hostile troop-movements over land from west to east until they are crippled completely.”
On December 16 the bridge over the river Falcon by the Central Road is blown up, by that, all cities at the east of Santa Clara, were unable to be reached from Havana. On December 26 Che writes: “The war is won, the enemy has come loudly to his knees, in the east we keep 10.000 soldiers in captivity. Those of Camoguey have no longer a way out. All of this is the result of only one thing: our effort.” The next day he decides to march to Santa Clara.
The international press informs the world that Che had died. ‘Radio Rebelde’ on the contrary sends word: “Latest news of primary importance! Great victory for the eight brigade of Las Villas. Troops under guidance of Ernesto Che Guevara conquered a blinded train and 300 fully equipped soldiers were captured.”
By day-brake of New-Year dictator Batista fled the country. Che Guevara gets the Cuban nationality on February 9.
From July till August he travels as head of an official delegation to the United Arab Emirates and Egypt where he meets Nasser. The trip goes on to India, Thailand, Japan, Indonesia and Pakistan. They turn back via Eastern and Western Europe to close up in Morocco. On his return Che declares to be surprised for the sympathy that the Cuban revolution evoked all over the world.
On October 17 Che advises university students to: “(. . .) get contact with the people, not to ‘help’ them with knowledge or what so ever – like an aristocratic lady that hand out a coin of money to a beggar – but to become participants of the revolutionary forces that rule over Cuba today. To place your shoulders under the extension of the revolution and, at the same time, to get experience that might be more important than all interesting things that you learn in your lessons.” On November 23 he introduces the first ‘day of voluntary labour’ in Cuba.
At the end of 1960 the U.S. establishes a complete trading-embargo against Cuba. Che leads an official Cuban delegation in a tour to different socialistic countries: from the Soviet-Union and Eastern Europe to China and Northern Korea. From there, back to the Soviet-Union, Eastern-Germany and Czecho-Slovakia. Early ’61 the U.S. breaks all diplomatic relations with Cuba.
On April 15 are the Cuban airports bombed by U.S. -planes. On April 17 there is the invasions in the Bay of Pigs: 1,500 CIA-mercenaries attack Cuba supported by the American fleet and airforce. The contra’s want to cause a revolt of the people. In barely 72 hours they get completely defeated by the Cuban nation. 1.200 of them are being captured.
May 17: confronted with new acts of sabotage of the imperialism in a harbour in the south he says: “We have rendezvous with history, and we simply can not permit ourselves to be afraid! We must maintain the same enthusiasm and faith. Build factories with our left hand, aim the rifle with the right hand and crush the worms with our heels.”
In August he talks about the situation in Congo: “What is happening in Africa, where only two years ago the prime minister of Congo was murdered and quartered, where North-American monopolies have installed themselves and the battle to own Congo has turn loose? Why? Because there is copper and radioactive minerals in their soil, because Congo has exceptionally strategic raw materials? Therefor a leader of the people, who was so naïve to believe in justice without render himself an account of the fact that justice gets expelled by power, got murdered. That is how he became a martyr of his people.”
Later on Che speaks to the general meetings of the UN in New York. He accuses in powerful terms the part of the UN in the murder of Lumumba and to help to get in the saddle, Tshombe as Congolese president, it was the same man that had tried to tear off the province Katanga of the rest of the Congolese nation. “All free people of the world must be prepared to declare to revenge the Congolese crime.”
Che arrives in Brazzaville on New Years day and begins with an official African journey. When he gets back in Cuba he convokes a secret conference with a hundred comrades who have great battle-experience. They are the future participants of the international mission in Congo. On February he arrives in Dar El Salaam together with different African revolutionary leaders who asked Cuba for weapons, training and finance. There he also meets Laurent Kabila and his general staff. They agree that the main African enemy is the North-American imperialism. In reply to Kabila’s question to train guerrilla’s in Cuba, Che says no. He explains the advantage of training on their proper terrain.
On March 31 Che writes a letter of goodbye to Fidel Castro. Later it will seem that Che, naturally clandestine, went to Congo. The U.S. abuse the fact that Che does not longer appear in public to spread the rumour that he have been liquidated by Fidel because of heavy ideological conflicts in the highest leadership in Cuba. In their broadcast to China the U.S. claim that Che was murdered because of his pro-Chinese point of view, and in the broadcasts to the East they claim the opposite.
On March 24 Che arrives from Tanzania near the harbour of Kigoma at the shore of the Lake Tanganyika. He disembarks with 14 Cubans outside the harbour to avoid the Belgian mercenaries patrol. Doing that they land in the water. From there he reaches Kibamba in Congo. On May 9 he succeeds making contact with the first group of guerrilla’s. He explains them that he has come to give them a guerrilla education, on demand of Gastón Soumaliot and Laurent Kabila to Fidel Castro. He wants to fight on their side in operations they decide. He is at their disposal. He starts with a school of warriors that gets the name “La Base”.
On July 7 Che Guevara meets Laurent Kabila who promises to accompany him in a visit to several fronts on the inland. Kabila however leaves for Kigoma and the visits are getting postponed. On August 16, 7 soldiers die in an ambush of the guerrilla, among them two Belgian non-commissioned officers and three South-Africans.
In November the situation seems at the different fronts — among other things because of continuous discussions between the various revolutionary leaders — so confused that more and more guerrilla’s leave the battle. Together with the Congolese the decision is made that the Cubans will retreat. The mission took seven months in which Cubans participated in over 50 actions.
In July Che travels in the greatest secrecy to Havana, were he prepares a new mission to Bolivia in consultation with Fidel.
Across Moscow, Prague and Vienna Che Guevara travels via Brazil to Bolivia were he arrives on November 3.
Che writes: “As I thought the attitude of Monje (the under-secretary of the Bolivian KP) was avoiding and later traitorous. His party is already getting armed against us. I don’t know where that will take him but it will not slow us down, and maybe in long terms it will be an advantage for us, I’m almost sure of that. The most honest and competitive people will stand on our side, although they have to go true a severe crisis of their conscience. So far Guavara has reacted well. We’ll see how he and his people will line up (. . .) The actual phase of the guerrilla will now begin, we will test our troops. Time will tell which are the perspectives of the Bolivian revolution. Of all things that were planned the recruit of Bolivian comrades in battle was the slowest.”
In March the analysis goes as followed: “This month there was no lack of incidents, but the total looks like this: phase of consolidation and purification of the guerrilla, slow development with few elements that came from Cuba – and they don’t perform badly – and elements of Guavvara’s group who were very weakly in general (two deserters, one loose-tongued whom we kept as prisoners, three that got scratches and two weaklings). Now the phase begins of actions with an exact and spectacular attack. We have to hit the road much sooner as I wanted, and with the burden of four possible talebearers. The situation is not good but a new stage of test begins for the guerrilla and it will do her good if they overcome it. The guerrilla consists of 29 Bolivians, 16 Cubans and 3 Peruvians.”
In the months that follow Che and his man get more and more count off communication problems with La Paz and Cuba through which they finally have to operate completely isolated. To get connected with the farmers is much harder than they have thought. About that he writes in May: “The farmers still don’t join us, although it seems that slowly they don’t fear us anymore and they seem to admire us. It is a slow and patient process.” In June he writes: “The farmers are still aloof. It is a vicious circle: to attract them we must have more actions in populated areas, but therefor we need more man. (. . .) The army stands nowhere in her military task, but it does dangerous work with the farmers that we may not leave without interference. If not all farmers will become tale-bearers, out of fear or because of the lies they tell them about our intentions.”
In the meantime the U.S. supplies more weapons and advisors to the Bolivian army. The land gets harassed with ever more strikes and the fame of Che’s man rises in Bolivian and world press every day: “On political field the official statement of the government is, that I’m really in Bolivia and not murdered in Cuba, the most important. They even add that the army has to deal with perfectly trained guerrilla’s, among them even Vietcong’s who had defeated the best trained American marines.”
In September the guerrilla gets further isolated and the have many losses in an ambush of the army. On October 8, in the village La Higuera, Che and two comrades fall into the hands of the army. Two comrades die. A Bolivian colonel and a Cuban, who works for the CIA, come on the spot by helicopter. On higher command they decide to slaughter Che and his comrades Willy Cuba and Juan Pablo Chang immediately. A Bolivian soldier does the job, his eyes turned sidewise. While international press barons offer up to $125,000 for the diary of Che, Bolivian revolutionaries make sure that copies of it reach Cuba the same year. Doing that the CIA-plan fails of making anti-communistic propaganda with falsifications of the original. | <urn:uuid:4ab25808-72ff-4d01-b27c-3484e32ac366> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.che-lives.com/che-guevara-biography/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396949.33/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00125-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971202 | 5,160 | 2.609375 | 3 |
1 Answer | Add Yours
We are looking at the relative strengths of H2S versus H2SO3. Both are acids and in water will ionize into a proton and the conjugate base. The equations for that are below.
H2SO3 <--> H+ + HSO3-
H2S <--> H+ + HS-
The equations above are called acid dissociation equations. The equilibrium constant is a way to measure what percentage of each acid is in the dissociated state (products) versus the associated state (reactant). The Ka for H2SO3 (sulfurous acid) is 0.016 and for H2S (hydrogen sulfide) it is 6.3x10^-8. The smaller the Ka, the weaker the acid. Since H2SO3 has the higher Ka value, it is the stronger acid of the two.
We’ve answered 328,308 questions. We can answer yours, too.Ask a question | <urn:uuid:58df38cb-1251-4fb8-9e36-8d8b4224c347> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/use-chemical-equation-prove-that-h2so3-stronger-432981 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783408828.55/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155008-00086-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.911507 | 207 | 3.5625 | 4 |
CERN Might Have Broken Light's Speed Limit: Not!
Download: Dialup / Broadband Stream: Dialup / Broadband Comment: at TheologyOnline
* Insects, Arachnids, and the Speed of Light & Flight: Real Science Radio co-hosts Fred Williams and Bob Enyart discuss locust wings creasing for flight along their veins, and about tarantula feet equipped with nozzles to shot out Kevlar-strength silk to avoid falls, and about the European researchers who claim to have shot neutrinos 450 miles from Geneva to Sasso, Italy at a speed faster than the speed of light!
* Locust Wings are WAY More Sophisticated than Expected: According to Creation magazine's Fall 2011 issue, the reason that designers of mini flying robots have not been able to demonstrate good aerodynamics even after imitating the size and shape of flapping insect wings is because, according to research from Oxford, insect wings deform along their vein structures to add flight control. Wow! Cool God!
* Tarantulas' Different Need, and Perfect Foot Design: First it was Kevlar-strength silk. Then it was cross-linked glue molecules to catch insects. Now it's nozzle-equipped feet. Real Science Radio has enjoyed talking about the amazing design features of spiders. Now, Creation magazine reports the latest research that shows that tarantulas have many nozzles in the bottoms of their eight feet that shoot out super-strength silk to help stabilize themselves on slippery surfaces because while other spiders are rarely injured in falls, these relatively heavy tarantulas get severely injured even from relatively minor falls.
2012 Update: The claim has been retracted and attributed to a lack of quality control (at a miniscule level). As RSR reported at the time:
* Researchers at CERN May Have Shot Out Neutrinos Faster than Light Speed: The European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) this week published a report about neutrinos they shot out of a particle accelerator at faster than the speed of light, from near Geneva, to a lab in Sasso, Italy 450 miles away, with an arrival time 60 nanoseconds earlier than the speed of light. (To extrapolate to help us visualize the speed difference, traversing a distance that photons would cover in 21 days, these neutrinos would arrive about an hour sooner.) Bob and Fred discuss this possibility, and talk about the starlight and time problem for Big Bang atheists and about a biblical answer for the Christian's starlight and time question.
* Have You Seen This GREAT Animation of a Few Features Inside a Living Cell: UPDATED in 2012 (the original video was removed from YouTube. This one is better anyway :)
* Bob & Fred Suggest the BEL Science Store: If you enjoy the science you hear about on our fast-paced RSR radio shows, you'll really love the books, audio, and DVD science materials in our online store's Science Department! The KGOV September Telethon is 9% toward it's goal of $20,000 in donations and purchases from our store, and $20 per month pledges! So, please help keep RSR airing and online for another year by shopping in the KGOV Store, getting a BEL monthly subscription, making a one-time donation or a monthly pledge to RSR and Bob Enyart Live!
Today’s Resource: Have you browsed through our Science Department in our online store? Check out especially Walt Brown’s In the Beginning and Bob’s interviews with this great scientist in Walt Brown Week! You’ll also love Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez’ Privileged Planet (clip), and Illustra Media’s Unlocking the Mystery of Life (clip)! You can consider our BEL Science Pack; Bob Enyart’s Age of the Earth Debate; Bob's creation/evolution debate that hits on Junk DNA with famous evolutionist Dr. Eugenie Scott (see description below); and the superb kids' radio program Jonathan Park: The Adventure Begins!
Eugenie Flubs Genetics Prediction, Bob Hits the Bull's-Eye: Eugenie Scott offered the "evidence" for evolution of Junk DNA. This scientist, from her Darwinist worldview, made a philosophical argument that a Creator would not fill our DNA with mostly junk. (Unlike the relatively few gene segments that code for the 20,000 proteins in the human body, the widespread evolutionary claim of the 1990s was that the rest of the genome had no function and so was called Junk DNA.) Bob, the Christian fundamentalist, answered from his biblical worldview, that our knowledge of genetics was in its infancy, and that it was too early to make the determination that all those non-coding segments of DNA had no function. The next decade of explosive genetic discoveries overwhelmingly validated this creationist perspective, so much so that aside from coding for 20,000 proteins, it is estimated that the remainder of the genome has approximately one million other functional regulatory segments of DNA. So much for junk. Fulfilled predictions, as the world saw with Einstein, go toward scientific credibility. However, Dr. Scott strongly rejected this creationist prediction making an extraordinary claim, which Bob immediately offered her to retract, that scientists currently knew everything they would ever need to know about genetics to conclusively state that all those regions were useless junk. Bob would love a rematch. But Eugenie Scott, (Ph.D. in Physical Anthropology, leading anti-creationist, and director of the National Center for Science Education), who had just debated evolution on a nationwide PBS television program, ended this one-hour program with Bob stating, "Well, I don’t debate." | <urn:uuid:9430a9b9-edfb-4d53-a440-b5848bef57ad> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://kgov.com/bel/20110923 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393463.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00194-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942114 | 1,170 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Though most true bugs eat plant sap, some feed on animals. One such true bug is the assassin bug, which feeds on fellow insects.
They get their name from their hunting prowess. They’re strong and good at overpowering victims much larger than themselves. They have raptorial forelegs similar to a praying mantis, meaning they’re covered in teeth-like extensions used for grasping prey. Their rostrum, the tube they use for sucking up their meals, is curved outward from their heads in such a way that it can swing out to pierce their victims.
They suck blood other nutrients from the victim. Once an assassin bug pierces an insect, it pumps a salivary secretion into the victim’s body. This secretion not only paralyzes the prey, but it dissolves the insect’s insides. In effect, the secretion digests the meal before the insect sucks it up. After it dines, all that’s left of the prey is a dry exoskeleton.
Assassin bugs can, and have bit humans. Assassin bug bites can be quite painful because the secretion kills off a small area of cells, but that’s the extent of it really. | <urn:uuid:f75bb8b8-9110-4ed3-bf8b-5439f307abdf> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/assassin-bugs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397873.63/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00028-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933228 | 252 | 2.8125 | 3 |
- Arts & Entertainment
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By Jeff Smith
Special to The PREVIEW
If I could make teaching and learning better in the school room, I would spend five minutes a day on a verse or two from Solomon, then add a few comments. Kids and adults respond to his ideas if you explain them. Those who don’t know about the Bible or its ideas on wisdom may not know how much scripture values learning.
This occurs to me as I read this passage this morning and drink my coffee:
Proverbs 10:14: “A wise man stores up knowledge. But the mouth of the foolish is near destruction.”
This hits on a mistake most of us made when we were kids in school. It’s easy to think, “This subject doesn’t apply to me. Why do I have to learn grammar when I speak gooder enough now?”
A wise person knows to stockpile knowledge like a squirrel stores up nuts for the winter. I may not need those facts now, but sure as the seasons change, I will need at least some of them later on and no, I don’t know which ones they will be.
Solomon doesn’t think much of fools. Neither do I, for that matter. When they open their mouth, we all get close to things going very, very badly. I mean, how much advice should we take from those who are about to destroy themselves?
I recall talking with a woman who told me she wasn’t feeling very well. She described her symptoms and I asked her if she had told these things to her doctor.
“Oh no,” she said. “What if he told me it was something bad?”
Here’s another thought with the same theme:
Proverbs 12:1 “Whoso loveth instruction loveth knowledge, but he that hateth reproof is brutish.”
To love being taught means something more than a teacher telling us where Brazil is. Solomon says that knowledge can only come when we are willing to have someone correct us. That is the broader Hebrew meaning of the term “instruction” here, and we must “love” it, even when it hurts.
Most agree that learning something new is a good thing. This verse takes that further. It says we are in danger when we resent being told that we are wrong. We risk becoming “brutish.” This Hebrew word pictures an animal, like a cow (Strongs Concordance), that is happy just eating grass and doesn’t care where burgers and leather purses come from.
If the idea of being wise is explained, it can become part of the mental DNA of a student or a classroom. It is sort of like how we drive on the right side of the road while other countries drive on the left. We don’t decide which side to drive on, because that is already a given. In the same way, wisdom can become the unspoken guide for the other issues we need to discuss. In the school room, it supports the learning process and will expose those as fools who want to scuttle it. This tells me that wisdom scripture is a friend and not a foe to learning. It is foolish not to use it.
Send your faith articles to [email protected]. Meet the faith writer’s team at http://bettyjslade.com/BJS/Writing_Opportunity.html. Join the faithful to pray at 8 a.m. on Thursday mornings. Wherever you are, lift up your prayer for this community and for the freedom of expressing our faith. | <urn:uuid:271d34e7-9b3e-4088-b646-67847232fcc3> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.pagosasun.com/wisdom-in-the-classroom-one-cup-at-a-time/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783400031.51/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155000-00045-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96742 | 773 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Surfaces are a concept to allow graphical embedding of heterogeneous untrusting clients efficiently into one scene.
In Chromium, we can use surfaces for many of the embedding cases we have today:
A Surface is a fixed size rectangle that can be rendered into by submitting frames. A client can create a surface by asking the SurfaceManager to construct one for a client (possibly itself) to render into. A Surface can be identified by two IDs generated by the SurfaceManager - one for identifying the surface when issuing frames to render to the surface, one to identify the surface when rendering from it to embed.
A Frame is a series of quads to draw, some of which may reference other surfaces. A frame also contains a set of resources and associated synchronization points. Here’s a (rough) outline of the structure of a frame:
The act of submitting a frame generates an implicit sequence number that can be used to synchronize presentation with other frames, potentially submitted by other clients. A surface identifier + sequence number tuple unique identifies a frame for all clients of an instance of the service (and there will typically only be one surface service in the system).
A Display is a physical display (when Chromium is the operating system) or a native OS window object (when Chromium is running inside another operating system). The surface service provides a surface for each display for a designated client to issue frames to. In the case of Chromium running on windows, for example, the surface service would generate a surface identifier for each top-level HWND and provide them to the browser UI code to render into.
Of particular note is that on Mac we can construct a display wrapping an IOSurface for each tab and let CoreAnimation composite the tabs with the browser UI. This does not provide the bandwidth benefits of ÜberCompositor but it does allow everything outside of the browser process to use the same presentation path as platforms using Aura/ÜberCompositor and reduce a lot of platform-specific complexity in our code.
Whenever a client wants to update the rendering of a surface it owns, it generates a new frame and submits it to the SurfaceManager. This frame may contain quads that references surfaces being embedded by this client. A client does not have to issue a new frame whenever a surface it embeds updates its rendering. Issuing a frame also transfers ownership of resources (GL textures, software shared memory buffers).
Whenever a client wants to start embedding another client, it first generates an appropriately sized surface through the SurfaceManager and then sends it to the client. The embedding client can start immediately issuing frames referencing the new surface or it may wait to receive an acknowledgement from the embedded client that the surface is ready, depending on the desired application semantics.
Resizing is analogous to creating a new surface.
For the service:
Whenever the manager receives a new frame, it performs some sanity checks on the frame (i.e. making sure it only references frames that the client should be referencing) and then saves it in the surface’s potential frame list along. Whenever this frame’s prerequisites are satisfied, it is moved into the eligible frame list for the surface. Only one frame can be rendered for a given surface at a time, but a client is allowed to pipeline multiple frames.
Whenever a display is ready for a new frame and something has changed, the service aggregates frames from the surfaces that contribute to that display and then renders them. The aggregation algorithm is simple:
When the service knows that it will never render from a given frame again - for instance if it has started rendering a newer frame for a given surface or if the embedding client has told the manager that it wants to destroy a surface - the service sends an acknowledgement to the client with a set of resources to return to the client along with associated synchronization points.
The SurfaceManager keeps track of all surfaces created in the system. For each surface, it keeps track of:
The ResourceProvider keeps track of resources that the service has ownership of and how to return ownership to clients. For GL textures, for instance, this means managing mailboxes.
The DisplayManager keeps track of all displays that the surface service is responsible for rendering into. For each display, the DisplayManager owns a surface used to render into the display as well as some state for hit testing against surfaces and determining which surfaces contributed to the display’s last produced frame.
There is only one instance of each of the Manager types in an instance of the service.
A SurfaceAggregator implements the aggregation algorithm and knows how to submit an aggregated frame to a renderer. Aggregators are (nearly) stateless and can be created whenever necessary.
A Renderer translates an aggregated frame into draw commands appropriate for a given display. In GPU rendering mode, this means GL draw calls and a swap into the display. In software rendering mode, this means skia calls into the appropriate SkCanvas.
Resource synchronization is the same as it is with ÜberCompositor, with the slight simplification that the pipeline depth is not influenced by the nesting level of the embedding.
Clients can optionally synchronize frames with each other using the prerequisite / postrequisite synchronization points. This has to be done with care but can be useful to do things like prevent resize guttering. 99% of the use cases in Chromium will not require any explicit synchronization between different surfaces - in nearly all cases it’s perfectly fine (and desirable) to let clients render independently of each other.
Here’s an example of a possible gutter prevention algorithm. Assume that client Alice is embedding client Bob and wants to resize its surface for Bob from 100x100 to 200x200. If Bob responds fast enough to Alice’s resize message, Alice wants to make sure that Bob shows up at 200x200 in the same frame as Alice’s decorations.
Alice is embedding Bob. Alice owns a 100x100 surface that Bob is rendering into. Alice and Bob both have pending frames referencing the 100x100 surface.
Sequence for Alice:
Sequence for Bob:
Alice and Bob are referencing a 200x200 surface
The SurfaceManager knows that the 100x100 surface can be destroyed as soon as the service no longer needs it.
If Bob is slow to respond, Alice may stall or submit one or more frames that gutter. However if Bob responds fast enough the service can guarantee using the sequence numbers that the new frame from Bob and the new decorations from Alice show up on screen at the same time. | <urn:uuid:1c73fe78-dd47-4ed4-b6f6-b80393b6cf84> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/chromium-graphics/surfaces | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396887.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00130-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.895448 | 1,355 | 3.015625 | 3 |
Simple Definition of childlike
: resembling or suggesting a child : like that of a child; especially : having or showing the pleasing qualities (such as innocence) that children often have
Examples of childlike in a sentence
a grown woman with a childlike face
We gazed at it in childlike wonder.
She took a childlike glee in describing every detail.
First Known Use of childlike
Rhymes with childlike
alike, apelike, armlike, barnlike, bearlike, belike, birdlike, bladelike, boatlike, boxlike, called strike, catlike, Christlike, clawlike, claylike, clocklike, dirgelike, dirt bike, dislike, doglike, dreamlike, feel like, first strike, fishlike, flu-like, fly-strike, garpike, godlike, grasslike, handspike, hitchhike, homelike, horselike, hymnlike, jazzlike, Klondike, lifelike, mislike, moonlike, nunlike, parklike, pealike, push-bike, rampike, ratlike, rent strike, restrike, ringlike, rocklike, rootlike, ropelike, scalelike, sharklike, sheaflike, shrimplike, shunpike, snakelike, sphinxlike, springlike, suchlike, tanklike, ten-strike, trail bike, trancelike, turnpike, unlike, Updike, Vandyke, Van Dyck, warlike, wavelike, whalelike, wifelike, winglike, wraithlike
CHILDLIKE Defined for Kids
Definition of childlike for Students
1 : like that of a child <a childlike voice>
2 : showing the more pleasing qualities (as innocence and trustfulness) often thought to be those of children <childlike wonder>
Seen and Heard
What made you want to look up childlike? Please tell us where you read or heard it (including the quote, if possible). | <urn:uuid:c8e9e109-73d1-487e-bef8-3df146d4b8b3> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/childlike | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396949.33/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00056-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.80712 | 437 | 3.0625 | 3 |
Simple but challenging: the Universe according to Planck
21 March 2013ESA's Planck satellite has delivered its first all-sky image of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), bringing with it new challenges about our understanding of the origin and evolution of the cosmos. The image has provided the most precise picture of the early Universe so far.
For the most part, the data agree extremely well with the 'standard model of cosmology' and allow for a much improved measure of its parameters. In the standard model, the Universe is described as homogeneous and isotropic on very large scales, and cosmic structure is the result of the slow growth of tiny density fluctuations that arose immediately after the Big Bang. At the same time, the extraordinary quality of the Planck data reveals the presence of subtle anomalies in the CMB pattern that might challenge the very foundations of cosmology. The most serious anomaly is a deficit in the signal at large angular scales on the sky, which is about ten per cent weaker than the standard model would like it to be. Other anomalous traits that had been hinted at in the past - a significant discrepancy of the CMB signal as observed in the two opposite hemispheres of the sky and an abnormally large 'cold spot' - are confirmed with high confidence. Planck's new image of the CMB suggests that some aspects of the standard model of cosmology may need a rethink, raising the possibility that the fabric of the cosmos, on the largest scales of the observable Universe, might be more complex than we think.
Cosmologists using ESA's Planck satellite have compiled the most accurate image so far of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the most ancient light observed in the history of the Universe, emitted only 380,000 years after the Big Bang. By exposing minute differences in the CMB temperature over the entire sky to unprecedented detail, the new Planck image provides a unique snapshot of the slightly mottled Universe as it was when the CMB was released. The pattern of fluctuations observed in the CMB carries a record of the cosmic seeds that were produced immediately after the Big Bang, and that would later evolve into all the structure observed in the Universe today – from stars and planets to galaxies and galaxy clusters.
"The CMB is a portrait of the young Universe, and the picture delivered by Planck is so precise that we can use it to scrutinise in painstaking detail all possible models for the origin and evolution of the cosmos," comments Jan Tauber, Planck Project Scientist at ESA. "After this close examination, the standard model of cosmology is still standing tall, but at the same time evidence of anomalous features in the CMB is more serious than previously thought, suggesting that something fundamental may be missing from the standard framework," he adds.
In the standard model of cosmology, currently the most widely accepted scenario, the Universe was born almost 14 billion years ago. At this time, its texture was highly homogeneous and isotropic, meaning that its properties were almost exactly the same in every point and that there were no preferential directions in space. This extremely uniform background was punctuated only by minuscule, random fluctuations, which would later give rise to cosmic structure. In spite of the rich variety of structure that currently populates it, the Universe has remained remarkably homogeneous and isotropic on very large scales. But the new CMB image delivered by Planck suggests that some aspects of this model might need revision: in particular, the large-scale isotropy might not hold when considering really large scales.
The standard model of cosmology relies on a multitude of different astronomical observations, from earlier-generation CMB experiments to gigantic surveys of galaxies and the observation of distant supernovae. These data sets, based on entirely different astrophysical sources, agree extremely well with the standard model's two pillar assumptions of homogeneity and isotropy. To reconcile data and theory, however, cosmologists in the past few decades have added some additional, more exotic ingredients that are now an integral part of the standard model: cosmic inflation, an early period of accelerated expansion that marked the beginning of the Universe's history, and during which the seeds of cosmic structure were embedded; dark matter, an invisible matter component whose web-like distribution on large scales constitutes the scaffold where galaxies and other cosmic structure formed; dark energy, a mysterious component that permeates the Universe and is driving its currently accelerated expansion.
"The CMB temperature fluctuations detected by Planck confirm once more that the relatively simple picture provided by the standard model is an amazingly good description of the Universe," explains George Efstathiou of the University of Cambridge, UK.
Cosmologists in the Planck Collaboration have reached this conclusion after painstaking work on the data collected by the satellite over 15.5 months. First, they had to remove all possible contamination due to emission by foreground sources – other galaxies as well as interstellar material in our own Galaxy, the Milky Way – before they could fully explore the CMB data and compare them to cosmological models.
"By analysing these extraordinary data collected by Planck, we have been able to set the most precise constraints so far on the small number of parameters that we need to characterise the standard model, ranging from the density of dark matter and dark energy to the speed at which the Universe is currently expanding and the relative amount of primordial fluctuations – the seeds of cosmic structures to be – on different scales," adds Efstathiou.
In particular, Planck has provided the first indisputable evidence that the distribution of primordial fluctuations was not the same at all scales, but comprised more structure on large rather than small scales.
"Since these fluctuations were generated during cosmic inflation, this constraint allows us to test the validity of many models that describe the dynamics of this epoch of accelerated expansion of the Universe," says François Bouchet of the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, France.
"However, when we try and make sense of the data on the grandest scale, more than about six degrees across the sky, we realise that we might be in trouble," he adds.
The view of the Universe presented in the standard model may not be able to fully explain the richness of detail present in the CMB at the largest scales on the sky, as cosmologists revealed a number of 'anomalies' in the all-sky CMB map that do not fit very well with this model's predictions. While the observations on small and intermediate angular scales agree extremely well with the model predictions, the fluctuations detected on large angular scales on the sky – between 90 and six degrees – are about 10 per cent weaker than the best fit of the standard model to Planck data would like them to be. Another, perhaps related, anomalous signal appears as a substantial asymmetry in the CMB signal observed in the two opposite hemispheres of the sky: one of the two hemispheres appears to have a significantly stronger signal on average. An additional peculiar element in the data is the presence of a so-called 'cold spot': one of the low-temperature spots in the CMB extends over a patch of the sky that is much larger than expected.
The lack of power at large angular scale is convincingly revealed by Planck for the first time, but the hemispheric asymmetry and the cold spot had already been found in the data of Planck's predecessor, NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). However, there were lingering doubts about their cosmic origin. With WMAP, in fact, it was not possible to confirm that the anomalies were genuine features in the CMB, rather than the imprint of either data processing or foreground emissions. The fact that these anomalies are also present in the more precise Planck data clears up any doubt about their cosmic origin.
"The Planck data call our attention to these anomalies, which are now more important than ever: with data of such quality, we can no longer neglect them as mere artefacts and we must search for an explanation," comments Paolo Natoli from the University of Ferrara, Italy.
"The anomalies indicate that something might be missing from our current understanding of the Universe. We need to find a model where these peculiar traits are no longer anomalies but features predicted by the model itself," he adds.
One of the possible ways to explain the anomalies present in the large-scale pattern of the CMB invites cosmologists to reexamine one of the pillar assumptions of the standard model – isotropy. An existing theoretical framework that describes such a Universe is known as Bianchi models. If the fabric of the cosmos is not isotropic on scales so large that extend beyond the horizon of the 'patch' of the Universe that we can access with observations, its global geometry would be rather complex: this could force bundles of light rays into highly intricate paths where they would be significantly focussed. As CMB photons have travelled across the Universe for most of its history, they might have experienced this effect, resulting in the anomalous pattern of the CMB observed across the sky.
"When we take into account the large-scale anisotropy described by the Bianchi models in the analysis of the Planck data, several anomalies are simultaneously reduced by a significant amount," explains Krzysztof M. Górski from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Caltech, U.S.A.
"However, it is not possible to merge this very specific anisotropic scenario with the standard model that holds very well on 'local' scales. Therefore, this exercise remains a tantalising demonstration of how attempts to reach a satisfactory description of the Universe at large scales might require us to get more creative in developing plausible extensions of the standard model," he adds.
Cosmologists are now facing an interesting dilemma: on the one hand, the standard model of cosmology is still the best way to describe the CMB data, although it includes elements that still lack solid theoretical understanding such as dark matter, dark energy, and inflation. On the other hand, the anomalies seen by Planck highlight that the model should be at the very least extended, if not radically modified.
"The precise measurements of CMB temperature fluctuations achieved by Planck hint at the presence of gaps in the foundations of our understanding of cosmology," comments Tauber. "The Universe seems to be simpler, but at the same time, also weirder than we ever thought. The anomalies in the CMB are telling us something fundamental: we do not know yet what this is, but we are eager to find out," he concludes.
Notes for editors
The new data from Planck are based on the first 15.5 months of its all-sky surveys. Launched in 2009, Planck was designed to map the sky in nine frequencies using two state-of-the-art instruments: the Low Frequency Instrument (LFI), which includes the frequency bands 30-70 GHz, and the High Frequency Instrument (HFI), which includes the frequency bands 100-857 GHz. HFI completed its survey in January 2012, while LFI continues to operate.
Planck's first all-sky image was released in 2010 and the first scientific data were released in 2011. Since then, scientists have been extracting the foreground emissions that lie between us and the Universe's first light to reveal the CMB presented in this release. The next set of cosmology data will be released in early 2014.
The Planck Scientific Collaboration consists of all the scientists who have contributed to the development of the Planck mission, and who participate in the scientific exploitation of the Planck data during the proprietary period. These scientists are members of one or more of four consortia: the LFI Consortium, the HFI Consortium, the DK-Planck Consortium, and ESA's Planck Science Office. The two European-led Planck Data Processing Centres are located in Paris, France and Trieste, Italy.
The LFI consortium is led by N. Mandolesi, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, Italy (deputy PI: M. Bersanelli, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy), and was responsible for the development and operation of the LFI instrument. The HFI consortium is lead by J.L. Puget, Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, France (deputy PI: F. Bouchet, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, France), and was responsible for the development and operation of the HFI instrument. The Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay is a Unité Mixte de Recherche (UMR8617) of the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and the Université Paris-Sud 11. The Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris is a Unité Mixte de Recherche (UMR 7095) of the CNRS and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie of Paris.
The development of the Planck mission was supported by substantial financial and technological contributions of ESA Member States. More than 40% of the mission's development cost was provided by the agencies supplying HFI and LFI. France and Italy, through the two leading funding agencies CNES and ASI, and the national research bodies, provided more than half of the national funding. The contribution of ESA Member States is even more significant for the scientific operation of the mission and the processing of its data. ESA Member States also provided key technologies such as the innovative cooler that enabled the mission’s instrumentation to be maintained at just one-tenth of a degree above absolute zero (-273.15°C). Important technologies and payload elements were also contributed by NASA.
A series of scientific papers describing the new results have been submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The preprints can be accessed here.
Background information to the topics discussed in this release – the Cosmic Microwave Background and the history of structure formation in the Universe – is available here.
The new data from Planck and the cosmological results based on them have been presented at a media briefing organised by the European Space Agency at Headquarters in Paris, on 21 March 2013, 10:00-12:00 CET. A reply of the briefing is available here. Further results were discussed at a science briefing on 21 March 2013, 14:00-15:45 CET.
The 47th ESLAB Symposium, "The Universe as seen by Planck" is an international conference dedicated to an in-depth look at the results from the Planck mission, and will be held from 2 to 5 April 2013 at ESA/ESTEC in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. More information at: http://www.congrexprojects.com/13a11
François R. Bouchet
Krzysztof M. Górski | <urn:uuid:2ecfa529-0208-4ca9-b8f2-23d5a2061077> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://sci.esa.int/planck/51551-simple-but-challenging-the-universe-according-to-planck/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394937.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00200-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94421 | 3,090 | 3.296875 | 3 |
What's the Latest Development?
A paper soon to appear in Astronomy and Astrophysics reports the discovery of a "rogue planet" about 100 light-years from Earth. This planet, which is drifting in space without a sun to orbit around, is the nearest of its kind to be observed from Earth and the only one found in a hunt using Hawaii's Canada France Hawaii Telescope and Chile's Very Large Telescope. It's not traveling alone, though: The team of researchers is about 87% certain that it's part of the AB Doradus Moving Group, a collection of about 30 drifting stars estimated to have formed at the same time as the planet, between 50 and 120 million years ago.
What's the Big Idea?
Astronomers believe rogue planets develop in one of two ways: either as planets that somehow got kicked out of a star's orbit, or as potential stars that never attained enough mass to start the process that creates starlight, a characteristic normally attributed to brown dwarfs ("failed stars"). This planet's mass is estimated to be four to seven times that of Jupiter's, which would make it much smaller than a brown dwarf. If it is indeed a rejected planet, it's likely that there are many more out there just like it, according to a co-author of the paper.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com | <urn:uuid:a9f68cf6-e49e-4e2d-b0db-364cdaedf816> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/found-in-our-neighborhood-a-planet-without-a-sun | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399425.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00030-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959677 | 274 | 4 | 4 |
Dr. Jeane Copenhaver-Johnson's work was featured in the chapter titled "Race" in the bestseller NurtureShock. She is considered one of the country's leading experts on talking with children about race. This OSU professor's research convinces her that avoiding talk about race in our homes and classrooms leaves our children vulnerable to the racism that permeates our culture. She has some recommendations about how to go about talking with children in ways that help children rather than leave them in the dark. She has published two practical papers—one for parents and another for teachers.
You can compare race with another topic people often have difficulty discussing with children: sexuality. We all know that refusing to discuss sex leaves children confused and concocting stories. My goal is to make First UU a place where we support parents in developing healthy attitudes about both sexuality and race.
We took the first step my first year with you when we started the middle school class called Race To Justice. Jeane has started to spend time with that class and she told me how impressed she was with the level of discussion, the teaching team, and the youth. Great thanks to Dave Gill, one of the teachers in that class. He read NutureShock, and realizing that Jeane was at OSU, he contacted her. This is the level of commitment we have in our Sunday School.
Our next step is to offer a conversation with Jeane on Sunday, May 1 from 2:00 to 3:30 PM. Invite your friends, regardless of their religion. This is a special opportunity to get some of your questions answered about talking with preschool through elementary children. If you like, we can also form a practice group to support one another as we take bold and sometimes scary steps. Families that attend the 11 AM service may want to bring your lunch. The RE Council will supply lemonade and tea. Childcare will be provided.
Mark your calendars now for this important event!
Director of Religious Education
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus
Raul and Judy Cardenas have been married for eight years, with three children: their daughter, plus two sons from Judy's previous marriage who call Raul "Papi." The Cardenases are like many American families except that except that Raul was born in Mexico and faces deportation in April— their family will soon be torn apart unless you help.
Despite the fact that he is married to a U.S. citizen, and the father
of another U.S. citizen, Raul is an undocumented worker and is
scheduled to be deported by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in
April. There is currently no pathway to legal U.S. residency for him.
Please sign the petition to halt the deportation of Jose Raul Cardenas Gonzalez of Denver. Keep the Cardenas family together.
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus.
On Saturday, March 19, Mr. Khan will speak at the 7th annual Amy Interfaith Lecture Series at the Church of the Master, United Methodist in Westerville.
Schedule of Events:
The Amy Lecture Series was established by the children of Dr. Bill and Flo Amy in honor of the ministry of their parents. Dr. Amy was professor of World Religions at Otterbein University from 1962–1978 and 1993–2005.
The March 13th Racial Unity Service was remarkable not only for the diversity of its participants (people of many races, cultures and religions were there) but also for its emphasis on the need for people of faith to work on justice. The messages focused on anti-poverty, comprehensive immigration reform, interfaith and anti-racism work.
We are energized!
"The road builds us as we build the road." Sarvodaya saying.
Here's the link to the poem. | <urn:uuid:45fe2430-f73f-4cb7-9855-23ee25e24b9a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://sites.google.com/site/rdtfnews/mar-2011 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391766.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00062-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972161 | 794 | 3 | 3 |
Anxiety is inevitable: the little jitters before giving a speech, the beads of sweat that break out when about to meet a blind date, the little knot in the stomach before a big test. These are things everyone will experience from time to time. However, for some people, anxiety can dominate their life. When this occurs, some simple things -- such as getting a bit of sun and enough sleep -- can help.
Sleep is restorative; it’s a biological need that cannot, for general health, be overlooked. An anxiety disorder can make sleeping more difficult and be caused, in part, by a lack of sleep. Sleep deprivation -- routinely getting less than six hours of sleep a night -- has been found by researchers to contribute to anxiety disorder. Not getting enough sleep can cause havoc with hormones and neurotransmitters.
How Anxiety Affects Sleep
Insomnia: Insomnia is a general term that includes problems falling asleep, problems staying asleep, and waking so early that the person is not refreshed by sleep. Most people suffering from an anxiety disorder have insomnia as one of their symptoms.
Nightmares: Another sleep problem those with anxiety often have, especially post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients, is nightmares. Recurring nightmares can contribute to feeling unrested and anxious.
Other sleep disorders: Researchers are hot on the trail of sleep problems associated with anxiety disorders. Some researchers believe that sleep paralysis (waking up and yet being unable to move) is anxiety related. Another set of researchers are looking at cataplexy (a sudden loss of muscle tone) as a lesser version of narcolepsy (suddenly falling asleep) in relation to anxiety.
Hypersomnia: Anxiety can also be a symptom of over-sleeping called hypersomnia. A full night’s sleep is essential, but there really can be too much of a good thing. Sleeping long hours at night or taking naps during the day after a full night’s sleep can be a symptom or a cause of anxiety. First, check medications, as some can cause sleepiness. If the drug is suspected, check with the prescribing doctor; the dose may need to be altered. Excessive sleepiness could also be caused by drug interactions. It is also possible that sleepiness during the day may be due to insufficient sleep at night. While the quantity may be there, the quality may not. Check with a doctor to rule out sleep apnea.
Catching Some Rays
Sunlight is another basic human need. The vitamin D produced in our skin as a reaction to sunlight can go a long way in making someone feel better by producing a calming effect. Exposure to sunlight also helps regulate the nocturnal/diurnal cycles of the body, helping a person get a good night's sleep.
Furthermore, if a person has seasonal affective disorder (SAD) -- feeling depressed during the shorter, winter months -- along with an anxiety disorder, the exposure to sunlight can bring much relief.
Of course, anxiety is related to serotonin levels in the brain. When the levels are low, depression and anxiety can result. When the levels are too high, it can manifest in aggression. Most drugs to treat anxiety make more serotonin available. Sunlight may allow your body to produce more of the neurotransmitter.
One cautionary tip to consider: Several anti-anxiety drugs, such as Xanax and Librium, may degrade in the light even after consumption. They also may make a person more sensitive to light, such that their skin may burn more easily with prolonged sun exposure.
Tips to Consider
To avoid or minimize anxiety:
- Get at least seven hours of sleep per night
- Get no more than nine hours of sleep per night
- Get several hours of direct sunlight a day
- Be cautious of sunlight if on a course of anti-anxiety medications
- Take vitamin D when sunlight exposure is limited
- Have a medical checkup if sleep becomes an issue | <urn:uuid:82e31a75-988f-4fd5-8ad5-e42661292929> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.healthboards.com/healthcenter/anxiety/sleep-sun-and-anxiety-what-you-should-know.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395166.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00131-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941169 | 811 | 3.125 | 3 |
Fine Needle Aspiration
Safe, Simple, Accurate
Your doctor has ordered a diagnostic procedure for you called Fine Needle Aspiration (FNA). This procedure will provide your doctor with a fast and accurate diagnosis that will help in determining the need for further tests or treatment. Fine Needle Aspiration is safe, simple and accurate. The following information will provide you with answers to the most commonly asked questions and concerns about Fine Needle Aspiration.
What is Fine Needle Aspiration? Why do I need it?
During your medical exam, your doctor has discovered a lump or growth about which there is some question. The next step is to determine if there are any problems associated with this tissue or growth. This requires tissue sampling for diagnosis and that's where fine needle aspiration will help. With Fine Needle Aspiration, a thin needle is used to collect a small quantity of cells or fluid to be analyzed under a microscope. Most patients tolerate the procedure well and usually do not require anesthesia or pre-medication.
How long does the procedure take?
The procedure itself only takes approximately 30 minutes. However, you will need to arrive at the Hospital's Pathology Department in the 1701 building approximately 15 minutes before your appointment. Also, the physician performing your Fine Needle Aspiration will talk with you prior to the procedure to ask questions concerning your medical history and to further explain Fine Needle Aspiration.
Who will perform my Fine Needle Aspiration?
A board-certified pathologist experienced in the performance of FNA will perform your Fine Needle Aspiration.
What should I do to prepare for Fine Needle Aspiration?
There are no restrictions on eating or drinking prior to the procedure. Your normal activities and routine should not be interrupted after the procedure.
Could there be any complications with Fine Needle Aspiration?
Fine Need Aspiration of tissue or a growth that can be felt from the skin surface is an extremely safe procedure with virtually no adverse complications. No anesthesia or pre-medication is required, thus eliminating potential allergic reactions. And since no incision is usually made, you will not develop a scar.
During the procedure, the skin is pierced with the needle, which on rare occasions may cause a bruise or hematoma (bump) which is due to bleeding underneath the skin. If this is the case, this area may be discolored and sensitive, but should return to normal within several days.
Another very small possibility is that of infection. This is extremely unlikely because the skin is cleaned thoroughly with alcohol prior to the procedure and only sterile, disposable needles are used.
If you are having a Fine Needle Aspiration procedure performed on a salivary gland, you may have a small amount of blood appear in your saliva after the procedure.
Are there alternatives to Fine Needle Aspiration?
Yes, surgery is usually the alternative to Fine Needle Aspiration, but surgery has a greater risk and usually is more expensive. Fine Needle Aspiration is a good first step for rapid diagnosis.
When will I know the results of the procedure?
The results of Fine Needle Aspiration are usually available 24 to 48 hours following the procedure. Your test results will be sent to your doctor who ordered the test for you. Your should contact your doctor in order to obtain the results.
Patient Instructions for Fine Needle Aspiration
Please arrive at Virginia Hospital Center Pathology Department Lobby level at 1701 N. George Mason Drive Arlington, Virginia approximately 15 minutes prior to your appointment time. The results of the Fine Needle Aspiration will be forwarded to the doctor who ordered the test. Please make arrangements with your doctor's office to obtain the results. | <urn:uuid:169692a0-9fcb-4c20-82cc-170a0a83a42c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.virginiahospitalcenter.com/medical/laboratory/aspiration.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403502.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00196-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93991 | 759 | 2.65625 | 3 |
An anecdote is a short story, narrative or parable often used in speeches, essays, toasts, books, articles and other written or spoken products. Anecdotes are often funny, inspiring, interesting, surprising, ironic, humorous and may teach a lesson, be biographical or cause reflection. Funny or interesting anecdotes can help make your speeches or writing better, especially when used in conclusions, introductions or to prove a point. We hope our anecdotes will help you in your speeches and writing.
This historical anecdote could be used to talk about Thomas Edison, innovation, determination, being open minded, new ideas, inventions, American history, dedication, job interviews, applying for a job, intellect, habits and more.
Thomas Edison was a great scientist and inventor, among other things, who made great impacts on American history. He was always looking for smart, open-minded young scientists to work for him on his many invetions. Whenever he met someone he thought might make a good candidate, he would take them to dinner. The interview would begin over the table, but the deal was not decided until the food arrived. Edison would watch what the inventor did when the food arrived. If the applicant tasted his food and then salted it, he could be a good addition to the team. If he salted his food before tasting it, the young man was not hired. Edison knew that people who did things automatically and made presumptions without knowledge would not be able to look at problems and find innovative solutions.
More information: We hope this page was helpful and provided you with a funny, interesting or entertaining anecdote to use for speeches, roasts, essays, toasts or a writing project. Check out more anecdotes or our main page for more articles here Can U Write. | <urn:uuid:b72ef9be-0ad2-4822-a3eb-0a8901e31a6d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.canuwrite.com/anecdote_edison.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398075.47/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00030-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967514 | 361 | 3.046875 | 3 |
Here you will find photographs of Mountain Gorillas taken in the Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda.
Mountain Gorillas are only found in the Virunga Massif which spans the Central African countries of Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. They are critically endangered; it is likely that less than 800 individuals exist in total (none are held in captivity). The main threats to their survival include poaching, habitat loss, disease and civil war.
Mountain Gorillas have longer fur and are larger than other types of gorilla. This enables them live in the colder conditions found high up in the Virunga Volcanoes. Mountain Gorillas are primarily herbivores; the majority of the diet consists of leaves, shoots and stems of 142 different plant species.
Adult males are called silverbacks because of the saddle of silver hair that develops on their backs. They can stand 1.9m tall, with an arm span of 2.3m and weigh 220 kg. Mountain Gorillas are highly social and live in family groups led by one silverback gorilla. The rest of the group consists of females, young “black back” males and youngsters.
The majority of the images on this website are of gorillas in “Group 13”, the “Hirwa Group” and the “Sabinyo Group”. To view the photos, check out our Gallery.
The gorilla images on this website were taken by Will & Matt Burrard-Lucas, find out more here: Behind the Photos. | <urn:uuid:b9276bbb-f931-428f-ab37-653454674cbb> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://gorillaimages.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395679.18/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00099-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934528 | 315 | 3.421875 | 3 |
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| A single photon is produced by a quantum dot (QD). Simultaneously, a pair of photons is produced by a parametric down-conversion crystal (PDC). One of the PDC photons—which has different characteristics than the QD photon—is routed into a cavity and filter, rendering this PDC photon and the QD photon nearly identical.|
Credit: Suplee, NIST
If quantum computers are ever to be realized, they likely will be made of different types of parts that will need to share information with one another, just like the memory and logic circuits in today's computers do. However, prospects for achieving this kind of communication seemed distant—until now. A team of physicists working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has shown* for the first time how these parts might communicate effectively.
The goal to develop quantum computers—a long-awaited type of computer that could solve otherwise intractable problems, such as breaking complex encryption codes—has inspired scientists the world over to invent new devices that could become the brains and memory of these machines. Many of these tiny devices use particles of light, or photons, to carry the bits of information that a quantum computer will use.
But while each of these pieces of hardware can do some jobs well, none are likely to accomplish all of the functions necessary to build a quantum computer. This implies that several different types of quantum devices will need to work together for the computer or network to function. The trouble is that these tiny devices frequently create photons of such different character that they cannot transfer the quantum bits of information between one another. Transmuting two vastly different photons into two similar ones would be a first step toward permitting quantum information components to communicate with one another over large distances, but until now this goal has remained elusive.
However, the team has demonstrated that it is possible to take photons from two disparate sources and render these particles partially indistinguishable. That photons can be made to "coalesce" and become indistinguishable without losing their essential quantum properties suggests in principle that they can connect various types of hardware devices into a single quantum information network. The team's achievement also demonstrates for the first time that a "hybrid" quantum computer might be assembled from different hardware types.
The team connected single photons from a "quantum dot," which could be useful in logic circuits, with a second single-photon source that uses "parametric down conversion," which might be used to connect different parts of the computer. These two sources typically produce photons that differ so dramatically in spectrum that they would be unusable in a quantum network. But with a deft choice of filters and other devices that alter the photons' spectral shapes and other properties, the team was able to make the photons virtually identical.
"We manipulate the photons to be as indistinguishable as possible in terms of spectra, location and polarization—the details you need to describe a photon. We attribute the remaining distinguishability to properties of the quantum dot," says Glenn Solomon, of NIST's Quantum Measurement Division. "No conceivable measurement can tell indistinguishable photons apart. The results prove in principle that a hybrid quantum network is possible and can be scaled up for use in a quantum network."
The research team includes scientists from the NIST/University of Maryland Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) and Georgetown University. The NSF Physics Frontier Center at JQI provided partial funding
*S.V. Polyakov, A. Muller, E.B. Flagg, A. Ling, N. Borjemscaia, E. Van Keuren, A. Migdall and G.S. Solomon. Coalescence of single photons from dissimilar single-photon sources. Physical Review Letters, 107, 157402 (2011), DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.157402.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
For more information, please click here
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Marrying superconductors, lasers, and Bose-Einstein condensates: Chapman University Institute for Quantum Studies (IQS) member Yutaka Shikano, Ph.D., recently had research published in Scientific Reports June 20th, 2016
A new trick for controlling emission direction in microlasers June 20th, 2016
Soft decoupling of organic molecules on metal June 23rd, 2016
FEI and University of Liverpool Announce QEMSCAN Research Initiative: University of Liverpool will utilize FEI’s QEMSCAN technology to gain a better insight into oil and gas reserves & potentially change the approach to evaluating them June 22nd, 2016 | <urn:uuid:a3be476c-8207-444a-b483-0830f736bb7a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=43733 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783400572.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155000-00014-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919573 | 1,094 | 3.96875 | 4 |
Catholic Emancipation, term applied to the process by which Roman Catholics in the British Isles were relieved in the late 18th and early 19th cent. of civil disabilities. They had been under oppressive regulations placed by various statutes dating as far back as the time of Henry VIII (see Penal Laws). This process of removing the disabilities culminated in the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 (and some subsequent provisions), but it had begun a number of years before. Priest hunting, in general, ended by the mid-18th cent.
In 1778, English Catholics were relieved of the restrictions on land inheritance and purchase. A savage reaction to these concessions produced the Gordon Riots (see Gordon, Lord George) of 1780, and the whole history of Catholic Emancipation is one of struggle against great resistance. In 1791 the Roman Catholic Relief Act repealed most of the disabilities in Great Britain, provided Catholics took an oath of loyalty, and in 1793 the army, the navy, the universities, and the judiciary were opened to Catholics, although seats in Parliament and some offices were still denied. These reforms were sponsored by William Pitt the Younger, who hoped thereby to split the alliance of Irish Catholics and Protestants. But Pitt's attempt to secure a general repeal of the Penal Laws was thwarted by George III. Pope Pius VII consented to a royal veto on episcopal nominations if the Penal Laws were repealed, but the move failed. In Ireland the repeal (1782) of Poynings' Law (see under Poynings, Sir Edward) was followed by an act (1792) of the Irish Parliament relaxing the marriage and education laws and an act (1793) allowing Catholics to vote and hold most offices.
By the Act of Union (1800) the Irish Parliament ceased to exist, and Ireland was given representation in the British Parliament. Then, since the Irish were a minority group in the British legislature, many English ministers began to advocate Catholic Emancipation, influenced also by the decline of the papacy as a factor in secular politics. Irish agitation, headed by Daniel O'Connell and his Catholic Association, was successful in securing the admission of Catholics to Parliament. In 1828 the Test Act was repealed, and O'Connell, although still ineligible to sit, secured his election to Parliament from Co. Clare. Alarmed by the growing tension in Ireland, the duke of Wellington, the prime minister, allowed the Catholic Emancipation Bill, sponsored by Sir Robert Peel, to pass (1829). Catholics were now on the same footing as Protestants except for a few restrictions, most of which were later removed. The Act of Settlement is still in force, however, and Catholics are excluded from the throne (though the Commonwealth nations where the British monarch is head of state agreed in 2011 to end the ban on the monarch's marrying a Catholic).
See studies by B. Ward (1911), D. Gwynn (1929), J. A. Reynolds (1954, repr. 1970), and G. I. T. Machin (1964); S. L. Gwynn, Henry Grattan and His Times (1939, repr. 1971).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:5d406ef2-a468-4bae-b7e5-571848ce4708> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.factmonster.com/encyclopedia/history/catholic-emancipation.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402699.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00141-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976501 | 673 | 4.28125 | 4 |
The Bigger Picture: Visual Archives and the Smithsonian
The Empress of the Galapagos Islands, Part 3
This is the third in a series of “murder mystery” posts about a 1930s Smithsonian scientific expedition, based on records in the Smithsonian Institution Archives’ collections.
This is the third in a series of “murder mystery” posts, based on the Waldo Schmitt Papers in the Smithsonian Institution Archives’ collections. As a member of the Hancock Pacific-Galapagos Expeditions of 1933-1935, Schmitt had become acquainted with eccentric German colonists on Charles Island in the Galapagos. Among them were the polyandrous Baroness (AKA Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn), and two couples, the Ritters and the Wittmers.
“[Ritter’s book] is of theosophical leanings, but it is the type of theosophical writing that no one cares to read after seeing the first page or two.” Waldo Schmitt, Waldo Schmitt Papers, Record Unit 7312 box 87.
Dr. Friedrich Karl Ritter of Berlin was a dentist who longed for a retreat where he could indulge his raw food theories and complete his magnum opus, a philosophical theosophist treatise. He was accompanied by his devoted disciple and girlfriend, Dore Koerwein, who was known to island visitors as Dore Ritter, although their respective spouses had been left in Germany with instructions to take care of each other.
Dr. Ritter’s dentistry came in handy; while on the island he had had to extract most of Dore’s teeth. Unfortunately the two of them had only one pair of false teeth to share, and these were stainless steel—Dr. Ritter’s own invention.
The Ritters quickly came to understand the challenges of living on remote Charles Island. When they arrived, they didn’t know that their land would be covered with thorn bushes and hardened lava flow. To plant a garden, the lava had to be broken up and carried away in buckets before arable soil could be hauled down from their hilltop spring. Dr. Ritter wistfully thought how nice it would have been had they thought to bring along a wheelbarrow.
The couple also arrived expecting tortoises and iguanas, but not realizing that there were large mammals, such as cattle and pigs, on the island. Eighteenth century pirates had introduced goats; in the nineteenth century, the mainland government introduced dogs to control the goats. Earlier colonists left behind cattle, donkeys, cats, and pigs, and accidentally introduced rats, mice, and cockroaches. Hordes of feral animals greeted the Ritters, all eager to share the produce of their garden, and the Ritter’s defenses were a bird gun, rat poison, and dynamite. Their attempts to shoot, poison, and explode the wild hogs were unsuccessful, but in the end the dynamite made the hogs nervous enough to stay away.
The Ritters found that the best way to protect their feet and legs from thorns and jagged rock was to wear hip boots—and the best way to cope with tropical heat was to wear only their hip boots. Visitors were encouraged to shout their presence at their front gate, and were welcomed by the sound of the Ritters scurrying away to get dressed. Thus began Charles Island’s reputation in the press as the nudist island.
Smithsonian scientist Waldo Schmitt noted they weren’t really nudists because they went without clothes for practical reasons—not philosophical ones. In other words, they weren’t nudists—they were just naked.
Ultimately, these two innocents from the arty crowd in Berlin carved a home and garden out of the wilderness. They reclaimed enough land from thorn scrub and lava slabs to build the house and garden they called “Eden,” The Ritters tamed cats and donkeys—as pets and to keep away vermin, and serve as beasts of burden. Dore’s pet donkey colt is in the foreground.
The Ritters were nothing if not high-minded, and the sight of their fellow colonist, the Baroness (AKA Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn), traipsing around in French silk underwear with her two boyfriends was just too much. There was also jealousy provoked by the fact that they had written up their adventure for the Atlantic Monthly—but it was the Baroness who by virtue of her exotic lovelife captured the spotlight and reaped the rewards— gifts from wealthy American tourists. On his deathbed, Dr. Ritter would later speculate that he was being punished for thinking so often of killing the Baroness!
"The nudism so widely touted in the papers is more or less a figment of the imagination. We have a picture of the only nudist on the island—the Wittmer infant…" Waldo Schmitt Papers, Record Unit 7312, box 87.
The story of colonists Arthur and Margarete Wittmer is shorter. They were a happy, relatively ordinary couple who had come to the Island with their children to escape Germany’s post-war financial meltdown. In retrospect, the Wittmers come off like the stars of a television sitcom—normal people surrounded by a cast of Charles Island’s daffy supporting characters.
The press wasn’t filled with racy stories about them, and if wealthy Americans came to visit the family, it didn’t make the papers. The best account of the Wittmers among Smithsonian scientist Waldo Schmitt’s papers comes from a translation of Danish travel writer Hakon Mielche’s account of his visit to Charles Island, Monsumens Reise:
"Wittmer was a quiet, ordinary man, who lived in a quiet, exceptionally beautiful stone house in the middle of a well kept garden. He had a sweet and natural wife and his two children were less noisy and more well-behaved than children usually are…
[Wittmer’s] story is sadly commonplace... German office worker…then the war came and threw him into the trenches…then completely nerve broken when he returned. No job, but a small capital. The inflation took care of that. He tried everything, but nothing would succeed…Sitting here in the quiet room and going through the hard conditions after the war…in spite of the distance in miles and years, his hands still shake and his voice trembles.
Then he broke out of it one day and came over here with his wife and young son. Then began peace and recovery. He is a happy man, and his wife and children thrive…No boxes of gifts are carried up to Wittmer’s house [as they are to the Baroness’], but it is perhaps therefore that his eyes are calm and his children happy. He drew in at his pipe while his children played with a Shepherd dog puppy, and his peace is comfortable."
The last words of Mielche’s chapter on Charles Island is prophetic:
"When Ritter and the Baroness have broken each other down to the level of the ground, when Paradise and Eden have gone down to smoking Hell, Wittmer will still be sitting outside his little comfortable house, sucking his pipe."
*Excerpts from “Monsumens Reise”, H. Mielche. Translated by Miss Deichmann. Waldo Schmitt Papers, RU 7231, Box 88.
In our next and final installment: bodies are found, and tragedy strikes Charles island. | <urn:uuid:485019fd-1fc6-4850-a05c-6097c950a996> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://siarchives.si.edu/blog/empress-galapagos-islands-part-3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393442.26/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00106-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977233 | 1,592 | 2.875 | 3 |
Tomorrow's smart car is likely to give drivers considerable control of their interaction with the telematics interface. The driver will most likely use a voice recognition interface when driving and a touch-screen interface when stopped. After all, driving-by itself-makes many demands of the human in the driver's seat. So it's important to ask:
- What is likely to happen when telematics brings into the vehicle lots of additional sensory detail?
- Will the system turn out to be more hindrance than help? Will drivers have enough control over the systems to protect themselves from distracting input?
- If drivers don't have control, who or what will make those decisions and on what basis?
These and similar questions must be answered before we can realize the full potential of tele-matics. But to get the answers, we must first ground ourselves in the findings of human factors research, especially research into how the brain deals with input.
Most such research related to driver and passenger behavior relies on indirect measures to quantify the effects of potential distractions. Most of these are related to the eyes, given the importance of vision to driving. The duration, frequency and scanning patterns of drivers' glances are fairly common measures. Also useful are driver-vehicle performance measures, such as lane-keeping, speed maintenance, car-following performance and driver reaction times to objects and events.
Another category of measures focuses on driver control actions, such as steering wheel inputs, accelerator modulations, gear shifting, brake pedal applications and hands-off-the-wheel time. These are used to infer the extent to which the driver is distracted during an experiment.
Finally, measures of task completion time have been used, or are proposed for use, as an index of the distraction potential of a device. As a last resort, subjective assessments of driver workload and device design are brought to bear.
Recent research in which IBM participated at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute has started to explore the differences in the level of driver distraction based on the type of speech (recorded or synthetic) as well as type of message (navigational messages, short e-mail messages or longer news stories).
The current research into human factors leads us to think of the role of technology in terms of three broad categories: safety, comfort and efficiency.
Safety is above all. Ideally, a telematics system will implement diagnostic routines to let you know when your car is in a dangerous state and you have to pull off the road. For example, when your engine is overheating. If you have an accident, an automatic collision-notification component of the system will try to analyze accident severity and report your location along with transmitting an automatic distress call. In case of vehicle breakdown, your location and the car's diagnostic information will be reported automatically to a dispatcher.
In terms of comfort, telematics systems will expand on the role already played by embedded systems in many vehicles. The car's temperature, seat and the position of steering wheel and mirrors will all be adjusted through the system.You will get traffic updates and accident reports combined with a navigation system to route you around problem areas.
To successfully address the many roles technology can play as a driver assistant, a framework for the human-computer interactions must be developed.
One of the main problems is the potential for information overload from all the incoming messages or notifications. Therefore a notification framework must be developed that specifies an organized, systematic way for how the device will communicate with the driver. Such a framework for an in-vehicle driver information system (Ivis) must take into account two distinct types of communication possible between the driver and the Ivis: synchronous and asynchronous.
In synchronous communication the driver acts and the Ivis responds with visual or audible feedback. Because the driver initiates synchronous communication, the response from the Ivis is expected. By contrast, in asynchronous communication the Ivis notifies the driver of an event, such as an emergency, a phone call or new e-mail. The driver does not anticipate this communication and therefore it must be disseminated carefully, maybe even sparingly, to reduce the likelihood of distracting the driver.
Driver notification in today's conventional cars is limited to sound cues and a few status lights on the dashboard. The driver is notified that something requires attention, but few details are available until the driver takes the car to a service center. In an automobile with a speech-based Ivis it will be tempting to have the Ivis begin speaking as soon as the system becomes aware of a problem or concern. But how many of these can the driver handle and still drive safely? To answer this question we need to consider how drivers manage their tasks and, specifically, how they respond to speech-based vs. visual-based input.
One approach to the brain's processing of input focuses on the ways drivers manage their tasks. Some initial data suggests that drivers may not prioritize and manage speech-based tasks effectively. For example, studies have shown that a concurrent verbal task may increase a driver's propensity to take risks and that he or she may not compensate appropriately when verbal interactions slow reaction times. In short, drivers may not fully recognize the distractions of speech-based interaction and may fail to compensate for the distraction they cause. Unfortunately, research on speech communication with cell telephones and standard concurrent verbal tasks is not helpful because they are fundamentally different from talking to a computer.
The special demands of navigating a complex menu structure may introduce a cognitive load that may compete with the spatial demands of driving in a way that a conversation would not. In addition, current in-vehicle computers cannot modulate their interaction with the driver as a function of the immediate driving situation.
Interaction with a speech-based system may prove to be less distracting than conversations with a passenger because it's easier to end a conversation with a machine. Further research is needed to clarify these matters for us before we fully implement telematics systems.
What we know about driver task management makes clear that telematics designs must take into account the brain's processing of speech-based vs. visual-based input. But the research on the suitability of one over the other is mixed. One set of answers is based in what's called the "multiple resource" capability of the brain. According to this theory, speech-based interaction will distract a driver less than a visual display from the primary task of manually controlling the car. Speech-based interaction demands the resources associated with auditory perception, verbal working memory and vocal response, while driving itself demands the resources associated with visual perception, spatial working memory and manual response. Because these resources are independent, time sharing should be quite efficient.
However, other points of view are in ready supply. Some researchers, for example, are concerned that the attention demands that speech-based interaction may place on common central-processing resources might undermine time sharing and compromise driving safety. We'll be able to better understand how speech-based interaction might undermine safety if we set aside theories about time sharing and focus instead on theories that see the brain as a single-channel entity with limited capacity.
A long-term goal of telematics human factors engineers is the establishment of a workload-management framework. Much effort in this regard is in progress at the University of Michigan. A workload-management component would decide what information to give the driver and when to give it. Decisions would be based on a wide range of variables, including weather, road conditions, driving speed, driver's heart rate, time of day and importance of the message. The workload manager would decide whether to allow a distraction to reach the driver.
While ideas about workload management are brought to maturity, IBM is working on an Ivis that alerts the driver to pending information with a subtle tone (earcon) or by turning on a status light (driver's choice). This lets the driver make a decision about when to listen to the message | <urn:uuid:aa8f196b-a438-4179-87e4-4f870eded3c6> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1225092 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392527.68/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00070-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944927 | 1,610 | 3.09375 | 3 |
Week Five: Handy Plants
Hello again, Green Hour visitors! Today I’d like to share a “handy” and creative way to get your kids engaged in flower and seed exploration. This activity will stimulate wonder and an appreciation for nature.
Summertime is an excellent time to take your little sprouts out and about for a seed search. Seeds have amazing ways of traveling, from floating through the air (think dandelions) to stowing away on a squirrel’s tail. It’s important for some seeds to travel away from the plants that they came from in order to find a spot of soil all their own.
Gather some stow-away seeds yourself!
- Get an old, itchy sock (the kind no one likes to wear or that’s missing a mate) or a knit winter glove. Have your child place her hand inside the sock or glove. Then, take a walk together outdoors.
- Seek out grassy areas or flower patches that are past the blooming stage. Have your child gently run her hand over and through the grass and across the flower tops. Experiment with a variety of vegetation. Soon, you’ll have tagalong visitors (seeds!) clinging to the knitwear.
- Take the sock or glove home and place some soil inside of it. Or “plant” it in a flower pot with soil, placing the glove just a quarter inch from the soil’s surface or so. Place it near a sunny window and water it. Then wait to see what grows!
See you next week!
Check out all of Jennifer Ward’s outdoor activity ideas:
- Week One: Let’s Go Outside!
- Week Two: A “Bugly” Scavenger Hunt
- Week Three: Get Out and Grow Some Bubbles!
- Week Four: Bird Nest Discovery
Happy trails out in nature! | <urn:uuid:7738a191-b16d-431f-8d34-877c65681780> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://blog.nwf.org/2009/08/week-five-handy-plants/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397865.91/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00164-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922594 | 401 | 3.078125 | 3 |
Plotting fourier series approximation of F(t)
I'm new to matlab and have a question for a class i'm taking. I've worked out everything except for the last part - which i'm absolutely stuck on...
F(t) is the function;
f(t) = t-1 for 1<t<2
= t for 0 <t<1
I had to determine a fourier representation of this analytically which is all done, but now I have absolutely no idea how to do a fourier series approximation in Matlab. I've checked countless sites and books but they typcailly go into heaps of detail and I get lost after a few lines of code...
Any help would be appreciated. | <urn:uuid:a3b7a37e-4acd-4cdc-92b3-908cfee13d26> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://mathhelpforum.com/calculus/56571-plotting-fourier-series-approximation-f-t-print.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395560.69/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00162-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959418 | 154 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Scotland could phase out all fossil fuel and nuclear power by 2030, maintain a secure electricity supply and generate significant revenue from renewable exports, according to new research by one of the world's leading energy consultants, Garrad Hassan.
Power of Scotland Secured cover pictureIt's now widely recognised that renewables could grow to comfortably exceed our electricity demand by 2020. But The Power of Scotland Secured shows that, contrary to popular myth, the variability of renewable power need not threaten the security of supply in Scotland, even in the context of a full phase out of conventional thermal power.
In fact, the transmission infrastructure required to keep the lights on at times of low renewables output will be easily justified by the value of exports which it will make possible at times of high output.
Moreover, if home heating and transport are electrified in line with the recommendations in this analysis, and modest demand management achieved, a 100% renewable grid system in Scotland could make overall household ‘triple fuel’ bills lower than in conventional scenarios.
This research was commissed by Friends of the Earth Scotland, and the summary published with generous assistance from WWF and RSPB. | <urn:uuid:4bce6b14-f42a-4ebe-bc95-316f1458ac54> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.foe-scotland.org.uk/power-secured | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396224.52/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00109-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935804 | 233 | 2.859375 | 3 |
December 29, 1996 |
Four rebel leaders stepped off a jet called "The Wings of Peace" here Saturday, returning from exile to a city they once hoped to capture. A military band played a popular tune, and hundreds of rebel supporters cheered as aging guerrilla commanders Pablo Monsanto, Rolando Moran, Carlos Gonzalez and Jorge Rosal arrived at Guatemala's international airport. "We are thrilled to return to Guatemala and to finally achieve peace," Monsanto said. "I hope we will have a country with justice."
December 23, 1996 |
As Guatemalans prepare to formally end 35 years of civil war by signing a peace pact Sunday, they strongly disagree about whether the accords negotiated over five years and two administrations will correct the injustice and poverty that originally caused Latin America's oldest guerrilla conflict. Negotiated in six parts--one of them, agricultural policy, was discussed for more than a year--the agreement was designed to provide peaceful solutions to a war that has cost more than 100,000 lives.
December 5, 1996 |
Guatemalan rebels and the government signed a cease-fire Wednesday that they hope will end Central America's longest civil war, a 35-year conflict that has killed 140,000 people. The cease-fire is one of three accords to be signed in Europe over six days, leading to a final peace pact signing Dec. 29 in Guatemala City. "With this agreement we sign today, the weapons will be silenced forever," rebel commander Rolando Moran said at Oslo City Hall.
November 13, 1996 |
Signing an accord next month to end 35 years of civil war in Guatemala may well prove easier than keeping the peace after Latin America's longest rebellion ends, analysts warned Tuesday. The day after the government and guerrillas announced in Chile and Mexico, respectively, that the peace agreement will be signed Dec. 29, experts who have been following negotiations closely took a hard look at whether the accords will bring the "lasting peace" that both sides have promised.
November 12, 1996 |
Guatemala has reached a peace agreement to end Latin America's longest civil war, Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu and the country's rebels announced separately Monday. The accord ushers in "a final period" of a 35-year war that has taken more than 100,000 lives, and it will be signed Dec. 29 in Guatemala City, Arzu told a summit of Ibero-American presidents meeting here. Later in the day, the Guatemalan guerrillas and the U.N.
November 9, 1996 |
Guatemala has agreed to resume peace talks with leftist rebels after the leader of a guerrilla group linked to a kidnapping agreed to step out of the negotiations. The U.N.-sponsored talks, which had been running smoothly for months, were abruptly suspended Oct. 28 after rebel commander Rafael Augusto Valdizon was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping a member of an influential family. Police briefly jailed Valdizon but let him go in return for the freeing of 86-year-old Olga Alvarado de Novella. | <urn:uuid:b33e65a9-9b5d-40b6-a592-0a9c4d3fd0b7> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/guerrillas-guatemala | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395160.19/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00009-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957258 | 627 | 2.546875 | 3 |
On 18th Zilhaja, 632, Muhammad after performing farewell pilgrimage, halted at the plain of Ghadir Khum, where he declared Ali bin Abu Talib as his successor.
Imam Sultan Muhammad Shah had called a Conference in Evian, France known as the Evian Conference between July 4, 1952 and July 8, 1952 to discuss various economic and social problems confronting the African Ismailis and also to make necessary amendments in the Constitution of the African Councils.
The Post-Alamut period in Ismaili history discloses itself with the Imamate of Mowlana Shamsiddeen Muhammed and is punctuated by the Imamate of Mowlana Shah Khalilillahi Aly.
Imam Shah Karim Al-Husayni was born on Sunday, the 13th of December, 1936, in Geneva, to Aly Solomone Khan and Princess Tajudowleh. From early on, him and his brother were under the care and training of their illustrious grandfather.
The Imamate of Imam Sultan Muhammed Shah is witness to a glorious period in Ismaili history, as portrayed by the illustrious presentation of the Jubilees, where the followers weighed their Imam physically against gold, diamond and platinum respectively, and subsequently placed these in humble submission to the Imam. The Imam graciously returned these in the sole endeavour of uplifting the economic and educational conditions of His Jamat.
Imam Sultan Muhammed Shah, the Aga Khan III, was born on Friday, the 2nd of November, 1877, in Karachi, Pakistan during the Imamat of his grandfather Imam Aga Hasan Aly Shah. He went to Europe in 1897, and spent most of his life there (Aziz, 1974).
Mowlana Imam Aly Shah had married five wives one after another, the third of which promised the Imam his successor, Sultan Muhammed Shah. Within a span of less than one year, his two eldest sons died, and the Imam himself fell sick and died also in the same year, vesting the Light of Imamate in his young eight-year old son, Aga Sultan Muhammed Shah (Aziz, 1974).
Mowlana Imam Ali Shah, the Aga Khan II, was born in 1830AD, in Mahalat, Iran. During the Imamate of his father, he himself had been appointed the Pir. During this time, he had travelled alongside the Imam and had visited the jamats all over India.
After the death of the King, Imam Hasan Aly Shah continued to enjoy the good pleasure of the newly enthroned grandson, much to the chagrin of the other political bodies. After such envy turned into rising political tension and armed conflict, the Imam was forced to leave Iran for good and travelled through Afghanistan to Sind, Pakistan, and finally choosing to settle down in Bombay, India. In due course, Imam Hasan Aly Shah was conferred the title of His Highness by Queen Victoria of Britain.
Mowlana Imam Hasan Aly Shah was born in Mahalat, Iran, in 1805AD. He would succeed his father, who had been murdered by a group of fanatics, at the young age of thirteen years. King Fatehali Qachar sentenced the assassins and their leader and became a great source of comfort to the young Imam and his followers. He gave the Imam his daughter in marriage and bestowed upon him the title of Aga Khan, meaning Lord of the Chiefs. He became known as Aga Khan I (Aziz, 1974).
Shah Fatehali ascended the throne of Iran in 1798AD. Imam Khalilillahi Ali had four sons and two daughters. He was murdered at the age of eighty years by some Ithnasheri fanatics in Yezd in 1817AD. He was buried in Najjaf, and was succeeded by his son Agha Shah Hasanali. His Imamat had lasted a period of thirty-nine years.
Imam Khalilillahi Aly was born in Kerman in 1749AD. At the age of two years he joined his father in Mahalat, and was brought under the care of his uncle Pir Mirza Muhammed Baqir. He would marry his uncle's daughter, Bibi Maryam Khatoon, by whom he would have his son, Agha Hasanali Shah (Aziz, 1974).
Imam Abyl Hasan Ali moved to Shahr-i Babak in Kirman, mainly to ensure the safety of the Ismaili pilgrims from the plundering tribesman who had thus far posed much difficulty to the pilgrims as they were on their way to the Anjudan and Mahallat regions where the Imam had previously resided. Sayed Fateh Ali Shah who had visited the Imam in Shahr-i Babak alludes to the Imam's location in northern iran ('sehentar deep') in one of his ginans. Mowlana Imam Abyl Hasan Ali passed away in Mahallat and was buried in Najaf, Iraq (Sadik Ali, 1997).
Imam Qasim Ali appointed his teenaged son Sayyid Abul Hasanali as the Pir. The latter, also known as Pir Shah Hasan Baig, was the forty-second Pir of the Ismailis, and at his father's death, was appointed as the next Imam in the succession of the Holy Imams (Aziz, 1974).
Imam Qasim Ali, also known as Agha Jafer Shah, was born in Kahek in 1675 AD, and succeeded to the Throne of Imamat at the age of twenty years (Aziz, 1974).
During the Imamate of Imam Hassan Aly, Ismaili dawat spread to Turkey, Armenia, and Crimea (Aziz, 1974). According to his will, he was buried in Najjaf, Iraq, after ruling as Imam of the Time for thirty-five years. He was followed in succession by his son Imam Qassim Ali (Aziz, 1974).
Mowlana Sayed Ali, also known as Shah Ismail, Agha Hasan Shah and Shah Abul-Hasan Baig, shifted his primary residence from Kahek to Kerman, after being offered governorship of the province by the Safawi court (Aziz, 1974). After appointing his son, Hasan Ali, to the Throne of Imamate, Imam Sayed Ali passed away in Kerman in 1661 AD (Sadik Ali, 1997).
Mowlana Imam Nizar rebuilt the city of Kahek and shifted his residence hereto from Anjudan (Aziz, 1974). An Ismaili dai, and a descendent of Pir Sadirdeen, by the name of Sayed Abdul Nabi, lived during this period in India and preached mostly in Gujrat. Imam Nizar passed away in Kahek, his body buried in his palace, which served as a mausoleum also for other members of the Imam's family. (Sadik Ali, 1997).
The last Imam to live in Anjudan, Imam Khalilillahi Ali remained aloof from the political instability which prevailed throughout Iran at this time. During this time, Pir Naseer Mohammed was followed by Pir Agha Hashem in the line of Piratan. Sayyid Daood, an acclaimed vakil, was appointed by the Imam to govern the religious affairs in the jamats of India. The Imam was followed in succession by his son Sayyid Nizar Ali in 1585.
After the death of his father, Pir Qasim Shah bin Pir Alauddin, Pir Naseer Muhammed was appointed to Piratan by Imam Nooruddin Ali. He was the 33rd Pir of the Ismailis. During the Imamate of Imam Nooruddin Ali, the devout Ismaili poet, Khaki Khorasani was imprisoned by the Mogul king Humayoon of India, and died in prison (Aziz, 1974). The Imam passed away in Anjudan and consigned the office of Imamate to his son, Khalilillahi Aly. | <urn:uuid:2b42724c-23ee-460d-ab5f-50c652fde343> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.ismaili.net/heritage/last_node/history_event | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402479.21/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00021-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984739 | 1,683 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Fuel efficiency will be a major concern during the eighth annual "Physics Day" at Hope College on Thursday, May 2.
In the event's traditional design and construction contest, which will be held in the Dow Center beginning at 9 a.m., teams of students from eight Michigan high schools have been challenged to create vehicles powered by the air from a balloon.
They've been told that their vehicle will need to reach a target located between five and 12 meters (16-39 feet) away--they'll learn the exact distance on the morning of the contest. The winning team will be chosen based on how close its vehicle came to the target in two trials.
The teams are free to choose the form their vehicle takes, working within just a few general parameters: all of the energy supply must come from the air-filled balloon; the vehicle can't leave behind a launch pad or other parts; the vehicle can't be touched once it's started its run; and the vehicle has to carry a light cargo--a small Physics Day decal that will be provided just before the contest.
The contest is one of three events in which the four-member teams will compete. Later in the morning, they will have a chance to solve a physics problem presented to them at the time, using only their wits and materials provided. Following lunch, each team will solve a set of physics problems.
Physics Day is coordinated by the college's department of physics and engineering. The two teams that earn the highest scores through the three events will receive a monetary prize to support the teaching of science at their respective high schools.
The schools participating this year include: Bangor High School, Battle Creek Math and Science Center, Holland Christian High School, Hudsonville High School, Owosso High School, Rockford High School, St. Joseph High School and West Ottawa High School. | <urn:uuid:a1f8aa36-43ae-439e-bf75-67b2fb410497> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.hope.edu/print/4505 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402746.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00093-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980163 | 379 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Patent ambiguity is an uncertainty that clearly appears on the face of an instrument. Such an ambiguity will appear in the language of the document. In such documents, the court, reading the language in the light of all the facts and circumstances referred to in the instrument would not be able to derive therefrom the intention of the parties.
When used in the context of wills, patent ambiguity is an ambiguity appearing upon the face of the instrument, for example, a bequest to "some" of the six children of the testator's brother.
Patent ambiguity is also known as intrinsic ambiguity or ambiguitas patens.
The following is an example of a case law defining the term:
A patent ambiguity is that which appears on the face of the instrument, and arises from the defective, obscure, or insensible language used. In contrast, a latent ambiguity arises from extraneous or collateral facts which make the meaning of a written agreement uncertain although the language thereof, on its face, appears clear and unambiguous. [Allegheny Int'l v. Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corp., 40 F.3d 1416, 1424 (3d Cir. 1994)]. | <urn:uuid:373f83e0-0fae-43ec-93bd-fde867493329> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://definitions.uslegal.com/p/patent-ambiguity/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783400572.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155000-00130-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931414 | 240 | 2.65625 | 3 |
The unique collection of galleries and museums on Berlin Museum Island, with its five temple-like buildings, houses treasures from 6,000 years of human history. Elevated to UNESCO World Heritage status in 1999, and located in Berlin's historical centre, the complex is the centrepiece of the city's museum network and is Europe's largest cultural investment project.
The Scottish historian John Strang once wrote that it would take several days to see all of the many thousands of artistic treasures housed in the Berlin museum. That was at a time when there was just one museum on this island in the river Spree: the Museum of the Ancient World, built in 1830 to designs by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and the first public museum in Prussia. Then followed the New Museum in 1859, the Old National Gallery in 1876, the Bode Museum in 1904 and the Pergamon Museum in 1930. The buildings on Berlin Museum Island house mainly 19th century art and the archaeological collections, which contain such treasures as the Ishtar Gate, the Pergamon Altar, the Market Gate of Miletus, the bust of Nefertiti and the Berlin Gold Hat from the Bronze Age. Post-reunification, the collections that had been dispersed between East and West Berlin were gradually reunited. Objects that been put into storage elsewhere as a result of war damage were also restored to their original places in the museums. The New Museum, for example, had been left as a ruin for around 60 years until it was restored and rebuilt by British star architect David Chipperfield. A new building, the James Simon Gallery, will soon serve as the main entrance to the entire Museum Island. An archaeological promenade will link the various museums and galleries both spatially and thematically as well as providing an extraordinary panorama of cultures from around the world.
Pergamon Museum (Collection of Classical Antiquities, Museum of Islamic Art, Museum of the Ancient Near East), the New Museum (Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection, and the Museum of Prehistory and Early History):
Monday to Sunday 10am to 6pm, Thursday till 8pm
From Autumn 2014, the Pergamon Altar in the Pergamon Museum is to be closed to the public for approx. five years.
Museum of the Ancient World, Bode Museum (Sculpture Collection, Museum of Byzantine Art and Numismatic Collection) and Old National Gallery:
Tuesday to Sunday 10am to 6pm, Thursday until 8pm
#contentName# is part of the '#routeName#' UNESCO route. Other stops on the route are:
UNESCO World Heritage sites:
Other towns and cities worth seeing:
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Dve korisne kombinacije tastera za zumiranje u internet-pregledniku:
Dodatnu pomoć možete dobiti od ponuđača internet-preglednika, klikom na ikonu: | <urn:uuid:c87aa925-f28c-45a8-8410-8756788d9485> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.germany.travel/rs/gradovi-i-kultura/svetska-bastina-unesco-a/berlin-museum-island.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391519.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00069-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.909465 | 686 | 2.8125 | 3 |
This article and detailed wiring diagram explain how to wire the common household receptacle. The 15A, 125V receptacle is the most widely used device in your home.
This is your standard receptacle that powers everything from your toaster to your TV. Whether you are replacing or adding a receptacle, here’s how to connect them.
Always ensure that the power is off before working on any circuit!
Step #1- Make sure that the circuit is properly grounded. When installing or replacing a receptacle, connect the ground wire first. When removing an old receptacle, disconnect the ground wire last. The ground or bonding wire should be connected to the bonding screw in the device box, and either pig-tailed (in the case of more than one conductor), or left long enough to connect to the green grounding / bonding terminal on the receptacle.
Step #2 – Connect the neutral wire (s) next. They connect to the silver terminals that correspond with the longer vertical prong on the face of the receptacle.
Step #3 – Then connect the black (or red) hot wire (s). They connect to the brass terminals that correspond with the shorter vertical prong on the face of the receptacle.
Our sample receptacle has two cables entering the device box, and in this first diagram we are using the device terminals to complete the circuit.
Note that this is a practice that is not accepted by everyone, so check with your local electrical authority.
*Click on images to enlarge.
The second method is to connect the receptacle by the use of “pig-tail” splices so that the receptacle is connected to only one set of conductors.
In your home, most of the receptacles will have at least two cables entering the same box. The second cable is usually feeding another receptacle, however, it could also be coming from a light or switch.
If you have only one cable entering the device box, tighten the unused screws to avoid them coming in contact with the metal box (if using a metal box), or to mitigate the risk of the unused terminals coming in to contact with the bare ground wire when installing the device in place.
There are many other types of receptacles that you may find around the house, like 20A, or 15/20A, 125V Receptacles, GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupter) Receptacles, electric Dryer Receptacles (30A, 125/250V), and electric Range Receptacles (50A, 125/250V), to name a few. | <urn:uuid:81736ac9-f31f-4641-93a1-aea018fa1281> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.electrical-online.com/wiring-receptical/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395546.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00032-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.895445 | 535 | 3.390625 | 3 |
Last name origins & meanings:
- Scottish: habitational name from Buchanan, a place near Loch
Lomond, perhaps named with Gaelic buth chanain ‘house of the
- The name Buchanan was brought independently to North America from
Scotland by several different bearers in the 17th and 18th centuries.
George Buchanan came to MD in 1698.
Comments for Buchanan | <urn:uuid:5eb8469b-2a20-4a4a-96ef-3decb1b999de> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://genealogy.familyeducation.com/surname-origin/buchanan | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396224.52/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00065-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965921 | 82 | 2.84375 | 3 |
In our normal, microeconomic world it is not a big deal when excess demand emerges in one market and excess supply emerges in another--it is, in fact, a good thing, because it induces shifts in production that make the structure of what is made correspond more closely to what people want (or perhaps to what the people with money want). There is excess demand in one industry. Sales exceed production, inventories fly off the shelves, and cupboards and supply chains become bare. Producers and entrepreneurs see large profit opportunities if they expand production to rebuild inventories and satisfy higher demand--and they do. They expand factories. They run more shifts. They offer workers more money for overtime, they offer workers more money to stay with their firm, and they offer workers not in the industry more money to come on over.
Where does the added supply of workers to swell the ranks of those in the industry whose products are in excess demand come from? From the industry whose products are in excess supply. There, producers see inventories piling up on their shelves. They are forced to liquidate products and lines of business at a loss. They are forced to lay off some workers, and lay off others lest they lose all their capital.
Overall unemployment may rise a bit or for a while as this process of adjustment takes place--it depends whether entrepreneurs and producers in the expanding industry where excess demand emerges are more or less on the ball, keen-eyed, and keen-witted than those in the industry where excess supply emerges and where businesses shrink. But the process of adjustment, even with frictional unemployment while it takes place, is a good thing--it makes us all richer. Attempts to stop it in its tracks or short-circuit its mechanisms are counterproductive and harmful. The end of the process comes and excess demand and supply are eliminated when there are more people making the things that are wanted more and fewer people making the things that are wanted less.
But in macroeconomics things are different. The excess supply is economy-wide--throughout all commodity markets, producing supply in excess of demand for goods, services, labor, and capacity. Producers and entrepreneurs respond to an aggregate demand shortfall just as individual producers respond to a particular shortfall of demand for their products: they hold sales to liquidate inventories, they cut prices, they cut wages to try to preserve margins, they fire workers. In the macroeconomic case, the dynamic process that leads to the elimination of excess supply and its counterbalancing excess demand in the microeconomic case gets underway--or, rather, half of it gets underway.
The problem is that the set of industries that are shrinking is made up of pretty-much-everybody. There are no industries that are expanding. The excess demand is not for the products of a goods-and-services producing industry that can rapidly ramp-up production by employing lots more labor. The excess demand is in finance: for means-of-payment, or safe high-quality assets, or for long-duration sales vehicles. There is a rise in unemployment from the flow out of goods-and-services producing industries where the excess supply has appeared. But there is no countervailing flow out of unemployment. How do you put large numbers of people to work making more Federal Reserve notes or increasing the supply of liquid assets that are means-of-payment that are the reserve deposits of banks? How do you shift the flow of production to instantaneously raise the stock of long-duration assets, of claims to wealth that are shares in companies with secure long-run prospects that are vehicles for moving purchasing power across time from the present to the future? You can't.
Thus workers fall into unemployment from the excess supply in the goods and services industries. But no workers are pulled out of unemployment by expanding production in growing goods-and-services industries. Incomes fall as the unemployed sit idle. Asset prices jump in the financial markets until markets clear. But markets clear and excess demand in finance is eliminated with incomes reduced by the amount of the lost earnings of the unemployed. The excess supply in goods-and-services is also eliminated in this rationed-equilibrium situation: inventories are no longer growing--but that is because the unemployed are not making anything.
And there the economy sits.
Whether this is an "equilibrium" or not is a matter of taste and definition.
Supply equals demand market by market in the markets for goods, services, and assets. There are no falling inventories or rising inventories to signal that any branch of production should be expanded or contracted.
There are, however, lots of unemployed workers who would like jobs. Their existence should aid employers in their bargaining with workers. Wages should then fall. And when wages fall higher profits should induce employers to expand production even without any increase in spending. Eventually wages should fall low enough that the economy returns to full employment and to normal levels of production and capacity utilization even without any increase in asset supplies.
Or will it? Falling wages means that households have even less money. Some of them will default on their loans. Some banks will find that their reserves are no longer large enough to provide an ample cushion because of these loan defaults. They will cut back the number of deposits they accept--and the money supply will shrink as a result, producing another round of excess demand for financial assets. Or if they are not deposit- but are themselves bond-financed their bonds will suddenly become shaky in quality, and we will see the emergence of an excess demand for safe, high-quality financial assets. In either case, Walras's Law will kick in again and this excess demand will be reflected in another round of excess supply for goods, services, labor, and capacity. Relying on nominal deflation of wages to restore full employment runs the risk of creating yet another shock of excess demand in finance and excess supply in goods and services to deepen the depression. The hoped-for cure's first effect is to worsen the disease.
We trust the market to take care of a microeconomic excess-demand excess-supply situation in a few industries in a productive way in a short period of time. Do we trust the market to do the same way to a macroeconomic imbalance, to quickly resolve a depression in a productive way without help? No, we do not. Rather than relying on economy-wide deflation to eventually restore balance, we should pursue other alternatives. | <urn:uuid:c1d877d1-0c70-4fd5-9085-813d7f3b0a0d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/06/microeconomic-and-macroeconomic-excess-supply.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402516.86/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00058-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957092 | 1,309 | 2.609375 | 3 |
By Mia Davidson and Jan Sattler
Numerous sea shells, naturally deposited by the tides, can be found along the shore of Laguna Beach. Shells are the hard protective coverings formed by many marine invertebrates, animals lacking a backbone. Though shells may be familiar, the animals that create them frequently are not.
One of the most impressive shells often found in Laguna is the wavy top turban shell (Megastraea undosa). The color of this spiraling shell is a reddish-brown to dark gray that erodes to a pearly white as the shell is rubbed across the sand by water movement. The heavy shell can reach up to six inches in diameter and is the largest gastropod in California. When alive, the wavy top turbans are slow moving herbivores that feed mostly on kelp and coralline algae, living on the rocks in the low intertidal zone and in depths up to 60 feet. When the snail retracts into its shell, a tear-drop shaped trap door, known as calciferous operculum, seals the opening of the shell to protect the gastropod inside. The maximum lifespan of the wavy top turban is estimated to reach 12 years. Predators include sea stars, Kellet’s Whelks, octopi, lobsters and fish.
Opportunities for shell observation are numerous along the 7.5 miles of Laguna’s coast. They are an important coastal resource that provide habitat to other living organisms and help replenish the marine environment so they need to be left where they are found. Previously collected shells should not be returned to the ocean environment because they may contain biological material that can harm the ecosystem. If anyone feels compelled to return legally collected shells, they may be dropped off at Marine Safety Headquarters on Main Beach where they will be incorporated into the tidepool education programs. Laguna Beach is either a state marine reserve or a no-take state marine conservation area, thus there is absolutely no collecting of shells permitted.
Mia Davidson and Jan Sattler are residents of Laguna Beach, year-round ocean swimmers and board members of Laguna Ocean Foundation. Its mission is to preserve and protect the beaches, intertidal zone, watersheds, and ocean waters of Laguna Beach and to educate the public about these resources. For more information, go to www.lagunaoceanfoundation.org | <urn:uuid:4da93356-add5-4b2b-8d2b-919ec2383e13> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://www.lagunabeachindy.com/shore-scene-hiding-in-a-turban-top-home/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396887.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00146-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926461 | 498 | 3.21875 | 3 |
SHADE TREE DIVISION
In December of 1935, the Township Council adopted an ordinance providing for the control, Planting, protection, and improvement of shade trees and shrubbery upon the highways, and municipal parks and grounds of Teaneck. The Council authorized the Township Manager to appoint a tree surgeon to supervise the work of this newly created Shade Tree Division, and to see that the ordinance provisions were enforced. An experienced man was engaged, who took over his duties on April 20, 1936.
Teaneck has about 10,000 trees on its streets, and in its parks and grounds. Prior to the inception of the Shade Tree Division, practically no care other than in emergency had been given to these trees; so a great deal had to be done, and planning was required to decide what art of the work should receive first attention. A complete supply of tools was purchased, including pruning and crosscut saws, ropes, blocks and tackle, chain, cable, wedges, etc.; a new Ford V8 hydraulic dump truck was also ordered.
The tree work requiring immediate attention was the pruning of low hanging branches which obstructed sidewalks and interfered with vehicles, also, the removal of such dead, dying, and dangerous trees as were hazardous to pedestrians and motorists. This clearing began early in June and continued to late in October, with an interruption of three weeks when it became necessary to care for tree damages on the Municipal Building grounds, caused by a heavy wind. In the course of the main job, approximately forty-five mile3 of streets were covered, and 6,160 man hours of labor used. From October to the end of December, l00 dead or dying trees were removed.
After receiving bids from several nurserymen, the Township awarded contracts to two bidders to furnish young trees for street planting at wholesale prices to Teaneck residents. Under this arrangement, which is still open, approximately 250 young trees, mostly Norway maples, lindens, and pin oaks have been planted, and numerous replacements of dead trees were made in different parts of the town with trees from the municipal nursery. In addition to tree work, time is given to shrubbery and pruning in the parks and grounds.
Care is Given to Shade Trees, under Skilled Supervision
Introduction | Foreward | An Open Door | Teamwork in the Department | Department Personnel Department Equipment | Street Maintenance | Street Cleaning | Winter Conditions Sewer and Disposal System | Refuse and Garbage Disposal | Shade Tree Division | Weed Cutting | "Jack of All Trades" | Department Costs | <urn:uuid:dbab303e-1af3-45f2-a6b1-21887338a337> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://teaneck.org/virtualvillage/DPW/1937report/page13.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397562.76/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00010-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974129 | 531 | 2.84375 | 3 |
Animal Wildlife | Arctic Wolf | The Arctic wolf is found in the most northern parts of the wolf's range, in the Arctic Circle. Arctic wolves mainly inhabit Northern Canada and Alaska, parts of Greenland and Iceland and Northern Europe. Arctic wolves are incredibly versatile and adaptive animals, able to withstand year round sub-zero temperatures. Living in the Arctic Circle, the Arctic wolf spends five out of twelve months in total darkness.
The Arctic wolf hunts lemmings, assorted rodents, and Arctic hare but will take larger prey like caribou when available. When the Arctic wolf wants to hunt musk ox, the pack will gather and work as a team attempt to isolate it from the herd and take it. An adult musk ox is simply too big for one Arctic wolf to try and take on alone. Although the Arctic wolf is generally smaller in size than the grey wolf, Arctic wolves tend to be bulkier than grey wolves with the male Arctic wolves also growing larger than the female Arctic wolves.
Normally, only the alpha male Arctic wolf and female Arctic wolves breed, but if a pack gets too large it may break up into new smaller packs giving others the opportunity to mate. Due to the Arctic Circle's uncompromising permafrost soil and the difficulty it poses for digging dens, Arctic wolves often use rock outcroppings, caves or even shallow depressions as dens instead.
Arctic wolf pups are born in litters of two or three in the months of May and June, meaning that the Arctic wolf pups are born about a month later than the grey wolf pups. Arctic wolves tend to be white with brown irises, unlike most other subspecies of wolves with yellow to amber eyes. White fur gives them camouflage in a snowy environment, and the darker irises give added protection to the eyes in a high glare environment.
Tags: wolf online school, wolf checks, wolf mobile phones, wolf range hood, wolf lodge idaho, wolf tanning bed, wolf appliances discount, wolf tanning beds, wolf watch winder, wolf range hoods, wolf oven problems, aids wolf, discount wolf appliances, wolf refrigerator prices, wolf commercial range, wolf dishwasher, wolf watch winders, wolf hoods, wolf outdoor grills, great wolf deals | <urn:uuid:13f8242d-8c43-44c7-b544-39b05b4174a0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://animal-wildlife.blogspot.com/2011/10/arctic-wolf.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402699.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00003-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.898331 | 458 | 2.84375 | 3 |
Doctor Who companions
The Doctor is an alien. He is a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. He travels in his spaceship called the TARDIS. It allows him to go anywhere in time and space. "TARDIS" stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. The Doctor usually takes other people with him, who are usually called "companions" or "assistants". The Doctor and his companions travel through space and time, have a lot of adventures, and often save many people.
The character of the companion was there so that the people watching the series could identify and feel close to a character. The companions were often present-time humans. People could relate to them because they knew as much as the viewers. Because of this, the Doctor could explain things to his companions, and at the same time to the viewers.
Most of the Doctor's companions have been human. Many have been aliens or robots.
Companions are named under the Doctors they travelled with, and sorted by the order in which they appear.
First Doctor[change | change source]
Susan Foreman[change | change source]
Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford) was the Doctor's granddaughter. She escaped with him from the planet Gallifrey in a stolen TARDIS. From her grandfather, she has an advanced knowledge of history and science. Her first appearance was in An Unearthly Child. Her last appearance was In The Dalek Invasion of Earth. In that episode, she meets David Campbell (Peter Fraser), a young freedom fighter in the 22nd century. The Doctor locks her out of the TARDIS and forces her to stay behind with David.
Barbara Wright[change | change source]
Her first appearance was in An Unearthly Child. Suspicious of student Susan Foreman's strange knowledge of history and science, Barbara and Ian follow her home to the TARDIS. There they meet the Doctor. With him, they begin to travel through space and time.
In The Chase, after two years of travelling with the Doctor, Barbara and Ian use a Dalek time machine to return to London.
Ian Chesterton[change | change source]
His first appearance was in An Unearthly Child. Suspicious of student Susan Foreman's strange knowledge of history and science, Ian and Barbara follow her home to the TARDIS. There they meet the Doctor. With him, they begin to travel through space and time.
In The Chase, after two years of travelling with the Doctor, Barbara and Ian use a Dalek time machine to return to London.
Vicki[change | change source]
Vicki (Maureen O'Brien) first appeared in The Rescue. She was a survivor of a spaceship crash on the planet Dido in the 25th century. She is rescued by the Doctor. She travels with him, Ian, and Barbara. In The Myth Makers, Vicki meets an ancient warrior of Troy named Troilus. She decides to stay behind with him. She eventually passes into legend as Cressida. She also makes sure that the Trojan girl Katarina enters the TARDIS in her place.
Steven Taylor[change | change source]
Steven Taylor (Peter Purves) first appeared in The Chase. The Doctor and his companions, Ian, Barbara, and Vicki find Steven on the planet Mechanus, where he had crash-landed two years before. In The Savages, Steven stays behind to accept the responsibility of leading the combined society of Savages and Elders that are attempting a lasting peace.
Katarina[change | change source]
Katarina (Adrienne Hill) first appears in The Myth Makers. She is a handmaiden of the prophetess Cassandra, the princess of ancient Troy. After Vicki stays behind in Troy, Katarina takes her place. During The Daleks' Master Plan, Katarina is taken hostage by the escaped prisoner Kirksen. He demands that the Doctor take him to Kembel, a planet taken over by the Daleks. To prevent the Doctor giving in to Kirksen's demands, Katarina triggers the controls to the airlock she is being held in. That sends both her and her captor into the vacuum of space. She is the first companion in the series to die.
Sara Kingdom[change | change source]
Sara Kingdom (Jean Marsh) is a Space Security Agent inThe Daleks' Master Plan. She joins the Doctor in his fight, briefly travelling in the TARDIS to several different locations in time and space. When the Doctor activates the Time Destructor, a device that accelerates time, Sara cannot be saved. She ages and dies, her remains turning to dust. Sara is sometimes counted as a companion of the First Doctor, but sometimes not.
Dodo Chaplet[change | change source]
Dorothea "Dodo" Chaplet (Jackie Lane) first appeared at the end of The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve. Dodo wanders into the TARDIS, thinking it was a real police box. In The War Machines, Dodo decides to stay in 1966 London.
Polly[change | change source]
Polly (Anneke Wills) was a companion of the First and Second Doctor. She and Ben Jackson appeared first in The War Machines. She was secretary to Professor Brett, creator of the artificial intelligence known as WOTAN. She travels with the Doctor after he regenerated into the Second Doctor. In The Faceless Ones, they return to 1966 London. Polly and Ben decide to remain behind to resume their lives without disruption
Ben Jackson[change | change source]
Ben Jackson (Michael Craze) was a companion of the First and Second Doctor. He appeared first in The War Machines as an Able Seaman serving in the Royal Navy. In The Faceless Ones, they return to 1966 London, and Polly and Ben decide to stay.
Second Doctor[change | change source]
Jamie McCrimmon[change | change source]
James Robert "Jamie" McCrimmon (Frazer Hines) was from 18th century Scotland. He first appears in The Highlanders. He meets the Doctor, Ben and Polly after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. At the end of The War Games, the Time Lords take Jamie's and Zoe's memories away, and send each of them back to their original time and place.
Victoria Waterfield[change | change source]
Victoria Waterfield (Deborah Watling) is from Victorian England in 1866. She is the daughter of scientist Edward Waterfield (played by John Bailey). She first appears in The Evil of the Daleks. In Fury from the Deep, Victoria leaves the Doctor and Jamie and stays with a family named Harris in the 20th century.
Zoe Heriot[change | change source]
Zoe Heriot (Wendy Padbury) first appears in The Wheel in Space. She is on a space station in the 21st century. At the end of The War Games, the Time Lords take Zoe's and Jamie's memories away, and send each of them back to their original time and place.
Third Doctor[change | change source]
Liz Shaw[change | change source]
Elizabeth "Liz" Shaw (Caroline John) was a scientist and civilian member of UNIT. She first appeared in Spearhead from Space. She became a member of UNIT and met the newly regenerated Doctor. In Inferno, Liz decided to leave the Doctor and UNIT, and go back to the University of Cambridge.
Jo Grant[change | change source]
Jo Grant (Katy Manning) first appears in Terror of the Autons as a replacement assistant for the Doctor. In The Green Death, Jo falls in love with the scientist Professor Clifford Jones. She decides to marry Jones, and goes with him to the Amazon Rainforest.
Sarah Jane Smith[change | change source]
Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) was a companion of the third and fourth Doctors (Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker). Sarah Jane was known for feminism and strong affection with the Doctor. He called her his best friend. She is the most popular of the companions from the old series.[source?] She has appeared in the new series twice. She also has her own spinoff series.
Fourth Doctor[change | change source]
Harry Sullivan[change | change source]
Leela[change | change source]
Leela (Louise Jameson) first appeared in The Face of Evil. She was a warrior of the savage Sevateem tribe. The Sevateem tribe were the descendants of the crew of an Earth ship that crash landed on an unnamed planet in the far future. In The Invasion of Time, Leela falls in love with Andred, a Gallifreyan. Leela chooses to stay with Andred on the Doctor's home planet Gallifrey. K-9 Mark I stays with her.
K9[change | change source]
K9 (voiced by John Leeson) was a robot dog. There have been several models, K9 Mark I through Mark IV. The original K9 Mark I was given to the Doctor, but later stayed with the Doctor's companion Leela on Gallifrey. K9 Mark II stayed with Romana in E-Space. K9 Mark III and Mark IV were presents of the Doctor to Sarah Jane Smith.
Romana I[change | change source]
Romana II[change | change source]
Adric[change | change source]
Adric (Matthew Waterhouse) was a companion of the Fourth and Fifth Doctor. He was from the planet Alzarius in the parallel universe E-Space. He came with the Doctor to our universe. Adric dies in Earthshock, when the spaceship he is on crashes into prehistoric Earth.
Tegan Jovanka[change | change source]
Nyssa of Traken[change | change source]
Fifth Doctor[change | change source]
Vislor Turlough[change | change source]
Vislor Turlough (Mark Strickson) was an alien from the planet Trion. After a civil war he had been exiled to Earth, to the Brendon Public School. In Mawdryn Undead he met the Doctor and joined him. In Planet of Fire, Turlough left and returned to his home planet Trion.
Kamelion[change | change source]
Kamelion (voiced by Gerald Flood) was a shape-changing android and a companion of the Fifth Doctor. He first appears in The King's Demons, where he is controlled by the Master. The Doctor frees him and takes Kamelion with him. In Planet of Fire, Kamelion is destroyed.
Perpugilliam "Peri" Brown[change | change source]
Perpugilliam "Peri" Brown (Nicola Bryant) was a companion of the Fifth and Sixth Doctor. She first appears in Planet of Fire. After that, she travels with the Doctor. After the Doctor regenerates, Peri stays and travels with the Sixth Doctor.
Sixth Doctor[change | change source]
- Peri Brown (Nicola Bryant)
Melanie Bush[change | change source]
Melanie "Mel" Bush (Bonnie Langford) was a companion of the Sixth and Seventh Doctor. She was a computer programmer from 20th century England. Mel leaves the Doctor at the end of Dragonfire, to stay on Iceworld with Sabalom Glitz.
Seventh Doctor[change | change source]
- Melanie "Mel" Bush (Bonnie Langford)
Ace[change | change source]
Dorothy "Ace" McShane, (Sophie Aldred) first appears in Dragonfire, on the planet Iceworld, although Ace was from 20th century Earth. At the end of this story, Melanie Bush leaves the Doctor. She invites Ace to come with him. Ace stays the Doctor's companion until the first end of the series in 1989.
Eighth Doctor[change | change source]
Grace Holloway[change | change source]
Dr. Grace Holloway (Daphne Ashbrook) was the Doctor's companion in the 1996 television movie Doctor Who. Grace is a cardiologist from 1999 San Francisco. She accidentally kills the Seventh Doctor during an operation. Grace helps the Eighth Doctor fight the Master. In the end of the movie, the Eighth Doctor invites Grace to travel with him, but she says that she will stay on Earth.
Ninth Doctor[change | change source]
Rose Tyler[change | change source]
Adam Mitchell[change | change source]
Adam Mitchell (Bruno Langley) was the Doctor's companion for only two episodes. In 2012, he was a young English researcher. He worked for the American billionaire Henry van Statten. In the episode "Dalek" he was at van Statten's base, and at the end he went with the Doctor in the TARDIS. In "The Long Game" he is travelling with the Doctor and Rose, but Adam behaves badly. At the end of the episode, the Doctor takes Adam home.
Jack Harkness[change | change source]
Tenth Doctor[change | change source]
Mickey Smith[change | change source]
Mickey Smith (Noel Clarke) was Rose Tyler's boyfriend. He helped Rose and the Ninth Doctor several times. Later he travelled with the Tenth Doctor and Rose. At the end of "The Age of Steel", Mickey decided to stay in the parallel world to help fight the Cybermen. In "Journey's End", Mickey returned to this world, and at the end decided to stay here again.
Donna Noble[change | change source]
Martha Jones[change | change source]
Astrid Peth[change | change source]
Astrid Peth (Kylie Minogue) was the Doctor's companion during the 2007 Christmas special "Voyage of the Damned". She is from the planet Sto. Astrid is a waitress on the starship Titanic. Astrid helps the Doctor. She is killed while she saves him. After saving the Titanic, the Doctor realises that Astrid was still wearing a teleporter bracelet when she died. He tries to bring her back to life, but it does not work fully: Astrid now is a ghost-like energy being. In the end, the Doctor sends Astrid away to fly through the universe.
Wilfred Mott[change | change source]
Wilfred Mott (Bernard Cribbins) was the grandfather of Donna Noble. He first appeared in the 2007 Christmas special "Voyage of the Damned". He made his final appearance in the 2009 Christmas special "The End of Time".
Eleventh Doctor[change | change source]
Amy Pond[change | change source]
Rory Williams[change | change source]
Rory is often also called Rory Pond by the Doctor. Rory does not like the name. He thinks since he and Amy Pond got married, they should be Mr. and Mrs Williams. The Doctor prefers Mr. and Mrs. Pond. Rory is also known as the Last Centurion.
River Song[change | change source]
played by Alex Kingston
Craig Owens[change | change source]
Craig Owens was a man whose apartment the Doctor stayed in during The Lodger (2010). He returned in Closing Time (2011) to help the Doctor fight some cybermen hiding underneath a department store.
John Riddell[change | change source]
John Riddell was an English game hunter. The Doctor picked him up in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship (2012). He took him to a Silurian Ark ship to help stop it crashing into earth. He left after the episode and may not be considered a 'proper' companion.
Queen Nefertiti of Egypt[change | change source]
Queen Nefertiti (called 'Neffie' by the Doctor) helped the Doctor with a Silurian Ark ship that was going to crash into earth in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship (2012). After she left and went to Africa with big game hunter John Riddell.
Clara Oswald[change | change source]
Clara Oswald was a companion of the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors. Clara was called "the impossible girl".
Paternoster Gang[change | change source]
Twelfth Doctor[change | change source]
Other pages[change | change source]
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Doctor Who| | <urn:uuid:4ea74f6f-cb3c-4fa7-891a-36d039af3a98> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Wright_(Doctor_Who) | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393533.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00190-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94851 | 3,466 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Sorry, no matches found.
GREENR (Global Reference on the Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources) is a new online resource that offers authoritative content on the development of emerging green technologies and discusses issues on the environment, sustainability and more. GREENR is an important part of a new generation of Knowledge Portals from Gale, Cengage Learning designed with the user in mind.
GREENR is interactive and current, allowing users to navigate issue, organisation and country portals. A one-stop site, this resource includes:
- Customisable journals and news
- Contextual multimedia including videos
- Refereed case studies
- Unique commentaries
- Primary source documents
Updated daily, GREENR is aligned to student, faculty and researcher needs
GREENR's reliable content is organised in highly accessible, visually appealing research areas covering relevant categories from Acid Rain right the way through to Wildlife. Portals are continuously added to ensure that GREENR remains relevant, for instance new portals include the Copenhagen Accord and the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill 2010.
To give you an idea of the breadth of content in GREENR, here are just a few of the portals topics featured:
Animal Welfare, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Conservation, Drought, Economic Growth, Ecosystems, Energy Efficiency, Environmental Justice, Extinction, Grasslands, Mining, Poverty, Soil Erosion, and Waste. | <urn:uuid:c136d03b-6a0b-4c3c-9363-2dc19771eeb4> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://gale.cengage.co.uk/greenr.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398075.47/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00198-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.890118 | 286 | 2.90625 | 3 |
From 11:00PM PDT on Friday, July 1 until 5:00AM PDT on Saturday, July 2, the Shmoop engineering elves will be making tweaks and improvements to the site. That means Shmoop will be unavailable for use during that time. Thanks for your patience!
Ishmael explains ambergris a bit more: it’s a "soft, waxy... highly fragrant and spicy" substance that is "largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum" (92.1)
It’s found in the bodies of sick whales, although nobody’s sure if it’s the cause or the effect of the illness.
Ishmael develops a metaphor about finding this fragrant and precious substance in the decaying corpse of a sick animal—it’s like what St. Paul says about the soul being "sown in dishonor" and "raised in glory."
Ishmael concerns himself with making the point that whaling isn’t usually a gross, unclean business, the way the Rose-bud made it appear.
He claims that, if everything is done properly, whales’ corpses and their oil are "nearly scentless" (92.7) or at least just have a pleasant musk and perfume. | <urn:uuid:7c9c218b-3e44-485d-b7a8-03c6662b2704> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.shmoop.com/moby-dick/chapter-92-summary.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392099.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00115-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934202 | 288 | 2.796875 | 3 |
A short piece for the general audience of RTR radio, Perth, Australia.
(listen to the original audio podcast)
There are many reasons why climate change is also a legal issue. One reason is because climate change is expected to cause much displacement, which refers to population migration caused by the effects of climate change, which include rising sea levels, heavier floods, more frequent and severe storms, drought and desertification.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the World Bank and many other organisations warn that the effects of climate change will cause large-scale population movements. Climate displacement presents an urgent problem for the international community.
The existence and scope of such displacement are often established by reference to the likely numbers of displaced people. The most cited estimate is 200 million climate change migrants by 2050 or one person in every forty-five.
There has been no coordinated response by governments to address human displacement, whether domestic or international, temporary or permanent, due to climate change. Given the nature and magnitude of the problem which climate change displacement presents, ad hoc measures based on existing domestic regimes are likely to lead to inconsistency, confusion and conflict. We believe the international community has an obvious interest in resolving the problem of human displacement in an orderly and coordinated fashion before climate change displacement becomes a problem.
We propose a multilateral Convention to address climate change displacement – an issue which is global in its causes, scope and consequences. The Convention would provide a general framework for assistance to climate change displaced persons and would address gaps in current human rights, refugee and humanitarian law protection.
The Convention would largely operate prospectively; assistance to refugees would be based on an assessment of whether their environment was likely to become uninhabitable due to events consistent with anthropogenic climate change such that resettlement measures and assistance were necessary. In other words, we view displacement as a form of adaptation that creates particular vulnerabilities requiring protection as well as assistance through international cooperation. Our Convention contemplates the provision of pre-emptive resettlement to those most at risk in terms of the impacts of climate change.
It has been suggested that Australia should take the lead in international efforts to develop a framework for responding to climate change displacement. The broader region in which Australia is situated accounts for 60% of the world’s population; it is also a region that will be significantly affected by the effects of climate change.
And, as has been noted, planning for a future of mass displacement due to climate change gives us the opportunity – before millions of people are on the move throughout the world because of climate change – … to develop frameworks and institutions that might not only be politically realistic, but also based on principles that promote human rights and dignity.
An extended version of this post with considerably more detail and background information can be found at Shaping Tomorrow's World, a website dedicated to providing information and a platform for civil discussion about the problems facing our societies.
Posted by David Hodgkinson on Wednesday, 20 April, 2011
|The Skeptical Science website by Skeptical Science is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.| | <urn:uuid:f7a322eb-f196-452b-8fd8-c944251867da> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?n=704 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402746.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00150-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947901 | 627 | 3.34375 | 3 |
Tourism is a sensitive industry that only thrives in an atmosphere of peace, tolerance, economic, social and political stability. The political, social and cultural situation plays significant role in shaping the nature and scope of tourism in any country. There is, no doubt, a direct relation between peace and political stability, and tourism development.
On December 17, 2010, dramatic political events occurred in the Middle East and North Africa. They sparked a new political phenomenon known as the Arab Spring, which created an unstable political and economic situation in the entire region.
According to international statistics, the overall GDP in the region fell from 4.2 per cent in 2010 to 2.2 per cent in 2011. The tourism industry also witnessed a great decline.For example, the number of inbound tourists in the major tourism countries in the region (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and Lebanon) fell by a quarter in 2011. Questions have been raised about Jordan’s ability to deal with these major challenges to the tourism development.
Tourism managers, the media and all those involved in Jordan’s tourism industry can play a crucial role in lessening the negative repercussions of the dramatic political situations in the area.
Intra-regional tourism has to be encouraged.Tourists need to be able to recognise that some countries of the region are still safe and secure, such as Jordan.
Moreover, those responsible for tourism marketing and promotion should provide a clear idea about the safety and security in Jordan.Attracting new tourism markets is also critical to enhancing the flow of tourists. Good candidates are BRIC countries, which witness big economic growth.
The media also have a role to play in promoting Jordan’s political, economic and social stability, and thus attracting tourists.
By Mamoon Allen | <urn:uuid:efaa5ea4-da2f-4a3d-a1dd-b93f9c4e293b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.albawaba.com/business/middle-east-tourism-545606 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403502.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00050-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944118 | 363 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Everything you need to understand or teach Rhetoric (Aristotle) by Aristotle.
Rhetoric is defined as "the faculty of observe in any given case the means of persuasion" (24) and, therefore, is used by all arts and sciences in order to persuade audiences of some specific point. Rhetoric is used in three specific fields: politics, the legal system, and ceremonially. Each of these fields makes different demands upon the rhetorician's arguments and style.
Rhetoric is neither an art nor a science, which means that...
On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse Lesson Plans contain 144 pages of teaching material, including: | <urn:uuid:d1ff513d-e9f3-46e8-aaa3-1d22050db53e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.bookrags.com/Rhetoric_(Aristotle)/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402746.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00062-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922153 | 140 | 3.609375 | 4 |
When you buy seed for your pet bird, usually it comes as a bird seed mix. Some of the most common seeds found in these mixes include safflower, sunflower, millet, canary seed, hemp, thistle seed, green split peas, yellow split peas, whole peas, corn, wheat and milo. These seeds are commonly found in the United States, but not necessarily in the natural habitats of pet bird species.
“Seeds such as millet and corn are often grown as food crops in many countries, but very few of the typical ‘bird seed’ seeds are endemic to most of the areas populated by parrots,” said Gayle Soucek, a pet trade consultant in Illinois and author of The Parrot Breeder’s Answer Book (Barron’s, 2001).
The macaws and Amazon parrots that live in the Central and South American rain forests would never find sunflower, millet or corn in the forest canopy, making it unlikely that an Amazon or a macaw would come in contact with these seeds. Nor would they encounter peanuts, which grow underground.
The African and Australian parrots that live in arid environments like grasslands, eucalyptus forests and savannahs are more likely to come in contact with some of the “bird seed” type seeds. Grains like wheat and millet, for example, grow in much of Australia, where parakeets, cockatiels and cockatoos are sure to feed. Sunflowers and corn are common in much of southern Africa, where many Poicephalus parrot species live. Still, these birds are unlikely to come across many of the other treats we offer our pets, such as almonds, pistachios, pumpkin seeds and oats.
Some bird seed mixes can have more than 20 different bird seeds and other ingredients.
It’s worth noting that even if certain seeds are native to a particular parrots’ range country, that’s probably not the only food those birds eat. They may also eat grasses, tubers, fruits, flowers and insects.
“Wild birds are opportunistic feeders,” said Larry Nemetz, DVM, a birds-only veterinarian in Santa Ana, California. “They will eat seed and nuts because they are available, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best possible diet for them. They may just be eating seeds because that’s all they can find.”
Manufacturing Process For Bird Seed
Most of the seed and grains contained in seed mixes come from growers in the United States and Canada. Manufacturers usually do not have access to tropical seeds or foods that would be part of the foods a wild parrot would eat. They do try to come up with substitute seeds that are similar in taste or nutrition to what parrots might find in the wild. For instance, red proso and white foxtail are two types of millet found in seed mixes, but neither are indigenous to the home range of the pet birds and parrots that are eating these seed mixes. They’re very similar, however, to the type of grass seeds the birds would find in the wild.
Growers typically plant their seed crops in spring and harvest in fall. (If there’s a bad crop, bird seed manufacturers may go out of the country to procure staples such as sunflower and safflower seed.) As soon as they harvest the seed, they ship it to manufacturers. This big seed shipment in the fall is what manufacturers use in their seed mixes for the next year.
“The seed we package in the fall is probably as fresh as it’s going to be, because it’s probably only been out of the field a month or two,” said Jason Clinger, general manager of Topper Bird Ranch, a seed mix manufacturer in Lexington, North Carolina. You don’t want the seed to sit around for too long of a time, he added, because “over time, oxidation can cause the seeds to lose nutrients. That’s why we only use this year’s crop, which could mean some of the seed we’re using could be 11 months old by the end of the growing season. But we never use seed older than that.”
Once a shipment arrives, “the seeds and grains are quality inspected, screened and cleaned before they are mixed into products using computerized and automated processes for manufacturing,” said Kathy Schneider, technical services manager for Kaytee Products, Inc., in Chilton, Wisconsin. Not all the seed will be put into mixes right away. After the initial screening process, the bulk of the seed is put into climate-controlled storage bins.
Manufacturers have unique “recipes” for their various seed mixes. “A parrot food might have 20 different ingredients, and we might need to make 1,000 bags of that food a day, so our computer would then generate a recipe indicating how much of each type of seed needs to be mixed together,” explained Brent Weinman, president of Sun Seed located in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Once a particular recipe is put together, the seeds go through one more vacuum-cleaning process to suck up hulls or dust that might have broken away from the seeds during the mixing process. Then the seeds go through a series of pipes and conveyors to be packed into plastic bags. Once bagged, they are loaded into boxes and shipped to retailers.
Many manufacturers use nitrogen-flushed packaging to kill any insects and insect eggs inside the seed and to retain the vitamins. “When the seed is packed, it’s about 2 percent oxygen and 98 percent nitrogen inside that bag, so any eggs, larvae or insects, which might be inside the bag, suffocate and die,” Weinman said. Nitrogen is a completely safe gas, he stressed. In fact, the air we breathe is 78 percent nitrogen and 22 percent oxygen. However, Weinman said, “If you increase the nitrogen to 98 percent and decrease the oxygen to 2 percent, you wouldn’t be able to breathe anymore, and the same thing happens with the insects or eggs.”
There’s another benefit of increasing the nitrogen and decreasing the oxygen in the seed bags. It slows down the oxidation process, which extends the nutritional life of the seeds and increases the bird seed's shelf life.
For information on wild bird seed mixes, click here. | <urn:uuid:7adf3d66-91a9-49f2-aebb-098a5fa3b799> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.birdchannel.com/bird-diet-and-health/bird-nutrition/whats-in-bird-seed.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402746.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00028-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95491 | 1,356 | 3.25 | 3 |
One of a series of views of the interior of Saint John's Co-Cathedral in Valletta, Malta.
St. Johns Co-Cathedral was built by the Knights of Malta between 1573 and 1578, having been commissioned in 1572 by Grand Master Jean de la Cassière as the conventual church of the Order of the Knights Hospitaller of St John, known as the Knights of Malta. The Church was designed by the Maltese military architect Glormu Cassar (Girolamo Cassar) who designed several of the more prominent buildings in Valletta. The church is considered to be one of the finest examples of high Baroque architecture in Europe and one of the world's great cathedrals.
The interior, in sharp contrast with the façade, is extremely ornate and decorated in the height of the Baroque period. The interior was largely decorated by Mattia Preti, the Calabrian artist and Knight. Preti designed the intricate carved stone walls and painted the vaulted ceiling and side altars with scenes from the life of St John. Interestingly, the figures painted into the ceiling next to each column initially appear to the viewer as three-dimensional statues, but on closer inspection we see that the artist cleverly created an illusion of three-dimensionality by his use of shadows and placement. Also noteworthy is the fact that the carving was all undertaken in-place (in-situ) rather than being carved independently and then attached to the walls (stucco). The Maltese limestone from which the Cathedral is built lends itself particularly well to such intricate carving. The whole marble floor is an entire series of tombs, housing about 375 Knights and officers of the order. There is also a crypt containing the tombs of Grandmasters like Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Claude de la Sengle, Jean Parisot de Valette, and Alof de Wignacourt.
In 1666, a project for the main altar by Malta's greatest sculptor, Melchiorre Cafà, was approved and begun. Cafà intended a large sculpture group in bronze depicting the Baptism of Christ. Following Cafà's tragical death in 1667 in a foundry accident while working on this work in Rome, the plans were abandoned. Only in 1703, Giuseppe Mazzuoli, Cafà's only pupil, finished a marble group of the Baptism of Christ which might have been influenced by his master's undocumented designs but certainly is strongly dependent on a small baptism group by Alessandro Algardi.
Critiques | Translate
jhm (152212) 2014-07-12 0:25
This interior picture is wonderful through the much nice paintings, also the floor is extraordinarily.
You took these picture with a wonderful clarity and sharpness.
Thank you very much for these nice series.
Very well done, TFS.
Have a nice weekend,
williewhistler (16394) 2014-07-12 2:45
given the less than perfect lighting this is an impressive piece of photography,by raising the ISO you have managed to get acceptable exposure settings that reveal all of the beautifully intricate details,fine colour and exception clarity make it fine shot.
timecapturer (49288) 2014-07-12 2:55
a beautiful place and this shot captures the exquisiteness of this enclave so perfectly. It looks so spiritually uplifting in this wonderfully executed and composed image.
Enjoy your weekend - B.
macjake (67534) 2014-07-12 3:39
I was hoping you'd show us more interior views of this Cathedral.
For me personally, its not just whats on the walls, its the floor too! Look at that! Its incredible.
There's no space left un-decorated.
enjoy your weekend
Fis2 (96737) 2014-07-12 4:10
I like pov and light.
Very impressive colors!
Have a nice weekend.
pierrefonds (65846) 2014-07-12 4:54
La distance entre la porte et la croix donne de la profondeur à la scène. La prise de vue permet de voir les détails des décorations sur le mur. L'image est claire et précise. Bonne journée.
marabu61 (10915) 2014-07-12 5:16
Amazing baroque decorations in this church indeed, it is almost an overkill to the senses. I can't see a spot here that is not carved or painted, even the floor is covered.
The warm golden tone of the interior is very appealing too.
have a great weekend
Sergiom (78551) 2014-07-12 6:11
On dirait certainement que la couleur or est à l'honneur dans ce lieu de culte. Autant de richesse autour de la croix est assez contradictoire mais aussi très photogénique.
Noel_Byrne (30998) 2014-07-12 6:15
It's says to see why it is considered so, the level of detail here is great, especially in the detailed floor. I find it a little unusual to see such military inspired design inside a church, but your note explains the knights of Malta well. I really like that you used the frame of the closer door as a good frame for the deep scene inside.
Thanks as always
resat1972 (7576) 2014-07-12 11:49
it is difficult to photograph indoors
become a beautiful work
the colors are very good
lousat (90682) 2014-07-12 16:10
Salut Steph,un style vraiment originale et une capture tres tres riche qui montre nous cet interieur dans la meilleure maniere,bine expose' et avec des details au top partout! Mes compliments et bon Dimanche,Luciano
Nicou (141118) 2014-07-12 21:57
quelle image superbe quelle dorure et captage et ce passage avec la belle croix en fond grandiose compo.
bravo et amitié
carlo62 (47393) 2014-07-14 6:47
mi ero perso questa foto, bella e ricca di dettagli da osservare, grazie all'esposizione.
Magnifico pavimento e bellissima la parete ricca di stemmi e rifiniture dorate, che contrasta molto con la scena del Cristo in croce che si vede attraverso l'arco.
ChrisJ (113203) 2014-07-14 14:19
Looks almost Italian in design, such is the ornateness of the intricate artwork. Good colour and sharpness and a fine close up of the Crucifixion scene. The shields add interest and remind me of the knights of St John castle on Rhodes. Tfs!
- Copyright: Stephen Nunney (snunney) (98253)
- Genre: Places
- Medium: Color
- Date Taken: 2014-06-00
- Categories: Architecture, Artwork
- Camera: Canon EOS 1100D, Canon 28-80 3,5-4,8 USM IV
- Exposure: f/8, 1/8 seconds
- More Photo Info: view
- Photo Version: Original Version
- Date Submitted: 2014-07-12 0:09 | <urn:uuid:696cdc42-147c-4080-af63-c7b503b4523b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/Malta/South/Malta/Valletta/photo1466474.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396029.85/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00113-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.828167 | 1,624 | 3.140625 | 3 |
Out in the cold world outside of Guile, not all strings are treated in the same way. Out there there are only bytes, and there are many ways of representing a strings (sequences of characters) as binary data (sequences of bytes).
As a user, usually you don’t have to think about this very much. When you type on your keyboard, your system encodes your keystrokes as bytes according to the locale that you have configured on your computer. Guile uses the locale to decode those bytes back into characters – hopefully the same characters that you typed in.
All is not so clear when dealing with a system with multiple users, such as a web server. Your web server might get a request from one user for data encoded in the ISO-8859-1 character set, and then another request from a different user for UTF-8 data.
Guile provides an iconv module for converting between strings and sequences of bytes. See Bytevectors, for more on how Guile represents raw byte sequences. This module gets its name from the common UNIX command of the same name.
Note that often it is sufficient to just read and write strings from
ports instead of using these functions. To do this, specify the port
set-port-encoding!. See Ports, for more on
ports and character encodings.
Unlike the rest of the procedures in this section, you have to load the
iconv module before having access to these procedures:
(use-modules (ice-9 iconv))
Encode string as a sequence of bytes.
The string will be encoded in the character set specified by the
encoding string. If the string has characters that cannot be
represented in the encoding, by default this procedure raises an
encoding-error. Pass a conversion-strategy argument to
specify other behaviors.
The return value is a bytevector. See Bytevectors, for more on bytevectors. See Ports, for more on character encodings and conversion strategies.
Decode bytevector into a string.
The bytes will be decoded from the character set by the encoding
string. If the bytes do not form a valid encoding, by default this
procedure raises an
decoding-error. As with
string->bytevector, pass the optional conversion-strategy
argument to modify this behavior. See Ports, for more on character
encodings and conversion strategies.
call-with-output-string, but instead of returning a string,
returns a encoding of the string according to encoding, as a
bytevector. This procedure can be more efficient than collecting a
string and then converting it via | <urn:uuid:3cff40f1-1144-4298-a05f-d24b72d76d8c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Representing-Strings-as-Bytes.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391519.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00107-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.863949 | 560 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Equation Word Problem Applications Math Fun Game Tips:
- This game provides practice in forming equations for word problem applications.
1) Decide what type of number the word problem requires. Does it ask you for
the number added, the number removed, the original number, or the number remaining?
2) Use a letter variable to represent the number you are asked to find.
- In this game, you choose the correct equation to answer each word problem.
See More SliderMath (below) for games providing practice steps in solving equations.
- The word problems used in this game involve finding the ' number of ' things such as:
photos, videos, e-mails, text messages, games, songs, teams, apples, candies,...
- Refresh/Reload the web page to start over again.
- If the game doesn't respond to keyboard input,
click inside the game area to reset the game's focus.
- The score report automatically appears after you have made 8 choices.
- The Equation score is based on your choices only and does not count the fish hits.
- The Game score is reduced by the number of fish hits.
- The game speeds up as your score increases. Adjust this with the - and + keys. | <urn:uuid:05b2863d-046b-42ba-a924-4e50c55e18b0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.slidermath.com/equation/Eqtnapps.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397873.63/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00118-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.86342 | 263 | 3.5625 | 4 |
1. A flower and shrub of any species of the genus rosa, of which there are many species, mostly found in the northern hemisphere
roses are shrubs with pinnate leaves and usually prickly stems. The flowers are large, and in the wild state have five petals of a color varying from deep pink to white, or sometimes yellow. By cultivation and hybridizing the number of petals is greatly increased and the natural perfume enhanced. In this way many distinct classes of roses have been formed, as the Banksia, Baurbon, Boursalt, china, noisette, hybrid perpetual, etc, with multitudes of varieties in nearly every class.
2. A knot of ribbon formed like a rose; a rose knot; a rosette, especially. One worn on a shoe.
3. A rose window. See rose window, below.
4. A perforated nozzle, as of a pipe, spout, etc, for delivering water in fine jets; a rosehead; also, a strainer at the foot of a pump.
5. (Science: medicine) The erysipelas.
6. The card of the mariners compass; also, a circular card with radiating lines, used in other instruments.
7. The colour of a rose; rose-red; pink.
8. A diamond. See rose diamond, below. Cabbage rose, china rose, etc. See Cabbage, china, etc. Corn rose, feuds between the houses of York and Lancaster, the white
rose being the badge of the house of York, and the red rose of the house of Lancaster.
Origin: AS. Rose, L. Rosa, probably akin to gr, Armor. Vard, OPer. Vareda; and perhaps to E. Wort: cf. F. Rose, from the latin. Cf. Copperas, rhododendron. | <urn:uuid:00b74cc8-e292-4ee4-be53-1b7579b83c36> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Rose | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393093.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00138-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.912032 | 404 | 3.1875 | 3 |
NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this view as it neared icy Enceladus for its closest-ever dive past the moon's active south polar region. The view shows heavily cratered northern latitudes at top, transitioning to fractured, wrinkled terrain in the middle and southern latitudes. The wavy boundary of the moon's active south polar region -- Cassini's destination for this flyby -- is visible at bottom, where it disappears into wintry darkness.
This view looks towards the Saturn-facing side of Enceladus. North on Enceladus is up and rotated 23 degrees to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 28, 2015.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 60,000 miles (96,000 kilometers) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 45 degrees. Image scale is 1,896 feet (578 meters) per pixel.
The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org. | <urn:uuid:b0f2f221-a4fe-4609-81e8-26487d4749ac> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA17202 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783400572.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155000-00034-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.89251 | 358 | 3.5 | 4 |
English lutenists and composers of Danyel's calibre were few and far between. Some of Tomkins' madrigals were dedicated to him and Dowland placing him in company with the best lute player of the day. Many lute pieces were composed by Danyel and can be found in the forms of duets, songs, and ensembles (lute, viol and voice). He served the public through the theatre and the court as a royal musician -- Danyel lived only for a short time after theRead more death of James I. Using accidentals and ascending and descending scales, Danyel was successful, for his time, at portraying textual data with his music. The lute was used primarily as an accompanying instrument in his works and he did not betray these conventions. Lute parts arranged by Danyel were often found to be in strict counterpoint to the melodic line. Though few references exist to his person, Danyl was highly esteemed and quite the skillful player. (This is presumed to be the case from, 1. the requirements of his compositions, and 2. the co-referential treatment given by Tomkins.) Read less
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Sign up now for two weeks of free access to the world's best classical music collection. Keep listening for only $0.0/month - thousands of classical albums for the price of one! Learn more about ArkivMusic Streaming | <urn:uuid:1c3135c4-3133-4903-9ba7-291c1e7386c6> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/Name/John-Danyel/Composer/2721-1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397842.93/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00153-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984219 | 320 | 2.78125 | 3 |
Whether it’s fending off a saber-tooth tiger or delivering a wedding toast, fear responses are hard-wired in our brains, compelling us either to flee from the situation or confront it head-on. But in recent years, scientists have established a third response: freezing. And a new study reveals how it’s integrated into the brain’s overall circuitry.
The part of your brain most responsible for feeling afraid is the amygdala. When threatening stimuli hits the back of your eye, signals are sent straight to the amygdala, which uses its bank of conditioned responses to quickly file away the present situation into any number of folders. Prior research has shown that people with lesions on parts of their amygdalae don’t produce a fear response. Such was the famous case of S.M., a female patient dubbed the “woman with no fear.” A severely damaged amygdala rendered her unfazed by snakes, horror films, haunted houses, and real-life knife attacks.
When we encounter frightening situations, we either engage in a fight response, flight response, or freezing response. Researchers have long understood the first two, but the third has remained something of a mystery. Now a team of scientists from the University of Bristol has discovered the pathways that regulate freezing responses, and their results, they argue, could be instrumental in helping people overcome certain disorders.
“Our work introduces the novel concept that the cerebellum is a promising target for therapeutic strategies to manage dysregulation of emotional states such as panic disorders and phobias,” explained Systems Neuroscience Professor Bridget Lumb in a news release.
Lumb and her colleagues examined a crucial part of the cerebellum involved in freezing response, the periaqueductal grey (PAG). It sits beneath the cerebrum, along the spine, and highly regulates animals’ sense of relaxation or tenseness. When researchers investigated where these pathways led, they found themselves in a separate region, known as the pyramis. Specifically, when innate and learnt threatening situations were at play (those being either survival modes or aversions to certain noises), the pyramis lit up.
The upshot, the team found, was that the pyramis acts as a junction for a number of survival-related responses. Many of these fear responses are emotional in nature, meaning that somehow tapping into the pyramis’ regulatory abilities could lessen the severity of panic disorders, phobias, and anxiety.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly nine percent of the U.S. adult population suffers from a phobia, and more than a fifth of those are classified as “severe.” Anxiety disorders feature even greater prevalence, at more than 18 percent of the U.S. population and 22.8 percent classified as “severe.” Developing treatment options that employ brain behavior specifically and directly could help offset these debilitating trends, the researchers argue.
“There is a growing consensus,” said Dr. Stella Koutsikou, researcher in the School of Physiology and Pharmacology and the study’s first author, “that understanding the neural circuits underlying fear behavior is a fundamental step towards developing effective treatments for behavioral changes associated with emotional disorders.”
Source: Koutsikou S, Crook J, Earl E, et al. Neural substrates underlying fear-evoked freezing: the periaqueductal grey–cerebellar link. The Journal of Physiology. 2014. | <urn:uuid:7184bdda-7eb9-4a75-889f-e823595f40a1> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.medicaldaily.com/fight-or-flight-or-freeze-scientists-find-brain-circuit-behind-third-fear-response-279176 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398628.62/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00013-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931382 | 727 | 3.5625 | 4 |
World Services for the Blind was founded in 1947 by Roy Kumpe
to serve people who are blind and visually impaired who needed to learn
independent living skills or job training skills that considered the
special requirements of their individual visual impairments. The goal of
the rehabilitation center then, and today, is to prepare the individual
who is blind or visually impaired to function independently in our
What we offer
- Life skills training, from learning Braille to mastering home management techniques, or weight loss which give our clients independence.
- Career training in a number of vocational programs that empower graduates to thrive in today’s high-tech workplace.
- Access for people 55 and older who are losing their sight to regain their independence through the Older Blind Program.
“Without World Services for the Blind, and the opportunity
for employment that it offered, I would still be struggling against the
current, and still unsure of my future.”
“Finding a job after graduation is a huge accomplishment, and Alivebynature has helped tremendously in that regard | <urn:uuid:804b41f1-e1b4-4e05-9940-9c33bff2a9e3> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://lwsb.org/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398873.39/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00092-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948495 | 216 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Extending voting rights to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds would be a first for the United States. But is the country ready? Rutgers University professor Daniel Hart says yes, and has found that these teens are just as informed as eighteen-year-olds who currently have the right to vote. Hart discusses his research, which is published in the January 2011 Annals volume, "The Child as Citizen," in the following interview with Stephanie Marudas. Daniel Hart is a professor of psychology at Rutgers University in Camden and runs the Rutgers Center for Children and Childhood Studies.
Stephanie Marudas: First off, let’s talk about voting rights in the United States. Its history, to some extent, is a long one and it is complicated as it relates to gender and race and age. And not even fifty years ago, most states, the voting age was twenty-one and it went to eighteen. If you can sort of give us an overview, what happened in the country? If you could take us back.
Daniel Hart: I think that one of the trends that has characterized all our voting, as you were just suggesting, is that increasingly we have seen that it is important for citizens to be able to vote and our understanding of who is a citizen and who is not has expanded over the past two hundred years to include populations that have traditionally been excluded; blacks, women and, in the last fifty years, to include eighteen-year-olds, for example, 18, 19, and 20-year-olds who had long been excluded from the vote prior to that.
SM: Thinking back to the early 1970s, Richard Nixon signs a declaration saying states should lower the voting age. You had young men going off to war but yet they could not vote.
DH: I think I remember reading a quote by Ted Kennedy, who argued that one of the big reasons—the best argument—for lowering the voting age to eighteen was that it was immoral in some sense to ask young men to go off to war in Vietnam and yet not be able to vote or comment on what our country believes and what our country ought to do. So I think you are right, that that is probably the biggest, easiest force to recognize as for why the voting age was lowered.
SM: Now here we are in 2011 and you and Robert Atkins in your article within The Annals “Child As Citizen” volume [American Sixteen- and Seventeen-Year-Olds Are Ready to Vote] are making the point that sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in the United States are ready to vote. There is empirical evidence that supports it. Your article shows this and also debunks some of the claims that teenagers, being sixteen and seventeen years old, are not mature enough or numerologically ready to do so. Can you take us through what you learned from the data and why this supports sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds voting?
DH: I think we make three major points. The first of these is that if you look at the kind of preparation that adolescents have to vote in terms of their understanding of the issues, what they understand about civic life, their levels of participation in public life, they are not different from those that we have seen in eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. So if you look, for example, at how much the average sixteen-year-old knows or the average seventeen-year-old knows about the political system, it is about the same level as the average eighteen- or nineteen-year-old. So if our justification for excluding someone from voting is that they lack the knowledge necessary to make an informed decision, then setting the barrier at age eighteen is not particularly legitimate. Now, our analyses seem to suggest that once you get below age sixteen, adolescents in fact do know less. So we are advocating the extension of the vote to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds but not to fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. On average we see fifteen-year-olds knowing much less about the political system than older adolescents. And so we think there is a justification for lowering the voting age by two years but not going below that. Second, people argue that adolescents are impulsive, too susceptible to peer influences, and for these reasons are not, say, fully adult, at least when it comes to issues, say, of criminal responsibility. And we tend to agree with those findings, but we do not think that they are particularly germane to the issue of who votes and who does not. That is, that you can be impulsive and prone to making bad decisions in situations that are high in stress, that are high in emotionality and, consequently, may have diminished criminal responsibility in situations that lead to criminal acts, but that is not the context in which adolescents would be voting. Okay, there is some emotion involved with that, but you have plenty of time to reflect about who you would want to vote for as a candidate and to deliberate on that. So the situations are a little bit different, we think, and very different in important respects. And third, we think that as our population grows older the concerns of younger people are being ignored and that one way of restoring this balance to give greater concern to the interests of children and teenagers is by giving younger people the vote.
SM: Going back to your study, what did you learn in terms of that difference between fifteen-year-olds and sixteen-year-olds? What showed that fifteen-year-olds just knew less?
DH: Across development there are rarely steps where you go from not knowing anything to knowing a whole lot, and so any dividing line will be somewhat arbitrary. But if you look at the levels of knowledge between, in the civic domain, how much people know about the political system and you asked them questions about who is the vice president, who is the president, how many senators there are, and so on. The average for the country for sixteen-year-olds is really not very different from that of eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds. But that is where you see things leveling off. Before that there is still an increase, so thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-olds there is still an increase in how much they know. That increase levels off around age sixteen and that is not really that uncommon of a finding as in other areas you see increases through early to mid-adolescence and then some leveling off after age sixteen or so.
SM: As your article points out in The Annals that sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, they possess the same amount of civic knowledge, political efficacy. There is really just no difference then, between them and an eighteen-year-old.
DH: We do not think so. Nothing that you would say would give a principled reason for excluding a seventeen-year-old or a sixteen-year-old from voting. This is not to say that the sixteen-year-old is the same as a thirty-year-old; in fact thirty-year-olds do know more typically about the civic world then do sixteen-year-olds. But having given the vote to eighteen-year-olds, the question is why give it to eighteen-year-olds and not to seventeen-year-olds or sixteen-year-olds and what we are suggesting is that there is really no good reason to allow eighteen-year-olds to vote and to exclude sixteen-year-olds from the ability to register their opinion about how the country is being run.
SM: One of the benefits, perhaps, of allowing sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to vote, as your article points out, would be deepening the civic commitment on the part of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, that if maybe you start their civic life a little sooner than eighteen that that will carry with them. If you could touch on that.
DH: There is a lot of evidence to indicate that the civic habits that are acquired in adolescence shape civic life through adulthood so that eighteen-year-olds who vote in the first election that they are eligible for are more likely to remain voters through the remainder of their lives than are people who do not vote at eighteen. And the same thing comes with volunteering and other forms of public participation in civic life. So if we give the vote to sixteen-year-olds where they are still in the context where adult influence is possible, we encourage them to vote, we get them to vote, we believe it is more likely that that will become part of their repertoire of public life, that they will continue to vote in early adulthood and throughout the rest of their lives. There is some evidence that that occurs with volunteering. We know that adolescents who volunteer or are involved in community service of one sort or another continue to be volunteers in adulthood. And so we think there is just a lot of benefit in terms of addressing everyone’s concern about the participation of younger generations in public life by allowing them to vote, trying to create these good habits for civic life now.
SM: Are other countries allowing sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to vote, or are other countries taking steps to do so?
DH: Yes, there is a lot of interest, in at least some countries, in thinking about this. The evidence is a little bit mixed about the value of doing this in terms of transforming adolescence. No one has come across evidence that suggests that allowing sixteen-year-olds to vote results in very strange voting patterns that would suggest that sixteen-year-olds are doing something foolish. It is not, by itself it appears, to be the solution to increasing dramatically the participation of sixteen-year-olds in public life, but it does seem to be a reasonable step in that direction. The countries that have tried it, that have extended the vote to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, are still very early in this process and so it is hard to say what the long-term results will suggest from this change in voting laws in other countries.
SM: Which countries are those that are starting to do this?
DH: Well, England has had a very heated discussion about this issue. I think the Isle of Man has extended the vote to sixteen-year-olds. I think Brazil has; Austria. But we do not have enough in the way of good research on what is happening as a consequence of extending the vote to really make any generalizations based on the international evidence.
SM: The election of President Barack Obama catalyzed a whole young voter movement in an unprecedented way. We heard even young people who could not vote, so those under eighteen, they still went to the rallies, they were sort of politically active with their families and friends, yet they did not have the right to vote.
DH: The analyses of the vote for President Obama suggested that the young vote was very important. And young voters, and young people in general, have often been very important in political movements, even when they have not been allowed to vote. We know that many of the social movements of the past fifty years have been energized by young people, whether or not they have been voters. If we look at Egypt right now, for example, almost everyone believes that young people are fueling the demonstrations there. Even though they are not all teenagers, teenagers are clearly present and important in terms of adding political fervor and energy to these kinds of demonstrations. It would be nice to capture some of that energy, we think, by allowing young people in the United States who have sufficient civic knowledge to do so, to vote.
SM: In some regards, by the time young people reach a college campus, if they do go to college, they might be politically active or they are just starting to become politically active.
DH: We think so. Adolescence is clearly a crucial period for forming opinions and it is probably the last period of the lifespan where you see a lot of plasticity in terms of habits and political views, and it would be an opportune time to give adolescence the possibility of actually using some of the knowledge they are acquiring in school in a setting that matters, to a degree, which is voting. And so I agree that the college years are very important. There is a lot of indication that those years are when people are laying the foundation for their lives as civic individuals in our society. But the late teen years, too, are also important and would become more important if we allowed sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to vote.
SM: Most high schools in this country have some sort of student government association, their clubs, and those are all typically elected positions and so students are already in that habit of making informed choices within their student bodies.
DH: We know that those kind of experiences, student government, clubs where you have elected offices and so on, are very important in promoting civic attitudes that carry on into adulthood. So we know that students who have been active in student government in high school are more likely to become active voters and active citizens. Same thing with clubs, participating in clubs in high school is a good predictor of who will be active in their communities in adulthood. Even mock votes, where students are invited to imagine who they would vote for if they were allowed to, and go to voting booths and cast their ballots for whoever is running for president; even that experience, which does not have any real meaning, has been shown to lay down habits that carry into early adulthood. Students whose schools have mock votes are more likely to really vote when they reach early adulthood. So it is a crucial period for forming good civic habits.
SM: What would need to happen in this country for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to vote? As your article in The Annals points out, this is a topic that really is not a topic of concern for a lot of Americans. But what would need to happen, if you could envision this?
DH: I do not think that there is organized opposition to an idea like this. Adults in general tend to think of adolescents as being poorly prepared for any adult responsibilities and imagine that adolescents will make bad decisions in whatever domain. So I think there is some ordinary resistance to the idea that we would find if we were to poll older adults, for example. On the other hand, I do not think that there is any particular group that would oppose this. The opposition to lowering the vote to eighteen turned out not to be impossible to overcome, and it certainly seems possible that it is an idea that could catch on and energize at least some seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. There are some small groups of young people who are trying to advance this cause already. If it became one of those ideas that really captured the attention of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds and made it into social media, who knows? I do not think we really have a good sense at this point about the power of that kind of social media for influencing political views. But I think most people suspect that social media can be very important. There have been suggestions that it has been important in the protests around Egypt and Tunisia, for example, and I think most people would also agree that the full potential of social media is not yet known. And almost everyone thinks that social media are better used by young people than by older people. So I think there is some possibility that it could happen, but it is hard to say what the actual possibilities are at this point. A big part of what society does in terms of preparing youth for adulthood is offer opportunities. And adolescents who are offered opportunities to contribute civically typically do. Our experience in Camden has been when you ask the kids we work with if they would like to volunteer to do one sort or another is that they are all very happy to do so. And they understand the value of these kinds of activities in terms of contributing to their neighbors and friends and the other citizens of Camden. What they need is not some skill that they do not have or some knowledge that they lack, but an opportunity to practice the skills that they have to one degree or another. Getting involved in community is one opportunity and communities do that through community service and volunteer opportunities. But another one could be voting. If adolescents could vote we think that they would make good use of that opportunity, would learn something from it, would establish good habits that would carry them into adulthood.
SM: What about fairness? If sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds are demonstrating that they are citizens yet they do not have the right to vote, how does fairness play into this?
DH: We would like to believe as a country that who we allow to vote and who we exclude from the vote is principled. It is based on some aspect of fairness. We could certainly make a good case for why five-year-olds should not be able to vote, because we would say they lack the knowledge necessary to make an informed vote. They might be too susceptible to the influence of their parents, and so on. Though it is worth noting that some people have argued that even five-year-olds ought to be given a vote that would be held in trust by parents and parents would be allowed to exercise on behalf of their children the vote. But what we are suggesting is that maybe on initial reactions we might think that sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds are fairly excluded from joining the public and voting, but then when you actually look at the details it is an unprincipled, unfair decision that, in fact, if we think of the qualities that we ordinarily imagine to be important for deciding who gets a vote and who does not, that adolescents who are sixteen and seventeen are in as much possession of those characteristics as are eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. And so on the principle of fairness and ensuring that everyone who ought to be able to vote is allowed to vote, we are saying that sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds ought to be given that right. | <urn:uuid:abfe3931-ebdf-4906-bbdf-547a8d100762> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.aapss.org/news/2011/02/24/interview-with-daniel-hart-time-for-american-teens-under-18-to-hit-the-polls | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399428.8/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00037-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984791 | 3,671 | 3.15625 | 3 |
It was April 1950. I was a young civil engineer given the task to head a five-man Port Authority (PA) inspection team to tighten the bolts on the George, the short name we all used for the George Washington Bridge (GWB). Tighten the bolts? Yes, all 3,368 of the cable band bolts, each 28 1/2-inches long, 2 1/4-inches in diameter and holding in place the cable bands on the 36-inch main cables. The cable bands, in turn, support the vertical cables from which the main bridge deck is suspended.
Why do it? Who's crazy enough to do it? How? How safe is it? What kind of wrench should be used?
The bridge built in 1931, was nearing maturity at 19 years of age. Adjustments were necessary. The tension on the bolts after years of heavy traffic varied all over the lot. Some, it turned out, were virtually hand loose or painted light; others were way over-stressed. To loosen the over tightened nuts there were 5-foot long wrenches with 6- to 8-inch sockets that equaled the leverage of as many as four, 200-pound men.
Tightening the Bolts
While the GWB was in no danger, the bolts needed to be tightened to avoid the theoretical possibility of a slipping of the cable bands. The task to be performed while 250- to 600-feet in the air was to adjust all 3,368 bolts to a constant tension of 29,000 pounds per square inch (psi).
We operated special strain gauges that were measuring the 29,000 psi tension. Our workstations were specially designed cages that were rolled by winches along the main cables of the 600-foot high towers. Every day we climbed the cables to reach the cage, either from the tower or from the saddle at the middle of the main span.
One of the PA inspectors, who ordinarily walked the cables like a monkey, froze with fear on the 12-foot ladder placed at mid-span to reach the main cables.
Once, after cooling off with a beer at lunch on a hot, sunny day, another inspector nearly passed out climbing on the steep end cables to reach the cage.
Still another time, we helped the PA police prevent a suicide. Having run down the cable to mid-span on to the roadway and to the sidewalk, there, alongside a parked car, a youth was hanging over the edge and threatening to jump. As we tried to talk him in, one of our group grasped him by the hair where he hung for a split second until another one of us grabbed his arm and hauled him in. He went to Bellevue Hospital. We went back to work.
We grew to know and love this magnificent structure and the little red lighthouse too, at the river's edge on the New York side. One of the first books my young son read was the wonderful children's book, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge, because you see, it was about Daddy's bridge.
And speaking of nuts, five young PA engineers – we did not volunteer– supervised 30 contractor's men, many of whom were Mohawk Indians. In 1950 and 1951, there was only one thing wrong about this job. The contractor's men whom we supervised were making $8 an hour and the five of us who were PA inspectors made only $2 an hour. As PA chief, the inspectors dispatched me to talk to the boss. Ten days later, there was a 30 percent bonus in our paychecks. Today, a lengthy study would be commissioned and the job would be long over before a recommendation on a pay raise would even be considered.
The Second Deck
While we were there tightening bolts, there was talk about a lower level to the George being added.
Now the 20-year old bridge was in great shape and ready to take on the job of carrying the additional load of a six-lane lower deck that the premier bridge engineer, O.H. Ammann had so brilliantly designed in the 1920s.
Eventually, I came out of the sky and sought refuge as a highway-planning engineer. Planning for a second GWB deck and its approaches was one of the Port Authority's major post-World War II projects. I became the project coordinator on this job and loved every minute of it.
The project was an exciting one and all of us were thrilled to be working on it, but there were some residents who weren't so enamored by the second deck and its approaches. One of the early opponents to the project was Louie Stern, president of the Chamber of Commerce for the Washington Heights neighborhood in which construction took place. A 4-foot, 10-inch dynamo who ate two raw eggs and drank a glass of scotch for breakfast every morning, he came around eventually. Perhaps the reason he became a strong proponent later on is because we fondly referred to the second deck as "Stern's Passover." He liked that.
There were only nine years between the germ of the idea in 1953 and the ribbon-cutting ceremony in 1962. Equally amazing was that the project was authorized for $183 million but came in at $145 million! These were not times of deflation, either.
Actually, the $183 million figure was a little distorted. In 1957, Austin Tobin, the legendary executive director of the Port Authority from 1942 to 1972, went to the New York City Board of Estimate with a $182 million job. When he emerged several hours later he said, 'Call it $183 million. They insisted we put a roof on the bus station.'" Thus, the origin of what became known as the Nervi- roof on the GWB bus station designed by the Italian architect.
During construction, Doug Tuomey, then manager of property acquisition, and later the PA's Washington, D.C. representative for many years, found an urn containing ashes in one of the vacated Washington Heights apartment buildings. Scared, Doug took the remains to the local police precinct. Leaving the urn on the captain's desk and making a hasty retreat, he never learned who it was or what the police did with the remains.
Many were involved in the planning for the second GWB deck and its approaches. In 2001, only Warren Quimby and I are still around, both long retired.
In a project of this scope, there are many reasons why a ramp or a roadway was located where it was; the reasons often were beyond planning and engineering. For example, in the functional and geometric design of the New Jersey approaches, we also had to locate the route for the Bergen Expressway, the I-95 approach to the bridge.
Readers familiar with the geography of the area may wonder why the route takes a long loop around from the south to approach the bridge from the north. The highway is located precisely on the boundary between the towns of Englewood and Leonia. A more direct alternative route would have bisected the town of Leonia. While that might have set up an interesting Thanksgiving Day rivalry between North and South Leonia, it was made clear to us planners and engineers that we better take out our T-squares and french curves and lay out something different. We did and it works.
The second deck project opened in September 1962 with a grand ceremony marking the completion of a great project. Those of us who had the privilege to work on it, under it, across it, or with it, will, I think agree, that the great gray bridge is the jewel in the PA crown, even as it celebrates its 70th birthday in 2001.
Return to Archives page | <urn:uuid:55b09271-6bbe-4691-9c60-934cebccda00> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://intransitionmag.org/archive_stories/george_washington_bridge_history.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396459.32/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00015-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982812 | 1,575 | 2.65625 | 3 |
UnNews:Paper to become plastic
From Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia
Paper to become plastic
Where man always bites dog
Tuesday, June 28, 2016, 17:12:UTC)(
23 November 2006
|UnNews Audio (file info)|
|Listen to this story!|
PARIS, France -- Toshiba is to turn paper into plastic, after pressure from the French Public have come up with a new age printer.
This printer, prints onto plastic paper, which can be re-used, many times. This is great for people who want to keep important documents for a long time. For example, a Birth Certificate, giving the people an option to re-write your essential records.
The French led a revolution on Sunday, after hearing about paper emissions. Paper emissions is a new theory, theorised by theorist Derren Brown, this is what he said when asked about his theory "paper is giving off nuclear radiation, and if it is continued to be used, mankind, as we know it, could become obsolete.Even my Grandmother says so."
Derren presented the theory on Nov. 16 to an audience of French students, and by the 19th, a group of activists went out and started riots all around Paris. Their demands were "Find a way of producing non-radioactive paper that will not affect our environment." This, put many pressures on Worldwide companies to produce something that would stop this.
Toshiba, reacting very quickly, managed to produce a device that would print on plastic paper in only four days of designing. It is called the Plastic Paper Printing Machine, or PLA.PAP.PRI.MAC, for short.
Surprisingly, Microsoft did not produce a prototype, and when they heard the complaints, they released the following statement, "We, as a company have better things to do. I do not know why people are rioting in Paris; I do not see the point in it. Trees are fine to use at the moment, it's not as if we need them." | <urn:uuid:ce544390-6724-42f9-beed-a75f80852590> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/UnNews:Paper_to_become_plastic | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396949.33/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00018-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968804 | 421 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1954
|Born:||September 13, 1916
Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales
|Died:||November 23, 1990, age 74
Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, England
|Occupation(s):||Novelist, short story writer|
|Magnum opus:||Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach|
Roald Dahl (September 13, 1916 – November 23, 1990) was a British novelist, short story author, and screenwriter famous as a writer for both adolescents and adults. His most popular books for adolescents include Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and The Witches, all of which were adapted into successful major motion pictures.
Roald Dahl, mainly through his output as a children's author, impressed millions of readers worldwide with his imaginative use of language, amusingly offbeat characters, inventive plots, and tender messages. Even posthumously, the sales of Dahl's books continue to flourish, due to the loyal following of young, reverent readers who find a special connection to the author's work.
To the young, Dahl is an adult figure who seems to have taken their side, speaking to them through his stories on an equal plane. Though this has made him popular with his adolescent readers, it has stirred much controversy with parents and critics. Parents also sometimes frown on the borderline inappropriateness of his language, as well as his apparent hostility toward social institutions. However, neither critics nor adults deny the Dahl's imaginative mastery of the art of storytelling, his unique control of language and humor, and his ability to strike an emotional chord.
Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales in 1916, to Norwegian parents, Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Dahl née Hesselberg. Roald was named after the polar explorer Roald Amundsen, a national hero in Norway at the time.
In 1920, when Roald was three, his seven-year-old sister, Astri, died from appendicitis. About a month later, his father died of pneumonia at the age of 57. Despite these tragedies, Dahl's mother made the decision not to return to Norway to live with her relatives, but to remain in the UK, as it had been the wish of her husband to have their children educated in British schools.
Roald first attended Llandaff Cathedral School. Many of the author's early antics and life experiences from his years at Llandaff are depicted in the autobiographical work, Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984). This includes the "Great Mouse Plot of 1923," the story of how at the age of eight, Roald and four of his schoolmates were caned by the headmaster after putting a dead mouse in a jar of sweets at the local sweet shop. Such scenarios were typical of Dahl's relatively harmless but mischievous nature, both in his work and in his life.
Thereafter, he was sent to several boarding schools in England including Saint Peter's in Weston-super-Mare. His time at Saint Peter's was an unpleasant experience, though he was able to escape during summer holidays with his family on trips to his parents' native Norway. When at school, though, he was very homesick and wrote to his mother frequently, though never revealing to her his despondency lest it cause her to worry. Many years later, when she died, Roald discovered that she had saved all of his letters.
Roald grew very tall in his adolescence, reaching 6 feet, 6 inches (1.98m) by the time he was a young adult. Popular with peers and talented at sports, he was elected captain of the school's Fives (handball) and squash teams, and also played well for the soccer team. He also developed an interest in photography during these years. Signs of Roald's unique imagination began to appear at this point. One such example is when the Cadbury chocolate company sent boxes of new products to the school to be tested by the pupils, Dahl would dream of inventing a new chocolate bar that would win the praise of Mr. Cadbury himself, a memory that would later serve as the inspiration for the author's third children's tale, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
In August 1939, as World War II became imminent, plans were made to round up the hundreds of Germans in Dar-es-Salaam. Dahl was made an officer in the King's African Rifles, commanding a platoon of askaris. Soon after this, in November 1939, he joined the Royal Air Force. He was accepted for flight training with 20 other men, 17 of whom would ultimately die in air combat. Following six months training in Hawker Harts, Dahl earned his wings as a Pilot Officer.
He was assigned to No. 80 Squadron RAF. Dahl was surprised to find that he would not receive any specialized training in aerial combat. On September 19, 1940, en route to Mersa Matruh from Abu Sueir in Egypt, Dahl crashed into a boulder while attempting to land on a desert airstrip at night, fracturing his skull and losing his sense of sight. Dahl was rescued and taken to a first-aid post in Mersa Matruh, where he regained consciousness. Despite doctors saying that he had no chance of flying again, in February 1941, five months after he was admitted to the hospital, Dahl was cleared to return to his flying duties.
He joined the Greek campaign based near Athens, flying a Hawker Hurricane. Here, Dahl saw his first aerial combat on April 15 while flying alone over the city of Chalcis. He attacked six Junkers Ju-88s that were bombing ships, managing to shoot one down. Then, on April 20, Dahl took part in the "Battle of Athens," alongside the highest-scoring British Commonwealth ace of World War II, Pat Pattle and Dahl's friend David Coke. Dahl survived the day with four take-downs to his credits, despite five of his fellow Hurricanes being shot down and four of their pilots killed, including Pattle.
When the German troops were pressing hard on Athens, Dahl's squadron was evacuated to Egypt before reassembling in Haifa. From here, Dahl flew missions every day for a period of four weeks, until he began to get severe headaches that caused him to frequently black out. Dahl, by this point a Flight Lieutenant, was invalided home to Britain. The year was 1942.
Dahl was transferred to Washington as Assistant Air Attaché and it was there that he began to write. His first published work, in the August 1, 1942 issue of the Saturday Evening Post was "Shot Down Over Libya," describing the crash of his Gloster Gladiator. C. S. Forester had asked Dahl to write down some RAF anecdotes so that he could shape them into a story. After Forester sat down to read what Dahl had given him, he decided to publish it exactly as it was. The original title of the article was A Piece of Cake — the title was changed to sound more dramatic, despite the fact that the he was not "shot down."
He ended the war as a Wing Commander, with a record of five aerial victories confirmed by post-war research and cross-referenced in Axis records.
Dahl was known during the latter time of his service for the wild yarns he would spin about his adventures overseas. He decided to put one of these fabrications to paper, titled "Gremlin Lore," which was about the mythical creatures that sabotaged RAF planes. Since he was a serving officer at the time he wrote the story, Dahl was required to submit everything he wrote for approval. The officer who read it decided to pass it along to his friend Walt Disney, who was looking for war–related ideas as material for his fledgling film company. Disney liked Dahl's story but was unable to make a motion picture of it due to copyright issues. However, he did create a picture book from it entitled Walt Disney: The Gremlins (A Royal Air Force Story by Flight Lieutenant Roald Dahl). These days, the book is extremely rare and considered a treasure by Dahl collectors, as it was the author's first book.
By the fall of 1944, Dahl had a literary agent, Ann Watkins, and a number of stories published in American magazines, including Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and Ladies Home Journal. Two of these stories were written for children.
In 1945 Dahl moved back home to Amersham, England to be near his mother. He spent the next year living simply amongst the residents of the small village, some of whom would later be immortalized as characters in Roald's works, such as Claud Taylor from the Claud's Dog series. In 1946 Reynal and Hitchcock published Over to You, a collection of Dahl's war stories. The book received mixed reviews but was successful enough to inspire Dahl's next major effort at writing: Sometime Never (1948), a novel about the possibilities of nuclear war. Though the book was a major flop, it is noted as the first published piece of fiction in the U.S. to depict nuclear catastrophe since the bombing of Hiroshima.
In the years following, Dahl reunited with his American friend and mentor Charles Marsh, helping the newspaper man amass a valuable collection of British art and antiques. Dahl also helped Marsh set up a charity known as Marsh's Public Welfare Foundation. In return, Marsh set up a trust in Dahl's name and invested thousands of dollars into Dahl's family forestry operation in Norway.
Though these years in England were enjoyable for Dahl, he began to miss the excitement of America, particularly of New York. As the 1950s began, Dahl began to earn some money from stories sold to Collier's and The New Yorker, and so he decided to make the move to the "Big Apple," settling in with the Marsh family in their Manhattan home. He soon found himself a part of the circuit of celebrity parties, and it was in 1951 at one such party, thrown by playwright Lillian Hellman, that he met the Tony award-winning actress Patricia Neal. Neal, like many of the New York elite, was charmed by Dahl's wit and clever sarcasm. The two soon began to see each other on a regular basis.
Dahl was enjoying a number of commercial successes by 1953, including the stories "Taste," "My Lady Love, My Dove," "Skin," and "Dip in the Pool," as well as the collection Someone Like You, which consisted of four stories taken from Dahl's days in the English countryside. It was also in 1953 that Roald and Patricia Neal were married, on July 2, at Trinity Church in New York.
The couple would go on to have five children together, and it is to them that Roald attributes his success as a children's book author. Though he had had success as a writer of adult fiction, it was through children's literature that he made his name. His first big success was with James and the Giant Peach in 1961 followed by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964.
Three tragedies struck the Dahl family in the 1960s. The first was in 1960 when the couple's only son was severely injured when a taxi drove into his baby carriage. For a time he suffered from hydrocephalus. Then in 1963 their eldest child, Olivia, died from a sudden outbreak of measles at the age of eight. And then, in 1965, Patricia suffered a series of near–fatal strokes caused by brain aneurysms during her pregnancy with the couple's youngest child, Lucy (who was nevertheless born healthy). She remained in a coma for 21 days though would eventually relearn to walk and speak. Roald was largely credited with her rehabilitation, as he had committed himself to staying by her side, and even designed her recovery routine.
The 1960s also saw a lot of success for the couple. Roald's career as an author was in full swing, and he wrote several screenplays for Hollywood, including the James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice (1967) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) starring Dick Van Dyke. Patricia's career was also on the up as she was acting steadily in one major production after the other, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1964 for the film Hud and receiving a nomination in the same category for her role in The Subject Was Roses (1968).
Through the 1970s, Patricia and Roald's careers continued steadily, though their marriage grew more and more turbulent. With their children grown and their lifestyles calming, the couple finally divorced in 1983 after 30 years of marriage. Dahl remarried in that same year Felicity ("Liccy") d'Abreu Crossland, who had been Patricia's best friend at the time.
The last years of Roald's life were relatively happy and productive, and some of his best books were written during this period: The BFG (1982), The Witches (1983), Boy (1984), and Matilda (1988). Roald Dahl died at the age of 74 from the rare blood disease, myelodysplastic anemia, on November 23, 1990 at his home, Gipsy House, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. He was interred at the parish church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, buried with his snooker cues, a bottle of burgundy, chocolates, HB pencils, and a power saw. In his honor, the Roald Dahl Children's Gallery was opened at Buckinghamshire County Museum in nearby Aylesbury.
In a 2000 survey, British readers named him their favorite author.
In 2002 one of Cardiff's modern landmarks, the historic Oval Basin plaza, was re-christened "Roald Dahl Plass." "Plass" means plaza in Norwegian, a nod to the acclaimed late writer's Norwegian roots. There have also been calls from the public for a permanent statue of him to be erected in the city.
In 2004, over 10 million copies of his books sold worldwide.
Dahl's charitable commitments in the fields of neurology, hematology and literacy have been continued by his widow since his death, through the Roald Dahl Foundation. In June 2005, the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre opened in Great Missenden to celebrate the work of Roald Dahl and advance his work in literacy.
One day a year his widow, Felicity, invites children to the estate where he lived in Buckinghamshire. There are games, such as Splat the Rat and Guess the Number of Sweeties in the Jar, as well as tea, cakes, and orange squash for sale, all while an Royal Air Force band plays.
Even though Dahl is more well-known as an author for children and young adults, he did not begin as such. Most of his early work consisted of short stories for adults, a demographic he continued to write for throughout his career up until the end of his life. The content of these works often contained deadpan, ironic, and bizarre humor, and though they were "generally macabre in nature, his stories won praise for their vivid details, carefully constructed plots, and surprise endings." His style was to use plenty of plot twists, throw in a couple of anticlimaxes along the way, and to ultimately catch the reader off guard with a carefully constructed, often abrupt, surprise ending.
In his work for adults, Dahl mostly wrote in third person and from a single perspective. This was part of his strategy for twisting the plot around, pivoting his angle on the limited perspective and biases of the narrator.
My Uncle Oswald was Dahl's second adult novel, published in October, 1979. The titular character is a reoccurring one, having previously appeared in the short stories, "The Visitor" and "Bitch." In the story, Oswald discovers the world's most powerful aphrodisiac and with the aid of a female accomplice uses it to seduce the world's most famous men. He then sells their semen to women wishing to be impregnated by them.
Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying was Dahl's first short story collection, published in 1946. These stories (e.g., "An African Story," "Only This," and "Katina") are more reflective, slow-moving and, at times, more experimental than his later work.
Man of the South was a short story published in 1948. In this story, a man offers an American boy his Cadillac if the boy can strike a lighter ten times in a row. The catch is that if he cannot, his finger will be cut off. The story contains a dramatic surprise ending and was remade as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents by the same name. It was also the inspiration for the Quentin Tarantino-directed segment of the 1995 film Four Rooms.
Dahl's works for children are usually told from the point of view of a child. They typically involve adult villainouses, who hate and mistreat children, and feature at least one "good" adult to counteract the villain(s). They often contain black humor and grotesque scenarios, including gruesome violence. The Witches and Matilda are two examples of this formula. The BFG ("Big Friendly Giant") follows it in a more analogical way with the good giant representing the "good adult" archetype and the other giants being the "bad adults." This formula is also evident in Dahl's film script for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Class-conscious themes—ranging from the thinly veiled to the blatant—also surface in works such as Fantastic Mr Fox and Danny, the Champion of the World. Dahl's books also feature characters that are very fat, usually children. Augustus Gloop, Bruce Bogtrotter, and Bruno Jenkins are a few of these characters. An enormous woman named Aunt Sponge is featured in James and The Giant Peach.
Some of Dahl's children's books contain references to trolls and mythical Norwegian creatures his mother used to describe to him and his sisters in stories. Other fanciful characters in his books appear to be the product of his own fertile imagination. His most famous character, perhaps, is Willy Wonka, from his popular book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Wonka was the eccentric owner of the titular factory, a mad scientist who resembled Dahl in many ways, including his tendencies of obscure invention, sharp humor, and the unique way in which he relates to children.
James and the Giant Peach was Dahl's first major work for children, published in 1961 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. The story regards James, an ordinary seven-year-old boy, who was orphaned as a result of a bizarre and terrible accident (his parents were eaten by a rhinoceros). He is then sent to live with his two evil aunts who subject him to a variety of physical and mental abuse. The story evolves as James is given a magic ingredient that enlarges an ordinary peach to many-times its size. The ingredient also happens to enlarge and animate a variety of insects who were within proximity to the peach at the time. James and his new friends have many adventures as they use the peach as a vessel to escape the evil aunts, by sailing it across the Atlantic Ocean to America.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) is the story of the adventures of young Charlie Bucket inside the chocolate factory of eccentric candymaker Willy Wonka, and is often considered one of the most beloved children's stories of the 20th century. The book was adapted into two major motion pictures: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in 1971, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2005.
The Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970) is the story of Mr. Fox, who steals animals from three mean farmers (Bunce, Boggis, and Bean) in order to feed his family. Although the farmers try repeatedly to kill the culprit, ultimately Mr. Fox gets the better of them. In the end, he invites all his friends to a feast made from the loot and decides never to go above ground again. Fantastic Mr. Fox has been adapted into an opera by Tobias Picker, and, in 2007, into a major motion picture directed by Wes Anderson.
Though the views of society revealed through Dahl's books—his implied criticism of adults and his contempt for social institutions—has made his works popular with adolescents, it has brought mixed reactions from critics and stirred quite a bit of controversy over the years with parents.
One example of this is The Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970), which some have viewed as Roald Dahl's promotion of anti-capitalist values. Mr. Fox, unprovoked, steals from the three farmers, who represent capitalism and are portrayed as evil. His theft of private property and capital is celebrated. Dahl attempts to conceal the fact that Mr. Fox's actions are criminal, by making Mr. Fox into a good hero and the farmers into evil villains.
James and the Giant Peach, though at first glance rather tame in content, has actually been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000 at number 56.
All links retrieved July 25, 2013.
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Kota Bekasi melangkah maju dalam penanganan sampah "Bekasi bersih partisipasi blogger" adalah sebuah sosialisasi para blogger bagi kota bekasi yang dengan proyek Landfill Gas Flaring nya telah mengubah sampah kota Bekasi menjadi Carbon Credit dan Tenaga Listrik. Bekasi Bersih Partisipasi Blogger adalah partisipasi dari para Blogger se Indonesia bagi Kota Bekasi.
Engines, transmissions and other mechanical systems contain hundreds of moving parts. Though the metal surfaces of these parts look smooth, they are actually full of microscopic peaks and valleys. When the peak of one surface touches its mating surface, it causes wear. Wear may lead to costly component damage or failure. Wear reduction and failure prevention are the primary functions of lubrication.
According to the Practical Handbook of Lubrication, grease is a lubricant composed of a fluid lubricant thickened with a material that contributes a degree of plasticity.
Greases are typically used in areas where a continuous supply of oil cannot be retained, such as open bearings or chassis components. Grease Components
Greases are comprised of three essential components: a base fluid,a thickening system and an additive system. Different types and combinations of thickeners and base fluids, along with supplemental structure modifiers and performance additives, combine to give the final product its special lubricating properties. I like to use the analogy of a sponge saturated with oil.
NORMAL Symptoms: Brown to grayish-tan and slight electrode wear. Correct heat range for engine ad operating conditions.
Recommendations: When new spark plugs are installed, replace with plugs of the same heat range.
WORN Symptoms: Rounded electrodes with a small amount of a deposit on the firing end. Normal Color. Causes hard starting in damp or cold weather and poor fuel economy Recommendations: Plugs have been left in the engine too long. Replace with new plugs of the same heat range. Follow the recommended maintenance schedule.
CARBON DEPOSITS Symptoms: Dry sooty deposits indicates a rich mixture or weak ignition. Causes misfiring, hard starting, and hesitation. Recommendations: Make sure the plug has the correct heat Range, Check for clogged air filter or problem in the fuel system or engine management system. Also check for ignition system problems. ASH DEPOSIT Symptoms: Light brown deposits encrusted on the side or center electrodes or both. Derived from oil ad/or fuel. Excessive amount may mask the spark, Causing misfiring and hesitation during acceleration. Recommendations: If excessive deposits accumulate over a short time or mileages, install new valve guide seals to prevent seep-age of oil into the combustion chambers. Also try changing gasoline brands. OIL DEPOSITS Symptoms: Oily coating caused by poor oil control, oil is leaking past worn valve guides or piston rings into the combustion chamber. Causes hard starting, misfiring and hesitation. Recommendations: Correct thr mechanical condition with necessary repairs and install new plugs. GAP BRIDGING Symptoms: Combustion deposits lodge between the electrodes, Heavy deposits accumulate ad bridge the electrode gap. The plug ceases to fire, resulting in a dead cylinder. Recommendations: Locate the faulty plug and remove the deposits from between the electrodes. TOO HOT Symptoms: Blistered, white insulator, eroded electrode and absence of deposits. Result in shortened plug life. Recommendations: Check for the correct plug heat range, over advanced ignition timing, lean fuel mixture, intake manifold vacuum leaks, sticking valves and insufficient engine cooling. PREIGNITION Symptoms: Melted electrodes, insulators are white, but may be dirty due to misfiring or flying debris in the combustion chamber. Can lead to engine damage. Recommendations: Check for the correct plug heat range, over advance ignition timing, lean fuel mixture, insufficient engine cooling and lack of lubrication. HIGH SPEED GLAZING Symptoms: Insulator has yellowish, glazed appearance indicates that combustion chamber temperatures have risen suddenly during hard acceleration. Normal deposits melt to form a conductive coating Causes misfiring at high speeds. Recommendations: Install new plugs. Consider using colder plug if driving habits warrant. DETONATION Symptoms: Insulator may be cracked or chipped, improper gap setting techniques can also result in a fractured insulator tip. Can lead to piston damage Recommendations: Make sure the fuel anti-knock values meet engine requirements. Use care when setting the gaps on new plugs. Avoid lugging the engine. MECHANICAL DAMAGE Symptoms: May be causes by a foreign object in the combustion chamber or the piston striking an incorrect reach (too long) plug, Causes a dead cylinder, and could result in piston damage. Recommendations: Repair the mechanical damage. Remove the foreign object from the engine and/or install the correct reach plug.
Long-distance bike ride to invite sleepiness potentially life-threatening. Tasenden keeping you safe despite sleeping on the luggage rack motorcycle. Made from a soft material such as dacron cushion, the frame buffer Tasenden equipped helmet / head, slit to put hands and harness that supports the position of ridership to continue to stick to the driver thus avoiding the risk of falling. When used alone, turned into Tasenden removable backpack. | <urn:uuid:7a8aceab-4801-4d86-a327-3608b0228e37> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://maticmod.blogspot.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396872.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00069-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.838773 | 1,119 | 2.5625 | 3 |
|The United States attack on Kuala Batu
The United States' so-called War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq is perhaps only the most recent example of the many times in which the long arm of US military power has reached into Asia to protect its economic interests (as in the Gulf), increase its sphere influence (as in the Philippines), overcome enemy nations and ideologies (as in Vietnam) or exact national revenge (as in Afghanistan). However, it is perhaps interesting for students of Malay history to note that the United States' first-ever armed intervention in Asia was against Malay states in Sumatra. The military assault on 'Quallah Battoo' (Kuala Batu) in Sumatra was a US response to attacks by what were perhaps the most-feared 'terrorists' of the day - the Malay pirate fleets of the Straits of Melaka.
In February 1831, an American merchant vessel, the Friendship, called on the harbour of Kuala Batu, on the Pedir coast of Sumatra. The ship was taking in a cargo of pepper when a Malay boat set off from the village, ostensibly to deliver part of the cargo. However, while the pepper was being carried aboard, the Malays, at a given signal, suddenly attacked the officers and crew. Owen Rutter, in his book "The Pirate Wind", said that every soul on board the vessel was killed in the raid and the pirates ransacked the ship, carrying off all its cargo and cash to the value of 8,000 dollars.
Fortunately, the captain of the Friendship, Charles M Endicott, had been ashore with four of his men. Returning to his ship and finding his crew dead, cargo missing and his ship in shambles, he fled the area and sought the aid of other American cargo ships that were trading along the Pedir coast. These ships assembled at Kuala Batu and sent a message to the local chieftain demanding the punishment of the robbers and return or restitution of all property seized or damaged. However, the local chieftain - recorded as a certain 'Mahomet' - denied all knowledge of the attack. He had, in fact, added insult to injury by putting a price on the head of Captain Endicott and any of his officers and seamen who may have escaped the raid. The American ships returned to their base port in Salem, Massachusetts, to report the incident to the authorities.
The then President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, promised swift retribution. In his third State of Nation speech in December that year, he told the Senate and House of Representatives that "a daring outrage" had been committed in the seas of the East Indies involving the "plunder" of one of its merchant-men engaged in the pepper trade at a port in Sumatra. There appeared to be no room for diplomatic action as Jackson believed that "the piratical perpetrators belonged to tribes in such a state of society that the usual course of proceedings between civilized nations cannot be pursued. I forthwith dispatched a frigate with orders to require immediate satisfaction for the injury and indemnity to the sufferers."
Jackson believed that if those who committed this " act of atrocious piracy" were found to be "members of a regular government, capable of maintaining the usual relations with foreign nations", satisfaction could be negotiated. However, if they were to be "a band of lawless pirates", the frigate had orders to "inflict chastisement".
The vessel selected to inflict this "chastisement" was the 'Potomac' - a navy frigate built at the Washington navy Yard in 1822 equipped with forty-two 32-pounder guns. Its commanding officer was a Commodore John Downes and this expedition was its first overseas cruise. It carried with it a combined force of over 300 armed Navy 'blue-jackets' and US marines. The Potomac left Sandy Hook, New York, on August 28th, 1831, and set off on what was to become the United States' first-ever official military intervention in Asia.
The Potomac weighed anchor five miles off Kuala Batu on February 5th, 1832, posing as a well-laden Danish East India merchant ship. Downes had received orders from Jackson to negotiate with the Malays before commencing any hostilities. However, Downes took the advice of a local Malay by the name of Adam who claimed to be friendly to the United States. Adam suggested that the local Chieftain was indisposed to negotiate, 'except with a very a sharp knife on his gullet.'
It was reported that all the Malays fought to the death before the stockade was overcome - the spears, ancient flintlock muskets and earth and wood fortifications of the Malays were no match for the rapid, long-range and overpowering firepower of modern Western rifles and forty-two 30-pounder cannons. One by one, the three other fortresses were captured during five hours of bitter fighting. Over 150 of the Malay pirates, including Mahomet were killed in attacks, while 2 American sea men were killed and 11 wounded. On February 9th, the men returned to the Potomac and the vessel proceeded to bombard the village itself, its cannons setting fire to and destroying the village - and killing over 300 of its inhabitants.
Downes was severely criticized at home by the press and the public for his severity but Jackson approved of his actions. In his fourth state of nation address, Jackson said that 'to inflict such a chastisement would deter them and others from like aggressions. This was done and the effect has been an increased respect for our flag and additional security for our commerce.'
However, this 'chastisement' was very quickly forgotten by the Malays just seven years later when in August 1838, in the same area, the U.S merchant ship 'Eclipse', commanded by Captain Wilkins, suffered the same fate as the Friendship. While trading at a village called Trabongan, near the town of Muka, she was visited by a party of 24 Malays, who asked permission to come aboard. Wilkins was wracked with fever in his cabin, but his second mate allowed them on deck, asking them to surrender their arms before boarding. This they did without complain. However, when the Captain appeared on deck to receive them, the chief of the party complained and asked that their weapons be given back to them as a mark of good faith. Wilkins agreed to this request and the Malays were returned their krises. Minutes later, Wilkins was stabbed and killed. His second mate was stabbed as well, but saved himself by leaping overboard. Several members of the crew followed him while others climbed up the rigging to save themselves. The pirates then began to plunder the ship, carrying away with them four chests of opium and 18 thousand Spanish dollars.
News of this second outrage reached Commodore Read of the US frigate Columbine at Ceylon. He sailed with his quadrant for Kuala Batu and demanded a surrender of the pirates and the property in their possession. When he received no response, he promptly bombarded the town. He then sailed for Muka where he landed a party of 30 officers and 300 men. Within hours Muka was ablaze and its inhabitant scattered to the surrounding jungles.
The first American traders had arrived in Sumatra at the end of the 18th century and from then until 1860 it's estimated that American ships based largely in Salem made nearly a 1000 voyages, carrying away 370 million pounds of pepper, worth 17 million dollars - almost half the pepper produced in Acheh during this period. In fact, low operation costs and faster ships enabled American traders to compete with the British and Dutch in the pepper trade, which was a matter of concern to the two colonial powers. The then Sultan of Acheh, Sultan Muhammed Shah (1823-38) was under pressure by both the Dutch and the British to check this American trade and the Achinese had on occasion detained American ships on alleged violation of British or Dutch trading laws. A treaty signed with Acheh in 1819 with the British actually included an undertaking to exclude American powers from Acheh. It is therefore unclear just how much of this piracy on American ships was pure robbery and just how much of it was actually the colonial power games of the period.
It cannot be denied though that the waters of the straits were indeed infested by Malay pirates at the time. Referred to as the 'Vikings of the East', no trading ships were safe from these sea-raiders. They could shelter in a thousand lonely bays or a thousand hidden rivers along the coast of the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, only to sweep out to open sea in swarms of up to 50 fast prahus and overwhelm the slow, heavy sail ships of the East India merchant men. The pirate prahus were fast and nimble, using both oars and light sails and were frequently armed with a few small swivel guns. Dressed in scarlet and coats of chain-mail, brandishing krises, two-handed swords and flint locks, the pirates either murdered every soul on board or sold the survivors to slavery.
However, the situation was to change dramatically in 1836 with the arrival in the Straits of HMS Diana - the Royal Navy's first steam-driven gunship in the East Indies This fast moving vessel - and those that followed it - could out manoeuvre and outrun the pirate prahus, especially upwind, while decimating the Malay ranks with its arsenal of long-range high-calibre cannon and rapid rifle fire from the armed sea men onboard. While there were still many instances of piracy, the new military technology of the West ensured it no longer became the dreaded scourge and terror that it was centuries before.
With regard to the Potomac, after its sacking of Kuala Batu, it proceeded to do an official tour circumnavigating the world, also becoming the first US Navy ship to play host to royalty - the King and Queen of the Sandwich Islands (i.e.Hawaii). It finally returned to Boston in June 1834. Its voyage around the world became the subject of a book, 'Voyage of the United States Frigate Potomac', by Downes' private secretary Jeremiah N Reynolds.
The Kuala Batu incident itself formed part of the basis of an American novel published in 1901 by a Kirk Munroe. Called "A Son of Satsuma", it is an interesting mingling of fiction and fact, with the book's main protagonist Bob Whiting finding himself stranded in Sumatra when his ship, the Friendship, is captured by local pirates. He meets a 'Malay with gray eyes' and observes life in the pepper fields of Sumatra before he makes his final dash for freedom and is rescued by the Potomac and "Uncle Sam's long arm". The book ends with Whiting in Japan, making arrangements for his trusty Japanese sidekick, Kato, to join the US Naval Academy!
The assault on "Quallah Battoo" is celebrated in US Marine Corps annals, but little is mentioned of it elsewhere. While significant as being America's first military action in Asia, Downes' exploits were perhaps not as renowned and celebrated in US military annals as the earlier naval exploits of Stephen Decatur against the pirates of the Barbary coast at Tripoli in Libya. Then again, if one were to change the opening lines of the US Marines hymn to "From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Quallah Batoo..." - it perhaps might not have quite the same ring to it.
Write to the author: [email protected] | <urn:uuid:a4ba4c0e-4e46-457d-aaf8-a31a486e2064> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.sabrizain.org/malaya/potomac.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393533.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00030-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981022 | 2,411 | 3.078125 | 3 |
Efficient, Responsible Water Use
The danger of exhausting valuable aquifers by excessive pumping is paralleled by the threat of polluting the groundwater with industrial, agricultural and home landscape contaminants. Nitrates from excessive and untimely fertilization are especially threatening.
Plants, Soils and Water
When water is applied to the soil it seeps down through the root zone very gradually. Each layer of soil must be filled to “field capacity” before water descends to the next layer. This water movement is referred to as the wetting front. Water moves downward through a sandy coarse soil much faster then through a fine-textured soil such as clay or silt.
If only one-half the amount of water required for healthy growth of your garden or landscape is applied at a given time, it only penetrates the top half of the root zone; the area below the point where the wetting front stops remains dry as if no irrigation has been applied at all.
Once enough water is applied to move the wetting front into the root zone, moisture is absorbed by plant roots and moves up through the stem to the leaves and fruits. Leaves have thousands of microscopic openings, called stomates, through which water vapor is lost from the plant. This continual loss of water called transpiration, causes the plant to wilt unless a constant supply of soil water is provided by absorption through the roots.
The total water requirement is the amount of water lost from the plant plus the amount evaporated from the soil. These two processes are called evapotranspiration. Evapotranspiration rates vary and are influenced by day length, temperature, cloud cover, wind, relative humidity, mulching, and the type, size and number of plants growing in a given area.
Water is required for the normal physiological processes of all plants. It is the primary medium for chemical reactions and movement of substances through the various plant parts. Water is an essential component in photosynthesis and plant metabolism, including cell division and enlargement. It is important also in cooling the surfaces of land plants by transpiration.
Water is a primary yield-determining factor in crop production. Plants with insufficient water respond by closing the stomata, leaf rolling, changing leaf orientation and reducing leaf and stem growth and fruit yield.
Not all water is suitable for use as an irrigation source. Prior to implementing an irrigation system, the water source should be tested for water quality. The instructions for testing and the testing results may be obtained from the Texas AgriLife Extension Service or an independent water lab. The results of the test will determine if the water is suitable for irrigation or reveal if any special tactics will be required to overcome quality deficiencies.
Major factors in determining water quality are its salinity and sodium contents. Salinity levels are expressed as categories based on conductivity.
Category C-1 represents a low salinity hazard. Water in this category has a conductivity of less than 2.5 millimhos/cm. It can be used for most crops without any special tactics.
Category C-2 reflects salinity that results in a conductivity of 2.5 – 7.5 millimhos/cm. The water in this category can be used for tolerant plants if adequate leaching occurs.
Category C-3 is high salinity water that has conductivity in the 7.5-22.5 millimhos/cm range. It can not be used effectively on poorly drained soils. On well drained, low salt soils, the water can be used for salt tolerant plants if it is well managed.
Category C-4 water is very high salinity and cannot be used for irrigation on a regular basis.
Sodium is a major component of the salts in most saline waters but its impact can be detrimental to soil structure and plant growth beyond its status as a component of salinity. The level of sodium (Na) in irrigation water is another important factor of quality.
Table 1. Determination of soil moisture content.
|Soil Moisture Level||Coarse (sand)||Light (loamy sand, sandy loam)||Medium (fine sandy loan, silt loam||Heavy (clay loam, clay)|
|No available soil moisture. Plants wilt. Irrigation required. (First Range)||Dry, loose, single grained, flows through fingers. No stain or smear on fingers.||Dry, loose, clods easily crushed and flows through fingers. No stain or smear on fingers||Crumbly, dry, powder, barely maintains shape. Clods break down easily. May leave slight smear or stain when worked with hands or fingers.||Hard, firm baked, cracked usually too stiff or tough to work or ribbon* by squeezing between thumb or forefinger. May leave slight smear or stain.|
|Moisture is available, but level is low. Irrigation needed. (Second Range)||Appears dry; will not retain shape when squeezed in hand||Appears dry; may make a cast when squeezed in hand but seldom holds together.||May form a weak ball** under pressure but is still crumbly. Color is pale with no obvious moisture.||Pliable, forms a ball; ribbons but usually breaks or is crumbly. May leave slight stain or smear.|
|Moisture is available. Level is high. Irrigation not yet needed (Third Range)||Color is dark with obvious moisture Soil may stick together in very weak cast or ball.||Color is dark with obvious moisture. Soil forms weak ball or cast under pressure. Slight finger stain but no ribbon when squeezed between thumb and fore finger.||Color is dark from obvious moisture. Forms a ball. Works easily, clods are soft with mellow feel. Stains finger and has slick feel when squeezed.||Color is dark with obvious moisture. Forms good ball. Ribbons easily, has slick feel. Leaves stain on fingers.|
|Soil moisture level following an irrigation. (Fourth Range)||Appears and feels moist. Color is dark. May form weak cast or ball. Leaves wet outline or slight smear on hand.||Appears and feels moist. Color is dark. Forms cast or ball. Will not ribbon but shows smear or stain and leaves wet outline on hand.||Appears and feels moist. Color is dark. Has a smooth, mellow feel. Forms ball and ribbons when squeezed. Stains and smears. Leaves wet outline on hand.||Color is dark. Appears moist; may feel sticky. Ribbons out easily; smears and stains hand; leaves wet outline. Forms good ball.|
|* Ribbon is formed by squeezing and working soil between thumb and forefinger.
** Cast or ball is formed by squeezing soil in hand.
Sodium levels are expressed as categories based on concentration and impact on soils.
The S-1 category denotes low-sodium water. Water in this category can be used for most plants without any special tactics.
S-2 water has a medium level of sodium. Its use may be a problem on some fine textured soils.
S-3 water has high levels of sodium and will produce harmful effects in most situations. Sometimes it is useful on soils with high gypsum levels and in low salinity situations where it can be chemically treated.
S-4 water has very high sodium levels and is generally unsatisfactory as irrigation water.
There are critical growth periods when water stress is most detrimental. It is imperative that a good moisture supply be maintained during seed germination and seedling emergence from the soil. Water transplants immediately. Many shallow-rooted plants and newly planted trees and shrubs suffer water stress. Wilting followed by browning leaf tips and edges are signs of water stress.
To determine if irrigation is needed, feel the soil in the soil zone where most roots are located. Table 1 explains how to determine the soil’s moisture by feel. As you gain experience feeling the soil and observing plant symptoms, it will help you time irrigations.
Proper watering methods are seldom practiced by most gardeners. They either under or over water when irrigating.
The person who under-waters usually doesn’t realize the time needed to adequately water an area; instead he applies light, daily sprinklings. It is actually harmful to lightly sprinkle plants every day. Frequent light applications wet the soil to a depth of less than 1 inch. Most plant roots go much deeper. Light sprinkling only settles the dust and does little to alleviate drought stress of plants growing in hot, dry soil. Instead of light daily waterings, give plants a weekly soaking. When watering, allow the soil to become wet to a depth of 5 to 6 inches.
This type of watering allows moisture to penetrate into the soil area where roots can readily absorb it. A soil watered deeply retains moisture for several days, while one wet only an inch or so is dry within a day.
In contrast, there are those who water so often and heavily that they drown plants. Symptoms of too much water are the same as for too little. Leaves turn brown at the tips and edges, then brown all over and drop from the plant. These symptoms should be the same, since they result from insufficient water in the plant tissue.
Too much water in a soil causes oxygen deficiency, resulting in damage to the root system. Plant roots need oxygen to live. When a soil remains soggy little oxygen is present in the soil. When this condition exists roots die and no longer absorb water. Then leaves begin to show signs of insufficient water. Often gardeners think these signs signal lack of water, so they add more. This further aggravates the situation and the plant usually dies quickly.
Thoroughly moisten the soil at each watering, and then allow plants to extract most of the available water from the soil before watering again.
A mulch is a layer of material covering the soil surface around plants. This covering befriends plants in a number of ways.
It moderates soil temperature, thus promoting greater root development. Roots prefer to be cool in summer and warm in winter. This is possible under a year-round blanket of mulch.
Mulch conserves moisture by reducing evaporation of water vapor from the soil surface. This reduces water requirements.
Mulching prevents compaction by reducing soil crusting during natural rainfall or irrigation. Falling drops of water can pound the upper 1/4 inch of soil, especially a clay soil, into a tight, brick-like mass that retards necessary air and water movement to the root zone.
Mulching also reduces disease problems. Certain types of diseases live in the soil and spread when water splashes bits of infested soil onto a plant’s lower leaves. Mulching and careful watering reduce the spread of these diseases. Mulching also keeps fruit clean while reducing rot disease by preventing soil-fruit contact.
Most weed seeds require light to germinate so thick mulch layer shades them and reduces weed problems by 90 percent or more.
Any plant material that is free of weed seed and not diseased is suitable for mulch. Weed-free hay or straw, leaves, grass clippings, compost, etc., are all great. Fresh grass clippings are fine for use around well-established plants, but cure them for a week or so before placing them around young seedlings.
Mulch vegetable and flower gardens the same way. First get plants established, then mulch the entire bed with a layer 3 to 4 inches thick. Work the mulch material up around plant stems.
Organic mulches decompose or sometimes wash away, so check the depth of mulches frequently and replace when necessary.
Recent research indicates that mulching does more to help newly planted trees and shrubs become established than any other factor except regular watering. Grasses and weeds, especially bermuda grass, which grow around new plants rob them of moisture and nutrients. Mulch the entire shrub bed and mulch new trees in a 4-foot circle.
Four distinct methods of irrigating are sprinkling, flooding, furrow-irrigation and drip irrigation. Consider the equipment and technique involved in each method before selecting the “right” system. Select a system that will give plants sufficient moisture without wasting water.
Sprinkler irrigation, or “hose-end overhead sprinkling” as it is sometimes called, is the most popular and most common watering method. Sprinkler units can be set up and moved about quickly and easily. They are inexpensive to buy, but if used incorrectly they can be extremely wasteful of water.
Sprinkler equipment varies in cost from a few dollars for a small stationary unit to $50 or more for units that move themselves. A solid-set sprinkler system for a small garden could cost more than $100, although it is not necessary to spend that much. The best investment is an impact-driving sprinkler than can be set to water either a full or partial circle.
Sprinkler irrigation has its advantages. The system can be used on sloping as well as level areas. Salt does not accumulate because water percolates downward from the surface carrying salts with it. Different amounts of water can be applied to separate plantings to match plant requirements.
However, there are some drawbacks. Use sprinkler irrigation early in the day to allow time for the soil surface to dry before nightfall. Irrigation in a wind of more than 5 miles per hour distributes the water unevenly. If you have poor quality water, the mist which dries on leaves may deposit enough salt to injure them. Strong winds may carry the water away to neighbors’ yards. Some water also is wasted by attempting to cover a square or rectangular area with a circular pattern. Move the sprinkler unit at regular intervals if the garden is larger than the sprinkler pattern. With caged tomatoes or trellised crops, set the sprinkler on a stand to allow the spray to arch up and over the top of the leaf canopy. Improper timing and operating in wind or at night can damage plants and waste water.
Flooding is one of the oldest irrigation methods. It is often used in areas with extreme summer heat, especially in large farming operations. It can also be used in the home garden.
First, a shallow dam is raised around the entire perimeter of the area to be watered. Then, water is allowed to flow over the soil until the dammed area is completely covered. Beneficial flooding is possible only if the area is level and the soil contains enough clay to cause the water to spread out over the surface and penetrate slowly and evenly. The soil must not remain flooded with water for more than a few hours.
Flood irrigation is useful where alkaline water causes a buildup of salts to toxic levels in the soil. Flooding leaches (flushes down) these excess soluble salts out of the soil. It is best to do this type of flooding before spring fertilizing, tilling and planting.
However, flood irrigation has its drawbacks. It can waste water because it is easy to apply much more water than is required to meet normal plant needs. Runoff is hard to avoid. Also, rapidly growing plants are injured by the low oxygen level present (oxygen starvation) in flooded soil, and fruits resting on flooded soil stay wet, often rotting as a result.
Furrow irrigation is a popular method of applying water, primarily to vegetable gardens. Successful furrow irrigation requires soil with enough clay so that water flows along shallow ditches between the rows and sinks in slowly. The water must reach the low end of the rows before much has soaked in at the high end. Many sandy or open soils are so porous that water seeps in too quickly, never reaching the end of the row. To solve this problem, use short rows in gardens with sandy soil.
Most gardens can be irrigated easily with the furrow method by using a hoe or shovel to make shallow ditches. To test furrow irrigation, make one shallow ditch from end to end and run water down it. If the water runs 20 to 30 feet in a few minutes, that’s fine. If the water sinks in too fast at the high end, divide the garden lengthwise into two or more runs and irrigate each run separately. Make a serpentine ditch to guide the water up and down short rows in small gardens on level ground. The number of rows which can be irrigated at the same time depends on the volume of water available and your ingenuity.
Leaves and fruit of erect plants such as beans and peppers will stay dry during furrow irrigation. New seedlings can be watered by running water as often as needed to keep the seedbed moist. The surface soil of a raised bed does not pack as with sprinkler irrigation, so there is less crusting. Only a hoe or shovel and a length of hose are needed to get the water from the house faucet to the garden.
But, furrow irrigation does have some disadvantages. Mature fruits of vine and tomato crops usually rest on the soil. Some will become affected with a soil rot after repeated wetting. And it is difficult, if not impossible, to protect them with mulch. Train vining plants away from furrows even though it is not an easy task. In areas with salty water, salts accumulate near the center of the row and can injure plants. If only a small volume of water is available, water a few rows at a time and then change to a new set. This can be time consuming and wasting water at the ends of the rows is a common problem.
Trickle or drip irrigation is an improvement over all the above as a watering technique. It applies a small amount of water over a long period of time, usually several hours. This is discussed in detail later in this publication.
Using Water Around Home Trees And Shrubs
Grass and/or weeds growing under and around trees and shrubs compete for the same nutrients and water. When summer rainfall is low and less than adequate watering occurs, competition for water and nutrients imposed by weeds or grass substantially reduced tree growth, bud development and fruit size. When competition from grass is eliminated, roots are more evenly distributed, root numbers increase and they utilize a larger volume of soil. Effective soil utilization by a large root system means that fertilizer and moisture will be used more efficiently.
Remove grass and/or weeds from beneath newly planted trees and shrubs as soon as possible. The longer turfgrass grows under trees and shrubs, the greater the reduction of new growth. There is also a cumulative effect which may decrease tree growth for several years. For instance, if the growth of a tree is reduced by 20 percent for one year because of grass competition, the growth automatically is 20 percent less during the second year’s growth. Grass competition reduces growth by as much as 50 percent.
If trees and shrubs are surrounded closely by tenacious grasses such as bermuda, remove or kill the turf. The safest grass killer for use near young trees and shrubs is glyphosate, which is sold as Roundup, Kleenup, Doomsday or Weed and Grass Killer.
This herbicide totally eliminates grasses and roots, yet is inactivated upon soil contact. Use a piece of wood, cardboard, etc, as a shield to prevent spray droplets from touching trunks or foliage of desirable plants. Use only the amount of glyphosate suggested on the product label.
Liberal watering offsets the retarding effect of grass. If the competition of grass for water can be overcome by extra watering, plants will grow much better.
Trees need a deep, thorough soaking once a week in the growing season, either from natural rainfall or supplemental irrigation. When irrigating, be thorough and allow the water to penetrate deeply. To water large trees let water flow slowly onto an area under the dripline of the tree for several hours.
Professionals indicate that large trees require more deep watering than homeowners can imagine. Remember that watering which is adequate for lawn grasses growing under trees is not adequate for actively growing trees.
Young and mature pecans, which are popular lawn trees in many areas, respond positively to irrigation. Irrigation can be very beneficial if not necessary, in June, July, and August. Irrigation often means the difference between a marketable and unmarketable product. A dry June and July may cause many or all nutlets to drop. Drought during July and early August can decrease nut size. Pecans fill during August and September. Drought during three months may cause nuts that are poorly filled. A dry September and October may prevent shuck opening and cause a high proportion of “sticktights”. Drought-induced sticktights can be a serious problem.
Growth of young, nonbearing pecan trees depends on a regular supply of water from April bud break to mid-August. The frequency of irrigation varies with the system used. However, avoid applying too much water. An understanding of internal soil drainage prevents overwatering. When too much water is supplied, oxygen is forced out of the root zone and many serious problems result, including the following:
- Growth stops.
- Minerals are not absorbed.
- Leaves turn yellow and remain small.
- Roots begin to die.
A guide for young tree irrigation is shown in Table 2. If soil drainage is poor, apply 50 percent of this volume.
All bearing pecan trees respond positively to irrigation. In general, pecans in good soil bear with only 32 inches of rainfall from August to October. However, more water increases tree health and regular production.
Table 2. Average weekly water requirements in gallons per tree.
|1-year old trees||7||7||14||28||28|
|4- to 7- year-old trees||56||56||112||224||224|
Pecans require 1 inch of water each week from April to October; the optimum amount is 2 inches per week.
A bearing pecan tree has its greatest water needs during the following periods:
- March, immediately before growth begins.
- June, when nuts begin to size
- Late July, when kernels begin to fall.
Severe drought during one of these four periods can cause complete crop failure or serious loss. If these occur during the last period, a poor crop results the following year.
Pecan roots can dry out and die if no rain occurs from September to April. Therefore, consider a mid-winter irrigation to ensure good tree health and regular production.
Water needs vary considerably among the turfgrasses. Consider this when establishing a lawn, for it may significantly reduce irrigation needs during the summer. Of the common turfgrasses tall fescue requires the most water and buffalo-grass the least. St. Augustine, hybrid bermuda grass and common bermuda grass have intermediate water needs.
Lightly water newly seeded or sprigged lawns at frequent intervals. Keep the seed or sprigs moist but not saturated during this initial growth period. This may require watering four or five times on hot, windy days.
The first 10 days to 2 weeks are especially critical. If young plants dry out, they may die. After a couple of weeks root system development should be well under way and the watering frequency can be slowly reduced. At about 1 month after seedling or sprigging the lawn it should be treated as an established lawn. Purple or red colored bermuda grass may indicate seedlings are overwatered. If this occurs, reduce watering and plants usually recover.
Water newly sodded lawns much like established lawns except more frequently. After the sod is applied, soak it with enough water so that the soil under the sod is wet to a depth of 2 to 3 inches. Each time the sod begins to dry out, resoak it. Roots develop fairly rapidly and within 2 weeks or so the sod can be treated like an established lawn.
Ideally, a lawn should be watered just before it begins to wilt. Most grasses take on a dull purplish cast and leaf blades begin to fold or roll. Grass under drought stress also shows evidence of tracks after someone walks across the lawn. These are the first signs of wilt. With careful observation and experience, one can determine the correct number of days between waterings. Common bermuda grass lawns can go 5 to 7 days or longer between waterings without loss of quality.
Early morning is considered the best time to water. The wind is usually calm and the temperature is low so less water is lost to evaporation. The worst time to water is late evening because the lawn stays wet all night, making it more susceptible to disease.
When watering a lawn, wet the soil to a depth of 4 to 6 inches. Soil type affects the amount of water needed to wet soil to the desired depth.
It takes about 1/2 inch of water to achieve the desired wetting depth if the soil is high in sand, and about 3/4 inch of water if the soil is a loam. For soils high in clay, an inch of water is usually necessary to wet the soil to the desired depth.
If waterings are too light or too frequent the lawn may become weak and shallow-rooted, which in turn makes it more susceptible to stress injury.
Use the following steps to determine the amount of water your sprinkler or sprinkler system puts out and check its distribution pattern at the same time.
- Determine the rate at which your sprinkler applies water to the lawn.
- Set out three to five empty cans in a straight line going away from the sprinkler. Set the last can near the edge of the sprinkler’s coverage.
- Run the sprinkler for a set time such as 1/2 hour.
- Measure the amount of water in each can.
- Each can will contain a different amount of water. Usually, the can closest to the sprinkle will have the most water. The sprinkler pattern must overlap to get an even wetness of the soil. Use this information to find out how long it takes your sprinkler to apply 1 inch of water. For example, if you find that most cans contain about 1/4 inch of water after the sprinkler runs 1/2 hour, it would take 4 x 1/2 or 2 hours to apply 1 inch.
- Run the sprinkler or sprinkler system long enough to apply at least 1 inch of water or until runoff occurs. If runoff occurs first:
- Stop sprinkler and note running time.
- Allow water to soak in for 1/2 hour.
- Start sprinkler.
- If runoff occurs, repeat above steps until at least 1 inch of water has been applied and allowed to soak into the soil.
- Do not water again until the lawn has completely dried out. (This usually takes 5 or 6 days.)
- Apply enough water to wet the soil to a depth of 4 to 6 inches.
- Avoid frequent light applications of water.
- Water in early daylight hours.
- Select a turfgrass with a low water requirement.
- Avoid using soluble nitrogen fertilizers. (They promote high growth rates which, in turn, increase water requirements of the plant.)
Many soils will not take an inch of water before runoff occurs. If this is a problem with your lawn, try using a wetting agent, also called a surfactant, which reduces the surface tension of water making it “wetter.” This “wetter” water runs into the soil at a faster rate and goes deeper than water in a non-treated soil.
There are a number of wetting agents available; apply them according to directions on their labels. If this does not solve to runoff problem, it may be necessary to apply 1/2 inch one day and 2 inches the next day.
Generally speaking, if you keep your tomatoes happy, the rest of the vegetables will receive enough water. Obviously, irrigating a garden containing many kinds of vegetables is not simple. Early in the season when plants are young and have small root systems, they remove water from the soil near the center of the row. As the plants grow larger, roots penetrate into more soil volume and withdraw greater quantities of water faster.
In sandy loam soils, broccoli, cabbage, celery, sweet corn, lettuce, potatoes and radishes have most of their roots in the top 6 to 12 inches of soil (even though some roots go down 2 feet) and require frequent irrigation of about 3/4 to 1 inch of water. Vegetables which have most of their root systems in the top 18 inches of soil including beans, beets, carrots, cucumbers, muskmelons, peppers and summer squash. These vegetables withdraw water from the top foot of soil as they approach maturity and can profit from 1 to 2 inches of water per irrigation.
A few vegetables, including the tomato, cantaloupe, watermelon and okra, root deeper. As these plants grow they profit from irrigations of up to 2 inches of water.
For fruiting crops, the most critical growth stage regarding water deficit is at flowering and fruit set. Moisture shortage at this stage may cause abscission of flowers or young fruits, resulting in insufficient fruit for maximum yield.
The longer the flowering period, the less sensitive a species is to moisture deficits. For example, the relative drought resistance of beans during flowering and early pod formation is the result of the lengthy flowering period — 30 to 35 days with most varieties. Slight deficits during part of this period can be partially compensated for by subsequent fruit set when the water supply is adequate. More determinate crops such as corn or processing tomatoes are highly sensitive to drought during the flowering period.
In terms of food production, the period of yield formation or enlargement of the edible product (fruit, head, root, tuber, etc.) is critical for all vegetables and is the most critical for non-fruiting crops. Moisture deficits at the enlargement stage normally result in a smaller edible portion because nutrient uptake and photosynthesis are impaired.
Irrigation, especially over irrigation during the ripening period may reduce fruit quality. Ample water during fruit ripening reduces the sugar content and adversely affects the flavor of such crops as tomatoes, sweet corn and melons. Moisture deficits at ripening do not significantly reduce yield of most fruit crops, irrigate at this time with extreme caution.
Drip Irrigation For The Home Landscape, Garden And Orchard
One of the best techniques to use in applying water to home landscapes, gardens and orchards is drip irrigation. This is the controlled, slow application of water to soil. The water flows under low pressure through plastic pipe or hose laid along each row of plants. The water drops out into the soil from tiny holes called orifices which are either precisely formed in the hose wall or in fittings called emitters that are plugged into the hose wall at a proper spacing.
Use drip irrigation for watering vegetables, ornamental and fruit trees, shrubs, vines and container grown plants outdoors.
Drip irrigation is not well suited for solid plantings of shallow-rooted plants such as grass and some ground covers.
The basic concepts behind the successful use of drip irrigation are that soil moisture remains relatively constant, and air, as essential as water is the plant root system, is always available. In other watering methods there is an extreme fluctuation in soil water content, temperature and aeration of the soil.
Soil, when flooded or watered by sprinkler, is filled to capacity. It is then left to dry out, and often it is not until the plant begins to show signs of stress that it is watered again. When the soil is saturated in this way, there is little or no available oxygen; at the end of the cycle there is insufficient water. Drip irrigation overcomes this traditional watering problem by keeping water and oxygen levels within absorption limits of the plants. It frequently (even daily) replaces the water lost through evaporation and transpiration (evapotranspiration). In addition to maintaining ideal water levels in the soil, this also prevents extreme temperature fluctuations which result from wet-dry cycles associated with other watering methods.
With proper management, drip irrigation reduces water loss by up to 60 percent or more as compared to traditional watering methods. These methods deliver water at a faster rate than most soils can absorb. Water applied in excess of this penetration rate can only run off the surface, removing valuable topsoil and nutrients. With drip irrigation the water soaks in immediately when the flow is adjusted correctly. There is neither flooding nor run-off, so water is not wasted. With a properly used drip irrigation system, all of the water is accessible to the roots. Watering weed patches, walkways and other areas between plants and row is avoided. Wind does not carry water away as it can with sprinkler systems, and water lost to evaporation is negligible.
Drip irrigation requires little or no time for changing irrigation sets and only about half as much water as furrow or sprinkler irrigation because water is delivered drop by drop at the base of the plants.
Water shortage and high energy costs motivate gardeners to harvest the greatest possible yield from every precious drop of water. If you have shied away from installing a drip irrigation system because it looked too complicated or too costly, this publication explains how to have one easily and economically.
The financial investment is reasonably small if you are willing to spend a few hours to plan, assemble and install the system. Savings in water combined with increased yield and quality of vegetables and flowers more than pays for the cost of parts to maintain a drip system.
The life of a drip system is extended by proper design, proper filtering, avoiding puncture with tillage tools, mulching over plastic lateral driplines to shield them from sunlight, and flushing and draining lines and storing system components inside a warm building before hard freezing temperatures arrive.
The 3- to 5-gallons-per-minute flow from a typical house faucet limits the area which can be adequately irrigated to usually not more than 1,500 to 2,000 square feet.
From $15 to more than $30 per 100 feet of row can be spent for equipment in an average sized home garden, depending on whether it is simple or has fancy automatic controls, pressure regulators and fertilizer injectors. As with most tools and machines, the simpler the better.
The two basic kinds of drip irrigation systems which have worked best for Texas growers are the two-channel plastic tubing represented by IRS Bi-Wall and Chapin Twin-Wall, and the plastic pipe with insert emitters represented by Submatic, Melnor Tirosh, Spot, Microjet and many others. The emitters are made by cutting 1-foot lengths of microtubing.
When planning a drip system, consider your needs, one at a time:
- A source of clear water which flows at a rate of at least 2 to 5 gallons per minute with at least 30 to 40 pounds pressure is needed. Clean water is essential for successful drip irrigation because sand, silt, organic material and other foreign material can easily clog small emitter openings. Most city water sources do not require a filter; however, some gardeners add a filter to avoid clogging. The filtration system required depends on the type and quantity of foreign materials in the water and/or emitter characteristics.
- Generally, a screen-type filter is best. A filter system in the main line near the faucet is much easier to maintain than several filter systems scattered throughout the irrigation system. Y-type, in-line strainers containing single, 100-mesh, corrosion-resistant screens (such as stainless steel or bronze) are usually adequate for filtering small amounts of sand, rust particles, etc. Filters with replaceable cartridges, synthetic-fiber fabric elements or multi-stage screens such as 100- and 180-mesh are required where water contains larger amounts of sand. Filters should be equipped with cleanout or flush valves to easily remove trapped particles. Daily flushing is necessary where water contains moderate amounts of sand or other material. Screens and filter cartridges need thorough cleaning or replacing periodically, depending upon the amount of foreign material in the water.
- A decrease in water pressure and volume delivered can signal filter clogging. A decrease in flow in spite of good pressure in the lines indicates emitter clogging. All water from streams and underground sources contains dissolved materials known chemically as salts.
Most water does not contain enough salt to be injurious to plants. However, irrigation water adds salt to the soil, where it remains unless it is removed in drainage water or the harvested crop. When the amount of salt added to the soil exceeds the amount removed, salt accumulates until the concentration in the soil may become harmful to plants.
The principal effect of salinity is to reduce the availability of water to the plant; however, certain salts or ions may produce specific toxic effects. Poor quality irrigation water containing moderate amounts of salt often can be used more successfully with drip irrigation than with sprinkler or surface irrigation. Less total salt is added with drip irrigation since less water is applied. In addition, a uniformly high soil moisture level is maintained with drip irrigation, which keeps the salt concentration in the soil at a lower level.
Salts accumulate in the soil around the edges of the west area under drip irrigation emitters, and some leaching (removal of salts with drainage water) may be required. Sufficient rainfall is received in much of the state to accomplish any required leaching of salts. However, extra irrigation water may be required in some areas to leach accumulated salts from the root zone. Operating the system when the crop’s water requirement is low can probably accomplish required leaching of salts in most cases.
Locate the area to be irrigated as closely as possible to a faucet. If the area is more than 100 feet from the faucet it may be difficult to get enough volume to run the drip system properly in a large area. Use 5/8-inch or 3/4-inch hose from the house faucet to the header in the area to be irrigated. Usually a 5/8-inch hose is a sufficient line size for normal gardens. Garden rows should be level or only slightly downhill (not more than 1 to 2 percent grade) even if it is necessary to run them on the contour (around the hill instead of up and down it). Place small irrigation pipes (drip hoses) right along the row; water drips out more uniformly when the rows are level or slightly downhill. Transport water from the source to the high side of the area to be irrigated.
If fruit and ornamental trees are to be drip-irrigated, use insert emitters. The number of emitters per tree or plant depends on plant size. A large fruit or ornamental tree having a canopy spread of 15 feet or more in diameter needs six emitters. A smaller tree or shrub needs one emitter for each 2 1/2 feet of canopy diameter. The number of emitters multiplied by the rated output per emitter gives the flow rate needed to irrigate all the trees and shrubs simultaneously. For example, if there are 12 trees on which 72 emitters will be used, each with a rated output of 1 gallon per hour at 15 pounds per square inch, the flow rate will be 72 gallons per hour or 1.2 gallons per minute. A 1/2 inch main line is sufficient according to the following guidelines.
Make a sketch of the area to be irrigated. Use graph or grid paper to draw the area’s shape using a scale of 1 inch to 5 to 10 feet.
Measure the length and width of the area. The distance from the water source to the edge of the area to be irrigated is the length of garden hose or plastic pipe needed to connect to the irrigation system.
Draw in the actual lines of drip hose required. If planning a garden, a drip hose will be run down each row. Count the number of rows and multiply the number of major rows by the row length to get the total length of drip hoses needed. If you run several rows close together (only a few inches apart) to create a bed culture, consider using one drip hose if it is up to 18 inches wide and two drip hoses if it is 24 to 36 inches wide. If wide beds are used for planting flowers, use one drip hose every 18 inches.
Other helpful facts involve the direction of downward slope in the garden and the gallons per minute delivered by your faucet. Use a container of known volume, such as a 5-gallon pail, and a watch to estimate gallons per minute.
Installing A Drip System
When buying irrigation equipment avoid mixing brands of fittings, hoses and emitters unless they are compatible. The design and installation of Bi-Wall and Twin-Wall drip tubing and the design and installation of Submatic, Melnor, Spot and Microjet emitter systems are discussed separately so that the instructions are easier to understand.
Table 3. Plastic line sizes for lengths less than 100 feet.
|Flow rate (gpm)||Line size (inches nominal)|
|1/2 to 2||1/2|
|2 to 4||3/4|
|4 to 8||1|
When planning a Bi-Wall or Twin-Wall system, use a 1/2-inch (16 millimeter) main water supply plastic hose (header) to feed the water into the drip tubing which runs alongside each row. Most house faucets supply enough water to run 200 to 300 feet of drip tubing at once. Divide irrigation systems for larger areas into two or more sets when the water volume is insufficient to cover the whole area at once.
Parts needed for a drip tubing system with a header are a hose long enough to reach from the house faucet to the header, a 1/2-inch female hose connector, a 1/2-inch diameter header long enough to connect all the drip tubes, an ear tee for each drip tube, a drip tube for every row, a nylon string or strong wire to tie the ends of the drip tubing and a sharp knife.
When a header is used, begin the installation by running a hose from the house faucet to a female hose connector which is installed in the end of the header closest to the faucet. The other end of the header is plugged or folded back and tied off. Be sure the header spans the entire width of the area to be irrigated on the high side.
Place the correct lengths of Bi-Wall drip tubing along each row. Plan rows to make the best use of water.
Small plants such as carrots, onions, radishes, lettuce, bush beans, etc., can be double-rowed; that is, seed can be planted on each side of the drip tubing.
To join the Bi-Wall tubing to the header pipe (the main water supply), use a connecting attachment called an ear tee. At each row, punch a small hole in the side of the 16-millimeter header tubing facing down the row. Use a blunt eight penny nail to punch the holes. Push the ear tee into the hole and wrap the two ears around the header. To secure the far end of the Bi-Wall, fold back 2 inches and tie with a string. If the water contains sand or dirt particles, screw a filter to the hose connector as sand particles and other trash can clog openings in the Bi-Wall tubing.
All of the drip irrigation fittings are connected to the plastic tubing in the same manner. For the hose connector, push the 16-millimeter header over the shaft and under the locking collar. When the header is as far as you can push it, pull back on the tubing. This binds the tubing under the locking collar. To disassemble, reverse the procedure. For installing Bi-Wall tubing, push it on the ear tee as far as it will go; push the collar outward, then grasp the Bi-Wall tubing and pull back on it while holding the ear tee in place with the other hand. This binds the Bi-Wall tubing under the locking collar. Note the difference in the locking collar for the Bi-Wall and the header. If irrigating only one row with Bi-Wall, put a wide Bi-Wall collar on the hose connector, install it in the Bi-Wall and fasten it to a water hose or faucet just as for the header. It may be necessary to twist the locking collar to allow the Bi-Wall to go all the way up.) Work the locking collar down on the Bi-Wall, then hold the ear tee in one hand and pull on the Bi-Wall tubing with the other hand. If it leaks around the collar on the ear tee, push the Bi-Wall farther up on the eat tee, twist the locking collar again and pull on the tubing. The notch on the collar should be over the top of the Bi-Wall.
The second type of drip irrigation system involves the use of insert emitters. When designing a drip system with insert emitters, strive to have the same amount of water flowing out of all emitters in the system. Secondly, have the flow rate regulated so that water drips into the soil without puddles forming on the surface. Insert emitter systems are ideally suited for irrigating trees, which are planted farther apart than garden crops, flowers or shrubs.
Trees previously irrigated by the other methods change their root systems when drip irrigation is used. New feeder roots concentrate near the emitters and become major suppliers. It is best to start drip irrigation at the beginning of spring growth to allow time for new roots to develop before hot weather arrives. If drip irrigation is initiated in midsummer, an occasional supplemental irrigation by the old method is recommended to avoid plant stress.
Soil texture is of primary importance in the design and use of drip irrigation. It directly affects the number or placement of emitters. In sandy soil where spaces between sand grains are relatively large, gravitational forces affect water movement more than capillary action. As a result, water moves down rather than laterally through the soil. In finer soils such as clay, capillary action is much stronger and water spreads laterally before penetrating very deeply. An emitter in sandy soil will water an area with a diameter of about 15 inches, while in clay soil the same emitter will water an area up to 2 feet in diameter. Since the same amount of water is released in both cases, the sandy soil obviously receives deeper watering than the clay.
The following chart on emitter placement suggests a 1-gallon-per-hour emitter at the base of the plant, assuming you have a low shrub in sandy soil. In fact, placing two 1/2-gallon emitters, each about 9 inches from the base, increases the area of coverage while using the same amount of water. Increasing the wet area encourages wider development of the root system, and watering time is reduced somewhat. However, remember that smaller volume emitters clog more easily than larger volume emitters.
When working with vegetable crops and sandy soil, use closer spacing (12 inches) to ensure that all shallow roots receive sufficient moisture. With finer soils, use greater distances between emitters while still ensuring proper coverage. To get a better idea of soil structure experiment with slow water applications to observe lateral movement and depth of water penetration. Observe the application rate and time so better decisions on emitter placement, as well as watering practices, can be made. Be sure that a sufficient percentage of the root zone is watered. Shallow root zones require emitters with closer spacing; deep roots allow wider spacing. The widest spacing to use safely on vegetables and ground cover is closer than the narrowest required by tree crops. This is shown in the table on the number and placement of emitters.
Water quality may be a factor in emitter location since salts concentrate at the edges of the wet area. It may be necessary to locate emitters so that wet areas overlap the tree trunk to prevent harmful salt accumulations near the trunk.
A popular emitter arrangement for large trees such as pecans uses a loop which circles the tree between the trunk and the dripline. The lateral pipeline which carries water along each row of trees is under ground. A 1/2-inch or 3/8-inch polyethylene pipe connected to the lateral near each tree extends to the soil surface and circles the tree. The tree loop is usually 6 to 12 feet long initially and contains one or two emitters. Additional lengths of pipe 8 to 12 feet long, each containing another emitter, are connected to the initial loop as the trees grow and require more water. Large pecan trees may require tree loops with five to nine emitters.
In-line emitter arrangements have been used satisfactorily for smaller trees such as apples, peaches and citrus. Install two or four emitters in the lateral so that wet areas overlap in line with the tree row.
Emitter selection and performance are keys to the success of all drip irrigation systems. Some emitters perform satisfactorily underground while others must be used only above ground. Emitter clogging is still a major problem in drip irrigation. Emitter openings must be small to release small amounts of water, consequently, they clog easily.
Table 4. Selection, number and spacing of emitters and orifices.
|Number of emitters or orifices||Placement of emitters or orifices|
|Low shrubs (2-3 feet)||1.0||1||at plant|
|Shrubs and trees (3-5 feet)||1.0||2||6-12 inches either side|
|Shrubs and trees (5-10 feet)||2.0||2-3||2 feet from tree equally spaced|
|Shrubs and trees (10-20 feet)||2.0||3-4||3 feet apart equally spaced|
|Shrubs and trees (20 feet or higher)||2.0||6 or more||4 feet apart equally spaced|
|Containers (Potted plants)||0.5-1.0||1||at plant|
|Flower beds||1.0||1||at plant|
|Ground cover||1.0||1||at plant|
|Vegetables (closely spaced)||0.5-1.0||1||every 16-24 inches|
|Vegetables (widely spaced)||1.0-2.0||one per plant||at plant|
Emitters are more easily observed, cleaned and oriented near the tree when they are located on the soil surface, although drip systems with underground emitters are out of the way. Some emitters can be flushed easily to remove sand or other particles which cause clogging, while others are more difficult to clean.
Ease of installation and durability are important considerations in emitter selection. Most emitters are either connected in-line or by attaching to the lateral. In-line connections are made by cutting the pipe and connecting the emitter to the pipeline at the cut. Clamps, which increase costs, are required for connecting emitters in some pipes. Check the pipe and in-line emitters for correct fit before purchasing. Emitters which attach to the lateral are either inserted into the pipe or clamped to it.
The flexibility of a drip irrigation system makes it ideal for most landscapes. When native plants are transplanted they often require watering for the first year or so until they establish a root system. After that they usually survive on natural rainfall.
As plants grown and watering needs increase, more emitters can be installed very easily. Or, 1 gallon emitters can be replaced with 2- or 4-gallon-per-hour emitters.
In landscaping, plants with different watering requirements must frequently be mixed together. Some ornamentals require occasional deep watering, while others prefer more frequent shallow watering. Differing needs can be satisfied through the number or size of emitters by placing either a greater number of emitters or by using emitters with a greater flow rate for plantings requiring extra water. In clay soils it is best to increase the number of emitters rather than the rate of flow since soil density limits absorption rates.
Once the system is set up this way, maximum benefit for all plants is achieved by several shallow waterings–leaving the water on for a short time (20 minutes to 2 hours) with an occasional deep watering (several hours) as needed, depending on season, plants and soil type.
Burial of the drip system is usually preferred by landscapers and ornamental gardeners. Generally 3 to 4 inches deep is sufficient. This not only hides the tubing from view but also adds to the system’s life expectancy. Most emitters can also be buried, but check them occasionally. Rodent damage (sometimes they chew through the tubing) and accidental damage from shovels or tillers are problems associated with buried systems. Repairing cut or punctured laterals is easy with a couple of connectors and a new section of tubing.
Drip irrigation is the best method for watering landscape trees also. A tree with only 25 percent of its roots wet regularly will do as well as a tree with 100 percent wetting at 14-day intervals. This saves water in drought situations by wetting only part of the root zone. Thus a single lateral line is often sufficient for even large trees.
Remember that the root system grows more vigorously in moist soil. If emitters are placed on only one side of a tree, the root system is not balanced and stability is threatened. In one experiment with drip irrigation, a large crop of trees was blown over in a storm because the roots had been watered on one side only.
When watering closely spaced plants such as garden crops, flowers or shrubs using insert emitters, a system must have the capability to maintain uniformly moist soil near the surface along any row where you wish to germinate seeds.
It is not feasible to place an emitter where each plant will grow. You do not use the same spacing for all vegetables and flowers and you must not grow the same kind of plant in the same spot year after year. All things considered, a spacing of 2 feet between emitters is best for most closely spaced plants and soils; a spacing of 18 inches might be better in very sandy soil.
Water is not wasted with 2-foot spaces even if plants are set 4 or 5 feet apart. Roots soon penetrate the soil around the plant in a radius several feet from the stem, and absorb water from every cubic inch of this soil.
Knowing the total length of a drip hose required allows you to buy a ready-made kit with emitters already inserted in the hose. Usually, hose length in these kits is either 50 or 100 feet. The better kits have a filter and flow control of some sort.
Installing these kits is simple. Lay enough garden hose to reach from the house faucet to the area to be irrigated, attach the hose end to the coupling on the emitter hose and unroll the hose down the first row. At the end of the row, curve the hose back up along the second row and so on for remaining rows. If the kit has a Y hose for equal lengths of hose connected to each leg of the Y, put the Y near the center row at the high end. If there is extra hose, run the excess back over the last row.
Taking one step at a time in customizing a drip system to fit your planting area is fun and easy. First, select an emitter that delivers 1 to 2 gallons per hour when operated in a pressure range of 2 to 10 pounds per square inch. One emitter commonly used in Texas is rated at 2 gallons per hour when operated at a pressure of 10 pounds per square inch. When operated at 2 pounds per square inch, this same emitter delivers 1 gallon per hour. In actual practice the emitter would be operating at a pressure somewhere between these two extremes. Emitter systems with insets irrigate most uniformly when the pressure in the hose along the row is maintained in a range of 3 to 6 pounds per square inch. The lower the pressure, the greater the effect of elevation changes.
Water flow through a pipe is slowed by the friction it creates. That is why water flows faster from the emitter nearest the header and slowest from the emitter farthest from the header. Keep this difference as small as possible. Well-designed small systems can be operated with no more than 10 to 15 percent variation in flow rate. Design your system for a uniform flow rate by limiting the emitter hose length to less than 50 feet when the emitters are 2 feet apart on 3/8-inch hose.
With row lengths of 60 to 100 feet select 1/2-inch diameter hose. If the 3/8-inch hose is used for runs up to 100 feet, a drop in flow rate of more than 25 percent from the head to tail of the hose will occur. Water is wasted at the beginning of the row to get enough water into the soil at the end of the row. If the garden is level, it is easy to shorten the length of run by placing the header in the center (halfway down the length of the garden). To keep the water volume adequate increase the diameter of the supply hose or main to 3/4 inch.
If the garden slope is only slight and there are only a few rows, put the header on the high end. For steep slopes where rows must be contoured, run the header down the slope and the emitter hose across the slope with the contour.
Now determine if the water supply is sufficient for the drip system to work properly. Count the number of emitters and multiply by the rated gallons per hour of the emitter. Divide this number by 60 to get the gallons per minute your water source must supply to allow the system to irrigate uniformly. For example, 100 emitters multiplied by 2 gallons per hour per emitter equals 200 gallons per hour, 200 gallons per hour divided by 60 equals 3.3 gallons per minute. If your water supply is 5 gallons per minute, design the header hose to irrigate the garden in one set; if your water supply is only 2 to 3 gallons per minute, divide the header into two sets using a tee with two shutoffs to permit irrigating each half of the garden separately.
Select the proper size main and submain (header) hoses next. For flow rate up to 3 gallons per minute, 1/2-inch diameter hose is adequate for the main hose from the faucet to the header and for the header, too. When a flow of 3 to 6 gallons per minute is required to satisfy the emitter hose, the main hose carrying water to the header should be 3/4 inch in diameter and the header can be 1/2-inch diameter hose.
For example, here is a hypothetical garden 20 feet wide and 30 feet long, with 25 feet from the hose faucet. It has six drip emitter hoses with emitters 2 feet apart in the hose. Starting at the house faucet, a drip system would require one 80-mesh hose strainer, 25 feet of 1/2-inch supply hose with threaded coupling, one 1/2-inch female swivel hose thread poly compression tee, 20 feet of 1/2-inch header hose, four male hose thread poly compression tees, six 1/2-gallon-per-minute flow control valves, 180 feet of 3/8-inch male hose compression couplings with caps, 100 emitters which deliver 1 to 2 gallons per hour and one twist punch. Include several repair couplings and a dozen hole or ‘goof’ plugs to help repair accidents. Row shutoffs and flow control valves can be omitted, but the system would be less versatile and less uniform in flow rate.
Installing this emitter hose system requires only a knife to cut the hose and a twist punch or hand punch to install insert emitters. Some hose comes with emitters already installed, and the cost is only slightly more.
Assemble the system starting at the house faucet. Lay hose from the faucet to the soil at the edge of the garden, leaving it slack. Sink wooden stakes in the soil to hold the hose and fittings where you place them. Measure pieces of header hose and push them into the compression fittings (tees) so that the drip hose lines up exactly with a center of the row. Then, punch a hole with the twist punch along the top side of the drip hose every 2 feet and press an emitter into each hole. Turn on the water to flush any foreign particles out of the end of the hoses. When the lines are cleaned, stop the water and cap the end of each drip hose. Now it’s ready to irrigate.
Operating A Drip System
Operating a drip system is a matter of deciding how often to turn it on and how long to leave it on. The object is to maintain adequate soil moisture without wasting water by applying too much.
Anyone can turn on a faucet for an hour or two every day, and some drip system manufacturers advise leaving systems on continuously for the entire growing season. Not all gardens, however, use the same amount of water daily. Knowing how often and how long to water depends on the system’s rate of delivery, soil type, varying weather conditions, kinds of plants, their growth stage and cultural practices in use. Irrigating trees has the same restrictions. Water requirements are influenced by tree size and growth as well as rainfall, temperature, relative humidity and wind velocity. Ideal system operation applies just enough water to replace the amount used by the plants the previous day. Uniform soil moisture content is maintained and the volume of moistened soil neither increases nor decreases.
Estimate daily operating time in hours by dividing the daily water requirement of each plant in gallons by the application rate to each plant in gallons per hour. Continuous irrigation may be required for short periods when water use by the plants is maximum, but continuous operation when it is not required offsets the basic advantage of minimum water application with drip irrigation.
The object of each watering is to bring the moisture level in the root zone up to a satisfactory level. Any more means cutting off necessary oxygen along with the loss of water and nutrients below the root zone. The system is then run again before the satisfactory moisture levels in the soil is lost. If plants are showing signs of insufficient moisture and watering duration is long enough (see Table 5), then shorten intervals between watering.
Table 5. Watering time (in hours) per irrigation.*
Table 6 give the amount of water various plants need under a range of temperature conditions. This is evapotranspiration. It considers the water used by the plant as well as the water evaporated. Plants need three to four times as much water in hot weather as they do in cool weather. Both tables are needed to calculate the number of waterings each week.
Table 6. Irrigation time needed each week.*
Divide the amount of water needed per week by the watering time to determine the number of waterings weekly. For example, a closely spaced vegetable garden in medium soil needs to be watered for 2 hours at each watering, and with warm weather the garden needs 6 hours of water each week. Divide six by two and the answer is three waterings per week. The formula makes it easier to figure weekly waterings.
Most home gardens have plants with various watering needs. This makes it difficult to give each type of planting optimum watering, but with some care results can be more than satisfactory. Plants with shallow root zones and shorter watering times benefit from more frequent applications. Other plants requiring deeper watering are satisfied by emitters with greater outputs, or in the case of clay soils, a greater number of emitters.
Knowing the number of gallons delivered per hour by a drip system is also vitally important. If the delivery rate of a system is known, one can easily decide how long to leave it on to get the desired amount of water.
For example, a typical system which delivers 15 gallons per hour to each 100 square feet of area irrigates at the rate of 1/4 inch per hour. Thus, you would leave the system on for 4 hours to get a 1-inch irrigation. To apply a 1-inch irrigation to a garden, run the system long enough to deliver about 60 gallons for each 100 square feet of garden area. Likewise, a system with a 30-gallon-per hour rate of delivery would do the same job in 2 hours.
To calculate the delivery rate of a particular drip system, read the meter again, subtract the first reading from the second and divide the total gallons per hour by the approximate number of units of 100 square feet in the garden. Divide the gallons per hour per 100 square feet by 60 to see what fraction of an inch is applied in 1 hour.
Another method of measuring the volume delivered by one emitter in 1 minute is to use a measuring cup or graduated cylinder. Repeat this for several emitters and take the average. Multiply this volume by the number of emitters in the system to get the volume per minute. Multiply this volume by 60 to get volume per hour and convert this to gallons per hour. Again, divide your gallons per hour by the number of units of 100 square feet in the garden to get gallons per hour per 100 square feet.
Probably the easiest method is to install an inexpensive water meter with automatic shutoff on the faucet. Then attach the hose which carries the water to the header pipe. Set the water to the header pipe. Set the meter to deliver the number of gallons needed to apply in inch of water. This volume would be 60 times the number of units of 100 square feet in the garden.
Turn on the water and stay nearby to record the time it shuts off. The elapsed time is how long it took the system to deliver the inch of water.
For newly seeded gardens the system should be run only a short time every day for a few days to keep the surface soil from drying out. Plants loaded with fruit will need an inch of water every other day.
Most people new to drip irrigation notice immediately that the soil surface is dry except for a circle of moist soil right around the emitter. The wet circles overlap where emitter holes are closely spaced. Two examples are the Bi-Wall and Twin-Wall hoses.
Moist surface soil is desirable only when germinating seed. At other times it is a waste of water because tremendous quantities evaporate from a wet soil surface. The small circle of moist surface soil around a drip irrigation emitter is like the tip of an iceberg, because after a few hours of irrigating a great volume of water under the emitter has spread out through the soil for several feet in all directions.
The water which falls gently from the drip hose into the soil is pulled downward by gravity. It is also pulled sideways, moving from one tiny soil particle to the next by a force known as capillary attraction. The slower the water flows into the soil, the greater is its sideways flow relative to its downward flow.
It is easy to see why water from a drip hose in the row spreads out several feet in all directions even though only a small circle of wetness on the soil surface is visible. Actually, the dry surface soil prevents moisture from evaporating into the air, thus conserving water.
Very often after spring or fall tillage, especially rototilling, the soil is fluffy and very loose. This soil will not conduct drip irrigation water properly. Instead of spreading out and wetting the entire soil volume in the garden, the water travels almost straight down. A narrow column of soil will be waterlogged, but most of the surrounding soil remains dry.
For tilled soil to regain its ability to conduct the water sideways, soil particles must settle back together after each spading, plowing or rototilling. Sprinkle irrigate an inch of water on the entire garden after spring and fall tillage to settle soil particles so that the soil will conduct water laterally as well as downward. An inch or two of rain also settles the soil.
Sandy loam soils hold less water per foot of depth than clay loam soils. Water moves downward faster in sandy soils than in those with high clay content. Generally, water spreads sideways more in clay loam than in sandy loam soils, but there are exceptions. Some homeowners have added so much organic matter to their sandy soil that the water from an emitter travels outward in a circular pattern, wetting soil 3 feet away from the emitter to within 3 inches of the soil surface.
In Texas, spring rainfall is often adequate to get plants started. In June and July rainfall is less, and higher air temperatures and longer days cause plants and soil to lose much more water into the air. Watch the weather and record the amount and frequency of rainfall, remembering that supplemental irrigation may be necessary even in a rainy week if the required amount has not been supplied naturally.
The frequency of irrigation should increase as hot summer weather approaches. When temperatures reach the high 90’s and humidity is low, fruiting tomato plants require irrigation every other day with at least an inch of water for maximum production. In the fall, with the return of more frequent rainfall and cooler temperatures, allow more time between irrigations. An inch every 5 to 7 days is adequate then.
Inspect plants regularly to determine necessary adjustments in daily irrigation time. If the zone of moistened soil is increasing in size, reduce operating time; if the moistened soil zone is decreasing in size, increase operating time.
The frequency and duration of drip irrigation also depend on the kinds of plants being grown. For instance, tomatoes use more water than any other vegetable in the garden when full grown and laden with fruit.
Three to 6 gallons of water daily usually is sufficient for a tree during the first and second year after planting. Only 3 to 6 hours of irrigation time are required daily during maximum water use months if one 1-gallon-per-hour emitter is used at each tree.
Water is a limited and fragile resource. Each gardener utilizes a small part of the total water consumed, but the total use by all gardeners is significant. Irrigating home gardens and landscapes is considered a luxury use of water by many people. Non-essential use of water implies a special responsibility on the part of gardeners to efficiently use the resource and to protect its quality.
This responsibility is fulfilled by following the recommendations in this bulletin concerning water conservation and to further avoid practices that contribute to surface and groundwater contamination. Among the threats to pure water are improper use of fertilizers, pesticides and soil erosion. Label instructions on all pesticides and fertilizers must be followed faithfully and water run-off due to excess irrigation should be minimized.
- – The falling off or breaking off of a leaf or fruit as the result of a weak point which forms at a point on the petiole or stem.
- Bi-Wall drip tubing
- – A brand of drip tubing which has a small diameter plastic tube fused to the top side of a large diameter plastic tube. Water flows through the large tube and into the small tube through holes spaced every 4 to 6 feet. Water drips out of the small tubing onto the soil from holes spaced about 1 foot apart. This system allows water to be distributed evenly along a relatively long row of up to several hundred feet.
- Drip irrigation
- – The slow application of water, usually drop by drop, to the soil.
- Ear tee
- – A fitting used to conduct water from a given point along a header pipe into a length of Bi-Wall or Twin-Wall tubing. The ears are two semi-rigid loops of plastic that are looped over the header pipe to prevent the tee from being pushed out by water pressure.
- – A small fitting (usually in the size range of an aspirin to a spark plug) with a precisely formed orifice or channel in it. This emitter is plugged into flexible plastic pipe permitting water to flow out of the pipe at a very slow rate at any point along its length.
- – The combined loss of water from the soil by evaporation and from leaves by transpiration.
- – A device which captures particles of sand or other matter which might plug orifices in the lateral drip lines.
- – Collectively, the parts of a drip system; pipe, connecting tees, valves, emitters, etc.
- Flow rate
- – The volume of water passing through a pipe or out of an emitter.
- – The process of washing captured particles out of a filter.
- – Gallons per hour, a term which specifies the rate of water flow through a pipe or the amount of water delivered by a pump.
- – Gallons per minute, a term which specifies the rate of water flow through a pipe or the amount of water delivered by a pump.
- – The length of pipe placed along the high side of the garden to conduct the water into the drip hoses, tubes or lateral driplines that are laid down along the row.
- Hose connector
- – The fitting connected to a plastic pipe or garden hose which has hose threads that match the threads on the house faucet.
- – Application of water to the soil surface.
- Lateral drip lines
- – Lengths of plastic pipe or tubing, containing emitters or precisely formed orifices, laid down along the center of a row of plants.
- – Another term for plastic pipe or plastic tubing that is used to transport water along rows of plants or from tree to tree in a drip system.
- Line size
- – Usually the diameter of a particular pipe or tubing used to conduct water in a drip system.
- Moisture deficit
- – a condition in which a plant’s requirement for water is greater than the supply available to it, thereby preventing the plant from reaching its full potential of beauty, yield and quality.
- – Generally, any organic or inorganic substance such as hay, lawn clippings, paper or plastic applied to the soil surface to prevent weed growth and water loss.
- – A precisely formed hole in a plastic pipe or tube or in a small fitting (known as an emitter) plugged into plastic pipe through which water flows out in drops or a tiny stream.
- – The formation of glucose by the reaction of carbon dioxide and water in the green leaf.
- – Pounds per square inch, a term used to specify water pressure to the amount of force pushing on the water in the pipe.
- Root zone
- – The location of most of a plant’s root system in terms of lateral spread and depth.
- – Water that flows over the surface of the ground rather than penetrating the soil.
- – Chemical elements in the form of dissolved ions that are carried in irrigation water and deposited in the soil when water moves into plants or evaporates from the soil surface.
- Soil texture
- – The relative amounts of sand, silt and clay present in a soil which places it in one of the textural classes: sand, loamy sand, sandy loam, silty loam, clay loam or clay.
- Soil tube
- – A hollow metal tube that is forced into the soil to remove a sample of soil.
- Soluble salts
- – Various naturally occurring or introduced salts such as sodium chloride and calcium which are dissolved in water.
- – A device attached to a hose to propel streams of water into the air, thereby distributin water evenly over a lawn or garden surface.
- – Tiny pores in the leaf surfaces (more on the underside) which open and close to allow carbon dioxide gas to enter and oxygen and water vapor to exit.
- – The process by which water moves from the leaf into the air in vapor form.
- Twin-Wall drip tubing
- – A brand of drip tubing which consists of two plastic tubes, one inside the other, joined by a seam that runs along the length. The inner tube conducts the water along the length of the row. It flows into the outer layer of tubing through tiny holes spaced 4 to 6 feet apart. Then the water drips out of tiny holes formed every 12 to 18 inches in the walls of the outer tubing.
The information herein is for educational purposes only. Reference to commercial products or trade names is made with the understanding that no discrimination is intended and no endorsement by the Cooperative Extension Service is implied.
Educational programs conducted by the Texas AgriLife Extension Service serve people of all ages regardless of socioeconomic level, race, color, sex, religion, handicap or national origin.
Issued in furtherance of Cooperative Extension Work in Agriculture and Home Economics, Acts of Congress of May 8, 1914, as amended, and June 30, 1914, in cooperation with the United States Department of Agriculture. Ed Smith, Director, Texas AgriLife Extension Service, the Texas A&M University System.
Publication adapted from the original version with additional authorship by Jerry Parsons, Extension Horticulturist (Retired), Sam Cotner, Extension Specialist Emeritus, Roland Roberts, Extension Horticulturist (Retired) and Calvin Finch, San Antonio Water System. | <urn:uuid:fe7e9174-acd5-456f-bc41-f223648b130e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/earthkind/drought/efficient-use-of-water-in-the-garden-and-landscape/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396887.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00120-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935128 | 16,071 | 3.71875 | 4 |
Shhhhhhhh! That's the urging at Redwoods National Park in California, where officials intend to ban loud music within 500 feet of old-growth forests during part of the year.
The goal is to avoid disturbing federally protected bird species such as the Marbled murrelet and Spotted owl that nest in the forests.
"Current research has shown that Marbled Murrelets and Northern Spotted Owls, which nest almost exclusively in old-growth forests, are sensitive to noise disturbance during the nesting season. Disturbance has been found to cause nest abandonment and/or failure in these species," notes the superintendent's 2014 compendium, which is now open for public comments.
With hopes of not disturbing these birds while nesting, the park plans to prohibit "(T)he use of a radio, CD player, or other device with an external speaker that generates music or amplifies noise at levels exceeding those of normal conversation in, or within 500 feet of old growth forests..." from February 1 through September 15.
The compendium defines old-growth forest: "a mature forest with a multi-species canopy dominated by large over-story trees."
Along the same lines, the park is closing Redwood Creek within the park's boundaries to motorized boats because the noise can disturb nesting murrelets and spotted owls.
No word on limiting motorcyle noise. | <urn:uuid:2d3cf94e-1db0-44f6-8429-b7bc1b22e5d5> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2014/01/turn-down-your-volume-near-old-growth-forests-redwoods-national-park24560 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396875.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00064-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950457 | 280 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Treatment of bile duct cancer based on the situation
The extent of a bile duct cancer is an important factor in determining treatment options. Whenever possible, surgery is the main treatment for bile duct cancers, as it offers the only realistic chance for a cure. Because of this, doctors generally divide bile duct cancers into 2 groups:
- Resectable cancers are those that doctors believe can be removed completely by surgery, based on the results of imaging tests and other tests.
- Unresectable cancers have spread too far or are in too difficult a place to be removed entirely by surgery.
Unfortunately, most bile duct cancers have spread too far to be resectable by the time they are found.
Resectable bile duct cancers
Most stage 0, I, and II cancers and possibly some stage III cancers in the TNM staging system are potentially resectable. But this also depends on other factors, such as the location of the cancer and if a person is healthy enough for major surgery.
Surgery to remove the cancer completely is the preferred treatment if it is possible. If surgery is being considered, a staging laparoscopy may be done first to look inside the abdomen for any spread of the cancer that could make it unresectable. This procedure is described in the section “How is bile duct cancer diagnosed?”
The type of operation done to remove the cancer depends on the location and extent of the cancer. (See the “Surgery for bile duct cancer” section for more details.) If the patient has jaundice before the surgery, a stent or catheter may be placed in the bile duct first to allow the bile to flow. This can help relieve symptoms over a few days and might help make a person healthy enough for the operation.
Adjuvant radiation therapy and/or chemotherapy (chemo) may be given after surgery to try to lower the risk that the cancer will come back, but doctors aren’t sure how helpful this is. Adjuvant therapy is more likely to be used if there’s a higher chance that the cancer wasn’t removed completely (based on looking at the tissue removed at surgery in the lab). If it is clear that some cancer was left behind at the primary site, a second surgery may also be an option in some cases.
Sometimes it isn’t clear from imaging or other tests whether the cancer can be removed completely. These cancers are often called borderline resectable tumors. Some doctors may recommend neoadjuvant treatment with radiation and/or chemo before surgery to try to shrink the tumor. Then, if the cancer shrinks, surgery can be done to try to remove all of the cancer. Although this approach is helpful with some other types of cancer, there is no strong evidence that this helps patients with bile duct cancer live longer.
Unresectable bile duct cancers
This includes most stage III and IV cancers, as well as some earlier stage cancers if a person isn’t healthy enough for surgery. Most bile duct cancers are unresectable.
As noted above, in uncommon cases where it isn’t clear if a cancer is resectable, chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy may be used first to try to shrink the cancer and make it resectable. Surgery could then be done to try to remove the cancer completely.
In some cases, the doctor might think that a cancer is resectable, but once the operation starts it becomes clear that it can’t be removed completely. For example, the cancer may turn out to have spread farther than was visible on imaging tests before surgery. At this point it would not usually be helpful to remove only part of the cancer, and surgery could still cause major side effects, so this part of the operation is stopped. The surgeon may instead do a biliary bypass at this time to relieve any bile duct blockage or to try to prevent it from becoming a problem in the future. Placing stents in the bile ducts to keep them open may also be an option during surgery.
For some unresectable intrahepatic or perihilar bile duct cancers, a liver transplant (after complete removal of the liver and bile duct) may be an option. Chemo and radiation may be given first. Although, it is often hard to find a compatible liver donor, a liver transplant can provide a chance for a cure.
For most bile duct cancers, it’s clear from imaging tests and/or laparoscopy that they are not resectable. For these cancers, treatment is aimed at trying to control the growth of the cancer for as long as possible and to relieve any symptoms it is causing.
Radiation therapy and/or chemo may shrink or slow the growth of the cancer for a time. When chemo is given alone (without radiation) the drugs cisplatin and gemcitabine (Gemzar) are often used. When chemo is given with radiation, the drug 5-FU is most often used. For bile duct cancers within the liver, ablation using extreme heat (radiofrequency ablation) or cold (cryotherapy) may help control the tumors. Unfortunately, almost all of these cancers begin to grow again eventually. For people looking to continue to try to treat the cancer, taking part in clinical trials of newer treatments may be an option.
Much of the focus of treating people with unresectable cancers is on relieving symptoms from the cancer. Two of the most important problems are bile duct blockage (which can lead to jaundice, itching, and other symptoms) and pain.
Bile duct blockage can be treated (and in some cases prevented) with surgery or other procedures. In most people with unresectable cancer, it’s probably best to avoid a major operation if it can be helped. A biliary bypass may be a good option if a patient is already having surgery and the cancer turns out to be unresectable. In other cases, a stent or catheter may be placed in the bile duct to keep it open or allow it to drain. This can be done by placing a needle through the skin over the liver (percutaneously) or using an endoscope (an instrument used to look inside the body) passed down the mouth. It can also be done surgically in some cases.
Other options to help keep the bile duct open include brachytherapy (placing a tube with radioactive pellets inside the bile duct for a short time) and photodynamic therapy (injecting a light-sensitive drug into the blood and then using an endoscope with a special light on the end inside the bile duct).
Advanced bile duct cancer may be painful, so it is important to tell your doctor about any pain right away so it can be managed effectively. Radiation therapy, alcohol injection, and ablation of tumors within the liver can be used to relieve pain in some cases. Doctors often prescribe opioid pain medicines (like morphine) as needed. Some people may worry about taking opioid drugs for fear of becoming addicted to them. Yet some of the most effective pain medicines are opioids, and studies show that most people are not at risk of becoming addicted to drugs prescribed for them to stop pain for medical conditions.
Maintaining your quality of life is an important goal. Please don’t hesitate to discuss pain, other symptoms, or any quality-of-life concerns with your cancer care team.
Recurrent bile duct cancer
Cancer is called recurrent when it come backs after treatment. Recurrence can be local (in or near the same place it started) or distant (spread to organs such as the lungs). If the cancer comes back, further treatment depends on where the cancer recurs, what kind of treatment was previously used, and on the patient’s health.
In most cases if the cancer comes back after initial treatment, it will not be resectable. Treatment will be aimed at controlling the cancer growth and relieving symptoms, as described above for unresectable cancers. In rare cases, if the cancer recurs in the area where it started, surgery to try to remove the cancer (and possibly adjuvant therapy) may be an option. Because most of these cancers are not curable, people might want to consider taking part in a clinical trial of newer treatments.
Last Medical Review: 11/01/2014
Last Revised: 01/20/2016 | <urn:uuid:1c6109d3-504c-4265-86c1-9d05759a15da> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.cancer.org/cancer/bileductcancer/detailedguide/bile-duct-cancer-treating-based-on-situation | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392527.68/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00064-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942248 | 1,755 | 2.625 | 3 |
Fish is a user friendly commandline shell intended mostly for interactive use.
To verify that it has been installed you can run:
$ grep fish /etc/shells
If you wanted to make Fish your default shell run:
$ chsh -s /usr/bin/fish
Like other shells, fish lets you redirect input/output streams. This is usefull when using text files to save programs output or errors, or when using text files as input. Most programs use three input/output streams, represented by numbers called file descriptors (FD). These are:
- Standard input (FD 0), used for reading (keyborad by default).
- Standard output (FD 1), used for writing (screen by default).
- Standard error (FD 2), used for displaying errors and warnings (screen by default).
Any file descriptor can be directed to other files through a mechanism called redirection:
Redirecting standard input: $ command < source_file Redirecting standard output: $ command > destination Appending standard output to an existing file: $ command >> destination Redirecting standard error: $ command ^ destination Appending standard error to an existing file: $ command ^^ destination
You can use one of the following as
- A filename (the output will be written to the specified file).
&followed by the number of another file descriptor. The output will be written to the other file descriptor.
&folowwed by a
-sign. The output will not be written anywhere.
Redirecting standard otput to a file: $ command > destination_file.txt Redirecting both standard output and standard error to the same file: $ command > destination_file.txt ^ &1 Silencing standard output: $ command > &-
You can redirect standard output of one command to standard input of the next command. This is done by separanting the commands by the pipe character (
cat example.txt | head
You can redirect other file descriptors to the pipe (besides standard output). The next example shows how to use standard error of one command as standard input of another command, prepending standard error file descriptor's number and
> to the pipe:
$ command 2>| less
This will run
command and redirect it's standard error to the
If you would like Fish to display the branch and dirty status when you are in a git directory, you can add the following to your
# Fish git prompt set __fish_git_prompt_showdirtystate 'yes' set __fish_git_prompt_showstashstate 'yes' set __fish_git_prompt_showupstream 'yes' set __fish_git_prompt_color_branch yellow # Status Chars set __fish_git_prompt_char_dirtystate '⚡' set __fish_git_prompt_char_stagedstate '→' set __fish_git_prompt_char_stashstate '↩' set __fish_git_prompt_char_upstream_ahead '↑' set __fish_git_prompt_char_upstream_behind '↓' function fish_prompt set last_status $status set_color $fish_color_cwd printf '%s' (prompt_pwd) set_color normal printf '%s ' (__fish_git_prompt) set_color normal end
If su starts with Bash (because Bash is the default shell), define a function in Fish:
$ funced su function su /bin/su --shell=/usr/bin/fish $argv end $ funcsave su
Pacman and Fish
Context-aware completions for Arch Linux-specific commands like pacman, pacman-key, makepkg, cower, pbget, pacmatic are built into Fish, since the policy of the Fish development is to include all the existent completions in the upstream tarball. The memory management is clever enough to avoid any negative impact on resources.
In Arch, there are a lot of shell scripts written for Bash, and these have not been translated to Fish. It is advisable not to set Fish as your default shell because of this. The best option is to open your terminal emulator with a command line option that executes Fish. For most terminals this is the
-e switch, so for example, to open gnome-terminal using Fish, change your shortcut to use:
gnome-terminal -e fish
With LilyTerm and other light terminal emulators that don't support setting the shell it would look like this:
Another option is to set Fish as the default shell for the terminal in the terminal's configuration or for a terminal profile if your terminal emulator has a profiles feature. This is contrast to changing the default shell for the user which would cause the above mentioned problem.
To set Fish as the shell started in tmux, put this into your
set-option -g default-shell "/usr/bin/fish"
Not setting Fish as system wide default allows the arch scripts to run on startup, ensure the environment variables are set correctly, and generally reduces the issues associated with using a non-Bash compatible terminal like Fish.
If you decide to set Fish as your default shell, you may find that you no longer have very much in your path.
You can add a section to your
~/.config/fish/config.fish file that will set your path correctly on login. This is much like
.bash_profile as it is only executed for login shells.
if status --is-login set PATH $PATH /usr/bin /sbin end
Note that you will need to manually add various other environment variables, such as
$MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH. It is a huge amount of work to get a seamless experience with Fish as your default shell.
Current state of Fish development
So far several bug fixes are available from the git repository. Also, there is an AUR package for the git master branch, which is considered stable for everyday use:AUR.
On May 30, 2012 ridiculous_fish has announced a new fork of Fish which has been adopted as mainstream later, and development is now relocated to github. The AUR package AUR follows the head branch of that, while the Fish package in the official repositories provides latest stable milestones as announced on the webpage.
Ridiculous_fish has announced fish 2.0 stable version at May 17th, 2013. | <urn:uuid:4cf6a3f7-144a-4aa9-abeb-cec5c67ee884> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Fish&oldid=268669 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395039.24/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00187-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.823266 | 1,361 | 3.203125 | 3 |
Ethics and Community
Protestant churches do not have priests, but ministers. This is because all Christians have equal status in God's eyes and direct access to God. There is no special class of Christians. At the same time, some people's "gifts" are well suited to the tasks of preaching and pastoral care, and these people are "called" to the ministry.
Protestantism began with attempts to reform the Church so that it would be in accord with the principles of morality and community found in scripture.
Principles of Moral Thought
Protestants base their moral thought and action on the Bible first and foremost. Corresponding to the theological diversity of Protestantism, there is a diversity of views on moral issues.
Vision for Society
There is a spectrum of Protestant views of the Kingdom of God, from those who believe that it is a this-worldly possibility, to those who believe that it will only be realized in a not-yet-arrived future, to those who believe that it is only a heavenly reality.
Gender and Sexuality
Protestant denominations are divided on questions of gender and sexuality. European churches tend to be liberal. Asian, South American, and African churches tend to be conservative. American churches have become increasingly fractured in recent decades. | <urn:uuid:cd5c1ade-b26d-489a-a59d-4b96de58374c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://www.patheos.com/Library/Protestantism/Ethics-Morality-Community | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397842.93/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00019-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955779 | 263 | 3.234375 | 3 |
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